Financial imperialism in the Ukraine

Michael Hudson’s masterful exposition of the forces of financial imperialism at play in the Ukraine, from both sides, came out a couple of days ago, but if you haven’t read it—it’s owrth the long read, as it covers the neocon/neoliberal “Great Game” strategy in historical context. Via nakedcapitalism.com

Michael Hudson: The New Cold War’s Ukraine Gambit

A diplomatic solution in the Ukraine

US Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Paris next week to talk about a negotiated settlement in the Ukraine, even as some 60,000 Russian troops mass on the eastern Ukrainian border.

An optimal negotiated settlement, in my view, would be approximately as follows:

• Voting in May determines a federal structure for the country;
• West and Russia let portions that want to join EU join; NATO membership not an option;
• Russia is assured it can keep its navel bases in the Crimea (they already had them); while a second plebescite if necessary validates the Crimea returning to Russia; all such voting needs to be internationally monitored and squeaky clean;
• Russia provides as close to an apology as possible to the Ukraine for its invasion of the Crimea, accompanied by a large chunk of the IMF money that has flowed to it in aid to the federated Ukraine.

The costs of war would fall on innocents, the profits would flow to plutocrats on both sides. I hope Putin sees this. Russia is collapsing demographically (see this); it is an early-dying nation of drunks and Putin is holding on to power only by increasing domestic repression and fanning the flames of nationalism.

Should Putin invade eastern Ukraine before May as many expect, NATO will surely arm the Ukrainian forces, which can be described as rag-tag (Vice News has great video reporting from the Ukraine). This war would be pathetic in the extreme. NATO could send in drones, no boots on the ground. The Ukraine would be torn up for a generation. There would be further losses to Western banks, who have just coughed up a bundle to keep the gas flowing, and who, through London, have a huge interest in seeing the Russian and Ukrainian plutocrats stay whole. So I can only imagine that the banks are doing their best to sweet talk both sides into playing nice.

When the bankers don't want war, it's not likely to happen. When it does, the bankers generally try to line up on the side that will win. If the hawks in the West push for war and get it, Russia might collapse, and another Russian revolution might easily be the result--the Western banks can't count on a stooge like Boris Yeltsin this time to let them come in and loot. Anyway, the Russian plutocrats already have their positions, are being serviced by the London banks, and would probably be happy to run the country as regional war lords. If the West can turn the Russian plutocrats against Putin by telling them what a sweet deal they could have if Russia fell to the West, then Putin might find himself odd man out. I wonder if the Russian plutocrats still in the country can leave if they want to.

Would the plutocrats trust the Western banks and the CIA? Well, they did pretty well working with them 23 years ago.... But can Russians ever make democracy work, or do they need an authoritarian Father figure? The neo-cons might not care, so long as they weaken Russia for another generation.

Who or what would come after Putin? That is the question.

Janet Yellen interview

I have just watched the Janet Yellen interview (available here) from forthcoming movie, Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve, and I must say I found Ms. Yellen's Brooklyn folksy I'm-your-friendly-Berkeley-macro-teacher persona absolutely nauseating.

Questioned aboat the steps taken to resolve the financial crisis in 2008 she presents the same tired "we had to do something of the system was gonna collapse" without the slightest seeming awareness that when FDR, one of her putative heroes, I would guess, attacked the same structural problem in the 'Thirties he took structural actions to remedy them.

She certainly has never made a loan and has no understanding of what bad debt is, debts that will never be repaid and should be charged off by the bank with the bank taking the loss.

It's the same old Hank Paulson, either/or, bail Wall Street out, ignore the fraud, let them increase their bonuses in coming years on the backs of the taxpayers--or it's martial law.

And these macro people still think the Phillips Curve works!

I could go on, but I can't. It was just sickening.

Janet Yellen will do Wall Street's bidding and like Bernanke cash in afterwards.

I hope I outlive the Fed. It will be great day for America when the Fed is abolished.

How monetary policy drives foreign policy

It should now be evident that America's foreign policy is to an extent being driven by our banking mess. Again and again, we see Washington, including Wall Street's handmaiden, the Fed, exporting monetary chaos implicitely in order to weaken the status of potentially competing reserve currencies:

• Wall Street sent a tsunami of bad AAA-rated mortgage debt to Europe, much to Germany, the locus of power for the Euro (and again, implicit admission of guilt is seen in the apparent fronting of billions of bailout dollars to the European banks by the Fed after the crisis);
• Washington has apparently fomented or supported a coup in the Ukraine that increases the likelihood of war in Europe dramatically therefore sending the gigantic pools of liquid financial assets in the world scurrying into the greenback and US Treasuries, which the Chinese have stopped gobbling up;
• the other factor is that the military-industrial complex needs war to get its funding, and when drone-bombing rag-heads can't provoke a serious attack, destabilizing a former Eastern bloc nation and provoking a somewhat justifiably paranoid Russian leader into military action guarantees at least a shot in the arm of crisis funding.

Russia has repeatedly stated over the past decades that an EU move on the Ukraine crosses a red line. The EU ignored the warning, and with the US's help and the ire of Ukrainians sick of a corrupt government crossed Putin's red line. What the Ukrainians want is democracy and relief from their corrupt plutocrats (see previous post's article by Paul Craig Roberts).

The US has no compelling strategic interest in the Ukraine, or in the Crimea remaining part of the Ukraine. Yes, the Ukraine has been looted by its oligarchs, just as Russia was, and just as the US is being looted by its oligarchs right now; incomes of a majority of American households are falling so the banks can collect on bad debts. It would be nice for people everywhere if they could break the grip of the plutocrats over their livelihoods. In the Ukraine, to substitute debt servitude to Western banks for the domination of the oligarchs would only accelerate the collapse of the EU. And it's not clear the EU, if it offers help, won't be ripped off by the oligarchs as well. The new government in the Ukraine has already increased the power of the oligarchs by giving them provinces to rule, so it's not clear the Western "rescuers" are even able to help solve the fundamental problem at all, and might end up losing their shirts again, as they have in Greece, Portugal, et al.

Until democratic governments around the world become strong enough to counteract the power of the plutocrats by taxing them, both their income and their wealth (as Sweden does) the revolving looting of sovereign governments and demolition of middle classes by the plutocrats and their corporations will continue.

A couple of posts ago I said the scariest thing I've heard recently was Catherine Anne Fitts saying what the world needs now is a global debt for equity swap. I should say I generally like Ms. Fitts' analysis and suspect she may even have misspoken when she made this comment. Such a move would concentrate ownership of the world's assets sufficiently to create even more of a Plantation Earth than we have currently.

She identified the problem, but not the solution. What the world needs now is a global jubilee, debt forgiveness. The debt that the Fed is shoving under the carpet via QE is what is known in banking circles as "bad debt." It is loans that never should have been made because they will never be repaid. In honest not crony capitalism such debts come out of the profits (as losses) of the banks that made them. In crony capitalism, with a central bank controlled by the banks, such debts are "paid back" by being monetized and put on the backs of the taxpayers either directly or through inflation.

The austerity programs Europe has put in place so that Wall Street and European banks can be paid back bad debts have destroyed more than one economy and more are probably yet to fall. (The idea promoted ten plus years ago of "convergence" of interest rates in the EU between periphery and core caused me to gag at the time.) Debt slavery to Western banks is not the answer. (China is apparently making similar mistakes; it will be interesting to see what they do with the bad debt. I suspect their strong central government will tell the bankers to go stuff it.) Ms. Fitts suggests that sooner or later the plutocrats will destroy the banks in order to buy them cheap and collect the rents themselves, canny suggestion indeed.

Chaos in the world = a strong dollar. Until it doesn't. Chaos has a way of being unpredictable.

Capitalism has killed democracy. "Free" markets dominated by monopolies and oligopolies are not what Adam Smith had in mind. It's time for democracy to be reborn. There are degrees of economic inequality that are simply immoral and destructive and humankind has the right to reject them. When the top 85 families own as much as the bottom 3.5 billion people, as recently reported, we have reached such a point.

Freedom’s Sunset

I am pleased to recommend a new thriller, Freedom’s Sunset, which is currently in the top 50 in Amazon’s political thriller category.  Please support this new author by reading the book and (if you like it) giving it a five-star review. Amazon’s algo's are very sensitive to the reviews.

Book Description

Are you concerned about the collapse of the American economy?  Here is a thriller about the collapse of the Soviet empire that provides historical insight into that collapse. It is June 1990. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, fears that his policies of glasnost--openness--will cause the union to split apart.  The Berlin Wall fell in the past November. 

His political rival, Boris Yeltsin, appears to be gaining popularity. On a cold day Gorbachev comes to Minnesota in the American heartland for a historic visit. A product of the Russian countryside himself, Gorbachev is happy to be free of the intrigues of Washington, D.C. and Moscow for a day. 

But he will face an encounter with Zack Pedersen, a troubled youth from South Dakota, on Summit Avenue in St. Paul that sheds light on two very different empires in different stages of collapse.

Written in a style combining John le Carré with The Hunger Games, this book will appeal to those around the world who yearn for freedom and are willing to pay the price to keep it. The story contains strong language and adult themes.

This book includes a lot biographical flashbacks on Gorbachev’s life.  Reviewers find that it provides a lot of historical insight into the collapse of the USSR, and what has happened there subsequently.  Gorbachev’s personal story is especially compelling.

Russia currently has a sovereign debt to GDP ratio of approximately 10-15 percent.  They defaulted on much of the USSR’s debt.  Putin must be laughing at the what the bankers are doing to the Europeans.

Obama’s political economic calculus

One of the best pieces of advice anyone can give a new President or reelected President in an economy that experiences a recession on average once every four or five years—keeping in mind that the long cycles of recent decades plausibly represent a period doubling characteristic of a phase transition to chaos—is, “Take your recession early in your term.”

Ronald Reagan did this, taking credit for Jimmy Carter’s ending the ‘Seventies inflation by appointing Paul Volcker in 1978.  Jimmy’s problem was that he didn’t understand how our monetary system works until after bringing a bunch experts to Camp David and learning about it midterm.  He followed his principles, ultimately whipped inflation, and lost the election.  Paul Volcker was a monetarist who did what he said he was going to do, and tightened credit, the source of credit-money in a fiat fractional reserve monetary system.

Obama won the election by brilliant data mining and positioning in swing states, and because Romney was such an unappealing personality.

Obama was lucky.

Like Carter, he didn’t understand the problems that confronted him in his first term—a corrupt and fraudulent Wall Street, excessively leveraged and coddled by the Treasury and the Fed when their bad derivative bets blew up.  Franklin Roosevelt had a better understanding and a stiffer backbone in his dealings with the bankers.  Heads rolled.  Obama let hundreds of billions of dollars of bad debt be piled onto the Treasury’s sovereign debt.

Obama does understand that America’s middle class is being hollowed out.  His solution is to raise marginal tax rates on high income people, in part.  In my view, this is a terribly important part, as I believe a sickness of self-regard (“we are gods”) has entered the American elites and nothing would benefit the polity more than taking some of the starch out of their shirts and bringing them back down to Earth with the rest of us working folk. 

I would love to see the payroll tax rate lowered and the ceiling removed, for example.  Imagine that!  Or the Bush-Obama tax cuts on the over-250 thousand dollars brackets removed.  Or better, those rates increased to Reagan levels around 50 percent.

There should be a wealth tax, and a financial transactions tax (the high frequency traders are already imposing such a tax and pocketing the proceeds).

But the larger problem is the debt that was largely created because it was so easy to do so after Nixon removed the dollar’s tether to gold 41 years ago.  Only monetary reform will address some of the root causes of American inequality at this point, a preponderance of which originates in the financial sector.

Glass-Steagall needs to be reinstated.  Was it an accident that America went from the ‘Thirties to the Oh-Oh decade without a major financial crisis?  The derivatives markets need to be made transparent and regulated (such a move is likely to reveal a house or horrors, however, showing many big banks to be effectively insolvent).  The big banks need to be downsized “by fiat” or required to maintain capital ratios such that they do it by themselves.  Perpetrators of fraud need to be prosecuted. 

And perhaps the Fed needs to buy up a bunch of federal debt and forgive it before the Fed itself is shut down.  The failure of fiat, fractional reserve banking is writ large across the entire Western world.  It will be a miracle if the BRICs don’t also emulate us in this regard.  But they may benefit by leapfrogging in this area as in others.

What to replace the Fed?  Something not owned by the banks at a minimum, something owned by the American people.  Ron Paul and Andrew Jackson get this right.  The American people accurately perceived the self-dealing of Wall Street via the Fed in the crisis.  Those with the expertise and access to see and understand it up close have been nauseated by the level of corruption that Obama did not “begrudge.”  This has been his major failing.  There was a moment when he could have marshaled support from both the far right and the far left and explained to the American people why reform was needed.  He sold out.  (He may have considered health care a more important priority in a nation about to collapse, a point of view I have sympathy with.  See the Wilkinson video below.)

If gridlock wins in Obama’s second term—because Obama is a consummate politician and may not attempt anything that he deems impossible—or may he, in a second term?—it will be because our system is broken, and the absolute failure and gut-wrenching Crisis apparently required in America to forge a new national identity and social contract (and this is per The Fourth Turning, which has been so durably prophetic lo these past couple of decades)—it will be because that Crisis has not yet come to a head, and Americans remain divided and willing to go down with their parties “on principle” instead of compromising.

I’d also like to see “economic policy” replaced with “social policy.”  What I mean by that is democratic capitalism within the following constraints: 

First, workfare and health benefits for the economically displaced (i.e., unemployed; health care is available for everyone). 

Second, a tax system sufficiently progressive to produce a more “optimal” after-tax distribution of income, consumption and wealth.  Here I am relying of the results of Wilkinson et al. that I take to be the most sweeping condemnation of the narrow, money-based approach to welfare adopted by economists.  Can we pull off an enlightened Scandinavian-type democratic capitalism (not really socialist, because the state doesn’t own the means of production, just influences the distribution of product)?  I hope so.  The Scandinavian countries have recently been ranked as the most prosperous in the world.

It may take the next generation to get us there.  It was nice to see youth breaking for Obama.

Capitalism is great, but it needs to function within a moral framework providing social justice while not encouraging dependency.  Libertarianism and traditional Republicanism leave that to the market, and markets fail to provide it.  Ultimately increasing inequality will cause aggregate demand to collapse as most people simply don’t have enough money.  We’re halfway there.  We may have to go all the way for everyone to get the point.  We may not have to wait that long to get there.  And then we will see as well to what purpose the President puts all the sinister powers he and George W. Bush accrued that have so eroded the Constitutional rights of the American people.  To what means, and to what ends? 

It may all be determined in the Crisis to come.

Wall Street is the welfare queen

Via:  www.zerohedge.com  today’s must read, The Dark Age of Money, an impassioned recitative of how “capitalism” and “free markets” have been transformed into “monetary fascism”—worldwide.

All Bow to the Welfare Queen

Total governmental transfers and assumed liabilities related to U.S. financial institutions since 2008 exceed the entire history of all social welfare programs for all free world economies collectively since Bismarck (do the numbers, its true).

Long-term stock market valuation

This is research, not investment advice.  You trade at your own risk.

Source:  Robert Shiller’s home page 

Note also the current ratio of corporate profits to GDP:

And this:

Shrinking profits (forecast) imply shrinking market capitalization.  Corporations would have to buy back an inordinate amount of stock to maintain prices, methinks. 

10 reasons to shun stocks

The inestimable Paul Farrell.  A must read. 

10 reasons to shun stocks till banks crash – Paul Farrell

A modest proposal

When things go wrong, people get mad, and when people get mad, they make mistakes.

I just watched Bill Moyers on public television.  He showed a bunch of people saying they are mad at corporations, that corporations are looting the common people.

But corporations are just a form of social organization that is very good at raising capital and producing goods and services.

It is the ruling class who are looting the common people, a ruling class of interlocking boards and CEOs and lobbyists and Congressmen and just plain greedy people who have forgotten to reward the people who are doing the work because they along with almost everyone else in America bought into the notion that greed is good and that it’s okay to take more than your share.  I want it all now.  It’s time for you to get into me.

The problem is the ruling class and the American social values that have until recently validated the behavior of our ruling class.  Greed has been good since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, approximately.  We let them get away with it.

The solution is to bring the people in the ruling class down to earth by raising marginal tax rates to at least 75 percent on income over one million dollars.  Take the fun out of expropriating the employees and shareholders of their corporations, let the rich bear their fair share of cleaning up the fiscal mess Wall Street created (whether they’re on Wall Street or not).

If they want to take their money out of the country, they probably can, but the IRS is making it more and more difficult.  If they want to leave, let them go, it’s still a free country, relatively speaking.

The Tea Party movement and the Republican party are sucker’s games, talking about getting government off people’s backs, when all they’re really talking about is protecting the highly unequal status quo and keeping taxes low for rich people.  The bottom half of the income distribution already doesn’t pay federal taxes.

Tax rates in 1944, when the country faced a similar fiscal debt load (but less overall national indebtedness), were 94 percent on incomes over $200,000 (about $2.4 million in today’s dollars).

The problem is not corporations, it’s the people who run them.  Peter Drucker’s long-ago dream of “pension fund socialism” failed to materialize (i.e., in which the public controls the corporations through their massive pension fund investments).  The separation of ownership and control of the American corporation has been perennial since Berle and Means wrote their class book on it in the ‘Thirties. 

So let’s hit ‘em with taxes.  Let’s teach the ruling class a lesson. Let’s bring them back down to earth.  Let’s raise the taxes on the stratospheric portions of the incomes they pay themselves for products and services generated by the work of others. 

Maybe then corporations will return to the pay multiples of only thirty years ago, when the top dog got thirty or forty times the entry level income—as if he or she were a member of the same team, one might say—not a multiple of hundreds of times. 

America is a banana republic with nukes until the inequality is reduced.

Raise tax rates on the super-rich who have taken all the income gains for the past decade.

Eliot Spitzer tells it like it is

h/t Zero Hedge, too good to pass up.  Wall Street is defecating in the face of Main Street America.  I hope the populist rage grows into productive action, ‘cause I get tired just being mad.