The Deindustrialization of America

Goodbye to Fosteria, Ohio

The Deindustrialization of America

By JOHN R. MacARTHUR

Pro-North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) forces staged on 9 November 1993 what may be remembered as the greatest salesman's trick in televised propaganda. Millions of Americans had just watched CNN's Larry King show, and its "debate" over the ratification of the agreement, between Ross Perot, the anti-Nafta crusader and independent presidential candidate, and then Vice President Al Gore, spokesman for mainstream political and business opinion about free trade and its alleged benefits to the US.

The professional politician Gore had bested the billionaire amateur Perot, but the show wasn't over, and neither was rhetoric about Nafta. CNN followed with a post-debate debate, in which four "experts" argued over the plan of former President George H W Bush and President Bill Clinton for eliminating tariffs and integrating the Mexican, Canadian, and American economies in ways they claimed would bring money and jobs to everybody — a "win-win" scenario. One expert, a soldier for David Ricardo's economic theory of comparative advantage, was Larry Bossidy, leader of the pro-Nafta business lobby and chairman and CEO of Allied Signal, an industrial corporation with worldwide interests, including the Autolite spark plug plant in Fostoria, Ohio.

With many fearing what Perot called the "giant sucking sound" of jobs heading to cheap labour in Mexico if Nafta passed Congress, Bossidy needed to promote the notion that the agreement would bring more work to the Midwestern rust belt, already in steep decline. So, on instructions from Gore's media adviser Carter Eskew, Bossidy held up a plug and pronounced: "I would like to say, about the jobs, this is a spark plug, an Autolite spark plug. It's made in Fostoria, Ohio. We make 18 million of them. We're going to make 25 million of them; the question is, where are we going to make them? Right now you can't sell these in Mexico because there's a 15% tariff... if this Nafta is passed, we'll make these in Fostoria, Ohio... we'll have more jobs... This is a small part of a car. We export 4,000 cars to Mexico today, we'll export 60,000 cars in the first year [of Nafta], that's 15,000 jobs."

As of 1 November 2010 General Motors was a ward of the federal government, the country was in prolonged economic slump, and there were 86 assembly jobs in the Fostoria factory. The remaining Autolite employees were there to make just the ceramic insulators around the plug. The rest of the jobs had moved to a maquilladora in Mexicali, where nearly 600 Mexicans were manufacturing mostly Motorcraft spark plugs, the house brand of Ford Motor Company, healthiest of the Big Three US auto companies.

A very different wage

The crucial difference between Mexicali (just south of the border from Calexico, California, on the Baja peninsula) and Fostoria was the wage scale: in Fostoria, unionised production workers made an average $22 an hour, including benefits, for a 40-hour week; in Mexicali, workers on the first two shifts made 15.5 pesos (about $1.83) an hour for a 48-hour week. Autolite's new owner was Honeywell, dominant partner of a 1999 merger with Allied Signal, and its chairman, Dave Cote, could be pleased with his investment. The maquilladora was not only less costly to operate, it was also protected against expropriation, serious environmental supervision, and strikes by Nafta, the Mexican government and Mexico's corrupt national labour union, the CTM. In 2009 Cole received more than $13m from his board of directors. Somewhat surprising was President Barack Obama's embrace of Cote as a spokesman for American employment and re-industrialisation.

When I went to Fostoria, in September 2009, long freight trains still rumbled through town regularly on the railroad lines that made the city, despite its modest size (population 13,441), such an attractive place to build a factory in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the trains weren't stopping to pick up much and the chamber of commerce was reduced to promoting itsadvantages for rail photography enthusiasts. No train buffs — or anyone else — were in evidence downtown, where Readmore's Hallmark Books and Gifts was advertising a closing sale. Vast empty parking lots abutting shuttered factories and businesses — Fostoria Industries, a maker of specialty ovens; the Thyssenkrupp Atlas crankshaft plant; the GM dealership — testified to the declining fortunes of what Fostoria's boosters had dubbed "A Small Town in the Middle of Everywhere!"

But while factory after factory had closed down, the Autolite plant seemed impregnable — not just because of Bossidy's pledge in 1993 but also because the plant was churning out vast quantities of spark plugs with stunning efficiency — as many as 1.2m a day on 13 production lines operating over three shifts. It couldn't last with so many plants heading to Mexico and, after passage by Congress of permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, the even cheaper labour of China. In January 2007 Autolite announced plans to build the plant in Mexicali, and in August said it would begin to lay off 350 of the plant's 650 workers.

Bob Teeple, the president of United Auto Workers Local 533, is the son of an Autolite millwright, and in 1995, at age 32, he followed his father into the plant's skilled trades, the elite of unionised blue-collar workers. There were "close to a thousand" employees at the plant. When I visited union headquarters with Hart Perry, the documentary filmmaker, Teeple was awaiting news from the company of the shutdown of everything but the ceramics section, but he wasn't sure when most of the remaining 271 employees would have to go, since the Mexicali plant was having start-up problems.

Teeple recalled the great Nafta debate and a later visit from Larry Bossidy "who even came to the plant and made it sound like, you know, our business is doing good. But I wasn't super aware of what effect Nafta would have. You know, it's just one of them things that you heard on TV — pros and cons."

Neither, it seems, were any of his co-workers super-aware of Nafta. When I sneaked inside the factory to observe one of the four production lines still in operation, I met Peggy Gillig, who was checking plugs for defects. Gillig had started work 10 years earlier, when she was 46, and she wasn't very politically or union minded. Automation at Autolite had failed to kill her job, but politicians had succeeded: "I'm disappointed in our leaders that they've more or less stabbed us in the backs — sold us out to foreign interests."

But Gillig didn't blame poor foreigners for taking her job and preventing her from retiring at age 60, which would have been possible under the UAW contract. "It doesn't seem like it's good for the third world countries they [the jobs] are going to. They don't pay those people... a living wage, so how is that good for them? I mean, it's better than not havin' any kind of a job... I don't understand who it is good for other than the big companies."

Other workers, current and former, spoke with me, including Larry Capetillo, a Spanish-speaking Mexican-American whom the company lured out of retirement in 2007 to help train workers in Mexico. Morally conflicted, Capetillo kept a journal about his dilemma. The Honeywell executive who recruited him and three other retirees claimed that the Autolite plant had lost money for the past "four to five years", according to the journal, not so much because of production costs "but because we have 1,200 retirees". However, if the move to Mexicali was successful, the executive had promised that "the goal is to keep 300-and-some jobs here [in Fostoria]". Capetillo thought of Autolite as a family affair — his wife, Fran, had taken a buyout after 29 years, and his daughter, Tracy, was still employed there with her husband.

"We all knew that people were going to dislike us very much for doing this," Capetillo told me. But the executive had been blunt: "Whether you go [to Mexico] or not, they're going to move this. We're going to try to make [the Mexicali plant] go if we can — if we can't, and it goes down... the rest of this is going to close." Capetillo said "We decided, you know, if we can keep the plant here; if we can do something to help there, we're going to go down and try to do it then... Believe me, the four of us were not going to go, but when he said the whole operation would close if the Mexico thing did not make it, we had to make a decision."

In his journal, Capetillo was more candid: "Many of our fellow employees hated us for making this decision." However, "the longer we can keep this plant open the longer my daughter gets to keep her job."

The company had no intention of keeping any plug production in Fostoria. After two years of commuting between Fostoria and Mexicali, Mexicali was ready to manufacture, as Bob Teeple put it, "everything with platinum attached to it". When negotiations began in 2009 for a contract, the company surprised Teeple with a demand: if the union wanted to keep more than 110 jobs in Fostoria, there would be a wage cut to $11 an hour plus big employee contributions to health insurance. "We couldn't do that," Teeple said. Better to negotiate for good severance than to take a humiliating reduction far below the UAW norm.

"I guess I felt totally betrayed by the company," Capetillo said. "It seems they all deal in half-truths... He did tell us that 300 jobs would stay, probably. And not even half of them stayed."

'All of us have to help'

Ordinarily, this story would have ended on 23 December 2009, when the last integrated production line was shut down. I felt obliged to interview Dave Cote, especially since he had appeared with Obama at the White House, just after his inauguration, to promote business-government cooperation in combating severe recession. As Cote told reporters, "The Congress, the American people, all of us as a business community, all of us have to help. Mr President, I can say that for Honeywell you can count on us and all of our employees to be there to help support this."

For months, Cote's PR man at corporate headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, kept putting me off, not knowing I wanted to talk about Nafta in general and Autolite in particular. It seemed just a matter of time before the remaining 99 workers in the ceramics department in Fostoria lost their jobs.

But on 4 April 2010 a catastrophe occurred — a 7.2 earthquake struck 60km from Mexicali, placing the region in a state of emergency and damaging the new plant. Honeywell's Consumer Products Group had no choice but to move some production back to Fostoria and rehire 70 laid-off workers to satisfy demand. Before long, Teeple said, "they told us we were doing four times the production of the Mexican plant, 130,000 a day, and some days we got as high as 230,000 with two lines running for three shifts." By October operations were back to normal in Mexicali and the 70 rehires were laid off again, for good: "Not one machine is left in department 9," Teeple said. "All of them were shipped to the Mexicali plant."

All Teeple had to look forward to was a 1 November 2011 contract expiration and another round of negotiations on behalf of the 86 survivors in the insulator section. "They're telling us no, they're not setting up kilns in Mexicali," Teeple said in December 2010, but the company had said the same things to Larry Capetillo . The ceramic insulators could easily be made by NGK, a Japanese company with a factory in Irvine, California, much closer to the Mexicali plant. It wouldn't be long before Fostoria's Autolite plant, which opened in 1936, shut forever.

Teeple was demoralised. When he called me in February, he said he wouldn't run for re-election in June as Local 533's president and would take a buyout from the company: "I'm dead in the water. I want to change professions, go into marketing. The more you do, the more you make." His first love, sprint-car racing, wasn't a way to support four kids and a wife. By May, Teeple had changed his mind — a sense of obligation to union members took precedence, — and he was re-elected.

But Teeple had more bad news: on January 28 Honeywell announced that it had agreed to sell its Consumer Products Group (CPG), including Autolite and Fram Filters, to the Rank Group, a New Zealand-based, privately held investment company, for $950m in cash (1). "While CPG is a good business," Dave Cote said in a press release, "it doesn't fit with our portfolio of differentiated, global technologies... we are confident that the Rank Group, with its proven track record of investing in and building established franchises, will be a good home for CPG's consumer brands, customers, and employees."

Rank was owned by the leveraged buyout billionaire Graeme Hart, said to be worth more than $8bn. His method for making money was borrow heavily to buy companies with a healthy cash flow; cut costs and increase profits through layoffs or mergers; then issue more debt or resell the company for more than he paid. His purchase of Alcoa's packaging and consumer group in 2008 was exemplary: after paying $2.7bn for the aluminium foil maker he cut more than 20% of the workforce by closing facilities, including 490 unionised workers at Reynolds Wrap manufacturing plants and a distribution facility in Richmond, Virginia, and by laying off 158 employees at a printing plant, also in Richmond. Under the new corporate entity, Reynolds Group Holdings Limited, Hart has assembled other packaging companies, including SIG and Evergreen Packaging. Bob Teeple was not optimistic about management-labour relations under Rank Group ownership: he predicted that Honeywell's union-staffed Fram Filters plant in Greeneville, Ohio, would fall victim to Hart's cost-cutting after the sale of the company became official, probably this autumn.

Rewarded for investing in the American dream

Over the past 12 years I have heard many stories about the beneficial effects of free trade from its proponents. But the stories recounted by its victims always seemed more persuasive. Among the best storytellers were two Autolite workers who lost their jobs. When I met Jerry Faeth in 2009 he was 52 and considered himself lucky. With 32 years at the plant, he would retire with a full pension, which he had planned to do just before being laid off. Both his daughters were well on their way to graduating from college, and his house in New Riegel, southeast of Fostoria, was fully paid for. He had liked Autolite because after 28 years, "I got into the prototype section of the plant. I loved working [there] because it's something different every day and you're not just using your hands; you're using your mind and you're working with college-graduated individuals who treat me as an equal." Faeth had invested in the American dream and been rewarded: "I was fortunate because of Autolite. We had good wages... and my wife was able to quit work and stay home for eight years with our two children; and I think that's key to some of the issues we're having in society today because the babysitter doesn't raise your kids like Mom or Dad." But now he was embittered.

After the meeting at which the layoffs were announced by a Honeywell executive, Faeth said it "felt like he hit me in the stomach... I wanted five more years [in the plant] and I'm not going to get it... I said, 'You know, you talked about us [needing to be] competitive. I contribute to the 401K in Honeywell and I get this book every year and it says the top five guys in Honeywell last year made $70 million. Sir, is that competitive?"' According to Faeth, the executive replied: "Well, I can't speak for Dave Cote's salary but, you know, that comes out of a different fund anyway." Faeth said: "'Sir, that's not what I asked. You can't tell me that there's not a smart person down there in Mexico that wouldn't do [Cote's] job for a whole lot less. How can he tell you that we're makin' too much money here when those top five guys made $70 million. What's wrong with that picture?' He didn't have an answer for me."

But others purported to have an answer to Faeth's question. One of them is the economist R Glen Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the first two years of the George W Bush administration and a villain in Inside Job (the Academy Award-winning documentary about the 2008 financial crisis). When I encountered Alison Murray at Local 533, she had read parts of his textbook, Macroeconomics. With a BA, Murray enrolled in night classes at the University of Findlay when layoffs loomed at Autolite. As a single mother, aged 42, with only 17 years in the plant, she couldn't retire with a pension and needed to plan for the future. But her encounter with Findlay's economics department left her troubled about post-industrial Fostoria.

Slapped in the face

"The ironic thing," she said, "was that the very first class that I took when I went back to school was a macroeconomics class. And the whole entire textbook told us how important it was that they move the manufacturing jobs from America to other countries — and that manufacturing in America was a dinosaur and that it should be outsourced to other countries because that was the only way to make money... So it was like getting slapped in the face. I was trying to go back to school... because I'm losing my job and I'm a displaced worker... and the very first class I took, the very first page of the textbook [justifies my layoff]."

Murray argued with her teacher: "I said, 'You know, that's all well and great in theory but I've lived the human side. I've seen the devastation that... is caused by these factories moving out to the other countries...' And the textbook and the teacher say, 'Well, we're not talking about very many jobs.' Well, to me in this town of 15,000, to have 900 jobs [roughly the number lost at Autolite since 1993] leaving, that's a lot... And it's affected every single person's life."

But there's no arguing with Hubbard, or even Obama, who pledged to "renegotiate" Nafta during his battle with Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Ohio primary campaign, then reversed once he entered the White House.

Hubbard's Macroeconomics puts together supposedly irrefutable economic truths turned into clichés in the aftermath of the 2008 financial debacle. In its orthodox advocacy of tax cuts, deregulation, free trade and free markets, it has a tone of bland authority that makes it hard to challenge unless one pays close attention to arguments, alternatives, and facts he omits. His chapter on "Comparative Advantage and the Gains from International Trade" is full of unprovable generalisations: "Some people worry that firms in high-income countries will have to start paying much lower wages to compete with firms in developing countries. This fear is misplaced, however, because free trade actually raises living standards by increasing economic efficiency. When a country practices protectionism and produces goods and services it could obtain more inexpensively from other countries, it reduces its standard of living."

Besides, says Hubbard, child labour isn't such a bad thing, since the "alternatives" (such as prostitution) can be "extremely grim". We can be grateful that the smart rulers of developing countries resist pressure to pay higher wages or impose environmental regulation because "jobs that seem to have very low wages based on high-income country standards are often better than the alternatives available to workers in low-income countries". While the US has a "comparative advantage" with many skilled workers doing "sophisticated" manufacturing, "other countries, such as China, have many unskilled workers and relatively little machinery... China has a comparative advantage in the production of goods... that require unskilled workers and small amounts of simple machinery." Nowhere is mentioned Chinese wages of 50 cents an hour, the government-controlled Chinese national labour union, the absence of a formidable Chinese environmental regulator, or the sophistication of Chinese factories.

In this distorted world, we're all operating on a level playing field: "It is true," the book says, that "jobs are lost" when "more-efficient foreign firms drive less-efficient domestic firms out of business." But the same is true when "more-efficient domestic firms" kill off the competition — we're all playing under the same global rules of free enterprise. One shouldn't worry about the lost jobs because "these job losses are rarely permanent."

While Jerry Faeth, Allison Murray, and Peggy Gillig awaited news of their next place of employment, and at what wage, they could contemplate Larry Bossidy's plug promise versus the Department of Labor's latest report on a programme called the Transitional Adjustment Administration. TAA is supposed to provide money to people who lost jobs directly as a result of Nafta, which became effective on 1 January 1994. TAA does not calculate actual job losses, only petitions made for assistance as a consequence of lost jobs. As of 21 June 2011 its "estimated number of workers covered" — those eligible for government money — stood at 2,491,479. It seemed likely that before long the figure would increase by 86, the total number of UAW members left in Autolite's Fostoria plant.

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of The Selling of Free Trade: NAFTA, Washington and the Subversion of American Democracy, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001, and You Can't Be President: the Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America, Melville House, 2008.

This article appears in the August edition of the excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found atmondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

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Londres: Las protestas que no osan decir su nombre

Arde Tottenham y los motines se extienden a una decena de distritos y a otras ciudades británicas

Parte de su juventud, inmigrante, desempleada o desafecta, se dedica a saquear tiendas y robar TV plasma, zapatillas y celulares.

Los viejos se meten horrorizados a sus casas.

La policía interviene con guantes para evitar muertos (el pretexto que encendió la pradera fue un muerto hace días).  

Los saqueadoreas se mueven de un sitio a otro y se comunican por celular.  ¿Más allá del happening, la exclusión y el

subempleo, que une a estos protestantes sin causa ni propósito?

El primer minstro regresa apresuradamente de vacaciones (¿será ése el verdadero motivo inconfesable de las protestas?  ¿el

que las clases dirigentes se hayan declarado en vacaciones?)

Si el asunto continúa un día más, tendrán que sacar al ejército a las calles.

Fwd: Macroperu EE.UU El desplome del Bank of America

EE.UU

El desplome del Bank of America

Leonel Carranco Guerra

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El precio de las acciones de Bank of America (BAC) se ha desplomado un 20.32% el día 8 de agosto del 2011.  Recordemos que este banco comercial es el más grande de Estados Unidos por valor de activos, del cual existe hoy en día una alarma financiera por parte de los inversionistas que están preocupados por la caída de los precios de sus acciones.  Jonathan Weil, columnista de Bloomberg, en su artículo titulado Curse the geniuses who gave us Bank Of America(1), menciona que "En cuanto al mercado se refiere, es falso más de la mitad del valor en los libros de la empresa, debido a los activos sobrevalorados, pasivos subestimados o alguna combinación de los dos".

El informe del Bank of America del segundo trimestre del 2011(2) hace mención que el valor de las acciones en libros es de 21.45 dls pero en la plaza financiera del Dow Jones su precio de cierre al 8 de agosto del 2011 fue de 6.51 dls. Es decir los inversionistas no creen que valga lo que el banco publica; la perspectiva de éstos es que hasta ese día, ellos creen que el banco vale aproximadamente un tercio de lo que dice el informe.

En este informe se publica que el banco tuvo perdidas por un valor de 9,127 millones de dólares las mayores de la historia del banco(3).  Estas pérdidas están relacionadas a cuestiones hipotecarias.

Los temores que existen, a parte de los mencionados por Weil, son por las demandas que se han hecho en contra de este banco en temas relacionados con hipotecas. Bank of America durante la crisis compró a dos bancos, Countrywide y Merrill Lynch, y ahora enfrenta acusaciones de fraudes hechos por él y por estas dos instituciones financieras.

Uno de los demandantes actuales es la "paraestatal" A.I.G.  Mencionemos algo que difícilmente se publica, esta empresa se encuentra limitada en algunas cuestiones jurídicas, por el hecho de que cuando fue rescatada por el gobierno de Estados Unidos de su inminente quiebra, se le hizo firmar un acuerdo en donde se le prohibía demandar a los grandes bancos en temas relacionados a los bonos de las hipotecas(4).  La cuestión es: ¿por qué ahora está demandando a Bank of America?  A.I.G se defiende diciendo que existen algunos valores de bonos que no se pueden catalogar dentro del acuerdo que firmó.  Pero las causas principales de estas demandas, según mi análisis, en caso de ganarlas podrán en parte resarcir pérdidas provocadas por el derrumbe del mercado hipotecario y así aumentar su flujo en caja para tener una mayor liquidez y con ello una mayor capitalización.

Todos los problemas mencionados, más la actual incertidumbre de los mercados por la rebaja de calificación de la deuda de Estados Unidos, han llevado a desplomarse el precio de las acciones de Bank of America.  Tan solo en los primeros seis días bursátiles de este mes (del 1 de agosto al 08 de agosto del 2011) ha tenido una contracción del 33.3% y en lo que va de este año la caída ha sido del 54%, y anualmente la caída es de 53.3%, pero si lo calculamos desde su valor más alto después de la crisis (9 de abril del 2010), tenemos una contracción del 65%. (Ver gráfico)

No se menciona mucho pero es momento de comenzar a preocuparnos por el futuro de Bank of America y su posible nuevo rescate por parte de la Reserva Federal (Fed).  Lo más posible es que la Fed le extienda una línea de crédito y hasta podría comprar acciones del banco.

- Leonel Carranco Guerra, Facultad de Economía, UNAM.

1) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-21/curse-the-geniuses-who-built-bank-of-america-jonathan-weil-1-.html

2) Bank Of America, Supplemental Information, Second Quarter 2011

3) http://lta.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idLTASIE76I0H520110719?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

4) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/aig-to-sue-bank-of-america-over-mortgage-bonds.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&hp

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AmericaSur: Una agenda para la desconexión

AmericaSur

Una agenda para la desconexión

Raúl Zibechi

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Con 700 mil millones de dólares de reservas monetarias, 400 millones de habitantes, grandes reservas de hidrocarburos, autonomía energética, importantes yacimientos mineros, la mayor biodiversidad del planeta, la región sudamericana no tienen ningún motivo para no despegarse de la crisis sistémica en curso y elaborar su propia agenda política y económica.

En las últimas semanas, ministros y presidentes de la región se pronunciaron por establecer medidas defensivas para evitar contagios de la crisis que afecta al primer mundo. Cristina Fernández dijo que "debemos blindar la región para no perder lo que hemos logrado"[1]. Guido Mantega, ministro de Hacienda de Brasil, se pronunció por establecer "un cordón de aislamiento" para evitar perjuicios[2]. Hasta el conservador presidente de Colombia Juan Manuel Santos advirtió en la Cumbre de UNASUR en Lima que se deben contrarrestar los efectos nocivos de las crisis económicas por las que atraviesa Estados Unidos y Europa que devalúan los ahorros de la región[3].

Son miradas positivas que muestran una toma de conciencia generalizada de que hay que actuar pronto. Pero las medidas defensivas son insuficientes. Mantega se equivoca cuando asegura que "la cuestión de fondo es la recuperación económica de Estados Unidos y de Europa, porque aquí sufrimos las consecuencias"[4]. En primer lugar, esa recuperación salvadora no va a llegar porque las economías que Oscar Ugarteche define como "países ricos altamente endeudados", ingresaron en un período de austeridad y estancamiento, o crecimiento muy lento, incapaz de reactivar la economía mundial.

En segundo lugar, y esto es decisivo, porque estamos viviendo un completo rediseño del sistema-mundo, no sólo de la economía. En pocas palabras: la relación centro-periferia se ha roto y están en proceso de conformarse nuevos centros regionales, eso que llamamos BRICS (Brasil, Rusia, India, China y Sudáfrica) con relaciones de otro tipo con sus propias periferias y con los viejos centros de poder en decadencia. A eso se suma la crisis de la hegemonía estadounidense y la consolidación de un mundo multipolar. Occidente ha dejado de ser el centro del mundo cuyo eje se traslada rápidamente hacia Asia, un cambio de envergadura que supera nuestra capacidad de imaginación, sobre todo en el terreno cultural. Y a todo esto debería sumarse el peak oil, la progresiva decadencia de la civilización del petróleo, y la crisis ambiental y climática en curso.

La advertencia de Immanuel Wallerstein acerca del "colapso importante que se avecina" y la necesidad de botes salvavidas para afrontarlo, debe ser tomado con la mayor seriedad[5]. En su opinión, Europa está ensayando la creación de un fondo monetario europeo de facto, como se desprende del último salvataje a Grecia que pasa por establecer una estructura de gobernanza común.

China está considerando dejar de comprar no sólo bonos del gobierno estadounidense sino activos en ese país[6]. Siendo el principal acreedor y comprador de bonos de la Reserva Federal, una decisión de ese tipo no haría sino acercar a Washington al temido default. Asia Times publica un excelente informe sobre el "colapso de la clase media en Estados Unidos", donde demuestra que la crisis inmobiliaria será de muy larga duración por razones demográficas y los beneficios de las pequeñas empresas, donde invierten sectores importantes de las clases medias, están lejos de recuperarse[7].

En síntesis, "hay mucha crisis por delante y urge por tanto pensar Sudamérica seriamente"[8]. El desafío mayor es que la región no puede pensarse en función de lo que suceda con la economía global sino en base a sus propias prioridades y la primera de ellas es construir su propia agenda: desconectarse del mundo rico endeudado y muy en particular del sistema financiero y de las multinacionales. Son ellos los que necesitan "invertir" en América Latina porque es en esta región donde hacen sus negocios y obtienen las ganancias que ya no consiguen en el mundo endeudado.

Para este objetivo es ineludible acelerar algunas medidas como la puesta en marcha efectiva del Banco del Sur, redireccionar los flujos de hidrocarburos hacia la propia región, abandonar el apego al dólar y sustituirlo por una moneda regional y seguir fortaleciendo el comercio y los vínculos Sur-Sur. Son propuestas largamente discutidas en la región, pero cuya implementación se viene demorando en gran medida por el escaso interés que vienen mostrando algunos de los países que juegan el papel de liderazgo.

Aún así, son medidas insuficientes. Porque, en rigor, no se trata de una o de varias crisis sino de una reconstrucción del mapa mundial que brinda a la región la posibilidad de modificar a su favor la distribución del poder en el mundo para que sea algo más equitativo. Las enormes reservas de Sudamérica, casi tan elevadas como las de Japón pero sin el lastre de su gigantesca deuda, deben ser usadas ahora para introducir cambios de larga duración. Quizá el más importante sea dar un vuelco en el terreno de la ciencia y la tecnología, en investigación e innovación.

El retraso es gigantesco. Brasil, con el 2,3% del PIB mundial solicita el 0,3% de las patentes, siendo el único sudamericano que se ha propuesto elevar sus inversiones en la materia. Registra menos de 500 patentes anuales, frente a 45 mil de Estados Unidos[9]. Los países asiáticos muestran que es posible dar un vuelco. En los últimos 20 años China, India y Corea del Sur experimentaron un crecimiento exponencial en la innovación. Se estima que para 2020 China superará a Estados Unidos como principal productor mundial de conocimientos científicos[10].

Pese a que tiene reservas de 11 mil millones de dólares, Bolivia invierte sólo 40 millones anuales en ciencia y tecnología, el 0,1% de su presupuesto. Por lo tanto, debe recurrir a las multinacionales para industrializar el litio. Los demás países de la región tienen una situación muy similar. Pero sin dar este vuelco en el dominio de la ciencia y la tecnología, será imposible en un plazo razonable, digamos de dos décadas, dejar de ser exportadores de commodities, dejar el extractivismo y tomar un rumbo nuevo.

Por último, no será posible desconectarse del caos sistémico en curso sin conflictos ni pérdidas, eludiendo desgarros internas. Eso es una crisis. Quiebre y ruptura para cambiar el rumbo.

- Raúl Zibechi, periodista uruguayo, es docente e investigador en la Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, y asesor de varios colectivos sociales.

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[1] Página 12, 29 de julio de 2011.

[2] Valor, 3 de agosto de 2011.

[3] Página 12, 30 de julio de 2011.

[4] Valor, 3 de agosto de 2011.

[5] La Jornada, 4 de agosto de 2011.

[6] Dean Baker en Diario del Pueblo: http://spanish.peopledaily.com.cn/31619/7560741.html

[7] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/global_economy/mh02dj05.html

[8] Oscar Ugarteche en ALAI, 3 de agosto de 2011.

[9] Proyecto Brasil en Tres Tiempos, Presidencia, 2004.

[10] http://spanish.peopledaily.com.cn/101390/7284766.html

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Ugarteche: EE.UU Banana Republic

EE.UU

EE.UU.: Banana Republic

Oscar Ugarteche

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Las cifras mágicas del (de)crecimiento

Aunque antes de la crisis no era evidente que Estados Unidos, Europa y Japón ya eran Países ricos altamente endeudados (PRAE), la realidad fue que después del 2007 todos comenzaron a sentir los impactos de su alto nivel de endeudamiento privado y público.  La dimensión del problema del 2007 en adelante fue menos evidente para Estados Unidos, que con una altísima deuda interna por consumo, no se esperaba que fuera a entrar en una espiral contractiva marcada.  Se pensó que habría un ajuste en las cuentas hipotecarias y se retomaría el camino del crecimiento.  No fue así.  Lo difícil es que EEUU ha optado por la política del avestruz para no espantar a las expectativas.  Dicen un dato de crecimiento económico y luego lo corrigen para abajo y entonces cuando tres trimestres después miras los datos, sale otra historia.  Los ajustes de crecimiento económico más recientes son los siguientes: "Del cuarto trimestre de 2007 al primer trimestre de 2011, el verdadero PIB disminuyó en un tasa promedio anual del 0.2 por ciento.  En las estimaciones antes publicadas, el verdadero PIB había aumentado en una tasa promedio anual del 0.2 por ciento." (http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm)

J.P. Morgan prevé recesión en EEUU en el semestre entrante y los años venideros (1).  Los pronósticos europeos, aunque fueron mejores, se han deteriorado (2).  Lo que empezó como un problema de finanzas, como en 1929, se está transformando en un problema mayor de paradigma productivo y de reglas del juego: es decir de paradigma teórico y tecnológico.  Los ajustes económicos que el FMI y el Banco Central Europeo le piden a los europeos, no obstante, son análogos a los que le pedían a América Latina en su tiempo, aunque lo que haya causado esta crisis sea la teoría donde los mercados desregulados resuelven sus propios problemas y a menor intervención del Estado mayor crecimiento económico.  Mientras el sector financiero no necesite ayuda del Estado, claro.  Ni las corporaciones. Las correcciones a las utilidades de las corporaciones son de este tipo: "las ganancias corporativas fueron revisadas a la baja en el 1.1 por ciento al 2008.  Éstas fueron revisadas al alza en 8.3 por ciento para el 2009, y al alza en 10.8 por ciento al 2010." (Ibid)

Mostrar que fueron muy rentables cuando se estuvo diciendo que perdían dinero y que por eso recibieron apoyos estatales, como ha señalado Atilio Boron, es una tomadura de pelo no digna de una cultura que se ha preciado de decir siempre la verdad y de un cuerpo institucional que parte de la premisa que los datos de la Bureau of Economic Activity provienen de una agencia seria.  Hace varios años que trampean los números y luego sale el reajuste que no tiene nada que ver con las proyecciones, como en América Latina en los años 80.  Pero este último reajuste parece ser el más serio de todos.  Es decir nos están diciendo que las empresas tuvieron utilidades cuando recibieron el apoyo, pero que en el 2008 estuvieron al ras.  Esta no fue la figura planteada en el 2008.  Las utilidades resulta que crecen pero el PIB no.  Esta es la concentración del ingreso fabricada con un sistema productivo e impositivo construido por los republicanos desde la década del 80, al menos bajo el paraguas de la globalización.

Sacrificar el prestigio nacional para sacar a Obama del juego

La forma de resolución de los límites de endeudamiento en Estados Unidos ha venido a demostrar que los republicanos están dispuestos a sacrificar la economía de Estados Unidos con tal de que Obama no salga reelegido.  Pueden quebrar su país con tal que no les suban los impuestos al 0.01% de la población beneficiado con la reducción de impuestos a los más ricos. Esto es a 35,000 personas.  El argumento es que sino dejarán de invertir.  O sea dejarán de jugar en bolsa y de especular con la deuda de España, Italia, los precios de los alimentos y el petróleo, en fin, una tragedia horrenda.

China creó su propia agencia calificadora de riesgos en lo que es la respuesta al abuso de las tres agencias calificadoras de riesgo incluidas en el NRSR de Estados Unidos, que calificaron lo que sus clientes les dijeron y propiciaron la venta de papeles basura a inversionistas ajenos a esos datos.  Moody's y Standard & Poor's (S&P) combinadas son aproximadamente el 80 % de la cuota de mercado mundial total, con Fitch que suma aproximadamente un 15 %. Mientras las otras 127 empresas en el mundo ocupan 3% del mercado mundial de análisis de riesgos. La calificadora de riesgo global de la China, Dagong, rebajó la calificación de riesgo de Estados Unidos, primero de AAA a A+ en noviembre pasado y ahora de A+ a A- (3). Esta es la única empresa calificadora no estadounidense que provee a los inversionistas asiáticos criterios de inversión.  Dijeron: "Los defectos en la estructura política expuesta en la lucha de los dos partidos indican que el gobierno de los EEUU tiene dificultad en la resolución de la crisis soberana de deudas en última instancia.  El interés y la seguridad de acreedores de los EEUU carecen de una garantía de los sistemas político y económico".

Si los chinos no creen en Estados Unidos y el peso del comercio entre ambos se ha reducido en la década inicial del siglo, hay un proceso de rediseño de la economía mundial en curso.  Los republicanos harán cualquier cosa para que fracase Obama, inclusive inmolar al país en el desprestigio internacional.  ¿Qué harán cuando sean gobierno?  Hay mucha crisis por delante y urge por tanto pensar Suramérica seriamente.  Los latinoamericanos aquejados de economías dolarizadas deberían de ver como salen de eso, que los puede llevar a una devaluación aún mayor con los efectos inflacionarios correspondientes.  Lo que se viene cayendo y seguirá cayendo es el dólar.  Y con eso el prestigio de la economía líder.

1) http://www.markit.com/assets/en/docs/commentary/markit-economics/2011/aug/GLOBAL_Manufacturing_ENG_1108_PR.pdf

2) http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3343,en_2649_34109_43123241_1_1_1_1,00.html

3) http://www.dagongcredit.com/dagongweb/english/pr/show.php?id=108&table=web_e_zxzx

- Oscar Ugarteche, economista peruano, trabaja en el Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas de la UNAM, México. Es presidente de ALAI y coordinador del Observatorio Económico de América Latina (OBELA) http://www.obela.org

Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets

Slash and Burn as the New Normal

Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets

By DAVID HARVEY
"Nihilistic and feral teenagers" the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.
The word "feral" pulled me up short. It reminded me of how the communards in Paris in 1871 were depicted as wild animals, as hyenas, that deserved to be (and often were) summarily executed in the name of the sanctity of private property, morality, religion, and the family. But then the word conjured up another association: Tony Blair attacking the "feral media," having for so long been comfortably lodged in the left pocket of Rupert Murdoch only later to be substituted as Murdoch reached into his right pocket to pluck out David Cameron.
There will of course be the usual hysterical debate between those prone to view the riots as a matter of pure, unbridled and inexcusable criminality, and those anxious to contextualize events against a background of bad policing; continuing racism and unjustified persecution of youths and minorities; mass unemployment of the young; burgeoning social deprivation; and a mindless politics of austerity that has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with the perpetuation and consolidation of personal wealth and power. Some may even get around to condemning the meaningless and alienating qualities of so many jobs and so much of daily life in the midst of immense but unevenly distributed potentiality for human flourishing.
If we are lucky, we will have commissions and reports to say all over again what was said of Brixton and Toxteth in the Thatcher years. I say 'lucky' because the feral instincts of the current Prime Minister seem more attuned to turn on the water cannons, to call in the tear gas brigade and use the rubber bullets while pontificating unctuously about the loss of moral compass, the decline of civility and the sad deterioration of family values and discipline among errant youths.
But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone's bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.
A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day. Does anyone believe it is possible to find an honest capitalist, an honest banker, an honest politician, an honest shopkeeper or an honest police commisioner any more? Yes, they do exist. But only as a minority that everyone else regards as stupid. Get smart. Get Easy Profits. Defraud and steal! The odds of getting caught are low. And in any case there are plenty of ways to shield personal wealth from the costs of corporate malfeasance.
What I say may sound shocking. Most of us don't see it because we don't want to. Certainly no politician dare say it and the press would only print it to heap scorn upon the sayer. But my guess is that every street rioter knows exactly what I mean. They are only doing what everyone else is doing, though in a different way – more blatently and visibly in the streets. Thatcherism unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the "animal spirits" of the entreprenuer they coyly named it) and nothing has transpired to curb them since. Slash and burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere.
This is the new normal in which we live. This is what the next grand commission of enquiry should address. Everyone, not just the rioters, should be held to account. Feral capitalism should be put on trial for crimes against humanity as well as for crimes against nature.
Sadly, this is what these mindless rioters cannot see or demand. Everything conspires to prevent us from seeing and demanding it also. This is why political power so hastily dons the robes of superior morality and unctuous reason so that no one might see it as so nakedly corrupt and stupidly irrational.
But there are various glimmers of hope and Light around the world. The indignados movements in Spain and Greece, the revolutionary impulses in Latin America, the peasant movements in Asia, are all beginning to see through the vast scam that a predatory and feral global capitalism has unleashed upon the world. What will it take for the rest of us to see and act upon it? How can we begin all over again? What direction should we take? The answers are not easy. But one thing we do know for certain: we can only get to the right answers by asking the right questions.
David Harvey is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest book is The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. He can be reached through his website.

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Sobre las manifestaciones de Londres

What isn't behind the London riots

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  By Jonathan Freedland, Published: August 11

London

To a watching world, the sight of Britain on fire this week has surely been shocking. The looting and torching has revealed an inner-city London, Birmingham and Manchester seldom glimpsed in the England usually offered for export via soft-focus period dramas, Hugh Grant movies or stories on Will and Kate.

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• Freedland: What's driving Britain's looters?
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If the revelation has puzzled outsiders, it has confused Britons no less. The mood here is a mixture of rage, fear and bafflement. Not that we're not used to riots: We are. England caught fire during that other royal-wedding year, 1981. But 30 years ago, the battle lines were relatively clear. Race was central, especially in the predominantly black south London neighborhood of Brixton. The target then was a police force charged with racial bias. But the recent explosions have had none of that clarity.

Even though the troubles ignited last weekafter the police killing of a black Briton in the north London area of Tottenham, the copycat outbursts since have lacked that racial dimension. Among the looters, all races have been represented, while their targets have not been overtly political. They have not hurled stones at police stations, city halls or the Houses of Parliament. Instead, these rapidly mobilized crowds have concentrated their fire on stores, especially those selling cellphones, sneakers and large-screen TVs. One looter was seen trying on different pairs of shoes, making sure she stole the right size.

The Guardian's Zoe Williams has called these the "shopping riots," noting the way the mobs move from malls to main-street stores, avoiding confrontation with the police, in contrast with the 1981 rioters, who actively sought it. If today's looters have a political point to make, it is that politics doesn't matter.

I walked the length of Tottenham's High Road on Wednesday, as demolition crews removed what was left of the large carpet store burned to ash on Saturday. I listened to Mohammed Abdi, a Somali-born cellphone store owner whose life's work was destroyed that night. "It took an age to build this business — and now I have nothing," he told me. The local member of Parliament, David Lammy, was doing his best to hug and reassure those whose neighborhood was ravaged. "The consumerist and materialist nature of it is new," he said. "And it's of this generation."

The methods are new, too: using instant-messaging technology to assemble a crowd; diverting police to one place by, say, burning a car; and then, once law enforcement is safely distracted, starting looting in another. The fact that police officers cannot be everywhere at once has proved their Achilles heel, making them all but powerless. The short-term remedy has been to triple the number of police on duty in London, which restored calm here Tuesday night but which is no more a long-term solution than the pleas for BlackBerry to turn off its instant-messenger system. One Tottenham resident warned Wednesday that the rest of the world should brace for the spread of this new "social criminality."

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Resiliencia macroeconómica

Tomado de Macroeconomic Resilience The Great Divide between Academics and Practitioners with 2 comments In an excellent article, Mark Thoma highlights the great divide between academics and practitioners in economics. He also identifies the fundamental reason for this divide – practitioners typically rely on intuition and rough heuristics whereas academics rely on rigorous theoretical constructs. In Herbert Simon's terminology, practitioners are satisficers, not optimisers. In a recent post, I outlined my preferred framework to analyse monetary policy as an attempt to influence the real rate curve. Clearly, this viewpoint is not rigorous but for my purposes transforming this framework into a theoretically watertight construct is not worth the effort. The aim of the framework is simple to give me a quick and dirty but useful way to process information and market data. It is also almost certain that in some scenarios, this framework will break down – but instead of thinking about all such scenarios in advance, I simply trust that my experience and my gut instinct will warn me when such a scenario occurs. To most academics, the process I have outlined above would seem to be a distinctly unscientific and "irrational" method. But as I have argued before, heuristics and intuition are rational responses in an uncertain environment where time and resources are scarce. Herbert Simon and Gerd Gigerenzer have both done excellent work on the role of heuristics but the most relevant research on the role of intuition has been undertaken by Gary Klein and other researchers in the field of 'Naturalistic Decision Making' (NDM). NDM originated from Klein's work in analysing the decision-making of firefighters – as Klein explains in this recent interview, expert firefighters follow a process that is far removed from the conventional definition of rational choice. They "build up a repertoire of patterns so that they can immediately identify, classify, and categorize situations, and have a rapid impulse about what to do. Not just what to do, but they're framing the situation, and their frame is telling them what are the important cues. That's why they're always looking, or usually looking, in the right place. They know what to ignore, and what they have to watch carefully." There's nothing magical about this: "Intuition is about expertise and tacit knowledge. I'll contrast tacit knowledge with explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is knowledge of factual material. I can tell people facts, I can tell them over the phone, and they'll know things. I can say I was born in the Bronx, and now you know where I was born. That's an example of explicit knowledge, it's factual information. But there are other forms of knowledge. There's knowledge about routines. Routines you can think of as a set of steps. But there's also tacit knowledge, and expertise about when to start each step, and when it's finished, when you're done and ready to start the next one, and whether the steps are working or not. So even for routines, some expertise is needed. There are other aspects of tacit knowledge that are about intuition, like our ability to make perceptual discriminations, so as we get experience, we can see things that we couldn't see before…. Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn't involve explicit knowledge. It doesn't involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can't explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuitions sometimes feel like we have ESP, but it isn't magical, it's really a consequence of the experience we've built up." Larry Summers is correct in noting that the solution is not for practitioners to become academics. It is for more academics to rigorously analyse the intuitive and heuristic-based methods and explanations that practitioners use. The real gap is in the paucity of applied economists and the misguided view of applied work with data-crunching rather than practical knowledge. As Daniel Kahneman explains in his introduction to Gary Klein's interview: "In the US, the word "applied" tends to diminish anything academic it touches. Add the word to the name of any academic discipline, from mathematics and statistics to psychology, and you find lowered status.  The attitude changed briefly during World War II, when the best academic psychologists rolled up their sleeves to contribute to the war effort. I believe it was not an accident that the 15 years following the war were among the most productive in the history of the discipline.  Old methods were discarded, old methodological taboos were dropped, and common sense prevailed over stale theoretical disputes. However, the word "applied" did not retain its positive aura for very long. It is a pity. Gary Klein is a living example of how useful applied psychology can be when it is done well. Klein is first and mainly a keen observer. He looks at people who are good at their job as they exercise their skills, sometimes in life-and-death situations, and he reports what he sees in clear and eloquent prose.  When you read his descriptions of real experts at work, you feel that it is the job of theorists to accommodate what he has seen – instead of doing what we often do, which is to scan the "real world" (when we think of it at all) for illustrations of our theoretical notions." The divide that Mark Thoma identifies is not restricted to economics – in the age of 'Big Data', all academic disciplines are moving away from the sort of work that requires researchers to get their hands dirty. In an excellent post, Jennifer Jacquet explains how field ecologists like Robert Paine are a dying breed, being replaced by ecologists more at home on a computer than in the field. This is not a criticism of mathematical ecology, simply an assertion that the kind of insights that Bob Paine derived from spending "45 years knee-deep in kelp and invertebrates on Washington State's coast" are valuable and cannot be replicated by other means. This presumption that data and theory can substitute for experience on the ground is symptomatic of the broader problem of the downgrading of tacit and contextual knowledge highlighted by many other changes in academic economics, most notably the neglect of economic history and institutional detail. One of the most striking deficiencies in economic theory that was exposed during the crisis was the disconnect between monetary economics and the institutional reality of the new regime of shadow banking and derivatives. Hyman Minsky's theories are relevant not because of their theoretical elegance but because of their firm grounding in the institutional evolution of the post-war monetary and banking system, a topic that he researched in great detail. An example of how this balance between the theoretical and applied fields can be restored is provided by the collaborative work between Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein. Kahneman and Klein have spent their entire careers tackling the same field (the psychology of decision-making) with diametrically opposed approaches – Kahneman focuses on controlled lab experiments, comparisons of decision-making performance to an objective optimum, and a generally skeptical stance towards human cognition. Klein focuses on research in real-world organisations, analysis of actual performance through more subjective variables and a generally admiring stance on human cognition. Yet they were able to collaborate and find common ground, the results of which are summarised in a fascinating paper. Economics could do with more applied researchers like Gary Klein as well as more theoretical researchers like Daniel Kahneman who are open to applied practical insights. ++++++++++ A great divide holds back the relevance of economists Jul 26, 2011 08:45 EDT economics | forecasts By Mark Thoma The opinions expressed are his own. Reuters invited leading economists to reply to Mark Thoma's Op-Ed on the "great divide" in economics and will be publishing the responses. Here are responses from Ashwin Parameswaran, James Hamilton, Dean Baker, Lawrence Summers, and a recap of Paul Krugman's. How much confidence would you have in the medical profession if the teaching faculty in medical schools had very little experience actually treating patients, and very little connection to – even a lack of respect for – the practitioners in the field? Would your confidence be improved if medical research had little to do with the questions that are important to the doctors trying to serve patients? Unfortunately, that's a pretty good description of how economics has been practiced. The questions academic economists are trying to answer have little connection to the problems faced by business economists trying to help their firms make good, profitable decisions (and vice-versa). And though academics pay some attention to government policy, particularly Federal Reserve policy, addressing the problems faced by government economists trying to help policymakers make the best possible choices is not the main focus of this research. This division between academic, government, and business economists is driven by the fact that economic theory and econometrics can be used for two different things. One is learning about how the world works. These "how and why" questions are the focus of academic research. For example, academic economists try to understand why demand curves slope downward, how business-cycle fluctuations in GDP come about, and how prices are determined in market economies. The other use of theoretical and empirical economic models is forecasting, for example predicting where the economy is headed so that businesses can react accordingly, and predicting what might happen if various government policy proposals are implemented. These are the "what if" questions that economists in government and business are most interested in. What will happen to tax revenue if business taxes are cut? What will happen to the demand for my product if the Fed raises interest rates? What is the most likely course that the economy will take? Again, a comparison with the medical field is useful. Science can help us to learn about how the body works, and that certainly aids our efforts to battle disease. This is an important area of research, and we wouldn't want to cut it short. But knowing how the body works isn't enough, we also need the ability to diagnose current illnesses and to predict when someone is going to get sick. In addition, we need to have treatments available to fix the problems that we've identified. Periodic checkups, for example, allow us to predict who might get coronary disease, and then take action to avoid much bigger problems down the road. Academic economists have emphasized the "how it works" part of economics; in econometrics, for example,  the focus is on hypothesis testing to determine which model of the economy is best, rather than on forecasting the future of the economy. Academic economists do evaluate policy proposals theoretically and empirically, and they do provide forecasts of the economy. But forecasting in particular is not the main focus of their efforts, , and they've all but ignored – even looked down their noses upon – forecasters and practitioners in the government and business communities. They are often viewed as data grubbers who use old-fashioned models and techniques, and are thus unworthy of attention from high-minded academics. However, a few practitioners saw the housing bubble coming. Shouldn't academic economists try to learn from them? What did they see that the academics missed? In addition, if the practitioners in the field are unaware of or do not have the technical ability to use the best approaches to the problems they face – criticism from academic economists over how business economists used value-at-risk models prior to the recession comes to mind – whose fault is that? Shouldn't academics try to help the practitioners get over this hurdle instead of turning their backs on the problem, and then looking down at them when they don't use or misapply cutting edge techniques? The failure of academic economists to predict the crisis shows just how costly such insularity and arrogance can be. The patient (the economy) didn't need to have a heart attack (financial meltdown), because even though the signs were there, the academic community had little interest in learning how to read them, let alone in developing early warning and intervention strategies for bubbles and other problems. The Fed does some of this, of course, and the financial crisis has motivated some academic interest in developing early warning systems that would have helped us to identify and do something about stock, housing, and other bubbles before they inflated to dangerous levels. The medical profession would do much worse without connections between the practitioners in the field and the how-it-works types in the labs. The questions researchers ask, for example, are shaped by the needs of the practitioners trying to prevent and cure illness. What types of tests can doctors do in their offices and labs to quickly and reliably indicate the current health of a patient and to forecast future health problems? In economics, if reliable tests for bubbles had been available to business economists, that could have saved the economy from considerable losses. Economics has lost the connection between the practitioners and the academics. This may have something to do with the desire among economists to become more of a science – a heavy focus on theory and math is the result. But no matter the cause, if we want to do all that we can to avoid big economic problems, and if we want to use the feedback from those testing economic ideas on real world applications as a way of better understanding how the economy works, then we must reestablish these ties. PHOTO: A stethoscope rests on a container of hand sanitizer inside of the doctor's office of One Medical Group in New York March 17, 2010. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

El lunes EEUU llega a su techo de endeudamiento

Entrará EEUU en default o a última hora el Congreso aumentará el límite de endeudamiento. Si no sucede los bonos del tesoro de EEUU subirán su prima de riesgo y podría colapsar el sistema financiero como en el 2008. Puede que sea el preludio de la devaluación del dolar que corrija la situación del déficit pero habrá que pensar en el reemplazo del dolar en el comercio mundial. Pero la pregunta es: ¿son los bonos del tesoro de EEUU papeles libres de riesgo como se consideran actualmente?

Tea Party Brinkmanship

What If the U. S. Looks Like Defaulting?

By MIKE WHITNEY
On Monday, the US government hit the statutory limit on the amount of money it can borrow, ($14.29 trillion) the so-called "debt ceiling". That means that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has started to implement an emergency plan to keep the government running and pay bondholders while the White House and Congress hammer out the details on a final budget deal. But Geithner's accounting maneuvers will only work for a short time. If a budget compromise isn't reached by early August, then "the borrowing authority of the United States will be exhausted" and the US will default.
Some Republican congressmen believe that a default will be "no big deal", and that bondholders and Social Security recipients will just get their checks a little later than usual. But these people really don't understand the way the system works or what is at stake. As The Economist's Greg Ip says,  "Treasury debt underpins a vast and complex web of financial relationships around the world which would all be thrown out of whack by even a technical default."  The mere suggestion that the US might delay payments to bondholders would roil markets and cause irreversible damage to the Treasuries market. That, in turn, would put the dollar into a nosedive and, perhaps, end its role as the world's reserve currency. Here's an excerpt from a post by economist Menzie Chinn who sums it up perfectly:

"....what would be key to causing a crash in the dollar's value would be a failure to raise the debt ceiling in a timely fashion. In almost any model I can think of, that would either cause a flight from US government debt, or -- even if we only go to the brink -- elevating the risk premium, and hence total interest payments, on US Treasury debt indefinitely. Thus, it's the height of irresponsibility to make unrealistic demands for deficit reduction based solely on spending cuts, thereby risking a crisis. ("What Would Really Bring about a Dollar Dive?, Econbrowser)

Nearly every other economist says the same thing. Congress is playing with dynamite.
What's obvious in the budget negotiations, is that the Republicans haven't the foggiest idea of how the financial markets work.  Of course, the Dems aren't much better, but at least they (occasionally) consider the advice of the experts . Not the Republicans. They seem to take great pride in their boneheadedness.  They think that threatening to blow up the economy is a sound strategy for forcing cuts to entitlement spending. They don't realize that their little game of chicken could backfire and change the perception that the US is a safe place for investors to park their money. In fact, the thought never seems to enter their mind.
Here's an excerpt from a letter by Geithner (to Senator Michael Bennet) warning of "catastrophic economic consequences" if the debt limit is not raised soon:

"The unique role of Treasuries securities in the global financial system means that the consequences of default would be particularly severe. Treasuries securities are a key holding on the balance sheets of virtually every major insurance company, bank, money market fund, and pension fund in the world. They are also widely used as collateral by financial institutions to meet their day-to-day cash-flow needs in the short-term financing market."

Geithner is explaining how the "shadow banking system" works and how it relies on "risk free" Triple A collateral. If the world's premier asset class--US Treasuries--suffers a downgrade because of default or falling public confidence, that would lead to widespread haircuts that would trigger another financial crisis.
Geithner again:

"A default on Treasury debt could lead to concerns about the solvency of the investment funds and financial institutions that hold Treasury securities in their portfolios, which could cause a run on money market mutual funds and the broader financial system--similar to what occurred in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. As the recent financial crisis demonstrated, a sudden and severe blow to confidence in the financial markets can spark a panic that threatens the health of our entire global economy and the jobs of millions of Americans."

Geithner is not exaggerating. This WILL happen. Why?  Because this is what happened in 2008 and, unfortunately, nothing has changed. If the US defaults, then the risk premium on US Treasuries will rise and their price will fall. That means that the trillions of dollars that have been exchanged for UST's in the repo market --where financial institutions exchange cash deposits for high-grade collateral--will be revalued causing massive losses for the holders of UST's. Those losses will ripple through the money markets and commercial paper markets knocking down the same financial dominoes they did when Lehman Brothers failed.  Bottom line: None of the Dodd-Frank reforms have increased financial market stability at all. The system is as vulnerable to meltdown as it was in September 2008.
Geithner again: 

"Treasuries securities enjoy their unique role in the global financial system precisely because they are viewed as a risk-free asset....A default would call into question the status of Treasuries securities as a cornerstone of the financial system, potentially squandering this unique role and the economic benefits that come with it."

This such an important point, it might help to use an analogy.
Let's say I need some cash to finance some other business operations I have going. So, I go down to the local pawn shop with my custom-built Jaguar, my original Vermeer oil painting, and my collection of Renaissance gold coins. The pawnbroker takes one look at my trove and says he can lend me $25,000 for a week, but I'll have to pay him $26,000 to get my stuff back. I say, "Okay", and borrow the money. This allows me to keep my other business operations running. Then, a week later, I return to the pawn shop and repay the money I borrowed.
Okay, so far?
So, next week I go back to the pawn shop and try to get the same deal. Only this time, the dealer has done a little research and discovered that my custom Jaguar is actually a late-model Yugo with a flashy paint job; my original Vermeer is actually a paint-by-numbers fake I picked up at a flea market, and my collection of Renaissance gold coins, is actually a scattering of slot-machine slugs with a pyrite finish. So the dealer gets all huffy and says he'll only lend me half of what he had before, ($12,500) But that's a big problem for me, because now I don't have the money to fund my other operations or pay my employees. So I have to dig into savings (bank capital), which makes it harder for me to lend money to anyone else.  As time goes on, I am forced to sell more of my personal belongings (assets) just to stay afloat.
This is precisely what happened to the banks during the financial crisis.  Financial firms that had been providing full-value for securitized bonds (my Jaguar) got worried that those bonds might contain toxic subprime loans (my Yugo). So they reduced the amount of money they would lend on the bonds.  These so-called "haircuts" set-off a slow-motion panic that lasted for over a year, draining nearly $4 trillion from the shadow banking system. The problem was compounded by the fact that no one knew which bundles held the worst mortgages or which banks had the biggest pile of bonds. So, interbank lending began to freeze, LIBOR skyrocketed, and the credit markets ground to a standstill. When Lehman Brothers defaulted on September 15, 2008, the downward spiral accelerated and the entire financial system crashed.
If the US defaults on its debt, Treasuries will be repriced, the country's biggest banks will discover they've got less capital than they thought, and the financial system will suffer another meltdown. Only this time, it will be much worse, because Treasuries will no longer be regarded as the premier risk-free financial asset upon which all other financial assets are measured. That means the US will have to pay higher rates to meet its obligations which will make it harder to dig out of recession.
Wall Street and Big Business understand the gravity of the situation which is why they've tried to discourage GOP brinkmanship. But--to their credit--congressional members of the Tea Party have shrugged off the arm twisting and stubbornly stood their ground. The idea is that eventually, Obama will see that they have him over a barrel and he'll cave in. Isn't that the way that power works?
There's a lesson here for political activists. The Tea Party has stumbled upon a perfectly-legal "asymmetrical" strategy for effecting change, that is, locate the vulnerabilities in the system and exploit those weaknesses to shape policy. There's no reason leftists couldn't play the same sort of game, provided they were  willing to get their hands dirty.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

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