Blogs

A green industrial policy?

Submitted by on

Back in the 1980s, writers such as Robert Reich were advocating what was called an "industrial policy", that is, the government should intervene in the economy and explicitly help a particular industry or set of industries in order to make them more competitive. Yes, I know this sounds like "picking winners", except that governments have been doing this successfully for hundreds of years. Think of it as the equivalent of the Park Service being stewards of a national park, intervening when necessary to keep the ecosystem healthy. Now, think of the economy as an ecosystem, and think of industrial policy as a way to keep the economy healthy.

Conservative Rule Costs U.S. $27 trillion

Is there a way to actually place a dollar amount on how much conservative rule has cost America? Stirling Newberry has offered a “back of the envelope” estimate of the costs of four consequences of conservative rule the past 28 years:

over-financialization of the American economy, the waste of privatized health care, over militarization of the American economy, and the externalization of global warming.

The total cost of conservative rule, in today’s dollars, is a staggering $27 trillion, nearly twice the total output of the entire U.S. economy for an entire year.

It's a Friggin' Christmas Miracle: Bush Comes through for the Auto industry?

It's a Christmas "Miracle", George Bush came through. $13.4 billion for the auto industry. Or maybe, not so fast. This is a stay of execution, not a pardon.

The troubled U.S. auto industry will receive emergency loans of $13.4 billion from the federal government in return for an extensive restructuring of its outstanding debt and labor costs over the coming year, according to administration officials.....

Funds for the loans will come from the Troubled Asset Relief Program initially set up to aid the financial industry. An additional four billion will be available in February.

But the money will come with some extensive strings attached. Though the White House will not appoint a "car czar" to oversee the industry going forward, the companies will have to restructure their wage agreements so that they are competitive with foreign automakers by the end of next year. In addition, by March 31 of this year the companies will have to show they are financially viable and able to repay the government -- a requirement that may, for example, force them to renegotiate outstanding debt and other agreements.

Be afraid, be very afraid. Although this money is going to push the industry through till March, a whole new set of challenges await the President-elect come March. First, let's set lay down a few facts to start the discussion.

The Big Boys Are Threatening to do..... What Hitler Couldn't Do

Time to Claw Back Wall Street's bonuses for Fictitious Profits

Back when the execrible Wall Street Bailout bill was before Congress, The New York Times and also Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture blog called for a "claw back" provision to the TARP program, pointing out that at the same time as Wall Street firms needed nearly $1Trillion from taxpayers to stay solvent, their CEO's and other senior executives were keeping monstrous bonuses for what turned out to be fictitious profits. Writedowns in the $ hundreds of billions had completely wiped awary the alleged profits of years' past.

Needless to say, that paeon fell on deaf ears.

Today CNBC has an article on exactly how egregious those bonuses were.

Wall Street's Culture of Corruption

Submitted by on

Now that the largest Ponzi Scheme in history has blown up, and the victims are tallied, questions are finally being asked about Bernard Madoff that should have been asked a long time ago. Like "who was minding the store?"

The answers aren't pretty.

For instance, yesterday it was revealed that Madoff's daughter was married to the SEC compliance examiner, Eric Swanson.

Swanson was at the commission in 2003 when the agency was examining the madoff firm. More importantly, he was also part of the SEC team that was conducting the actual inquiry into the firm.

Even worse, the SEC was warned repeatedly as far back as 1999, that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

The Deflationary Bust accelerates

Consumer prices in November fell ( - 1.9%) non-seasonally adjusted. The YoY rate of inflation is now only 1.1%. In the last 4 months, prices have fallen ( - 3.4%), or at an annual rate of ( - 13.2%). I am accordingly updating my table of Deflationary Recessions:

Recession dates/ YoY, monthly deflation/greatest +/- change

Recession Time Period -1.5% Deflation Largest Change
1/13 - 12/14 2 - 4/14 (-3.0%)
8/18 - 3/19 n/a (inflationary) +23.7%
1/20 - 7/21 8/20 - 9/22 (-15.8%)
5/23 - 7/24 4/24 (-1.8%)
10/26 - 11/27 1 - 5, 8/27 (-3.4%)
n/a 6/28 (-2.8%)
8/29 - 3/33 4/29, 3/30 - 8/33 (-10.7%)
5/37 - 6/38 1 - 12/38 (-3.4%)
2/45 - 10/45 n/a (inflationary) +2.8%
1/49 - 10/49 1/49 - 1/50 (-3.2%)
7/53 - 5/54 n/a (-.8%)
12/07 - ???? 10/08 - ???? (-3.4%)

Black September

Introduction

On December 3, John Bergstrom of Bergrstrom Automotive, a major auto dealer, appeared on CNBC and said,

on about September 10, we saw our business fall off 30-35%.

A similar sudden decline in consumer spending during September was reported by Shoppertrak:

Throughout 2008, the American shopper has endured record high gasoline prices, hurricanes and flooding, and a stalled housing market in their quest to shop. While the consumer has remained fairly resilient during this time, two very recent events are dramatically impacting mall visits and consumer confidence.
- Once the financial crisis emerged at the beginning of September, retail traffic declined even further. Between August 31 and September 20, SRTI total U.S. traffic fell an estimated 9.2 percent per day....
- After the failure of Washington Mutual, President Bush’s address to the nation, the presidential debate and the initial rejection of the TARP bailout, traffic fell by an average of 10.5 percent (September 21 – 29).
- The day the TARP bailout package was rejected by congress (September 29) and the NYSE Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 778 points, consumers again responded negatively as shopper traffic fell 12 percent as compared to the same day in 2007
- Sales, which were up 4.0 Percent for the Month of July, and up 3.5 Percent for the Month of August, fell 1.0 percent in September – "the first year-over-year sales decline since March 2003."

Shoppertrak has subsequently reported that "retail sales rebounded slightly, posting a very slight 0.7 percent increase in October. sales for the week ending November 15 dropped 3.1 percent as compared to the same period in 2007." But car sales have not recovered at all. In August car sales were already down about 19% YoY. In September the loss was 21%. In October it was 23%. By November car sales had declined close to 40% from already depressed levels in 2007.

And the stock market, which was only down (-18%) from its all time high in 2007 of 1565 to 1282 at the end of August, by October 10 was down (-43%) to 899.

In the 40 day period between September 1 and October 10, the shallow recession which had crippled the housing industry and Wall Street, but left Main Street virtually intact, suddenly metastasized into a collapse of the consumer economy that some were beginning to liken to the 1930s.

This diary is "the first draft of history", an attempt to look at not only what has happened, but as best we can tell from the vantage point of several months later, why it happened.

Pages