Financial Flings: Robert Rubin…

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A name you never hear when people talk about what hollowed out the US economy in the past few years.
Rubin’s former bank Citigroup (now under the leadership of Chuck Prince) is out with the begging bowl, asking the Fed to bail it out (it’s neck deep in subprimes through its affiliates). That’s really what the new deal, financed by three major banks but put together by the Fed, is all about – saving the hides of a few big banks that waded too deep (through their affiliates) into the subprime slime.

There are cries for Prince’s head, and for the genius Rubin to return and rescue his old bank….

Now, it’s true the banking crisis is unfolding on Prince’s watch, not Rubin’s. Just as poor Ben Bernanke’s been left holding the bag that the canny Greenspan shoved into his hand. But wait a minute — Sossides and Patridge-Hicks, the pair who are credited with having invented the structured investment vehicles (SIVs) that are now falling apart under the weight of bad subprime debt, devised their schemes in the late 1980s and refined them through the 1990s. That was the period when Rubin first left Goldman Sachs for the Treasury Secretary’s office and then left that office for Citigroup, and when Goldman itself (under Jon Corzine) was heavily involved with schemes for off-balance sheet book-cooking (MIPs) of its own; that was also when Enron was swelling up like a poisoned pup with schemes (SPEs) that uncannily resemble the present-day SIVs. What are the odds that Rubin did not know what was going on somewhere along the line, did not aid and abet it, and did not waltz away to leave the cleaning up of the mess to others, ala Alan Greenspan? Slim to none, I would say.

Mind you, it was the same El Roberto who bailed out banks and bondholders in the Mexican crisis, in Brazil., in Russia etc., etc., et. nauseating cetera through the long, long, 1990s…

Hailed as a genius of capitalism, he acted more like a welfare king who used government moolah (or government subsidized moolah) to snatch his bad deals out of the flames.

Of course, the media took him at his face-value — which, like that of the old buck, was a little inflated.

They treated him with massive awe and not enough shock, quite overlooking the fact that it was Rubin, along with Larry Summers and Jeff Sachs, who did the most to turn the Russian economy into a gambling den for bankers, broke down the wall between the commercial and merchant banks in the US, in the course of consolidating the banking system through the repeal of the Glass -Steagall Act ….and much, much more.

It was Rubin who put in that call to the Treasury Secretary’s office (after his own departure to greener pastures), all in the greater good of stopping the bond- rating agencies from downgrading Enron’s bonds – a call that would have been plainly illegal had he not already changed the law that said so just before the Clintons departed office (with a prescience that was just short of god-like).

Yessir – it’s the Rube we need to hear from..

(Check out my own mortal prescience in these pieces on Goldman Sachs, Paulson, IMF gold tinkering, and Malcolm Gladwell’s strange defense of Ken Lay, to get more of the low-down on high finance…)

Financial Flings: government commodity trading…

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“Until now forex reserves have been largely invested in government paper (US and Europe mainly).owning more than half all US Government paper. This was great for the US and other debtor country consumers but hardly sound investment management for the emerging economies since this policy is guaranteed to lose real value over time. The benign period in which the US and others could just parcel out their paper willy-nilly to the emerging economies is over. The pigeons are wising up!

As reserves are projected to keep expanding, a growing number of countries have established stand alone sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in which their excess reserves can be invested more aggressively into equities, public and private, property and commodities. It is these funds that are likely to make a huge splash in the markets in coming years.

Whilst SWFs have been around in some relatively minor form since the 1950s with Kuwait’s fund, they have mushroomed in the last two years. They already manage an estimated USD 2.5 trillion in assets – greater than the total assets controlled by hedge funds – and their assets are expected by Morgan Stanley and others to grow 5 or 6 times in the next few years.

As they will become important players, potentially controlling politically sensitive assets, their investment policies are likely to become hot political issues with the potential to generate a momentum towards financial protectionism. There are straws in the wind in this direction in countries such as the United States and Germany already.

SWFs funds fall into one of two major categories: commodity funds (such as the OPEC or Russian oil funds) or non-commodity funds funded from current account surpluses. Market estimates currently attribute approximately two-thirds of SWFs assets to commodity funds and the remaining one-third to non-commodity funds.”

More here.

Conservative Book Club review

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Happy that the prowar Christian crowd considers this book conservative. I don’t think it really is. I think it is a libertarian book. But thanks to the editor for letting it fly under whatever colors.

Update: In the original piece, I had done a vanishing act. Since being a non person does not sit well with me and my contribution to the book was substantial and copyrighted, I took respectful umbrage, because, while I object to being vanished, I understand also that web editors are gods within their realm. And while remaining agnostic, I always defer to gods.
I wrote to the powers that be and they told me it was an oversight and graciously gave me credit. Thanks to them.

Umbrage of a respectful sort seems to be a useful piece of equipment. I will pack some more.

Conservative Club Book Review

Mobs Messiahs and Markets –

A man on the way to see his stock broker drops his wife off at the grocery store. At the store, she sees that tuna fish is on sale that week, and buys some. The same day, her husband buys a stock that his broker recommends. The next week, he drops his wife at the grocery store again, where she notices that tuna fish is twice as expensive as it was last week. So she decides to buy chicken instead. At just the same time, at the stock broker’s, the man discovers that the stock he bought last week has also doubled in price because “everyone’s buying it.” He congratulates himself on his gains and his stock-picking savvy, and buys more of the same stock.

Continue the review below…

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(continued from above)
What’s wrong with this picture?

William Bonner, author of the new contrarian investing guide, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, argues that too many twenty-first-century investor are victim of the same mob psychology that drove the Salem witch trials and continues to turn otherwise rational human beings into Che Guevara fans. People who make perfectly intelligent decisions within their own areas of expertise and responsibility fall prey to dangerous groupthink when it comes to investing. They know how to acquire tuna fish and chicken at reasonable prices, but they make fools of themselves as soon as they start buying stocks and bonds.

Bonner is president and CEO of Agora, Inc., one of the largest financial newsletter companies in the world. He knows what motivates people to invest in the stock market — and why they lose their shirts. And Bonner is now warning that Alan Greenspan’s two-decade easy-money regime has created “The Mother of the Mother of All Bubbles.” “Mr. Greenspan,” Bonner says, “blew up the Grand Coolee Dam and sent a wall of cash and credit flooding the world like a rogue wave.”

If Bonner is right, the subprime mortgage debacle is just the tip of the iceberg. Investors had better rethink their investment strategies — and fast. Bonner offers practical tips on “how not to be chumped by Wall Street,” beginning with his instructions for “steering clear of the mob.” Not a bad place to start, if you want to put your investments on a solid foundation.

Econ-job: The Good Debt Trap…

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Hunted this up from a year back — I guess I was feeling a bit prescient about the present debt crisis. Penny was declared persona non grata by the powers that be and banished to the Baltimore Chronicle from whence I reproduce it as my contribution to the succour of the indigent middle-class.

The Good Debt Trap No one Talks About

by Penny Whys

In America today, it would be hard to find even a borderline member of the human species who had not slapped up hard against the phenomenon of home-as-honey-pot.

In our last little chat, I talked about the addiction that drives consumers to spend in America, an addiction driven by a desperate loss of control over their financial future. No longer is a house, an education, or good health care a genteel burden your average upstanding citizen can shoulder on his own. Instead, it has become debt bondage….life-long servitude. And the enslaved ones yank at their chains in the only way they know—by recklessly throwing away money on consumer goods they hope will compensate them for their slavery. They buy to fill the queasy emptiness unsettling the pit of their stomachs. But salvation by stuff is not in any gospel that Penny ever read. King Solomon—he of the supernumerary wives—had plenty of stuff too. But didn´t he sigh wearily that it was all vanity? Or was that the preacher in Ecclesiastes? Twenty years out of school, these things can get foggy.

The point is, the urge to look outside yourself for solutions to problems that stem within yourself is the source of addictive behavior. And buying stuff you don´t need is the definition of looking outside your self for solutions.

But Penny realizes that not all stuff is stuff you don´t need. In fact, the largest part of the modern consumer´s debt in the United States and the source of her perpetual anxiety is necessary debt, “good debt.” The kind that she feels proud to own up to, the kind that she staggers under for the natural term of her adult life with the game smile of a Christian being escorted into the catacombs. All for a good cause, it says, before it sets into rigor mortis.

Now, anyone who has picked up a newspaper or even switched on his TV has surely absorbed every nuance of the first of the “good debt” traps lying in wait for the unwary—the great housing hustle of the early twenty-first century. Actually, in America today it would be hard to find even a borderline member of the human species who had not slapped up hard against the phenomenon of home-as-honey-pot. And we also haven’t lacked for warnings about the advanced state of deterioration of another “good debt” trap—our health care system—since überwench Hillary decided to play Nurse Ratched with it in the boisterous days of William Jefferson’s regnum.

But the third “good debt” trap—the gargantuan price tag of education, lower, higher, and all sizes in between—seems to have slipped through our fiscal early-warning system, no doubt because a mega-tsunami of debt suddenly becomes manageable, worthy, and indeed downright righteous when it’s driven not just by vulgar splurging on run-of-the-mill consumer junk but by the sweat-and-blood payments of the solid citizenry on something so rarefied (and thus obviously much too elevated for us plebes to debate) as education.

Well—time to debate.

First, college costs rise faster than inflation and have done so for the last ten years. According to the report, “Trends in College Pricing 2005,” of the College Board, a non-profit association of 4,500 schools, colleges and universities, tuition costs at four-year private colleges grew at about the same rate as in 2004—5.9 percent—to $21,235.

The rate fell at four-year public universities to 7.1 percent (from 10.5), but the actual costs still increased by $5,491.

Second, Kal Chaney, author of Paying for College Without Going Broke, forecasts that “For the foreseeable future, college cost increases are going to exceed inflation…”

Add room and board to tuition, and the cost of a private college averages out to $29,026 per year, and at a four-year public college to $12,127. Over four years, that works out to the price of a modest bungalow and condominium. At least in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

But of course, it’s completely worthwhile delivering this samurai chop to the family piggy bank because when Junior grows up to be a hair-transplant surgeon, bankruptcy lawyer, used car salesman, or—better yet—beltway lobbyist, it pays off big time. That’s the theory, anyway. But what the theory overlooks is that counting on a professional in the family means doubling the bill to fit in professional school fees. Three years of education at one of the nation’s tonier law schools, for instance, and you rack up at least a hundred twenty grand on the ..er..bar tab. So now we’re looking at something over two hundred grand for the whole business.

But so what? Aren’t we all worth it? Don’t we all deserve the very best? Don’t we love us enough to do this for us?

Apparently, vast numbers of college-intoxicated adults think so. But Penny—who has eyeballed more ivy halls than she cares to admit to—is here to tell you otherwise. No. Don´t do it. Think again. Need to get a job? There are much quicker ways. Need to make more money? Take that college fund and buy an education franchise…or a gas station. Need to get an education? Just remember it was Mark Twain who said he never let his schooling get in the way of his education. And he wasn´t kidding. Twain, Jack London, Benjamin Franklin, George Gershwin, Galileo…just a few of the geniuses who never finished college…and never needed to.

There is no longer any need to accept debt—even respectable debt—as a badge of honor of your socio-economic aspirations. From now on, the highest mark for smarts will go to those who avoid any kind of debt.

And even if you insist on going, there is no reason whatsoever for contracting a terminal case of insolvency.. Penny knows several ways you can get yourself a college degree for substantially less than the going rate, and do it with a lot less effort.

The point is from now on, the highest mark for smarts will go to those who avoid any kind of debt.

Next time: How to get an education without getting into debt….or even into your car.

Until then,
Penny, giving you the whys of thrift, not just the hows.

Penny Whys is a column of personal finance written by Lila Rajiva, a political journalist and writer for the Daily Reckoning, a libertarian financial magazine headquartered in Baltimore.

Police State Chronicles: Homeland Insecurity kills again…

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*Carol Anne Gotbaum did not strangle herself with the handcuffs that were used to restrain her.

Thus it follows that the Phoenix Police Department, which claimed that the tiny, 45-year-old mother of three small children somehow choked herself on the cuffs, is concealing the truth about what killed her.

Mrs. Gotbaum, who was on mood stabilizing drugs (which she hadn’t taken that morning), was detained at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport en route to a very expensive alcohol rehabilitation clinic in Tucson.

Her family contact hadn’t met her there, as he was supposed to, which didn’t improve her mood. She had been singled out by the TSA groper squad for individualized molestation, which likewise helped to undermine her serenity. Carol Anne had reportedly attempted suicide in New York a year ago, which suggests that she was severely troubled and desperately seeking help.

By the time the police arrived, Gotbaum was in the middle of a full-orbed breakdown.

“They’re not letting me on!” she exclaimed in a cellphone call to her husband Noah just before her arrest. “It’s all falling apart.” Noah called US Airways officials to plead on behalf of her wife: “It will be okay. She just needs to take her medication.”

It was clearly a medical crisis, not a security issue. But those running the Homeland Security State in which we’ve been sentenced to live insist on treating those situations identically….”

More at William Grigg at Pro Libertate.

Alexander Cockburn on Naomi Klein’s literary shock and tell…

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“Leftists used to think that at least as a general axiom, if not by a precise deadline, capitalism was doomed. When I first arrived in the United States in the early 1970s, there was enough exuberance in the air even for mild-mannered reformers to be pushing plans for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, World Bank and kindred institutions.But today most of these same leftists deem capitalism invincible and fearfully lob copious documentation at each other detailing the efficient devilry of the executives of the system. The internet serves to amplify this pervasive funk into a catastrophist mindset. It imbues most of the English-speaking left west of the Atlantic after seven years of Bush and Cheney, and frames Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.“

At the outset Klein permits herself a robust trumpet blast as intrepid pioneer:

“This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story — that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies.”

The arc of triumph she is alluding to spans the half century from the Eisenhower administration’s onslaughts on political and economic nationalism in Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s, to the US attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. These are not decades where official apologetics have been entirely without challenge until Ms. Klein embarked on her researches. There are shelves worth of books on the ghastly consequences of the covert interventions and massacres organized or connived at by the United States in the name of freedom and the capitalist way. Klein’s own bibliography attests that there has plenty of detailed work on the neoliberal onslaught that gathered strength from the mid-70s on, marching under the intellectual colors of one of her arch villains, the late Milton Friedman, the Chicago School economist….”

More here at Counterpunch.

Torture Files: The Parable of the Sower and the Seed

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“When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures….”

From Der Spiegel, in the New York Times.

Well, I hate to say I told you so….

But I wrote about this in relation to the torture of women in Iraq in July- August 2004.
and in relation to rendition flights in December 2005

and in relation to undisclosed abuse in February 2006.

and in relation to the way the media works in such things in November 2005

and in relation to the broader picture: opinion-making and legal culture in my book.

Investigative journalism is a bit irrelevant in all this, ultimately. Any one with a ear for truth can hear when people are lying. The real question is why do people not have a ear for lies anymore? Why are they selective about what lies they want to fall for and what they want to see through? I would venture to guess here — but I think — a little black humor here — I will wait for copyright protection first.

And even then, maybe, pass.

Why go out to educate people, I wonder. Who are they to me? They should be free to be ignorant.

Education, in my humble elitist opinion, is not for everyone. It is not a right. It is a privilege (and a punishment) for those who go looking for that sort of privilege and punishment. It demands self-discipline, humility before truth, and ethical behavior to your fellow man. And even then, it is not entirely in your hands how or where you get it.

It will come to you…. or depart from you as the spirit lists.

Let him who has ears hear…..

Financial Follies: Dollar dithering….

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“One of the big differences between the current situation and the situation in early October of 2005 is that in October of 2005 the US$ had been trending upward for 9 months and was close to an intermediate-term peak, whereas the US$ is currently (in our opinion) at the tail-end of an intermediate-term decline. Putting it another way, the US$ has considerably more upside potential now than it had in October of 2005. In fact, we think the US dollar can currently be likened to a beach-ball that is getting pushed further and further underwater. The pressure being applied by speculative selling may continue to force it lower in the very short-term, but at some point in the not-too-distant future it will catapult upward. We therefore continue to perceive significant downside risk for gold and substantial downside risk for gold stocks associated with a US$ recovery.

The downside risk for gold stocks is much greater than the downside risk for gold bullion, for two reasons. First, the gold-stock indices recently became extremely ‘overbought’ relative to gold bullion. Second, US$ weakness has been one of the propellants of the global stock market rally, so the initial phase of the US dollar’s next upward trend will probably be associated with parallel declines in the gold market and the broad stock market. This could result in gold stocks being simultaneously hit from two directions.

Outlook

Gold bullion ended last week at a new multi-decade high while the HUI finished the week about 2% below its 11th May-2006 and 21st September-2007 peaks. This is a bearish divergence because the stocks typically lead the metal at important turning points, although it clearly wouldn’t take much additional strength from here in the gold-stock indices to eliminate the divergence.

Regardless of whether the HUI is in the process of completing a major double top or is immersed in an intermediate-term upward trend that will take it much higher over the coming months, a sizeable pullback is likely to occur over the next few weeks. As previously advised, history tells us to expect the HUI/gold ratio to trade at least a few percent below its 40-day moving average prior to the next short-term bottom. If this happens over the next few weeks and gold concurrently pulls back by around 5% then the HUI will drop to the 340s.

The sort of pullback described above is the most likely short-term outcome even if the overall upward trend is going to remain intact.

The risk is that a top of longer-term significance is currently being put in place. This possibility doesn’t mesh with the current fundamental backdrop and is therefore not the most likely intermediate-term outcome, but the fundamentals could change and therefore need to be continually re-assessed. Just to quickly recap, the main fundamental drivers of the gold price are credit/yield spreads, nominal interest rates, inflation expectations (the expected rate of purchasing-power loss), and currency exchange rates….”

Says Steve Saville at Speculative Investor.

Comment:

Well, this has been my thinking too (I think the Fed Reserve’s future rate cuts this year have been priced into the dollar already), but the sharpness of the decline following September’s cut took me by surprise. So much so that I am no longer sure of my dollar reversal theory.

I worry that should the credit problem unravel further and show signs of hitting the banks even more, there will be a run on the dollar.

What to do? When in doubt, do nothing — especially nothing that is too fast or too drastic. Think incremental. Take metal/foreign currency profits in increments on dollar strengthening but be prepared to do a 180 degree pirouette and buy back when the dollar moves against you.

This makes you, of course, a speculator and a trader.

Neither activities terribly good for the economy or the social fabric.

But you are absolved from guilt. When the big fish trade, the little fish have to as well. For several years now, buy and hold has been a bad strategy except for the sharp of wit and the deep of pocket. For the rest of us, guessing the short term movement for buying opportunities, and knowing the long term trend for knowing what to buy has been the best strategy.

The trend for the dollar is down. But right now, we might be at the end of a midterm decline.

On the other hand, there is a  wild card —  the credit crunch…..

Nothing like stumbling  on the rairoad tracks with your belongings in a bundle and trying to second guess the speed of the train bearing down on you.

Holocaust Denial….. in Iraq

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“A bottom-line measure of the consequences of human actions is provided by excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that should not have happened, excess mortality, avoidable mortality). Excess deaths can be VIOLENCE-related (from bombs and bullets) or NON-VIOLENT (due to deprivation). For a detailed analysis of excess deaths from violence and deprivation see “Global avoidable mortality”: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/and “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ and http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ ).

Authoritative estimates of violent and non-violent Iraqi excess deaths now show that the post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Iraq total 2.0 million (see: http://open.newmatilda.com/crosswire/ ), the 1990-1990 Gulf War violent deaths totalled 0.2 million (see: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_Iraqis_died_in_the_Gulf_War ), and the 1990-2003 Sanctions War was associated with 1.7 million excess deaths. The total 1990-2007 excess deaths in Iraq now (September 2007) total 3.9 MILLION (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17066/42/ ).

The post-invasion NON-VIOLENT deaths in Iraq (now 0.7-0.8 million) are being caused by grievous deprivation by the US Coalition Occupiers in gross violation of the Geneva Convention (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ). The post-invasion VIOLENT deaths (0.8-1.2 million) are being caused by violence from Occupiers, failure of Occupier security, Indigenous fighters and their confrères, from directly or indirectly US-funded sectarian militias, Government militias and death squads and by US mercenaries….”

Gideon Polya at Countercurrents.