David Harsanyi on Why Environmental Alarmists Are Still Losing

All that money. All that
effort. All the sermonizing and bloodcurdling imagery and still,
Americans don't seem to be evolving quickly enough on the
environment. Progressives, writes David Harsanyi, still have their
work cut out for them.

View this article.

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David Harsanyi on Why Environmental Alarmists Are Still Losing

All that money. All that
effort. All the sermonizing and bloodcurdling imagery and still,
Americans don't seem to be evolving quickly enough on the
environment. Progressives, writes David Harsanyi, still have their
work cut out for them.

View this article.

Read More

DAVID STOCKMAN: We've Been Lied To, Robbed, And Misled

Then, when the Fed’s fire hoses started spraying an elephant soup of liquidity injections in every direction and its balance sheet grew by $1.3 trillion in just thirteen weeks compared to $850 billion during its first ninety-four years, I became convinced that the Fed was flying by the seat of its pants, making it up as it went along. It was evident that its aim was to stop the hissy fit on Wall Street and that the thread of a Great Depression 2.0 was just a cover story for a panicked spree of money printing that exceeded any other episode in recorded human history.

David Stockman, The Great Deformation

David Stockman, former director of the OMB under President Reagan, former US Representative, and veteran financier is an insider's insider. Few people understand the ways in which both Washington DC and Wall Street work and intersect better than he does.

In his upcoming book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America [37], Stockman lays out how we have devolved from a free market economy into a managed one that operates for the benefit of a privileged few. And when trouble arises, these few are bailed out at the expense of the public good.

By manipulating the price of money through sustained and historically low interest rates, Greenspan and Bernanke created an era of asset mis-pricing that inevitably would need to correct.  And when market forces attempted to do so in 2008, Paulson et al hoodwinked the world into believing the repercussions would be so calamitous for all that the institutions responsible for the bad actions that instigated the problem needed to be rescued -- in full -- at all costs. 

Of course, history shows that our markets and economy would have been better off had the system been allowed to correct. Most of the "too big to fail" institutions would have survived or been broken into smaller, more resilient, entities. For those that would have failed, smaller, more responsible banks would have stepped up to replace them - as happens as part of the natural course of a free market system:

Essentially there was a cleansing run on the wholesale funding market in the canyons of Wall Street going on. It would have worked its will, just like JP Morgan allowed it to happen in 1907 when we did not have the Fed getting in the way. Because they stopped it in its tracks after the AIG bailout and then all the alphabet soup of different lines that the Fed threw out, and then the enactment of TARP, the last two investment banks standing were rescued, Goldman and Morgan [Stanley], and they should not have been. As a result of being rescued and having the cleansing liquidation of rotten balance sheets stopped, within a few weeks and certainly months they were back to the same old games, such that Goldman Sachs got $10 billion dollars for the fiscal year that started three months later after that check went out, which was October 2008. For the fiscal 2009 year, Goldman Sachs generated what I call a $29 billion surplus – $13 billion of net income after tax, and on top of that $16 billion of salaries and bonuses, 95% of it which was bonuses.

Therefore, the idea that they were on death’s door does not stack up. Even if they had been, it would not make any difference to the health of the financial system. These firms are supposed to come and go, and if people make really bad bets, if they have a trillion dollar balance sheet with six, seven, eight hundred billion dollars worth of hot-money short-term funding, then they ought to take their just reward, because it would create lessons, it would create discipline. So all the new firms that would have been formed out of the remnants of Goldman Sachs where everybody lost their stock values – which for most of these partners is tens of millions, hundreds of millions – when they formed a new firm, I doubt whether they would have gone back to the old game. What happened was the Fed stopped everything in its tracks, kept Goldman Sachs intact, the reckless Goldman Sachs and the reckless Morgan Stanley, everyone quickly recovered their stock value and the game continues. This is one of the evils that comes from this kind of deep intervention in the capital and money markets.

Stockman's anger at the unnecessary and unfair capital transfer from taxpayer to TBTF bank is matched only by his concern that, even with those bailouts, the banking system is still unacceptably vulnerable to a repeat of the same crime:

The banks quickly worked out their solvency issues because the Fed basically took it out of the hides of Main Street savers and depositors throughout America. When the Fed panicked, it basically destroyed the free-market interest rate – you cannot have capitalism, you cannot have healthy financial markets without an interest rate, which is the price of money, the price of capital that can freely measure and reflect risk and true economic prospects.

Well, once you basically unplug the pricing mechanism of a capital market and make it entirely an administered rate by the Fed, you are going to cause all kinds of deformations as I call them, or mal-investments as some of the Austrians used to call them, that basically pollutes and corrupts the system. Look at the deposit rate right now, it is 50 basis points, maybe 40, for six months. As a result of that, probably $400-500 billion a year is being transferred as a fiscal maneuver by the Fed from savers to the banks. They are collecting the spread, they've then booked the profits, they've rebuilt their book net worth, and they paid back the TARP basically out of what was thieved from the savers of America.

Now they go down and pound the table and whine and pout like JP Morgan and the rest of them, you have to let us do stock buy backs, you have to let us pay out dividends so we can ramp our stock and collect our stock option winnings. It is outrageous that the authorities, after the so-called “near death experience" of 2008 and this massive fiscal safety net and monetary safety net was put out there, is allowing them to pay dividends and to go into the market and buy back their stock. They should be under house arrest in a sense that every dime they are making from this artificial yield group being delivered by the Fed out of the hides of savers should be put on their balance sheet to build up retained earnings, to build up a cushion. I do not care whether it is fifteen or twenty or twenty-five percent common equity and retained earnings-to-assets or not, that is what we should be doing if we are going to protect the system from another raid by these people the next time we get a meltdown, which can happen at any time.

You can see why I talk about corruption, why crony capitalism is so bad. I mean, the Basel capital standards, they are a joke. We are just allowing the banks to go back into the same old game they were playing before. Everybody said the banks in late 2007 were the greatest thing since sliced bread. The market cap of the ten largest banks in America, including from Bear Stearns all the way to Citibank and JP Morgan and Goldman and so forth, was $1.25 trillion. That was up thirty times from where the predecessors of those institutions had been. Only in 1987, when Greenspan took over and began the era of bubble finance – slowly at first then rapidly, eventually, to have the market cap grow thirty times – and then on the eve of the great meltdown see the $1.25 trillion to market cap disappear, vanish, vaporize in panic in September 2008. Only a few months later, $1 trillion of that market cap disappeared in to the abyss and panic, and Bear Stearns is going down, and all the rest.

This tells you the system is dramatically unstable. In a healthy financial system and a free capital market, if I can put it that way, you are not going to have stuff going from nowhere to @1.2 trillion and then back to a trillion practically at the drop of a hat. That is instability; that is a case of a medicated market that is essentially very dangerous and is one of the many adverse consequences and deformations that result from the central-bank dominated, corrupt monetary system that has slowly built up ever since Nixon closed the gold window, but really as I say in my book, going back to 1933 in April when Roosevelt took all the private gold. So we are in a big dead-end trap, and they are digging deeper every time you get a new maneuver.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with David Stockman (56m:33s):

iTunes [3] | Download [4] | Report Problem [5]

Click here to read the full transcript

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David Stockman Is Outraged — And A Lot Of Powerful People Won't Like What's In His New Book

A few years ago I walked around David Stockman’s backyard. I was admiring his stone walls. We fell into a conversation about rocks and masons. David has a good eye for stone, and he knows the proper way to lay it up (A balance of symmetry and chaos, with the least amount of mortar possible).  I was pleased to learn that he holds stone masons (all artists) in much higher regard than lawyers, bankers and politicians. My kinda guy.

We talked about the macro/micro issues at length — Stockman knows the numbers and the history. He has an interesting perspective on the global economic scene. I thought about the meeting later. I concluded that Stockman was not just passionate about the state of affairs — he was out-raged. I wondered why.

Stockman is still out-raged. His new book, The Great Deformation, is his opportunity to vent some of that emotion. He does a pretty good job of it. There are a dozen “names” who will cringe reading it.

This is a history book. It’s a detailed account of the key events since the Depression that have shaped modern finance. I love history, and I’m familiar with those events. Stockman’s spin on financial history makes for a very good read. There’s something for everyone. For example, were you troubled by the bailout of AIG, and TARP? If so, you’ll love this chapter:

Paulson’s Folly – The needless Rescue of AIG and Wall Street

Do you worry that Bernanke has overplayed his hand with monetary policy? Stockman rips him apart:

The Bernanke Bubble: Last Gift to the 1 Percent

or

How the Fed Brought the Gambling Mania to America’s Neighborhoods

Do TV talking heads influence Fed policy? Stockman says “yes.”

The Rant That Shook the Eccles Building: How the Fed Got Cramer’d

Worried about U.S. indebtedness to foreign central banks? That’s covered in:

Monetary Roach Motels

Stockman puts meat on the bones to some old stories. A few examples:

Nixon took the USA off of the gold standard in 1971. The motivation and timing was Nixon’s burning desire to win the 1972 elections. He devalued the dollar for a short-term boost to the economy. Tricky Dick rigged the global currency markets to achieve his ends. That makes Watergate look like small beer. Very high stakes poker was played. Nothing new today.

During WWII the Fed capped long-term interest rates at 2.5 percent. To hold that level, the Fed bought up all the supply (A slightly different version of today’s QE). The rate cap continued until 1951. How it ended (and the secret fight between Truman and the Fed) is history worth studying. This is a window into what will happen when the Fed is forced to end the current QE. Not surprisingly, it was 5 percent inflation that ended cheap money in 1951. How do you think Bernanke’s QE will end?

A central element of the US economy is Roosevelt’s New Deal — Stockman shreds it:

The payroll tax has become an anti-jobs monster

In truth the trust funds are both meaningless and broke.

The fast approaching day of reckoning is thinly disguised by trust fund accounting fiction.

There’s plenty of one-liners; a few of the many I found amusing:

On George Kaiser‘s “loss” in Solyndra: (How not to make friends in Tulsa)

by essentially “shorting” Uncle Sam, George Kaiser stands to harvest a 4.6 times return on his sham investment to “rescue” Solyndra

On Elon Musk (How not to make friends in SoCal)

That a megalomanical promoter like Elon Musk could walk off with half a billion in taxpayer money, blown in less than four years, and make himself the toast of Hollywood in the process is powerful evidence that the putative conservative parted has vacated the ramparts of the US Treasury.

On Bernanke (“befuddled academic“) and Janet Yellen (“career policy apparatchik“): (How not to make friends at the Fed):

these hired hands keep the carry trades well lubricated and generate continuous  opportunities for speculators to extract vast economic rents from deformed financial markets

Bernanke is the godfather of the debt zombies.

On former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and the AIG bailout:

in one of the most egregious derelictions of duty every recorded, Paulson and his posse of Goldmanite hotshots hastily and blindly shielded these behemoths (the TBTF banks) from even a dollar of loss on their AIG insurance policies.

On economists:

New Deal revivalists Like Paul Krugman are essentially telling fibs and peddling historical legends is not offensive merely because it distorts the distant past. These legends actually compound the deformations of the present by rationalizing policies that cannot succeed and will only bury the nation deeper in debt.

Glenn Hubbard was of the opinion that the Wall Street-coddling policies of the Greenspan-Bernanke era had been a roaring success.

The preposterous Fred Mishkin headed the posse of debt-bubble deniers who dominated the Fed’s supporting cast. In a major study he concluded that the only bubbles in Iceland were those welling up from its famous hot geysers.

Keynes fancied himself a dandy, of course, and would never have been caught wearing the equivalent of Gandihi’s loom. But when it came to nations and their unwashed masses, it is not at all surprising  that he thought the nationalistic and autoartic Nazi Germany was the most likely candidate for early adoption of his program.

 

My only disappointment with The Great Deformation is that there is very little in the way of what could be done, versus what is being done. Stockman does offer up a few thoughts of what might be considered. These will get more than a few eyebrows raised on Wall Street and in D.C.:

- Abolish deposit insurance, strangle the Fed and shrink the banks.

- Adopt a Super Glass-Steagall. Abolish bailouts.

- Eliminate the Electoral College and establish strict term limits.

- A balanced budget, eliminate economic subsidies, shrink the federal government.

- Impose a 30 percent tax on wealth to reduce debt to 30 percent of GDP (assumes a $10T tax on the top 10 percent — think Cyprus on steroids)

- Eliminate income taxes and replace it with consumption taxes.

This is all blue sky stuff. It sounds alright, but it’s not feasible for the U.S. to consider any of these measures. Stockman acknowledges that his list will never see the light of day,  “They would never be adopted in today’s regime of money politics, fast money speculators, and Keynesian economics”.

Stockman sees nothing but trouble ahead for the U.S. He realizes that the changes that are needed to avoid the big fall are simply not in the cards. Now I understand why he’s so out-raged.

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David Beckham's Newest Commercial Is The Perfect Athlete Product Endorsement

If there is one athlete in the world that is the epitome of "cool" it is David Beckham. In addition to having been one of the best players in the world's most popular sport, he has model looks and he's always dressed to the nines, whether he is playing soccer or not.

That's why this new commercial for the Adidas climacool is so perfect. In it, Becks goes for a jog, and all along his route, he is constantly attracting a breeze that keeps him "cool." And his perfect appearance never waivers.

It is also reminiscent of the GIF below (via TheBigLead.com) in which Beckham is tackled and his first reaction is to fix his hair...

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