Here Come the Seventies

The U.S. cannot cut its interest rates much more or it will end up at zero.

US interest rate falls to 1 per cent

Which means that the U.S. is no longer facing infaltion but the very real recessionary spiral of deflation. The very thing that created the crisis of the Seventies.

Deflation now tops policy-makers' hit list
Globe and Mail, Canada - These are some of the disquieting signs that the once-distant spectre of deflation is looming larger on the horizon, now that economies around the world .
..Deflation: A Primer New York Times
Deflation is the new bogey word as crunch sends prices tumbling Times Online
Deflation worries send Dow below 8000 Washington Times

When your house is burning, there is no sense fretting over painting the fence. With the U.S. economy mired in what will likely be a recession of historic proportions—and an outright depression in some industries—it would be foolish to get too worked up over future inflation concerns. Oracle-of-the-moment Nouriel Roubini, in his Forbes.com column, forecast the following for next year:
“The advanced economies will face stag-deflation (stagnation/recession and deflation) rather than stagflation, as the slack in goods, labor and commodity markets will lead advanced economies’ inflation rates to become below 1% by 2009.”

Remember those wheelbarrows of cash Germans had to use to buy things after WWI watch for Americans to roll out the barrow.

Deflation is considered a problem in a modern economy because of the potential of a deflationary spiral and its association with the Great Depression, although not all episodes of deflation correspond to periods of poor economic growth historically.

And true to form the Austrians celebrate deflation as one of the great things about the Great Depression.

Now we get to the crux of the matter: the Great Depression. The assumption is that falling prices somehow caused the economy to crumble. In fact, it was the after-effects of the boom combined with massive government intervention that caused the depression. The only silver lining in the entire period of the 1930s was precisely the falling prices that made the dollar count for more. Falling prices (a falling cost of living) are what Murray Rothbard has described as the "great advantage" of recessions. If you can imagine the Great Depression without falling prices, you have conjured up an image that is far worse than the reality.
As Rothbard has said, "rather than a problem to be dreaded and combatted, falling prices through increased production is a wonderful long-run tendency of untrammelled capitalism. The trend of the Industrial Revolution in the West was falling prices, which spread an increased standard of living to every person; falling costs, which maintained general profitability of business; and stable monetary wage rates—which reflected steadily increasing real wages in terms of purchasing power. This is a process to be hailed and welcomed rather than to be stamped out."

Now with deflation rising on the horizon as Bush bails out the financial market this prediction from the CATO Institute holds a warning for the future.

The Bush Legacy: Deflation or Inflation?
by Steve H. Hanke
Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.
Added to cato.org on September 24, 2008

Economists of the Austrian school of economics term this type of debt deflation a "secondary deflation". If the forces of a secondary deflation are strong enough, a central bank's liquidity injections are rendered ineffective by what amounts to private sector sterilization. When people expect prices to fall, their demand for cash increases and soaks up central bank liquidity injections. This phenomenon characterized Japan's economy during most of the 1990s.
But what if the Federal reserve--fearing a secondary deflation, as they feared (incorrectly) a mild deflation in late 2002--pushed the Fed funds rate lower (now it's 2%) and turned on the inflation switch by monetizing more debt? Given the growing mountain of government debt, there is virtually an unlimited potential. It's a scenario worth thinking about.

And that future is here and now.

This week's cover story in The Economist makes it more or less official. Deflation, not inflation, is now the greatest concern for the world economy. Over the past year, producer prices have fallen throughout the advanced world; consumer prices have been falling for the last 6 months in France and Germany; in Japan wages have actually fallen 4 percent over the past year. Until the recent crisis prices were falling in Brazil; they continue to fall in China and Hong Kong; they will probably soon be falling in a number of other developing countries.
So far, none of these price declines looks anything like the massive deflation that accompanied the Great Depression. But the appearance of deflation as a widespread problem is disturbing, not only because of its immediate economic implications, but because until recently most economists - myself included - regarded sustained deflation as a fundamentally implausible prospect, something that should not be a concern.

The point is that deflation should - or so we thought - be easy to prevent: just print more money. And printing money is normally a pleasant experience for governments. In fact, the idea that governments have a hard time keeping their hands off the printing press has long been a staple of political economy; dozens of theoretical papers have argued that the temptation to engage in excessive money creation causes an inherent inflationary bias in fiat-money economies. It is largely to combat that presumed bias that most of the world has accepted the notion that monetary policy should be conducted by an independent central bank, insulated from political influence - and has written into the charters of those central banks that they should seek price stability as their main, often only, goal.

And since we are being nostalgic here is the theme song to the CTV series Here Comes the Seventies....



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Con Game

As I predicted here the Harpocrites have only one song sheet they sing from when it comes to the economy;the old neo-con tighten your belt.

Throne Speech warns of deficit
It pledged cost-control measures in Ottawa, including a squeeze on the budgets of many government departments and a law to limit the pay raises of civil servants.
"Hard decisions will be needed to keep federal spending under control and focused on the results," Ms. Jean read, following with the government's pledge to place grants and capital spending "under the microscope."
Mr. Layton argued that the Throne Speech adopted austerity measures and a laissez-faire approach, when intervention is needed. "I don't think you want to be taking ideas from the Mike Harris-era in Ontario and applying them to today's economic crisis," he said.

SEE:
Blue Throne Speech
Pinocchio Conservatives
Deja Vu


Tags
Canada, Great Depression, market crash, free trade, recession, Harper, Conservatives, deficit, Government, politics, Flaherty, Budget, GST, politicsCanada, Surplus, Economy, Taxes, EI,

Stiglitz On Market Fundamentalism

The market crisis exposes the failure of the neo-con agenda of deregulation, self regulation, privatization and contracting out. The real solution to this crisis as Stiglitz pointed out in 2006 is the socializtion of capital.

Joseph Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.

Gardels: What, then, is the ultimate impact of the Wall Street meltdown of market-driven globalization?

Stiglitz: The globalization agenda has been closely linked with the market fundamentalists -- the ideology of free markets and financial liberalization. In this crisis, we see the most market-oriented institutions in the most market-oriented economy failing and running to the government for help. Everyone in the world will say now that this is the end of market fundamentalism.
In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism -- it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the end, everyone says, that model doesn't work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.

Financial markets are supposed to be a means to an end -- a more prosperous and stable economy as a result of good allocation of resources and better management of risk. But instead, financial markets didn't manage risk, they created it. They didn't enable America's families to manage the risk of volatile interest rates, and now millions are losing their homes. Furthermore, they misallocated hundreds of billions of dollar.
We will never achieve perfect stability of our financial markets, or of our economy. Markets are not self-correcting.

Gardels: What set of policies in the advanced countries can make globalization work?

Stiglitz: The prescription for making globalization work is what is generally called “the Scandinavian model.” That means high levels of investment in education, research and technology plus a strong safety net. That of course also entails, as in the Scandinavian countries, a highly progressive income tax.
Far from making these countries less competitive, it has made them more so. Though it may seem a contradiction to conservative ideologues who think cutting taxes is the answer to everything, the fact is that people are more willing to take entrepreneurial risks if they can count on a safety net and if they have the training to be innovative.
In Sweden, the social democrats who fashioned this policy have just been turned out of office. But we should not read that as a some kind of rupture in the social consensus. The new, more conservative government will only be about fine-tuning the model.

SEE:
Blue Throne Speech
Auto Solution
Not So Good News
Huh?
Super Bubble Burst
October Surprise Was The Market Crash
No Austrians In Foxholes
CRASH

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Blue Throne Speech

Why am I not surprised?

Throne speech warns of deficit, offers economic plan

No specifics in Tory economic plan

Because the neo-con agenda was about the failure of Keynesianism, except now all the capitalists and their political puppets are Keynesians when the market crashes. And when they applied their neo-con agenda it was during a temporary debt and deficit crisis of their own creation and it exasperated that into a full blown Reagan Recession. A little historical fact they fail to mention.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper moved closer to an about-face on economic policy today, outlining plans to stimulate growth that may run up a budget deficit after vowing to preserve surpluses.
A month after his Conservative Party government strengthened its hand in Parliament while falling short of a majority, Harper outlined his legislative agenda in a so-called Speech from the Throne, the ceremonial opening of a session. He pledged ``support'' for the country's car makers and plans to expedite infrastructure spending.
``In a historic downturn, it would be misguided to commit to a balanced budget in the short term at any cost,'' according to the text of the speech, which by tradition was read by Governor General Michaelle Jean in the country's Parliament, while Harper and other lawmakers listened. ``Ongoing'' deficits, though, would be ``unacceptable,'' Harper said.
Harper, who pledged ahead of his Oct. 14 re-election to maintain a balanced budget, told reporters last week his government may need to provide more stimulus to the world's eighth-largest economy to boost demand amid a global recession.


SEE:
Pinocchio Conservatives
Deja Vu
Business Unionism Offers No Solution To Capitalist Crisis

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Funding A Myth

While the petro economy in Alberta gets bashed the Tired Old Tories plow ahead with funding for the mythical carbon capture and storage. What a waste of money.And this from a government that supposedly is not in the business of funding business, picking winners and losers. Well carbon capture and storage is not just a loser, it does not exist yet. Call it funding the Emperors New Clothes instead of saving for a rainy day. Clean Coal technology is a right wing fantasy.

However, in the face of a $6.5-billion surplus shortfall and multibillion-dollar "green" spending commitments made when oil peaked at $147 US a barrel in July, Finance Minister Iris Evans said Tuesday she doesn't expect there will be anything left to save.
In fact, the province's new fiscal update revealed the heritage fund's value has fallen to $15.8 billion from $17.1 billion, due to the financial market meltdown.
Several government critics are calling the government's decision to push ahead with $2 billion for technology to capture and store greenhouse gas emissions foolhardy.
NDP Leader Brian Mason said the province should inject those public dollars into savings, not hand over seed money to help the energy industry cut its carbon footprint.
"That is just a tiny drop in the bucket for an unproven technology that essentially landfills carbon, rather than focussing on real reductions in carbon emissions," Mason charged.
Evans, however, defended the spending, saying it will help strengthen the province's environmental reputation. Alberta produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other province.
"Our $2 billion towards our carbon capture and storage is a necessary expenditure to show the world, to show Canada, that we're serious about environment and we're going to get emissions under control," Evans said

Now if only we had those oil and gas royalties in place our provincial budget would not have taken such a hit

SEE:

Harpers Alberta Green Plan

Between Coal and a Hard Place

King Coal

Coal=Cancer

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Whew

That was close almost lost Peter Miliken as speaker of the house. Almost. Imagine Speaker Rob Anders....shudder.....

OTTAWA–They called for change, but in the end they stuck with experience and a side of optimism.
Peter Milliken, the Liberal MP from Kingston and the Islands who has been Speaker of the House of Commons since 2001, was re-elected by fellow MPs to the prestigious and demanding post yesterday.
It took five ballots for Milliken, challenged by seven other MPs, to win back his job. Many of the challengers campaigned on promises of restoring order and civility to the Commons, the scene of rancorous, partisan exchanges in recent years. Besides Milliken and Devolin, also running for the post were: New Democrat Joe Comartin (Windsor-Tecumseh); Conservative MPs Andrew Scheer (Regina-Qu'Appelle), Merv Tweed (Brandon-Souris), Rob Anders (Calgary West); and Royal Galipeau (Ottawa-Orléans) and Liberal Mauril Belanger (Ottawa-Vanier).

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Rob Anders, Conservatives, MP, Canada,Calgary-West,

Turn About

"It is not a secret that in a real way this problem began in the United States
with completely inadequate regulation of the financial sector," Harper said in
Winnipeg. "Unregulated financial markets do not work. Canada has
known that for a long time. We all knew that from events of many decades
ago."

My, my now our neo-con, republican lite, libertarian free marketeer PM is proclaiming praise for state regulation. Like I said before when capitalism crashes there are no Austrians in fox holes. And as our PM has admited come a capitalist melt down there are no neo-cons in foxholes either.



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Nepotistic Boondoogle

The idea perhaps originated in the PMO after last election. Being a minority government who knew when King Stephen might get kicked from office. So lets find a legacy project for Steve. And viola what should appear on the horizon but the National Portrait Gallery. And as I pointed out here suddenly it was being moved out of Ottawa, lock, stock, and special atmospheric preservation equipment, to the Calgary riding of the PM.

Until last week when the whole idea was shelved, cause Calgary no longer looked like a shoe in for best P3 deal.

In a scathing editorial in the National Post entitled Portrait of Incompetence it is all made painfully clear. The P3 bid opened up to other cities was a mere fient, the fix was in for Calgary, until Edmonton put in two bids both lower than the Calgary costs.

The thoroughly depressing history of the project has been covered exhaustively -- but here is a capsule summary. Sheila Copps' original 2001 brainwave for a permanent centre at the old U. S. embassy in Ottawa ran headlong into cost overruns, belt-tightening in the national capital district and a new Liberal regime that was none too keen on building an expensive legacy for its leading critic. Paul Martin's government vacillated, and when it was ousted by the Conservatives, they seized upon the opportunity, first engaging in backdoor negotiations to find room for the gallery in downtown Calgary, and then opening the whole thing up to private-public bids from major cities across the country.
Edmonton threw a spanner in the works by coming up with not one but two bids that would have been extremely easy on the public purse; this led to the deadline being quietly extended so that Calgary could improve the terms of its proposed deal. Meanwhile, Ottawa's partisans put on a full-court press, arguing chauvinistically that the right place for a national gallery could not possibly be anywhere but the national capital. These master logicians told an ostensibly pretty story about the Portrait Gallery serving as a locus of educational tours of the capital, but failed ever to mention the real truth -- that in downtown Ottawa the building would probably remain a poor cousin to Parliament Hill, the National Gallery, the Museum of Civilization and other competing sites. The nation's capital Ottawa may be, but not many schools can afford to send children on the week-long field trips that the city perhaps deserves.

And speaking of Shelia Copps she has her own take on this mini-boondoogle.

The decision of Stephen Harper's Conservative government to cancel the National Portrait Gallery was a smart move to get out of a poorly conceived plan to build the museum as a public-private partnership, says former Liberal heritage minister Sheila Copps.
"I think that was a bit of a way of getting themselves out of a pickle that they'd created," Copps said Saturday. Heritage Minister James Moore announced on Friday that the gallery would be cancelled.
Moore said none of the proposals submitted by developers in a nationwide competition was acceptable and the government must act prudently in a time of economic instability.
But Copps said she didn't buy that excuse.
She described the competition as "poorly thought-out" and a "no-win" political situation that would pit the losing cities against the government.

This was always about Calgary. It was a sop to Encana, and the ideology of P3's. Encana of course is the company that Gwyn Morgan used to run. Harpers old political/business pal whom he tried to get appointed as the newly created Federal Government Appointments Commissioner after the 2006 election. But that too failed to pass. And like the National Gallery cancellation the post of Appointments Commissioner was never filled.

Encana was also a victim of the Harpocrites about face on Income Trusts so having the National Gallery in Calgary built by Encana was simply payback.

This was about moving a National Gallery to Calgary to show that political power had shifted west, to the Petro Bay Street of Canada. It was also about selling off the Gallery to Encana. Thus Canada's National Portrait Gallery would have been the Encana National Portrait Gallery of Canada.

The new Conservative government killed that project in 2006 and tried to forge the EnCana deal. When that failed in the face of withering criticism from Ottawans and others, the government resorted to the bidding process. Now cities across the country have spent money preparing bids and $11 million has been wasted renovating the U.S. embassy location. The machinations surrounding the gallery have been a sorry display of government inefficiency and inept politics.

Once again the neo-con ideology of Privatization bites the bullet.



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Wage Controls

Here we go again the recession of the 1970's brought in wage controls under Trudeau. Then again in the ninties with the deficit and debt hysteria public and private sector workers faced assualts on their wages and benefits by provincial NDP and Conservative, and Federal Liberal governments. Now the Harpocrites are suggesting another attack on workers wages. While bailing out the bankers.



Flaherty also said the government is looking at controlling the rate of growth in the salaries of public servants, and is continuing with a strategic review of expenditures at all government departments.



We should not be surprised that Mike Harris's Finance Minister should talk about cutting wages for public sector workers. This was the neo-con aganeda during the ninties, carried out by Harris, Klein and Paul Martin. This is not new thinking, this is reactionary thinking. Attacking workers wages during a crisis of consumer capitalism will further entrench a recession which will then whipsaw into the private sector.



Flaherty says the equalization program itself isn’t threatened but spending growth needs to be controlled. "It’s a federal program, we will limit the growth of the program … it’s not sustainable otherwise," he said, I thought rather gravely.
The problem is, if transfers grow more slowly than inflation, provinces will face shortfalls. So less risky, politically at least, is cutting the civil service.
The Conservatives know there’s a standing constituency for strict control of public spending. And cuts can be doled out in ways that minimize the pain to particular constituencies.
That said, the last round of deep cuts was in the early 1990s, when Paul Martin and Jean Chretien put the brakes on federal transfers to the provinces and hacked away at programs. They cut the civil service and conditioned people to expect public spending cuts as the tactic of choice when times are tough.



While capitalist apologists bemoan any claw back of tax cuts to big business the Harpocrites now are suggesting attacks on workers wages.The reduction in transfer payments and discussions amongst the Premiers with Harper recently shows that the message has also been sent to these levels of government; prepare to roll back wages and benefits to your public sector workers. Anything to avoid a deficit. Class war has been declared by the Harpocrites.

SEE:

Pinocchio Conservatives

Deja Vu

Business Unionism Offers No Solution To Capitalist Crisis

tags

asset-backed commercial paper ,, gold, homes, mortgages, housing, bubble, US, economy, oil prices, sub-prime mortgage, Wall Street, crash, recession,Bernanke, Inflation, Staglation, Stock-Market, US, Federal-Reserve-Chairman, Oil, gold, commoditiesSmoot-Hawley, protectionism, tariffs, Herbert Hoover, U.S., U.S. economy, Canada, Great Depression, market crash, free trade, recession, Harper, Conservatives, deficit, Government, politics, Flaherty, Budget, GST, politicsCanada, Surplus, Economy, Taxes, EI,

UBScandal

As capitalism melts down the rich always find a way to hide their taxable income. In the best of times and the worst of times. If they don't get the tax cuts they demand c'est lavie. They can always hide their money in Swiss bank accounts courtesy of the Gnomes of Zurich.In this case courtesy UBS. As we found with Enron, capitalism breaks down because those who play in the market know that rules are made to be broken and so they break them.


UBS executive indicted in US

UBS executive charged with aiding tax evasion

The Swiss Banker and 'Toxic Waste'

Gee could that have anything to do with this;

Top Executives at UBS Will Not Get Bonuses

Or maybe its actually because of this;

UBS warns earnings will be squeezed for rest of year

After being Europe's first major credit crunch victim, writing down $37.0 billion in the first two quarters of the year, there has been a shift in focus in the concerns that investors have about UBS. Its balance sheet is looking decidedly less frightening, now that it has shifted $60.0 billion of illiquid mortgage-backed securities into a vehicle created by the Swiss national bank, while it managed a profit in the third quarter.

And before we get all warm and fuzzy about those poor bankers UBS will still pay em heaping amounts of gold, just not all at once....

UBS said its new compensation model would be "focused on the long-term" and "closely aligned with the value creation of the firm." Executive board members whose bonuses had depended on annual performance alone will now be paid according to the new system that tracks their performance and the bank's share price over a three-year period. The two variable parts of their compensation--in cash and equity--will both be performance linked and the chairman of the bank will no longer get so-called "variable compensation."

And like that other Republican Investment Banker; Dan Quayle, who works for Cerebeus, lookee here UBS has one in their pocket too.

Phil Gramm: A Deregulator Unswayed
RGE Monitor, NY - , he left Capitol Hill in 2002 to work as an investment banker and lobbyist for UBS, a Swiss bank that has been hard hit by the market downturn,

You remember Phil he advised the McCain campaign until last summer when he called Americans concerned about the meltdown appearing on the horizon a bunch of 'Whiners'.

In an interview with the Washington Times,

Phil Gramm, a former Texas senator who is now vice chairman of UBS, the giant Swiss bank, said he expects Mr. McCain to inherit a sluggish economy if he wins the presidency, weighed down above all by the conviction of many Americans that economic conditions are the worst in two or three decades and that America is in decline.
"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. "We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet."

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners," he said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline" despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said. "

Now he says the push to deregulate the market had nothing to do with the current meltdown.

<'>The retired Texas senator claims that deregulation “played virtually no role” in the current economic turmoil engulfing the globe, nor the housing collapse or the credit crisis. The exempting of any regulation of derivatives, including state insurance supervision, reserve requirements or clearing information was not significant to the crisis. The nonfeasance of the Fed in supervising all of the non-bank lenders that lay at the heart of the housing boom and bust was not the cause either (it was “Predatory Borrowing”). And the payola scandals at the ratings agencies — Moodies, S&P, and Fitch — that slapped triple AAA ratings on paper that turned out to be junk would not have been prevented via better oversight.
Gramm said placing any blame on deregulation was simply “an emerging myth.”

The whole UBS scandal comes home to Canada where we specialize in White Collar Crime....Corporate Captialist criminals get away with murder in Canada. We have no single national regulator liie the SEC, and clearly our bank laws are not enforced effectively, if UBS can set up a secret offshore account for wealthy Americans called the 'Canada Desk' because the deals were done on Canadian soil.

Top Firm Accused Of Having Illegal 'Secret' Desk


This scandale has caused the Montreal Gazzette to pick up on the popular slogan of the Communist Party of Canada Marxist Lenninist in its latest editorial; Make The Rich Pay.

Government has obligation to make the rich pay, too
Raoul Weil, a senior executive of the Swiss bank UBS, has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of helping his U.S. clients hide some $20 billion in assets from the taxman. Americans will be glad to see their government pursue this sort of case aggressively.
In Canada, however ....
The Globe and Mail reported last week that Weil was also in charge of a secretive team of senior bankers whose job was to help Canadians hide as much as $5.6 billion from the Canada Revenue Agency, this country's tax collector.
So what has that agency, and the rest of the Canadian government, been doing about these allegations, the outlines of which have long been known? Nobody knows. Maybe nothing. And that's not nearly good enough.
Nothing is more corrosive to the sense of fairness and transparency that society needs to function well than the idea that there are two standards - one for the wealthy and one for everyone else


And in light of this scandal this failure to collect what is due the people of Canada or to prosecute UBS for breaking our banking laws, what does the Government and Revenue Canada do? Wait for it....

Ottawa targets online merchants who pay no taxes

Canada Revenue Agency to focus on so-called 'power sellers' on eBay

Pound foolish, pennyt wise.



SEE:

Crime Pays If You Are Rich

Whining and Dining with the Irvings

Hedge Funds, Junk Bonds, Ponzi Schemes

Criminal Capitalism Business As Usual

Tax Cuts For All

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