Month: September 2012

Debt Got Us Here; More Debt Will Keep Us Here

ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

The Federal Reserve opened a new chapter Thursday in its efforts to stimulate the economy, saying that it intends to buy large quantities of mortgage bonds, and potentially other assets, until the job market improves substantially.

Binyamin Appelbaum, Fed Ties New Aid to Jobs Recovery in Forceful Move, New York Times, September 13, 2012.

 COMMENTS

The likely outcome of the Federal Reserve’s new round of bond buying is another round of investment bubbles, another financial crisis, and another round of concentrating the world’s wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

The underlying problems are 1) income growth for the majority of the world’s people and 2) downward pressure on global GDP growth from limits to the earth’s carrying capacity.

The tradeoff between job growth (which is dependent on rapid GDP growth) and high rates of inflation is a problem tied directly to the finite carrying capacity of the earth.  We started hitting those limits in the 20th century.

Debt growth in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s worked fairly well as a way to sidestep stagnant income growth for the majority of the world’s middle class people, but it no longer works because of the carrying capacity problem.  As the world economy is currently structured, a jump in global demand from debt growth or from a radical redistribution of wealth sufficient to push job growth to acceptable levels would push prices toward the stratosphere.

The solution to the world’s employment problems is not more debt and it is not classical redistribution of wealth, its a global economic transformation that ends the tradeoff between employment and inflation.

The ‘All’ in ‘We’re All in This Together’ Is the Whole World

ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

… that if you just “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect … a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one. There is just one problem: It’s out of date.

… when Clinton first employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet was just emerging, virtually no one had e-mail and the cold war was just ending. In other words, we were still living in a closed system, a world of walls, which were just starting to come down. It was a world before Nafta and the full merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar manufacturing were still relatively strong, and where America could still write a lot of the rules that people played by.

That world is gone. It is now a more open system.

 Thomas Friedman, New Rules, New York Times, : September 8, 2012.

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Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more….“Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

Voilà, a Factory in Your Garage, Reading File, New York Times, February 6, 2010.

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Both cyclical and structural effects appear evident in the recession, suggesting that some features of the U.S. economy can benefit from stimulatory monetary and fiscal policy, while others are more permanently damaged and unlikely to respond to such policies.

 Eric Swanson, Structural and Cyclical Economic Factors, Economic Newsletter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, June 11, 2012.

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After all, borders are not impermeable. On the contrary, globalization – the immense flow across borders of people, ideas, greenhouse gases, goods, services, currencies, commodities, television and radio signals, drugs, weapons, emails, viruses (computer and biological), and a good deal else – is a defining reality of our time. Few of the challenges that it raises can be met unilaterally; more often than not, cooperation, compromise, and a degree of multilateralism are essential.

Richard N. Haass (Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department (2001-2003), To the Victors Go the Foils, Project Syndicate, Apr. 25, 2012.

COMMENTS

When there are no limits to competition, competition destroys the commons – whether that commons is arable land, fish stocks in the ocean, the earth’s breathable air, or the economy in which all the world’s working people must earn an income sufficient to support a family and contribute to the well-being of their communities.

Structural factors that rob working people of living wage jobs are not confinedto the U.S., are not confined to any nation. There are national and local variations, but, fundamentally, the structural problems are global in scope and must be addressed through globally coordinated efforts.

A global system in which one nation outdoes others for a few years, and then another nation outdoes others for a few years, while the global trend is greater hardship for the greater number, is not one the American people should want and it is not one in which a high standard of living can be sustained.