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The Escape From
Delusional Economics
& the Catastrophic Failure of Magical Thinking
By
Jay B Gaskill
Attorney at Law
Rise of the Swift Adaptive Traders
During every period of systemic economic dysfunction (noting that those unsustainable bubbles masquerading as booms were every bit as dysfunctional as the current super-recession), we can follow the patterns of the clever few who manage to prosper in spite of it all. These belong to that small group of Swift Adaptive Traders (I’ll be calling them SATs). These are the traders who have learned how to make money by staying ahead of the curve. SATs can prosper in a downturn in much the same way that a sailor can make forward progress against a headwind by tacking. As sailors have learned, going almost “the wrong way” into the wind can produce gains.
But is it magic?
Anything can be bundled into an asset package and anything can be traded. For example, derivatives are contractual arrangements between investors that act as risk insurance, essentially as a bet between players on the future of a fluctuating asset. Derivatives can be traded, and asset bundles containing derivatives can be traded.
In any major market decline where asset prices fall across
the spectrum, some investors will gain against the grain because of
derivatives. All complex and rapidly
changing markets open up buy-hold-sell opportunities for those SATs who can
move quickly enough. but,
just as a stage magician does not violate the laws of physics, an
Enter the Hedge Funds. These are carefully assembled asset packages (often including derivatives) that operate by mixing asset classes, one group of which is likely to go down in the same scenario wherein others will tend to go up. When actively tweaked by SATs, hedge funds can do very well, indeed, but not uniformly. Hence the robust market in Wall Street antacids.
There are two takeaway points here:
FIRST: For any competent individual player, the SATs have a winning approach. But, like any movie stunt with the on-screen
warning, “Don’t try this at home”, the same tricks, writ large, do not work for
a majority of investors. This is true
because most of the
SECOND.
The project of original wealth generation has always been the task of the core commercial enterprises.
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The Care and feeding of Core Commercial
Enterprises
The core commercial enterprises are the ones that you cannot imagine any self-sustaining civilization operating without, in the same sense that we can’t imagine our basic animal existence without food, oxygen, water and shelter. Core enterprises generate wealth through the invention, production and exchange of goods and services for which human need, greed and preferences have generated a strong, persistent demand.
These enterprises include agriculture/food production, food
storage, energy production, transportation, the communication networks and
technologies, the manufacturing activities needed to sustain the foregoing, the
creative generation and marketing of intellectual property, and, yes, even the
luxury products and services that drive incentives to make wealth.
What I’ve just described are the aboriginal elements of any real economy, the earth, air, fire and water, if you will, that make up the periodic table of the elements in the great catalog of essential wealth.
The Necessary Support
Systems
A working and reliable financial system is essential to facilitate the various markets in these core enterprises, and to provide a stable but fluid investment platform for new enterprises. However, if you take away the core wealth, the finance system amounts to a system of shuffling cards in a game with no stakes.
Leave it to postmodern politicians to confuse transfers of wealth with its origination!
Of course there are many other support functions, services and technologies, all of which are essential to the operation of the overall goods aan services exchange system, but they are not sufficient individually or collectively by themselves to sustain a civilization itself. Think, for example, of the transportation web for goods and services, but without the goods and services.
Few countries contain all of the elements of the core
commercial enterprises. Therefore all
but the most self-sufficient nations trade internationally or die. The
[][][]
The Free Money Delusion
For the last half century, the
most dangerous and persistent copycat reasoning of the political class was
something like – “If an
The political elites that have driven American fiscal policy for the last fifty years acted as though magic was at work.
I am reminded of the Cargo Cult in post WWII New Guinea: Those simple souls built faux airports and control towers from bamboo, hoping vainly that the giant metal birds carrying wonderful cargo would return to bring back prosperity.
The multi-trillion
dollar deficits of the current economic train wreck are the 21st
century political equivalent of a Cargo Cult.
THE SEDUCTION OF MAGICAL THINKING
What was the appeal of this magic? Two circumstances fed the political delusion:
That Wall Street Celebrity Intoxication
Some celebrity Wall Street players have entangled themselves in politics in order to gain sufficient influence to mitigate harmful legislation. They have mingled with politicians of the left, in many cases exploiting their educational links with the intelligentsia of the left. And the most susceptible members of the political class have swooned.
For the political class, Wall Street was not just another interest group to be courted and pampered; it was a power center to be cultivated. The interpenetration of the interests and concerns of the main Wall Street players and those who managed union and public sector pension funds has sealed the deal: Wall Street mavens have gone from the malefactors of great wealth that Teddy Roosevelt maligned, to valued political allies. To be fair, the investor class is hardly monolithic, but key figures within that larger group have become trusted policy advisors and, privately, a major source of campaign funds for leading political figures in both parties. All this took place while members of the political class remained blithely ignorant about how real wealth is created and maintained.
Guru Intoxication: Keynes as Shaman and Drug Dealer
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was the famous British economist who advanced the provocative notion that governments could and should smooth out the business cycle by manipulating the supply of money. This was to be accomplished by creating new currency (easy enough to do since every modern government has gone off the gold standard), and by directly spending it. Or by creating new money and lending it out at zero interest or by borrowing money against a promised prosperity in the future, and by directly spending it. Of course when countries play the borrowing game they create “sovereign debt”. They tend to collaterize these loans with the promise that the sovereign will use its taxing power -or fiat money creation power as a last resort. How is that working out?
Reality check: Ultimately, all sovereigns must pay the borrowed money back, not because their debtors can sue them but because when their credit-worthiness falls into question, only fools will lend them more. Note here that the Chinese are not fools.
KEYNES WAS NO MAGICIAN
Here is a short
description of Keynes’ theory, excerpted from the “Concise Encyclopedia of
Economics” -- available on the web “Library of Economics and
“Keynes’s General Theory revolutionized the way economists think about economics. It… introduced the notion of aggregate demand as the sum of consumption, investment, and government spending; and … that full employment could be maintained only with the help of government spending…Why shouldn’t government, thought Keynes, fill the shoes of business by investing in public works and hiring the unemployed? The General Theory advocated deficit spending during economic downturns to maintain full employment.”
The most foolish thing Keynes ever advocated (and – to be fair - later partly retracted) was his example that full employment can be attained by burying money and employing people to dig it up.
“If the Treasury were to fill old
bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines
which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to
private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes
up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course by tendering for leases
of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and with the
help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital
wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.” The
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
(1935).
To his credit, Keynes, in his later years came to the view that the deficits run in lean times were to be made up by surpluses in the fat ones, and he even agreed that tax cuts might be as effective as direct government spending in boosting economic activity.
The magical thinking of the political class here becomes evident once you factor in a realistic understanding of wealth-creation: Currency manipulation works as a real “stimulus” only to the extent that core commercial enterprises are positively affected. This is why, in part, the so called “stimulus bill” has produced disappointing results. Modern political machines tend to buy votes from key constituencies, if possible without taxing or alienating other key constituencies. The worship of Keynes-as-Guru provided cover for these politicians to use faux money and irresponsible fiscal behavior to please everyone. Keynes would not have approved, but the invocation of his name worked in much the same way as a corrupt or misguided physician (playing the Keynes role) who tells a drug addict, “don’t worry, heroin is fine for you right now.”
THE GREAT RISK
Once the sovereign debt/deficit addiction took hold inside
the Beltway, constituencies and feedback loops formed to keep it going. This process is the perfect economic analog
to a narcotics addition. The next major crash may be the equivalent of an
addict hitting bottom. But when an entire country hits bottom, the results are
very ugly. This is a good time to review
the history of
Keynesian economic theory is a spectacular 21st century failure due to the operation of three factors, all of which have been recently demonstrated in the laboratory of real world experience:
(1) The utter lack of discipline of popular democracies, whose politicians are ever seduced by the promise of a free fiscal lunch;
(2) the profound impact of the world economy, the monetary effects of which are fully capable of swamping local currency and money supply policies, and;
(3) The complete incompetence of government bureaucracies when it comes to the creation of wealth-generating enterprises.
The edifice of Keynesian-derived policy among the Western democracies has been discredited. That which remains should be cautiously implemented by clear eyed economists and political leaders who have undergone reality therapy.
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The Grand Delusion:
Phantom Gold, Hollow Bubbles
There is one inexorable law of economics, one that towers over all the rest, the rule that no ruler has the power to repeal: the law of supply and demand.
No asset is worth more than what a real purchaser is willing and able to pay for it. A glut of supply will drive down prices for any fixed asset class and a surge of demand will drive up prices, increasing pressure to augment supply, whenever that is feasible.
Ironically, the supply/demand law is the single most ignored
economic principle among politicians of the leftish persuasion. Two blatant signs of magical thinking inside
the Beltway and at
1. In the face of a
credit and banking collapse, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others led the charge to dump a huge ($.8
tr.) dose of deficit-financed (i.e., borrowed) money into the economy to spur
demand, apparently on the bizarre theory that supply will magically materialize
and lift production. But supply is
mostly imported from
2. The whole
emergency stimulus spending scheme was predicated on the existence of stores of
sovereign and private loan collateral (noting that the Chinese
are not fools). And the movers and
shakers behind the effort pretended (or delusionally believed) that there was
far more collateral than there really was.
This whole effort was done in concert with the quixotic employment of
borrowed funds to artificially prop up the ratio of US collateral to
In the present moment, the real estate collateral scam has
failed, and the fiscal hollowness of the American situation is nakedly exposed
for all to see. We can take some small
comfort in the fact that
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Monetary Policy: Inflation, Deflation
& the Illusion of Control
“Monetary” Keynesians have been appointed and
reappointed to the Federal Reserve bureaucracy for decades. The distinction between fiscal and monetary actions
to affect the
It should tell us
something that the fed has kept the interest rates (its primary economic tool)
as close to zero % as in any time in memory.
This means that the fed retains little, if any power – except via
blatant currency creation – to augment the effective money supply in the
current economy.
So why not
just print more money?
The lack of
discipline in
Bernanke’s reluctance is well founded. Any significant increase in the raw money
supply without an increase in the supply of goods and services will create
inflation, quite possibly catastrophic hyper-inflation. History provides us with a long list of bad
examples -
The fed is also
appropriately worried about deflation, a protracted collapse of incomes that
depresses demand that tends to paralyze new investment. But when the deflation is limited to a single
asset class, such as the
The notion, recently
advanced, that the decline in the value of “perceived home equity” is
depressing consumer spending” invites us into a trap. For the reasons I outline below, we have run
the course of a consumption driven economy.
We can no longer rely on consumer demand to fuel a recovery. This will require up to transition back to a
production economy, something more like the
Chairman Bernanke has hinted in his recent comments that all is not
well with the
[][][]
BUT CAN WE BREAK OUT OF THIS?
Yes.
Yet every day that
our policy makers operate in a fantasy construct will make the necessary steps
more difficult to take. We may not be
able to withstand one more bubble and one more crash – especially if the bubble
is sovereign debt and the crash is the collapse of our currency.
To see your way out
of a deep pit, the perspective of altitude, distance and time is helpful. Let’s rise above the whole mess for a moment
and take the long perspective. This is
what we can see:
For decades the
Over roughly the same period,
post-communist
Neither model is sustainable
for much longer.
The
The Chinese will or will not
work to accomplish that in time. They
certainly cannot be expected to take steps solely in order to benefit the
USA. For this and a host of other
reasons, we need to extricate ourselves from the position of China’s principal
debtor as soon as possible.
[][][]
LAUNCHING AN AMERICAN TIGER ECONOMY
It
can be done. But the project requires competent and realistic leadership and a
critical mass of the members of political class, all persuaded to make the
necessary structural changes.
Our
breakout into sustained growth and prosperity – effectively launching an American
tiger economy – will depend on recreating an environment in which core
commercial enterprises can once again flourish here. The broad outlines of the necessary US
economic transition from debt-dependent consumption economy to an
investment-driven one can be summarized here in five bullet points.
·
US government spending must be brought into line with actual income,
leaving an annual surplus to apply to the staggering sovereign debt. This must be done as quickly as practicable.
·
US government taxation and spending must be reconfigured to reduce the
economic burdens on our core commercial enterprises, and to avoid all
unnecessary spending that does not directly or indirectly benefit those core
enterprises.
·
The US government must refrain hereafter from picking economic winners
and losers, whether by subsidizing preferred winners or bailing out favorite
losers.
·
The entire taxation and regulatory bureaucracy in this country must be overhauled
to attract and facilitate the inflow of business capital, and to enhance the
security and stability of long term investments in profitable enterprises,
particularly those in the core group.
·
US policy should be sharply and comprehensively concentrated on
regenerating a production-driven economy.
The days when we could borrow and buy our way back into prosperity are
over.
Every
crisis is an opportunity. Trillions of
dollars of private capital are parked around the world, waiting for the world’s
next profit and growth center to open up.
The way out of our current predicament is to become that center.
My
argument will be more fully developed in a coming article, called “Breakout”.
Among
all the developed countries in the world, the USA still holds the key to the
next major economic development of the 21st century. China and India are poised to launch
themselves into the 1950’s. Western
Europe may be able to reboot itself into a more solvent version of the 1990’s.
But
we have the capacity, the economic culture and infrastructure to
launch ourselves into the 22nd century. The only restraints holding us back are of
our own making. Our chains were made in
the USA, and the lock and key are of our own design. Our liberation is up to us.
JBG
Jay
B Gaskill is a California lawyer who served as the Alameda County Public
defender before her left his “life of crime” to devote full time to
writing. His profile is posted at www.jaygaskill.com/Profile.pdf
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