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Tuesday, 28 October 2008 |
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It is a small measure of the dramatic financial meltdown of 2007-08 that leading representatives of western liberal capitalism ransacked the past for reference-points to convey its scale. The "most wrenching [financial crisis] since the end of the second world war", said former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, in March 2008; the "largest financial shock since the great depression", said the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April; even "the largest financial crisis of its kind in human history" said the deputy governor of the Bank of England, Charlie Bean in October.
All this before the crisis has run its course. For even after the massive bailouts and banking takeovers of September-October 2008, there is no end to the fear and panic in global stock-markets. A problem that was (during the epic week of 22-28 September when the Hank Paulson plan to stabilise Wall Street was being debated) seen by some complacent Europeans as being confined to the United States soon came to force European governments too into emergency responses; after Iceland's desperate situation was exposed, now emerging markets in east-central Europe (Hungary, Ukraine) have needed urgent assistance to provide credit and shore up the currency. For some global-south countries (Pakistan, Argentina) the difficulties are even more severe; and several of Asia's powerhouse economies (South Korea, China) have been forced into a rapid rethinking.
A systemic problem
The prospect that the huge funding packages of these weeks will not contain the problems, and that indeed things may get even worse, is terrifying for central-bank governors, financial institutions and politicians - and indeed for the citizens who will carry the greatest burden of the crisis in terms of disappearing jobs, repossessed homes, and tightened credit.
Yet I believe things will indeed get worse, for one reason above all others: that those in the financial and political establishments charged with making decisions to contain the crisis have shown themselves inadequate to the task. In particular, elected finance ministers, International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff, the governor of the European Central Bank (ECB), Jean-Claude Trichet and his fellow central-bank governors persist with flawed economic policies:
* dear money or high real rates of interest which aggravating the downturn by amplifying debts, bankrupting debtors and accelerating deflation
* sustained capital liberalisation - despite shocks to exchange rates, global imbalances and volatility
* the dumping of even more debt on to the giant Ponzi scheme that is the globalised economy.
These policies have been responsible for a pernicious cycle in which easy money fuelled easy credit; easy credit fuelled consumption, which in turn fuelled economic growth; and alongside, "easy jets" and "easy cars" helped fuel a massive expansion of toxic greenhouse-gas emissions.
This sequence makes clear that what is at stake is more than a financial breakdown that can be repaired by policy adjustments at the margin. Rather, the excessively indebted global economy is but one aspect of an unprecedented triple crunch, each element of which has contributed to the current crisis:
* an enormous Ponzi scheme of debt
* peak oil
* climate change.
It is becoming clearer that at heart the resulting crisis is "systemic" not "conjunctural", and that it requires a holistic response that addresses it in its linked as well as singular aspects: financial-economic, governance-political, environmental-ecological (see John Elkington & Mark Lee, "Finance, politics, climate: three crises in one", 14 October 2008). A small group of economists connected to the new economics foundation (nef) has proposed such a holistic approach, which they have termed a "green new deal". To implement this set of policies will require using all the resources of democracy to make governments and regulators switch course, guided by and understanding that the threat of debt, peak oil and climate change must be addressed in imaginative and radical ways.
A model infusion
The latest dominoes to fall have been in Europe, in part thanks to the misjudgment of one of the most orthodox central bankers, Jean-Claude Trichet - who has (as Aurelia Maccario notes) been exposed by the collapse of both the real and the financial European economy. In a show of macho defiance, he had in 2007 already rebuked Nicolas Sarkozy for objecting to the ECB's higher interest rates, and for not "adapting faster". In July 2008, at the height of the worst debt crisis in modern history, he and his board hiked borrowing costs on loans in the European Union.
By this action they helped precipitate the crisis now engulfing economies like Hungary. Hungarians, like many east-central European citizens and companies, were lured by promises of EU into buying mortgages and loans in euros and Swiss francs. These borrowers have now been hit by the fall of the currency in which they earn income (Hungary's forint), relative to the currency (the euro or Swiss franc) in which they owe debts.
They have been dealt a further blow by the decision of the European Central Bank (ECB) to raise rates. Its governor, Jean-Claude Trichet, somewhat embarrassed by negative impact of that decision, now offers to "rescue" Hungary, by dumping another €5 billion ($6 bn) on her already debt-burdened economy. High interest rates and heavy economic conditions will further undermine Hungarian economic independence, and cause social, political and ecological dislocation.
The policies of the ECB, of other central banks, and of finance ministries and treasuries mean that the world is now embarked on a debt-deflationary spiral that destroys the value of assets, wages, incomes, goods and services - and will lead to political and social upheaval. The threats are very grave.
The IMF, whose predatory lending has been rebuffed by emerging markets ever since its policies both caused, and then exacerbated the southeast Asian crisis of 1997-98 and the Argentinean crisis of 2001, is pouring more debt down the throats of bankrupt countries like Iceland and struggling economies like those of Hungary, Ukraine, Pakistan and Argentina. The IMF is also encouraging foolish central bankers to play the speculators' game by raising interest rates (in Hungary, for example, they were raised on 22 October 2008 to a staggering 11.5%.
This is unbelievable good luck for those hedge-fund managers facing major losses elsewhere, and roaming the world for gains; but this luck is predicated on the now inevitable bankruptcies of small and large businesses in Hungary's domestic economy, and on the livelihoods of those who are amongst the lowest-paid in Europe. It will come as no surprise if Hungarians of all classes become disillusioned and angry at the failure of their central-bank "guardians" to protect their country's interests and finances; the chances of a populist backlash are thereby strengthened (see Andrew Dobson & David Hayes, "A politics of crisis: low-energy cosmopolitanism", 22 October 2008).
The IMF will further oblige international speculators by injecting billions of dollars into the bloodstream of the central banks' collapsing hard currency. This transfusion of capital will enable international investors and speculators to make a quick "smash, grab and getaway" - leaving the same banks with even more debts, owed at high real rates of interest to the IMF. To repay these debts, without any change in basic structures or operating modes, will require even greater exploitation of labour and the ecosystem.
The ill-judged economic policies that aggressively deregulated lending and encouraged borrowing, also held down incomes while boosting consumption. In the context of prevailing industrial and commercial patterns, both had the effect of inflating greenhouse-gas emissions and contributed further to the creation of a global "debtonation".
When high real rates of interest raised borrowing costs, making debts unpayable, the collapse of the Ponzi scheme was inevitable. In August 2007, the vast bubble of credit, responsible for so much inflation, began to deflate. Now the massive de-leveraging of debts is leading to an enormous deflation of asset prices, particularly property prices - with no end in sight.
The increasingly desperate actions of central bankers and finance ministers - and the silence or irrelevance of academic, neo-liberal economists - are evidence of the flawed nature of the past generation's economic orthodoxy, and of the intellectual bankruptcy of the world's ruling elite.
A democratic deficit
What strategy and policies should democratic citizens and progressive forces around the world adopt to challenge the destructive policies of these elites? (see Paul Rogers, "A world in flux: crisis to agency", 16 October 2008). It will not be easy, but three processes are essential
First, it will be important to divert popular anger away from bankers and their bonuses towards the institutional failings of the real transgressors: the central-bank governors, regulators and the political legislators that created the framework for the giant house-of-cards that is global debt. It was politicians and regulators not private bankers or other oligopolistic businessmen who legislated for, facilitated and permitted the creation and growth of easy (but never cheap) debt that has fuelled both consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions.
It's true that private bankers or oligarchs have effectively ensnared politicians. But in the end it is regulators that draft policy and politicians that sign and agree legislation; only regulators and legislators, prompted by citizens-voters informed with democratic arguments and ideas for change, who can implement a system-wide fix.
Second, citizens all over the world need to build the political parties and movements that will rise to the challenge of climate change, peak oil and the current global financial meltdown.
In liberal-democratic countries whose democratic systems have withered or which still have inbuilt unfairness (such as Britain, with its centralised and winner-takes-all electoral system), this will mean an energetic work of reform. Democratic political parties in the past decades have been hollowed out of political content and power. The signs of revival around the Democratic Party in the United States - if they continue and are consolidated in practical results - are an encouragement to all those wishing to challenge the status quo in democratic economies.
To succeed, political parties must be rebuilt from the bottom-up. Such initatives as Moveon.org provide clear evidence that by exploiting the openness, plurality and uncensored reach of the web - and combining these strengths with down-to-earth, face-to-face "townhall meetings" - activists can reclaim the political agenda.
This major task of democratic revitalisation will take time, but it is an essential process if the policies needed for restoring balance to both the economy and the ecosystem are to be informed by the active discussion and engagement of citizens.
A radical agenda
The heart of such policies are a series of principles that if followed would lead to a more stable, strong and sustainable political economy that can begin to meet the tests of debt, peak oil, and climate change:
* debts must be recognised as unpayable, and written off. This needs to done as far as possible in an orderly, structured manner, and with due attention to principles of fairness and awareness of the causes of high levels of debt
* the monetary system must be managed in the interests of society as a whole, not just the finance sector
* debt/credit-creation must be carefully regulated
* capital flows must be regulated, and the power to fix the key levers of the economy (interest-rates and the exchange-rate) must be restored to elected, sovereign governments- accountable to labour and industry, and accountable to the ecosystem
* publicly accountable central banks must be free to a) inject debt-free money into the economy, and b) keep the cost of borrowing low, so that loan-expenditure projects can be easily financed
* incomes must be raised, to restore the balance between an economy burdened with debts and stripped of pensions, and people starved of income to repay those debts or unable to live in dignity
* there must be no ways eviction of people from their homes because of unpayable debts
* new forms of social, cooperative housing and housing finance should be developed
* resources must be raised to create jobs, by using the monetary tools above and by filling tax-loopholes and closing tax havens
* a "carbon army" of green-collar workers must be mobilised to insulate homes, transform every building into a power station, and build alternative sources of energy
* trade must be localised and regionalised in order to limit the impact of emissions, to cut oil consumption and to end trade imbalances, with only exceptional items traded internationally (when war-memorial panels in northeastern England containing lists of names of the fallen are stripped for the metal they contain to feed a ravenous global commodity-market, the destructive consequences of the dominant form of globalisation are vividly revealed)
* a new global and independent central bank should be established - based on JM Keynes's International Clearing Union - to manage and stabilise trade between countries; this should be on the agenda of the G20 summit in Washington on 15 November 2008 as part of the discussion of a "new Bretton Woods" settlement.
In other words, the way beyond this period of severe crisis and multiple threats lies in a green new deal.
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Written by admin
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Tuesday, 28 October 2008 |
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By William Greider
Published September 23, 2008
Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: Dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses -- many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What's not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?
If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public -- all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called "responsible opinion." If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics -- exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.
Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, a brave conservative critic, put it plainly: "The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson's latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist lovefest between Washington's one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks."
A kindred critic, Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher in New York, defined the sponsors of this stampede to action: "Let us be clear, it is not citizen groups, private investors, equity investors or institutional investors broadly who are calling for this government purchase fund. It is almost exclusively being lobbied for by precisely those institutions that believed they were 'smarter than the rest of us,' institutions who need to get those assets off their balance sheet at an inflated value lest they be at risk of large losses or worse."
Let me be clear. The scandal is not that government is acting. The scandal is that government is not acting forcefully enough -- using its ultimate emergency powers to take full control of the financial system and impose order on banks, firms and markets. Stop the music, so to speak, instead of allowing individual financiers and traders to take opportunistic moves to save themselves at the expense of the system. The step-by-step rescues that the Federal Reserve and Treasury have executed to date have failed utterly to reverse the flight of investors and banks worldwide from lending or buying in doubtful times. There is no obvious reason to assume this bailout proposal will change their minds, though it will certainly feel good to the financial houses that get to dump their bad paper on the government.
A serious intervention in which Washington takes charge would, first, require a new central authority to supervise the financial institutions and compel them to support the government's actions to stabilize the system. Government can apply killer leverage to the financial players: Accept our objectives and follow our instructions or you are left on your own -- cut off from government lending spigots and ineligible for any direct assistance. If they decline to cooperate, the money guys are stuck with their own mess. If they resist the government's orders to keep lending to the real economy of producers and consumers, banks and brokers will be effectively isolated, therefore doomed.
Only with these conditions, and some others, should the federal government be willing to take ownership -- temporarily -- of the rotten financial assets that are dragging down funds, banks and brokerages. Paulson and the Federal Reserve are trying to replay the bailout approach used in the 1980s for the savings and loan crisis, but this situation is utterly different. The failed S&Ls held real assets -- property, houses, shopping centers -- that could be readily resold by the Resolution Trust Corporation at bargain prices. This crisis involves ethereal financial instruments of unknowable value -- not just the notorious mortgage securities but various derivative contracts and other esoteric deals that may be virtually worthless.
Despite what the pols in Washington think, the RTC bailout was also a Wall Street scandal. Many of the financial firms that had financed the S&L industry's reckless lending got to buy back the same properties for pennies from the RTC -- profiting on the upside, then again on the downside. Guess who picked up the tab? I suspect Wall Street is envisioning a similar bonanza -- the chance to harvest new profit from their own fraud and criminal irresponsibility.
If government acts responsibly, it will impose some other conditions on any broad rescue for the bankers. First, take due bills from any financial firms that get to hand off their spoiled assets, that is, a hard contract that repays government from any future profits once the crisis is over. Second, when the politicians get around to reforming financial regulations and dismantling the gimmicks and "too big to fail" institutions, Wall Street firms must be prohibited from exercising their usual manipulations of the political system. Call off their lobbyists, bar them from the bribery disguised as campaign contributions. Any contact or conversations between the assisted bankers and financial houses with government agencies or elected politicians must be promptly reported to the public, just as regulated industries are required to do when they call on government regulars.
More important, if the taxpayers are compelled to refinance the villains in this drama, then Americans at large are entitled to equivalent treatment in their crisis. That means the suspension of home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies for debt-soaked families during the duration of this crisis. The debtors will not escape injury and loss -- their situation is too dire -- but they deserve equal protection from government, the chance to work out things gradually over some years on reasonable terms.
The government, meanwhile, may have to create another emergency agency, something like the New Deal, that lends directly to the real economy -- businesses, solvent banks, buyers and sellers in consumer markets. We don't know how much damage has been done to economic growth or how long the cold spell will last, but I don't trust the bankers in the meantime to provide investment capital and credit. If necessary, Washington has to fill that role, too.
Finally, the crisis is global, obviously, and requires concerted global action. Robert A. Johnson, a veteran of global finance now working with the Campaign for America's Future, suggests that our global trading partners may recognize the need for self-interested cooperation and can negotiate temporary -- maybe permanent -- reforms to balance the trading system and keep it functioning, while leading nations work to put the global financial system back in business.
The agenda is staggering. The United States is ill equipped to deal with it smartly, not to mention wisely. We have a brain-dead lame duck in the White House. The two presidential candidates are trapped by events, trying to say something relevant without getting blamed for the disaster. The people should make themselves heard in Washington, even if only to share their outrage.
William Greider is the author of, most recently, "The Soul of Capitalism" (Simon & Schuster).
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 28 October 2008 )
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Written by admin
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Monday, 13 October 2008 |
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Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky
By Noam Chomsky
12/10/08 "Irish Times" - -- THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.
Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.
The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.
These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.
Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.
Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.
In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.
The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.
The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.
Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*
The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".
In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.
But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".
The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".
Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.
Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.
* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.
Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.
The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.
The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.
Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press.
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