Somebody posted that Buffett and Munger are selling the idea that - "The financial crisis was caused by over bullishness on real estate by EVERYBODY. Financial reform cannot prevent bubbles but can regulate over leverage." They also said" Envy is a bigger mischief than greed as the key contributor to the crisis".
That's a sad rationalization by multi-billionaires to blame the great recession on EVERYBODY. Sure, lots of middle- and working-class people made bad decisions with regard to credit, but make no mistake: the crisis was caused by the $1 trillion cash hoard of the Chinese and Saudis (mostly) looking for return in an environment where it had mostly drained out of the market. The Gang of 13 dreamed up the CDO market as a way to produce respectable and apparently sustainable return (HA!) and from there they were off to the races. A SMALL NUMBER of people were playing a high stakes game where anybody with any brains knew that when the music stopped, the thing was going to cave in. But it didn’t matter – the iBankers and market makers were pulling eight- and nine-figure bonuses and the Hedge funder were pulling 10-figure dividends. It was the natural order of things, right?
EXCEPT, we now have a business environment in which everyone is undercapitalized, the way they were making easy money in the aughts – when corporate profits grew at unprecedented rates – wasn’t because of return on assets, it was because of return on floating their cash flow! Now the F1000 looks like a bunch of zombie addicts who can’t get their fix. Look at John Hagel’s last work for the Edge Center with Deloitte. He’s no Marxist; he says the trend is that ROA for the F1000 is trending to 0 by 2020! What does that mean? It means that businesses were so hooked on making money with MONEY that they forgot how to make money exchanging valuable goods and services.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Monday, October 12, 2009
Regarding Paul Krugman's October 12, 2009 column:
Professor Krugman must address the fact that the US implicit fiscal policy remains High Supply Side-ism. All fiscal structures are still rigged to channel wealth to where G~d and providence deign it to go -- into the hands of the top one percent. Nothing has changed in this equation, and yet it can be shown empirically that if you give the top one percent a $1.3 trillion tax break sop, they create market conditions that destroy somewhere from $4 to $10 trillion. This we now know, but if Congress were presented with the same plan tomorrow, I'd wager the same would do the same. No amount of debate around the margins on the impact of monetary policy will have any impact as long as the fiscal policy is -- implicitly, never explicitly -- set in this way.
Professor Krugman must address the fact that the US implicit fiscal policy remains High Supply Side-ism. All fiscal structures are still rigged to channel wealth to where G~d and providence deign it to go -- into the hands of the top one percent. Nothing has changed in this equation, and yet it can be shown empirically that if you give the top one percent a $1.3 trillion tax break sop, they create market conditions that destroy somewhere from $4 to $10 trillion. This we now know, but if Congress were presented with the same plan tomorrow, I'd wager the same would do the same. No amount of debate around the margins on the impact of monetary policy will have any impact as long as the fiscal policy is -- implicitly, never explicitly -- set in this way.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
In response to Paul Krugman's latest blog entry:
Corporate America is hooked -- badly -- on the globalization of labor markets. It's gutting its domestic workforce by offshoring what it can. More significantly, it's gutting the goodwill and marginal capacity to invest in the greater good exhibited by its workforce -- "workplace engagement" as measured by Gallup has plunged unprecedentedly over the past 24 months. The resulting zombie corporations are following the lead of the financial services companies, serving.mainly as hollow shells to be bailed out. This seems to be the abiding strategy in much of corporate America. I think this spells a much harder crash looming -- consumer spending will depress another 10 percent, dragging the fragile CRE market down with it. This facilitates another credit seizure, at which point the Chinese central bank asserts "Who's your daddy?" The corporatist right will then use this to provoke war rhetoric against the Chinese, as the prevailing historical model is that "we need a war to pull us out of this" echos from the first half of the 20th century
I can't envision any virtuous upward spiral that prevent this. What Professor Krugman failed to note in his magazine opus from a few weeks back is the utter lack of an explicit Fiscal policy in the US, and that the implicit strategy remains Supply Side-ism. The economy remains bent on redistributing all wealth upward, and that program is running quite well, thank you. The Rightist principle of gutting the middle class will achieve some sort of denouement, and the private domestic militias that the right has been fomenting will be ready t mop up the opposition. At that point, we finally will have achieved the wet dream of all extant demon spawn of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand -- the Banana Republic of America.
Corporate America is hooked -- badly -- on the globalization of labor markets. It's gutting its domestic workforce by offshoring what it can. More significantly, it's gutting the goodwill and marginal capacity to invest in the greater good exhibited by its workforce -- "workplace engagement" as measured by Gallup has plunged unprecedentedly over the past 24 months. The resulting zombie corporations are following the lead of the financial services companies, serving.mainly as hollow shells to be bailed out. This seems to be the abiding strategy in much of corporate America. I think this spells a much harder crash looming -- consumer spending will depress another 10 percent, dragging the fragile CRE market down with it. This facilitates another credit seizure, at which point the Chinese central bank asserts "Who's your daddy?" The corporatist right will then use this to provoke war rhetoric against the Chinese, as the prevailing historical model is that "we need a war to pull us out of this" echos from the first half of the 20th century
I can't envision any virtuous upward spiral that prevent this. What Professor Krugman failed to note in his magazine opus from a few weeks back is the utter lack of an explicit Fiscal policy in the US, and that the implicit strategy remains Supply Side-ism. The economy remains bent on redistributing all wealth upward, and that program is running quite well, thank you. The Rightist principle of gutting the middle class will achieve some sort of denouement, and the private domestic militias that the right has been fomenting will be ready t mop up the opposition. At that point, we finally will have achieved the wet dream of all extant demon spawn of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand -- the Banana Republic of America.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Re: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23iht-edcohen.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print
Does it ever occur to people like Cohen that the Bush administration's response to 9/11 wasn't really a frantic lashing about to deal with an incalculably frightening and disheartening event? Within weeks after the event, the Patriot Act sprung from the drawer of a Justice Department attorney intact -- a complete architecture for undermining civil rights in an era of unending war and indeterminable threat. No, that was an act of calm prepossession, as if the events that apparently made it necessary were somehow preordained, if not necessarily prescribed.
Does Cohen and his cadre ever wonder why the Bush administration moved so swiftly and readily toward a usurpation of power -- the consolidation of control into the "unitary executive" branch? Again, the swiftness and sureness of these OVP-led actions betrays not a sudden fright -- a search for answers though the midst of dark nights of the soul -- but rather the execution of a thoroughly reviewed and vetted strategy -- one just waiting for the right event to precipitate its execution.
Does the wise man like Roger Cohen consider that the company the Dick Cheney lead before "reentering public service" was so completely prepared to operate as the outsourced provider for military services -- that its capacity was an almost hand-to-glove fit for the military operations deployed in the Middle East? Was this the sudden and striking response to a global crisis comparable to that executed by the US during World War II? Or was it evidence that Cheney and Rumsfeld and their minions had been preparing these plans for over a decade -- again with precision and refinement, and executed with the calm resolve of a weekend corporate golf outing?
Does Cohen wonder how a large component of the real horror of the abuses of Abu Ghraib were conducted by a band of privateers, indemnified from accountability by the administration? Could it be the case that 9/111 galvanized this posse of "broad shouldered" men to disrupt the military chain of command sufficiently to remove all accountability except for the few "bad apples" captured on cell phone cameras? These patriots doing the dirty work of democracy -- for $1250 an hours billed by CACI, Inc. of Reston, VA. Was this the panicked and irresolute action of a nation swaying as it developed a response to an unseen, incalculable horror? Or was it further proof of a monstrous architecture, lovingly conceived and hatched inside right-wing think tanks through the Clinton era -- as the BJ kabuki played to its sad denouement?
Cohen's intellectual fraud in this piece is that he conflates the "torture issue" with all the wrongs committed by BushCo during its reign. In his construction, by facing some of the ugly facts of one tiny side note of the most monstrous strategic miscalculation in the republic's history, then somehow we can claim to have had our collective "accountability moment" and move on. But the failure to expose and recognize the fact that the Bush administration's activities were clearly NOT those of a flailing and reactive group, but were instead marched out in order as off a giant GANTT chart on a wall in the White House sub-basement. that is the real danger that this post recognizes and which the commentary amplifies. Lots of people (Richard Clarke, Ron Susskind, Naomi Klein, et alia) have demonstrated that the Bush administration's actions were clearly preordained and predetermined to a frightening degree. Cheney sought establishment of unitary executive. He and Rumsfeld executed a well-established plan for privatizing the military. The frightening pictures from Abu Ghraib were a distraction from the fact that private companies were doing most of the torture! Did that thought only occur in a post-9/11 environment? Given what we know now, it's impossible to think that it wasn't pre-ordained.
Does it ever occur to people like Cohen that the Bush administration's response to 9/11 wasn't really a frantic lashing about to deal with an incalculably frightening and disheartening event? Within weeks after the event, the Patriot Act sprung from the drawer of a Justice Department attorney intact -- a complete architecture for undermining civil rights in an era of unending war and indeterminable threat. No, that was an act of calm prepossession, as if the events that apparently made it necessary were somehow preordained, if not necessarily prescribed.
Does Cohen and his cadre ever wonder why the Bush administration moved so swiftly and readily toward a usurpation of power -- the consolidation of control into the "unitary executive" branch? Again, the swiftness and sureness of these OVP-led actions betrays not a sudden fright -- a search for answers though the midst of dark nights of the soul -- but rather the execution of a thoroughly reviewed and vetted strategy -- one just waiting for the right event to precipitate its execution.
Does the wise man like Roger Cohen consider that the company the Dick Cheney lead before "reentering public service" was so completely prepared to operate as the outsourced provider for military services -- that its capacity was an almost hand-to-glove fit for the military operations deployed in the Middle East? Was this the sudden and striking response to a global crisis comparable to that executed by the US during World War II? Or was it evidence that Cheney and Rumsfeld and their minions had been preparing these plans for over a decade -- again with precision and refinement, and executed with the calm resolve of a weekend corporate golf outing?
Does Cohen wonder how a large component of the real horror of the abuses of Abu Ghraib were conducted by a band of privateers, indemnified from accountability by the administration? Could it be the case that 9/111 galvanized this posse of "broad shouldered" men to disrupt the military chain of command sufficiently to remove all accountability except for the few "bad apples" captured on cell phone cameras? These patriots doing the dirty work of democracy -- for $1250 an hours billed by CACI, Inc. of Reston, VA. Was this the panicked and irresolute action of a nation swaying as it developed a response to an unseen, incalculable horror? Or was it further proof of a monstrous architecture, lovingly conceived and hatched inside right-wing think tanks through the Clinton era -- as the BJ kabuki played to its sad denouement?
Cohen's intellectual fraud in this piece is that he conflates the "torture issue" with all the wrongs committed by BushCo during its reign. In his construction, by facing some of the ugly facts of one tiny side note of the most monstrous strategic miscalculation in the republic's history, then somehow we can claim to have had our collective "accountability moment" and move on. But the failure to expose and recognize the fact that the Bush administration's activities were clearly NOT those of a flailing and reactive group, but were instead marched out in order as off a giant GANTT chart on a wall in the White House sub-basement. that is the real danger that this post recognizes and which the commentary amplifies. Lots of people (Richard Clarke, Ron Susskind, Naomi Klein, et alia) have demonstrated that the Bush administration's actions were clearly preordained and predetermined to a frightening degree. Cheney sought establishment of unitary executive. He and Rumsfeld executed a well-established plan for privatizing the military. The frightening pictures from Abu Ghraib were a distraction from the fact that private companies were doing most of the torture! Did that thought only occur in a post-9/11 environment? Given what we know now, it's impossible to think that it wasn't pre-ordained.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The New Thesis, take 1
The corporate media has decided that the downturn is the fault of all the evil working and middle class people who were part of an evil conspiracy to take out bank loans and credit lines they could never afford to pay back. It's YOUR FAULT PEOPLE is the message I see seeping from the corporate media I catch out of the corner of my eye.
I have another perspective. Corporate America has pursued a set of catastrophically destructive strategies since the beginning of the new millennium. Some would say twas ere so, but the cost removal policies that drove the outsourcing boom, the establishment of law and legal concerns as the primary skill set for the executive class, and the strategy of making money by floating cashflow and other financial engineering tactics have left most businesses merely hollowed out shells. Now that the opportunity to make money with money has dried up, corporate America can now be characterized as a metastatic body committed to strategies that have no connection to combining capital, labor, and other infrastructure into products and services that are demanded now, and into the future. They are still looking for ways to make money by floating cashflow into the giant Ponzi system that the Ibanks and insurance companies had devised, and are hunkering down to generate income by suing. This is what they have left.
The Dow is down, and will continue to sink, becuase the future cash flows of these reckless, smoldering hulks will continue to sink. Big business largely divorced itself from its underlying productive capacities, and as a result will flounder in a new environment that is diametrically opposite to what it is set up to achieve. Companies with lawyers as their CEO will continue to crash and burn. Companies who elevated financial engineers to key spots will shrink into oblivion.
The corporate media has decided that the downturn is the fault of all the evil working and middle class people who were part of an evil conspiracy to take out bank loans and credit lines they could never afford to pay back. It's YOUR FAULT PEOPLE is the message I see seeping from the corporate media I catch out of the corner of my eye.
I have another perspective. Corporate America has pursued a set of catastrophically destructive strategies since the beginning of the new millennium. Some would say twas ere so, but the cost removal policies that drove the outsourcing boom, the establishment of law and legal concerns as the primary skill set for the executive class, and the strategy of making money by floating cashflow and other financial engineering tactics have left most businesses merely hollowed out shells. Now that the opportunity to make money with money has dried up, corporate America can now be characterized as a metastatic body committed to strategies that have no connection to combining capital, labor, and other infrastructure into products and services that are demanded now, and into the future. They are still looking for ways to make money by floating cashflow into the giant Ponzi system that the Ibanks and insurance companies had devised, and are hunkering down to generate income by suing. This is what they have left.
The Dow is down, and will continue to sink, becuase the future cash flows of these reckless, smoldering hulks will continue to sink. Big business largely divorced itself from its underlying productive capacities, and as a result will flounder in a new environment that is diametrically opposite to what it is set up to achieve. Companies with lawyers as their CEO will continue to crash and burn. Companies who elevated financial engineers to key spots will shrink into oblivion.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
That Prince of Foods
"...Bruce Fowler on trombone, Napoleon Murphy Brock on tenor sax and lead vocals, Terry Bozzio on drums, Tom Fowler ob bass, Denny Walley on slide, George Duke on keyboards, Captain Beefheart on vocals and soprano sax and madness. Thank you very much for coming to the concert tonight, hope you enjoyed it. Goodnight Austin Texas wherever you are!"
I llistened to this song for the nth thousand time at the gym yesterday. No matter how many times I hear it, I always want to match the energy and intensity screaming through. FZ and the band were on that night at the Armadillo World Headquarters in May 1975. Wow. The Flyers were playing the Sabres on their way to their second Stanley Cup. I was in 8th grade at St. Barnies. It's sometimes interesting to go back in time to think about what you were doing in your life when a live recording was made.
Muffin Man is really tow songs, I think. The spoken-word studio intro, with the processed piano and kazoo, and the live section; essentially the with same phrase repeated twice, and then the solo.javascript:void(0)
I think Zappa once said that he always played the same solo. In his Project/Object universe that's probably totally valid. Having listed to a lot of his work, there's certainly a lot of resonance among his soloes. But this one benefits from Bozzio's muscular drumming underneath--Terry Ted's work throughout that Bongo Fury record is a pretty singular statement in rock drumming. To the extend that it drove FZ's wailing, cutting, smashing solo on that song again validates Zappa's belief in teh importance of the accuracy and discipline fo the drummer as being the key to playing his music correctly.
"...Bruce Fowler on trombone, Napoleon Murphy Brock on tenor sax and lead vocals, Terry Bozzio on drums, Tom Fowler ob bass, Denny Walley on slide, George Duke on keyboards, Captain Beefheart on vocals and soprano sax and madness. Thank you very much for coming to the concert tonight, hope you enjoyed it. Goodnight Austin Texas wherever you are!"
I llistened to this song for the nth thousand time at the gym yesterday. No matter how many times I hear it, I always want to match the energy and intensity screaming through. FZ and the band were on that night at the Armadillo World Headquarters in May 1975. Wow. The Flyers were playing the Sabres on their way to their second Stanley Cup. I was in 8th grade at St. Barnies. It's sometimes interesting to go back in time to think about what you were doing in your life when a live recording was made.
Muffin Man is really tow songs, I think. The spoken-word studio intro, with the processed piano and kazoo, and the live section; essentially the with same phrase repeated twice, and then the solo.javascript:void(0)
I think Zappa once said that he always played the same solo. In his Project/Object universe that's probably totally valid. Having listed to a lot of his work, there's certainly a lot of resonance among his soloes. But this one benefits from Bozzio's muscular drumming underneath--Terry Ted's work throughout that Bongo Fury record is a pretty singular statement in rock drumming. To the extend that it drove FZ's wailing, cutting, smashing solo on that song again validates Zappa's belief in teh importance of the accuracy and discipline fo the drummer as being the key to playing his music correctly.
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