PAUL SAMUELSON ON DEFICIT MYTHS

TIME TO DROP THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

By L. Randall Wray

On Wednesday April 28 several New Economic Perspective bloggers participated in a 1960s style "teach-in" in Washington DC to explode some of the myths about Federal Government deficits. Our event was timed to counter the Pete Peterson-funded extravaganza that promoted all of the fallacies used to stoke hysteria and fear of deficits. You can find more information about our event, as well as our power point presentations (here).

Right before the event, we also issued a joint piece examining the nine worst myths, posted at both New Deal 2.0 (here) and at the Huffington Post (here). The flurry and fury of comments to our piece was amazing, nay, shocking. I think these comments demonstrate just how successful the billions of dollars spent in Peterson's campaign have been at promulgating dangerous falsehoods over the past two decades. Indeed, the level of commentary is notable both for the vitriol and for its sheer ignorance. One wonders whether civil and informed discussion on the topic of money is even possible.

I was reminded of a conversation I once had with the late and great Robert Heilbroner about my book, "Understanding Modern Money". He warned me that the book was going to scare the living daylights out of readers (actually he used more colorful language—but it was a private conversation, not a public blog fit for family viewing). He went on to explain that money is the scariest thing for most people, sure to result in heated and angry discussion. It is also complex, something everyone talks about but few understand. Hence, it is a topic that must be carefully addressed, and with plenty of reassurances that one is not propounding anything too unsettling. It is also a subject that accumulates more than its fair share of cranks—indeed, "monetary cranks" actually earned an entry in the New Palgrave dictionary of economics. (By the way, most of the "cranks" discussed in that entry actually were less "cranky" than someone like Milton Friedman or Friedrich von Hayek—but that is a topic for another time.) For that reason, new ways of looking at money will (rightly, sometimes) be suspiciously treated.

The reaction to our post on the nine myths also reminded me of an interview Nobel winner Paul Samuelson gave to Mark Blaug (in his film on Keynes, "John Maynard Keynes: Life/Ideas/Legacy 1995"). There Samuelson said:

"I think there is an element of truth in the view that the superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times [is necessary]. Once it is debunked [that] takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. There must be discipline in the allocation of resources or you will have anarchistic chaos and inefficiency. And one of the functions of old fashioned religion was to scare people by sometimes what might be regarded as myths into behaving in a way that the long-run civilized life requires. We have taken away a belief in the intrinsic necessity of balancing the budget if not in every year, [then] in every short period of time. If Prime Minister Gladstone came back to life he would say "uh, oh what you have done" and James Buchanan argues in those terms. I have to say that I see merit in that view."

In other words, the need to balance the budget over some time period determined by the movements of celestial objects, or over the course of a business cycle is a myth, an old-fashioned religion. But that superstition is seen as necessary because if everyone realizes that government is not actually constrained by the necessity of balanced budgets, then it might spend "out of control", taking too large a percent of the nation's resources. Samuelson sees merit in that view.

It is difficult not to agree with him. But what if the religious belief in budget balance makes it impossible to spend on the necessary scale to achieve the public purpose? In the same film James Buchanan argues that the budget ought to be balanced except in wartime—and while he does not explicitly endorse Samuelson's argument that this is nothing but a useful myth, he does imply that there is no financial/economic/solvency reason for balancing the budget. Rather, it is to keep government in check, to ensure it does not grow and absorb too many of the nation's resources. Ironically, Buchanan's willingness to deficit-spend in wartime seems to imply that the US ought to almost always run deficits since we are almost always at war with someone. Hence, he seems to advocate nearly permanent budget deficits—no doubt unintentionally. Many might question that position on the argument that if it is OK to run deficits to destroy one's enemy then it surely makes sense to run deficits to build a strong nation. Indeed, older readers of this blog will remember that our nation got interstate hiways on the argument that this is good for national defense, and that many of us got through college on "national defense student loans". But that is not really the point I am driving at in this blog.

What I am arguing is that discussion of money and budget deficits has simply reached a state in which it has become impossible to address real world problems. I have always thought that honesty is the best policy—even if the truth is scary—but I am in the education business, not in politics or marketing or religion. But even if we concede Samuelson's point, that old-time deficit religion is not now useful—even if it might have served a useful purpose in the past.

Yes, government must be constrained. That is what elections and budgeting and accounting and accountability are all about. We need more democracy, more understanding, and more transparency. Politicians need to listen to Main Street—not just Wall Street—before deciding where and how much to spend. They need to be controlled by a budgeting process—whose purpose is not to balance the budget, ensuring tax revenues match spending outgo, but rather to give us some idea of the size of the programs (hence, what percent of our nation's resources will be devoted to their projects) and, equally important, to hold our leaders and project managers accountable. When managers run over budget, it does not threaten our government's solvency but it should threaten its credibility. Fraud and over-reach are always a threat where government's spending is unconstrained. And, yes, too much government spending generates competition over resources, bottle-necks, and even excessive aggregate demand, all of which can generate inflation.

We don't need myths. We need more democracy, more understanding, and more transparency. We do need to constrain our leaders—but not through dysfunctional superstitions.

Greece CAN Go it Alone

By Marshall Auerback and Warren Mosler

Greece can successfully issue and place new debt at low interest rates. The trick is to insert a provision stating that in the event of default, the bearer on demand can use those defaulted securities to pay Greek government taxes. This makes it immediately obvious to investors that those new securities are 'money good' and will ultimately redeem for face value for as long as the Greek government levies and enforces taxes. This would not only allow Greece to fund itself at low interest rates, but it would also serve as an example for the rest of the euro zone, and thereby ease the funding pressures on the entire region.  

We recognize, of course, that this proposal would also introduce a 'moral hazard' issue. This newly found funding freedom, if abused, could be highly inflationary and further weaken the euro.  In fact, the reason the ECB is prohibited from buying national government debt is to allow 'market discipline' to limit member nation fiscal expansion by the threat of default. When that threat is removed, bad behavior is rewarded, as the country that deficit spends the most wins, in an accelerating and inflationary race to the bottom.

It is comparable to a situation where a nation like the US, for example, did not have national insurance regulation.  In this kind of circumstance, the individual states got into a race to the bottom, where the state with the laxest standards stood to attract the most insurance companies, forcing each State to either lower standards or see its tax base flee. And it tends to end badly with AIG style collapses.

Additionally, the ECB or the Economic Council of Finance Ministers (ECOFIN) effectively loses the means to enforce their austerity demands and keep them from being reversed once it's known they've taken the position that it's too risky to let any one nation fail.   

What Europe's policy makers would like to do is find a way to isolate Greece and mitigate the contagion effect, while maintaining the market discipline that comes from the member nations being the credit sensitive entities they are today; hence, the mooted "shock and awe" proposals now being leaked, which did engender an 8% jump in the Greek stock market on Thursday.

But these proposals don't really get to the nub of the problem. Any major package weakens the others who have to fund it in the market place, because the other member nations are also revenue dependent, credit sensitive entities. Much like the US States, they do not control central bank operations, and must have good funds in their accounts or their checks will bounce.

The euro zone nations are all still in a bind, and their mandated austerity measures mean they don't keep up with a world recovery. And Greek financial restructuring that reduces outstanding debt reduces outstanding euro financial assets, strengthening the euro, and further weakening output and employment, while at the same time the legitimization of restructuring risk weakens the credit worthiness of all the member nations. 

It does not appear that the markets have fully discounted the ramifications of a Greek default.  If you use a Chapter 11 bankruptcy analogy, large parts of the country would be shut down and the "company" (i.e. Greece Inc) could spend only its tax revenues.  But the implied spending cuts represent a further substantial cut in aggregate demand and decreased revenues, in a most un-virtuous spiral that ends only with an increase in exports or privation driven revolt. 

The ability of Greece to use the funds from the rescue package as a means to extinguish Greek state liabilities would improve their financial ratios and stave off financial collapse, at least on a short term basis, with the side effect of a downward spiral in output and employment, while the sovereign risk concerns are concurrently transmitted to Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and beyond. Those sovereign difficulties also morph into a full-scale private banking crisis which can quickly extend to bank runs at the branch level.

Our suggestion will rescue Greece and the entire euro zone from the dangers of national government insolvencies, and turn the euro zone policy maker's attention 180 degrees, back to their traditional role of containing the potential moral hazard issue of excessive deficit spending by the national governments through the Stability and Growth Pact. If the member states ultimately decide that the Stability and Growth Pact ratios need to be changed, that's their decision. But the SGP represents the euro zone's "national budget", precisely designed to prevent the hyperinflationary outcome that the "race to the bottom" could potentially create. At the very least, our proposal will mitigate the deflationary impact of markets disciplining credit sensitive national governments and halting the potential spread of global financial contagion, without being inflationary. 

Do Not Confuse Solvency with Sustainability

By Pavlina R. Tcherneva

The Peter G. Peterson foundation held its ‘fiscal summit’ yesterday to address the looming government debt and deficit ‘problem’. According to a TRNN journalist who attended the summit, the conference began with “we know what the problem is, the federal government debt and deficits have become unsustainably large, we need to make hard choices, cut government spending, including on Social Security and Medicare…”

Any sensible person should be scandalized by this purely ideological stance. When it is necessary to go into war, the deficit is never a problem; when we bail out the financial sector, deficit spending is a ‘requirement’, when we build prisons and pack more people in our jails, oh well… But when it comes to paying for the retired and the sick, surely the government can’t afford to do that! Grandma better pull herself by her bootstraps and take responsibility for her retirement or healthcare needs. But even if we get past the propaganda, Peterson and all the deficit hawks are making one fundamental mistake: they are confusing sustainability with solvency.

A counter-conference on fiscal sustainability, that very same day, addressed the technical aspects of the way the U.S. government actually spends. It demonstrated that it makes absolutely no sense to talk about deficit sustainability, in terms of the ability of the government to pay its obligation. By definition and in practice, the government sector in a sovereign-currency economy is the only sector that settles its payments in terms of its own liability. I would love to create my own IOUs and use them to pay my electric bill, but I can’t. Of course I could issue “Pavlina notes” but my electric company would not accept them because they cannot be converted into cash or dollar reserves –in other words, into government money! Remember, the Federal Reserve is the bank of the Government and settles its payments by crediting private bank accounts with reserves. For this reason, unlike my commercial bank or yours, the Fed never ‘bounces’ government payments. And how could it? Would it ever run out of electronic dollar reserves? It is impossible for the only sector in the economy which spends by issuing its own liability, to ever ‘run out’ of liabilities.

Just because the government pays by issuing liabilities, does not mean that it can spend willy-nilly on whatever it chooses! Absolutely not! The constraint to government spending is inflation (not the ability to ‘pay’), which is why you always have to fix government spending to something of value. When government spending injects bank reserves into the private sector it must do so by producing something for society.

Mad obsession with debt- and deficit-to-GDP ratios, divorced from any consideration to what is happening to the real economy, boggles the mind. Remember government deficits always create non-government surpluses--to the penny. When the government spends more than it collects, the private sector earns more than it pays in taxes to the government. That is, the private sector accumulates these government liabilities, again, in the form of electronic dollar reserves. The government does not run out of ‘electronic reserves’. These deficits go somewhere! They create income and profits for someone. The real question is “for whom?” and did those earners produce anything of value to society in exchange for getting this money? This is not a matter of financially bankrupting the nation. It’s a matter of bankrupting the economy in real terms. It’s about filling the coffers of a financial sector which has hired 7% of total U.S. employees in increasingly dubious services and who take almost 40% of total corporate profits (half of which are rents and serve no economic purpose). It’s about starving grandma, leaving our kids without world- class education, allowing the sick to get sicker, and the unemployed to become unemployable. And all because we refuse to build the real resources which we all need in order to maintain a decent standard of living. Now I would prefer not just a decent standard of living, but an excellent one—one to boast about, one that the richest country in the world can offer its citizens. Stop confusing solvency with sustainability. Start measuring sustainability in terms of the real goods, services, and jobs government spending creates for the public purpose. To paraphrase and old adage, how sustainable the future of a society is can be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable members—its children, elderly, poor and unemployed.

"A Fed with broad regulatory authority": Is it a good idea?

According to James Bullard (President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), Sandra Pianalto, (President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland), and  Richard W. Fisher (President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) the answer is yes.  Recently, they delivered their speeches at the 19th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the U.S. and World Economies After the Crisis: Planning a New Financial Structure, held at the Ford Fundation on April 14-16, 2010, NY.

The following statements can be found on the conference's website:

"A Fed with appropriately broad regulatory authority provides the nation with the best chance of avoiding a future crisis...Bottom line: Due to its narrow regulatory authority, the Fed had a severely limited view of the financial landscape as the crisis began." James Bullard, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis emphasis in the original

"the Federal Reserve should continue to supervise banking organizations of all sizes and should take on an expanded role in supervising systemically important financial institutions" Sandra Pianalto, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland 2010 see here)

"Current proposals being discussed in Congress would shrink the Fed’s regulatory and supervisory responsibilities...leaving us either with no regulatory oversight or solely with regulatory oversight of LFIs. In my view, these proposals are misguided." (Richard W. Fisher, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 2010:4 see here)

On the other hand, Prof. William K. Black, on his testimony on Lehman Bankruptcy (see here and here), opposed to the view that the Fed did not have the appropriate regulatory authority:

"The Fed's defense of its disgraceful refusal to protect the public is meritless. It argues that it was not there in its regulatory capacity and that it sent only a few staffers that laced the capacity or the leverage to accomplish any supervisory goals. This is either a deliberate obfuscation or a confession of a core failure. As Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the FHLBSF I was always a regulator - even when I was providing involved in credit-side activities. As a lender, the FHLBSF often learned material information about the institutions we regulated because we engaged in effective underwriting of asset quality. My predecessor famously used the leverage of the FHLBSF as lender of last resort for the largest S&L in America, which was in a liquidity crisis, to force out the fraudulent CEO controlling the institution and to enter into a broad array of steps that greatly reduced the institution's risk exposure and frauds. At its peak, we had roughly 50 FHLBSF credit personnel resident at the S&L. The fact that the FRBNY, which had far more resources than the FHLBSF, chose to send only a token crew to be on-site at a potential global catastrophe is a demonstration of failure, not a valid excuse for their failure to act to protect the public. The FRBNY has vastly greater leverage than the FHLBSF ever had and in the context of the Lehman crisis it had the leverage to force any change it believed was necessary, including an immediate conversion of Lehman to a bank holding company and a commercial bank.

The Fed has inherent problems even in safety & soundness regulation due to its structure. First, the regional FRBs have boards of directors dominated by the industry. Congress already made the policy decision, in removing all regulatory functions from the FHLBs in the 1989 FIRREA legislation, that this is an unacceptable conflict of interest.

Second, supervision is, at best, a tertiary activity at the Fed and regional banks. Monetary policy gets all the emphasis, the credit windows come second, and economic research and safety & soundness regulation vie for a distant third place. (Consumer regulation is a bastard step child at the Fed and most agencies.)

Third, the Fed is far too close to the systemically dangerous institutions. The SDIs are in an ideal position to exploit opportunities for regulatory "capture."

Fourth, the Fed is dominated by neo-classical economists that have no theory of, experience with, or interest in the complex financial frauds that are the dominant cause of our recurring, intensifying financial crises. Bernanke appointed an economist, Patrick Parkinson, with no examination or supervision experience to head all Fed examination and supervision.

Fifth, the Fed is addicted to opaqueness and its senior ranks believe the bankers when they claim that the people must never be allowed to learn the truth about asset losses. One of the conflicts of interest that a banking regulator must never succumb to is the temptation to encourage or allow the regulated entity to lie about its financial condition for the purported purpose of preventing a run on the bank. Geithner, unfortunately, embraced that temptation and stated it openly to the Bankruptcy Examiner. It is very easy, psychologically, to believe that you are letting a bank lie to the public for a noble reason - protecting the public. The bankers always tell the regulators that the world will end if the banks tell the truth - but that is a lie. Regulators' greatest asset is their integrity. I was one of the four FHLBSF regulators that met with the "Keating Five." To this day, I have no idea what political affiliations, if any, my three colleagues hold. We simply insisted on honest disclosures and we always made a referral to our agency to alert the SEC (and the FBI) to any efforts we found to use accounting to deceive the investors or the regulators."

Prof. William K. Black, has argued elsewhere that "The Fed refused to exercise that authority despite knowing of the fraud epidemic and potential for crisis". He pointed out that:

"The Fed's failures were legion, but five are worthy of particular note.

1. Greenspan believed that the Fed should not regulate v. fraud

2. Bernanke believed that the Fed should rely on self-regulation by "the market"

3. (Former) Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Geithner testified that he had never been a regulator (a true statement, but not one he's supposed to admit)

4. Bernanke gave the key support to the Chamber of Commerce's effort to gimmick bank accounting rules to cover up their massive losses -- allowing them to report fictional profits and "earn" tens of billions of dollars of bonuses

5. Bernanke recently appointed Dr. Patrick Parkinson as the Fed's top supervisor. He is an economist that has never examined or supervised. He is known for claiming that credit default swaps (CDS, a.k.a the financial derivatives that destroyed AIG) should be unregulated because fraud was impossible among sophisticated parties.

Each error arises from the intersection of ideology and bad economics.

The Fed's regulatory failures pose severe risks today. Three of the key failed anti-regulators occupy some of the most important regulatory positions in the world. Each was a serial failure as regulator. Each has failed to take accountability for their failures. Last week, Dr. Bernanke asserted that bad regulation caused the crisis -- yet he was one of the most senior bad regulators that failed to respond to the fraud epidemic and prevent the crisis. As Dr. Bernanke's appointment of Dr. Parkinson as the Fed's top supervisor demonstrates, the Fed's senior leadership has failed, despite the Great Recession, to learn from the crisis and abandon their faith in the theories and policies that caused the crisis. Worst of all, the Fed is an imperial anti-regulatory seeking vastly greater regulatory scope at the expense of (modestly) more effective sister regulatory agencies. The Fed's failed leadership is setting us up for repeated, more severe financial crises." (see here)

A Little Help from Our Friends

By Stephanie Kelton

Next week, four New Economic Perspectives bloggers -- Randy Wray, Marshall Auerback, Pavlina Tcherneva and I -- will head to Washington, D.C. to participate in a day-long "teach-in" at George Washington University. The event will take place on April 28^th, alongside (or in opposition to) the "Fiscal Summit" that is being sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation (also taking place in Washington, D.C. on the 28^th). Click here to learn more about the teach-in.

If you live in the area, we hope you'll join us for the event (which is free and open to the public). You can also help by spreading the word or by making a donation to help cover the very modest cost of our event. Click here to support us.

"The Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter-conference will be the important event in Washington on April 28. Unlike the other meeting, this one will feature important work by honest scholars. It deserves at least equal attention, and very much more respect." -- Professor James K. Galbraith

We will be "tweeting" updates from the event on the 28^th. Stay tuned for details ….

Prof. William K. Black Testimony on Lehman Bankruptcy

"Fed Chairman Ruml got it right in 1946"

Hat tip Warren Mosler's blog (http://www.moslereconomics.com/)

On his recent piece "Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete " that appeared on the Huffington Post he notes:

April 15th has come and gone, but the issue of taxation remains the course de jour. I was recently forwarded an article entitled Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete, written in 1946 by Beardsley Ruml, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and published in a periodical named American Affairs. While Ruml was writing about the merits of corporate taxes, it is his discussion about how the function of taxes changed after the nation exited the gold standard that make this a must read. As Ruml's stated, with an "...inconvertible currency, a sovereign national government is finally free of money worries and need no longer levy taxes for the purpose of providing itself with revenue... It follows that our Federal Government has final freedom from the money market in meeting its financial requirements... All federal taxes must meet the test of public policy and practical effect. The public purpose which is served should never be obscured in a tax program under the mask of raising revenue." He goes on to explain how, with Federal spending not revenue constrained, the first function of taxation is to regulate the value of the dollar, which we know as regulating inflation. The notion of the Federal government 'running out of money' and 'dependence on foreign borrowing' as well as 'sustainability' is categorically inapplicable. The operative CBO 'scoring' is the inflationary effect, rather than simply a revenue forecast. And while Social Security and Medicare may turn out to be inflationary, they are not 'bankrupting the nation' as most believe, including a Democratic Congress that cut Medicare spending with the recent health care bill and has all entitlements 'on the table.'

See also here.

19th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the U.S. and World Economies: After the Crisis: Planning a New Financial Structure

After many requests from media and academics and Wall Street practitioners, we are posting L.Randall Wray's presentation at the 19th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference (Session 7. International Financial Fragility) held at the Ford Foundation.

To download the ppt file click here.

Troubles in the Eurozone: Is a Conflict with the U.S. Far Behind?

By Marshall Auerback

At its most basic, our economy can be divided up into 3 sectors: there is a private sector that includes both households and firms; there is a government sector that includes both the federal government as well as all levels of state and local governments; and there is a foreign sector that includes imports and exports. As my friend Randy Wray notes (.pdf): “At the aggregate level, the dollar spending of all three sectors combined must equal the income received by the three sectors combined. Aggregate spending equals aggregate income. But there is no reason why any one sector must spend an amount exactly equal to its income. One sector can run a surplus (spend less than its income) so long as another runs a deficit (spends more than its income). This applies to households, businesses, net saving nations vs. net “dis-saving” nations, and the government sector."

How does this work in practice? If households attempt to net save by spending less than they are earning, and businesses attempt to net save (reinvesting less than their retained earnings), then nominal incomes and real output are likely to fall. Money incomes and economic activity will tend to contract until private savings preferences are reduced (with essential goods and services taking up a larger share of household income as incomes fall), or until depreciation leaves businesses and households inclined to invest once again in durable assets. Common sense suggests that a drop in private income flows while private debt loads are high is an invitation to debt defaults and widespread insolvencies – that is, unless creditors are generously willing to renegotiate existing debt contracts en masse. Which is why any particular nation in these circumstances must either run an external surplus on its current account, or experience a rising government deficit or some combination of the two.

Of course, given the prevailing levels of government deficit hysteria in the US right now, one can see the political appeal of focusing on export led growth, along Asian lines, since a sufficiently large trade surplus will facilitate the government’s ability to cut spending and run public sector surpluses. The problem of course comes from the fact that it is impossible for all governments (in all nations) to run public surpluses without impairing growth because not all nations can run external surpluses. There has to be another nation willing to become a net importer. For nations running external deficits (the majority), public surpluses have to be associated with private domestic deficits, which is inherently constraining in a way that government deficits are not.

Historically the US private sector has spent less than its income—that is, it has run a surplus, whereas the government has run deficits. From a straight national accounts identity, then, the paradox of private sector thrift is that it is facilitated by public sector profligacy. Or another way of putting it: every time the government runs a deficit and issues a bond, adding to the financial wealth of the private sector.

Of course, the opposite would also be true. Assume we have a balanced foreign sector and that the government runs a surplus—meaning its tax revenues are greater than government spending. By identity this means the private sector is spending more than its income, in other words, it is deficit spending. The deficit spending means it is going into debt, and at the aggregate level it is reducing its net financial wealth. By extension, a country which runs a large trade deficit (as the US has persistently done for the past quarter century), needs an even greater degree of government fiscal expenditure to offset the potential “deficit” spending by the private sector.

Clearly, this financial balances approach is not well understood by most voters. Indeed, a recent poll by Douglas Schoen and Patrick Caddell suggests that the swing voters, who are key to the fate of the Democratic Party, care most about three things: reigniting the economy, reducing the deficit and creating jobs. But the latter two goals are generally incompatible, especially during major recessions. In times of high unemployment, government deficits are required to underwrite growth, given that the private sector shift to non-government surpluses has left a huge spending gap and firms responded to the failing sales by cutting back production. Employment falls and unemployment rises. Then investment growth declines because the pessimism spreads. Before too long you have a recession. Without any discretionary change in fiscal policy (now referred to in the public media as “stimulus packages”) the government balance will head towards and typically into deficit, unless the US miraculously becomes an export powerhouse along emerging Asia lines, and runs persistent current account surpluses, to a degree which allows the governments to run budget surpluses.

This is not going to happen, particularly when the largest current account surplus nations, notably Germany, cling to a mercantilist export led growth model, an inevitable consequence of that country’s aversion to increased government deficit spending. The German government’s reticence to counter any kind of shift in regard to its current account surplus is particularly significant in light of the ongoing and intensifying strains developing in the EMU nations (see here). Following the inexorable logic of the financial balances approach sketched above, then, I am now more convinced than ever that there is a "Lehman" style event waiting to happen in the euro zone. Last week’s Greek "rescue" is, as we suggested earlier, Europe’s "Bear Stearns event”. The Lehman moment has yet to come. One possible outcome of this could well be significantly larger budget deficits in the US and a substantial increase in America’s external deficit. Let me elaborate below.

In the euro zone, I now see one of two possible outcomes. Scenario 1: the problem of Greece is not contained, and the contagion effect extends to the other “PIIGS” countries, leading to a cascade of defaults and corresponding devaluations as countries exit the EMU. Interestingly enough, the country which could well be affected most adversely in this situation is France, as the country’s industrial base competes largely against countries like Italy and the corresponding competitive devaluation of the Italian currency in the event of a euro zone break-up could well destroy the French economy (by contrast, as a capital goods exporter with few euro zone competitors, Germany’s industrial base will be less adversely affected in our view).

In Scenario 2 (more likely in my opinion) we get some greater fears about other PIIGS nations (discussion is now turning to Spain, Portugal and Ireland). The EMU might well hold together but the corresponding fear of contagion might well provoke capital flight and drive the euro down to parity (or lower) with the dollar. Of course, the euro’s weakness creates other problems: when the euro was strengthening last year due to portfolio shifts out of the dollar, many of those buyers of euro bought euro denominated national government paper (including Greece). The resultant portfolio shifts helped fund the national EMU governments at lower rates during that period. That portfolio shifting has largely come to an end, making national government funding within the euro zone more problematic, as the Greek situation now illustrates.

The weakening euro and rising oil prices raises the risk of 'inflation' flooding in through the import and export channels. With a weak economy and national government credit worthiness particularly sensitive to rising interest rates, the ECB may find itself in a bind, as it will tend to favor rate hikes as prices firm, yet recognize rate hikes could cause a financial collapse. And should a government like Greece be allowed to default the next realization could be that Greek depositors will take losses, and, therefore, the entire euro deposit insurance lose credibility, causing depositors to take their funds elsewhere.

It's all getting very ugly as it all threatens the value of the euro. The only scenario that theoretically helps the value of the euro is a national government default, which does eliminate the euro denominated financial assets of that nation, but of course can trigger a euro wide deflationary debt collapse. The 'support' scenarios all weaken the euro as they support the expansion of euro denominated financial assets, to the point of triggering the inflationary 'race to the bottom' of accelerating debt expansion.

So timing is very problematic. A rapid decline of the euro would facilitate a competitive advantage in the euro zone’s external sector, but it could also set alarm bells off at the ECB if such a rapid devaluation creates incipient inflationary strains within the euro zone.

What about the US? In the latter scenario, we can envisage a situation in which the combination of panic and corresponding flight to safety to the dollar and US Treasuries, concomitant with the increased accumulation of US financial assets (which arises as the inevitable accounting correlative of increased Euro zone exports) means that America’s external deficits inexorably increase. There will almost certainly be increased protectionist strains, a possible backlash against both Europe and Asia, especially if the deficit hawks begin sounding the alarm on the inexorable rise of the US government deficit (which will almost certainly rise in the scenario we have sketched out).

Assuming that the US does not wish to sustain further job losses, the budget deficit will inevitably deteriorate further, either “virtuously” (via proactive government spending which promotes a full employment policy), or in a bad way , whereby a contracting economy and rising unemployment, produce larger deficits via the automatic stabilisers moving to shore up demand as the economy falters.

How big can these deficits go? Easily to around 10-12% of GDP or higher (versus the current 8% of GDP) should a euro devaluation be of a sufficient magnitude to induce a sharp deterioration of America’s trade deficit.

What will be the response of the Obama Administration? America can sustain economic growth with a private domestic surplus and government surplus if the external surplus is large enough. So a growth strategy can still be consistent with a public surplus, but this becomes virtually impossible if the euro zone’s problems continue, as we suspect that they will.

President Obama, however, has long decried our “out of control” government spending. He clearly gets this nonsense from the manic deficit terrorists who do not understand these accounting relationships that we’ve sketched out. As a result he continues to advocate that the government leads the charge by introducing austerity packages – just when the state of private demand is still stagnant or fragile. By perpetuating these myths, then, the President himself becomes part of the problem. He should be using his position of influence, and his considerable powers of oratory, to change public perceptions and explain why these deficits are not only necessary, but highly desirable in terms of sustaining a full employment economy.

Governments that issue debt in their own currency and do not promise to convert their currency into anything else can always “afford” to run deficits. Indeed, in this context government spending financially helps the private sector by injecting cash flows, providing liquid assets and raising the net worth of some or all private economic agents. In contrast to today’s budget deficit “Chicken Littles”, we maintain that speaking of government budget deficits as far as the eye can see is ludicrous for the simple reason that as the economy recovers, tax revenue rises, the deficit automatically reduces. That’s the whole reason for engaging in deficit spending in the first place. Any projections that show the deficit continuing to climb without limit is misguided--the Pete Peterson projections, for example, will never come to pass. As we near and exceed full employment, inflation will pick-up, which reduces transfer payments and increases tax revenues, automatically pushing the budget toward surpluses. In the 220 year experience of the United States there have only been a few years when we've not had deficits and each time the surpluses were immediately followed by a depression or a recession. So the historical evidence here, indicates that we can run nearly permanent deficits and that when we do, it's better for the economy. The challenge for our side of the debate is to expose these voluntary constraints for what they are and explain why the US is not a Weimar Germany waiting to happen.

William K. Black on the Charges Filled by the SEC against Goldman Sachs

GOLDMAN SACHS VAMPIRE SQUID GETS HANDCUFFED

L. Randall Wray

In a startling turn of events, the SEC announced a civil fraud lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. I use the word startling because a) the SEC has done virtually nothing in the way of enforcement for years, managing to sleep through every bubble and bust in recent memory, and b) Government Sachs has been presumed to be above the law since it took over Washington during the Clinton years. Of course, there is nothing startling about bad behavior at Goldman—that is its business model. The only thing that separates Goldman on that score from all other Wall Street financial institutions is its audacity to claim that it channels God as it screws its customers. But when the government is your handmaiden, why not be audacious?

The details of the SEC's case will be familiar to anyone who knows about Magnetar. This hedge fund sought the very worst subprime mortgage backed securities (MBS) to package as collateralized debt obligations (CDO). The firm nearly single-handedly kept the subprime market afloat after investors started to worry about Liar and NINJA loans, since Magnetar was offering to take the very worst tranches—making it possible to sell the higher-rated tranches to other more skittish buyers. And Magnetar was quite good at identifying trash: According to an analysis commissioned by ProPublica, 96% of the CDO deals arranged by Magnetar were in default by the end of 2008 (versus "only" 68% of comparable CDOs). The CDOs were then sold-on to investors, who ultimately lost big time. Meanwhile, Magnetar used credit default swaps (CDS) to bet that the garbage CDOs they were selling would go bad. Actually, that is not a bet. If you can manage to put together deals that go bad 96% of the time, betting on bad is as close to a sure thing as a financial market will ever find. So, in reality, it was just pick pocketing customers—in other words, a looting.

Well, Magnetar was a hedge fund, and as they say, the clients of hedge funds are "big boys" who are supposed to be sophisticated and sufficiently rich that they can afford to lose. Goldman Sachs, by contrast, is a 140 year old firm that operates a revolving door to keep the US Treasury and the NY Fed well-stocked with its alumni. As Matt Taibi has argued, Goldman has been behind virtually every financial crisis the US has experienced since the Civil War. In John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Great Crash", a chapter that documents Goldman's contributions to the Great Depression is titled "In Goldman We Trust". As the instigator of crises, it has truly earned its reputation. And it has been publicly traded since 1999—an unusual hedge fund, indeed. Furthermore, Treasury Secretary Geithner handed it a bank charter to ensure it would have cheap access to funds during the financial crisis. This gave it added respectability and profitability—one of the chosen few anointed by government to speculate with Treasury funds. So, why did Goldman use its venerable reputation to loot its customers?

Before 1999, Goldman (like the other investment banks) was a partnership—run by future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The trouble with that arrangement is that it is impossible to directly benefit from a run-up of the stock market. Sure, Goldman could earn fees by arranging initial public offerings for Pets-Dot-Com start-ups, and it could trade stocks for others or for its own account. This did offer the opportunity to exploit inside information, or to monkey around with the timing of trades, or to push the dogs onto clients. But in the euphoric irrational exuberance of the late 1990s that looked like chump change. How could Goldman's management get a bigger share of the action?

Flashback to the 1929 stock market boom, when Goldman faced the same dilemma. Since the famous firms like Goldman Sachs were partnerships, they did not issue stock; hence they put together investment trusts that would purport to hold valuable equities in other firms (often in other affiliates, which sometimes held no stocks other than those in Wall Street trusts) and then sell shares in these trusts to a gullible public. Effectively, trusts were an early form of mutual fund, with the "mother" investment house investing a small amount of capital in their offspring, highly leveraged using other people's money. Goldman and others would then whip up a speculative fever in shares, reaping capital gains through the magic of leverage. However, trust investments amounted to little more than pyramid schemes—there was very little in the way of real production or income associated with all this trading in paper. Indeed, the "real" economy was already long past its peak—there were no "fundamentals" to drive the Wall Street boom. It was just a Charles Ponzi-Bernie Madoff scam. Inevitably, Goldman's gambit collapsed and a "debt deflation" began as everyone tried to sell out of their positions in stocks—causing prices to collapse. Spending on the "real economy" suffered and we were off to the Great Depression. Sound familiar?

So in 1999 Goldman and the other partnerships went public to enjoy the advantages of stock issue in a boom. Top management was rewarded with stocks—leading to the same pump-and-dump incentives that drove the 1929 boom. To be sure, traders like Robert Rubin (another Treasury secretary) had already come to dominate firms like Goldman. Traders necessarily take a short view—you are only as good as your last trade. More importantly, traders take a zero-sum view of deals: there will be a winner and a loser, with Goldman pocketing fees for bringing the two sides together. Better yet, Goldman would take one of the two sides—the winning side, of course--and pocket the fees and collect the winnings. You might wonder why anyone would voluntarily become Goldman's client, knowing that the deal was ultimately zero-sum and that Goldman would have the winning hand? No doubt there were some clients with an outsized view of their own competence or luck; but most customers were wrongly swayed by Goldman's reputation that was being exploited by hired management. The purpose of a good reputation is to exploit it. That is what my colleague, Bill Black, calls control fraud.

Note that before it went public, only 28% of Goldman's revenues came from trading and investing activities. That is now about 80% of revenue. While many think of Goldman as a bank, it is really just a huge hedge fund, albeit a very special one that happens to hold a Timmy Geithner-granted bank charter—giving it access to the Fed's discount window and to FDIC insurance. That, in turn, lets it borrow at near-zero interest rates. Indeed, in 2009 it spent only a little over $5 billion to borrow, versus $26 billion in interest expenses in 2008—a $21 billion subsidy thanks to Goldman's understudy, Treasury Secretary Geithner. It was (until Friday) also widely believed to be "backstopped" by the government—under no circumstances would it be allowed to fail, nor would it be restrained or prosecuted—keeping its stock price up. That is now somewhat in doubt, causing prices to plummet. Of course, the FDIC subsidy is only a small part of the funding provided by government—we also need to include the $12.9 billion it got from the AIG bail-out, and a government guarantee of $30 billion of its debt. Oh, and Goldman's new $2 billion headquarters in Manhattan? Financed by $1.65 billion of tax free Liberty Bonds (interest savings of $175 million) plus $66 million of employment and energy subsidies. And it helps to have your people run three successive administrations, of course.

Unprecedented and unprecedentedly useful if one needs to maintain reputation in order to run a control fraud.

In the particular case prosecuted by the SEC, Goldman created synthetic CDOs that placed bets on toxic waste MBSs. A synthetic CDO does not actually hold any mortgage securities—it is simply a pure bet on a bunch of MBSs. The purchaser is betting that those MBSs will not go bad, but there is an embedded CDS that allows the other side to bet that the MBSs will fall in value, in which case the CDS "insurance" pays off. Note that the underlying mortgages do not need to go into default or even fall into delinquency. To make sure that those who "short" the CDO (those holding the CDS) get paid sooner rather than later, all that is required is a downgrade by credit rating agencies. The trick, then, is to find a bunch of MBSs that appear to be over-rated and place a bet they will be downgraded. Synergies abound! The propensity of credit raters to give high ratings to junk assets is well-known, indeed assured by paying them to do so. Since the underlying junk is actually, well, junk, downgrades are also assured. Betting against the worst junk you can find is a good deal—if you can find a sucker to take the bet.

The theory behind shorting is that it lets you hedge risky assets in your portfolio, and it aids in price discovery. The first requires that you've actually got the asset you are shorting, the second relies on the now thoroughly discredited belief in the efficacy of markets. In truth, these markets are highly manipulated by insiders, subject to speculative fever, and mostly over-the-counter. That means that initial prices are set by sellers. Even in the case of MBSs—that actually have mortgages as collateral—buyers usually do not have access to essential data on the loans that will provide income flows. Once we get to tranches of MBSs, to CDOs, squared and cubed, and on to synthetic CDOs we have leveraged and layered those underlying mortgages to a degree that it is pure fantasy to believe that markets can efficiently price them. Indeed, that was the reason for credit ratings, monoline insurance, and credit default swaps. CDSs that allow bets on synthetics that are themselves bets on MBSs held by others serve no social purpose whatsoever—they are neither hedges nor price discovery mechanisms.

The most famous shorter of MBSs is John Paulson, who approached Goldman to see if the firm could create some toxic synthetic CDOs that he could bet against. Of course, that would require that Goldman could find chump clients willing to buy junk CDOs—a task for which Goldman was well-placed. According to the SEC, Goldman allowed Paulson to increase the probability of success by allowing him to suggest particularly trashy securities to include in the CDOs. Goldman arranged 25 such deals, named Abacus, totaling about $11 billion. Out of 500 CDOs analyzed by UBS, only two did worse than Goldman's Abacus. Just how toxic were these CDOs? Only 5 months after creating one of these Abacus CDOs, the ratings of 84% of the underlying mortgages had been downgraded. By betting against them, Goldman and Paulson won—Paulson pocketed $1 billion on the Abacus deals; he made a total of $5.7 billion shorting mortgage-based instruments in a span of two years. This is not genius work—84% to 96% of CDOs that are designed to fail will fail.

Paulson has not been accused of fraud—while he is accused of helping to select the toxic waste, he has not been accused of misleading investors in the CDOs he bet against. Goldman, on the other hand, never told investors that the firm was creating these CDOs specifically to meet the demands of Paulson for an instrument to allow him to bet them. The truly surprising thing is that Goldman's patsies actually met with Paulson as the deals were assembled—but Goldman never informed them that Paulson was the shorter of the CDOs they were buying! The contempt that Goldman shows for clients truly knows no bounds. Goldman's defense so far amounts to little more than the argument that a) these were big boys; and b) Goldman also lost money on the deals because it held a lot of the Abacus CDOs. In other words, Goldman is not only dishonest, but it is also incompetent. If that is not exploitation of reputation by Goldman's management, I do not know what would qualify.

By the way, remember the AIG bail-out, of which $12.9 billion was passed-through to Goldman? AIG provided the CDSs that allowed Goldman and Paulson to short Abacus CDOs. So AIG was also duped, as was Uncle Sam—although that "sting" required the help of the New York Fed's Timmy Geithner. I would not take Goldman's claim that it lost money on these deals too seriously. It must be remembered that when Hank Paulson ran Goldman, it was bullish on real estate; through 2006 it was accumulating MBSs and CDOs—including early Abacus CDOs. It then slowly dawned on Goldman that it was horribly exposed to toxic waste. At that point it started shorting the market, including the Abacus CDOs it held and was still creating. Thus, while it might be true that Goldman could not completely hedge its positions so that it got caught holding junk, that was not for lack of trying to push all risks onto its clients. The market crashed before Goldman found a sufficient supply of suckers to allow it to short everything it held. Even vampire squids get caught holding garbage.

Some have argued that the SEC's case is weak. It needs to show not only that Goldman misled investors, but also that this was materially significant in creating their losses. Would they have forgone the deals if they had known that Paulson was shorting their asset? We do not know—the SEC will have to make the case. Besides, Goldman does this to all its clients—so the SEC will have to make the case that clients could have been misled, whilst knowing that Goldman screws all its clients. After all, Goldman hid Greece's debt, then bet against the debt—another fairly certain bet since debt ratings would fall if the hidden debt was ever discovered. Goldman took on US states as clients (including California and New Jersey and 9 other states), earning fees for placing their debts, and then encouraged other clients to bet against state debt—using its knowledge of the precariousness of state finances to market the instruments that facilitated the shorts. Did Goldman do anything illegal? We do not yet know. Reprehensible? Yes. Normal business practice.

To be fair, Goldman is not alone—all of this appears to be normal business procedure. In early spring 2010 a court-appointed investigator issued his report on the failure of Lehman. Lehman engaged in a variety of "actionable" practices (potentially prosecutable as crimes). Interestingly, it hid debt using practices similar to those employed by Goldman to hide Greek debt. The investigator also showed how the prices by Lehman on its assets were set—and subject to rather arbitrary procedures that could result in widely varying values. But most importantly, the top management as well as Lehman's accounting firm (Ernst&Young) signed off on what the investigator said was "materially misleading" accounting. That is a go-to-jail crime if proven. The question is why would a top accounting firm as well as Lehman's CEO, Richard Fuld, risk prison in the post-Enron era (similar accounting fraud brought down Enron's accounting firm, and resulted in Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that requires a company's CEO to sign off on company accounts)? There are two answers. First, it is possible that fraud is so wide-spread that no accounting firm could retain top clients without agreeing to overlook it. Second, fraud may be so pervasive and enforcement and prosecution thought to be so lax that CEOs and accounting firms have no fear. I think that both answers are correct.

To determine whether Goldman and other firms engaged in fraud will require close examination of the books, internal documents, and emails. Perhaps the SEC has finally fired the first shot at the Wall Street firms that aided and abetted the creation of the conditions that led up to the financial collapse. More importantly, that first shot might have driven a bit of fear into the financial institutions that have been trying to carry-on with business as usual. And, finally, perhaps the SEC might induce the Obama administration to stand-up to Goldman.

It is probably not too early for Goldman management and alumni to begin packing bags for extended stays in our nation's finest penitentiaries. More than 1000 top management at thrifts served real jail time in the aftermath of the Savings and Loan fiasco. This current scandal is many orders of magnitude greater—probably tens of thousands of managers and traders and government officials were involved in fraud. We may need dozens of new prisons to contain them.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration should immediately revoke Goldman's bank charter. Even if the firm is completely cleared of illegal activities, it is not a bank. There is no justification for provision of deposit insurance for a firm that specializes in betting against its clients. Its business model is at best based on deception, if not outright fraud. It serves no useful purpose; it does not do God's work. Government should also relieve itself of all Goldman alumni—no administration that is full of Goldman's people can retain the trust of the American public. President Obama should start his house cleaning with the Treasury department. Yes, Rubin and his hired hand Summers and protégé Geithner (and his hired hand Mark Patterson, Goldman's lobbyist who became chief of staff of the Treasury) and Hank Paulson must be banned from Washington; and Rattner (former NYTimes reporter who tried to bribe pensions funds when he worked for the Quadrangle Group—who served as Obama's "car czar" and is now likely to face lawsuits), and Lewis Sachs (senior advisor to Treasury, who helped Tricadia to make bets identical to those made by Magnetar and Goldman), and Stephen Friedman (Goldman senior partner who served as chairman of the NYFed), and NY Fed president Dudley (former chief US economist at Goldman) must all be sent home. Actually, anyone who ever worked for a financial institution must be banned from Washington until we can reform and downsize and drive a stake through the heart of Wall Street's vampires.

And why not use the powers of eminent domain to take back Goldman's shiny new government-subsidized headquarters to serve as the offices for 6000 newly hired federal government white collar criminologists tasked with the mission to pursue Wall Street's fraud from the Manhattan citadel of the mighty vampire squid? If Obama is serious about reform, that would be a first step.

What is Responsible Fiscal Policy?

By Pavlina R. Tcherneva

I can't fault the taxpayer for being upset with the deficit. I blame my profession, which has been spewing nonsense about government spending for decades. Economics is long-overdue for a renaissance. The deficit phobia, not the deficit itself, should be made public enemy #1. Taxpayers are decidedly working against their own interests when they demand that the government reduce or eliminate its deficit. Here is why:

Government deficits create non-government surpluses. It is a simple mathematical proposition; it is neither high theory, nor rocket science. If one sector spends more than it earns, another, by the rules of double-entry bookeeping, earns more than it spends. And so it is with the government—if it spends more than it collects in taxes, it runs a deficit, which is exactly equal to the surplus accumulated by the non-government sector. Deficits create income and profits for the private sector in excess of the taxes the private sector pays to the government. My fellow bloggers have explained this clearly many times before (e.g. here, here and here).

What I'd like to impress upon the taxpayers is a simple logical flaw in their anger with the deficit itself.

If we want the government to "correct" its budget stance, then we must necessarily be offering to reverse ours. If we demand that the government run a surplus, then we are demanding that we, the private sector, run a deficit. If we are demanding that the government pay off its entire debt, then we must be demanding that every single private portfolio, retirement account, or college fund sacrifice its Treasury securities. Surely the private sector does not want that. The government's deficit is someone else's surplus and the government's debt is someone else's asset. If you would like to wipe out one, then you must be offering to wipe out the other.

Recall the Clinton surpluses. What was then considered to be a very 'prudent' government stance was in fact only possible because the private sector acted 'imprudently' and ran negative savings for many years. So, take your pick: would you like the private sector be in surplus or the government? You cannot have both. Presumably, we'd prefer the private sector to save and accumulate financial assets, which means that the government must run a deficit and accumulate financial liabilities (note again, that the foreign sector balance does not change this story). Because most people do not think about this basic accounting result, they tend to think that a responsible government is one that acts like a household, without recognizing that a 'responsible' government is possible only with an 'irresponsible' private sector behavior and vice versa. As Rob Parenteau has argued previously, the quest for fiscal sustainability may very well destabilize the private sector.

Since all of us agree that it is prudent for the private sector to accumulate savings, we must be in agreement that the prudent thing for the government to do is to allow us to be prudent by running deficits. In other words, a truly prudent government is one that does not mimic the behavior of the private sector, but one that offsets it.*

Even after people grasp this very basic logic, they still get hung up on the question "how long can the government keep running deficits and what if it goes bankrupt?" Here, too, we have to remember that government deficits are unlike those of the private sector. This is because the private sector cannot pay by issuing its own currency or create reserves at the stroke of a pen, but the federal government can. By constitutional right, it has monopoly powers over its currency and bank reserves and, therefore, always pays by creating such reserves when it credits the private bank accounts of its payees (see how the Fed and Treasury interact to make payments). The US government has a Central Bank that never bounces government checks and always makes good on government commitments.

In other words, there are no technical reasons why a nation with sovereign control over its currency, like the U.S., should ever go bankrupt—unless of course a misguided Congress places arbitrary political restrictions on the government to meet its financial obligations.

But just because government deficits can always be financed and just because government deficits create private sector surpluses, does it mean that all kinds of government spending are equally responsible? And the answer is clearly, NO.

A responsible government spending policy is not measured by some arbitrary accounting result called the deficit, but by the impact it has had on the real economy. This same sentiment has been echoed by others. (see here and here).

Different fiscal policies will have different effects on output, employment and inflation. It is on the basis of these effects that fiscal policy should be judged. Those of us, who have gone to great lengths to explain how such a modern money system works, have never advocated 'printing money' or deficit spending in unlimited amounts for anything and everything. I have argued elsewhere that a responsible government policy is not one that waits for months and years for the economy to recover to see job growth, but acts immediately and directly to create jobs without delay. In the latter case, spending is intimately linked to actual production and employment. The absence of direct job creation programs indicates a government that has not taken its responsibility to the unemployed seriously. Surely, unemployment insurance helps, but unemployed men and women want jobs, not the dole. Paying a pittance to the unemployed (who are not producing) is not the same thing as paying a living wage to those producing something of value.

If government deficit spending fills the coffers of the non-government sector with net financial assets, then a responsible government does so for all private sub-sectors in need, and links its deficit spending to actual employment and production. So while the government could not sit idly by and watch the global financial system collapse, a responsible policy would have immediately provided relief for households, small business owners, and states, all of whom have received inadequate assistance in comparison with the financial sector.
So while it is true that government deficits create non-government surpluses, the real question that taxpayers should be asking is, not how large the deficit is, but who benefits from the deficit and whose coffers does it fill?

If the deficit went to bailing out banks, then we know exactly who accumulated net financial assets. If we knew that the deficit saved state programs and prevented school shut downs, teacher layoffs and civil servant furloughs, then we would know that it is they who 'received' the deficit. If the deficit went towards massive infrastructure investment and direct job creation, we would know exactly which individuals and which firms got the funds and how many jobs and projects were created.

The taxpayers should not be angry with the deficit itself, but they are right to ask the question which sector is earning and accumulating net financial assets as a result of the government's deficit spending. And with unemployment still close to 10 percent, personal bankruptcies and foreclosures unacceptably high, broken state budgets and disappearing public programs, and Wall Street bonuses sky high, I think the answer is quite clear.

Wall Street knows all too well that the government cannot go bankrupt, which is why it never objects when the government socializes its losses. Notice how financial gurus temporarily suspend their own deficit phobia until Wall Street's balance sheets and incomes are restored. The average person, however, does not know that deficits are forever sustainable and that the government is not obligated to raise anyone's taxes to 'pay' for them (see here a discussion on the role of taxes). And so the taxpayer does not demand from its government what the taxpayer genuinely wants and needs: more jobs, more infrastructure, better education, higher quality public services, and a standard of living that only a resource-rich nation as the U.S. can provide. It is time to stop buying into the deficit phobia and demand that the government deficit spend … responsibly.

*I thank Jan Kregel for putting it so succinctly.

"My alternative proposal on trade with China"

By Warren Mosler*

We can have BOTH low priced imports AND good jobs for all Americans

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has urged US Treasury Secretary Geithner to take legal action to force China to let its currency appreciate. As stated by Blumenthal: “By stifling its currency, China is stifling our economy and stealing our jobs. Connecticut manufacturers have bled business and jobs over recent years because of China’s unconscionable currency manipulation and unfair market practices.”

The Attorney General is proposing to create jobs by lowering the value of the dollar vs. the yuan (China’s currency) to make China’s products a lot more expensive for US consumers, who are already struggling to survive. Those higher prices then cause us to instead buy products made elsewhere, which will presumably means more American products get produced and sold. The trade off is most likely to be a few more jobs in return for higher prices (also called inflation), and a lower standard of living from the higher prices.

Fortunately there is an alternative that allows the US consumer to enjoy the enormous benefits of low cost imports and also makes good jobs available for all Americans willing and able to work. That alternative is to keep Federal taxes low enough so Americans have enough take home pay to buy all the goods and services we can produce at full employment levels AND everything the world wants to sell to us. This in fact is exactly what happened in 2000 when unemployment was under 4%, while net imports were $380 billion. We had what most considered a ‘red hot’ labor market with jobs for all, as well as the benefit of consuming $380 billion more in imports than we exported, along with very low inflation and a high standard of living due in part to the low cost imports.

The reason we had such a good economy in 2000 was because private sector debt grew at a record 7% of GDP, supplying the spending power we needed to keep us fully employed and also able to buy all of those imports. But as soon as private sector debt expansion reached its limits and that source of spending power faded, the right Federal policy response would have been to cut Federal taxes to sustain American spending power. That wasn’t done until 2003- two long years after the recession had taken hold. The economy again improved, and unemployment came down even as imports increased. However, when private sector debt again collapsed in 2008, the Federal government again failed to cut taxes or increase spending to sustain the US consumer’s spending power. The stimulus package that was passed almost a year later in 2009 was far too small and spread out over too many years. Consequently, unemployment continued to rise, reaching an unthinkable high of 16.9% (people looking for full time work who can’t find it) in March 2010.

The problem is we are conducting Federal policy on the mistaken belief that the Federal government must get the dollars it spends through taxes, and what it doesn’t get from taxes it must borrow in the market place, and leave the debts for our children to pay back. It is this errant belief that has resulted in a policy of enormous, self imposed fiscal drag that has devastated our economy.

My three proposals for removing this drag on our economy are:

1. A full payroll tax (FICA) holiday for employees and employers. This increases the take home pay for people earning $50,000 a year by over $300 per month. It also cuts costs for businesses, which means lower prices as well as new investment.

2. A $500 per capita distribution to State governments with no strings attached. This means $1.75 billion of Federal revenue sharing to the State of Connecticut to help sustain essential public services and reduce debt.

3. An $8/hr national service job for anyone willing and able to work to facilitate the transition from unemployment to private sector employment as the pickup in sales from my first two proposals quickly translates into millions of new private sector jobs.

Because the right level of taxation to sustain full employment and price stability will vary over time, it’s the Federal government’s job to use taxation like a thermostat- lowering taxes when the economy is too cold, and considering tax increases only should the economy ‘over heat’ and get ‘too good’ (which is something I’ve never seen in my 40 years).

For policy makers to pursue this policy, they first need to understand what all insiders in the Fed (Federal Reserve Bank) have known for a very long time- the Federal government (not State and local government, corporations, and all of us) never actually has nor doesn’t have any US dollars. It taxes by simply changing numbers down in our bank accounts and doesn’t actually get anything, and it spends simply by changing numbers up in our bank accounts and doesn’t actually use anything up. As Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke explained in to Scott Pelley on ’60 minutes’ in May 2009:

(PELLEY) Is that tax money that the Fed is spending?
(BERNANKE) It’s not tax money. The banks have– accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed.

Therefore, payroll tax cuts do NOT mean the Federal government will go broke and run out of money if it doesn’t cut Social Security and Medicare payments. As the Fed Chairman correctly explained, operationally, spending is not revenue constrained.

We know why the Federal government taxes- to regulate the economy- but what about Federal borrowing? As you might suspect, our well advertised dependence on foreigners to buy US Treasury securities to fund the Federal government is just another myth holding us back from realizing our economic potential.


Operationally, foreign governments have ‘checking accounts’ at the Fed called ‘reserve accounts,’ and US Treasury securities are nothing more than savings accounts at the same Fed. So when a nation like China sells things to us, we pay them with dollars that go into their checking account at the Fed. And when they buy US Treasury securities the Fed simply transfers their dollars from their Fed checking account to their Fed savings account. And paying back US Treasury securities is nothing more than transferring the balance in China’s savings account at the Fed to their checking account at the Fed. This is not a ‘burden’ for us nor will it be for our children and grand children. Nor is the US Treasury spending operationally constrained by whether China has their dollars in their checking account or their savings accounts. Any and all constraints on US government spending are necessarily self imposed. There can be no external constraints.


In conclusion, it is a failure to understand basic monetary operations and Fed reserve accounting that caused the Democratic Congress and Administration to cut Medicare in the latest health care law, and that same failure of understanding is now driving well intentioned Americans like Atty General Blumenthal to push China to revalue its currency. This weak dollar policy is a misguided effort to create jobs by causing import prices to go up for struggling US consumers to the point where we buy fewer Chinese products. The far better option is to cut taxes as I’ve proposed, to ensure we have enough take home pay to be able to buy all that we can produce domestically at full employment, plus whatever imports we want to buy from foreigners at the lowest possible prices, and return America to the economic prosperity we once enjoyed.

*This article first appeared on moslereconomics.com

The Coming European Debt Wars

By Michael Hudson
(Portions of this essay appeared in today's Financial Times)

Government debt in Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs that are set to explode. The mortgage debts in post-Soviet economies and Iceland are more explosive.  Although these countries are not in the Eurozone, most of their debts are denominated in euros. Some 87% of Latvia's debts are in euros or other foreign currencies, and are owed mainly to Swedish banks, while Hungary and Romania owe euro-debts mainly to Austrian banks. So their government borrowing by non-euro members has been to support exchange rates to pay these private sector debts to foreign banks, not to finance a domestic budget deficit as in Greece.

All these debts are unpayably high because most of these countries are running deepening trade deficits and are sinking into depression. Now that real estate prices are plunging, trade deficits are no longer financed by an inflow of foreign-currency mortgage lending and property buyouts. There is no visible means of support to stabilize currencies (e.g., healthy economies). For the past year these countries have supported their exchange rates by borrowing from the EU and IMF. The terms of this borrowing are politically unsustainable: sharp public sector budget cuts, higher tax rates on already over-taxed labor, and austerity plans that shrink economies and drive more labor to emigrate.

Bankers in Sweden and Austria, Germany and Britain are about to discover that extending credit to nations that can't (or won't) pay may be their problem, not that of their debtors. No one wants to accept the fact that debts that can't be paid, won't be. Someone must bear the cost as debts go into default or are written down, to be paid in sharply depreciated currencies, but many legal experts find debt agreements calling for repayment in euros unenforceable. Every sovereign nation has the right to legislate its own debt terms, and the coming currency re-alignments and debt write-downs will be much more than mere "haircuts."

There is no point in devaluing, unless "to excess" – that is, by enough to actually change trade and production patterns. That is why Franklin Roosevelt devalued the US dollar by 41% against gold in 1933, raising its official price from $20 to $35 an ounce. And to avoid raising the U.S. debt burden proportionally, he annulled the "gold clause" indexing payment of bank loans to the price of gold. This is where the political fight will occur today – over the payment of debt in currencies that are devalued.

Another byproduct of the Great Depression in the United States and Canada was to free mortgage debtors from personal liability, making it possible to recover from bankruptcy. Foreclosing banks can take possession of collateral real estate, but do not have any further claim on the mortgagees. This practice – grounded in common law – shows how North America has freed itself from the legacy of feudal-style creditor power and the debtors' prisons that made earlier European debt laws so harsh.

The question is, who will bear the loss? Keeping debts denominated in euros would bankrupt much local business and real estate. Conversely, re-denominating these debts in local depreciated currency will wipe out the capital of many euro-based banks. But these banks are foreigners, after all – and in the end, governments must represent their own home electorates. Foreign banks do not vote.

Foreign dollar holders have lost 29/30^th of the gold value of their holdings since the United States stopped settling its balance-of-payments deficits in gold in 1971. They now receive less than a thirtieth of this, as the price has risen to $1,100 an ounce. If the world can take that, why shouldn't it take the coming European debt write-downs in stride?

There is growing recognition that the post-Soviet economies were structured from the start to benefit foreign interests, not local economies. For example, Latvian labor is taxed at over 50% (labor, employer, and social tax) – so high as to make it noncompetitive, while property taxes are less than 1%, providing an incentive toward rampant speculation. This skewed tax philosophy made the "Baltic Tigers" and central Europe prime loan markets for Swedish and Austrian banks, but their labor could not find well-paying work at home. Nothing like this (or their abysmal workplace protection laws) is found in the Western European, North American or Asian economies.

It seems unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that large sectors of the New European population can be made subject to salary garnishment throughout their lives, reducing them to a lifetime of debt peonage. Future relations between Old and New Europe will depend on the Eurozone's willingness to re-design the post-Soviet economies on more solvent lines – with more productive credit and a less rentier-biased tax system that promotes employment rather than asset-price inflation that drives labor to emigrate. In addition to currency realignments to deal with unaffordable debt, the indicated line of solution for these countries is a major shift of taxes off labor onto land, making them more like Western Europe. There is no just alternative. Otherwise, the age-old conflict-of-interest between creditors and debtors threatens to split Europe into opposing political camps, with Iceland the dress rehearsal.

Until this debt problem is resolved – and the only way to resolve it is to negotiate a debt write-off – European expansion (the absorption of New Europe into Old Europe) seems over. But the transition to this future solution will not be easy. Financial interests still wield dominant power over the EU, and will resist the inevitable. Gordon Brown already has shown his colors in his threats against Iceland to illegally and improperly use the IMF as a collection agent for debts that Iceland doesn't legally owe, and to blackball Icelandic membership in the EU.

Confronted with Mr. Brown's bullying – and that of Britain's Dutch poodles – 97% of Icelandic voters opposed the debt settlement that Britain and the Netherlands sought to force down the throat of Althing members last month. This high a vote has not been seen in the world since the old Stalinist era. It is only a foretaste. The choice that Europe ends up making will likely drive millions into the streets. Political and economic alliances will shift, currencies will crumble and governments will fall. The European Union and indeed, the international financial system will change in ways yet to be seen. This will be especially the case if nations adopt the Argentina model and refuse to make payment until steep discounts are made.

Paying in euros – for real estate and personal income streams in negative equity, where the debts exceed the current value of income flows available to pay mortgages or for that matter, personal debts – is impossible for nations that hope to maintain a modicum of civil society. "Austerity plans" IMF and EU style is an antiseptic, technocratic jargon for life-shortening and killing impact of gutting income, social services, spending on health on hospitals, education and other basic needs, and selling off public infrastructure for buyers to turn nations into "tollbooth economies" where everyone is obliged to pay access prices for roads, education, medical care and other costs of living and doing business that have long been subsidized by progressive taxation in North America and Western Europe.

The battle lines are being drawn regarding how private and public debts are to be repaid. For nations that balk at repayment in euros, the creditor nations have their "muscle" waiting in the wings: the credit rating agencies. At the first sign a nation is balking in paying in hard currency, or even at the first hint of it questioning a foreign debt as improper, the agencies will move in to reduce a nation's credit rating. This will increase the cost of borrowing and threaten to paralyze the economy by starving it for credit.

The most recent shot was fired n April 6 when Moody's downgraded Iceland's debt from stable to negative. "Moody's acknowledged that Iceland might still achieve a better deal in renewed negotiations, but said the current uncertainty was hurting the country's short-term economic and financial prospects."

The fight is on. It should be an interesting decade.


*Prof. Hudson is Chief Economic Advisor to the Reform Task Force Latvia (RTFL). His website is michael-hudson.com.