The actual law that was passed in the wake of the debt ceiling deal is a very detailed and complicated 28-page document. Given that the deal was supposedly agreed upon on Sunday, July 31 and was passed by both chambers and signed into law just two days later, I am amazed at how such a complex legal document could have been prepared in such a short time, even allowing for the massive resources the government has at its disposal. Now that the dust seems to have settled on the debt ceiling deal, let’s see what it says and what is likely to happen. As I said, it is quite complicated and I am not certain that I have all the details right. [Read more…]

I have been on a crash course to try and understand the arcane details of what options are available if the current debt ceiling is reached with no action taken to raise it and the balance in the government’s account actually becomes zero. I thought I would share what I have learned so far.

We tend to think of the US government as having a checking account, just like many of us, and of the debt ceiling like a loan given to us by a bank. This is mostly true, except in one significant way that I will get to below. This informative article by John Carney says that the government does have something that looks like a checking account in which all the money it receives continuously (tax receipts, air transport security fees, the postal service, Medicare premiums, etc.) is deposited and from which all its payments (federal employee salaries, income tax refunds, NASA, interest on our debt, unemployment insurance benefits and paying defense contracts) goes out. To get an idea of the scale of transactions in that account, at the beginning of last Friday, the account had $83 billion and during the day it received $7 billion in deposits and paid out $13 billion in withdrawals, leaving it at the end of the day with $77 billion. When the debt ceiling is raised, the balance of money available for use in that account is effectively increased by that amount.
[Read more…]

I read the book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (2006) by Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, some time ago and much of it consisted of him jetting around the globe meeting with heads of state and helping them solve their economic problems. He put out the hopeful message that global poverty could be eradicated and as an establishment liberal working within the system, he was high profile and you would find articles by him and about him all over the place. Then a couple of years ago, he seemed to suddenly disappear from the op-ed pages of the major newspapers.

I think I now know why. Yesterday an opinion piece written by him appeared in the Huffington Post and reveals that he has come to the conclusion that the political system is inherently corrupt, with both parties serving the oligarchy (though he does not use that term) and guilty of swindling the public.

Here’s a sample:

The Democrats of the White House and much of Congress have been less crude, but no less insidious, in their duplicity. Obama’s campaign promise to “change Washington” looks like pure bait and switch. There has been no change, but rather more of the same: the Wall-Street-owned Democratic Party as we have come to know it. The idea that the Republicans are for the billionaires and the Democrats are for the common man is quaint but outdated. It’s more accurate to say that the Republicans are for Big Oil while the Democrats are for Big Banks. That has been the case since the modern Democratic Party was re-created by Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin.

Thus, at every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class. He refused to tax the banks and hedge funds properly on their outlandish profits; he refused to limit in a serious way the bankers’ mega-bonuses even when the bonuses were financed by taxpayer bailouts; and he even refused to stand up against extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich last December, though 60 percent of the electorate repeatedly and consistently demanded that the Bush tax cuts at the top should be ended. It’s not hard to understand why. Obama and Democratic Party politicians rely on Wall Street and the super-rich for campaign contributions the same way that the Republicans rely on oil and coal. In America today, only the rich have political power.
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Who runs America today? The rich and the multinational corporations. Who runs the White House? David Plouffe, whose job it is to make sure that ever word, every action of the president is calculated for electoral gain rather than the country’s needs. Who runs the Congress, on both sides of the aisle? The lobbyists, who win in every negotiation. And who loses? The American people, who have said repeatedly that they want a budget that sharply cuts the military, ends the wars, raises taxes on the rich, protects the poor and the middle class, and invests in America’s future not just in Obama’s speeches but in fact.

That kind of view quickly gets you booted out of the mainstream media and government circles. Sachs now joins a growing number of former establishment intellectuals who are increasingly being described as ‘shrill’ because they express views outside that narrow slice of so-called respectable opinion that requires you to pretend as if the two parties represent widely divergent interests. They have seen through the charade of politics in the US and talk about where power really lies and that is simply not allowed.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), issued a statement on the latest budget plan that Obama seems to be enthused about, although there is still some confusion about what the plan calls for since it is still in outline form. Baker’s statement is worth reading in full but here is his conclusion:

The budget plan produced by the Senate’s “Gang of Six” offers the promise of huge tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in the country, while lowering Social Security benefits for retirees and the disabled.
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It is striking that the Gang of Six chose to respond to the crisis created by the collapse of the housing bubble by developing a plan that will give even more money to top Wall Street executives and traders.

Obama seems to be actually proud that he is going along with the long-sought-after dream of the oligarchy to cut the safety net of older and poor people, saying that the plan is ‘broadly consistent’ with what he has been advocating, adding that “We have a Democratic President and administration that is prepared to sign a tough package that includes both spending cuts, modifications to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare that would strengthen those systems and allow them to move forward, and would include a revenue component.”

The wingnuts seem to be mobilizing against the plan too so it may not go anywhere.

During any budget debate, politicians who want to cut spending on salaries and benefits for the middle classes and on public services never fail to invoke the family budget as a model for how the government should deal with its own finances. We are repeatedly told that just as families have to make hard choices about what to spend their money on in order to stay within their income, so should the government. This comparison invokes the cozy image of thrifty families getting together around the kitchen table and making decisions about what they can afford based on their income, and making painful cuts when necessary.

This is a fantasy, especially in America, a country in which the general public has a notoriously low savings rate and exists on credit card debt and has nowhere near enough money saved to meet their retirement needs. In fact, living beyond their income seems to be the norm in families, not the exception.

Actually there are good reasons for not trying to balance the budget right now. High unemployment is a huge problem right now. The devastating effects it could be ameliorated by government spending a lot of money on projects that put people back to work. While increasing the debt is not good as a permanent policy, there are times when it makes the most sense in the short term and this is one of them. Even families realize that going into debt to purchase a home or paying for college can be a good thing.

So in reality, the federal government’s budgeting process is already like that of the average family. Just not in the way the moralizing speakers intend.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), exposes all the myths and lies about Social Security being in crisis and requiring a radical overhaul.

Fortunately, the program is fundamentally solid. While you can sound really smart in Washington by saying that Social Security is going bankrupt, the facts say the opposite. According to the Social Security trustees’ report, if we did absolutely nothing the program could pay every penny of scheduled benefits through the year 2036.

Even if we never did anything, Social Security could always pay near 80 percent of scheduled benefits.
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Social Security is a great program that does exactly what it was supposed to do. It provides a core retirement income as well as insurance against disability and support for survivors. It has extremely low administrative costs and little fraud. The only problem is the politicians who say they want to save it.

… in two minutes, 15 seconds. He does a nice job. His cartooning skills are pretty good, too.

Michael Lewis appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show recently to discuss the financial crisis. I realize that this is a comedy show and that the humor is provided by Colbert using his guests as foils, but on occasion Colbert gets carried away and talks far too much. This was one of those episodes where he kept on interrupting Lewis and became really annoying. Lewis as a guest was interesting and amusing in his own right and Colbert was a nuisance and a distraction.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Michael Lewis

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Those following business news will have read that many European countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy) are facing financial crises and are looking for help from external sources. The causes of their predicament are drearily familiar: a banking sector that lent money recklessly on the basis of endless growth in real estate prices and now that that market collapsed, the big banks are demanding that governments must bail them out or that the entire financial system will collapse. It is exactly the kind of extortion that happens in the US. This is why the terms ‘banksters’, which was coined as an amalgam of bankers and gangsters during the time of the Great Depression, is so apropos in describing them.

Currently all eyes are on Greece but in an article for Vanity Fair titled When Irish Eyes Are Crying, Michael Lewis describes the spectacular rise, and even more spectacular fall, of the Irish economy. “What has occurred in Ireland since then is without precedent in economic history. By the start of the new millennium, the Irish poverty rate was under 6 percent and by 2006 Ireland was one of the richest countries in the world.” And yet, within a few years, it had completely tanked.

An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10 trillion.) At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.
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In late 2006, the unemployment rate stood at a bit more than 4 percent; now it’s 14 percent and climbing toward rates not experienced since the mid-1980s. Just a few years ago, Ireland was able to borrow money more cheaply than Germany; now, if it can borrow at all, it will be charged interest rates nearly 6 percent higher than Germany, another echo of a distant past. The Irish budget deficit—which three years ago was a surplus—is now 32 percent of its G.D.P., the highest by far in the history of the Eurozone. One credit-analysis firm has judged Ireland the third-most-likely country to default. Not quite as risky for the global investor as Venezuela, but riskier than Iraq. Distinctly Third World, in any case.

Ireland managed to collapse its banking sector without all the new fangled gimmickry of Wall Street with its derivatives and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs). They lost money the old-fashioned way, with a classic bubble where they kept buying and selling each other real estate at escalating prices using easily available mortgages on the assumption that prices would continue to rise.

But unlike in the US where a homeowner is only liable for the value of the mortgage and thus can walk away from their home if its market value drops below the mortgage amount (a state known as being ‘underwater’ or ‘upside down’), leaving the bank to get what it can from the foreclosed property, in Ireland you are forced to pay back to the bank what you owe. This means that the average person faces unavoidable large and inescapable debts.

Ireland’s 87 percent rate of home-ownership is among the highest in the world. There’s no such thing as a non-recourse home mortgage in Ireland. The guy who pays too much for his house is not allowed to simply hand the keys to the bank and walk away. He’s on the hook, personally, for whatever he borrowed. Across Ireland, people are unable to extract themselves from their houses or their bank loans. Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.

There is one major difference in what happened in Ireland and in the US. As Lewis says, “In America the banks went down, but the big shots in them still got rich; in Ireland the big shots went down with the banks.”

But despite that one slightly positive aspect, the Irish banks are still draining the economy. In March, the Irish government said that they need another 24 billion euros to ‘save’ the banks, whose ratings have been reduced to junk status and the total cost of the bailouts keeps continually rising.

Currently Greece is in the headlines because of fears that it will default on its debts. I do not think this will happen because the banksters will demand that money be loaned to the Greek government so that it can then give it to the banks. Since these banks have global reach, they can exert pressure on the French and German governments to lend the Greek government the money. Of course, those governments will tell their people that this ‘aid’ is in order to save the European Union when it is really driven by the banksters’ extortion.

With all the talk of the deficit and national debt, it is illustrative to see the chart that the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has published that shows the source of the projected budget deficits.

The main sources are the Bush-Obama wars and the Bush-Obama tax cuts for the rich, not ‘big government’, as is claimed by those who want to use the deficit as an excuse to further reduce government services and, more importantly, reduce government oversight over business.

This should come as no surprise to those who follow the numbers but it is worth periodically reiterating.