Political Economy category archive

David P. Goldman, writing at Asia Times, considers the current economic news.

He finds a bright side:

But the reason for the downgrades is that hedge funds have crippled out. Hedge funds can’t earn the 15%-20% returns they promise investors in a world of 3% bond yields and 2% gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Investors desperate for higher returns, including pension funds, returned to the hedges during 2010 and 2011, and are now suffering spasms of buyers’ remorse.

That prompted an across-the-board liquidation of all assets, including commodities and emerging market equities most favored by the hedges. The nearly $2.6 trillion of hedge fund assets constitute the system’s only real bubble: too much money chasing too few returns, with a lot of fingers on the recall button. As of May, equity hedge funds with $1.25 trillion in assets had strongly net bullish positions.

As near as I can figure it out (I’m not a banker and hedge funds are notoriously secretive), hedge funds are premised on playing both ends against the middle while having cake eating it too. I do know that an acquaintance of mine who understands the mechanics of this stuff far better than I do has long considered hedge funds to be a destructive force.

Housing prices would be rising, but foreclosures are keeping them within reach of those few persons who can still qualify for mortgages.

But with foreclosures and short sales accounting for more than 50 percent of home sales, overall prices are up only 0.9 percent since January in Miami-Dade. In Broward, overall prices have fallen 3.2 percent since January, according to the report, which uses an index of single-family home prices for June. Non-distressed prices in Broward are down 0.4 percent.

To paraphrase the Secretary, the way to create job is not by laying workers off.

Left unsaid was the “except in Wingnut World.”

Everything is proceeding according to plan to reinvigorate the rental industry:

Last Friday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of people who owned a home had dropped to 65.9% during the second quarter — its lowest level since the first quarter of 1998 and a far cry from the high of 69.2% reached in late 2004.

Yet, in a research paper issued a week earlier, Morgan Stanley analysts Oliver Chang, Vishwanath Tirupattur and James Egan argued that the home ownership rate is even lower than the Census Bureau statistics say.

In fact, once they factored in delinquent mortgage borrowers (the ones who are likely to lose their homes at some point), Morgan Stanley calculated that the home ownership rate is more like 59.2%.

At Asia Times, Mike Davis theorizes that the economies of the European Union, the United States, and China are headed for a collision (he also makes a side trip to the hot rod tales of Henry Felsen, many of which I read). Like almost everything in Asia Times, it’s worth a look.

What caught my eye particularly is this:

In addition to making everything else, China now seems to making its own homegrown banksters, who are adopting the tactics of our own U. S. variant and feeding-frenzying a real estate bubble:

In effect, a shadow banking system has arisen with big banks moving loans off their balance sheets into phony trust companies and thus evading official caps on total lending. Last week, Moody’s Business Service reported that the Chinese banking system was concealing one-half-trillion dollars in problematic loans, mainly for municipal vanity projects. Another rating service warned that non-performing loans could constitute as much as 30% of bank portfolios.

Real-estate speculation, meanwhile, is vacuuming up domestic savings as urban families, faced with soaring home values, rush to invest in property before they are priced out of the market. (Sound familiar?) According to Business Week, residential housing investment now accounts for 9% of the gross domestic product, up from only 3.4% in 2003.

It sounds a lot like the U. S. real estate market, circa 2005.

This can’t be good.

Mary Winter, writing at the Denver Post, takes a look at “strategic defaulters”–persons who walk away from their mortgages because the houses are under water–and asks, “Just who broke a promise with whom?” (emphasis added):

Most officials condemn these so-called strategic defaulters — homeowners who technically can afford to make payments but opt not to. “Any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator — and one who is not honoring his obligation,” said former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.

But Paulson had it backwards.

Wall Street bankers, not homeowners, failed to honor their obligations. Bankers took excessive risks, designed loans to generate the greatest number of fees for themselves, pushed no-down and predatory loans on unqualified and financially illiterate customers, and paid lip service to modifications.

When housing collapsed, bankers took $175 billion in taxpayer bailouts and, to show their gratitude, promptly handed out $33 billion in performance bonuses to their executives.

The BBC explores the new home of the homeless: cheap motels.

I drop down into Albuquerque, into Joy Junction, which in the red dusk looks like a scene from Steinbeck. There are 300 homeless people staying here, all families.

Jeremy Reynalds, an expat Brit who runs the place, tells me frankly that the mainstay of the place are people with drug, alcohol and domestic violence issues. But as the years of crisis have dragged on, there is a new phenomenon – the homeless middle-class.

Sam Uretsky digs them out, in the Progressive Populist:

The rudiments of macroeconomics date back to Genesis 37: 25-36, the story of Joseph and the Pharaoh, when Joseph increased taxes by collecting grain during the years of plenty and redistributed the grain during the years of famine. Unfortunately, the Republicans under President Bush didn’t build up a surplus, or even maintain a balanced budget, when they had control, but the answer to improving economic conditions remains stimulation through deficit spending, even if the nation’s indebtedness continues to grow. The alternative, cutting spending, will simply cost more jobs and drive the economy further down. President Obama’s role should be to use the bully pulpit to teach economics 101 and explain why bad times are the right time to spend. He didn’t, and walked into the trap.

’nuff said.

Under 400k:

Jobless claims fell by 24,000 to 398,000 in the week ended July 23, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The level of claims was fewer than forecast, as the median estimate of economists in a Bloomberg News survey called for a drop to 415,000. There were no special factors associated with the decrease other than the usual volatility that occurs each year in July, a Labor Department spokesman said.

(snip)

The four-week moving average, a less volatile measure than the weekly figures, fell to 413,750 last week from 422,250.

The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits dropped by 17,000 in the week ended July 16 to 3.7 million.

I’m putting on my “analyst” hat (I’m clearly as qualified as the next guy) and predict the number will be up next week.

If I get it wrong, maybe someone will offer me a job as a forecaster. Getting it wrong seems to be the main qualification.

Foreclosure-based jobs are secure jobs:

Down in Florida – two state Prosecutors – Theresa Edwards and June Clarkson – uncovered rampant foreclosure fraud perpetrated by big banks using robo-signers to kick thousands of families out of their homes illegally. But as the prosecutors were preparing their cases against the banksters – they were inexplicably fired by Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Why? Because, as they allege, they were going after banksters TOO aggressively.

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Via Hanlon.

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From This Modern World.

Facing South parses the “compromise” proposal from the Gang of Six.

“Gang” is right.

Here are some snippets:

Current top marginal income tax rate for the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations: 35%

Lowest rate to which that would be reduced by the Gang of Six proposal: 23%

Estimated amount in profits being held offshore by U.S. companies, which under the plan would see an end to taxation of most of their overseas profits: $1 trillion

Follow the link for the full post and the links to their sources.

I have a pretty low opinion of Ralph Nader.

His best days are far behind him, and his fits of scolding everyone have become tiresome.

Then there’s that enabling George the Worst thing.

But I must admit that he raises a good question in a recent column in the Chicago Trib, to wit (I’m paraphrasing here):

Is it unreasonable to expect corporations, who are more and more extended the rights of individual persons, to act with some level of loyalty to the country that extends them those rights?

Read it.

For all practical purposes, no change:

Applications for jobless benefits increased 10,000 in the week ended July 16 to 418,000, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast 410,000 claims, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The data included about 1,750 additional job cuts due to the Minnesota government shutdown, the agency said.

Aside:

The interviewer spins wheels to get her to commit to concessions.

Of course, if she did so, they would not longer be “concessions.”

They would be the starting point in the next round of talks.

(I nearly wrote “negotiations” instead of “talks,” but there aren’t any “negotiations.” It takes two to “negotiate.” Going limp on the floor and yelling “my way or the highway” in Republican fashion is not “negotiating.”)

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Dana Garrett has a suggestion:

So what Republican and Democratic administrations have in common is that they tend to engage in optional wars, but they don’t want to pay for them through increased tax revenues. They’d rather borrow to pay for these wars regardless of its impact on the national budget.

So instead of a balanced budget amendment, I recommend an amendment to the constitution that requires Congress to raise taxes across the board whenever the nation undertakes a major military endeavor to cover the FULL cost of the military endeavor.

It doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, but it does point out the absurdity of the current budget kabuki in Washington.

Follow the link to read his entire argument.

Philly dot com takes a look at foreclosures in Willingboro, N. J., one of the original Levittowns.

The foreclosure market is still going strong:

The statistics are overwhelming. About two homes a week there were lost last year in sheriff’s sales, the final and most extreme event in a foreclosure. So many people are unable to avoid foreclosure, through mediation or the private sale of their homes, that Willingboro houses accounted for 20 percent of all sheriff’s sales in 2010 in Burlington County.

In 2005, 209 foreclosure actions were filed against homeowners in Willingboro. In 2006, when the crisis hit, the number shot up 34 percent to 281, according to an analysis from American Foreclosures Inc., a firm that collects detailed foreclosure data.

Since 2005, about 2,400 foreclosures have been filed in the township of 12,000 homes, according to the analysis.

I am going to predict that the foreclosure segment of the economy is starting to weaken and that jobs created by the need to process foreclosures may be in jeopardy.

Why? Because I am starting to see commercials on television inviting Joe and Jane Viewer to call this number! or click that website! to learn how they, too, can get in on the foreclosure bonanza and pick up a houses for “as little as $1,000.00!”

I think this is the foreclosure-based economy’s equivalent to all those mailings we used to get from CountryWide and AmeriQuest, inviting us to jump on the mortgage-go-round.

Foreclosure entrepreneurs are running out of a market; they need to drum up new marks.

No doubt this will be followed by shows on cable channels with names like, “Flip This Foreclosure.” Other, lesser cable channels will follow with clones. Viewers by the twos and threes will drive ratings.

After a couple of years, pundits will start to wonder whether there is a “foreclosure bubble” that has become unsustainable.

Other pundits will argue that “God ain’t making no more foreclosures,” so the market for foreclosures should continue to thrive and grow.

And then–well, you know.

Crash.

This time, though, no one will become unemployed and homeless, because everyone who is not a CEO or hedge fund manager already will be living in tent cities and begging at freeway exits.

Coming up:

The emerging new market in tricked-out shopping carts: the latest rage in tent cities.

And a new show on the latest trend to help families make ends meet: Pimp My Bride.