The Way Out of Shutdown Shenanigans

Posted on December 3, 2014 by | 6 comments

Today, I received an e-mail from the Friends of (the very popular with progressives) Senator Bernie Sanders. In it the Senator says:

I’m joining with the members of Progressives United to send a clear message to President Obama that we will stand with him when he vetoes Republican legislation that attacks the well-being of the struggling middle class.

Join me and members of Progressives United to urge the president to VETO any Republican legislation that attacks working families.

NO to cuts in Social Security. NO to cuts in Medicaid. NO to converting Medicare into a voucher program. NO to new trade legislation that sends our jobs overseas and hammers our middle-class workers. NO to cuts to nutrition programs, education or environmental protection.

YES to raising the minimum wage. YES to a massive jobs program rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. YES to transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels. YES to pay equity for women workers. YES to overturning Citizens United.

We already know what “compromise” will mean from a Republican Congress: their way or the highway. In order to win in the future, President Obama must stand strong for the American middle class, and we must support him.

Tell President Obama: Standing firm is the only option, and that means committing to VETO legislation that attacks working families, and fighting for legislation that defends their needs.

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The Answer to the Unemployment Problem Is More Jobs

Posted on December 2, 2014 by | 35 comments

By L. Randall Wray

Dean Baker, everyone’s favorite progressive economist (mine, too), has an interesting take on our unemployment problem.

Give more paid vacations.

The idea is that if all the employed work less, employers will need to hire the unemployed to produce what the already employed won’t be producing while sunning themselves on Florida’s beaches.

Look, I’m all for shorter work weeks. It is ridiculous that labor’s push somehow got stuck a century ago at the 40 hour work week in the USA. Employed Americans work more hours per year than just about any other workforce on the planet.

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Enough Money

Posted on December 2, 2014 by | 4 comments

By J.D. Alt

Money causes labor to do useful things, and goods and services to be exchanged between people, thereby enabling people in general—both individually and collectively—to obtain what they need. In order for this process to occur in an optimal way—that is, in order for the maximum number of people to obtain what they need, individually and collectively, it seems clear that two basic conditions must be met: (1) there needs to be enough money to pay people to create all the goods and services they need, and (2) this adequate supply of money needs to be in the hands of people who are actually able and motivated to spend it for that purpose.

By “enough money” I mean this: Is there enough money to pay people to build all the things and provide all the services they need both individually and collectively—without there being too MUCH money (which could cause prices to escalate)? If there isn’t enough money, it is likely there will be things we need but which we cannot have—not for the lack of available and willing labor to provide those things, but for lack of money with which to pay that labor. In this case that labor not only remains wastefully unemployed, but we, collectively and individually, go without something which we otherwise could have, and might possibly—even desperately—need. (It is also possible, of course, that we cannot have the things we need because the required natural resources—energy, materials, chemicals and minerals etc.—are not available. This, however, is not a “money problem” but a resource problem.)

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The Wall Street Journal Still Refuses to Grasp Accounting Control Fraud via Appraisal Fraud

Posted on December 2, 2014 by | 7 comments

By William K. Black
Kansas City, MO: December 2, 2014

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) report described one of three epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the financial crisis in these terms.

“Some real estate appraisers had also been expressing concerns for years. From 2000 to 2007, a coalition of appraisal organizations circulated and ultimately delivered to Washington officials a public petition; signed by 11,000 appraisers and including the name and address of each, it charged that lenders were pressuring appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties. According to the petition, lenders were ‘blacklisting honest appraisers’ and instead assigning business only to appraisers who would hit the desired price targets” [FCIC 2011: 18].

The FCIC Report then documents scale of this epidemic of loan origination fraud.

“One 2003 survey found that 55% of the appraisers had felt pressed to inflate the value of homes; by 2006, this had climbed to 90%. The pressure came most frequently from the mortgage brokers, but appraisers reported it from real estate agents, lenders, and in many cases borrowers themselves. Most often, refusal to raise the appraisal meant losing the client” [FCIC 2011: 91].

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Another Dose of Prosecutorial Discretion

Posted on November 26, 2014 by | 3 comments

Here’s a footnote to my recent post on prosecutorial discretion. Of course, the Grand Jury verdict not to indict Darren Wilson in Ferguson was a product of prosecutor McCulloch’s decision to perform a non-directive prosecution accompanied by a “jury dump” without benefit of clear guidelines and instructions. This had the predictable result that the jury would carry on its own trial, not only absent vigorous prosecution, but by all accounts a prosecution that played more of the role of a defense attorney then a representative of law enforcement prosecuting a crime.

The way McCulloch proceeded in the case is almost never done by prosecutors and it illustrated perfectly the contrast between prosecution for me, and discretion for thee, the very mark of a legal system that is broken, failing to produce equal justice for all, under the law. This is perfectly acceptable to many Americans when it is not their ox that is being gored. So, we recently heard thunderous recriminations from the right over the President’s executive orders on immigration, but perpetual loud silence about the IRS’s failure to enforce the law prohibiting tax exemptions for claimed 501 (c) (4) organizations that are not exclusively engaged in social welfare activities. Now, we’re seeing rage against a prosecutor who obviously fixed an unjust outcome in a prosecution he did not want to engage is at all. The rage is justified, of course, and there are many lessons we can draw from Ferguson, but surely one of them is that we need to limit prosecutorial discretion. It gives prosecutors far too much power to ‘fix’ justice, which in various ways they do all the time.

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The NYT Thinks Jailing the Banksters Would Cause a “Bind

Posted on November 25, 2014 by | 5 comments

By William K. Black
San Francisco California: November 24, 2014

Peter Henning, in his self-bowdlerized Dealbook feature he branded as “White Collar Watch” (note his deletion of the word “crime”) has come up with an article that illustrates that the New York Times is clueless about bank regulation. The good news is that once the fundamental error in their understanding of banking regulation is corrected the supposed dilemma that the Henning claims has placed the NY Fed in a terrible “bind” disappears. The title of Henning’s November 24, 2011 article has morphed during the course of the day into “Fed’s New ‘Cop on the Beat’ Role Put it in a Bind.” The title exemplifies three fundamental errors. First, the role of federal financial regulators as “regulatory cop on the beat” is not “new.” It has always been our paramount role as financial regulators. Second, Henning’s columns was prompted by William Dudley, the NY Fed’s President’s testimony before a Senate banking committee subcommittee in which he expressly refused to function as the “cop on the beat” our Nation vitally needs. Third, were Dudley to embrace the role of “cop on the beat” and perform it properly he and our Nation would escape the desperate “bind” we are in – not create a “bind.” Henning’s article tries to support the three errors encapsulated in his title in the reverse order, which I will track.

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How NPR Was Conned by Geithner into Censoring My Criticisms

Posted on November 23, 2014 by | 10 comments

By William K. Black
San Francisco, CA:  November 23, 2014

In December 2013 NPR interviewed me about one the great disgraces of the Obama administration – its refusal to prosecute either the officers or HSBC for laundering roughly $1 billion over the course of the decade for Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.  The NPR story doesn’t name the cartel or inform the listener that it is one of the world’s most violent drug cartels, or that HSBC also routinely violated the money laundering laws on transactions involving tens of trillions of dollars, and covered up its numerous violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran and Burma.

The original NPR story presented my comments on Treasury’s opposition to brining criminal charges.  Those comments were subject to what NPR labeled a “clarification” which meant they were removed from the program.

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Dudley Do Wrong Rejects Being a “Cop” and Embraces “Foaming the Runways”

Posted on November 23, 2014 by | 2 comments

By William K. Black
San Fransisco, CA: November 22, 2014

William Dudley, the President of the NY Fed, is not a stupid man. He is, however, wholly unfit to be a regulator. He has now admitted that publicly. It is time for him to return to Goldman Sachs so that he can be replaced by someone expressly chosen to be a vigorous regulator who will embrace the most critical function of a financial regulator – to be the tough “regulatory cop on the beat.”

The story of Dudley’s ineptness has been mirrored by the New York Times’ inept coverage of the failures of one of the reporter Peter Eavis’ favorite sons on Wall Street. Eavis is a Brit with a B.A. in international history and politics. He has also been a pastor. He co-authored the epically incoherent column on the NY Fed’s most recent scandal, the leaking of confidential information by a NY Fed employee to a former NY Fed employee who had joined Goldman Sachs. I criticized that column in my November 20, 2014 article and provided some of the key missing facts and analytics.

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Prosecutorial Discretion: Plenty for Me; But None for Thee

Posted on November 22, 2014 by | 4 comments

Republican “strategists,” Party functionaries, and Congresspeople, are saying, with considerable emotion and rage, that the President’s Executive Order allowing undocumented immigrants goes beyond presidential authority under the Constitution in the areas of law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion, claiming that he must enforce the law without bias, in a manner consistent with his oath to uphold the Constitution. They’ve made similar claims in relation to his decision to delay for one year the requirement that employers with over 50 employees provide health care coverage or pay penalties, and have now gone to court to get relief from this “horrible” action relieving the financial burden on one of the Republicans supposed favorite constituencies, non-small businesses.

On the other hand, the President’s unwillingness to investigate, prosecute and seek convictions against: Continue reading →

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MMT and the Next Growth Cycle

Posted on November 21, 2014 by | 14 comments

By Thornton Parker

Discussions on this forum generally treat MMT in isolation rather than in the context of other forces that drive an economy.   In Japan, for example, the sales tax increase to reduce the government’s deficit is widely seen as a recent cause of its lagging economy. But a bit of history shows a different picture.

At the end of World War II, the country was decimated. Many of its young men were dead; its industries and cities were in ruins; its people were humiliated and overwhelmed by two atomic bombs; even its religion was repudiated. An island nation, it had no local friends, little fuel, and almost no raw materials. The only thing it was rich in was poor people.

Most western economists believed it was destined to remain a basket case indefinitely. But the Japanese rejected that assessment, saying if that was what conventional economics predicted, they would invent their own economics. And they did just that.

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