Column of mine published in January 2008.
RUN FOR YOUR MONEY ---- WHERE?
The other day an old friend called. We had been in the Navy together and continue to share a jaundiced view of the powers that be. He asked me how safe he should feel with all his money, hopefully enough to get him out of this life - dead, resting in a variety of accounts at Merrill Lynch, the humongous investment and brokerage house. I snorted, not in derision but because I was in the same boat, along with all the rest of us, unless you are sleeping on a mattress of gold bars.
All of us, rich, comfortable, stretched or poor are caught in a pickle. Our financial underpinnings are less than what we assumed they were, less than what we have taken for granted, at least going back to 1933. Since 1933 there has not been a vision of a financial abyss such is now hovering on the horizon.
In March of 1933, a different time in every way, except for greed and other unpleasant hard wired human traits, President Roosevelt shut the nations banks for a four day "holiday," in order to calm the population and slow the drainage of cash and gold that people wanted back under their mattresses. The government was able to shore up the financial system, ease the panic and put in place the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), that insures, by the government, bank deposits, in member banks, for up to a total of $2,500 in 1934 and $100,000 today with an additional $250,000 coverage on Individual Retirement accounts (IRA). A lot of money in those days and still a big deal today.
Over the past several months Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America and innumerable investment houses, mutual funds and even the sacrosanct treasury of the great state of Maine have literally had the hubristic stuffing plucked out of their over inflated mattresses. Racing for fat returns they all drank their own bath water either packaging for resale, buying, or both, rafts of mortgage obligations, from "sub prime" borrowers. Many who had little hope of ever paying them off.
Insurance funds that were supposed to cover the failures are proving insufficient to cover the mess and as these rock solid piggy banks have had to show their losses they have been scrambling all over the world to raise capital by selling steeply discounted stock to deep pockets. The majority of the new investors are sovereign funds of various countries who are floating on trillions of petro and lead toy generated dollars. In short the dollars that we profligate citizens have shipped overseas are now coming back to buy our banking assets that rest on collapsing pillars of probity.
Needless to say the dollar also has tumbled in value. To the extent if your retirement money is in Treasury Bills, the assumed safest of the safe, though you will get your money back with interest it will be worth substantially less than when you put it in safekeeping. Maybe way less.
So what to do?
Run to the bank and yell give me my money? Forget it, they cannot print the stuff fast enough. Look to a stimulus package? How funny, in other words send more depreciated dollars to the citizens and urge them to blow it at the mall all in the hope of holding off an inevitable shattering correction.
Am I an alarmist? To a degree, probably, but face it we have been living way beyond our means. Stories in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Economist point out that the country has taken bigger hits in the past and that we are a $ 13 trillion economy. So what does it matter if we take a mere $700 billion hit on the mortgage trash.
But, but, but — if this mess spreads to all other parts of the debt economy, credit cards, home equity, retail sales, etc., as I am convinced it will, we could end up realizing that we are all living on the San Andreas fault of a shaky global economy.
What did this? The nasty greedy corporations? Please, we all did it. We want, and our politicians, of all stripes, want us to be happy so they feed our wants. Meanwhile we cannot even fill the infrastructure jobs that the 12 million illegal immigrants fill. Not because we can’t, but because we view such employment with disdain. Who wants to work as a busboy when they can sit at the table? Who wants to have their kids educated until they are stuffed with knowledge on physics and engineering and math when it is a free ride and easier to take a bogus course in "lifeology."
The piper will be paid.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Our future-------
This week we learned that President Bush has authorized cross border attacks, by ground forces in Afghanistan, on Pakistani tribal retreats from where the Taliban launches attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has wailed over our ignoring their sovereignty but unless those enclaves are thrashed our hopes of eliminating this terrorist base their infrastructure could take over Pakistan along with it’s nuclear weapons and know how.
Meanwhile, Russia, with foreign investors bailing out, has pulled back from forward checkpoints in Georgia, one of it’s breakaway republics. This, even after Vice President Cheney, as Bush emissary, pledged $ 1 billion of our money to rebuild that befuddled country, after it was appropriately thrashed and trashed by Russian forces, who were responding to Georgia’s full scale attack on it’s own breakaway province of South Ossetia.
On a muggy, overcast day in Maine I am reviewing video clips on the web of the scenes in Galveston and Houston that have also been thrashed by Hurricane Ike while also following the news reports of top level meetings aimed to still the economic hurricane that is thrashing our financial and banking system.
Finally, I have watched with interest and no small dismay the ABC interviews of Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice President, by Charles Gibson, that networks lead talking head. I was and am dismayed.
Dismayed by Gibson’s prosecutorial and churlish tone and Ms. Palin’s obvious lack of background. Having once been in such a situation I regret the need for her or anyone to be placed in a position subject to a talking heads interrogation that are then distorted by the network edits.
Needless to say she could have avoided such treatment simply by refusing Senator McCain’s offer to join his ticket. After she accepted the interview entertainment, instead of the Republican minders trying to cram everything that there is to know about everything into her head over a week they should have trained her to answer fire with fire.
No one, including Bill or Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain can or should be expected to give a discourse, in detail, in under twenty seconds a question, on any of the key points challenging our country and the world. No one can provide clear steps to just address the few points I have listed at the intro to this blog, let alone provide a running, real time analysis of how to cure the worlds ills and uncertainty.
Ms. Palin however, did not chose to do that and her vulnerability came through. Her understanding of what the Bush doctrine was, or is, demonstrated lack of depth. Her statements about stem cell research demonstrated that she really had no idea what stem cell research is.
Her stated beliefs that she and McCain can make a dent in our entitlement mess by bringing efficiencies to government agencies is a hopeless concept.
But why do I focus on her a mear potential vice president? She is absolutely correct that others who have come to that office never had met a head of state before and yes, I do not think that such an accomplishment is a qualification for anyone. However, I am two months older than John McCain and if, like the old cliche, she is one heartbeat away from being president, I am dismayed. Her lack of background and core beliefs that are based on a depth of religious surety, that we have seen having great effect on the reasoning of George Bush, magnifies my concerns.
Meanwhile Obama squirms and Biden is lost and alone, somewhere out in America. Obama all ready has given answers to all of the questions that someone like Charles Gibson will ask (Gibson and Stephonopolous once probed Obama about a flag pin in his lapel.) and it will sound like beautiful music. But, if he actually tries even half of what he may at any given time espouse (it changes) he will not be leading a nationwide sing along.
So, our future is cluttered. Problems are building, problems are escalating and there is no leeway for frivolous as usual.
Our future is grim!
Meanwhile, Russia, with foreign investors bailing out, has pulled back from forward checkpoints in Georgia, one of it’s breakaway republics. This, even after Vice President Cheney, as Bush emissary, pledged $ 1 billion of our money to rebuild that befuddled country, after it was appropriately thrashed and trashed by Russian forces, who were responding to Georgia’s full scale attack on it’s own breakaway province of South Ossetia.
On a muggy, overcast day in Maine I am reviewing video clips on the web of the scenes in Galveston and Houston that have also been thrashed by Hurricane Ike while also following the news reports of top level meetings aimed to still the economic hurricane that is thrashing our financial and banking system.
Finally, I have watched with interest and no small dismay the ABC interviews of Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice President, by Charles Gibson, that networks lead talking head. I was and am dismayed.
Dismayed by Gibson’s prosecutorial and churlish tone and Ms. Palin’s obvious lack of background. Having once been in such a situation I regret the need for her or anyone to be placed in a position subject to a talking heads interrogation that are then distorted by the network edits.
Needless to say she could have avoided such treatment simply by refusing Senator McCain’s offer to join his ticket. After she accepted the interview entertainment, instead of the Republican minders trying to cram everything that there is to know about everything into her head over a week they should have trained her to answer fire with fire.
No one, including Bill or Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain can or should be expected to give a discourse, in detail, in under twenty seconds a question, on any of the key points challenging our country and the world. No one can provide clear steps to just address the few points I have listed at the intro to this blog, let alone provide a running, real time analysis of how to cure the worlds ills and uncertainty.
Ms. Palin however, did not chose to do that and her vulnerability came through. Her understanding of what the Bush doctrine was, or is, demonstrated lack of depth. Her statements about stem cell research demonstrated that she really had no idea what stem cell research is.
Her stated beliefs that she and McCain can make a dent in our entitlement mess by bringing efficiencies to government agencies is a hopeless concept.
But why do I focus on her a mear potential vice president? She is absolutely correct that others who have come to that office never had met a head of state before and yes, I do not think that such an accomplishment is a qualification for anyone. However, I am two months older than John McCain and if, like the old cliche, she is one heartbeat away from being president, I am dismayed. Her lack of background and core beliefs that are based on a depth of religious surety, that we have seen having great effect on the reasoning of George Bush, magnifies my concerns.
Meanwhile Obama squirms and Biden is lost and alone, somewhere out in America. Obama all ready has given answers to all of the questions that someone like Charles Gibson will ask (Gibson and Stephonopolous once probed Obama about a flag pin in his lapel.) and it will sound like beautiful music. But, if he actually tries even half of what he may at any given time espouse (it changes) he will not be leading a nationwide sing along.
So, our future is cluttered. Problems are building, problems are escalating and there is no leeway for frivolous as usual.
Our future is grim!
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Capitalism, free enterprise and common sense
In a Republican administration that prides itself on global and market economies, the government has, in the last two years, stepped in to tweak the system. It has taken control of the side flippers on the pinball machine of economic well being and is trying to prevent a world wide economic tilt and I wish them well.
At the same time I think the whole mess deserves serious thought by the general public. Unfortunately this is wishful thinking.
Our economy, which the Democrats try to lay at the feet of the Bush administration, belongs to all. Until recently Bush and his administration have done virtually nothing to improve our steadily deteriorating economic foundation and it can be convincingly argued that he has hastened the erosion. However, in the end, it is the general tone and expectations of our population, egged on by politicians and fools of both parties, who, for over 60 years has generated the conditions that we now find ourselves in.
The Great Depression of the 1930's "cured" by the demands and sacrifices, in blood and treasure, of World War II, provided a pent up demand that propelled this country forward into the 1960's. As the natural momentum slowed the Republicans amplified their preaching of free enterprise and the Democrats, supposedly echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt, urged programs that would "take care of the little guy." But, in the era of the great depression that was not only what Roosevelt was trying to do. Roosevelt was desperately trying to right the economic foundations of this country, a foundation built on excesses, that had crumbled.
It is interesting to find that it is now a Republican administration that is attempting to do the same thing and using tools that were first developed in the Roosevelt administration. I do not believe that Bush is leading this effort. In fact, I have not read or heard him say anything that indicates that he even recognizes or comprehends the fundamentals of what has transpired and what the possible ramifications are.
For perhaps different reasons neither of the two candidates for president or their running mates have given any indication that they are intellectually invested in the dilemma other than to toss blame.
Out on a limb, indeed very far out on a limb, is Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. Paulson, who came to government after running Goldman Sachs, the free market, capitalistic giant of Wall Street, is wielding a large club and banging around the vested interests of this era’s financial excesses. He is, using long standing powers, that are vested in his position, as well as new powers recently voted by congress, to take steps that are unprecedented since Roosevelt declared a four day bank "holiday" in 1933.
First, a year ago, he took great liberty with his powers and forced the teetering Bear, Stearns, a Wall Street firm that was a perfect model of a traders and, bare knuckled , risk takers. A firm that believed "the market price, is the market price" showing no mercy, to those on the other side of a bad bet, and forced them to eat their own cake. He forced them to sell themselves to J. P. Morgan, Chase at a pittance. He did this as Bear had made tremendous bets on the mortgage market "securities" that, as the housing bubble burst, were anything but secure.
Helping the housing boom, supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, was the creation of two companies, whose roots are historically tied to the Roosevelt era, that came to be called Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. They were odd hybrids. Each was chartered as private, publicly traded corporations and were labeled Government Sponsored Entities. Their charter was for them to buy mortgages placed by banks, combine them into other forms of securities and sell those securities to all comers. Thus, they continuously replenished the originating banks capital creating a rolling snowball of revolving money with everyone involved taking fees. The Democrats looked at these GSE’s as a way to promote home ownership for the lower end of the middle class and the Republicans looked at them as engines of infinite liquidity and profit for all. The buyers of the securities issued by the GSE’s, banks, foreign and domestic, foreign government sovereign funds, etc. considered the investments to be implicitly backed by the United States government but nowhere did the securities that the Fannie’s issued state that they had the "full faith and backing" of our government. Still, the Fannie’s sold, or guaranteed, in the neighborhood of at least $ 5 trillion of paper.
Alas, some of the ultimate mortgages that backed the Fannie’s paper, in total fully one half of all mortgages in place in this country, started to sink rapidly in value as those who had been urged to buy homes, that they really could not afford, with mortgages that should never have been written, fell into foreclosure. All of a sudden the buyers of Fannie paper, the banks of Europe, China, Russia, etc. got very nervous. Paulson, fully realizing that a collapse of the Fannie’s could lead to a worldwide financial freeze up, not so different to the Great Depression, took government control of the Fannie’s using a conservatorship. Call it a gentle form of bankruptcy without using the word.
Economists have estimated that in the end this debacle may cost us taxpayers some $100 billion to cover the rotten paper. If it works, it will be cheap.
What we must think about is what will happen if it does not work. And on the brighter side, what can we do to stop it from happening again.
At the same time I think the whole mess deserves serious thought by the general public. Unfortunately this is wishful thinking.
Our economy, which the Democrats try to lay at the feet of the Bush administration, belongs to all. Until recently Bush and his administration have done virtually nothing to improve our steadily deteriorating economic foundation and it can be convincingly argued that he has hastened the erosion. However, in the end, it is the general tone and expectations of our population, egged on by politicians and fools of both parties, who, for over 60 years has generated the conditions that we now find ourselves in.
The Great Depression of the 1930's "cured" by the demands and sacrifices, in blood and treasure, of World War II, provided a pent up demand that propelled this country forward into the 1960's. As the natural momentum slowed the Republicans amplified their preaching of free enterprise and the Democrats, supposedly echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt, urged programs that would "take care of the little guy." But, in the era of the great depression that was not only what Roosevelt was trying to do. Roosevelt was desperately trying to right the economic foundations of this country, a foundation built on excesses, that had crumbled.
It is interesting to find that it is now a Republican administration that is attempting to do the same thing and using tools that were first developed in the Roosevelt administration. I do not believe that Bush is leading this effort. In fact, I have not read or heard him say anything that indicates that he even recognizes or comprehends the fundamentals of what has transpired and what the possible ramifications are.
For perhaps different reasons neither of the two candidates for president or their running mates have given any indication that they are intellectually invested in the dilemma other than to toss blame.
Out on a limb, indeed very far out on a limb, is Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. Paulson, who came to government after running Goldman Sachs, the free market, capitalistic giant of Wall Street, is wielding a large club and banging around the vested interests of this era’s financial excesses. He is, using long standing powers, that are vested in his position, as well as new powers recently voted by congress, to take steps that are unprecedented since Roosevelt declared a four day bank "holiday" in 1933.
First, a year ago, he took great liberty with his powers and forced the teetering Bear, Stearns, a Wall Street firm that was a perfect model of a traders and, bare knuckled , risk takers. A firm that believed "the market price, is the market price" showing no mercy, to those on the other side of a bad bet, and forced them to eat their own cake. He forced them to sell themselves to J. P. Morgan, Chase at a pittance. He did this as Bear had made tremendous bets on the mortgage market "securities" that, as the housing bubble burst, were anything but secure.
Helping the housing boom, supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, was the creation of two companies, whose roots are historically tied to the Roosevelt era, that came to be called Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. They were odd hybrids. Each was chartered as private, publicly traded corporations and were labeled Government Sponsored Entities. Their charter was for them to buy mortgages placed by banks, combine them into other forms of securities and sell those securities to all comers. Thus, they continuously replenished the originating banks capital creating a rolling snowball of revolving money with everyone involved taking fees. The Democrats looked at these GSE’s as a way to promote home ownership for the lower end of the middle class and the Republicans looked at them as engines of infinite liquidity and profit for all. The buyers of the securities issued by the GSE’s, banks, foreign and domestic, foreign government sovereign funds, etc. considered the investments to be implicitly backed by the United States government but nowhere did the securities that the Fannie’s issued state that they had the "full faith and backing" of our government. Still, the Fannie’s sold, or guaranteed, in the neighborhood of at least $ 5 trillion of paper.
Alas, some of the ultimate mortgages that backed the Fannie’s paper, in total fully one half of all mortgages in place in this country, started to sink rapidly in value as those who had been urged to buy homes, that they really could not afford, with mortgages that should never have been written, fell into foreclosure. All of a sudden the buyers of Fannie paper, the banks of Europe, China, Russia, etc. got very nervous. Paulson, fully realizing that a collapse of the Fannie’s could lead to a worldwide financial freeze up, not so different to the Great Depression, took government control of the Fannie’s using a conservatorship. Call it a gentle form of bankruptcy without using the word.
Economists have estimated that in the end this debacle may cost us taxpayers some $100 billion to cover the rotten paper. If it works, it will be cheap.
What we must think about is what will happen if it does not work. And on the brighter side, what can we do to stop it from happening again.
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