NYC to Close Schools, Subways, and Orders Evacuations - CME Closes Trading Floor

"New York City has issued a mandatory evacuation of Zone A, which includes CME Group's NYMEX World Headquarters and New York trading floor. As a result, the New York trading floor will be closed on Monday, October 29. We will open all of our electronic markets at their regularly scheduled times on CME Globex and CME ClearPort, our online electronic platforms."

As the northeastern US braces for landfall of Hurricane Sandy tomorrow, high tides and a storm surge expected to run from 5 to 9 feet has caused the bottleneck low-lying areas in the New York boroughs to be evacuated.

A storm surge and tide combination of over 8 feet will breach the seawall in Battery Park.

NYC schools and the subway system will also be closed tomorrow.

Atlantic City casinos have closed for the first time in their history.

Widespread power outages are expected to affect over ten million people.

The storm is expected to make landfall tomorrow in central New Jersey. Although there is a possibility that the storm will not follow the predicted path, the probability of a turn west is growing greater by the hour.

The most powerful winds and waves in a counterclockwise rotating storm are in the right quadrant.

There is no existential uncertainty involved here. Take precautions and keep yourself and your family protected. Listen to advisories and updates. Stay safe.

It will be interesting to see if this impacts any of the NYSE trading tomorrow. The NYMEX is closing floor trading for the day. I hope the floor brokers bring their galoshes.

Lord Bichard: Old People Need To Work For Their Pensions (Even If They Already Have)

"Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but a human being presents a more difficult problem.

The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation.

Lewis H. Lapham

In response to Baron Bichard's proposal that old people be required to do community service or lose their pensions, Robert Oxley of the Tax Payers Alliance said, "it's a bit rich from a civil servant who was able to retire early to lecture us on working during retirement."

In related news, Baron Bichard has been selected as first recipient of the Dolores Jane Umbridge Award for a lifetime achievement in bureaucratic vindictiveness and petty hypocrisy.

Does anyone else notice a trend here amongst the self-righteous elite of the English speaking peoples? What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine as well, but I might allow you to keep a bit if you fall in and toe the line.

Guardian UK
On Pensions, Listen to the Technocrats
By Richard Seymour
26 October 2012

Retired people should work for their pensions, says Lord Bichard. The fact that pensioners already have worked for their pension, by definition, doesn't detain him. Pensioners are a "negative burden" on the state, who need to be "incentivised" into doing jobs that young people could do for a wage.

The interesting thing about Bichard is that he isn't some rabid Tory. He is a cross-bench peer, a technocratic former senior civil servant who worked closely with the last Labour government. His suggestion was raised in the context of discussions between politicians, bureaucrats and Bank of England experts on the state's response to demographic change.

And while his specific proposals may have been off-centre, they point to a consensus among policy-making elites. In general, the consensus is that British capitalism will find its way out of crisis and restore global competitiveness by squeezing more work out of the labour force. In terms of pensions, the consensus is that people will have to work longer, for less.

Part of the rationale for this consensus is that the "old age dependency ratio" is going to change dramatically, with a growing elderly population relative to the working-age population. By 2051, just under a quarter of the population will be over 65.

According to a simplistic inference, pensions would therefore have to be paid for by raising taxes on the working population. However, labour migration counteracts this tendency, meaning that the "economic support ratio", the ratio of the working population to the dependent population, will either remain static or any fall will be compensated for by increased productivity. The demographic rationale is therefore a red herring.

Madam Undersecretary Dolores Jane Umbridge

The real issue is how the growing pensions system will be managed. The orthodoxy among civil servants and politicians alike is that salvation lies with "thrift" and private sector provision. This means relying on a costly complex of financial entities to provide coverage, while grinding down public pensions.

This explains the Tories' introduction of the workplace pensions scheme. The result will be inequality and greater poverty in old age.

Bichard admits that forcing pensioners to work will be hard to sell to the public. But then, as he puts it, "so was tuition fees". There is a lesson in governance here.

Senior civil servants and technocrats formulate many of the policies or underlying policy goals that governments try to gain public support for. Formally neutral as far as the party system is concerned, they are the permanent administration of the country...

Read the entire article here.

Charles Ferguson: Behind Every Great Con Artist Is a Man Like Glenn Hubbard

Here is a piece by Charles Ferguson, the documentary film maker who produced Inside Job, with an essay that was re-posted by Capitalism Without Failure.  He apparently does not think well of Glenn Hubbard, and I think he might be right.

In Hubbard's defense, Timmy is almost as big of a douche. And I do not think that Hubbard is nearly as dangerously reckless an advisor as John Bolton, who is Mitt's man at foreign policy.

Charles Ferguson: Standing Behind Every Great Con Artist is Someone Like Glenn Hubbard

Mitt Romney has a credibility problem. He changes his beliefs like laundry (abortion, medical insurance, whether Bin Laden was worth killing, attacking Iran), refuses to disclose his tax returns, and won't explain how he could possibly pay for the tax cuts he proposes. But there is another scandal in Romney's campaign -- namely Glenn Hubbard, Romney's chief economic advisor, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, and is now Dean of Columbia Business School.

I interviewed Hubbard for my documentary film Inside Job, and analyzed his record again for my book Predator Nation. The film interview became famous because Hubbard blew his cool after I interrogated him about his conflicts of interest: "This isn't a deposition, sir. I was polite enough to give you time, foolishly I now see, but you have three more minutes. Give it your best shot."  

But the really important thing about Hubbard isn't his personality; it's that as an economist and an advisor, he is a total, unmitigated disaster.

First, Hubbard has an abysmal track record in economic policy, including the very issues that Romney has made the pillar of his presidential campaign. Second, like Romney, Hubbard refuses to disclose critical information about his income, conflicts of interest, and paid advocacy activities. Third, both in public statements and in my personal experience, Hubbard has been evasive, misleading, and even dishonest when discussing both policy issues and his own conflicts of interest. 

And last but not least, those conflicts of interest are huge: Hubbard has long advocated policies that Wall Street loves, often without disclosing that he is, in fact, highly paid by Wall Street.

Let's start with tax cuts, since Romney claims that he can cut tax rates sharply without increasing the deficit, and without benefiting the rich. Mr. Romney claims that tax cuts will be fully paid for by closing loopholes and deductions, and will not add to the deficit; Hubbard has publicly supported Romney's claims. Interestingly, Mr. Hubbard has quite a record on this very issue. Shortly after becoming chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in 2001, he spearheaded the Bush administration's tax cuts, and he said lots about them.

How did that work out? First, we now know that over half of the benefits of the Bush-Hubbard tax cuts went to the top 1 percent of the population. In part to benefit the wealthy, the tax cuts were also structured to reward investment in financial assets, rather than either consumer spending or real capital investment. As a result, the tax cuts caused huge budget deficits, yet did little to stimulate growth or job creation: there were basically no new jobs created during the Bush administration, despite adding trillions to the national debt.

That is not, however, what Hubbard said would happen. On August 22, 2001, he published anarticle in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Tax Cuts Won't Hurt the Surplus." Oops. In the article, also, Hubbard predicts that his tax cuts would preserve the Clinton budget surpluses by causing GNP to grow 0.3 percent per year faster.

Hubbard also co-authored an article with William Dudley, then the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, entitled "How Capital Markets Enhance Economic Performance and Job Creation." It was published by the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute in 2004, just as the housing bubble was getting seriously crazy.

Read the rest of this at Capitalism Without Failure here.