Jesse's Café Américain

America has become more a debt 'junkie' - - than ever before
with total debt of $53 Trillion - - and the highest debt ratio in history.

That's $175,154 per man, woman and child - - or $700,616 per family of 4,
$33,781 more debt per family than last year.

Last year total debt increased $4.3 Trillion, 5.5 times more than GDP.
External debt owed foreign interests increased $2.2 Trillion;
Household, business and financial sector debt soared 7-11%.

80% ($42 trillion) of total debt was created since 1990,
a period primarily driven by debt instead of by productive activity.

And, the above does not include un-funded pensions and medical promises.

America's Total Debt Report - Grandfather's Economic Series

Since a picture is 'worth a 1000 words" here are a few charts for your consideration.

In a simple handwave estimate, one might say that the debt will have to be discounted by at least half. That includes inflation and selective defaults. The seductiveness of this chart is that things have continued on in their frenzied pace for so long, it seems like the norm. That is always a problem with chronic drunks and addicts; they rarely know when to quit, or can't, until they really hit the wall.

Nine out of ten Americans might understand that when the growth of your debt outrageously outstrips your income for so long, that something has got to give. The givers will most likely be all holders of US financial assets, responsible middle class savers, and a disproportionate share of foreign holders of US debt.

While the debtors hold the means of payment in dollars and the power to decide who gets paid, where do you think the most likely impact will be felt?

This is not intended as a rant, a screed in the pejorative sense, or anything else but a reasoned diagnosis based on the data as we find it.

We could be wrong, and we hope we are. Show us better data. The prognosis is not optimistic.

Here is a view of the debt data that is "optimistic" if you are willing to ignore the relative historic context and the huge amount of debts that are off the Federal balance sheet.

A dismissive reaction to this kind of forecast is understandable.

The doctor is always viewed as a 'party pooper' and a gloomy sort when he informs the uber-alpha hard drinking, stress generating, self-medicating, recreational drug=binging forty-something patient that their shortness of breath is emphysema, their blood pressure is soaring as quickly as their self-absorption, and that chest discomfort is a warning sign of a rapidly developing heart problem that could be a deal breaker if they do not change their lifestyle.

But, like most prognostic warnings go, it will be ignored with the dawn of a new day, a successful if awkward commute to work, and the anticipation of another evening's delight and binges yet to come. Until they don't.

It might be a good idea not to be a passenger with a recklessly self-destructive debt junkie at the wheel of your financial assets. Unless you are c0-dependent like Saudi Arabia, China and Japan or are one of the kids in the backseat. Then you have some serious decisions to make.

In the meantime buckle up, because Uncle Sugar-Daddy still has the keys to the car.

Its interesting to read this essay from early 2006 today in the light of what we have seen in the intervening period. A number of people who might have dismissed this out of hand back then might see a little more truth behind the rhetoric today.

So, how can the political system reform itself? How can we reestablish checks, balances, countervailing power, and a sense of public purpose? How can we get modern economic predation back under control, restoring the possibilities not only for progressive social action but also—just as important—for honest private economic activity? Until we can answer those questions, the predators will run wild.

It is something to think about for the New Year, for all parties involved. FDR was denounced as a 'traitor to his class' at the time, but in reality he was one of the most insightful of leaders. If one views outcomes in other contemporary governments from 1916 to 1940, and considers what a Huey Long administration might have been as an example, the New Deal seems like a wise and appropriate political move for all involved.

Why are people so reluctant to believe that sociopaths and narcissists can use the power of the pen to prey on people? Because they are well spoken and organized? We would contend that these are the most dangerous of the emotionally warped with a need to acquire, dominate and control, because they are smarter and more calculating than the impulse murderers, burglars, rapists, thieves, and pedophiles.
There is a need for economic law and enforcement as there is a need for the less cerebral, hairy knuckled criminal law and enforcement. The notion that people become naturally good, rational and well-adjusted because they are wearing a suit is ludicrous, especially to anyone who has worked with many of those who move in the upper echelons of money and power.
Some of the scariest people we have ever met were articulate and pathologically driven borderline psychopaths with a need to acquire political and economic power. It is the focus of their illness that makes them powerful. They are not distracted by the diffusion of emotional responses that color most people's actions. They have a need, and the will to satisfy it, no matter what it takes.
As an aside, we have met many kind and gentle and thoughtful people in all walks of life, rich and poor. It is not the office that makes the person; it is their character. Class prejudice is mistaken and unjust, and there is always someone less fortunate than you who might view you as the object of their anger, no matter who you might be. The hypocrisy and injustice of prejudice and 'class warfare' knows few limits.
There will always be those at the extremes who need to 'take it to the limit,' with a well stocked foreign retreat in case things get ugly. But for most of us, restoring a sense of justice and order and putting the nation back into some kind of working balance will be high on the priority list, if not for ourselves, then for our families. Violence does not work, ever. The Constitution is a restraint that works both ways, against the predations of the powerful, but also as a shield against would-be Robespierres with their dark reigns of terror.
It is going to take a lot of hard work, and time. Its been a long time coming, it will be a long time gone. But it has been done before by those who created this nation, and it can be done to restore it again.
We are not doomed. Our situation is not hopeless. But the system is badly out of balance, and will have to be restored by meaningful reform. There will be inflation and selective defaults, real justice and show trials, innovation and false starts, disproportionate suffering, uncertainty and even some level of conflict. But eventually the accounts will be squared and we will gather ourselves together an move forward. The sooner we start, the sooner it will be over.

Mother Jones
The Predator State
By James K. Galbraith
May/June 2006 Issue

WHAT IS THE REAL NATURE of American capitalism today? Is it a grand national adventure, as politicians and textbooks aver, in which markets provide the framework for benign competition, from which emerges the greatest good for the greatest number? Or is it the domain of class struggle, even a “global class war,” as the title of Jeff Faux’s new book would have it, in which the “party of Davos” outmaneuvers the remnants of the organized working class?

The doctrines of the “law and economics” movement, now ascendant in our courts, hold that if people are rational, if markets can be “contested,” if memory is good and information adequate, then firms will adhere on their own to norms of honorable conduct. Any public presence in the economy undermines this. Even insurance—whether deposit insurance or Social Security—is perverse, for it encourages irresponsible risktaking. Banks will lend to bad clients, workers will “live for today,” companies will speculate with their pension funds; the movement has even argued that seat belts foster reckless driving. Insurance, in other words, creates a “moral hazard” for which “market discipline” is the cure; all works for the best when thought and planning do not interfere. It’s a strange vision, and if we weren’t governed by people like John Roberts and Sam Alito, who pretend to believe it, it would scarcely be worth our attention.

The idea of class struggle goes back a long way; perhaps it really is “the history of all hitherto existing society,” as Marx and Engels famously declared. But if the world is ruled by a monied elite, then to what extent do middle-class working Americans compose part of the global proletariat? The honest answer can only be: not much. The political decline of the left surely flows in part from rhetoric that no longer matches experience; for the most part, American voters do not live on the Malthusian margin. Dollars command the world’s goods, rupees do not; membership in the dollar economy makes every working American, to some degree, complicit in the capitalist class.

In the mixed-economy America I grew up in, there existed a post-capitalist, post-Marxian vision of middle-class identity. It consisted of shared assets and entitlements, of which the bedrock was public education, access to college, good housing, full employment at living wages, Medicare, and Social Security. These programs, publicly provided, financed, or guaranteed, had softened the rough edges of Great Depression capitalism, rewarding the sacrifices that won the Second World War. They also showcased America, demonstrating to those behind the Iron Curtain that regulated capitalism could yield prosperity far beyond the capacities of state planning. (This, and not the arms race, ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.) These middle-class institutions survive in America today, but they are frayed and tattered from constant attack. And the division between those included and those excluded is large and obvious to all.

Today, the signature of modern American capitalism is neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. Instead, predation has become the dominant feature—a system wherein the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class. The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live.

Our rulers deliver favors to their clients. These range from Native American casino operators, to Appalachian coal companies, to Saipan sweatshop operators, to the would-be oil field operators of Iraq. They include the misanthropes who led the campaign to abolish the estate tax; Charles Schwab, who suggested the dividend tax cut of 2003; the “Benedict Arnold” companies who move their taxable income offshore; and the financial institutions behind last year’s bankruptcy bill. Everywhere you look, public decisions yield gains to specific private entities.

For in a predatory regime, nothing is done for public reasons. Indeed, the men in charge do not recognize that “public purposes” exist. They have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest—we’re the prey. Hurricane Katrina illustrated this perfectly, as Halliburton scooped up contracts and Bush hamstrung Kathleen Blanco, the Democratic governor of Louisiana. The population of New Orleans was, at best, an afterthought; once dispersed, it was quickly forgotten.

The predator-prey model explains some things that other models cannot: in particular, cycles of prosperity and depression. Growth among the prey stimulates predation. The two populations grow together at first, but when the balance of power shifts toward the predators (through rising interest rates, utility rates, oil prices, or embezzlement), both can crash abruptly. When they do, it takes a long time for either to recover.

The predatory model can also help us understand why many rich people have come to hate the Bush administration. For predation is the enemy of honest business. In a world where the winners are all connected, it’s not only the prey who lose out. It’s everyone who hasn’t licked the appropriate boots. Predatory regimes are like protection rackets: powerful and feared, but neither loved nor respected. They do not enjoy a broad political base.

In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the law and economics crowd don’t apply. There’s no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rules but by breaking them. They take the business-school view of law: Rules are not designed to guide behavior but laid down to define the limits of unpunished conduct. Once one gets close to the line, stepping over it is easy. A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior.

Why don’t markets provide the discipline? Why don’t “reputation effects” secure good behavior? Economists have been slow to answer these questions, but now we have a full-blown theory in a book by my colleague William K. Black, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Black was the lawyer/whistle-blower in the Savings and Loan and Keating Five scandals; he later took a degree in criminology. His theory of “control fraud” addresses the situation in which the leader of an organization uses his company as a “weapon” of fraud and a “shield” against prosecution—a situation with which law and economics cannot cope.

For instance, law and economics argues that top accounting firms will protect their own reputations by ferreting out fraud in their clients. But, as with Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, at every major S&L control fraud was protected by clean audits from top accountants: You hire the top firm to get the clean opinion. Moral hazard theory shifts the blame for financial collapse to the incentives implicit in insurance, but Black shows that the large frauds were nearly all committed in institutions taken over for that purpose by criminal networks, often by big players like Charles Keating, Michael Milken, and Don Dixon. And there’s another thing about predatory institutions. They invariably fail in the end. They fail because they are meant to fail. Predators suck the life from the businesses they command, concealing the fact for as long as possible behind fraudulent accounting and hugely complex transactions; that’s the looter’s point.

That a government run by people rooted in this culture should also be predatory isn’t surprising—and the link between George H.W. Bush, who led the deregulation of the S&Ls, his son Neil, who ran a corrupt S&L, and Neil’s brother George, for whom Ken Lay sent thugs to Florida in 2000 on the Enron plane, could hardly be any closer. But aside from occasional references to “kleptocracy” in other countries, economic opinion has been slow to recognize this. Thinking wistfully, we assume that government wants to do good, and its failure to do so is a matter of incompetence.

But if the government is a predator, then it will fail: not merely politically, but in every substantial way. Government will not cope with global warming, or Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq—not because it is incompetent but because it is willfully indifferent to the problem of competence. The questions are, in what ways will the failure hit the population? And what mechanisms survive for calling the predators to account? Unfortunately, at the highest levels, one cannot rely on the justice system, thanks to the power of the pardon. It’s politics or nothing, recognizing that in a world of predators, all established parties are corrupted in part.

So, how can the political system reform itself? How can we reestablish checks, balances, countervailing power, and a sense of public purpose? How can we get modern economic predation back under control, restoring the possibilities not only for progressive social action but also—just as important—for honest private economic activity? Until we can answer those questions, the predators will run wild.

James K. Galbraith teaches economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. He previously served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including executive director of the Joint Economic Committee.