With every major financial recovery since the second World War beginning in a place of greater debt than the one before it, how could we not have foreseen the financial crisis of 2008? In this episode of Meet the Renegades, economics professor and author, Michael Hudson argues we did.
How could an economy that created so much debt also save the banks rather than the economy itself, following the 2008 financial crisis? Michael discusses the phenomenon of debt inflation and how the economic curriculum should change.
“If you’re teaching economics, you should begin with the relationship between finance and the economy, between the build up of debt and the ability to pay.”
Michael discusses the ‘Great Moderation’, a common misrepresentation of a healthy economy in which job productivity was increasing, labor complacency was at an all-time low was a complete myth. Michael argues that ‘traumatized’ workers were too in debt to fight for better working conditions leading up to the 2008 financial crisis and how this reflects neo-classical ideas.
Michael offers solutions – urging the importance of writing down the debt and keeping basic services in the public sector, ridding the economy of financial tumors through a proper tax policy based upon the this public sector model.
Capitalism in America: Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge in Conversation with Gillian Tett
it’s useful to understand how the systemworks and the key turning point is avery remarkable period it’s WilliamJennings Bryan William Jennings Bryan in1896 was a fairly young 36 year oldNebraskan who got up in the middle ofthat particular I guess you could sayAssociation of then the Democratic Partyand it was the one of thoseextraordinary events which turnspolitics around the Democratic Party wasa highly conservative party prior tothem and essentially it’s characterizedby presidents who thought that the leastgovernment the best it was essentiallylazy fair he got up Bryan got up andmade this extraordinary speech which isnow historical and then cross of goldspeech about the American worker and theAmerican farmer of being crucified on across of gold called being the goldstandard and that propelled himstrangely enough into the head of theparty he got nominated he never becamepresident because he kept losingyou think he went three times and failedeach time but left a very majorindelible stamp which led to WoodrowWilson and all the way through toFranklin Roosevelt and I you know Ilooked at Bryan as the root of FranklinRoosevelt’s New Dealthat’s fascinating cause I think mostpeople that part of it’s often beingobscured in history it’s again one ofthe reasons why this book is sointeresting is it throws up thesecreating the existing tax pattern [M]yview is that that’s the right thing todo provided you funded the result ofthat is a bit of variance is going to bea very large federal budget deficit andfederal budget deficits invariably downthe road out qualification in genderinflation at the moment we have thetightest labor market I have ever seenthat is the number of job openings issignificantly greater than the number ofpeople looking for work and that mustinevitably begin to push on wages italways has and always will but it’salways delayedand my told you that is something hasgot to give and that’s I don’t knowwhere it all comes out well your blyatcomes out with inflation well theproblem basically is if we do nothingwe’re going to end up with probablystagflation which is an inflation rate Ishould say it’s partly stagnation whichas mentioned was very significantlyslowed output per our output per hournow which used to be 3/4 percent peryearback in the early post-world war iiperiod it’s now well under 1% whichbrings me very nicely on to the nextquestion from the audience which issomeone has asked for you to share yourthoughts about president Trump’s recentcriticism of Jay Powell and the Fed Ilike him to answer that with all theanswers I think it’s very short-sightedthe issue of the Federal Reserve isrequired by the Congress to maintain astable currency which means no inflationno deflation and the policy they’reembarked upon at the moment seems verysense it will be caused as I mentionedbefore the wage rates are beginning toshow signs of moving and you cannot havereal wages rising without it ultimatelythink if they continue on the road wouldthat we willgoing Pretlow I should say that thepresident wants to go we’re gonna end upwith a very significant budget deficitand very significant inflationultimately not not in the short termthat it takes a whilepolitical system doesn’t care aboutdeficits what they do care about isinflation when the inflation rate was 4%in the 1970sPresident Nixon imposed wage and pricecontrols were nowhere near there yet butit’s wrong our wayif we are though heading towards apotential rise in inflation rise in debtat a time of growing populism do youthink there’s a chance that the FederalReserve will lose independence I’mtrying to follow you which I mean wellcheating is a chance at Congress or thepresident will try to control theFederal Reserve or take away some of itsindependence I really don’t know one ofthose forecasting aspects which isdifficult another question from theaudience as the Federal Reserve’s reachgrows do you think that leged ofoversight will become necessary againthat’s above my pay gradeor do you think that Congress shouldexert more control or oversight of theFed I think the Federal Reserve is bystatuteremember the Federal Reserve Act of 1913which essentially did something veryunusual we had a long period wediscussed this in the book in whichfinancial crises kept surging up andthen collapsing which is a typical cyclewithwhich went on to a decade upon decadeand the populism that evolved as aconsequence of this looked atever-increasing lead to find a way tosolve the problem of why the crisesoccur and the general solution was ifthe economy is accelerating and it’srunning out of gold species and you’regoing to get into a situation in whichthey are always going to be crises sowhat the Federal Reserve Act actuallydid was very very interesting itsubstituted the sovereign credit of theUnited States for gold and then if no westayed on the gold standard technicallythat was a major change in Americanfinancial history and debate the basicconsequence of that is that FederalReserve determines what in effect is asensible level of money supply expansionand one of the reasons the FederalReserve Act was actually passed was toprevent the political system whenbecoming so very dominant in determiningmonetary policy which is exactly whatyou don’t want to happen and I mean Iwas you know eighteen and a half yearsas you mentioned getting letters fromeverybody who won very littlecongressmen or otherwise who wants it’sa the issue of and don’t worry about theissue of inflationand nobody was well when I would begetting people who say we want lowerinterest rates I got tons of that mail Inever got a single letter saying pleaseraise them and it tells you that thereare some views which go against realityand reality always wins but if you lookat that the history of populism some ofthe worst populism you got was in the1970s some of the work that the angerthat was generated by inflation in thenineteen seventies were roiled right theway through the political systemeventually leads to the rise of ofRonald Reagan because and who comes inand then you know crushes crushesinflation so inflation is is not asolution to populism it drivers it makespeople very angry do you think thecurrent populism is going to get worsechairman Greenspan well let’s rememberwhere populism comes from it’s I don’tknow whether this is a generalproposition but I find it’s difficult toget around the answer that when theinflation rate or that must theinflation ratings as much as the levelsof income slow down when you getproductivity for example which is thatthe major determinant of income and youget productivity slowing down you get amuch lower increase in JD GDP and grossdomestic income and wages and salariesalike and there’s a great deal of uneasein the population which is saying thingsare not good somebody come help us andsomebody necessarily on the white horsebecause comes up and says I’ve got a wayto handle this and if you look at LatinAmerica the history ofgoodly part of Latin America is aremarkable amount of people like Peroncoming in and all the subsequent postWorld War two governments in LatinAmerica and it’s really quiteunfortunate and surprising it’s not thatthey try it and it fails which it doesalways it always fails but it doesn’teliminate the desire to do it in otherwords of Peru Brazil and like they’veall undergone very significant periodsof huge inflation and collapsing andnobody wears a lessonyeah well we’re almost out of time butthere’s one other question from theaudience which I think cuts to the heartof a lot of what we’re talking aboutright now which is this does the successof capitalism come at the cost ofenormous wealth disparity is it possibleto have this vision of creativedestruction of capitalism of dynamismwithout having massive income inequalityI doubt it and I doubt it for the reasonI said earlier namely that we’ve got theproblem that human beings don’t changebut technology as it advances and it’sembodied in the growth of an economy isalways growing and when you havesomething that’s growing and the otherthing that’s flat you get obviouslyinequality and the politicalconsequences of that can I qualify thatjust a little bit I mean there – thereare different sorts of inequalitythere’s a there’s the inequality thatyou get from suddenly like Bill Gates orSteve Jobs producing a fantastic newinnovation and idea which means thatthey reap a lot of rewardfor that but which means that society asa whole gets richer and better off andthere’s the inequality that comes fromcrony capitalism from people usingpolitical influence blocking innovationand and sucking out and do rewards forthemselves so I think we need to beabsolutely very very sensitive to thewrong source of inequality whilecelebrating the right sort of inequalityand also had that Joseph Schumpeter thatgreat man once said that the the natureof capitalist progress doesn’t consistof Queens having a million or twomillion pairs of silk stockings itconsists of what used to be theprerogative of a queen being spreadthroughout the whole of society silkstockings you know that become somethingthat go from being very rare and onlyworn by Queens to being worn by allsorts of people all over the place soit’s the nature of capitalism is tocreate new innovations which are atfirst rare but spread throughout thewhole of society and everybody uses soif you think think of the the iPhone orsomething like that some that wassomething that was incredibly rare and afew people had those sort ofcommunications vais now everybodycarries them around all the time and thegreat capitalists the Bill Gates theSteve Jobs don’t get rich by selling onereally really good iPhone to one purposeand they get into selling their productsto all sorts of people so there’s asense in which there is no realtrade-off between very rich peoplegetting very rich and the rest ofsociety getting getting better off youknow they only get rich because theycreate things which everybody mostpeople want to have and buy you knowit’s it’s it’s it’s the Silk Stockingquestion really I you know I accept thatqualifications let me just say one thingyou going back to his mentioning hereWalter Isaacson’s book on innovation hewrote that book and I remember readingit and my final conclusion was and Iasked him why is it that most innovationis in the United Statesit’s American and he said you know I’venever thought of that I don’t think hewas aware of the fact that he here andall these innovationto developers and they all turned out tobe American which leads me to concludethat there’s something fundamental inthe psyche of American history in theAmerican public which creates it it’snot an accident which is why I won in itwho too often so which is what you ofcourse you sought to explain the book soif you had a chance to take this bookinto the Oval Office today or into theTreasury and give it to the Presidentand say this is a history of Americahere are the key lessons what is a topbit of advice that you would give to theadministration today to keep capitalismgrowing in America well you know we dohave we haven’t mentioned that there’san underlying financial problem which wehaven’t addressed in the best way todiscuss it as when I first became awareof itI would haven’t been looking at data andaccidentally created a chart whichshowed the relationship betweenentitlements spending which is socialbenefits in the rest of the world andgross domestic savings and I’m from 1965to the current period the ratio ofentitlements to the sum of those two isflat as a percent of gross domesticproduct which means or at least impliesthat one is crowding out the other andwhen you look at the individuals theyare actually looking different andenable one goes up the other goes downand so forth and I think that’ssuggestively the fact that there issomething in the sense of when we saythat entitlements by which a rising andthe baby boom generation is essentiallycrowding out gross domestic savingswhich in turn coupled withthe borrowing from abroad is how wefinance our gross domestic investmentwhich is the key factor in productivityright so entitlement reform well I lookforward to a tweet about entitlementreform I look forward to this veryimportant book being part of thediscussion about how to keep AmericaAmerica’s economy great and growing butin the meantime thank you both very muchindeed for sharing your thoughts it isindeed a fascinating book and quite anachievement and best of luck in gettingthis very important message out so thankyou both very much indeed[Applause]
Alan Greenspan has a new worning for investors: “Run for cover”
Alan Greenspan has a new worning for investors: “Run for cover”
President Trump Bashes the Fed. This Is How the Fed Chief Responds.
Jerome Powell’s playbook includes making allies outside the Oval Office, never talking politics and sticking to the economy.
Federal Reserve leaders for the past quarter-century have made decisions about interest rates without being pressured by the president.
President Trump has broken that streak, calling the central bank “crazy” for raising rates and more than once saying the Fed is damaging the economy. That has prompted Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to update playbook rules for dealing with a president annoyed by America’s central bank.
Rule 1: Speak not of Mr. Trump.
Rule 2: When provoked, don’t engage.
Rule 3: Make allies outside the Oval Office.
Rule 4: Talk about the economy, not politics.
.. Mr. Trump blamed the Fed for October’s stock market selloff, calling the central bank “out of control.” The president told The Wall Street Journal Oct. 23 that Mr. Powell seemed to enjoy raising rates.
Not since the 1990s has a president leaned so hard on the Fed chief and never so publicly. On Monday, Mr. Trump told the Journal: “I think the Fed right now is a much bigger problem than China.”
.. The Fed’s benchmark interest rate is now in a range between 2% and 2.25%, well below long-run averages. The central bank is expected to raise rates by a quarter-percentage-point at its Dec. 18-19 meeting.
Mr. Powell says he is raising rates to return them to a more normal setting and avoid the type of boom-and-bust economy that ended in past recessions.
.. Mr. Trump has said he doesn’t plan on firing Mr. Powell, and it isn’t clear he could. The Federal Reserve Act states a Fed governor can only be removed for cause, a high bar that courts and legal scholars have interpreted to mean malfeasance or neglect.
.. The Fed’s credibility could suffer
- if investors believe its commitment to guard against inflation has been compromised by politics, or
- if Mr. Trump’s attacks sour the public’s view of the central bank.
“At some point, it becomes very damaging to the institution to be perceived as not acting in the best interest of America,” former Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in an interview.
.. Mr. Powell has told others that he knows the president’s criticism could make his life unpleasant, but that he wouldn’t respond to political pressure. People close to Mr. Powell said he understood that history would judge him on policy decisions made over his four-year term.
- President Lyndon B. Johnson once summoned Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin to his Texas ranch to berate him for raising interest rates, saying it was despicable, according to Mr. Martin’s account.
- One low point for the central bank came when President Richard Nixon privately pressured Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to keep rates low before the 1972 election, according to Oval Office recordings. Mr. Burns kept rates low and inflation accelerated.
.. Shortly after President Reagan’s inauguration, a White House staffer asked Fed Chairman Paul Volcker if he wanted to host the new president at the Fed. Mr. Volcker declined, but replied he would be happy to meet the president anywhere else. They settled on the Treasury Department as a neutral ground.
Top Reagan administration officials frequently criticized Mr. Volcker, who presided over rate increases that triggered recessions in 1980 and 1981. But President Reagan refrained. “He just never did it,” Mr. Volcker said in an interview last year.
.. President George H.W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady cut off regular breakfasts with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to show his disapproval of tight-money policies in 1992. Mr. Brady stopped inviting Mr. Greenspan to dinner parties and golf dates at Augusta National.
“Our decisions can’t be reversed by the administration,” Mr. Powell said earlier this month in Dallas. “Of course, Congress can do whatever it wants.”
.. Messrs. Coons and Sen. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) later decided to send Mr. Trump a letter telling him to lay off the Fed.
“You appear to be telling the Fed what to do with interest rates, which we believe is unconstructive and dangerous,” the senators wrote the president.
.. In his new memoir, Mr. Volcker described how White House chief of staff James A. Baker III, with President Reagan watching silently, ordered the Fed chairman not to raise interest rates before the 1984 election.
Mr. Volcker, who wasn’t planning to lift rates anyway, didn’t tell colleagues or lawmakers about the episode. Mr. Baker has said he didn’t recall that.
The dangerous myth we still believe about the Lehman Brothers bust
The central error in the popular post-crisis consensus was the idea that naive believers in the self-policing efficiency of markets led us over the precipice. Greenspan was painted as the high priestof this laissez-fairy-tale delusion, and people seized on a moment when he appeared to plead guilty: Under the pressure of congressional questioning, he confessed to a “flaw” in his pro-market ideology. What Greenspan meant was that all belief systems — whether pro-government or pro-market — are imperfect. But that subtlety was lost. Quoted and requoted without proportion or context, Greenspan’s purported mea culpa threatened to define his legacy.
.. Bestsellers by two Nobel Prize-winning behaviorists — Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler — encouraged people to see the crisis as proof that this new science had been ignored, as did contributions from the sublime storyteller Michael Lewis.
.. Contrary to myth, Greenspan himself never believed that markets were efficient. In his youth, he wrote lucidly about bubbles and crashes and regarded market inefficiencies as so obvious that he sought to exploit them by day trading
.. As Fed chairman years later, Greenspan frequently reminded his colleagues that periods of prosperity could be punctured by “irrational exuberance” in financial markets.
.. political constraints, not intellectual failures, prevented policymakers from curbing the housing mania. Nobody remembers that in 2001 the Greenspan Fed banned the most abusive subprime mortgages, for the good reason that the ban was circumvented. But why was it circumvented? The answer is that the capture of Congress by financial lobbies ensured the balkanization of regulation into an alphabet soup of agencies, many of them underfunded and ineffective.
.. Nonbank mortgage lenders, for example, came under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, which had no resources to conduct preemptive supervision. Small wonder that the sharp practices in the industry became egregious, or that nonbanks continue to dominate today’s mortgage business.
.. The Greenspan Fed also tried to force more capital into the banks it supervised, but it soon realized that this would drive risk-taking into various “shadow banks” that lay outside its authority
.. Greenspan also pushed for tougher regulation of the Federal National Mortgage Association and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (a.k.a. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), the government-backed mortgage giants, presciently observing that they posed “a systemic risk sometime in the future.” Fannie’s lobbyists hit back with a TV ad warning Congress not to back the Greenspan plan. That buried it.
.. The important lesson of the crisis is not that markets are fallible, which every thoughtful person knew already. It is that essential regulations — the sort that the supposedly anti-regulation Greenspan actually favored — are stymied by fractured government machinery and rapacious lobbies.
.. Even today, the financial system has multiple overseers answerable to multiple congressional committees, because all this multiplying produces extra opportunities for lawmakers to extract campaign contributions.
.. Vast government subsidies still encourage Americans to take big mortgages; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac still operate, despite endless talk of breaking them up. And although post-2008 regulations have ensured that banks are better capitalized, the lobbyists are pushing back. Merely a decade after the Lehman bankruptcy brought the world economy to its knees, the Trump administration is listening to them.
The cult of the expert – and how it collapsed
Led by a class of omnipotent central bankers, experts have gained extraordinary political power. Will a populist backlash shatter their technocratic dream?
.. A quiet, balding, unassuming technocrat confronted the lions of the legislative branch, armed with nothing but his expertise in monetary plumbing.
.. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, defused panic in the eurozone in July 2012 with two magical sentences. “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” he vowed, adding, with a twist of Clint Eastwood menace, “And believe me, it will be enough.”
.. “Superman and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke are both mild-mannered,” a financial columnist deadpanned. “They are both calm, even in the face of global disasters. They are both sometimes said to be from other planets.”
.. the cult of the central banker was only the most pronounced example of a broader cult that had taken shape over the previous quarter of a century: the cult of the expert
.. Those moments when Bernanke faced down Congress, or when Draghi succeeded where bickering politicians had failed, made it seem possible that this technocratic vision, with its apolitical ideal of government, might actually be realised.
.. No senator would have his child’s surgery performed by an amateur. So why would he not entrust experts with the economy?
.. At the Fed, by contrast, experts were gloriously empowered. They could debate the minutiae of the economy among themselves, then manoeuvre the growth rate this way or that, without deferring to anyone.
.. the ultimate embodiment of empowered gurudom was Alan Greenspan, the lugubrious figure with a meandering syntax who presided over the Federal Reserve for almost two decades. Greenspan was a technocrat’s technocrat, a walking, talking cauldron of statistics and factoids, and even though his ideological roots were in the libertarian right, his happy collaboration with Democratic experts in the Clinton administration fitted the end-of-history template perfectly.
.. Richard Nixon and his henchmen once smeared Arthur Burns, the Fed chairman, by planting a fictitious story in the press, insinuating that Burns was simultaneously demanding a huge pay rise for himself and a pay freeze for other Americans.
.. When Greenspan replaced Volcker in 1987, the same pattern continued at first. The George HW Bush administration tried everything it could to force Greenspan to cut interest rates, to the point that a White House official put it about that the unmarried, 65-year-old Fed chairman reminded him of Norman Bates, the mother-fixated loner in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
.. The Clinton adviser Dick Morris summed up economic policy in this period: “You figure out what Greenspan wants, and then you get it to him.”
.. How did Greenspan achieve this legendary status, creating the template for expert empowerment on which a generation of technocrats sought to build a new philosophy of anti-politics?
.. The bullying of central banks by Johnson and Nixon produced the disastrous inflation of the 1970s, with the result that later politicians wanted to be saved from themselves – they stopped harassing central banks, understanding that doing so damaged economic performance and therefore their own reputations.
.. To the contrary, he embraced politics, and loved the game. He understood power, and was not afraid to wield it.
.. He entered public life when he worked for Nixon’s 1968 campaign – not just as an economic adviser, but as a polling analyst.
.. In Nixon’s war room, he allied himself with the future populist presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan
.. In the mid-1970s, when Greenspan worked in the Gerald Ford administration, he once sneaked into the White House on a weekend to help rewrite a presidential speech, burying an earlier draft penned by a bureaucratic opponent. At the Republican convention in 1980, Greenspan tried to manoeuvre Ford on to Ronald Reagan’s ticket – an outlandish project to get an ex-president to serve as vice president.
.. “He has the best bedside manner I’ve ever seen,” a jealous Ford administration colleague recalled, remarking on Greenspan’s hypnotic effect on his boss. “Extraordinary. That was his favourite word.
.. Greenspan’s critics frequently complained that he was undermining the independence of the Fed by cosying up to politicians. But the critics were 180 degrees wrong: only by building political capital could Greenspan protect the Fed’s prerogatives.
.. But after a landmark 1993 budget deal and a 1995 bailout of Mexico, Clinton became a firm supporter of the Fed. Greenspan had proved that he had clout. Clinton wanted to be on the right side of him.
.. Volcker lacked Greenspan’s political skills, which is why the Reagan administration succeeded in packing his board with governors who were ready to outvote him. When Greenspan faced a similar prospect, he had the muscle to fight back: in at least one instance, he let his allies in the Senate know that they should block the president’s candidate.
.. Volcker also lacked Greenspan’s facility in dealing with the press – he refused to court public approval and sometimes pretended not to notice a journalist who had been shown into his office to interview him. Greenspan inhabited the opposite extreme: he courted journalists assiduously ..
.. It was only fitting that, halfway through his tenure, Greenspan married a journalist whose source he had once been.
.. Greenspan maximised a form of power that is invaluable to experts. Because journalists admired him, it was dangerous for politicians to pick a fight with the Fed: in any public dispute, the newspaper columnists and talking heads would take Greenspan’s side of the argument. As a result, the long tradition of Fed-bashing ceased almost completely.
.. The Brexit referendum featured Michael Gove’s infamous assertion that “the British people have had enough of experts”.
.. In the United States, Donald Trump has ripped into intellectuals of all stripes, charging Fed chair Janet Yellen with maintaining a dangerously loose monetary policy in order to help Obama’s poll ratings.
.. If the experts’ legitimacy depends on delivering results, it is hardly surprising that they are on the defensive.
.. As the advertising entrepreneur John Kearon has argued, the public has to feel you are correct; the truth has to be sold as well as told; you have to capture the high ground with a brand that is more emotionally compelling than that of your opponents.
.. To survive these inevitable resentments, elites will have to understand that they are not beyond politics – and they will have to demonstrate the skill to earn the public trust, and preserve it by deserving it.