The Guns (and Economy) of August

August 14, 2008

Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:

I’m pleased to offer the following commentary, as prelude to Part II of my essay/book review on our nation’s economic crisis, entitled The End of an Era? Part I appeared on June 17, 2008, and if you are new to the Email list and didn’t receive it, just send me an Email at w.neil@att.net and I’ll zip it out to you, or you can Google the title and my name and that should take you to an online version at ourfuture.org.

I decided to send this piece out now, and not wait until completion of Part II itself, which may take a couple of weeks yet, because of the press of events, economic and military. The fighting in Georgia, and the pending naval blockade of Iran, are addressed at the conclusion.

Much has happened in our economy in these intervening two months, and it is the purpose of my writings to not only review the six books we are considering, which help supply the depth and perspective missing from day-to-day press commentary, but also to try to give you a sense of the ongoing and shifting dynamics.

Making sense of the daily economic news in 2008 is no easy task. There is great volatility in the markets and swings of 200 points or more in opposite directions on consecutive days are not uncommon. The market, the one that according to the dominant paradigm of the old “era” – the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) – is the daily summation of all existing knowledge and data about the state of the economy (“All Knowing” would be the term - if it were not so sacrilegious sounding) – and therefore “knows” better than any one commentator, or “government” certainly – now seems to display all the equilibrium of a Kansas weather front in March.

There is also an underlying psychological struggle going on, that plays out on a number of levels. Some conservatives who have invested the most in what I call a utopian view of free markets, like Larry Kudlow on CNBC, deny the deep structural fault lines underneath our economy’s foundations, and also have resisted, with battle of Stalingrad- like tenacity, the thought that we could be in a recession. His views have the sound of the old Republican optimist/Democratic pessimist debate, and columnist George Will falls into this camp as well, he of “the economic question is settled” for all time view. While it is easy, under EMH, to underestimate the impact of psychology and irrational factors on market behavior, participant outlook and assumptions still play an important part in economic behavior, as George Soros points out in his new book. The danger now is, however, letting national and business inclinations towards cheerful positive thinking override a clear headed analysis of where we stand. There is a reality, folks, buried here underneath all the pop psychology and damage control efforts. That’s what we should be trying to understand.

Turn on your local am right wing radio (630 AM, WMAL in the DC area is the one I endure) and you would never know we had a systemic financial crisis, marking its one year anniversary this very August, a monumental private debt crisis, a vast trade imbalance problem, or a US dollar that has lost 35% of its value against a basket of currencies since February of 2002. You will hear, however, about the high price of gas caused by environmentalists blocking domestic drilling. Why the prolonged period of dramatically higher oil prices – reaching $147 per barrel in futures markets on July 11, has not already induced drilling on existing oil leases has not clearly been explained. Did “the market” lead the oil companies to lease the wrong parcels? How could that happen under EMH? After all, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve stated the high oil/gas price was due to the fundamentals of high demand and straining supply, in that great causation argument between market fundamentals versus oil speculation. However, on the connection between a weak and falling US dollar and high commodity prices, especially oil prices, you won’t hear so much in the mainstream media coverage. You will, though, from Kevin Phillips, Robert Kuttner and George Soros, three of the authors we are reviewing. Now, over the past few weeks, oil prices have fallen 22% to $116 per barrel, and the dollar has risen against the Euro, and the changes are being attributed to the increasing chances for a worldwide economic downturn. That may help ease US gas prices, but it does not bode well for the structural problems in the US economy and the worldwide financial system. Could the fundamentals backing higher oil prices noted by Chairman Bernanke have turned 180 degrees in just a few weeks? Perhaps there was something to George Soros’congressional testimony that we noted in our June 17th essay, that it was both strong demand and a layer of speculation driving oil prices higher. For markets that are supposed to be so “transparent,” they sure are hard to decipher.

Economists are still in disagreement over whether we are in a recession, and the official finding is not in yet. Most agree, based on many consecutive months now of varying degrees of job losses and sub-par growth data, that the economy is at minimum, slowing. What I’ve noted as I mine my daily readings at Bloomberg.com, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times (not quite daily), Asia Times, Counter Punch, The Market Oracle, and other sources, is a toughening of the questions and a very slow drift towards a recognition that some fundamental economic assumptions from the old era are about to be displaced. That’s least true of the Washington Post, Steve Pearlstein’s columns in the Business section excepted. He’s been ahead of the rest of the paper in understanding the depth of what is happening. I took special note of his Friday, August 1, 2008 article “Wave Goodbye to the Invisible Hand,” where he observes that “It’s always risky to call turns in history, but my guess is that this consensus is unraveling…the current era of free-market capitalism seems to be giving way to something else.” (Page D1. My emphasis.)

Even some conservative leaning economist’s like Harvard’s well known Martin Feldstein, who served as an advisor to President Ronald Reagan, and sits on the official “recession designating panel,” have begun to see tough times ahead: “The U.S. may now be in a ‘very long’ recession that will drive the unemployment rate higher, with little that the Federal Reserve can do to help…‘I don’t see recovery’ on the horizon…” (See the article by Kathleen Hays and Timothy R. Homan, July 31, 2008 at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=azUho7KDltW4 .

June was a brutal month for stocks. The Dow was down 10.2% for the month, triggering this headline in a Bloomberg.com article by Michael Patterson on June 26th: “U.S. Stocks Tumble, Sending Dow to Worst June Since Depression.” That’s right; the worst June “since an 18 percent tumble in 1930 during the Great Depression.” On July 2, Reuters reported that “The Dow became the second major U.S. Index to enter a bear market, crossing the critical 20 percent decline from its peak {Oct. 9, 2007}, following the Nasdaq in February.” at http://uk.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUKN0241960520080702). For the whole month of July, the Dow finished up only .25%.

July was also the month that saw a replay of the “end of the week crisis,” the by now familiar weekend overdrive by the Plunge Protection Team. The PPT is The Fed, the Treasury…and the head of the “floundering institution of the moment”….etc..originally set up in 1988 just after the Oct. 1987 Dow crash as the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, but now nicknamed the PPT. There followed a dramatic Sunday announcement of a plan to save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage and housing “hybrid” giants, in trouble because Wall Street had lost confidence in them and their share prices had taken a dramatic plunge during the week of July 7-11th. Rules to prevent “naked shorting” (bets that their stock would continue to decline, without even having to locate shares of their stock, much less enter into a formal contract to place the bet) against them and other selected, sensitive financial targets were imposed – a seeming dramatic departure from the ordinary until, in a not very reassuring assessment of the status-quo, CNBC’s Jim Cramer insisted that this type of shorting always was illegal – it was just never enforced. Oh well, little detail that. But make no mistake about it: the degree of distress for these mortgage giants, their $5 trillion dollar plus holdings, and the fact that their debt is held around the world by many major investing platforms, including extensive holdings by foreign governments, meant that their troubles made headlines even in the Washington Post, and rattled world markets nearly as much as the Bear Stearns crisis in March of this year. The crisis is not over - even with the Congressional bill rushed through to help them in the following week. We’ll have more to say above these institutions in the essay which follows, because their troubles illuminate broader questions about the era we’re leaving – and the uncertain shape of the one we are going to enter, like it or not.

And then on to what truly amazed this writer: the Presidential “undercut” press conference of Tuesday morning, July 15th, just in the wake of the Fannie/Freddie drama. That was exactly when Fed Chairman Bernanke was delivering a somber economic assessment in front of a congressional committee. Since all Fed. Chairmen are under the constant burden of never speaking in a way that would panic the markets, no matter how bad economic reality has become, this was about as candid as it can get. Not quite what you’re going to read below from Martin Weiss, but cold water enough. The White House must have had advance warning of the testimony, because President Bush dashed out to cheer the public up, and do damage control for our flagging national economic spirits. Of course Jon Stewart did not miss the opportunity on his Daily Show, where the point-counterpoint was easily spliced together for our enjoyment – or perhaps bewilderment. Here’s the segment of the July 16th show, courtesy of YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqWJoVUEV1Y . Has a President, sitting or retired, ever done this to a Federal Reserve Chairman? I’ve never seen anything like it. We can only wonder what the foreign investors thought. There was a time in American history when we didn’t have to worry much about what they thought – that time has passed.

Also in the immediate wake of the Fannie/Freddie drama came a long article in the New York Times, revealingly entitled “Uncomfortable Answers to Questions on the Economy” by Peter Goodman (July 19th) at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/business/economy/19econ.html?em&ex=121... . Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard, is quoted as wondering “‘…whether we’re in for a bad couple of years, or a bad decade.’” Alan S. Blinder, who has moved between roles at the Federal Reserve and academe, noted that “‘ I was a relative optimist, but I’ve certainly become more pessimistic…the financial system looks substantially worse now that it did a month ago…’ In one respect…this is like the Great Depression. ‘We haven’t seen this kind of travail in the financial markets since the 1930’s.’” Even the impressively credentialed, prophet-in-the-wilderness Nouriel Roubini, from NYU’s Stern School of Business, has now moved into the mainstream commentary. As this article notes, he saw the sequence of housing bubble, financial crisis and recession more than two years ago, but “was widely dismissed as an attention-seeking Chicken little.” Now he feels the “cost of the financial system’s losses could reach $2 trillion…” which is double the formal amount noted by Charles Morris, one of our authors under review. Roubini’s larger toll comes from his sense that derivatives built upon other forms of debt besides housing are souring fast: credit cards, auto loans, corporate and municipal debt. And I’m finding an increasing number of stories every week in support of this, especially on credit cards and auto loans – and with auto leasing now being thrown in. I’m glad that Professor Roubini is being sought for his insights. George Soros lists him in his “honor roll” of those who saw “it” coming in his New Paradigm for Financial Markets (Page xix), along with Charles Kindleberger, Paul Volker, Bill Rhodes (one of the bright spots at Citibank) and Martin Feldstein. So does Charles Morris in his Trillion Dollar Meltdown.

There is another, deeper structural worry that is surfacing beyond even these two ominous questions from the Times article: “where will the banks raise the huge sums needed to replenish the capital they have apparently lost? And what will happen if they cannot?” Writing in the same July week (July 17th), the respected Economist magazine, as part of a series on the financial crisis, ran an article entitled “End of Illusions.” It concludes by noting that “traders in the credit-default swaps market have recently made bets on the unthinkable: that America may default on its debt.” (My emphasis; at http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11751139 )

Now if it weren’t for the Economist dignifying this line of speculation, I probably wouldn’t be calling your attention to Martin Weiss’ eye-opening “Draft Script for a Fictional Scene, The Last Government Rescue,” which appeared at the Market Oracle (UK) website on August 5th. (at http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article5766.html). His fictional account of a grand and expanded “Plunge Protection Team” meeting, including former Fed Chairman Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan, the head of Fannie Mae and General Motors, incorporates some of the same hard data I’m picking up from my reading: the extremely dire situation at GM, spreading now to the collapse of the auto leasing system, and the foreclosed, gutted house that sold for only $5,000 in Flint Michigan. It ends with Volker’s account of the real life meeting that was held at Camp David in the twilight of the Carter administration, triggered by the inability of the US to sell its long term bonds because of investor worries about runaway inflation. We all know the extraordinarily tough medicine Volker prescribed to wring it out: a dramatic rise in interest rates and the induced, worst recession since the Great Depression. So Volker is here presented as the ultimate symbol of hard truths and great sacrifice: facing up to the depths of the crisis we are staring at. We don’t get a solution in this article, but you, the reader will get a sobering education from the facts in the run-up. Since the Plunge Protection Team meetings are not on the public record, it has to be a fictional account – but my sense is that it brings us closer to the truth then the current offerings of officialdom.

While Paul Volker’s appearance above in “The Last Government Rescue” is symbolic of a “reckoning time” time for the U.S. financial system, it is also a good reminder that another one of our nation’s most knowledgeable economic commentators has also returned to the scene of the disaster – William Greider. Among his many books was one which made Paul Volker a central figure – Secrets of the Temple (1987), although I’m pretty sure Bill is hoping for a far more progressive and less bloody solution to contemporary troubles than the one Chairman Volker imposed to cure inflation. It’s not that Bill had entirely disappeared from his commentary role in The Nation magazine. It’s rather that he’s had two recent, insightful pieces which tell me that he now sees our situation as far graver than the previous periodic crises that have punctuated the past quarter-century.

In “Wall Street’s Great Deflation,” (July 14 at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/336722/ ) and “Economic Free Fall?” (July 30 at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080818/greider ) he worries that what is left of our democracy, and the citizen’s role in shaping the economy’s rules will suffer even further erosions as the Fed’s new powers of crisis management and supervision recede ever deeper into the shadowy realm he describes in “Secrets of the Temple.” The Fed is gaining oversight – but the public doesn’t get the daylight – for two of our most troubling and secretive financial entities: private equity firms and hedge funds. What is the public gaining in return for backing the failing financial system with our tax dollars? He is calling for Washington to acknowledge “to the general public the depth of the national crisis and the need for more dramatic interventions” especially ones to help “the real economy” and announcing that “US policy-makers and politicians are putting us at risk of historic deflationary forces that, once they take hold, are very difficult to reverse.”

Bill Greider is not exaggerating. On August 13th, Bloomberg.com’s Jeff Kearns and Bradley Keoun report that Merrill Lynch & Co’s chief investment strategist Richard Bernstein has said that “the credit crisis is ‘broad, deep and global,’ and ‘far from over’ for financial companies even after they reported $500 billion in writedowns and credit losses.” Bernstein goes on to say that “ ‘investors are significantly underestimating both the scope and the extent of the credit bubble and the consequences of its subsequent deflation…the problems are not confined to large institutions that are overexposed to U.S. subprime loans…’” See “credit Crisis Still ‘Far From Over…’ at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a19eCTOBf_MM .

Now I’m pleased to share with you, at Bill Greider’s request, the good news that he is busy working on a book to be called Come Home America, due out in February of 2009. It will be about “the historic predicament of our country.”

And quite a predicament it is. In his article “Wall Street’s Great Deflation” Bill urges people to “to get angry - really, really angry -- and take it out on both parties. What the country needs right now is a few more politicians in Washington with the guts to stand up and tell us the hard truth about our situation. It will be painful to hear. They will be denounced as ‘whiners.’ But truth might be our only way out.”

Well, that was written before the dramatic outbreak of fighting between Russia and Georgia burst upon our drowsy August scene. And before the alleged embarkation of a large American, British and French naval armada, headed for the Persian Gulf, after conducting a training exercise in the Atlantic named, right out of the Old Testament (and echoes of Kevin Phillips take in “American Theocracy”) – operation “Brimstone.” Are they sailing to merely bluff, or actually impose the naval blockade upon Iran implied in House Resolution 362? What’s that you say, you haven’t heard about the 35 or so US ships on the way? Naval Blockade of Iran? How did we get from the National Intelligence finding of no Iranian nuclear bomb program in November of 2007 to throwing up a blockade? Are we missing some big official announcement, a new “finding”? You didn’t read a word about it in the NY Times or heaven forbid, the Washington Post? Neither did I. Truth is not an easy thing to come by these days in foreign policy. Or in economic matters. As Kevin Phillips says in the very first sentence of his Preface to Bad Money, “the most worrisome thing about the vulnerability of the U.S. economy circa 2008 is the extent of official understatement and misstatement – the preference for minimizing how many problems there are and how interconnected they are.” And how imperial illusions, hubris and over-reach in foreign policy can affect what is already a very shaky economic situation.

In pursuit of what is really going on in the Georgian crisis I went first to Professor Stephen F. Cohen, who teaches Russian politics at Princeton University. His essay at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Russia/New_Cold_War_Russia.html will give you the background that you won’t find in the regular press. A shorter piece with similar themes is online at The Nation here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/cohen.

When I went looking for even more information on the Georgia crisis, I ended up at new site (for me), called DEBKAfile, based in Jerusalem, which specializes in military and diplomatic matters, and more, which I’ll spare you. That is where I first learned about “Brimstone” and the armada of US ships sailing for the Persian Gulf – not from my own government, nor our own “flagship” press. Here’s the article I first saw at http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=5499. Since I can’t vouch 100% for this site, you’ll have to form your own judgements about the naval activity.

And this is where I also learned about the Israeli government’s own investments and activities in Georgia, formal and informal, at http://debka.com/article.php?aid=1358 . Since no one else seems to have the inclination to write about it, I can’t do my usual information “arbitrage” on its validity. So, again, judge for yourself.

But I will say this, since I am primarily writing about the economic crisis, and currently reading Charles P. Kindleberger’s seminal book, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. He writes about the impact of large external events – “displacements” is the term he uses, “…an outside event or shock that changes horizons, expectations, anticipated profit opportunities, behavior…a surge in the oil price is a displacement. An unanticipated devaluation is another displacement…War is a major displacement.”

I have raised these themes in my review of Kevin Phillips’ Bad Money (“What Market Utopians Have Wrought” sent out to you May 13, 2008 If you missed it you can find it online in several places by just Googling my name and the title.) Phillips was worried about the brutal, hard-ball politics involved in the geo-politics of oil. That is an important part of the Georgian story, even if the U.S. does not like to admit it. It isn’t the only factor, though, by any means, as Professor Cohen ably demonstrates. Interestingly, the Georgian crisis, despite the “era changing” spin given in mainstream coverage, has not yet affected oil prices and world markets, - they were both headed down before events broke. But, as I warned at the conclusion of my Phillips’book review, an attack on Iran, either by the US or Israel, or a blockade drama reminiscent of October, 1962, will send the price of oil into the $200 per barrel range – some say higher. With the world economy suddenly now turning down, the financial crisis still unfolding, the US financial system and indeed the international one we are deeply connected to is not likely to be able to withstand such a “displacement.” Not under current circumstances. And if we are headed to a naval blockade of Iran for the reasons outlined in the DEBKAfile article, then that may be enough in itself to send the financial system reeling.

It’s my sense terrible miscalculations have been made already in the Georgian crisis by their President Mikheil Saakashvili. Who else made them is an open question, and even the question of who struck first and why is not settled: witness the dispute between Washington Post editorials and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Op-Ed there of August 12. Whatever the motivations of those planning a naval blockade of Iran – and the commentary out there says they span a wide range from provoking an “incident” – to trying to prevent Iran’s nuclear development, real or imagined – the odds of a terrible miscalculation are high. They do invoke Barbara Tuchman’s famous book The Guns of August.

Good luck to us all.

Until the longer essay….

Bill Neil
Rockville, MD

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future