Boeing continues its downward spiral

The plight of Boeing continues to fascinate me. Dad's cousin was a machinist / toolmaker for them from the 1940s to the early 1970s—from the B-29 to the 727. One Sunday afternoon I listened to him explain the problems of producing the tooling for the 727's tail section. Not only did the tail carry important control surfaces, the designers had run a third jet engine through the middle. Not surprisingly, making all this work required fabricating some complex shapes out of high-strength aluminum alloys. This was before computerized milling machines so these tools were built with slide rules, micrometers, Bridgeport mills, and a whole lot of skills. The resulting aircraft exceeded every important performance projection by at least 5%, thousands were made, and there are still people who argue it was the fastest subsonic airliner to ever fly.

My brother-in law was the guy who specified for Boeing which welding method would be used for every part that would be joined using heat. For every potential operation, he would test several welding methods, X-ray the results, and then break the weld to see how much load it would take. His results became part of Boeing's institutional memory. Any time folks needed to weld up a landing gear, or whatever, they could check to see what methods had been certified. My brother-in-law had not gone to engineering school but he was so good at what he did, he was given a "field promotion" to engineer by the company (along with the increased pay grade.) Such was the "old" Boeing.

According to his account, old Boeing began to die with the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas on Aug. 1, 1997. The value of the transaction was $16.3 billion. McDonnell Douglas had been on the ropes for awhile and their senior management had turned to the Wall Street sharpies for "help"—the kind of help that stressed share prices and political connections to the Defense Department over the real work of building quality airplanes. These folks came to Boeing in the merger and began an assault on the company's engineering culture. On February 9, 2000, Boeing's engineers actually went out on strike—egged on, no doubt by the designated management fool / Wall Street darling named Debbie Hopkins who wondered aloud, "Just why does Boeing need engineers anyway?" I don't know Debbie, maybe it's because punching a hole through the air at nearly 600 mph is really hard to do. Maybe it's because without engineers, Boeing does not exist.

Anyway, shortly after the SPEEA strike was settled, my brother-in-law quit in disgust and found a peaceful job teaching non-ferrous welding at a Tacoma community college where he worked into his late 70s. Debbie was soon fired but her work was done. The rot at Boeing soon showed up in airplanes that had serious quality issues. I did a post in 2013 about the troubled Dreamliner and now the 737max fleet is grounded.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The Dreamliner is grounded

If anyone ever needs a lesson in what happens when Predators take over a Producer company, Boeing will do perfectly.  In it's glory days, Boeing pretty much defined a Producer company.  Engineers ran the show.  The company would occasionally bet the farm on a breakthrough product.  There was a sense of pride you could feel the moment you passed through the plant gates.  And people who knew aircraft were often fanatically loyal to their output (It's Boeing or I'm not going.)  Yes, there were other companies that made large aircraft but sensible people would often ask "Why?"  Boeing was so sure about its products that for decades, it only had one salesman.  One was plenty because everyone knew what buying from Boeing meant.

And then it started to unravel.  In 1997, Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, a company that had lost its airplane-making chops and had become just another cost-plus supplier hanging off the big Defense Department teat.  Boeing also had significant ties to the defense industry but were babes in the woods compared to the sharpies from McDonnell Douglas.  Soon the sharpies were ensconced in senior management at Boeing and the rot began to set in.  The open assault on Boeing's engineering culture came out into the open during the SPEEA (Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace) strike of 2000.  The cordial atmosphere between the engineers that designed Boeing's products and the engineers that managed the company was broken.  Management even moved the headquarters to Chicago from Seattle to show the divorce was final.

Once the Boeing Producer / engineering culture had been trashed, the chance for breakthrough, industry-defining projects was trashed as well.  The Dreamliner, which was not even that revolutionary to start with, became an expensive, ongoing fiasco that demonstrated the truth of the most famous sign carried during the SPEEA strike "No nerds, No Birds."  And so now, after several years of delays and $Billions of cost over-runs, the few Dreamliners that have been delivered are grounded.  The problem isn't even an aerospace problem but rather faulty lithium batteries.  If the Predators of the "new" Boeing management were actually capable of feeling shame, they would be resigning en mass. Yeah, that's going to happen (NOT)!

The economic nutcase behind the coup attempt in Venezuala

The economic takeover of the country with the largest oil deposits is being planned by a Milton Friedman disciple from Venezuela. He is currently at Harvard—that rat's nest of neoliberalism. Some say ideas don't matter. Well strap yourself in—apparently this guy has the ear of Donald Trump. Just ghastly!

Ricardo Hausmann Is Taking Milton Friedman’s Lessons to Venezuela

Tanya Rawal-Jindia | February 9, 2019


For a few years now, there has been a tendency to compare Donald Trump to Richard Nixon, but the more urgent comparison in the face of the Venezuelan crisis is one between two well-pedigreed economists: Milton Friedman and Ricardo Hausmann.

Under Nixon’s reign, Milton Friedman was the “intellectual” who started to gain excessive power. Friedman was a trained economist, earning a doctorate at Columbia University, with teaching and research stints at the Universities of Chicago and Stanford.

And under Trump, we have another trained economist: Ricardo Hausmann. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and is the director for the Center of International Development at Harvard University.

For years now, Ricardo Hausmann has been suggesting that the solution for Venezuela’s socialist “crisis” is a U.S. invasion or “intervention.”

Financing the Green New Deal

Sister Ellen—Keep on preaching the truth as demonstrated by the successful social actions of North Dakota's Non-Partisan League, the KfW Bank of Germany, and FDR's RFC. The BIGGEST single impediment to a more enlightened approach to the oncoming catastrophe that is climate change is the fact that we allow our monetary system to be run by thieves.

The Financial Secret Behind Germany’s Green Energy Revolution

Ellen Brown | January 26, 2019

The “Green New Deal” endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.-N.Y., and more than 40 other House members has been criticized as imposing a too-heavy burden on the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it. However, taxing the rich is not what the Green New Deal resolution proposes. It says funding would come primarily from certain public agencies, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and “a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks.”

Funding through the Federal Reserve may be controversial, but establishing a national public infrastructure and development bank should be a no-brainer. The real question is why we don’t already have one, as do China, Germany and other countries that are running circles around us in infrastructure development. Many European, Asian and Latin American countries have their own national development banks, as well as belong to bilateral or multinational development institutions that are jointly owned by multiple governments. Unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve, which considers itself “independent” of government, national development banks are wholly owned by their governments and carry out public development policies.

China not only has its own China Infrastructure Bank but has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which counts many Asian and Middle Eastern countries in its membership, including Australia, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. Both banks are helping to fund China’s trillion-dollar “One Belt One Road” infrastructure initiative. China is so far ahead of the United States in building infrastructure that Dan Slane, a former adviser on President Donald Trump’s transition team, has warned, “If we don’t get our act together very soon, we should all be brushing up on our Mandarin.”

Producer v Predator—a battle of Titans

The news that Elon Musk wants to take Tesla private has provided us with a further confirmation of Veblen's class theories. Musk is such an excellent example of a Producer Class Superstar, we should probably be selling a Musk bobble-head doll around here. And he has just pulled off a production miracle. And honestly, he looks terrible—120 hour workweeks will do this to a now middle-aged man. And so he looks up from that effort and discovers that a bunch of Predators are trying to suck out the energy from Tesla by shorting the stock.

My pioneer forebears discovered this grim reality while trying to farm in Minnesota. It was like going on a camping trip to hell. With small children in tow. Winters featuring -30° temps, summers with incredible heat and swarms of biting insects, the problems of breeding animals and sowing crops, and 100 other similar annoyances. And when you had survived that, you had to deal with crazy shipping fees by a railroad monopoly, crooked grain grading systems, usurious money-lenders, and the corrupt politicians bought by those thieves. The producing classes had to organize politically. In Wisconsin it was LaFollette and the Progressive Republicans, in North Dakota is was the Non-Partisan League, and here in Minnesota, it was the Farmer-Labor Party. In fact, nearly all the prairie farm states had  political movements to protect the interests of the Producing classes.

Musk vs the Wall Street crooks will be a titanic showdown. Wall Street is on at least a 45-year winning streak. Musk has been taunting the shorts for several years. Musk does not have a political movement backing him—in fact what he does know about the Producer-Predator conflicts seem to be self-taught. But Musk has a LOT going for him. He has that ultimate Producer skill—vision and the organizational abilities to turn his visions into reality. That skill is so rare that people who possess it attract followers. And Musk has a bunch of them. Does he have enough to take Tesla private at $420 per share? We will see.

Hudson on the current economy

Watching the business news these days is truly to look into advanced irrationality. Apple worth a $1 Trillion? I have been a reasonably loyal Apple customer since 1985 and think some of their offerings a have redefined genius but even I believe this is absurd. Elon Musk should be having songs written about him for the accomplishment of making electric cars cool and desirable but a car company that is still not profitable should probably not be valued in the same territory as GM.

On the other hand, the tattered remnants of the once robust USA middle class is hanging on by their fingernails. They cannot afford houses, they are still paying off student loans in their 40s, energy prices are up, they are a small medical step away from bankruptcy, agriculture hasn't seen a profit in four years, etc. And the businesses that would otherwise rely on their spending are wondering where their customers went.

Meanwhile, the financial sector has abandoned any pretense of honesty or responsibility. You can hardly blame them—with the real economy staggering along, there is hardly any reason to even try honest banking. So they don't. And so economic conditions seem even more hazardous than they were in 2007. Why would anything else be true? After all, none of the problems of 2007 were meaningfully addressed.

So here we have Michael Hudson, who seems to have the stomach to look at the bankster community, explaining where we stand.

The “Next” Financial Crisis

THE HUDSON REPORT, AUGUST 3, 2018

In this episode of The Hudson Report, we speak with Michael Hudson about the implications of the flattening yield curve, the possibility of another global financial crisis, and public banking as an alternative to the current system.

‘The Hudson Report’ is a Left Out weekly series with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every week, we look at an economic issue that is either being ignored—or hotly debated—in the press that week.

Paul Sliker: Michael Hudson welcome back to another episode of The Hudson Report.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here again.

Paul Sliker: So, Michael, over the past few months the IMF has been sending warning signals about the state of the global economy. There are a bunch of different macroeconomic developments that signal we could be entering into another crisis or recession in the near future. One of those elements is the yield curve, which shows the difference between short-term and long-term borrowing rates. Investors and financial pundits of all sorts are concerned about this, because since 1950 every time the yield curve has flattened, the economy has tanked shortly thereafter.

NPL in North Dakota (cont.)

Last Thanksgiving, Tony produced a short post on the Nonpartisan League. Think of this as an update. I happen to think the history of the NPL is important because it shows how effective a movement can be if they have a workable agenda. Instead of running against parties and personalities, an agenda-driven party wins because they are FOR something. Even better, an agenda usually outlives even the best supporters. And the State Bank of North Dakota is arguably the best political idea Progressives ever had—the signal accomplishment that lives on to this day.

Student Debt Slavery

My little town is home to two liberal arts colleges that cost over $60,000 / year to attend. Both have stellar reputations for what they do. One is more of a music conservatory with solid departments in math and science. The other is a place where high achievers like National Merit Scholars go to see what its like to be in rooms full of high school valedictorians. But $60,000??

In one of the college's student center, I got into an interesting conversation with a 19-year-old who was reading Kerouac and wondering why his professor had assigned the thing. Now I have a bit of sympathy for the professor who probably, like me, read Kerouac on his own initiative back in the day. I read On the Road and was amazed that Kerouac was able to describe anything at all considering the serious drug and booze haze he was in most of the time. Looking back, this book is mostly a tribute to the casual rootlessness that was possible owing to the general prosperity of the times and $0.26 per gallon gasoline. There was so much prosperity that whole subgroups of people like the hippies could survive on the what fell from prosperity's table. There is probably nothing wrong with having the young read Kerouac if only to discover what their grandparents found cool. But $60,000???

Anther encounter with a product of a quarter-million dollar's worth of enlightenment was amazing in another way. This sparkling-sharp young man had gotten his degree in video production who when faced with the task of how to use the sun to light his scene, got completely befuddled because, I am pretty sure, he had never noticed the different times and positions of the setting sun based on the calendar so could not predict where his subjects should be placed if he wanted to shoot them in golden-hour light. Think of that—this guy did not learn something that humans have known about for at least 6000 years, something that was of practical value if he wanted to be a good cinematographer, and he had just spent a $quarter-million on an "elite" education. $250,000! For that sum of money, he could have traveled the world for a couple of years so he wouldn't have that typical "Merikun parochialism, equipped himself with professional-grade cameras and audio gear, and still have plenty left over to fund his video ventures for a couple of years while starting up. $250,000 is a LOT of money.

I have neighbors who have tenure—which these days is an amazing accomplishment. There's probably at least 50 highly qualified PhD s for every tenured position available. And because being a professor is a pretty cushy job, a lot of them don't retire at 65 and open up the job for someone younger. One neighbor finally got tenure at 50. Hard to find fault with them as people. On the other hand, they are part of a system that consigns children into a lifetime of debt peonage / slavery.

Nasty business.

Five Hundred Million Dollar Negative Yield Bond Issued

I have permission from Mr. Welsh to repost anything he writes after waiting at least a day or two from his original posting. TW.
by Ian Welsh, Nov. 17, 2017

No, central banks aren’t screwing the economy up with their purchases:

Veolia (Paris:VIE) has issued a 500 million 3-year EUR bond (maturity November 2020) with a negative yield of -0.026 %, which is a first for a BBB issuer.

To be clear, central banks didn’t buy those bonds, investors did. But central bank purchases of government debt are a large part of what is causing this issue.

The ECB (European Central Bank) has been buying SEVEN times the issuance of government bonds. Seven times. Seven times.

They are straight up financing governments (which, done right, could be a good thing, but isn’t in this context).

The problem in the world today is the same as it was 15 years ago, before the financial collapse: There is too much money chasing not enough returns. Because there isn’t enough real growth, that money moves into bubbles and fraud, and destroys companies through leveraged buyouts and so on, but it also means that, if there isn’t enough fraud or predation going on, it sits and stagnates and does nothing worthwhile.

What the developed world actually needs is stuff to invest in, high marginal tax rates (higher on capital gains than on earned income), distributive policies to the bulk of the population to create wide-spread demand, and moderate inflation of about five percent a year to get people to actually invest in new businesses, not in financial speculation.

The problem with this solution set is that if it doesn’t also include effective regulation, it can have to environmentally devastating effects; for instance, because solar is not fully online, the above solution set could lead to oil price spikes.

Those problems, however, are not why this isn’t being done. This isn’t being done because current leadership does not believe in high taxes, wide distribution, or regulation. They are neoliberals, and 40 years of neoliberal disasters cannot convince them to engage anything other than neoliberalism, because neoliberalism has made them and their friends very very rich.

But the game is coming to an end. They want to tax the middle class and poor people, sparing the rich but they are now starting to tax the rich through the back door of negative interest rates. Meanwhile, the poor and middle class, especially the young ones, are losing patience and are willing to go either straight-up socialist or straight-up fascist (the Polish 50K rally).

This is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.

There will be three choices for countries: Fascism, left-wing populism, or dystopic surveillance/police states.

Choose.

Trump's New Fed Chairman--Meet the New Boss; Same as the Old Boss

Trumpster's choice as next chairman of the Federal Reserve is Jerome Powell, who is not an economist, but a lawyer. Powell, a Republican, has been on the Fed Board of Governors since 2012 when he was appointed by that paragon of unrequited bipartisanship, Barack Obama.

Actually, I myself missed the news: Powell's appointment was on November 2, 2017. I just learned of it via one of today's postings at Naked Capitalism: Powell’s Federal Reserve, a melange of reactions from various economists, including Kenneth "dangerous debt cliff" Rogoff, and Joseph Stiglitz, one of the precious few high-profile but decent economists in the world, who "wonders whether Trump has captured the Fed." The best line in the piece linked to by NC is "Tho Bishop at Mises Wire argues that with the nomination of Powell the “swamp wins again”." This is one time the libertarians get it right: a quick perusal of Powell's profile on Wikipedia shows that Powell is a swamp creature, a Wall Street financial predator, and nothing else.

Powell started his career clerking for a federal judge, followed by joining the big Wall Street law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell in 1981. This firm was a central legal player in the leveraged buy outs (LBOs) of the 1980s, which laundered hundreds of billions of dollars of dirty money by taking over and asset-stripping thousands of U.S. industrial and other companies.

In 1984, Powell moved to Dillon, Read & Co., one of the most established of the Wall Street establishment investment banks. A few years ago, a former managing director of Dillon Read, Catherine Austin Fitts, made her public mea culpa by posting details of the firm's involvement in dirty money laundering that will make your eyeballs pop. Dillon Read was involved in what was by far the largest LBO of the time, the $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts in 1988. (KKR has been a top funder of the Republican Party and conservative political infrastructure for decades now). Fitts writes that the RJR Nabisco LBO made no business sense at all, since it was impossible for RJR Nabisco to service the buyout debt piled on it within the limits of its stated cash flow. The LBO only made sense after she read a European Union lawsuit against RJR Nabisco, which alleged that RJR Nabisco was engaged in multiple long-lived criminal conspiracies, including business with Latin American drug cartels, Italian and Russian mafia, and Saddam Hussein’s family. There were literally billions of dollars in additional cash flow, but it was all dirty money.

Wiping Out Puerto Rico’s Debt Without Hurting Bondholders

Even before Hurricane Maria leveled the island of Puerto Rico, their economy was already in a world of hurt. They were attempting to refinance $74 billion in debt when Maria inflicted another $55 billion in property damage and caused $40 billion in lost economic output.

But hey, Puerto Rico is part of USA and we just spent the last nine years wiping out the massive banking losses incurred when the financial system crashed in the 2007-8 recession. The method used was a little gimmick called "quantitative easing." If we can bail out a bunch of crooked banksters, we should surly be able to rebuild an island responsible for a significant fraction of global Viagra production.

Below Ellen Brown explains just how this could be done. Of course, this does not mean it will be done. It's one thing to bail out crooked banksters—it's quite another to help poor people struggling to survive.

Glass-Steagall, now more than ever

For those of us who have watched in absolute horror as the neoliberals have retested their crackpot theories on a country too ignorant to know better, our response is usually some variation on the theme "we know how to do it better because we have already demonstrated that our ideas are pragmatically superior." Paul Roberts is another throwback to the time when industrial "capitalism" created generalized prosperity and rewarded hard work and innovation rather than the scam of the month.

In some ways, it is almost impossible to imagine that something as honest, basic, and necessary as Glass-Steagall needs to be defended. Yet it was repealed, the banking systems blew up, and the taxpayers were put on the hook to save the perpetrators of deregulatory madness. Of course, the original act was put in place to prevent exactly the problems that showed up in the real estate bubble. In a sane world, Glass-Steagall would have been reinstated in 2008. But NOOOOO! The Predators want their bucket shops because it beats the hell out of honest work. And so the USA staggers from one economic crises to another.

Private banks create virtually all money

Do you want to shock, confuse, and probably alienate your friends? Probably the easiest way is to explain what really happens when they sign up for a home mortgage.

• The bank will engage in a massive invasion of the borrower's privacy in the name of their financial interests. What is really happening is the bank is trying to ascertain if the borrower can actually service the debt—sort of like "hiring" a slave, when you think about it. This step is critically important because without performing loans, banks cannot exist.
• The bank will then, after the signing of important-looking and expensive documents, create a new balance in the borrower's account. The bank has done nothing except reprogram some computer memory in the bank's electronic books. With a few keystrokes, the bank has put a customer on the hook for a large sum of money payable over 30 years. Roughly 40% of everything the borrower earns in those next 30 years will go to pay off the the creation of those few keystrokes.

This is what actually happens. But because of the massively unequal nature of this transaction, the banking industry has created an amazing body of lies to justify this rip-off. In fact, most of us who subscribe to the above explanation for how banking really works have faced the angry reaction from those who believe the big banking lies should we ever make the mistake of springing too many facts on the credulous.

But now, no less than the Bank of England has come clean and admitted that loans create deposits rather than the other way around. The story of BoE making this amazing admission follows (complete with video.)

Iceland and USA vs banksters

Of all the forms of human behavior I have paid attention to in life, the one that continues to baffle me is the "soft power" of the creditor classes.  Yes, they provide essential services, but that is a trivial fraction of their activities.  The rest of what they do is just plain naked money-grabbing.  But to hear them describe themselves, they are paragons of financial, political, and moral virtue.  Then, they surround themselves with the trappings of power—bank architecture is so predictable as to be a cliché.  And it works.  They keep their power and no one of significance goes to jail no matter the outrage.

So far, the only place that has managed to rise above the soft power of international finance is Iceland.  It requires a uniquely egalitarian society to rise above the bankster bullshit and they have one. Part of this come from the fact that it is a country small enough so it is possible to actually know who runs the significant elements.  But part is probably the Viking heritage—during a storm in a longboat, no one escaped the dousing when waves broke over the gunwales.  In such conditions, people who didn't understand the concept of "we are all in this together" didn't last all that long.

And so Iceland has thrown their banksters in jail while in USA, they have been returned to their power to loot and given handsome bonuses for keeping the specter of meaningful regulation and enforcement at bay. Not surprisingly, I much prefer the Icelandic approach.

One of the more recent Wikileaks dumps shows how Citigroup managed to surround young Obama with layers of advisors whose job it was to argue that their naked criminality should not have been a crime in the first place.  Notice how accurate Citigroup's list of cabinet appointees turned out to be and this was written well before the election even happened.  To show how successful this operation was, compare it with the Icelandic outcome.  And so the global economy remains in the hands of criminals who can only destroy.  This simply cannot continue.  Turns out the banksters are so destructive, they are about to destroy life on earth as we know it.  It's possible someone will organize resistance to this madness.

Moneylenders and their illusory social utility (update)

One of the more popular posts recently was Tony' epic takedown of those who believe that money-lending is an unalloyed good.  That this is not true should be blindingly obvious to anyone who can count.  Tony made sure everyone could understand.

The biggest problem, by far, is the excessive size of the financial sector.  The society simply cannot support such a huge parasitic / Predatory population.

Of course, since the real economy needs nowhere near such a large financial sector, there is almost no way for them to generate enough income from legitimate business to keep the doors open—much less provide for the pay scales the banksters seem to think is their due.  So not surprisingly, eventually all of them resort to fraud. Bernie Sanders made the claim “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” That was the statement Tony was defending, after all. In fact, as William Black argues below starting at the 17:30 mark, fraud has become the organizing principle of banking—without it, most large banks are unprofitable.

Wall Street's Fraud and Illusion of Social Utility

On April 5 2016, someone posted a story on DailyKos assailing Senator Sanders’ claim that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” I was shocked to see the story had enough support to elevate it to the DK recommended list, despite these provably false statements:

...to say that the “business model of Wall Street” is fraud “to a significant degree” is completely irresponsible.  Do you know what else is part of their business model?  Helping enterprises raise capital in order to innovate and grow and provide goods and services to the economy.

On reflection, I realized that there are a lot of new people reading DailyKos who are—how to put this politely?—not completely aware of certain facts. Once or twice a year, Kos proudly notes how many more people are reading this site—which is great and certainly something to be proud of. But, it obviously means that we need to begin a new cycle of educating people about economics, banking, finance, Wall Street, and so on. The facts clearly show that Wall Street is NOT a net benefit to society, but a major reason why the United States continues to suffer poor economic performance for the bottom ninety percent of Americans.

The British people have forfeited the confidence of their government

The Saker is not a big fan of the USA empire.  Anyone who has carefully followed the crimes of humanity carried out in the name of said empire eventually reaches a stage where even the tiniest stumble of the global ruling class is cause for at least a little celebration.  So there is a small amount of celebration mixed here with a stern warning of what how the Empire will react to a rejection from one of the founding members, and arguably the main inventor and designer of that Empire.  Brexit made a lot of very rich people very angry—not least because a lot of them lost a large pile of money.  Brexit was a peasants' revolt and like such revolts in the past, the big hammer is about to drop.  The slander against the peasants has already started.

I am not so certain that the ruling classes are beyond redemption or as unwilling to accept a new set of operating instructions as The Saker.  In fact, I grew up in a country that had accepted Keynesianism as an alternate instruction set to the neoliberal swill that dominates economics today.  It was what made the economy so much better for the average worker that even today, that is what made the old days "good" in the minds of so many—especially the Brexit supporters in the English Midlands.

But the Saker is probably right for one simple reason—the English economy today, such as it is, is mostly the banksters in London doing things that are criminal or should be.  Hoping a criminal will go straight is usually misplaced because going straight is so much more difficult and risky than making money by stealing.  Criminals usually win because they will stop at nothing.  Crushing a peasants' revolt is a small price to pay to keep that gravy train rolling.

TTIP necessary to protect megabanks from prosecution

Oh, those lovely trade agreements.  Those of us who are veterans of the 1992-93 fight against NAFTA find it hard to believe that someone has designed a trade deal even more odious.  Someone has been working overtime because the TTIP makes NAFTA look like an act of charity.

The problem with these trade deals is that they operate from the assumption that anything that might possibly impede unfettered trade is by definition, evil.  And so social necessities like environmental laws, consumer protection, fair labor standards, etc. are all targeted as impediments to trade.  Worse, these local laws and regulations can be sued out existence if it can be proven that they materially harm the interests of those who would pollute, run sweatshops, and otherwise accelerate the race to the bottom.

It requires a lot of coordinated political action to get most such laws and regulations in place.  Watching them be eliminated naturally upsets those whose efforts these trade deals negate.  Not surprisingly, these trade deals face enormous political opposition.  That's not a problem for those who would profit from them.  For them, democracy is merely a messy detail.  The only hope is that the opposition to the mega-Predators who want these new NAFTA-on-steroids deals is substantially larger and vastly more organized than in 1993.  It also helps to have the NAFTA disaster to point to.

Michael Lewis: The Book That Will Save Banking From Itself

During my visit with Jon last month, we both agreed that Michael Lewis is one of the best USA writers living. A partial list of some of Lewis's books:

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street (1989)
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003)
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (2006)
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010)

The Big Short was the basis of the movie Jon reviewed here a couple months ago; I reviewed the book back in June 2011.

Since the article below was written by Lewis, I overcame some grave misgivings, and decided to post it here. It is a rather detailed review of a recent book by the former governor of the Bank of England (2003-2013) Mervyn King. The book is entitled The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy, and it presents King's argument that nothing has fundamentally altered the financial system's stupidity, greed, and appetite for high-payoff risks, followed by King's detailed proposal for what governments and financial regulators should do before the next crisis inevitably hits. Normally, I do not believe that highly technocratic financial discussions conduce to furthering an enlightened public discourse. Frankly, such discussions are usually a steaming pile of bovine manure. But now that it appears our sole choice for USA President is Trumpillary, it seems very likely that the best we can hope for in terms of forcing the banksters to behave civilly is exactly the sort of proposal King is putting forward.

I also am usually reluctant to hold anything British in a favorable light. But, some of the most startlingly truthful pronouncements by financial officials during and after the Crash of 2007-2009 were from King, and from Adair Turner, who became chairman of the UK Financial Services Authority in September, 2008, five days after Lehman Brothers collapsed.

In my opinion, King's proposal to have central banks determine beforehand how much capital they would lend against big banks' riskier assets in a crisis is fundamentally flawed on three counts. First - which Lewis discusses briefly - is that the big banks have achieved "regulatory capture." It is very likely that in a severe enough crisis, what a central bank had previously said would be the upper limit it would lend to a troubled bank in a crisis, will simply be ignored. Or, some other part of government will be prevailed upon to give the bankers the money they say they need to prevent the collapse of Western civilization.

Second, King's proposal accepts as valid the current business model of Wall Street and the City of London. He is not proposing to outright prohibit the riskiest behavior of the big banks. Rather, he explicitly argues that with the role of a central bank in a crisis firmly fixed beforehand, "the market" can be relied on to do the right thing, and leaving free the "incentives to innovate." This is, therefore, no repudiation of the reigning neo-liberal economic paradigm of the past half century.

Third is an extension of the second: I do not believe that we can build a sustainable economic future for humankind if we continue to treat present financial elites as legitimate. The past half century of financial legerdemain and shenanigans have, in a financial echo of Grehsam's Law, turned most of the financial system into a vast criminal enterprise. I agree with Ian Welsh, who a few days ago wrote Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-Wing Government:

The banking sector creates money. Money determines what people can and cannot do. This is the control mechanism for the economy in any state which runs on markets. You must control it. If you control it, you can use it to strangle your domestic enemies. If you do not, your enemies will use it to strangle you.

Welsh goes on to provide a stark example of how Obama, had he been a real leftist, could have used the crimes of the banksters to seize their money under RICO. 

Far better to simply tax all financial market transactions. You don't even have to ban the most odious transactions outright. A simple tax of less than one full percent would be enough to render much of the speculative trading in financial markets unprofitable.

Ellen Brown on Trump's monetary musings

It is really hard to know what part of Donald Trump's message he means or even understands.  I was a designated driver the night Obama won the election of 2008 and watched as deliriously happy and very drunken supporters celebrate what they thought was a new day.  He had talked for months about hope and by god, they were projecting all their hopes on him.  I am pretty sure that Trump's supporters are making the same mistake.  After all, he promises to bring about a brighter day but has already selected a Goldman Sachs man as an economic advisor.

That said, his latest dustup with the lords of high finance over monetary theory has been very interesting.  Not surprisingly, they are aghast at his willingness to point out that the ghouls of austerity do NOT have a monopoly on good economic ideas.  In fact, they have been a global disaster and Trump has much enjoyed talking about this.  So along comes our hero Ellen Brown to inform us how Trump's monetary ideas have much in common with folks like Lincoln and Franklin—two guys who actually appear on the currency itself.  Whether Trump actually understands this little piece of history is an open question.  And to be perfectly honest, it doesn't matter a whole lot that he understands who may have had similar thoughts about money in the past because once someone understands that money is merely a convenience, the idea that money is scarce becomes ridiculous.  And such a thought does not go away no matter who is shouting that the idea is crazy.

It is ideas like these that make the Republican establishment panic at the thought that Trump is their presumptive nominee.  We can be pretty sure they are not worried that he is a walking insult to political correctness—in fact, they probably approve of that.  But if Trump is willing to expose the big lies that banksters use to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, then he MUST be stopped.  We will see.  After all, real estate dvelopers are essentially the only people who understand that their interests and the interests of the banksters do not align and have the expertise and clout to do something about it.  So even though Trump seems to have a short attention span, this might not be an idea that goes away so easily.

Iceland proposes to take back the power to create money

Michael Lewis likes to recount the story about how the charlatans, who were turning Iceland's very conservative banks into the go-go ponzi schemes that wildly exceeded needs of that island's tiny economy, would flatter the natives by reassuring them that they had a very special talent for such enterprises because they knew how to "manage risk."

Well, actually this story was partly true.  Iceland's largest industry, by far, is fishing the cold and dangerous waters of the North Atlantic.  Anyone who can do that knows that on a regular basis, they have to manage situations that would turn most of us white with fear.  Compared to riding out North Atlantic storms, the "risks" of money management are utterly trivial.  So when those crooked banks went belly-up, the natives pretty much decided that the banksters actually didn't know much at all about risk and treated them as the liars and failures they were.  Iceland sent a surprising number of them to jail.  In fact, Iceland may have jailed more crooked bankers for their schemes in the early 21st century than all the rest of the world combined.

So now that those risk-managing fisherfolk have discovered what a bunch of lightweights bankers really are, they have decided to take control of their money supply.  As the essay below indicates, taking on the international banking establishment at that level can be very hazardous to one's health.  But I seriously doubt the Icelanders will be intimidated—they have been laughing at real risks their whole life.  In USA, the only state that ever managed to set up a publicly controlled state bank is North Dakota.  Not surprisingly, North Dakota, like Iceland, has a serious percentage of Viking inhabitants.  And like for the Icelanders, surviving North Dakota winters is sometimes just as frightening as a North Atlantic storm.