It could be argued that politicians talked up the economy. It isn’t so much that they talked it up or down, but that they did them backwards. If they had tightened lending during the boom, we never would have been in the position to bust. Talking up the bust and down the boom makes me wonder if they wanted us to crash in order to boost U.S. manufacturing (see my conspiracy theory post), or if it was just straight corruption at the point where regulators choose who gets the money.

Our government is comprised almost entirely of investor-class elected officials. When times are good, they want to use their power to fuel growth and for their own profits and popularity. When times are bad, they feel the ire of the populace threatening their re-election and seek someone to blame in order to appear to be cracking down on the problem. We can see an example of this in the housing market boom and subsequent crash:

• In 1977 Jimmy Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which went a long way towards giving government the right to force the banking system to lend to high risk borrowers.
• In 1982, Congress (with a Democratic majority) passed the Alternative Mortgage Transactions Parity Act, which allowed non-federally chartered housing creditors to write adjustable-rate mortgages.
• Clinton put pressure on “Government Sponsored Entity” Fannie May to relax credit requirements in order to try to boost lending to low income buyers. HUD wanted them to keep 50% of their portfolios in loans to low income people.
• Clinton threatened to essentially audit lenders and air their dirty laundry if they didn’t comply. Here is what realtytimes was saying back in the beginning of ’03: “Government policies encouraged riskier lending. They did this ‘encouraging’ with threats to step in with GSE reform legislation in response to accounting scandals, and other such methods.” There is clear evidence of both carrots and sticks being used by the government.
• Bush continued and expanded these policies. In 2008, Government Sponsored Entities had extended over five trillion in loans, with a mere hundred million in total assets. They were able to do this via Fractional Reserve Lending, which is an outdated concept from back when banks didn’t want to have to hold on to large amounts of gold, and more recently is used as a way for central banks to regulate the money supply.
• Investors would flee if they saw the banks making such high risk loans, so the banks started bundling risky loans and selling them at bargain prices in order to keep profits up for investors.
• People saw great profit in real estate and started taking out as much debt as they could, figuring they could always just sell some if things got tight.
• A hiccup in the housing prices started a cascade. Housing prices began to drop, and people started to default on homes that were no longer worth as much as the loan.
• As the problem gained media attention, the politicians deflected the blame, blaming the banks for the government-pushed subprime loans. They assured us that they would fix the problem by regulating these wicked banks and doing away with their subprime lending.
• The inability of people to get loans or refinance demolished the housing market, making it even harder for those in trouble to sell, even at a loss. Foreclosures cascaded further. This tanked the housing prices and caused the very foreclosures they were intended to prevent. People who would have gladly sold their homes or refinanced were foreclosed on instead. The banks were nothing but a Ponzi scheme.
• Bush realized his legacy was threatened, and that the collapse of the American banking system would be put at his feet. He abandoned any pretense of free market and crafted the largest corporate bailouts in history.

To unravel the above mess, you have to realize that government financial regulation is an illusion. It creates waste and assures that the booms and busts are larger, last longer, and affect everyone. The bottom line is that we had people borrowing fake money from the central bank, money which was backed up by the government, which is backed up by the people – people borrowed fake money from themselves to buy houses they couldn’t afford, and subsequently lost them. The free market won out and balanced itself, despite the government meddling, but with a loss of productivity caused by the waste of effort. Without government regulation, fractional reserve lending wouldn’t exist on a national scale, nor would subprime loans, and neither would the problem.

From the wiki: “fractional reserve banking benefits the economy by providing regulators with powerful tools for manipulating the money supply, interest rates, and government debt creation. From a Keynesian point of view this debt creation provides governments with much greater latitude to stimulate the economy through government spending.”

On the Federal Reserve: According to the wiki,  “The Federal Reserve System is subject to the Administrative Procedure Act. It is not “owned” by anyone and is “not a private, profit-making institution”. It describes itself as “an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects”". The Federal Reserve was created in 1913, by a Democratic Congress and approved by Woodrow Wilson. The Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve are both appointed by the U.S. President.

The very creation of the Federal Reserve gave regulators both the power and the inclination to lengthen booms and then plunder private sector savings (monetize) to ‘stimulate’ our way out of the ensuing and ever larger busts.

Lack of oversight? There is a difference between no oversight and bad oversight. The government controls everything from taxes, to laws, trade treaties, tariffs, lending practices. If the regulators were pushing subprimes and Fractional Reserve Lending, then how would additional regulating been helpful? The only idea I’ve heard out of Washington lately is that we should borrow money to make a product we don’t want and then go buy it. We have a sinking boat with one party wanting to bail water out of the front of the boat into the back, and the other party wanting to bail water from the back of the boat into the front. It doesn’t help to shuffle the money around if you don’t make it in the first place.

It isn’t so much the fault of the market or government, but at the point at which the two meld, where government decisions affect the flow of large amounts of money in the private sector, here corruption is inevitable. The banking sector is a tough issue. The way I see it there are three main ways we can deal with this:

1. We can nationalize the banks. It wouldn’t be the first time. Obviously, the government has its own problems with inefficiency and corruption, and this essentially gives a competitive advantage to those banks which are subsidized by the government (as does our current meddling in which we have seen bailed out failures buy up successful competitors).
2. We can do nothing. This is high risk in the sense that if the banks fail, the government is obligated to pay for most of what the banks lose (FDIC guarantee of 250k per account), so if they fall, we pay anyway. As for if they will fail; deflation causes defaults, which causes bank failure; inflation higher than interest rates makes the banks lose money on all of their loans. Due to fractional reserve lending, this means they will fail if the economy is at all unstable. Seeing how we just doubled our money supply last year, this is pretty much going to happen. A failure of the banking industry impacts lending, which is central to the Ponzi schemes that are most modern businesses, and to the housing market. If everyone has to buy their houses with cash, the price is either going to fall a lot farther, or they are going to be bought by China.
3. We can do what we are doing now, which is leave them private and give them money, which they will abuse, both due to human nature and greed, and due to it being in the bank’s best interest to hold the money as long as the dollar is gaining value (which it has been until very recently), because using it causes inflation (if the dollar drops much longer, expect dramatic inflationary action by banks trying to drop dollars which are losing value). This is just meddling, and isn’t healthy for anyone.

The problem is that we are so deep in this Keynesian lunacy, that switching systems guarantees a crash. What are we to do?

I think this highlights a serious flaw in human nature. People have this unshakable feeling that there is a benevolent deity looking out for them, that everything will turn out fine in the end, and that there is a good solution to every problem, that when life gives you lemons, you get lemonade.

Sometimes every solution comes with pain and sacrifice. Sometimes the government can’t fix it, people die, wars are lost, retreat is the best you can do. Sometimes you just have to eat your damn lemons.

The longer you fight the tough decision, the worse the consequences get. We need to deal with the core issue, which is that every day we pay more regulators more money to regulate a shrinking industrial base. It’s time we let go of the micromanaging and let our good citizens keep the fruits of their labor so that they might afford to keep doing it.

“For three decades, in the face of the great crime wave that started in the early 1960s, we have been trying to solve our crime problem with brute force:  building more and more prisons and jails. We now keep 2.4 million of our fellow human beings under lock and key at any one time, and that number has continued to grow despite the spectacular drop in crime between 1994 and 2004, which took crime rates to 50% of their peak levels.

Imprisonment at five times the historical level in the United States, and at five times the level of any of the countries with which we would like to compare ourselves, has not been sufficient to fully reverse the growth in crime; current crime rates are still at 2.5 times the level of the late 1950s and early 1960s.”

He goes on to promote the idea of removing the vengeance from justice and attempting to reduce it to a cost/benefit analysis between the cost of enforcement and the public benefit received. He estimates the cost of crime in America (excluding white collar crime) to be around ten percent of GDP.

He believes punishment should be swift and certain rather than severe, and he reminds us that punishment is always a cost, not a benefit.

Kleiman proposes starting and ending the school day later to lessen the after school time adolescents have to commit crimes.

“imagine a classroom full of unruly children.  When Johnnie throws a spitball at Suzie, Ms. Jones is too distracted by the need to break up the fight between Dick and Fred to have time to rebuke Johnnie, let alone the six others who are acting out at the same time.  Johnnie and the others learn that they can get away with almost anything in Ms. Jones’s class.”

“Thus both the well-behaved and the ill-behaved classroom are self-sustaining situations.  Indeed, they can be two equilibria of the same system:  the very same children with the very same teacher may wind up either well-behaved or ill-behaved as the result of random accidents at the beginning of the period.”

He proposes a surge in local enforcement to break the criminal mindset and freeing up resources to do it again elsewhere. This goes back to the old theory that if we only had enough cops, there would be no criminals. I have several issues with this.

Our laws are essentially made by politicians. If you look at the creation of legislation, it often seems to revolve less around seeking efficient solutions than trying to appear to have taken strong action. The politician who raises rehabilitation rates by 12% is always going to lose to the one who took another 300 ‘criminals off our streets’ and put them ‘safely behind bars’.

On the enforcement side of things, the police can only enforce the laws they are given, which are usually both too broad in their scope (imprisoning productive members of society who have some bad habits) and very limiting (police can’t simply do door to door searches in each town they hit). I expect what we would see with his proposal is large enforcement squads being shipped out of their home town to raid problem areas. Criminals would simply lay low, knowing they can wait it out. The policing forces would know they are expected to show some arrests, which leads to all sorts of problems, from false or trumped up charges to constitutional violations.

I don’t dispute the theory that strong enforcement can break the criminal mindset, we’ve seen that happen with traffic cameras. People knowing that the machine never sleeps makes them less likely to break traffic laws. We have also seen the results: districts cutting yellow lights short, shutting off the enforcement periodically to try and get people back into a gambling mode and breaking laws in order to increase ticket revenue, additional laws invented in order to create new sources of revenue, etc. Increasing enforcement won’t help until we make crime less profitable for legislators and law enforcement. These are people who know they will be out of a job if there is less crime.

“Much crime-avoidance behavior is wasteful from a social perspective, but not from an individual perspective.  If my putting a burglar-alarm sticker on my front door simply leads a burglar to break into my neighbor’s home instead, the victimization loss is shifted rather than avoided, and in effect I incur a real resource cost to make sure that someone else suffered the cost of being burglarized.  But that fact makes putting up the sticker no less rational for me as an individual.”

This brings up a point about the scope of our legislation. The above example works on a city or state scale as well. Very localized legislation may only serve to chase problems to the proverbial neighbor. This is one reason why banishment is no longer a common practice. On the other hand, one of the greatest aspects of These United States is the way the autonomy of the states can serve as testing grounds for new ideas, a market for them to succeed or fail and thus serve as an example. and a way of allowing like minded communities to enact legislations that suit their nature.

An interesting side note on vengeance as a motive for justice, I just noticed the following quote in a file from the department of justice:

“State prisoners had a 19% lower death rate than the adult U.S. resident population; among blacks, the mortality rate was 57% lower among prisoners.”

I guess universal health care does work (universal for them anyway). Back to Kleiman:

“The current total budget for law enforcement and criminal justice, adding together all levels of government, comes to about $200 billion a year.  If a 1% reduction in crime is worth $15 billion, even modestly successful crime-control efforts can easily justify their budgets.”

By this reasoning, the best way of both increasing relative enforcement and decreasing costs would be to pick our battles and reduce our total legislation. Around a quarter of US inmates are in there for drug offenses. By the above statistics, halting the war on drugs would save us something on the order of half a trillion dollars every year, and that’s not counting the positive effect on GDP of having them back in the work force. The key here is figuring out how much it costs society to put someone away as compared to letting them go or to finding them a new opportunity. People who see themselves as having opportunities and who see their path to a good future don’t want to screw it up. A large portion of crime is committed out of desperation.

One of the things I love about Kleiman’s writing on the subject is that he sees crime as something that people commit against others, that crime is something suffered, and arrests are a cost. This brings home the need to reduce both the crime and the need for justice, and also brings up some interesting points about race and class.

“even adjusting for overall lower incomes, African-Americans suffer much more crime than do members of other ethnic categories. Homicide provides the most dramatic example; representing less than 15% of the population, blacks suffer more than 50% of the murders.”

Both the poor and racial minorities tend to be segregated into areas that, due to the lesser opportunities have a much higher crime rate. Even their crimes are segregated (white collar and blue collar). Blue collar crimes tend to be punished more harshly, but who is more morally bankrupt, the criminal who burgles homes in order maintain their basic needs, or the banker who embezzles millions in order to maintain a lavish lifestyle? If the burglar were to be given a good paying job with a future, do you think they would still burgle? Some might, but again I think this may owe more to their upbringing surrounded by crime.

A few excerpts from Kleiman’s crime reduction checklist:

“Identify and target high-rate serious offenders, with the goal of incapacitating them by incarceration.  Don’t neglect domestic violence in this analysis.”

I admit that the whole concept of incarceration is beyond me. I don’t like vengeance as a motive for justice either. What is the purpose of incarceration?

As a punishment, it is a failure because it merely gives the incarcerated a concentrated group of criminals as peers and role models. When you let them out they are worse than before you put them in, not only because of the above, but also because they likely now have no home, no non-criminal friends outside, fewer family ties and job prospects, etc.

If we aren’t seeking vengeance, and prison isn’t a good form of rehabilitation, then why do we have prisons? The only thing that I can think of is just trying to keep people out of society. I say if they have a strong potential for rehabilitation, then focus on it in a way that works. If they have little hope of ever being decent members of society, then why let them out, or keep them alive at all? Severe mental illness is often behind crime, and falls under the same test as far as I’m concerned.

I think we should offer sterilization as an option for the reducing of sentence. It’s the oldest and most tested technique our species has for ensuring that the next generation doesn’t share our failures. Any genetic traits that would lead to criminal activity would be reduced, and we wouldn’t be subjected to the results of their poor parenting skills.

“Move toward “community prosecution” programs where policies are allowed to vary by neighborhood and are made after active consultation with both police and community leaders.”

I’d be very interested to see this tried. There is plenty of potential for problems, but there is also a lot we could learn. The problems are temporary, the knowledge is forever.

“Offer every prisoner a tightly-disciplined therapeutic community as an alternative to a conventional cellblock.”

Another idea with potential.

Since skills such as literacy are portable across the boundary between prison and the community, stress skill acquisition rather than attempts at behavior change such as drug treatment.  Put a computer in each cell.

I like this one a lot. Internet access should be limited of course, but skill acquisition might just be the top choice for fixing crime related to class.

Make recidivism a key performance measure for prison managers.

This one is also great, and if it could be extended to police and politicians, we might have a real solution to the systemic problems.

Abolish the minimum drinking age.

I was a little surprised to see this one. I agree. It isn’t helping create responsible drinkers and is increasing the cost of enforcement. I definitely think the drinking age should be lower than the driving age. Let them get it out of their system before they get keys.

“Allow concealed carry by anyone who passes a gun-safety course, and require every state to recognize concealed-carry permits from other states.”

I like this. I don’t remember anything in the constitution about concealed weapons. I do remember the part about “shall not be infringed”.

From his final post:

“If people who call themselves fiscal conservatives understood that a sentence of life without parole imposed on an 18-year-old represented a present-value expenditure of $1 million, the enthusiasm for “throwing away the key” might be diminished.”

Too many of the things we do in the name of safety are really the government infringing on the rights of the innocent on the theory that they may become guilty.

If you would like to hear more from Mark Kleiman, check out his book:

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment

Taxation has become pervasive. When you earn a dollar, it is taxed, when you spend it, it is taxed again. At the same time as you are being taxed for spending it, someone else is being taxed for earning it. These taxes are increasing, and not just by total value, but by percentage, which is unaffected by inflation and thus unjustifiable in a digital age which should be lowering the cost of governing.

When you think of the nature of income and sales taxes, it becomes clear that the government makes a lot of money, not on the saving and responsible use of money, but on its momentum. The next time you hear someone in power speaking of the need to get consumers consuming again, think of what their true motive might be.

While this comes as no surprise to those of us who have been paying attention, I think it deserve some further scrutiny. The obvious conclusion would be that religion causes a desire to torture, but I think that may be backwards. Another recent study showed the religious as being far more likely to seek extreme life prolonging measures when deathly ill. What does all this have in common? A fear of the unknown extreme enough to lead people to oppose the values they claim to have, just to scrabble at a scrap of hope. It is religion that is an irrational safety blanket for some very rational fears, that provides the self  righteousness and justification for the commission of atrocities that were already desired by those susceptible to it’s pull of absolution. It is the dichotomy of hope and fear that got both Bush and Obama elected by the same electorate. While hope and fear are polar opposites, they are two sides of the same coin.

It is as if the whole country is in a Kübler-Ross model of the stages of grief. 

1. Denial: This is where we were between WWII and the Bush years. We were the greatest country on earth. It was our birthright, not just a side effect of being the last manufacturing power standing after the war due to the distance of our homes from the front lines.
2. Anger: We clearly transition from denial to anger early in the Bush years. We believe all of our problems are external in nature, that it isn’t our fault. The Axis of Evil is the source of our pain. Wars ensue on multiple fronts.
3. Bargaining: Hope. Perhaps if we elect a Democrat, they will fix everything. We will give the banks whatever they want, bail out the manufacturing industry, borrow money, whatever it takes. The final days of Bush and the first 100 days of Obama.
4. Depression: This is where we are now. consumer confidence is low, the parties are fragmented, the future unclear. 
5. Acceptance: This is where we are going. We need to accept that our problems are fundamental and widespread, that the middle east won’t have peace, China isn’t going away, and the Dollar isn’t intrinsically strong. Our economy isn’t  in a downturn, it has seen a correction, and we aren’t going back to the golden age of the 1950′s any time soon. It is time to pick up the pieces, make some hard choices, and begin to move forward. 

We are a government of the people, by the people. It hasn’t led us here, we have led it here. We can take it back, but we can’t do it without a majority. Our next president should be a Ron Paul.

There is a debate raging through the country as to whether the pig flu is a scary plague of DOOM, or merely a bunch of media hype. The answer, I believe, lies in part at one end of the spectrum, and in part at the other. If you watch the media lately, they seem to have switched sides to try to calm the public. This is never a good sign. 

The good news is that the pig flu is responding to treatment. It isn’t cutting a swath of death and destruction, now that we know what it is. That’s where the good news ends.

The bad news is that it is already spreading worldwide. It isn’t just something passed from pigs to people, it also goes from people to people, and likely from bird to bird, bird to human, etc. I really believe it is far past the point of eradication. Due to immune overreaction, it strikes the strong the hardest. Keep in mind that the purple dots on this map are confirmed cases. By the time a case of pig flu is confirmed, it generally has been in a person’s system for a few days, and then after they manage to see a doctor, it tends to take several more days to confirm. What I’m saying is that this map is lagging. This is a snapshot of the pig flu as it existed nearly a week ago. I think it is worth keeping an eye on, because most of us will likely get it, if not this year, then next, or the year after.

Our primary adversary in this isn’t the piggy flu, it is fear, and the overreaction in the populace. It isn’t the media’s fault. We don’t need their help to panic. The worry here isn’t riot, it is economic. If we shut the schools, restaurants, and other workplaces in fear of influenza, the loss of wages will push those who are already teetering in this tough economy over the edge. We need to try to slow the progression by social distancing, without shutting everything down.

What we need the public to understand is that there is a flu going around. We can treat it, but not immunize (yet) against it. It is a nasty flu, but not likely deadly. It is a time to be wary rather than fearful or dismissive.

I’ll keep this post updated with resources as I find them. If you have any thoughts or links, please post them in the comments.

Latest numbers 06-08-09: 25,288 cases, 139 deaths.

The most recent swine flu map I’ve found.

Good post on The Umlaut about the nature of this type of influenza.

Most recent info from the World Health Organization.

It is unusual to see a Fed Chief do a network interview. He makes some interesting statements about inflation and the printing of money. He speaks calmly about the printing of money and thinks it is an important part of recovery. He seems to believe that when the economy turns the corner, he will simply contract the money supply and prevent inflation from increasing. I’ll be interested to see if this works. I get the feeling that inflation is going to be a whole lot easier to create than to prevent once the money is out of the bag.

Something constructive has come of the Santelli rant after all, albeit through a rather circuitous route. The above video is the meatier portion of the whole escapade thus far. After being taunted by NBC for just being a comedian, taking things out of context, and making funny faces, Jon Stewart had Cramer on his show and conducted the interview in a more serious and constructive manner than you will see any of the so-called journalists who leveled these accusations do themselves. Cramer was friendly and apologetic, so this must have been a hard thing to do to the man, but Stewart met any evasions with career crushing force. There have been responses from most of the major media and the White House.

CNN has a poll up that asks readers whether they see this interview as being a comic diversion or serious business. Comedy is winning 52-48. This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what went down. A bit of background for those of you not well versed in investing; a short is when a broker sells you an investment they don’t own because they think it will go down. They intend to take your money, and when the stock goes down and you wish to sell, they just give you some of your money back and pocket the rest. Kind of like a Ponzi scheme, in the sense that if the stock market booms and everyone wants their money, we see a whole new scandal. This is legal. Some of what he was admitting to doing was not. Listen carefully to the clips Stewart plays, rewind if you have to, but make sure you understand what Cramer was admitting to. He isn’t a rogue bad apple. This is business as usual and whole system is full of rot. The government is rotten, the banks are rotten, as are the analysts, the brokers, the corporations, the media, and the investors. This isn’t something we can just make more rules against. This isn’t a failure of the free market. The people who make the rules are the same people breaking them. What we need is simple transparency. Jon Stewart has given us a taste.

I was recently baffled by the outbreak of support for a Santelli rant. You can find it on Thoughts Aloud, or The Intellectual Redneck. In this case, Santelli got a bunch of Wall Street investors to boo people with an extra bathroom for being the cause and recipient of government bailouts. He suggested we all go have  Chicago tea party in July in protest. And do what? Should we all go to Chicago and not pay our mortgage? It seems all you have to do to impress conservatives these days is get so worked up with mock outrage that the cameraman needs a spittle guard. The biggest problem I have with Republicans of late is their willingness to start running with torches and pitchforks without deciding first what their goals are. Going along with them  is like hunting with Dick Cheney.

I was ready to let the matter drop until I saw this response by Jon Stewart over at The Osterley Times, as well as politickybitch. I would have loved to see Santelli on the show, but he apparently didn’t have as much to talk about as he thought he did. Stewart goes on at length to show how CNBC analysts are almost as bad as FOX News analysts. Please, if you care about your money, don’t listen to these analysts; they clearly have a conflict of interest.

This is one of the most understandable and least biased explanations I’ve seen for the economic collapse.

I have a couple of minor criticisms of it:

The holders of sub-prime mortgages are portrayed as fat, cigarette smoking welfare parents who just buy the biggest house they can see and predictably fail to pay for it. I’m of the opinion that most of the defaults were not on the primary residences of the poor, but on those individuals who were trying to leverage their own moderate wealth into bigger payouts by buying several homes. The failures came when the credit crackdown prevented them from being able to sell it for enough money to meet their obligations. Those sub-primes which were on primary residences were fought for tooth and nail, because those families didn’t just stand to lose their credit rating, they stood to lose their homes and dreams for the future. In their position I would take on several roommates before letting them take my home.

In one part of the video, *POOF* all the money disappears. Wealth doesn’t just disappear. It either went somewhere else, or in this case, wasn’t actual wealth, but rather was the expectation of returns everyone had on their over leveraged investments. The illusion that what they were holding was owned by them, even though it was not yet payed for.

In this interview Ron Paul talks a bit about the stimulus bill, and the process by which it was introduced. Ron Paul is an honest guy, so I’ll take him at his word until I see strong evidence otherwise. Obama made a campaign promise to publish all legislation five days ahead of time to allow congress and the public to peruse it. He didn’t do this for the stimulus. It could be argued that the stimulus is an emergency measure and should be exempt, but he also didn’t do this for children’s health insurance, which was hardly an emergency since it doesn’t kick in until mid-year. But this was more than a simple broken campaign promise; according to Ron Paul, the bill wasn’t revealed until the midnight before the vote, and was 1,000 pages. This was made worse by making only five hard copies available, which seems to me to be a clear tactic to prevent the opposition from being able to work together to get it read and discussed before the vote. Lets get this info out to the public at large. I want to see either a denial, an explanation, or a loss of credibility over of this one. If it is true, it is disappointing.