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"We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives."
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But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary. The same preferences are reflected in what the polities omit to do. They do not pursue monetary policy with sufficient force to ensure expenditure growth even at risk of inflation. They do not purse fiscal policy with sufficient force to ensure employment even at risk of inflation. They remain forever vigilant that neither monetary ease nor fiscal profligacy engender inflation. The tepid policy experiments that are occasionally embarked upon they sabotage at the very first hint of inflation. The purchasing power of holders of nominal debt must not be put at risk. That is the overriding preference, in context of which observed behavior is rational.
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That’s true. But the revealed preference of the polity is not balanced. It is not some cartoonish capitalist-class conspiracy story, where the goal is to maximize the wealth of exploiters. The revealed preference of the polity is to resist losses for incumbent creditors much more than it is to seek gains. In a world of perfect certainty, given a choice between recession and boom, the polity would choose boom. But in the real world, the polity faces great uncertainty. The policies that might engender a boom are not guaranteed to succeed. They carry with them a short-to-medium-term risk of inflation, perhaps even a significant inflation if things don’t go as planned. The polity prefers inaction to bearing this risk.
This preference is not at all difficult to understand. The ailing developed economies are plutocratic democracies. “The people” do have power, but influence is weighted in a manner correlated with wealth. The median influencer in these economies is not a billionaire, but an older citizen of some affluence who has mostly endowed her own future consumption. She would like to be richer, of course. But she is content with her present wealth, and is terrified of becoming poorer. For such a person, the depression status quo is unfortunate but tolerable. The risks associated with expansionary policy, on the other hand, are absolutely terrifying.
"The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics by veteran political reporter Thomas Edsall, suggests that’s a mistake.
Writers both friendly and hostile to the banking establishment have focused on the continuity at some high levels of policymaking. Ben Bernanke has stayed on as top central banker; Timothy Geithner slid from the New York Fed to the Treasury after Obama’s inauguration; TARP was a bipartisan collaboration between Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush, continued by his successor. Various former investment bankers have shuffled in and out of office in Washington. Lost or marginalized in these tales is the extraordinary partisan political mobilization of the past several years."
"Colin Crouch – The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism "
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Instead of governments taking on debt to stimulate the economy, individuals and families did so, including some rather poor ones.
Crouch argues that this explains why workers in the Anglo-American world were willing to maintain consumer confidence when their equivalents in many continental European countries were highly unwilling to spend. Rising house prices allowed the former to borrow money. At first this was accidental – it soon became a necessary condition for governments to do what they wanted to do. In a key paragraph, he argues:
The dependence of the democratic capitalist system on rising wages, a welfare state and government demand management that had seemed essential for mass consumer confidence has been withering away. The bases of prosperity shifted from the social democratic formula of working classes supported by government intervention to the neoliberal conservative one of banks, stock exchanges and financial markets. Ordinary people played their part, not as workers seeking to improve their situation through trade unions, legislation protecting employment rights and publicly funded social insurance schemes, but as debt-holders, participants in credit markets. This fundamental political shift was more profound than anything that could be produced by alternations between nominally social democratic and neoliberal conservative parties in government as the result of elections. It has imparted a fundamental rightward shift to the whole political spectrum, as the collective and individual interests of everyone are tied to the financial markets, which in their own operations act highly unequally, producing extreme concentrations of wealth.
More succinctly financial “irresponsibility became a collective good,” albeit a perverse one – no-one wanted the party to stop or the bezzle to be revealed.
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The most worrisome aspect about our current slump is that it combines obvious short-term problems — from the financial crisis — with less obvious long-term problems. Those long-term problems include a decade-long slowdown in new-business formation, the stagnation of educational gains and the rapid growth of industries with mixed blessings, including finance and health care.
Together, these problems raise the possibility that the United States is not merely suffering through a normal, if severe, downturn. Instead, it may have entered a phase in which high unemployment is the norm.
"The Obama administration’s response to the crisis was visibly poor in real time. Klein shrugs off the error as though it were inevitable, predestined. It was not. The administration screwed up, and they screwed up in a deeply toxic way. They defined “politically possible” to mean acceptable to powerful incumbents, and then restricted their policy advocacy to the realm of that possible. The administration could have chosen to fight for policies that would have been effective and fair rather than placate groups whose interests were opposed to good policy. They might not have succeeded, but even so, as Mike Koncazal puts it, they would have lost well. We would be better off with good policy options untried but still on the table than where we are now, with policy itself — monetary, fiscal, whatever — discredited as both ineffective and faintly corrupt."
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Once you understand that the problem is a fairness issue rather than a dollars-and-cents issue, the policy space grows wider. Holding constant the level of expenditure, one can make bail-outs more or less fair by the degree to which you demand sacrifice from the people you are bailing out. TARP was deeply stupid not because it meant socializing risks and costs created by bankers. TARP was terrible public policy because it socialized risks and costs while demanding almost no sacrifice at all from the people most responsible for those risks. The alternative to TARP was never “let the banks fail, and see how the bankruptcy system deals with it.” The alternative would have been to inject public capital (socialize risks and costs!) while also haircutting creditors, writing-off equityholders, firing management, and aggressively investigating past behavior. It was not the money that made TARP unpopular. It was the unfairness. And the unfairness was not at all necessary to resolve the financial problem.
"More than three years after the financial crisis struck, the economy remains stuck in a consumer debt trap. It's a situation that could take years to correct itself. That's why some economists are calling for a radical step: massive debt relief."
"And make no mistake, this is revolt — an insurrection against a monstrous status quo that's failed too many, too deserving, for too long, while serving too few, too undeserving, far too well. It is not in the nature of man or beast to stay yoked to the gleaming machines of their own economic, social, and moral annihilation. Better — as perhaps Bouazizi thought — to commit the ultimate act; to choose. To choose to let loose a brutally human cry, one whose echoes might come to define a defining decade."
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.
"There's a glum desperation in the air that's hard to escape: volatility, futility, and a McFuture ghoulishly wagging its skeletal finger at a lost generation."
"There’s one big reason why the current economic weakness in the US has come as such a shock. It’s not the only reason, but it’s an important one, and it hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves: the state of macroeconomic data-gathering in the US is pretty weak."
"As I see it, there are three main complaints one can make about economists and their role in the current crisis. First is the complaint that economists fell down on the job by not seeing the crisis coming. Second is the complaint that economists failed even to see the possibility of this kind of crisis — and that by pointing out the possibility, they could have helped head the crisis off. Third is the complaint that they have either failed to offer useful advice on what to do after the crisis struck, or that they have offered such a cacophony of voices as to provide no useful guidance for policy.
As I see it, the first complaint is mostly — though not entirely — unfair. The second is much more substantial: anyone with some knowledge of history should have realized that the age of financial crises was far from over. But the most damning failure of economists, I’d argue, was their acquired ignorance of what I’ve called depression economics — the principles that should govern policy after a financial crisis has left conventional open-market operations impotent."
"Our theoretical analysis shows that an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society's expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations. "
"For many years now, societies have been limping on with broken institutions and splintered social contracts — right into the heart of this perfect storm. And I'd bet most of us have assumed that we'll continue to "get by" — that we can wait for the economy to repair itself, for the next economic boom to provide shelter from the approaching cyclone, for the invisible hand to pick us up and put us back on our feet. Yet, I'd suggest: the upheavals we're seeing now are stark evidence that the status quo's faith-based modus operandi hasn't worked — and isn't working. We're not magically going to "find" shelter from the gathering clouds of this economic whirlwind. We're going to have to build shelter: more resilient, less dysfunctional institutions that can deliver on the promise of real human prosperity that matters, lasts, and multiplies. Because if you didn't know what a lost decade looked and felt like before — well, you sure do now."
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Call it the logic of opulence: a paradigm of plenitude centred on more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now. Its glittering, unattainable fever dream seems to have driven the rioters mad. As one told the Guardian, "Why are you going to miss the opportunity to get free stuff that's worth loads of money?" Indeed: why, given a poisonous compact tattooed into the deeper calculus of everyday culture, not? Hence, as many have pointed out, the mob hasn't exactly been looting bookshops, but the stuff of faux-luxe, mass-designer plenitude: plasma TVs, fast fashion, video games. The vision they seemed to be pursuing, as if their long-denied birthright, is less one of sign-waving activism, fighting against deep-seated social injustice, and more one of raiding a consumerist Disneyland to which they've long been glumly denied a ticket.
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I call it a Great Splintering — not purely an economic phenomenon, as in "Great Contraction," but a social one: an era when social contracts are being torn up, abrogated, betrayed, abandoned, by accident, by design, by "regulatory capture," or simply by polities too gridlocked to progress. Broken social contracts aren't just tidy abstractions, empty of visibly real consequences, disconnected from the noise and clamor of our messy human lives. As they break, yesterday's ways of living, working, and playing rupture; yesterday's organizations, from corporations to banks to nations, creak and crack.
"There it is. Job creators hate future taxes, and unemployment insurance has left our workforce weak, so don’t expect unemployment to come down anytime soon.
For all the fancy math, this logic is very similar to Fisher. ”Now suppose that, for the reasons just mentioned, p fell by 10 percent in the past three years and z increased by 0.05 during this period” is about as close to a “gut” feeling and “gut” reasoning as you can get. This appears to be how one of the most powerful people in the world for determining the future of the United States’ economy is determining his dissent from Bernanke’s position."
But - here’s what drives me crazy as a reporter - did you say anything about it before? It doesn’t seem a coincidence that voter apathy, financial illiteracy, and government spending have all risen in tandem. As reporters, we’re trying to inform you so that you can be a fully functioning citizen. We tell you: here’s the debate. Here’s what people are saying on both sides. And too often, the response we get back is, “how DARE you tell me what those people think? La la la la, I can’t hear you!”
"Here’s a theory. It’s to do with organizational brittleness. Here are some background principles:
- The death rate for firms generally is high. Of the UK’s biggest employers in 1907, only three are still independent, stock market-listed companies today.
- Companies embody specific vintages of organizational capital. Their expertise depends upon the state of technology when they were formed. It’s rare for a firm to transform itself from one activity to a completely different one; Nokia, which used to be a cable firm, is a rare exception - and a less healthy one than it seemed a few years ago.
- Because organizational capital is fixed, firms have “very limited capacities to acquire knowledge.” Rather than adapting to new conditions, firms die."
"IN 2007, the great ship of the American economy began encountering darkening skies. In 2008, it was suddenly faced with a violent storm which blew it miles off course, well south of where it ought to have been. The country's leaders didn't know how far from their charted path they'd been swept, but they recognised a need to make a course correction. Now, three years later, a look at the maps tells us that the storm was more powerful than previously believed, and it left the vessel much farther south than anyone had expected. The course corrections made earlier? Far too small to bring the ship back to its previous path. Yet none of America's leaders are trying to steer the ship back northward. Indeed, many seem anxious to yank on the tiller and drag the economy farther south still."
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