OCTOBER 9, 2013 – Charlie Kimber and Alex Callinicos (2013) have written a defence of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a party wracked by crisis since late 2012. This crisis was precipitated by the response, on the part of the SWP leadership, to allegations of rape and sexual assault. However, Kimber/Callinicos assert that “all those involved … have agreed that the case itself should be treated as ‘closed’” and therefore barely address issues of sexual violence, sexism, women’s oppression – the substantive issues that have generated the current crisis.
Showing posts with label U.S. Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.S. Economy. Show all posts
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
Monday, 20 February 2012
I fought the Google, and the Google won: the Genesis of PolEcon.net
Apologies to the Clash, the Bobby Fuller Four, and especially Sonny Curtis and The Crickets. • Since 2007, I’ve maintained a little blog, formerly known as PolEconAnalysis.org. It’s gone. You are at its successor, PolEcon.net. You’re reading this, so you’ve arrived here. Welcome. A little explanation is in order.
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Debt crisis in the U.S. – the issue is warfare, not welfare
JULY 26, 2011 – As July came to an end, the United States central government had come up against its congressionally mandated debt ceiling. Without an agreement to raise that debt ceiling – last set at $14.3-trillion – the U.S. central government will be unable to borrow money to pay its bills. The consequences could be extremely serious – soaring interest rates, a collapse of the U.S. dollar, not to speak of social security stipends, pensions and salaries going unpaid.
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Message to the U.S. – Blame the Wars, not China
DECEMBER 2, 2010 – There is a growing chorus of voices in the media and the academy singling out the actions of the Chinese state as central to the dilemmas of the world economy. This focus finds its most articulate presentations, not in the xenophobia of the right, but in the polite analysis of many left-liberals. Paul Krugman, for instance, writing in the run-up to November’s G20 summit in South Korea, praised the United States’ approach of creating money out of nothing (“Quantitative Easing”) as being helpful to the world economy, and criticized the Chinese state’s attempts to keep its currency weak as being harmful. “The policies of these two nations are not at all equivalent,” he argues, adding his influential voice to the chorus which is increasingly targeting China for the world’s woes.[1] Krugman’s, however, is a simplistic analysis which overlooks the role of the U.S. over decades in creating huge imbalances in the world economy, and has the dangerous effect of scapegoating one of the poorest nations of the world (China) for the problems created by the world’s richest.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Currency Wars and the Privilege of Empire
OCTOBER 23, 2010 – In uncertain times, the headline was soothing - "Secretary Geithner vows not to devalue dollar."[1] United States Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner was saying, in other words, that if there were to be "currency wars" - competitive devaluations by major economies in attempts to gain trade advantage with their rivals - the United States would not be to blame. Who, then, would be the villain? China, of course. Earlier this year, Democratic Party congressman Tim Murphy sponsored a bill authorizing the United States to impose duties on Chinese imports, made too inexpensive (according to Murphy and most other commentators) by an artificially devalued Chinese currency. "It's time to deliver a strong message to Beijing on behalf of American manufacturing: Congress will do whatever it takes to protect American jobs."[2] But the Geithner balm and the Murphy hyperbole are simply matching sides of a deep hypocrisy. For three generations, the United States has leveraged its position as the centre of empire to print dollars with abandon, devalue at will, and "debase" its currency at a rate impossible for any other economy. But the privileges of empire are starting to unravel, and the U.S. economy is wallowing in the consequences of 60 years of irresponsible monetary policy. Emotional attacks on China are simply a cover for problems deeply rooted in the U.S. itself. One part of that is a long history of currency wars, where the U.S. dollar has been used as a weapon in a manner without parallel in the modern world economy. That story has four aspects - Bretton Woods; the Nixon Shock of 1971; Petrodollars; and Quantitative Easing. This article will look at each in turn.
Saturday, 29 November 2008
Addicted to war: A tale of three corporations
In the unfolding of the current economic crisis, many are looking to the state for help. There has been a sudden revival of state intervention or Keynesianism. But what kind of state intervention? There is a dangerous pattern, established over years, of corporations in trouble turning to “Military Keynesianism” – producing for sale to the armed wing of the state – as a “quick fix” for deep structural problems. Corporations addicted to war are the worst way to fix economic problems – a “solution” which only accelerates pressures to engage in overseas military adventures.
Some corporations are well-known as being embedded in the Military-Industrial Complex. In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore identified Lockheed-Martin as the world’s biggest weapons maker, and in spite of the outrage this created from supporters of U.S. imperialism, his statement is probably true.[1] But there are other corporations which are less well-known as arms-manufacturers. Boeing, for instance, while for a long time a supplier to the Pentagon, is usually seen as a largely civilian corporation – the company of the Jumbo Jet. However, in a dramatic evolution since the early 1990s, Boeing has transformed itself from civilian to military production.
Boeing revealed itself as a major military player in the context of the development of the National Missile Defence (NMD) program – better known as Star Wars. Boeing is the “Lead System Integrator” for NMD “responsible for ensuring that all component NMD parts and systems are developed and integrated successfully.”[2] Pushed to the background by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the time-bomb of NMD is still ticking away in the background. Col-Gen Varfolomey Korubushin, first vice-president of the Military Science Academy in Russia, has said, “If the U.S.A. deploys a national missile defence [system], other nuclear powers may opt for increasing their nuclear missile potential, which will worsen the situation in the world.”[3] He should know. After all, his government is a full participant in this burgeoning arms race, in 2005 successfully testing a “missile with a highly manoeuvrable warhead capable of annihilating the national missile defence (NMD) currently being developed by the Americans.”[4]
Boeing’s NMD role was symptomatic of a deep change in the physiognomy of the company. In the early 1990s, fully 80 per cent of Boeing’s revenue came from its sales of commercial planes – the jumbo jets and other passenger planes that are everywhere in the skies of the world. But in the next two years Boeing suffered a serious decline in revenues. In its annual report for 1995 it explained this decline as “due to fewer commercial jet transport deliveries as a result of economic conditions and airline industry overcapacity in most major market areas of the world,” [5] what Karl Marx called “a crisis of overproduction.”
The company’s solution to this problem was revealed in 1997, with its merger with McDonnell Douglas. The merger was driven by one consideration – while Boeing was in its majority a “civilian” corporation, McDonnell Douglas was one of the Pentagon’s prime contractors. Its 1996 Annual Report “At A Glance” section, proudly proclaimed that it was “#1 military aircraft maker, #2 prime contractor and research-and-development contractor to the U.S. Department of Defense, and #4 NASA contractor.”[6]
The chart here shows its evolution through the 1990s, the percentage of its revenues derived from building military aircraft, missiles and other paraphernalia of the U.S. war machine rising from two-thirds to nearly 80 per cent.[7] Now there are some who would challenge the interpretation of these statistics. McDonnell Douglas, for instance, has three categories and not two: “military aircraft,” “commercial aircraft,” and “missiles, space and electronic systems.” But unless you are a “fly me to the moon” romantic, it is pretty obvious that “missiles and space” production is driven by the needs of a war economy, not by visions of Star Trek exploration. If anything, the emergence of Star Wars should make this abundantly clear.
The second chart reveals the resulting transformation of Boeing. From deriving just 20 per cent of its revenues from arms sales in the early 1990s, by 2004 and 2005, arms sales accounted for 60 per cent of its revenues.[8] From 2005 to 2008 that drifted down again to the 50 per cent mark. But that was before the outbreak of the current crisis. The picture is clear – Boeing has attempted to “solve” the crisis of overproduction that was plaguing it in the early 1990s, by turning to a customer with an eternal appetite for commodities – the Pentagon.
The transition to the war economy has succeeded in slowing Boeing’s decline. (But only partially – In 2003, Boeing had to cede to AirBus its position as the world’s largest airplane manufacturer.[9])
AirBus has unveiled its new, massive A380 airliner – the largest passenger jet ever built – capable, in some configurations, of seating more than 800 people. The plane is designed as a “jumbo-jet killer” to displace Boeing’s big 747 at the top of the commercial airline market. Perhaps then we can look to Europe as a place where business is not driven by militarism. This is in fact how spokespeople for the European Union often market their institutions.
Look more closely. AirBus pushed hard to finish work on the A380 to allow its engineers to turn to building a new military transport plane, the A400M. This massive plane is described by Airbus Military as “the most ambitious European military procurement programme ever undertaken.”[10] One commentator said that this, “the biggest joint venture ever in the European defence industry” was “crucial for the credibility of the European Union's commitment to strengthen its military capability and coordination.”[11]
“Total firm orders for the A400M stand at 192 aircraft,” according to a leading airforce technology web site. Outside of Europe, South Africa has ordered 14. Malaysia has ordered four which could open the door to sales in other Asian countries.[12] European industry, in other words, is just as capable of playing the war production game as is American.
Perhaps this new militarism is particular to the troubled aerospace industry, desperate for sales in a world saturated with expensive to build and maintain airplanes? Turn your attention to the world’s biggest manufacturing corporation, General Motors. GM, as everyone knows, is in trouble. Its current lurch towards bankruptcy has roots that go back years. By the end of 2004, its debt burden had skyrocketed to a mind-numbing $291 billion.[13] In 2005, it recorded losses totaling $10.6 billion.[14] The vast majority of GM’s earnings came from its finance arm, General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC), but to cover its mounting losses, it reached an agreement to sell 51 per cent of GMAC by the fourth quarter of 2006[15]. This staved off problems for a few months, but they came back with a vengeance in 2007 and 2008. February 2008, GM announced 2007 losses of $38.7 billion “the largest annual loss in the history of the auto industry.”[16]
Business analyst Robert Walberg has a solution. GM must, he says, find a “higher margin business with more promising and stable growth prospects.” That business, of course, is the death business. He doesn’t call it that. The nice word for the death business is “defence contracting”. Such a move into war production “could be a good one for the automaker, just as it was for the jet maker Boeing nearly a decade ago.” Walberg is nostalgic for “the 1940s, when GM delivered more than $12 billion worth of war material.”[17] Walberg doesn’t mention that the 1940s was the decade of the most destructive war in human history.
In this tale of three corporations, we have in outline form some of the key elements in the contemporary U.S. and world economy. Industry cannot survive in its traditional markets. Recurring crises of overproduction are driving debt levels higher and higher. In the search for a reliable consumer of last resort, again and again corporations are driven towards arms production. War requires that states purchase massive quantities of expensive to produce weapons and materiel – and if overproduction is the problem, then war with its infinite destructive potential is “the answer”.
It is an economic solution that clearly carries with it huge political and social risks, and very starkly poses the necessity of finding a political solution. The turn to state intervention into the economy is a welcome reprieve from the decades of neoliberalism. But if that state intervention is the intervention of the warfare state and not the welfare state, the dangers for working people around the world are obvious.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] See for instance Andrea Rothman, “U.S. chief executives, Pentagon brass fail to make Paris show,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 17, 2003, p. 54. Rothman without comment and quite uncontroversially, refers to L-M as “the world’s biggest weapons maker.” But this is for the consumption of the readers of the business press. It is one thing for investors to know the truth about who builds what. It’s a little more awkward when that is made available to the public at large.
[2] Kevin Martin, Rachel Glick, Rachel Ries, Tim Nafziger and Mark Swier, “The Real Rogues: Behind the Star Wars missile defense system,” Z magazine, September 2000.
[3] Cited in “Deploying U.S. national missile defence may trigger arms race – Russian expert,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, February 27, 2006, ProQuest document ID: 994482301
[4] “Russia has successfully tested a warhead,” The Press Trust of India Limited, November 2, 2005, Gale Document Number: A138245614
[5] Boeing, 1995 Annual Report, www.boeing.com
[6] McDonnell Douglas, 1996 Annual Report, www.boeing.com
[7] Based on McDonnell Douglas, Annual Reports, 1994-1996, 2nd Quarter 1997, www.boeing.com. The figures for 1997 represent revenue for the first half of the year only
[8] Boeing, Annual Reports, 1995-2007, www. Boeing.com. Figures for 2003-2007 updated from “Five-Year Summary (Unaudited),” The Boeing Company 2007 Annual Report, p. 21 . 2008 Figures are annualized approximations based on three quarters of results available at “Boeing Posts Lower Third-Quarter Results on Reduced Commercial Deliveries,” News Release, October 22, 2008
[9] Robert J. Samuelson, “The Airbus Showdown,” Washington Post, December 8, 2004, p. A31
[10] Airbus Military, “Final go-ahead for A400M military airlifter,” Press Release, May 27, 2003, www.airbusmilitary.com
[11] Yacine Le Forestier, “Europe’s military aircraft dream takes wing at last,” AFP, May 27, 2003
[12] “A400M (Future Large Aircraft) Tactical Transport Aircraft, Europe,” www.airforce-technology.com
[13] Daniel Gross, “GM’s Debt Crisis,” Slate, Dec. 21, 2004, www.slate.com
[14] “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations / General Motors,” www.gm.com
[15] David Streitfeld, “GM Agrees to Sell 51% of Finance Unit,“ Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2006, ww.latimes.com
[16] Associated Press, “GM reports biggest-ever automotive loss,” www.msnbc.msn.com, Feb. 12, 2008
[17] Robert Walberg, “GM’s best offense could be defense,” MSN.com, February 3, 2005, www.moneycentral.msn.com
Some corporations are well-known as being embedded in the Military-Industrial Complex. In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore identified Lockheed-Martin as the world’s biggest weapons maker, and in spite of the outrage this created from supporters of U.S. imperialism, his statement is probably true.[1] But there are other corporations which are less well-known as arms-manufacturers. Boeing, for instance, while for a long time a supplier to the Pentagon, is usually seen as a largely civilian corporation – the company of the Jumbo Jet. However, in a dramatic evolution since the early 1990s, Boeing has transformed itself from civilian to military production.
Boeing revealed itself as a major military player in the context of the development of the National Missile Defence (NMD) program – better known as Star Wars. Boeing is the “Lead System Integrator” for NMD “responsible for ensuring that all component NMD parts and systems are developed and integrated successfully.”[2] Pushed to the background by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the time-bomb of NMD is still ticking away in the background. Col-Gen Varfolomey Korubushin, first vice-president of the Military Science Academy in Russia, has said, “If the U.S.A. deploys a national missile defence [system], other nuclear powers may opt for increasing their nuclear missile potential, which will worsen the situation in the world.”[3] He should know. After all, his government is a full participant in this burgeoning arms race, in 2005 successfully testing a “missile with a highly manoeuvrable warhead capable of annihilating the national missile defence (NMD) currently being developed by the Americans.”[4]
Boeing’s NMD role was symptomatic of a deep change in the physiognomy of the company. In the early 1990s, fully 80 per cent of Boeing’s revenue came from its sales of commercial planes – the jumbo jets and other passenger planes that are everywhere in the skies of the world. But in the next two years Boeing suffered a serious decline in revenues. In its annual report for 1995 it explained this decline as “due to fewer commercial jet transport deliveries as a result of economic conditions and airline industry overcapacity in most major market areas of the world,” [5] what Karl Marx called “a crisis of overproduction.”
The company’s solution to this problem was revealed in 1997, with its merger with McDonnell Douglas. The merger was driven by one consideration – while Boeing was in its majority a “civilian” corporation, McDonnell Douglas was one of the Pentagon’s prime contractors. Its 1996 Annual Report “At A Glance” section, proudly proclaimed that it was “#1 military aircraft maker, #2 prime contractor and research-and-development contractor to the U.S. Department of Defense, and #4 NASA contractor.”[6]
The chart here shows its evolution through the 1990s, the percentage of its revenues derived from building military aircraft, missiles and other paraphernalia of the U.S. war machine rising from two-thirds to nearly 80 per cent.[7] Now there are some who would challenge the interpretation of these statistics. McDonnell Douglas, for instance, has three categories and not two: “military aircraft,” “commercial aircraft,” and “missiles, space and electronic systems.” But unless you are a “fly me to the moon” romantic, it is pretty obvious that “missiles and space” production is driven by the needs of a war economy, not by visions of Star Trek exploration. If anything, the emergence of Star Wars should make this abundantly clear.
The second chart reveals the resulting transformation of Boeing. From deriving just 20 per cent of its revenues from arms sales in the early 1990s, by 2004 and 2005, arms sales accounted for 60 per cent of its revenues.[8] From 2005 to 2008 that drifted down again to the 50 per cent mark. But that was before the outbreak of the current crisis. The picture is clear – Boeing has attempted to “solve” the crisis of overproduction that was plaguing it in the early 1990s, by turning to a customer with an eternal appetite for commodities – the Pentagon.
The transition to the war economy has succeeded in slowing Boeing’s decline. (But only partially – In 2003, Boeing had to cede to AirBus its position as the world’s largest airplane manufacturer.[9])
AirBus has unveiled its new, massive A380 airliner – the largest passenger jet ever built – capable, in some configurations, of seating more than 800 people. The plane is designed as a “jumbo-jet killer” to displace Boeing’s big 747 at the top of the commercial airline market. Perhaps then we can look to Europe as a place where business is not driven by militarism. This is in fact how spokespeople for the European Union often market their institutions.
Look more closely. AirBus pushed hard to finish work on the A380 to allow its engineers to turn to building a new military transport plane, the A400M. This massive plane is described by Airbus Military as “the most ambitious European military procurement programme ever undertaken.”[10] One commentator said that this, “the biggest joint venture ever in the European defence industry” was “crucial for the credibility of the European Union's commitment to strengthen its military capability and coordination.”[11]
“Total firm orders for the A400M stand at 192 aircraft,” according to a leading airforce technology web site. Outside of Europe, South Africa has ordered 14. Malaysia has ordered four which could open the door to sales in other Asian countries.[12] European industry, in other words, is just as capable of playing the war production game as is American.
Perhaps this new militarism is particular to the troubled aerospace industry, desperate for sales in a world saturated with expensive to build and maintain airplanes? Turn your attention to the world’s biggest manufacturing corporation, General Motors. GM, as everyone knows, is in trouble. Its current lurch towards bankruptcy has roots that go back years. By the end of 2004, its debt burden had skyrocketed to a mind-numbing $291 billion.[13] In 2005, it recorded losses totaling $10.6 billion.[14] The vast majority of GM’s earnings came from its finance arm, General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC), but to cover its mounting losses, it reached an agreement to sell 51 per cent of GMAC by the fourth quarter of 2006[15]. This staved off problems for a few months, but they came back with a vengeance in 2007 and 2008. February 2008, GM announced 2007 losses of $38.7 billion “the largest annual loss in the history of the auto industry.”[16]
Business analyst Robert Walberg has a solution. GM must, he says, find a “higher margin business with more promising and stable growth prospects.” That business, of course, is the death business. He doesn’t call it that. The nice word for the death business is “defence contracting”. Such a move into war production “could be a good one for the automaker, just as it was for the jet maker Boeing nearly a decade ago.” Walberg is nostalgic for “the 1940s, when GM delivered more than $12 billion worth of war material.”[17] Walberg doesn’t mention that the 1940s was the decade of the most destructive war in human history.
In this tale of three corporations, we have in outline form some of the key elements in the contemporary U.S. and world economy. Industry cannot survive in its traditional markets. Recurring crises of overproduction are driving debt levels higher and higher. In the search for a reliable consumer of last resort, again and again corporations are driven towards arms production. War requires that states purchase massive quantities of expensive to produce weapons and materiel – and if overproduction is the problem, then war with its infinite destructive potential is “the answer”.
It is an economic solution that clearly carries with it huge political and social risks, and very starkly poses the necessity of finding a political solution. The turn to state intervention into the economy is a welcome reprieve from the decades of neoliberalism. But if that state intervention is the intervention of the warfare state and not the welfare state, the dangers for working people around the world are obvious.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] See for instance Andrea Rothman, “U.S. chief executives, Pentagon brass fail to make Paris show,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 17, 2003, p. 54. Rothman without comment and quite uncontroversially, refers to L-M as “the world’s biggest weapons maker.” But this is for the consumption of the readers of the business press. It is one thing for investors to know the truth about who builds what. It’s a little more awkward when that is made available to the public at large.
[2] Kevin Martin, Rachel Glick, Rachel Ries, Tim Nafziger and Mark Swier, “The Real Rogues: Behind the Star Wars missile defense system,” Z magazine, September 2000.
[3] Cited in “Deploying U.S. national missile defence may trigger arms race – Russian expert,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, February 27, 2006, ProQuest document ID: 994482301
[4] “Russia has successfully tested a warhead,” The Press Trust of India Limited, November 2, 2005, Gale Document Number: A138245614
[5] Boeing, 1995 Annual Report, www.boeing.com
[6] McDonnell Douglas, 1996 Annual Report, www.boeing.com
[7] Based on McDonnell Douglas, Annual Reports, 1994-1996, 2nd Quarter 1997, www.boeing.com. The figures for 1997 represent revenue for the first half of the year only
[8] Boeing, Annual Reports, 1995-2007, www. Boeing.com
[9] Robert J. Samuelson, “The Airbus Showdown,” Washington Post, December 8, 2004, p. A31
[10] Airbus Military, “Final go-ahead for A400M military airlifter,” Press Release, May 27, 2003, www.airbusmilitary.com
[11] Yacine Le Forestier, “Europe’s military aircraft dream takes wing at last,” AFP, May 27, 2003
[12] “A400M (Future Large Aircraft) Tactical Transport Aircraft, Europe,” www.airforce-technology.com
[13] Daniel Gross, “GM’s Debt Crisis,” Slate, Dec. 21, 2004, www.slate.com
[14] “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations / General Motors,” www.gm.com
[15] David Streitfeld, “GM Agrees to Sell 51% of Finance Unit,“ Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2006, ww.latimes.com
[16] Associated Press, “GM reports biggest-ever automotive loss,” www.msnbc.msn.com, Feb. 12, 2008
[17] Robert Walberg, “GM’s best offense could be defense,” MSN.com, February 3, 2005, www.moneycentral.msn.com
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
The year 'laissez-faire' became profane
Pity the poor priests of laissez-faire (the French phrase associated with the advocates of free market capitalism). They want to name a building at the University of Chicago after Milton Friedman. Milton was teaching there in 1976 when he won the Nobel Prize in economics. But 100 faculty members have signed a petition objecting. One of the 100, Bruce Lincoln told the press: "He was the darling of the Reaganite revolution and the American right ... He was a scathing critic of the state playing a role of any importance ... It's now a whole lot more obvious to everyone that [Mr. Friedman] got us into some problems and that he didn't have the final solution to everything that makes an economy work."[1] That’s an understatement. The financial markets are breathing thanks only to a $3 trillion injection of public funds.[2] Laissez-faire has never been so discredited.
Others are figuring this out. We saw this in the run-up to the October 14 vote in Canada’s federal election. The Bloc Québécois were expected to lose a fair number of seats when Stephen Harper launched his 2008 bid for a majority. But they roared back into contention, ending up with 50 seats, just one shy of their 2006 result. There were several reasons for this comeback. The Tories alienated Quebec voters with a reactionary attack on culture, and an even more reactionary attack on youth “criminals.” But Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, before any other leader, figured out that with the crisis wracking financial markets, “free-market” had become a swear word.
• During the French language leaders’ debate October 1, Duceppe charged that "Mr. Harper is a laissez-faire-ist like Mr. Bush and we see the disaster happening in the United States now.”[3]
• October 6, Duceppe demanding a recall of Parliament to debate the economic crisis said that Harper had no clue how to fix the broken economy “It is still the economic laissez-faire of George W. Bush.”[4]
• In Trois Rivières, October 7 he took it further. "With his economic philosophy, Harper is the worst thing that could happen to Quebec. It's laissez faire ... It is exactly like (George W.) Bush's Republican policies and we see the results today."[5]
• A week after the election, responding to Tories injecting money into Canada’s banking system, Duceppe said: “I think he [Harper] had to do that, but this is not enough. At first they said there was no problem at all. It was the George Bush laissez-faire (approach), and that was a huge error, with the results that we are seeing now."[6]
What a sea-change. Starting with the entire Reagan-Thatcher years, and continuing during the so-called “neo-liberal revolution,” we were told that the state had caused all our problems. We were told that the market would cure our ills. We were told that if you let the free market do its work, incomes for the rich would go way up, but incomes for the rest of us would follow, even if at a slower pace. Wealth would trickle down, and incomes would trickle up. Language was easy. State, bad; market, good. “Laissez-faire” – the great slogan of Adam Smith, was a badge to be worn with pride.
Now, just one little $3-trillion bailout later, everyone is quietly hiding those badges. Laissez-faire has become a swear word.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Cited in Paul Waldie, “He inspired Reagan’s revolution,” The Globe and Mail Report on Business, October 22, 2008, p. B1
[2] According to Barry Ritholtz, cited in Alice Gomstyn, “Bailout Critic: Plan Could Cost $3 Trillion,” ABC NEWS Business Unit, Oct. 13, 2008
[3] “Harper targeted on economy, crime in French debate,” cbc.ca, Oct. 2, 2008
[4] Rhéal Séguin, “Duceppe wants Parliament recalled over economy,” The Globe and Mail, Oct. 6, 2008
[5] “Harper improvising on economy, Duceppe charges,” The Gazette, Oct. 7, 2008
[6] “Ottawa has linguistic double standard: Duceppe,” The Gazette, October 22, 2008
Others are figuring this out. We saw this in the run-up to the October 14 vote in Canada’s federal election. The Bloc Québécois were expected to lose a fair number of seats when Stephen Harper launched his 2008 bid for a majority. But they roared back into contention, ending up with 50 seats, just one shy of their 2006 result. There were several reasons for this comeback. The Tories alienated Quebec voters with a reactionary attack on culture, and an even more reactionary attack on youth “criminals.” But Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, before any other leader, figured out that with the crisis wracking financial markets, “free-market” had become a swear word.
• During the French language leaders’ debate October 1, Duceppe charged that "Mr. Harper is a laissez-faire-ist like Mr. Bush and we see the disaster happening in the United States now.”[3]
• October 6, Duceppe demanding a recall of Parliament to debate the economic crisis said that Harper had no clue how to fix the broken economy “It is still the economic laissez-faire of George W. Bush.”[4]
• In Trois Rivières, October 7 he took it further. "With his economic philosophy, Harper is the worst thing that could happen to Quebec. It's laissez faire ... It is exactly like (George W.) Bush's Republican policies and we see the results today."[5]
• A week after the election, responding to Tories injecting money into Canada’s banking system, Duceppe said: “I think he [Harper] had to do that, but this is not enough. At first they said there was no problem at all. It was the George Bush laissez-faire (approach), and that was a huge error, with the results that we are seeing now."[6]
What a sea-change. Starting with the entire Reagan-Thatcher years, and continuing during the so-called “neo-liberal revolution,” we were told that the state had caused all our problems. We were told that the market would cure our ills. We were told that if you let the free market do its work, incomes for the rich would go way up, but incomes for the rest of us would follow, even if at a slower pace. Wealth would trickle down, and incomes would trickle up. Language was easy. State, bad; market, good. “Laissez-faire” – the great slogan of Adam Smith, was a badge to be worn with pride.
Now, just one little $3-trillion bailout later, everyone is quietly hiding those badges. Laissez-faire has become a swear word.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Cited in Paul Waldie, “He inspired Reagan’s revolution,” The Globe and Mail Report on Business, October 22, 2008, p. B1
[2] According to Barry Ritholtz, cited in Alice Gomstyn, “Bailout Critic: Plan Could Cost $3 Trillion,” ABC NEWS Business Unit, Oct. 13, 2008
[3] “Harper targeted on economy, crime in French debate,” cbc.ca, Oct. 2, 2008
[4] Rhéal Séguin, “Duceppe wants Parliament recalled over economy,” The Globe and Mail, Oct. 6, 2008
[5] “Harper improvising on economy, Duceppe charges,” The Gazette, Oct. 7, 2008
[6] “Ottawa has linguistic double standard: Duceppe,” The Gazette, October 22, 2008
Monday, 29 September 2008
The Septembers of Neoliberalism
It was September 11, 1973, that the neo-liberal experiment began. The brutal U.S.-backed coup against Salvador Allende’s government opened the door for the “Chicago Boys” – a group of Chilean economists who had studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago[1] – to “reconstruct the Chilean economy … along free-market lines, privatizing public assets, opening up natural resources to private exploitation and facilitating foreign direct investment and free trade.”[2] September 7, 2008 – thirty-five years later – that experiment came to an end, not with a whimper, but a bang. The neo-liberal regime of George Bush – more closely identified than any other world figure with the politics of keeping government out of the market – is now presiding over a state intervention into the so-called “free” market that is without parallel. When the dust settles: a) hundreds of billions of dollars will have been spent to try and fix a broken financial system; b) a generation of free-market arrogance and ideology will lie in ruins, its ideological clarion call “neo-liberalism” completely discredited; and c) the U.S. empire will be exposed as a declining (if vicious) beast. The events of September 2008 mark a watershed in the history of capitalism.
Fannie and Freddie
The first act in this story is in many ways still the most significant if not the most dramatic. September 7, 2008, the United States Treasury announced it would seize control of two institutions called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At the time, this represented “the world’s biggest financial bailout” (a record it would only claim for a few dozen hours). The U.S. government pledged to guarantee literally trillions in the two companies’ investments, something that estimates said would end up costing U.S. taxpayers in the order of $25 billion.
What are these peculiarly named institutions? Fannie Mae stands for “Federal National Mortgage Association” and Freddie Mac stands for “Federal Loan Mortgage Corporation.” Both are GSEs – “government-sponsored enterprises,” creations of the U.S. government, but which operate as shareholder run companies. Fannie Mae’s roots go back to the depression-era. It was created in 1938 to “provide funding to the housing market ... Freddie Mac was created in 1970 to provide competition to Fannie Mae.”[3]
Their role in the housing market is indirect. Homeowners in the United States borrow money from lenders (banks and other financial institutions) just as in other countries. What Fannie and Freddy do is to buy these mortgages from the lenders. This gives the “mortgage initiators” instant cash, and a little bit of profit, allowing them to go back and quickly offer new mortgages. Fannie and Freddy then turn around and repackage the various mortgages they have purchased as “mortgage-backed securities.” They sell these securities on the secondary mortgage market – in effect borrowing money, but using these “securities” as collateral – counting on the income from the payment of mortgage principle and interest to give them cash to repay these loans.[4]
This “provides liquidity” to the housing market. It also has the effect of creating a huge incentive to get more and more people to buy houses, as at every level of this structure, incomes and profits are dependent on a constantly expanding base of home ownership. In the scheme above, there are massive fortunes to be made – by the banks and other mortgage issuers, by Fannie and Freddy and their hangers-on, and by the investors who buy up the Fannie and Freddy debt. Former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd was in line to receive up to $8.4 million in compensation. Freddie Mac’s former CEO was in line for $15.5 million.[5] And John McCain’s campaign for the U.S. presidency, suffered a setback when it was revealed that Freddy Mac had been paying $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 until September 2008 to a firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager.[6] All had an incentive in “priming the pump” – creating incentives for working people to pony-up and enter the world of home ownership. The whole scheme works fine as long as homeowners can pay their mortgages. But if they can’t ...
So base greed is an element that fed this bonfire. But that wasn’t the only, or even the biggest issue – the problems were structural. In the stock market crash at the turn of the century, huge fortunes were lost when the dot-com bubble burst. With investors burned from their experience in the stock market, U.S. interest rates were reduced to unprecedentedly low levels, as the U.S. federal reserve essentially “printed money” to stave off a deeper crisis. One key measure of interest rates, the U.S. federal funds rate, dropped below two percent in November 2001, and stayed below two percent for three years, bottoming out at just below one percent in December 2003.[7] Mortgage rates don’t track Federal Funds Rates exactly, but mortgage rates did come down, so that at their lowest point in 2003 and 2004, it was possible to get Adjustable Rate Mortgages (mortgages which increase or decrease with the rise and fall of interest rates) for between 3 and 4 percent.[8] In fact, people often were able to get mortgages below that rate – with incentives of very low interest rates in the first few years of the mortgage to encourage the plunge into home ownership. With millions moving into home ownership, the mortgage-backed securities market prospered. The effect was to create an environment where billions of dollars could flee an insecure stock market, and find a “safe haven” in the housing market, by investors moving from speculating in stocks to speculating in “mortgage-backed securities.”
This structure was riven with problems. The rush into home buying which this created, pushed house prices very high very fast. This has been a visible problem for some time. In 2006, one analyst wrote: “Cheap money turned the real estate boom into a frenzy ... prices in most hot markets ... soared by 55 per cent to 100 per cent (on top of inflation). Trying to keep pace, buyers increasingly resorted to riskier loans to lower monthly payments. Two types became the rage: adjustable rate mortgages and exotics.” We have already looked at the ARMs. The Exotics bear a little examination, the most extreme of which was “the negative-amortization loan, which allows borrowers to pay less than the interest due. The unpaid interest is tacked onto the principal, so the size of the loan grows every month. In 2004 and 2005, no less than 75 per cent of all mortgages were either ARMs or exotic loans, compared to 20 per cent in the late 1990s.”[9]
This outline is important. Some are blaming poor home buying decisions by ordinary working people for the way in which this crisis has unfolded. But it was not “reckless spending” by the poor. It was a structure, driven by greed, which created enormous pressures and incentives to abandon renting and jump into the home-buying game – simply because massive fortunes were being made. Suddenly, working people were being pressured to take on debt far in excess of their capacity to pay. The best way of measuring this is looking at the ratio of house prices to household income. The graph here shows a steady upward climb in that ratio for the United States as a whole, from the late 1990s to the mid-point of this decade – in some cities, an extremely steep rise.[10]
But interest rates don’t stay low forever. Here the story has another layer of complications. There is a close relationship in most countries between the health of the currency and the trend in interest rates. Roughly, if the country is increasing its international indebtedness, there will be downward pressure on its currency relative to other currencies. This can be countered by increasing interest rates to attract investors in spite of the increasing debt burden. At times these rates have to go up considerably to prevent a precipitous fall in the currency.
There are some who say this pressure has yet to make itself felt in the United States. The entire post-war period has been defined by the domination of the international economy by the U.S. dollar. Its “unique” place in the world economy is often seen as making it relatively immune to the downward pressure that other currencies experience when their economies become increasingly indebted. A commonly used measure of this is a comparison of the U.S. dollar to major currencies. The resulting graph does not show overwhelming U.S. dollar weakness, but rather a generations-long fluctuation with no clear trend either up or down.[11]
But there is a problem with this way of representing the health of the U.S. Dollar. The figures in this comparison go back only until 1973. This leaves out of the picture the biggest story in the history of the U.S. dollar, the effect of it “freeing itself” from the gold standard. This was the decision Richard Nixon took in 1971, allowing the U.S. to “print dollars” unencumbered by maintaining an equivalent stock in gold. The most readily accessible international comparative figures, because they begin in 1973, do not factor this epochal event into their picture. But it is possible to improvise a comparison.
The chart “Decline of the U.S. Dollar” shows the U.S. Dollar measured against the Yen (currency of Japan) and something that is being called the “EuroMark” – a statistical composite of the Mark, formerly the currency of Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, and the Euro which has now replaced the Mark and most other major European currencies. The result is very clear. The U.S. dollar is approximately 1/3 of what it was in 1971, compared to the Yen and the “EuroMark”.[12]
The U.S. Dollar has been steadily declining against its major competitors for years. The devaluation that happened after the abandonment of the gold standard was immediate and quick, becoming precipitous in the late 1970s. This was reversed in the early 1980s by a policy of very high interest rates, then fell steadily until the 1990s, recovering somewhat in the Clinton years, but returning to decline under Bush. As the dollar declines, it inevitably leads to a day when interest rates have to go up, or the dollar’s fall could accelerate dangerously. So in Bush’s second term, interest rates have inched upwards, and this in turn became part of an environment pushing higher and higher the interest rates on millions of peoples’ mortgages.
Finally, none of this works if homeowners start to lose their jobs. When this cycle began, unemployment was at historically low levels – just 3.9 per cent, in the last four months of 2000. That increased to 6.3 percent by September 2003, dropped below five percent through the last half of 2005 and the first two months of 2008, but has since climbed steadily to 6.1 percent by August of 2008.[13]
The effects of these problems became visible in the summer of 2007. With interest rates rising, some homebuyers could not make the payments, and the number of defaults began to rise. Rising interest rates and rising unemployment, started to decrease demand for houses, so prices began to fall. And with house prices falling, many saw the value of their house fall far below the principal remaining on their mortgage – creating an incentive to simply walk away from the debt – default on the mortgage, and go back to renting. The result has been the highest rates of foreclosures in the modern era. A report from the Mortgage Bankers’ Association indicated that: ”about 2.75 percent of all home loans, or about 1.75 million mortgages, were in foreclosure at the end of June [2008], up from 2.47 percent in March. That was the highest foreclosure rate since 1979, when the Mortgage Bankers first collected the data.”[14]
As these millions of foreclosures rippled through the system, the whole flimsy structure started to shake. Between them, Fannie and Freddy had issued $3.7 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities.[15] But suddenly, as mortgage payments started to fall because of defaults, as the assets backing these mortgages started to lose value with the falling prices of houses in the United States, these securities looked a whole lot less secure.
Bankers’ Strike
Neo-liberalism is a modern restatement of an old “free-market” orthodoxy. Markets know best. Let the “hidden hand” of the market do its magic, and a million individual decisions based on individual self-interest, will end up with a virtuous direction for the economy and society as a whole. Sometimes there are barriers to the operation of this hidden hand – too much government intervention, too much regulation being two of the most often cited. Get rid of them. The state’s role is to do away with regulation, to unfetter the markets from the hands of government, to let the markets do their work.
So – from the standpoint of neo-liberal orthodoxy, it is a matter of some indifference that Fannie and Freddy were under stress. Joseph Schumpeter argued last century that capitalism worked through processes of “creative destruction” where periodically whole sections of capital are destroyed in economic slump. This process, while painful, was central to the working of capitalism, clearing the ground for a new round of investment, the way in which a forest fire burns away the underbrush, allowing new saplings to reach for the sky. In Schumpeter’s words the “creative destruction” of competition, bankruptcy and consolidation “revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist has got to live with.”[16]
But the capitalists who made the decisions leading to the impasse of the U.S. financial system are not going to live with the consequence of their actions. Something pushed the neo-liberals into acting against neo-liberal orthodoxy and save those capitalists from the consequences of their actions. What the neo-liberals discovered was that the U.S. economy was not all-powerful, that had they let the process go too far, and the consequences of a full-blown cycle of “creative destruction” would have been disastrous. The issue was not simply one of mortgages – it was about the structural problems of the international, not just the U.S., capitalist system.
So far only one part of the story has been told, the story of mortgages, Fannie and Freddy, and their selling of “mortgage-backed securities”. The next question that has to be asked is, who buys these securities? The economists’ answer is that they are bought by “risk-averse investors such as banks, pension funds and central banks around the world,”[17] investors in other words who want a guaranteed return on their investments, and little or no risk of these investments turning into worthless paper. Fannie and Freddy’s total liabilities is mostly debt, most of it from the sale of mortgage-backed securities, and it totals in excess of $1.7 trillion dollars.[18] Significantly, increasing portions of that debt have been sold to non-U.S. banks and investors. The top five in reverse order, as of June 2007 were Taiwan ($55 billion), South Korea ($63 billion), Russia ($75 billion), Japan ($228 billion) and China ($376 billion).[19] The entire structure then was increasingly dependent on the willingness of banks and other institutions in these countries, to continue giving Fanny and Freddy billions of dollars.
This summer, it came to an end. Under pressure from their eroding mortgage business, Fannie stocks fell from $67.30 a share October 5 2007, to just $7 a share, September 4, 2008.[20] Freddy stocks followed the same downward slide, from $63.43 to $4.95.[21] Suddenly, non-U.S. investors, particularly in Asia, began to worry. The slide in share value of Fannie and Freddy raised the possibility that the two companies could go bankrupt. That would leave banks and investors in Asia and elsewhere holding pieces of paper worth billions of dollars less than their face value. “Chinese banks ‘were probably facing significant losses,’ says Logan Wright, an analyst with Stone & McCarthy Research.”[22]
Bankers from outside the United States began to apply leverage. In the first half of 2007, central bank holdings of Fannie and Freddie securities increased on average by $22 billion a month. But in 2008, those holdings fell by $27 billion from mid-July through early September.[23] And the Financial Times reported in August under the headline “Bank of China flees Fannie-Freddie,” that “Bank of China has cut its portfolio of securities issued or guaranteed by troubled US mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by a quarter since the end of June. The sale by China’s fourth largest commercial bank, which reduced its holdings of so-called agency debt by $4.6bn, is a sign of nervousness among foreign buyers of Fannie and Freddie’s bonds and guaranteed securities.”[24] “The threat of a central bank buyers’ strike was real,” accord to Brad Setser, a former Treasury Dept. official and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.[25]
Neo-liberal orthodoxy dictated “let the market rule,” let the processes of creative destruction work themselves out. But bankers outside the U.S. who stood to lose billions from this market failure said; “Creative Destruction be damned. If you don’t act, we will start withdrawing our money. We are already doing it. We will not let you ‘cleanse’ your economy by leaving us holding worthless pieces of paper.” So facing an enormous catastrophe, Bush and the U.S. administration suddenly switched from the world’s biggest neo-liberals, to the world’s biggest state-capitalists, when they intervened to guarantee the debt held by Fannie and Freddy. Many of their neo-liberal ideologues were left wondering what had hit them. This whole thing might, said one commentator become a “nightmare scenario, the descent into quasi-socialism” which “balloons the national debt and wrecks foreign investors’ faith in the economy.”[26]
The state and capital
But of course this has nothing to do with “socialism” – unless it is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster socialism, where the state robs from the poor to give to the rich – because that is exactly what is happening: tax dollars from U.S. workers to be used to pour into the balance sheet of two failed corporations. It is a myth of the neo-liberals that the state is separate from the market. There is of course the central role of state militarism. The British Navy ruled the waves so that British business could penetrate every corner of the globe in the 19th century. The U.S. military has time and again overthrown governments in Latin America to keep the hemisphere open for business. But there are also the directly economic ways in which the state is intimately tied to the development of capitalism. British imperialism jealously protected its industries behind the walls of empire. India did not build its rail network with British steel and rolling stock because of the market, but because of imperialism.[27] Japanese capitalism burst into the 20th century after the Meiji Restoration used the Japanese state to mobilize resources in order to industrialize.[28] Canadian capitalism had at its core the construction of a continental rail network, which bankrupted the private capitalists, and was only finished because of the state-capitalist “National Policy.”[29] In South Korea, the industrial revolution in the post-war era was inconceivable without the “chaebols”, very much creatures of the South Korean state.
The myth that capitalism is about the retreat of the state, and that socialism is about its reverse – state intervention – is a myth made easier by the long nightmare of Stalinism, where there were states which called themselves “socialist” and which said the same thing as the neo-liberals only in reverse: “We are socialist because the state owns everything: never mind the absence of civil rights and the absence of democracy.” But the Stalinist states are long gone, and a new generation is returning to the roots of the socialist movement, understanding that socialism is about popular control, workers’ control of the economy and the state, or it is about nothing. It can be important to have the state intervene to fix problems in the economy. But the key question becomes – who controls that state? In the United States, we can be pretty sure that the state is controlled by the corporate elite.
That capitalist state, having got the taste of government intervention to save capitalism from itself, has now become ravenous for more. Fannie and Freddy were only two of the institutions under stress because of economic problems in the United States. September 16, the U.S. Federal Reserve took over American Insurance Group for $85 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized the rescue, calling the $85 billion a "staggering sum." Ms. Pelosi said the bailout was "just too enormous for the American people to guarantee."[30] But that staggering sum has now been dwarfed by another even larger sum. United States’ Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is asking Congress to come up with $700-billion to clean “toxic assets” out of the U.S. financial system. What he wants is to have enough money on hand so that any bank or financial institution which has a piece of paper that is looking pretty worthless, Paulson will have the money to say “no problem, we’ll take it off your hands.”
How do you come up with this “worst-case scenario” figure? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in testimony that “ ‘various metrics’ could be used to arrive at that $700 billion number. It is 5% of $14 trillion in outstanding mortgage debt and roughly the same percentage of the $10 trillion to $12 trillion of commercial bank assets. ‘So it seems like an appropriate amount relative to the size of the problem.’”[31]
Seems like an appropriate amount. You would have thought he would have hired someone to get figures so that he could be a little more definitive given the “size of the problem.” What we are looking at is a trillion-dollar intervention by the U.S. government into the financial system of the world’s biggest economy – the biggest ever economic intervention by a state into any economy anywhere – that is going to change the shape of economics and politics for a generation. The crisis brings into focus three central points.
1) The decline of the U.S. and the Danger of Militarism
There has been a sharp divide in anti-capitalist circles over the position of the U.S. in the world system. Theorists like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argued that empire had become disembodied from the state.
In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding powers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.[32]
The actions of states in the context of the current crisis shows this analysis to be inadequate. The states of the various central banks which had holdings of U.S. securities, including the state in China – all have particular interests that they seek to assert. Similarly, the state in the U.S. is suddenly enormously and obviously important to Empire – doing what no corporation on its own can do, mobilizing the tax resources of working people to bail out the financial system. “Empire” is just as bound up with the state system – a system of competing and predatory states – as were all previous systems of imperialism.
Theorists like Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have challenged Hardt and Negri on exactly this point, seeing very clearly the continuing role of the state in shaping the field of power that has been called “Empire.” However, in the place of a system of imperialist states, they tend to reduce “Empire” to just one state – the overwhelmingly dominant U.S. state. They have argued that U.S. penetration of European and Asian capital is so profound as to make irrelevant and archaic any notion of inter-imperial rivalry.[33] But this view too is being revealed as problematic. The long decline of the U.S. dollar, documented above, is an indication of the worsening competitive position of the United States against its rivals in Europe and Asia. And the way in which this bailout took shape – in part from the threat of a strike by central bankers outside the United States, refusing to further invest in U.S. securities, is another powerful indicator of a changing world order. The U.S. remains the world’s biggest economy and most powerful state. But its position relative to others has been in decline for decades, and this débacle shows that the decline is ongoing.
There is a very developed literature, under the heading of the “Permanent Arms Economy,” that makes a compelling case to explain this decline.[34] The long-term structural shift of resources into arms has effectively starved key sections of the U.S. economy of investment, allowing others in the world system to catch-up and in some cases economically overtake the United States. The massive military presence sustained by the U.S. since the Korean War, has been accomplished at the cost of its international competitiveness. Other countries have invested in their “civilian economies” to a much greater extent than the U.S., overtime weakening the relative position of the U.S. in the world system, something now being starkly revealed in the current economic crisis.
But we also know from the last empire to fall under the weight of its arms spending – the Soviet Union – that an addiction to war might have negative effects for an economy, but it is still an addiction. The Soviet Union stayed mired in pointless and bloody wars abroad virtually until it collapsed in the years 1989-1991. The U.S. addiction to arms spending is likely to have the same contours – bad for the economy, but unshakeable for the state. It means that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to be with us for some time.
2) Ideological crisis of neo-liberalism
This September financial shock, has opened up a period of deep confusion and splits for the hegemonic ideology of neo-liberalism. The $700-billion bailout is being pushed by Republican George W. Bush, the world’s pre-eminent neo-liberal. Its principal opposition has come from – the staunchly neo-liberal Congressional Caucus of his own party.[35] It was these neo-liberal hardliners who were at the core of the defeat of the $700-billion bailout package in the first vote in Congress.[36] The neo-liberal monolith has cracked over its key precept – that markets should be “free” of the state.
Without any question, this chaotic, sudden shift from the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the small state and the free market to a new state-capitalist interventionism – this shift will like a thunderbolt make millions question the orthodoxies of neo-liberalism. Why are the bankers being given billions, while those who have lost their homes get nothing? In the parlance of the journalists, “why is Wall Street getting billions that come from the pockets of the ordinary folk of Main Street”? If we are going to have state intervention, why not go all the way – use the money for public transit, green jobs, public housing, schools and education, investments that help ordinary people not overpaid bankers?
But as Naomi Klein has pointed out, a crisis in the ideology of neo-liberalism is not the same thing as a retreat from the policies of neo-liberalism – the privatization and deregulation which have so plagued working peoples’ lives for more than a generation.
It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the right's ability to use this crisis – created by deregulation and privatization – to demand more of the same. ... the dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor. A President McCain would embrace these policies willingly. A President Obama would come under huge pressure from the think tanks and the corporate media to abandon his campaign promises and embrace austerity and "free-market stimulus."[37]
It is worth remembering that one of the modern architects of neo-liberalism, Margaret Thatcher, was very clear on this point. Thatcher is associated with the phrase “there is no alternative” or “TINA” – usually seen as justifying the unbridled rule of competition. Susan George writes that Thatcher:
... was well known for justifying her programme with the single word TINA, short for There Is No Alternative. The central value of Thatcher's doctrine and of neo-liberalism itself is the notion of competition – competition between nations, regions, firms and of course between individuals. Competition is central because it separates the sheep from the goats, the men from the boys, the fit from the unfit. It is supposed to allocate all resources, whether physical, natural, human or financial with the greatest possible efficiency.[38]
But in Thatcher’s classic and most often cited use of the term, this was not quite what she said and this was not quite her point. At a speech to the Conservative Women’s Conference, May 21, 1980, Thatcher’s theme was the way in which wages were increasing too quickly.
Wages in the public sector are still higher than the country can afford ... earnings will have to rise much more slowly if we are to avoid still more unemployment and if we are to get inflation down. It is too often forgotten that during the last two years there has been considerable increase in average living standards. What we produce has been growing much more slowly. We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative.[39]
The point is, Thatcher was not in the first instance driven by an abstract commitment to the market, but by a class commitment to transferring wealth from workers to employers. In this, the role of the state is a tactic, not a principle. The Thatcherite state showed its capacity to intervene against workers’ wages with real brutality during the bitter miners’ strike of 1984-1985.[40] Neo-liberal orthodoxy may lie exposed as nonsensical, but the class which brought us neo-liberalism remains in power, motivated by the same project – capturing the wealth produced by “Main Street” and making sure it ends up in the pockets of “Wall Street.”
3) The need for social movements against capitalism in all its forms
Which leads to the most important point, the need to insist that Thatcher and the neo-liberals are wrong – there is an alternative. In the 1990s and early 21st century, there was a magnificent international movement against neo-liberal globalization. The great protests against NAFTA led by the Zapatistas, the protests against the WTO in Seattle, against the FTAA in Quebec City, against the G8 in Genoa – these protests mobilized hundreds of thousands.
But the political leadership of these movements rested in groups like ATTAC in France or the Workers’ Party of Brazil. For them the target was not capitalism itself, but capitalism in its neo-liberal form. Neo-liberalism is now in open crisis, but the alternative on offer is not re-assuring – a strong state that protects corporations from their own excesses, and does so by taxing and squeezing the wages of ordinary workers. The problem is not just neo-liberalism. The problem is capitalism, whether in its “neo-liberal” or “state-interventionist” form. The next round of anti-corporate mobilizations needs that understanding at its centre.
We are seeing today in North America the hollowness of the neo-liberal dystopia. Others saw it earlier. It was after all the indigenous people of Chiapas who rose up against the neo-liberal North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in January, 1994, the peasants of Cochabamba in 2000 who stopped the water privatizers in their tracks, the masses of Caracas who in 2002 prevented the coup d’état which would have restored neo-liberalism in Venezuela, part of the swelling rage of all the oppressed in Latin America who, the principal road-block to the 2005 imposition of the U.S. led neo-liberal Free Trade Area of the America (FTAA). Perhaps just as neo-liberalism’s birth was in Latin America, it will similarly be Latin America where we will see the beginnings of the new social movements challenging capitalism in all its forms.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Gilberto Villarroel, “La herencia de los ‘Chicago boys’,” BBCMUNDO.com, December 10, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk
[2] David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capital: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 12
[3] “US rescues giant mortgage lenders,” BBC News, September 7, 2008
[4] Alana Semuels, “Q&A about mortgage giants Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2008, www.latimes.com
[5] The Associated Press, “Answers to your Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac takeover questions,” New York Daily News, September 11, 2008, www.nydailynews.com
[6] Jackie Calmes, David D. Kirkpatrick, “McCain Aide’s Firm Was Paid by Freddie Mac,” The New York Times, September 23, 2008
[7] Bank of Canada, “Monthly Series: V122150: Federal Funds Rate”, www.bankofcanada.ca
[8] HSH Associates Financial Publishers, “HSH’s National Monthly Mortgage Statistics,” www.hsh.com
[9] Shawn Tully, “Real Estate Survival Guide,” Fortune, Vol. 153 Issue 9, May 11, 2006, pp. 94-102
[10] Calculated from Joint Centre for Housing Studies, The State of the Nation’s Housing 2007, “Additional Table: Metropolitan Area House Price-Income Ratio, 1980-2006," www.jchs.harvard.edu. Figures are not yet readily available for 2007 and 2008. However, an update has been released to one analyst, which shows the same general trend, with the addition that from 2007 on, house prices have started to fall – the graphical representation of the bursting of the housing bubble. See CalculatedRisk, “Update: Ratio Median House Price to Median Income (2008 Report)," June 24, 2008, http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com
[11] U.S. Federal Reserve Board, Federal Reserve Statistical Release, H.10 “Foreign Exchange Rates,” “Price-adjusted Major Currencies Dollar Index,” www.federalreserve.gov
[12] Derived from “FXHistory®: historical currency exchange rates," accessed September 24, 2008.
[13] Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” http://data.bls.gov
[14] Vikas Bajaj, “Foreclosures Rose as Delinquencies Eased in Quarter,” The New York Times, September 5, 2008
[15] According to Peter Coy, “Back on Track – Or Off The Rails?” Businessweek, September 22, 2008, p. 24
[16] Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 83
[17] Coy, “Back on Track,” p. 24
[18] MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, www.marketwatch.com and Forbes.com
[19] U.S. Treasury Dept., as reported by Bruce Einhorn and Theo Francis, “Asia Breathes a Sigh of Relief,” Businessweek, September 22, 2008, p. 32.
[20] Yahoo Finance, http://yahoo.finance.com
[21] Yahoo Finance, http://yahoo.finance.com
[22] Einhorn and Francis, “Asia Breathes A Sigh of Relief,” p. 32
[23] Einhorn and Francis, “Asia Breathes A Sigh of Relief,” p. 32
[24] Saskia Scholtes and James Politi, “Bank of China flees Fannie-Freddie,” Financial Times, August 28, 2008
[25] Einhorn and Francis, “Asia Breathes A Sigh of Relief,” p. 32
[26] Coy, “Back on Track – Or Off the Rails,” p. 25
[27] Clarence Baldwin Davis, Kenneth E. Wilburn, Ronadl Edward Robinson, Railway Imperialism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991)
[28] Colin Barker, “Origins and Significance of the Meiji Restoration,” 1982, www.marxists.de
[29] Stanley Ryerson, Unequal Union (New York: International Publishers, 1968)
[30] Edmund L. Andrews, “Fed’s $85 Billion Loan Rescues Insurer,” The New York Times, September 16, 2008
[31] Joshua Zumbrun and Liz Moyer, “Your Guide To The Bailout Debate,” September 24, 2008, Forbes.com
[32] Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. xii-xiii
[33] See essays in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge and Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded (London: Merlin Press). For an exchange that goes over this controversy in detail, see: Alex Callinicos, “Imperialism and Global Political Economy,” International Socialism 108 (Autumn 2005); Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “ ‘Imperialism and Global Political Economy’ – A Reply to Alex Callinicos,” International Socialism 109 (Winter 2006); and Alex Callinicos, “Making sense of imperialism: a reply to Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin,” International Socialism 110 (Spring 2007) – all available online at www.isj.org.uk.
[34] See Michael Kidron, Capitalism and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1974) for a classic development of this thesis. Some of Kidron’s writings are available at The Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org
[35] Sheldon Alberts and Don MacDonald, “Bailout plan stalls as conservative Republicans voice their opposition,” The Vancouver Sun, September 26, 2008
[36] Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn, “Lawmakers Defy Bush and Party Leaders, Rejecting Bailout,” The New York Times, September 29, 2008
[37] Naomi Klein, “Now is the Time to Resist Wall Street’s Shock Doctrine,” The Huffington Post, September 25, 2008
[38] Susan George, “A Short History of Neoliberalism: Twenty Years of Elite Economics and Emerging Opportunities for Structural Change,” Transnational Institute,, March 24, 1999, www.tni.org
[39] Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Women’s Conference,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, May 21, 1980, www.margaretthathcer.org
[40] See, among other accounts, Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons, The Great Strike: The Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 And Its Lessons (London: Socialist Worker, 1985)
Fannie and Freddie
The first act in this story is in many ways still the most significant if not the most dramatic. September 7, 2008, the United States Treasury announced it would seize control of two institutions called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At the time, this represented “the world’s biggest financial bailout” (a record it would only claim for a few dozen hours). The U.S. government pledged to guarantee literally trillions in the two companies’ investments, something that estimates said would end up costing U.S. taxpayers in the order of $25 billion.
What are these peculiarly named institutions? Fannie Mae stands for “Federal National Mortgage Association” and Freddie Mac stands for “Federal Loan Mortgage Corporation.” Both are GSEs – “government-sponsored enterprises,” creations of the U.S. government, but which operate as shareholder run companies. Fannie Mae’s roots go back to the depression-era. It was created in 1938 to “provide funding to the housing market ... Freddie Mac was created in 1970 to provide competition to Fannie Mae.”[3]
Their role in the housing market is indirect. Homeowners in the United States borrow money from lenders (banks and other financial institutions) just as in other countries. What Fannie and Freddy do is to buy these mortgages from the lenders. This gives the “mortgage initiators” instant cash, and a little bit of profit, allowing them to go back and quickly offer new mortgages. Fannie and Freddy then turn around and repackage the various mortgages they have purchased as “mortgage-backed securities.” They sell these securities on the secondary mortgage market – in effect borrowing money, but using these “securities” as collateral – counting on the income from the payment of mortgage principle and interest to give them cash to repay these loans.[4]
This “provides liquidity” to the housing market. It also has the effect of creating a huge incentive to get more and more people to buy houses, as at every level of this structure, incomes and profits are dependent on a constantly expanding base of home ownership. In the scheme above, there are massive fortunes to be made – by the banks and other mortgage issuers, by Fannie and Freddy and their hangers-on, and by the investors who buy up the Fannie and Freddy debt. Former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd was in line to receive up to $8.4 million in compensation. Freddie Mac’s former CEO was in line for $15.5 million.[5] And John McCain’s campaign for the U.S. presidency, suffered a setback when it was revealed that Freddy Mac had been paying $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 until September 2008 to a firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager.[6] All had an incentive in “priming the pump” – creating incentives for working people to pony-up and enter the world of home ownership. The whole scheme works fine as long as homeowners can pay their mortgages. But if they can’t ...
So base greed is an element that fed this bonfire. But that wasn’t the only, or even the biggest issue – the problems were structural. In the stock market crash at the turn of the century, huge fortunes were lost when the dot-com bubble burst. With investors burned from their experience in the stock market, U.S. interest rates were reduced to unprecedentedly low levels, as the U.S. federal reserve essentially “printed money” to stave off a deeper crisis. One key measure of interest rates, the U.S. federal funds rate, dropped below two percent in November 2001, and stayed below two percent for three years, bottoming out at just below one percent in December 2003.[7] Mortgage rates don’t track Federal Funds Rates exactly, but mortgage rates did come down, so that at their lowest point in 2003 and 2004, it was possible to get Adjustable Rate Mortgages (mortgages which increase or decrease with the rise and fall of interest rates) for between 3 and 4 percent.[8] In fact, people often were able to get mortgages below that rate – with incentives of very low interest rates in the first few years of the mortgage to encourage the plunge into home ownership. With millions moving into home ownership, the mortgage-backed securities market prospered. The effect was to create an environment where billions of dollars could flee an insecure stock market, and find a “safe haven” in the housing market, by investors moving from speculating in stocks to speculating in “mortgage-backed securities.”
This structure was riven with problems. The rush into home buying which this created, pushed house prices very high very fast. This has been a visible problem for some time. In 2006, one analyst wrote: “Cheap money turned the real estate boom into a frenzy ... prices in most hot markets ... soared by 55 per cent to 100 per cent (on top of inflation). Trying to keep pace, buyers increasingly resorted to riskier loans to lower monthly payments. Two types became the rage: adjustable rate mortgages and exotics.” We have already looked at the ARMs. The Exotics bear a little examination, the most extreme of which was “the negative-amortization loan, which allows borrowers to pay less than the interest due. The unpaid interest is tacked onto the principal, so the size of the loan grows every month. In 2004 and 2005, no less than 75 per cent of all mortgages were either ARMs or exotic loans, compared to 20 per cent in the late 1990s.”[9]
This outline is important. Some are blaming poor home buying decisions by ordinary working people for the way in which this crisis has unfolded. But it was not “reckless spending” by the poor. It was a structure, driven by greed, which created enormous pressures and incentives to abandon renting and jump into the home-buying game – simply because massive fortunes were being made. Suddenly, working people were being pressured to take on debt far in excess of their capacity to pay. The best way of measuring this is looking at the ratio of house prices to household income. The graph here shows a steady upward climb in that ratio for the United States as a whole, from the late 1990s to the mid-point of this decade – in some cities, an extremely steep rise.[10]
But interest rates don’t stay low forever. Here the story has another layer of complications. There is a close relationship in most countries between the health of the currency and the trend in interest rates. Roughly, if the country is increasing its international indebtedness, there will be downward pressure on its currency relative to other currencies. This can be countered by increasing interest rates to attract investors in spite of the increasing debt burden. At times these rates have to go up considerably to prevent a precipitous fall in the currency.
There are some who say this pressure has yet to make itself felt in the United States. The entire post-war period has been defined by the domination of the international economy by the U.S. dollar. Its “unique” place in the world economy is often seen as making it relatively immune to the downward pressure that other currencies experience when their economies become increasingly indebted. A commonly used measure of this is a comparison of the U.S. dollar to major currencies. The resulting graph does not show overwhelming U.S. dollar weakness, but rather a generations-long fluctuation with no clear trend either up or down.[11]
But there is a problem with this way of representing the health of the U.S. Dollar. The figures in this comparison go back only until 1973. This leaves out of the picture the biggest story in the history of the U.S. dollar, the effect of it “freeing itself” from the gold standard. This was the decision Richard Nixon took in 1971, allowing the U.S. to “print dollars” unencumbered by maintaining an equivalent stock in gold. The most readily accessible international comparative figures, because they begin in 1973, do not factor this epochal event into their picture. But it is possible to improvise a comparison.
The chart “Decline of the U.S. Dollar” shows the U.S. Dollar measured against the Yen (currency of Japan) and something that is being called the “EuroMark” – a statistical composite of the Mark, formerly the currency of Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, and the Euro which has now replaced the Mark and most other major European currencies. The result is very clear. The U.S. dollar is approximately 1/3 of what it was in 1971, compared to the Yen and the “EuroMark”.[12]
The U.S. Dollar has been steadily declining against its major competitors for years. The devaluation that happened after the abandonment of the gold standard was immediate and quick, becoming precipitous in the late 1970s. This was reversed in the early 1980s by a policy of very high interest rates, then fell steadily until the 1990s, recovering somewhat in the Clinton years, but returning to decline under Bush. As the dollar declines, it inevitably leads to a day when interest rates have to go up, or the dollar’s fall could accelerate dangerously. So in Bush’s second term, interest rates have inched upwards, and this in turn became part of an environment pushing higher and higher the interest rates on millions of peoples’ mortgages.
Finally, none of this works if homeowners start to lose their jobs. When this cycle began, unemployment was at historically low levels – just 3.9 per cent, in the last four months of 2000. That increased to 6.3 percent by September 2003, dropped below five percent through the last half of 2005 and the first two months of 2008, but has since climbed steadily to 6.1 percent by August of 2008.[13]
The effects of these problems became visible in the summer of 2007. With interest rates rising, some homebuyers could not make the payments, and the number of defaults began to rise. Rising interest rates and rising unemployment, started to decrease demand for houses, so prices began to fall. And with house prices falling, many saw the value of their house fall far below the principal remaining on their mortgage – creating an incentive to simply walk away from the debt – default on the mortgage, and go back to renting. The result has been the highest rates of foreclosures in the modern era. A report from the Mortgage Bankers’ Association indicated that: ”about 2.75 percent of all home loans, or about 1.75 million mortgages, were in foreclosure at the end of June [2008], up from 2.47 percent in March. That was the highest foreclosure rate since 1979, when the Mortgage Bankers first collected the data.”[14]
As these millions of foreclosures rippled through the system, the whole flimsy structure started to shake. Between them, Fannie and Freddy had issued $3.7 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities.[15] But suddenly, as mortgage payments started to fall because of defaults, as the assets backing these mortgages started to lose value with the falling prices of houses in the United States, these securities looked a whole lot less secure.
Bankers’ Strike
Neo-liberalism is a modern restatement of an old “free-market” orthodoxy. Markets know best. Let the “hidden hand” of the market do its magic, and a million individual decisions based on individual self-interest, will end up with a virtuous direction for the economy and society as a whole. Sometimes there are barriers to the operation of this hidden hand – too much government intervention, too much regulation being two of the most often cited. Get rid of them. The state’s role is to do away with regulation, to unfetter the markets from the hands of government, to let the markets do their work.
So – from the standpoint of neo-liberal orthodoxy, it is a matter of some indifference that Fannie and Freddy were under stress. Joseph Schumpeter argued last century that capitalism worked through processes of “creative destruction” where periodically whole sections of capital are destroyed in economic slump. This process, while painful, was central to the working of capitalism, clearing the ground for a new round of investment, the way in which a forest fire burns away the underbrush, allowing new saplings to reach for the sky. In Schumpeter’s words the “creative destruction” of competition, bankruptcy and consolidation “revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist has got to live with.”[16]
But the capitalists who made the decisions leading to the impasse of the U.S. financial system are not going to live with the consequence of their actions. Something pushed the neo-liberals into acting against neo-liberal orthodoxy and save those capitalists from the consequences of their actions. What the neo-liberals discovered was that the U.S. economy was not all-powerful, that had they let the process go too far, and the consequences of a full-blown cycle of “creative destruction” would have been disastrous. The issue was not simply one of mortgages – it was about the structural problems of the international, not just the U.S., capitalist system.
So far only one part of the story has been told, the story of mortgages, Fannie and Freddy, and their selling of “mortgage-backed securities”. The next question that has to be asked is, who buys these securities? The economists’ answer is that they are bought by “risk-averse investors such as banks, pension funds and central banks around the world,”[17] investors in other words who want a guaranteed return on their investments, and little or no risk of these investments turning into worthless paper. Fannie and Freddy’s total liabilities is mostly debt, most of it from the sale of mortgage-backed securities, and it totals in excess of $1.7 trillion dollars.[18] Significantly, increasing portions of that debt have been sold to non-U.S. banks and investors. The top five in reverse order, as of June 2007 were Taiwan ($55 billion), South Korea ($63 billion), Russia ($75 billion), Japan ($228 billion) and China ($376 billion).[19] The entire structure then was increasingly dependent on the willingness of banks and other institutions in these countries, to continue giving Fanny and Freddy billions of dollars.
This summer, it came to an end. Under pressure from their eroding mortgage business, Fannie stocks fell from $67.30 a share October 5 2007, to just $7 a share, September 4, 2008.[20] Freddy stocks followed the same downward slide, from $63.43 to $4.95.[21] Suddenly, non-U.S. investors, particularly in Asia, began to worry. The slide in share value of Fannie and Freddy raised the possibility that the two companies could go bankrupt. That would leave banks and investors in Asia and elsewhere holding pieces of paper worth billions of dollars less than their face value. “Chinese banks ‘were probably facing significant losses,’ says Logan Wright, an analyst with Stone & McCarthy Research.”[22]
Bankers from outside the United States began to apply leverage. In the first half of 2007, central bank holdings of Fannie and Freddie securities increased on average by $22 billion a month. But in 2008, those holdings fell by $27 billion from mid-July through early September.[23] And the Financial Times reported in August under the headline “Bank of China flees Fannie-Freddie,” that “Bank of China has cut its portfolio of securities issued or guaranteed by troubled US mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by a quarter since the end of June. The sale by China’s fourth largest commercial bank, which reduced its holdings of so-called agency debt by $4.6bn, is a sign of nervousness among foreign buyers of Fannie and Freddie’s bonds and guaranteed securities.”[24] “The threat of a central bank buyers’ strike was real,” accord to Brad Setser, a former Treasury Dept. official and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.[25]
Neo-liberal orthodoxy dictated “let the market rule,” let the processes of creative destruction work themselves out. But bankers outside the U.S. who stood to lose billions from this market failure said; “Creative Destruction be damned. If you don’t act, we will start withdrawing our money. We are already doing it. We will not let you ‘cleanse’ your economy by leaving us holding worthless pieces of paper.” So facing an enormous catastrophe, Bush and the U.S. administration suddenly switched from the world’s biggest neo-liberals, to the world’s biggest state-capitalists, when they intervened to guarantee the debt held by Fannie and Freddy. Many of their neo-liberal ideologues were left wondering what had hit them. This whole thing might, said one commentator become a “nightmare scenario, the descent into quasi-socialism” which “balloons the national debt and wrecks foreign investors’ faith in the economy.”[26]
The state and capital
But of course this has nothing to do with “socialism” – unless it is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster socialism, where the state robs from the poor to give to the rich – because that is exactly what is happening: tax dollars from U.S. workers to be used to pour into the balance sheet of two failed corporations. It is a myth of the neo-liberals that the state is separate from the market. There is of course the central role of state militarism. The British Navy ruled the waves so that British business could penetrate every corner of the globe in the 19th century. The U.S. military has time and again overthrown governments in Latin America to keep the hemisphere open for business. But there are also the directly economic ways in which the state is intimately tied to the development of capitalism. British imperialism jealously protected its industries behind the walls of empire. India did not build its rail network with British steel and rolling stock because of the market, but because of imperialism.[27] Japanese capitalism burst into the 20th century after the Meiji Restoration used the Japanese state to mobilize resources in order to industrialize.[28] Canadian capitalism had at its core the construction of a continental rail network, which bankrupted the private capitalists, and was only finished because of the state-capitalist “National Policy.”[29] In South Korea, the industrial revolution in the post-war era was inconceivable without the “chaebols”, very much creatures of the South Korean state.
The myth that capitalism is about the retreat of the state, and that socialism is about its reverse – state intervention – is a myth made easier by the long nightmare of Stalinism, where there were states which called themselves “socialist” and which said the same thing as the neo-liberals only in reverse: “We are socialist because the state owns everything: never mind the absence of civil rights and the absence of democracy.” But the Stalinist states are long gone, and a new generation is returning to the roots of the socialist movement, understanding that socialism is about popular control, workers’ control of the economy and the state, or it is about nothing. It can be important to have the state intervene to fix problems in the economy. But the key question becomes – who controls that state? In the United States, we can be pretty sure that the state is controlled by the corporate elite.
That capitalist state, having got the taste of government intervention to save capitalism from itself, has now become ravenous for more. Fannie and Freddy were only two of the institutions under stress because of economic problems in the United States. September 16, the U.S. Federal Reserve took over American Insurance Group for $85 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized the rescue, calling the $85 billion a "staggering sum." Ms. Pelosi said the bailout was "just too enormous for the American people to guarantee."[30] But that staggering sum has now been dwarfed by another even larger sum. United States’ Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is asking Congress to come up with $700-billion to clean “toxic assets” out of the U.S. financial system. What he wants is to have enough money on hand so that any bank or financial institution which has a piece of paper that is looking pretty worthless, Paulson will have the money to say “no problem, we’ll take it off your hands.”
How do you come up with this “worst-case scenario” figure? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in testimony that “ ‘various metrics’ could be used to arrive at that $700 billion number. It is 5% of $14 trillion in outstanding mortgage debt and roughly the same percentage of the $10 trillion to $12 trillion of commercial bank assets. ‘So it seems like an appropriate amount relative to the size of the problem.’”[31]
Seems like an appropriate amount. You would have thought he would have hired someone to get figures so that he could be a little more definitive given the “size of the problem.” What we are looking at is a trillion-dollar intervention by the U.S. government into the financial system of the world’s biggest economy – the biggest ever economic intervention by a state into any economy anywhere – that is going to change the shape of economics and politics for a generation. The crisis brings into focus three central points.
1) The decline of the U.S. and the Danger of Militarism
There has been a sharp divide in anti-capitalist circles over the position of the U.S. in the world system. Theorists like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argued that empire had become disembodied from the state.
In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding powers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.[32]
The actions of states in the context of the current crisis shows this analysis to be inadequate. The states of the various central banks which had holdings of U.S. securities, including the state in China – all have particular interests that they seek to assert. Similarly, the state in the U.S. is suddenly enormously and obviously important to Empire – doing what no corporation on its own can do, mobilizing the tax resources of working people to bail out the financial system. “Empire” is just as bound up with the state system – a system of competing and predatory states – as were all previous systems of imperialism.
Theorists like Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have challenged Hardt and Negri on exactly this point, seeing very clearly the continuing role of the state in shaping the field of power that has been called “Empire.” However, in the place of a system of imperialist states, they tend to reduce “Empire” to just one state – the overwhelmingly dominant U.S. state. They have argued that U.S. penetration of European and Asian capital is so profound as to make irrelevant and archaic any notion of inter-imperial rivalry.[33] But this view too is being revealed as problematic. The long decline of the U.S. dollar, documented above, is an indication of the worsening competitive position of the United States against its rivals in Europe and Asia. And the way in which this bailout took shape – in part from the threat of a strike by central bankers outside the United States, refusing to further invest in U.S. securities, is another powerful indicator of a changing world order. The U.S. remains the world’s biggest economy and most powerful state. But its position relative to others has been in decline for decades, and this débacle shows that the decline is ongoing.
There is a very developed literature, under the heading of the “Permanent Arms Economy,” that makes a compelling case to explain this decline.[34] The long-term structural shift of resources into arms has effectively starved key sections of the U.S. economy of investment, allowing others in the world system to catch-up and in some cases economically overtake the United States. The massive military presence sustained by the U.S. since the Korean War, has been accomplished at the cost of its international competitiveness. Other countries have invested in their “civilian economies” to a much greater extent than the U.S., overtime weakening the relative position of the U.S. in the world system, something now being starkly revealed in the current economic crisis.
But we also know from the last empire to fall under the weight of its arms spending – the Soviet Union – that an addiction to war might have negative effects for an economy, but it is still an addiction. The Soviet Union stayed mired in pointless and bloody wars abroad virtually until it collapsed in the years 1989-1991. The U.S. addiction to arms spending is likely to have the same contours – bad for the economy, but unshakeable for the state. It means that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to be with us for some time.
2) Ideological crisis of neo-liberalism
This September financial shock, has opened up a period of deep confusion and splits for the hegemonic ideology of neo-liberalism. The $700-billion bailout is being pushed by Republican George W. Bush, the world’s pre-eminent neo-liberal. Its principal opposition has come from – the staunchly neo-liberal Congressional Caucus of his own party.[35] It was these neo-liberal hardliners who were at the core of the defeat of the $700-billion bailout package in the first vote in Congress.[36] The neo-liberal monolith has cracked over its key precept – that markets should be “free” of the state.
Without any question, this chaotic, sudden shift from the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the small state and the free market to a new state-capitalist interventionism – this shift will like a thunderbolt make millions question the orthodoxies of neo-liberalism. Why are the bankers being given billions, while those who have lost their homes get nothing? In the parlance of the journalists, “why is Wall Street getting billions that come from the pockets of the ordinary folk of Main Street”? If we are going to have state intervention, why not go all the way – use the money for public transit, green jobs, public housing, schools and education, investments that help ordinary people not overpaid bankers?
But as Naomi Klein has pointed out, a crisis in the ideology of neo-liberalism is not the same thing as a retreat from the policies of neo-liberalism – the privatization and deregulation which have so plagued working peoples’ lives for more than a generation.
It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the right's ability to use this crisis – created by deregulation and privatization – to demand more of the same. ... the dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor. A President McCain would embrace these policies willingly. A President Obama would come under huge pressure from the think tanks and the corporate media to abandon his campaign promises and embrace austerity and "free-market stimulus."[37]
It is worth remembering that one of the modern architects of neo-liberalism, Margaret Thatcher, was very clear on this point. Thatcher is associated with the phrase “there is no alternative” or “TINA” – usually seen as justifying the unbridled rule of competition. Susan George writes that Thatcher:
... was well known for justifying her programme with the single word TINA, short for There Is No Alternative. The central value of Thatcher's doctrine and of neo-liberalism itself is the notion of competition – competition between nations, regions, firms and of course between individuals. Competition is central because it separates the sheep from the goats, the men from the boys, the fit from the unfit. It is supposed to allocate all resources, whether physical, natural, human or financial with the greatest possible efficiency.[38]
But in Thatcher’s classic and most often cited use of the term, this was not quite what she said and this was not quite her point. At a speech to the Conservative Women’s Conference, May 21, 1980, Thatcher’s theme was the way in which wages were increasing too quickly.
Wages in the public sector are still higher than the country can afford ... earnings will have to rise much more slowly if we are to avoid still more unemployment and if we are to get inflation down. It is too often forgotten that during the last two years there has been considerable increase in average living standards. What we produce has been growing much more slowly. We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative.[39]
The point is, Thatcher was not in the first instance driven by an abstract commitment to the market, but by a class commitment to transferring wealth from workers to employers. In this, the role of the state is a tactic, not a principle. The Thatcherite state showed its capacity to intervene against workers’ wages with real brutality during the bitter miners’ strike of 1984-1985.[40] Neo-liberal orthodoxy may lie exposed as nonsensical, but the class which brought us neo-liberalism remains in power, motivated by the same project – capturing the wealth produced by “Main Street” and making sure it ends up in the pockets of “Wall Street.”
3) The need for social movements against capitalism in all its forms
Which leads to the most important point, the need to insist that Thatcher and the neo-liberals are wrong – there is an alternative. In the 1990s and early 21st century, there was a magnificent international movement against neo-liberal globalization. The great protests against NAFTA led by the Zapatistas, the protests against the WTO in Seattle, against the FTAA in Quebec City, against the G8 in Genoa – these protests mobilized hundreds of thousands.
But the political leadership of these movements rested in groups like ATTAC in France or the Workers’ Party of Brazil. For them the target was not capitalism itself, but capitalism in its neo-liberal form. Neo-liberalism is now in open crisis, but the alternative on offer is not re-assuring – a strong state that protects corporations from their own excesses, and does so by taxing and squeezing the wages of ordinary workers. The problem is not just neo-liberalism. The problem is capitalism, whether in its “neo-liberal” or “state-interventionist” form. The next round of anti-corporate mobilizations needs that understanding at its centre.
We are seeing today in North America the hollowness of the neo-liberal dystopia. Others saw it earlier. It was after all the indigenous people of Chiapas who rose up against the neo-liberal North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in January, 1994, the peasants of Cochabamba in 2000 who stopped the water privatizers in their tracks, the masses of Caracas who in 2002 prevented the coup d’état which would have restored neo-liberalism in Venezuela, part of the swelling rage of all the oppressed in Latin America who, the principal road-block to the 2005 imposition of the U.S. led neo-liberal Free Trade Area of the America (FTAA). Perhaps just as neo-liberalism’s birth was in Latin America, it will similarly be Latin America where we will see the beginnings of the new social movements challenging capitalism in all its forms.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Gilberto Villarroel, “La herencia de los ‘Chicago boys’,” BBCMUNDO.com, December 10, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk
[2] David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capital: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 12
[3] “US rescues giant mortgage lenders,” BBC News, September 7, 2008
[4] Alana Semuels, “Q&A about mortgage giants Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2008, www.latimes.com
[5] The Associated Press, “Answers to your Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac takeover questions,” New York Daily News, September 11, 2008, www.nydailynews.com
[6] Jackie Calmes, David D. Kirkpatrick, “McCain Aide’s Firm Was Paid by Freddie Mac,” The New York Times, September 23, 2008
[7] Bank of Canada, “Monthly Series: V122150: Federal Funds Rate”, www.bankofcanada.ca
[8] HSH Associates Financial Publishers, “HSH’s National Monthly Mortgage Statistics,” www.hsh.com
[9] Shawn Tully, “Real Estate Survival Guide,” Fortune, Vol. 153 Issue 9, May 11, 2006, pp. 94-102
[10] Calculated from Joint Centre for Housing Studies, The State of the Nation’s Housing 2007, “Additional Table: Metropolitan Area House Price-Income Ratio, 1980-2006," www.jchs.harvard.edu. Figures are not yet readily available for 2007 and 2008. However, an update has been released to one analyst, which shows the same general trend, with the addition that from 2007 on, house prices have started to fall – the graphical representation of the bursting of the housing bubble. See CalculatedRisk, “Update: Ratio Median House Price to Median Income (2008 Report)," June 24, 2008, http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com
[11] U.S. Federal Reserve Board, Federal Reserve Statistical Release, H.10 “Foreign Exchange Rates,” “Price-adjusted Major Currencies Dollar Index,” www.federalreserve.gov
[12] Derived from “FXHistory®: historical currency exchange rates," accessed September 24, 2008.
[13] Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” http://data.bls.gov
[14] Vikas Bajaj, “Foreclosures Rose as Delinquencies Eased in Quarter,” The New York Times, September 5, 2008
[15] According to Peter Coy, “Back on Track – Or Off The Rails?” Businessweek, September 22, 2008, p. 24
[16] Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 83
[17] Coy, “Back on Track,” p. 24
[18] MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, www.marketwatch.com and Forbes.com
[19] U.S. Treasury Dept., as reported by Bruce Einhorn and Theo Francis, “Asia Breathes a Sigh of Relief,” Businessweek, September 22, 2008, p. 32.
[20] Yahoo Finance, http://yahoo.finance.com
[21] Yahoo Finance, http://yahoo.finance.com
[22] Einhorn and Francis, “Asia Breathes A Sigh of Relief,” p. 32
[23] Einhorn and Francis, “Asia Breathes A Sigh of Relief,” p. 32
[24] Saskia Scholtes and James Politi, “Bank of China flees Fannie-Freddie,” Financial Times, August 28, 2008
[25] Einhorn and Francis, “Asia Breathes A Sigh of Relief,” p. 32
[26] Coy, “Back on Track – Or Off the Rails,” p. 25
[27] Clarence Baldwin Davis, Kenneth E. Wilburn, Ronadl Edward Robinson, Railway Imperialism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991)
[28] Colin Barker, “Origins and Significance of the Meiji Restoration,” 1982, www.marxists.de
[29] Stanley Ryerson, Unequal Union (New York: International Publishers, 1968)
[30] Edmund L. Andrews, “Fed’s $85 Billion Loan Rescues Insurer,” The New York Times, September 16, 2008
[31] Joshua Zumbrun and Liz Moyer, “Your Guide To The Bailout Debate,” September 24, 2008, Forbes.com
[32] Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. xii-xiii
[33] See essays in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge and Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded (London: Merlin Press). For an exchange that goes over this controversy in detail, see: Alex Callinicos, “Imperialism and Global Political Economy,” International Socialism 108 (Autumn 2005); Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “ ‘Imperialism and Global Political Economy’ – A Reply to Alex Callinicos,” International Socialism 109 (Winter 2006); and Alex Callinicos, “Making sense of imperialism: a reply to Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin,” International Socialism 110 (Spring 2007) – all available online at www.isj.org.uk.
[34] See Michael Kidron, Capitalism and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1974) for a classic development of this thesis. Some of Kidron’s writings are available at The Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org
[35] Sheldon Alberts and Don MacDonald, “Bailout plan stalls as conservative Republicans voice their opposition,” The Vancouver Sun, September 26, 2008
[36] Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn, “Lawmakers Defy Bush and Party Leaders, Rejecting Bailout,” The New York Times, September 29, 2008
[37] Naomi Klein, “Now is the Time to Resist Wall Street’s Shock Doctrine,” The Huffington Post, September 25, 2008
[38] Susan George, “A Short History of Neoliberalism: Twenty Years of Elite Economics and Emerging Opportunities for Structural Change,” Transnational Institute,, March 24, 1999, www.tni.org
[39] Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Women’s Conference,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, May 21, 1980, www.margaretthathcer.org
[40] See, among other accounts, Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons, The Great Strike: The Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 And Its Lessons (London: Socialist Worker, 1985)
Friday, 30 May 2008
The toxic tango of markets and housing
You can see it in the streets of Cleveland, or Buffalo, or Minneapolis. On all those streets, the working poor who five years ago lived in their own homes, are back in cramped apartments, paying rent to their landlords. On the streets where they used to live, their old houses sit boarded up and rotting. Every week, some of these homes come down, as city governments spend millions to demolish houses abandoned because of what is being called the “subprime” mortgage crisis. It should be called the “free-market” housing crisis. What these streets tell us is the catastrophic failure of a decade long experiment in using the free-market to regulate housing policy in the United States.
Go back to 1999. Then U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan put his weight on the scales to block new regulations for interesting things called “derivative products.” Any new regulations would be a “major mistake” he told the Futures Industry Association in March of that year.[1] Derivatives are complex financial instruments whose value is related to an underlying asset. They can become enormously complex. But Greenspan – at the time arguably the most powerful financial manager in the world – used his authority to make sure that the trading in these derivatives should be very loosely regulated. Greenspan is a free-market evangelist.
A loosely regulated derivatives market encouraged the creation of “exotic” investment vehicles, including the practice of combining consumer debt (credit card debt, automobile, mortgages, etc.) from hundreds and thousands of different customers, dividing up the resulting amalgam into smaller portions, calling them “securities,” and then selling these securities for a profit. The underlying assumption was that behind these “exotics” were real assets – debt that was going to be repaid.
Move ahead to 2001. The long stock market expansion rooted in the 1990s came to a sudden halt. The enormous speculation in high tech industries was unsustainable. The stock index most closely associated with the high tech sector – the NASDAQ – suffered a collapse that rivaled that of the Japanese stock market ten years earlier.
Greenspan’s response was to cut interest rates to almost zero – effectively, printing money and making it available on the cheap to banks and other financial institutions, to keep the US economy out of recession.
But this had another effect. Other interest rates came down as well, including those for mortgages. With interest rates for mortgages at historic lows, a new industry emerged – selling mortgages to people who had low incomes, who had never thought of buying a house.
From the standpoint of the poor, it was a good move. If low interest rates meant that a mortgage was cheaper than rent, then why not invest in a mortgage? Millions did so. This in turn fed the practice of repackaging this debt as exotic derivatives, and increasing portions of these derivatives had mortgages as the underlying asset – and many of those were the mortgages taken on by the poor, the ones we have come to call “subprime”.
Don’t blame the poor for the consequences. According to Mark Seifert of Cleveland’s East Side Organizing Project (ESOP) “predatory lenders targeted inner-city, African-American neighbourhoods, where they fudged property values and signed up thousands of borrowers without explaining the details of the loans.”[2]
Lenders and investors were locked in a toxic tango – lenders pushing “cheap” mortgages on the working poor, investors creating a billions-dollar market for the derivatives based on these “cheap” mortgages. As long as the tango lasted, both lenders and investors made huge sums of money in fees and bonuses.
The low rates driving this tango could not last. In the years after 2001, the U.S. Federal Reserve sent interest rates steadily higher. The low interest rate policy had saved the stock market, but it had created another problem – a weakening of the U.S. dollar, which was slowly losing strength against other currencies. To protect the dollar, interest rates rose higher and higher.
By 2007, the problems created were massive. The rise in interest rates meant that mortgage payments were floating up, not down. The low “teaser” rates were ending, and millions of working poor did not have the income to make their payments. The home ownership mirage of the early 21st century had, in the words of British analyst Robin Blackburn, “avoided the real problem, which is the true extent of poverty in the Untied States and the folly of imagining that it can be banished by the waving the magic wand of debt creation.”[3]
Predictably, the working poor were driven from their homes. Their mortgages were unsustainable. They returned to cramped apartments, the locks on their foreclosed homes were changed, windows boarded up, a target for wind, rats and vandalism.
The result is an enormous mess. The subprime/derivatives tango had encouraged real estate speculation sending house prices through the roof. With defaults on the rise, the housing market is being flooded with homes, and predictably prices are now collapsing. But the derivatives market based on mortgages and based on assumptions of continuously rising real estate prices had become truly massive. The Federal Reserve has abandoned its high interest rate policy in an attempt to reduce the damage. This has had some impact – the U.S. economy is not yet in an official recession. But it is exposing the U.S. to other risks, as the return to low interest rates has accelerated the decline of the U.S. dollar.
But the real victims of the subprime crisis are on the working class streets of Cleveland. In 2003, there were 200 foreclosures in Cleveland Ohio. In 2007, there were 7,583. “On average, 20 Cleveland homeowners faced foreclosure every day last year.”
“Many streets” are “lined with vacant buildings. Most have been stripped of windows, doors, siding and even copper wiring and pipes.” And after a while, there is nothing to do with an abandoned house except to tear it down. “Last year, Cleveland spent $7-million demolishing abandoned homes, compared with about $1-million a couple of years ago.” That demolition bill might rise to $70 million to deal with all the vacant buildings.[4]
This is not just a Cleveland story. Chicago Heights mayor Anthony De Luca said that “city officials are planning a major wave of demolitions of homes and businesses that have been left in disrepair.”[5] And governments in Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo and Minneapolis “have all filed lawsuits against lenders or developers based on the devastating effects foreclosures have wreaked on their communities.”[6]
“I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk” said the Greenspan in his very defensive autobiography. “But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.”[7] But Greenspan was wrong on derivatives and wrong on mortgages, and the result has been an economic and social mess.
Here’s a modest idea. Instead of pushing people out of apartments and into houses, and then back to their apartments, instead of boarding up their abandoned homes and then spending millions to demolish them, instead of spending additional millions to sue the lenders and developers who profited from this mess – instead of this frenzy of unproductive spending, lets instead invest in public housing. Instead of tricking people into financing this public housing with risky mortgages, lets make these new houses geared to income. Instead of leaving the managing of housing to speculators and developers, lets manage housing ourselves through the well-established principle of housing co-ops. There will be some who object, saying "that's a socialist housing program." Whatever you call it, it's a bit more rational than the chaos left behind by ten years of the free market.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, “What Created This Monster?”, New York Times, March 23, 2008; cited in Robin Blackburn, “The Subprime Crisis,” New Left Review, 50, March/April, 2008, p. 82
[2] Paul Waldie, “Is the U.S. housing mess headed our way?", The Globe and Mail, January 19, 2008, p. F.1
[3] Blackburn, p. 73
[4] Waldie
[5] David Schwab, “30 buildings to be demolished this summer,” The Southtown Star, May 4, 2008
[6] Julie Kay, “Empty Homes Spur Cities’ Suits,” The National Law Journal, May 9, 2008, www.law.com
[7] Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, New York 2007, p. 233; cited in Blackburn, p. 82
Go back to 1999. Then U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan put his weight on the scales to block new regulations for interesting things called “derivative products.” Any new regulations would be a “major mistake” he told the Futures Industry Association in March of that year.[1] Derivatives are complex financial instruments whose value is related to an underlying asset. They can become enormously complex. But Greenspan – at the time arguably the most powerful financial manager in the world – used his authority to make sure that the trading in these derivatives should be very loosely regulated. Greenspan is a free-market evangelist.
A loosely regulated derivatives market encouraged the creation of “exotic” investment vehicles, including the practice of combining consumer debt (credit card debt, automobile, mortgages, etc.) from hundreds and thousands of different customers, dividing up the resulting amalgam into smaller portions, calling them “securities,” and then selling these securities for a profit. The underlying assumption was that behind these “exotics” were real assets – debt that was going to be repaid.
Move ahead to 2001. The long stock market expansion rooted in the 1990s came to a sudden halt. The enormous speculation in high tech industries was unsustainable. The stock index most closely associated with the high tech sector – the NASDAQ – suffered a collapse that rivaled that of the Japanese stock market ten years earlier.
Greenspan’s response was to cut interest rates to almost zero – effectively, printing money and making it available on the cheap to banks and other financial institutions, to keep the US economy out of recession.
But this had another effect. Other interest rates came down as well, including those for mortgages. With interest rates for mortgages at historic lows, a new industry emerged – selling mortgages to people who had low incomes, who had never thought of buying a house.
From the standpoint of the poor, it was a good move. If low interest rates meant that a mortgage was cheaper than rent, then why not invest in a mortgage? Millions did so. This in turn fed the practice of repackaging this debt as exotic derivatives, and increasing portions of these derivatives had mortgages as the underlying asset – and many of those were the mortgages taken on by the poor, the ones we have come to call “subprime”.
Don’t blame the poor for the consequences. According to Mark Seifert of Cleveland’s East Side Organizing Project (ESOP) “predatory lenders targeted inner-city, African-American neighbourhoods, where they fudged property values and signed up thousands of borrowers without explaining the details of the loans.”[2]
Lenders and investors were locked in a toxic tango – lenders pushing “cheap” mortgages on the working poor, investors creating a billions-dollar market for the derivatives based on these “cheap” mortgages. As long as the tango lasted, both lenders and investors made huge sums of money in fees and bonuses.
The low rates driving this tango could not last. In the years after 2001, the U.S. Federal Reserve sent interest rates steadily higher. The low interest rate policy had saved the stock market, but it had created another problem – a weakening of the U.S. dollar, which was slowly losing strength against other currencies. To protect the dollar, interest rates rose higher and higher.
By 2007, the problems created were massive. The rise in interest rates meant that mortgage payments were floating up, not down. The low “teaser” rates were ending, and millions of working poor did not have the income to make their payments. The home ownership mirage of the early 21st century had, in the words of British analyst Robin Blackburn, “avoided the real problem, which is the true extent of poverty in the Untied States and the folly of imagining that it can be banished by the waving the magic wand of debt creation.”[3]
Predictably, the working poor were driven from their homes. Their mortgages were unsustainable. They returned to cramped apartments, the locks on their foreclosed homes were changed, windows boarded up, a target for wind, rats and vandalism.
The result is an enormous mess. The subprime/derivatives tango had encouraged real estate speculation sending house prices through the roof. With defaults on the rise, the housing market is being flooded with homes, and predictably prices are now collapsing. But the derivatives market based on mortgages and based on assumptions of continuously rising real estate prices had become truly massive. The Federal Reserve has abandoned its high interest rate policy in an attempt to reduce the damage. This has had some impact – the U.S. economy is not yet in an official recession. But it is exposing the U.S. to other risks, as the return to low interest rates has accelerated the decline of the U.S. dollar.
But the real victims of the subprime crisis are on the working class streets of Cleveland. In 2003, there were 200 foreclosures in Cleveland Ohio. In 2007, there were 7,583. “On average, 20 Cleveland homeowners faced foreclosure every day last year.”
“Many streets” are “lined with vacant buildings. Most have been stripped of windows, doors, siding and even copper wiring and pipes.” And after a while, there is nothing to do with an abandoned house except to tear it down. “Last year, Cleveland spent $7-million demolishing abandoned homes, compared with about $1-million a couple of years ago.” That demolition bill might rise to $70 million to deal with all the vacant buildings.[4]
This is not just a Cleveland story. Chicago Heights mayor Anthony De Luca said that “city officials are planning a major wave of demolitions of homes and businesses that have been left in disrepair.”[5] And governments in Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo and Minneapolis “have all filed lawsuits against lenders or developers based on the devastating effects foreclosures have wreaked on their communities.”[6]
“I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk” said the Greenspan in his very defensive autobiography. “But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.”[7] But Greenspan was wrong on derivatives and wrong on mortgages, and the result has been an economic and social mess.
Here’s a modest idea. Instead of pushing people out of apartments and into houses, and then back to their apartments, instead of boarding up their abandoned homes and then spending millions to demolish them, instead of spending additional millions to sue the lenders and developers who profited from this mess – instead of this frenzy of unproductive spending, lets instead invest in public housing. Instead of tricking people into financing this public housing with risky mortgages, lets make these new houses geared to income. Instead of leaving the managing of housing to speculators and developers, lets manage housing ourselves through the well-established principle of housing co-ops. There will be some who object, saying "that's a socialist housing program." Whatever you call it, it's a bit more rational than the chaos left behind by ten years of the free market.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, “What Created This Monster?”, New York Times, March 23, 2008; cited in Robin Blackburn, “The Subprime Crisis,” New Left Review, 50, March/April, 2008, p. 82
[2] Paul Waldie, “Is the U.S. housing mess headed our way?", The Globe and Mail, January 19, 2008, p. F.1
[3] Blackburn, p. 73
[4] Waldie
[5] David Schwab, “30 buildings to be demolished this summer,” The Southtown Star, May 4, 2008
[6] Julie Kay, “Empty Homes Spur Cities’ Suits,” The National Law Journal, May 9, 2008, www.law.com
[7] Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, New York 2007, p. 233; cited in Blackburn, p. 82
Sunday, 27 January 2008
U.S. economy – Taking the pulse
Getting a picture of something as complex as the economy of the
U.S. – the world’s largest – is not an easy matter. An earlier post showed that it is completely misleading to paint such a picture using only the “simple” figures of annual growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). To only use these “simple” GDP figures, you arrive at the ridiculous conclusion, pictured in the first graph of this article, that today’s U.S. economy is twice as big as in 1995, four times as big as in 1983, eight times as big as in 1976, 16 times as big as in 1969, 32 times as big as in 1958, and more than 60 times as big as in 1947 – a picture of triumphal, unending growth.[1]
When statistics are presented in graphic form, as here, economic realities can be brought into focus in a way that is much more accessible than unending rows of statistics. For instance, the black line on this first graph shows what happens to “simple” growth figures when a very basic step is taken – adjusting those figures for inflation (price increases). To say the least, this changes the picture. There is still overall growth, but nothing on the scale implied when inflation is excluded.
But this is still not a reasonable picture of the last 60 years of the U.S. economy. Growth statistics are also relatively meaningless if they don’t take into account population growth. A ten percent growth in population has to be matched by a ten percent growth in the economy just for everything to stay in the same place.
The second graph shows both figures – GDP in the U.S. reduced first by inflation (the grey area),[2] then reduced by both inflation and population increase (the black line).[3] The result is a much more accurate picture of the growth of the U.S. economy over three generations.
But still the picture is not complete. What is meaningful to a working person is not only whether, in five years, the economy is going to be bigger than it is today. Equally and sometimes more important is the direction now. Is the economy we are living in today expanding or contracting, and how quickly?
There is a fairly accurate way of getting a picture of this. The reason the first graph has a Roman numeral “I” after the dates, is that is the traditional way of labeling each quarter of the year (I, II, III and IV). U.S. GDP figures are available quarter by quarter, and similar figures can be calculated for both inflation and population increases.
All of this can by combined to get “annualized” growth rates per quarter. This is a measure of how fast the economy is growing, or shrinking, in any given quarter. If the answer to that question is “five percent”, it doesn’t mean that the economy grew five percent in that quarter. It means that its rate of growth was five percent. This rate is determined by measuring back four quarters (one year), and seeing how much bigger or smaller the economy is, and from that calculating a rate. The resulting picture is fascinating.
Serious analysts, both left and right, would not be surprised by this picture. Capitalism’s history is one of recurring periods of booms and slumps, or (in less extreme terms) of “business cycles” An advocate of capitalism like Joseph Schumpeter, argued almost 70 years ago that business cycles “are not like tonsils, separable things that might be treated by themselves, but are, like the beat of the heart, of the essence of the organism that displays them.”[4] The Russian socialist Leon Trotsky – writing more than 80 years ago, wrote that “capitalism lives “by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling. First there is a boom in industry, then a stoppage, next a crisis, followed by a stoppage in the crisis, then an improvement, another boom, another stoppage and so on ... Crises and booms were inherent in capitalism at its very birth; they will accompany it to its grave.”[5] Both Schumpeter and Trotsky could have been describing capitalism today.
The cycle of booms and slumps has to be a central feature of any accurate picture of the health of the economy. The graph here exactly confirms Schumpeter’s and Trotksy’s descriptions – this is a system inhaling and exhaling or to use Schumpeter’s analogy, a pulse – the very beating heart of the capitalist economy, booms followed by slumps.
Look at each decade. We know that the 1950s was a time of economic expansion. But that doesn’t mean there were no slumps, no recessions. Three sharp recessions punctuate the decade, short in duration, but sometimes very sharp. In the first quarter of 1958, for instance, the economy was contracting at a rate of almost six per cent. Workers at the time would get little comfort from being told that they were living through boom times.
The decade of the 1960s has the reputation of being the most spectacular decade of what has come to be known as the long boom – and there was considerable growth through the decade. But it opened with a two-quarter recession in 1960 and 1961, and was followed in 1970 by a full year of recession. Even in boom times, U.S. capitalism could not escape the boom-slump cycle. And by historic standards, the 1960s boom was not all that long. Trotsky argued that each business cycle “lasts from 8 to 9 or 10 to 11 years.” Well, the 1960’s cycle was about 10 years long. If anything, what this highlights is not the surprising length of the 1960’s business cycle, but the manic nature of the 1950s, where very high growth rates were punctuated by frequent returns to recession or slump.
Then we get to the 1970s. What a terrible decade. The 1970s recession was followed by three years of growth, and then the brutal slump of 1974-75, where the economy shrank consistently. In the fourth quarter of 1974, the U.S. economy was shrinking at a rate of 4.8 percent a year. There followed three and a half years of growth, and then an even worse slump, which in a real sense lasted from the second quarter of 1979 through the fourth quarter of 1982. (There was a brief return to growth in 1981, but so brief and so feeble that it felt like the recession was still ongoing.) At its worse, the U.S. economy was shrinking at a rate of 7.37 percent, in the second quarter of 1980, a really astonishing rate of decline.
The expansion of the 1980s was a welcome relief, only if you didn’t examine one of its principle sources – the massive re-arming of the U.S. – beginning under Democrat Jimmy Carter and continuing under Republican Ronald Reagan. That boom was shorter than its counterpart in the 1960s. Similarly, the recession which followed it in 1990-91 was shorter than the slump of 1979-82 (the steepest decline in the 1990-91 period was 2.97 percent, considerably less than the 7.37 percent rate ten years previous).
The story of the 1990s and the 21st century is still being written. It is true that there was a third long expansion of the system in the 1990s, but growth rates were lower than in either the 1980s or 1960s. There was a return to slump in the second quarter of 2001, and the period of decline or near decline lasted longer than in 1990-91, not ending until the second quarter of 2003. But the rates of economic decline in this slump were the lowest on record – never registering more than an annual decline of 1.17 percent. We seem to be on the edge of another slump, whose story will have to wait until another day.
Getting this into focus – the cycle of booms and slumps – is an important element in understanding the world in which we live. But even with this picture, there is considerable work to do. One very big missing piece is the overall trajectory. Trotsky introduces a third analogy to get at that picture. “[T]o determine capitalism’s age and its general condition – to establish whether it is still developing or whether it has matured or whether it is in decline – one must diagnose the character of the cycles. In much the same manner the state of the human organism can be diagnosed by whether the breathing is regular or spasmodic, deep or superficial, and so on.”
In more economic language he summarizes: [T]he curve of economic development is a composite of two movements: a primary movement which expresses the general upward rise of capitalism, and a secondary movement which consists of the constant periodic oscillations corresponding to the various industrial cycles.”[6] This article has only looked at the latter – the secondary movement. But even if not the full story, it is a necessary component in developing a complete picture of the current dynamics of the U.S. economy.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Income and Product Accounts Table: Table 1.1.5. Gross Domestic Product (Billions of Dollars), www.bea.gov.
[2] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index – All Urban Consumers,” Series ID: CUUR0000SA0, www.bls.gov.
[3] Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 1: Annual Estimates of the Population of the United States”; Population Estimates Program, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical National Population Estimates: July 1, 1900 to July 1, 1999,” www.census.gov
[4] Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, volume 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), p. v. Schumpeter is best known for his praise of the “Creative Destruction” inherent in periodic recessions (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942), p. 82).
[5] Leon Trotsky, “Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of The Communist International,” in The First 5 Years of the Communist International, Volume I (New York: Monad Press, 1972), p. 200.
[6] Trotsky, pp. 200-1.
When statistics are presented in graphic form, as here, economic realities can be brought into focus in a way that is much more accessible than unending rows of statistics. For instance, the black line on this first graph shows what happens to “simple” growth figures when a very basic step is taken – adjusting those figures for inflation (price increases). To say the least, this changes the picture. There is still overall growth, but nothing on the scale implied when inflation is excluded.
But this is still not a reasonable picture of the last 60 years of the U.S. economy. Growth statistics are also relatively meaningless if they don’t take into account population growth. A ten percent growth in population has to be matched by a ten percent growth in the economy just for everything to stay in the same place.
The second graph shows both figures – GDP in the U.S. reduced first by inflation (the grey area),[2] then reduced by both inflation and population increase (the black line).[3] The result is a much more accurate picture of the growth of the U.S. economy over three generations.But still the picture is not complete. What is meaningful to a working person is not only whether, in five years, the economy is going to be bigger than it is today. Equally and sometimes more important is the direction now. Is the economy we are living in today expanding or contracting, and how quickly?
There is a fairly accurate way of getting a picture of this. The reason the first graph has a Roman numeral “I” after the dates, is that is the traditional way of labeling each quarter of the year (I, II, III and IV). U.S. GDP figures are available quarter by quarter, and similar figures can be calculated for both inflation and population increases.
All of this can by combined to get “annualized” growth rates per quarter. This is a measure of how fast the economy is growing, or shrinking, in any given quarter. If the answer to that question is “five percent”, it doesn’t mean that the economy grew five percent in that quarter. It means that its rate of growth was five percent. This rate is determined by measuring back four quarters (one year), and seeing how much bigger or smaller the economy is, and from that calculating a rate. The resulting picture is fascinating.Serious analysts, both left and right, would not be surprised by this picture. Capitalism’s history is one of recurring periods of booms and slumps, or (in less extreme terms) of “business cycles” An advocate of capitalism like Joseph Schumpeter, argued almost 70 years ago that business cycles “are not like tonsils, separable things that might be treated by themselves, but are, like the beat of the heart, of the essence of the organism that displays them.”[4] The Russian socialist Leon Trotsky – writing more than 80 years ago, wrote that “capitalism lives “by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling. First there is a boom in industry, then a stoppage, next a crisis, followed by a stoppage in the crisis, then an improvement, another boom, another stoppage and so on ... Crises and booms were inherent in capitalism at its very birth; they will accompany it to its grave.”[5] Both Schumpeter and Trotsky could have been describing capitalism today.
The cycle of booms and slumps has to be a central feature of any accurate picture of the health of the economy. The graph here exactly confirms Schumpeter’s and Trotksy’s descriptions – this is a system inhaling and exhaling or to use Schumpeter’s analogy, a pulse – the very beating heart of the capitalist economy, booms followed by slumps.
Look at each decade. We know that the 1950s was a time of economic expansion. But that doesn’t mean there were no slumps, no recessions. Three sharp recessions punctuate the decade, short in duration, but sometimes very sharp. In the first quarter of 1958, for instance, the economy was contracting at a rate of almost six per cent. Workers at the time would get little comfort from being told that they were living through boom times.
The decade of the 1960s has the reputation of being the most spectacular decade of what has come to be known as the long boom – and there was considerable growth through the decade. But it opened with a two-quarter recession in 1960 and 1961, and was followed in 1970 by a full year of recession. Even in boom times, U.S. capitalism could not escape the boom-slump cycle. And by historic standards, the 1960s boom was not all that long. Trotsky argued that each business cycle “lasts from 8 to 9 or 10 to 11 years.” Well, the 1960’s cycle was about 10 years long. If anything, what this highlights is not the surprising length of the 1960’s business cycle, but the manic nature of the 1950s, where very high growth rates were punctuated by frequent returns to recession or slump.
Then we get to the 1970s. What a terrible decade. The 1970s recession was followed by three years of growth, and then the brutal slump of 1974-75, where the economy shrank consistently. In the fourth quarter of 1974, the U.S. economy was shrinking at a rate of 4.8 percent a year. There followed three and a half years of growth, and then an even worse slump, which in a real sense lasted from the second quarter of 1979 through the fourth quarter of 1982. (There was a brief return to growth in 1981, but so brief and so feeble that it felt like the recession was still ongoing.) At its worse, the U.S. economy was shrinking at a rate of 7.37 percent, in the second quarter of 1980, a really astonishing rate of decline.
The expansion of the 1980s was a welcome relief, only if you didn’t examine one of its principle sources – the massive re-arming of the U.S. – beginning under Democrat Jimmy Carter and continuing under Republican Ronald Reagan. That boom was shorter than its counterpart in the 1960s. Similarly, the recession which followed it in 1990-91 was shorter than the slump of 1979-82 (the steepest decline in the 1990-91 period was 2.97 percent, considerably less than the 7.37 percent rate ten years previous).
The story of the 1990s and the 21st century is still being written. It is true that there was a third long expansion of the system in the 1990s, but growth rates were lower than in either the 1980s or 1960s. There was a return to slump in the second quarter of 2001, and the period of decline or near decline lasted longer than in 1990-91, not ending until the second quarter of 2003. But the rates of economic decline in this slump were the lowest on record – never registering more than an annual decline of 1.17 percent. We seem to be on the edge of another slump, whose story will have to wait until another day.
Getting this into focus – the cycle of booms and slumps – is an important element in understanding the world in which we live. But even with this picture, there is considerable work to do. One very big missing piece is the overall trajectory. Trotsky introduces a third analogy to get at that picture. “[T]o determine capitalism’s age and its general condition – to establish whether it is still developing or whether it has matured or whether it is in decline – one must diagnose the character of the cycles. In much the same manner the state of the human organism can be diagnosed by whether the breathing is regular or spasmodic, deep or superficial, and so on.”
In more economic language he summarizes: [T]he curve of economic development is a composite of two movements: a primary movement which expresses the general upward rise of capitalism, and a secondary movement which consists of the constant periodic oscillations corresponding to the various industrial cycles.”[6] This article has only looked at the latter – the secondary movement. But even if not the full story, it is a necessary component in developing a complete picture of the current dynamics of the U.S. economy.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Income and Product Accounts Table: Table 1.1.5. Gross Domestic Product (Billions of Dollars), www.bea.gov.
[2] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index – All Urban Consumers,” Series ID: CUUR0000SA0, www.bls.gov
[3] Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 1: Annual Estimates of the Population of the United States”; Population Estimates Program, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical National Population Estimates: July 1, 1900 to July 1, 1999,” www.census.gov
[4] Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, volume 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), p. v. Schumpeter is best known for his praise of the “Creative Destruction” inherent in periodic recessions (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942), p. 82).
[5] Leon Trotsky, “Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of The Communist International,” in The First 5 Years of the Communist International, Volume I (New York: Monad Press, 1972), p. 200.
[6] Trotsky, pp. 200-1.
Thursday, 24 January 2008
U.S. economy – The disappearance of growth
“I’m here to tell you ... the U.S. economy is in a recession,” said Sherry Cooper, chief economist for BMO Financial Group, speaking to the Canadian Club of Ottawa January 22.[1] Yet it is only November 29 that the Associated Press reported that the U.S. economy “barreled ahead in the summer, growing at a 4.9 percent annual rate.”[2] How does an economy go from barreling in one quarter, to slump in the next?
The 4.9 percent figure comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), who offers a table which offers simple percentages of annual growth rates in GDP by quarter.[3] But different and very interesting results can be arrived at if we do our own calculations, using the most comprehensible table for GDP (that measured in the dollar value of Gross Domestic Product) and the most meaningful table for measuring inflation (the one that measures consumer prices in major cities).
With these tables, growth before inflation actually looks stronger, coming in at an annual rate of 5.3 percent.[4] But the annual rate for inflation in the third quarter was 2.76 percent[5], leaving real GDP growth at 2.5%, about half of the figure reported by the BEA.
But there is a final figure that has to be taken into effect. Economic statistics are only meaningful when they also take into consideration population growth. Think of it this way – if a country’s economy doesn’t grow at all, but its population does – then as far as the people in that country are concerned, the economy has effectively become smaller. The population of the U.S. is growing at an annual rate of 0.96 percent[6], so the most accurate reading of U.S. growth for the third quarter is 1.59%. (These are all annual figures, reflecting the rate of growth from the third quarter of 2006 to the third quarter of 2007).
That is a much slower rate than first reported, and perilously close to stagnation. We don’t yet have figures for fourth quarter growth in 2007. But we do have inflation figures. It won’t be a surprise to anyone that inflation – the cost of living – has jumped considerably – from 2.76 percent to 4.08 percent.
In all probability, fourth quarter figures will show “negative growth” for the U.S. economy. Two quarters of negative growth, and it will be official – the economy will be in recession.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] “Canada Will Skirt Recession, But U.S. Already There, Says BMO’s Cooper,” Canadian Economic Press, January 22, 2008, www. economicnews.ca
[2] The Associated Press, “Economy Surged in Summer,” The New York Times, November 29, 2007, www.nytimes.com
[3] Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Economic Accounts: Table 1.1.1. Percent Change From Preceding Period in Real Gross Domestic Product” www.bea.gov
[4] Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Economic Accounts: Table 1.1.5; Gross Domestic Product” www.bea.gov
[5] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index – All Urban Consumers,” Series ID: CUUR0000SA0, www.bls.gov.
[6] Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 1: Annual Estimates of the Population of the United States”; Population Estimates Program, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical National Population Estimates: July 1, 1900 to July 1, 1999,” www.census.gov
The 4.9 percent figure comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), who offers a table which offers simple percentages of annual growth rates in GDP by quarter.[3] But different and very interesting results can be arrived at if we do our own calculations, using the most comprehensible table for GDP (that measured in the dollar value of Gross Domestic Product) and the most meaningful table for measuring inflation (the one that measures consumer prices in major cities).
With these tables, growth before inflation actually looks stronger, coming in at an annual rate of 5.3 percent.[4] But the annual rate for inflation in the third quarter was 2.76 percent[5], leaving real GDP growth at 2.5%, about half of the figure reported by the BEA.
But there is a final figure that has to be taken into effect. Economic statistics are only meaningful when they also take into consideration population growth. Think of it this way – if a country’s economy doesn’t grow at all, but its population does – then as far as the people in that country are concerned, the economy has effectively become smaller. The population of the U.S. is growing at an annual rate of 0.96 percent[6], so the most accurate reading of U.S. growth for the third quarter is 1.59%. (These are all annual figures, reflecting the rate of growth from the third quarter of 2006 to the third quarter of 2007).
That is a much slower rate than first reported, and perilously close to stagnation. We don’t yet have figures for fourth quarter growth in 2007. But we do have inflation figures. It won’t be a surprise to anyone that inflation – the cost of living – has jumped considerably – from 2.76 percent to 4.08 percent.
In all probability, fourth quarter figures will show “negative growth” for the U.S. economy. Two quarters of negative growth, and it will be official – the economy will be in recession.
© 2008 Paul Kellogg
References
[1] “Canada Will Skirt Recession, But U.S. Already There, Says BMO’s Cooper,” Canadian Economic Press, January 22, 2008, www. economicnews.ca
[2] The Associated Press, “Economy Surged in Summer,” The New York Times, November 29, 2007, www.nytimes.com
[3] Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Economic Accounts: Table 1.1.1. Percent Change From Preceding Period in Real Gross Domestic Product” www.bea.gov
[4] Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Economic Accounts: Table 1.1.5; Gross Domestic Product” www.bea.gov
[5] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index – All Urban Consumers,” Series ID: CUUR0000SA0, www.bls.gov
[6] Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 1: Annual Estimates of the Population of the United States”; Population Estimates Program, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical National Population Estimates: July 1, 1900 to July 1, 1999,” www.census.gov
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