Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 30 of 91

How Economic Decisions Are Made

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On September 5, 2019

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Image by TW Collins

Let’s talk money. Everyone’s favorite subject, perhaps after sex.

Money does a lot of things, but one of the most important things it does is signal “Do this, do that, don’t do that.” It says, “We need more of this, we need less of that.”

As a result money moves people around. It compels them to do things. Or, if you prefer, “profit” does. How much you can make doing something. You have to at least break even, and the more profit you make, the more you should do of something.

This is completely vanilla economic theory. This is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Right now, we have a situation where there are things we need to do, but the price/profit/wage signals are saying, “Build super yachts. Optimize selling ads. Build more weapons. Play financial games instead of building things, because financial games make more money.”

That’s the reality. That’s what money is saying, and people are responding to it.

So we have a vast explosion–not of nurses, but of health administrators. We aren’t sinking carbon to prevent climate change, because there’s no money in it. We are creating palliative medicines rather than cures, and monetizing medicines like insulin ($300).

People are doing what money tells them to do. It’s that simple.

But, as I’ve said before, money is a social construction, and price signals are not given by God and nature: They are choices. Political choices. That isn’t to deny some physical reality behind what they signal as “worth,” but that reality has obviously been elided, when, in America, the life spans of some demographic groups are dropping while super-yachts and luxury condos are hot to trot.

All systems have to do only one thing: Whatever is required to keep the system in power.

That’s all they have to do. Whether or not human welfare is advanced, whether or not we care about animals or nature is irrelevant to the raw calculus of power and staying in power. Until it effects staying in power.

If the hoi polloi can be kept from revolting or demanding (remember demands are based on “or else,” they are not requests) well then, the powerful will not do anything that does not increase their power or money. They will only care about human welfare outside of their own group if they feel they must, or if, as happens occasionally, they see their group as being something other than the elite group.

Right now, elites don’t care about other humans enough to reshape the money and political systems (the same thing, ultimately) to prioritize human welfare, avoid a great-die-off, or stop climate change. This is clear. It is not arguable, it is a fact, based simply on their actions.

If money isn’t saying, “Do the right thing,” then money is failing. The argument of capitalism was simple: “Markets will do the right thing, if we mostly get out of the way and let them operate.”

That’s just not true. Markets only do the right thing if they are properly managed. That management may look light at times, but it actually has to be ferocious because the first thing that anyone who wins a market fight does is try to stop the market operating properly; they don’t want price signals that would take away what they’ve won.

In 2007/2008 those price signals were given. They said: “The entire banking and shadow banking system has allocated resources to the wrong things. All of their money and power needs to be taken away from them. They need to go bankrupt and that power and money needs to go to other people.”

We ignored that signal. We pretended that ignoring that signal was the right thing to do by propping up failures and incompetents–who had not only massively mis-allocated resources, but engaged in mass fraud.

It wasn’t the right thing to do. Capitalism requires both outside management and an insistence on market discipline. It is most important that market discipline is exercised on the large actors, not the small ones, because the large ones set the market terms and make most of the allocative decision. When you offer people too-cheap loans, they will take them. YOU are the one offering them; YOU are the one in the wrong.

Price signals must encourage doing the right thing. When those with market power either misbehave or mis-allocate money, they must lose their power to do so.

This is fundamental, and no society which relies on money to determine allocative decisions will prosper if it is not managed properly.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

When the Ideas that Run the World Change

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On September 3, 2019

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Real political change happens infrequently. The cycles are decades long. So, most recently, there was the crisis of the 70s which led to the rise of neoliberalism: Thatcher and Reagan. Everything that has happened since then, in the Western world and Japan, has been an unfolding of that. There are some important sideshows, but this is a neoliberal world.

Before that the Crisis of the Great Depression and WWII led to the post-war era. In the US, that runs from 1933 to 1980, essentially, but it was in crisis from about ’68 or so.

There are other such cycles, for example, in the early 1900s there was a collapse of support for Imperialism in Britain. It disappeared in a few years (I know a lot less about this). Everyone had to support it for decades, and suddenly they didn’t.

During a period where a sub-ideology reigns (all of these were capitalist periods, but they were very different forms of capitalism) it’s almost impossible to do things against the trend. The best you can do is grip on for dear life and try not to lose too much. You can, alternatively, go orthogonal: Neoliberals are basically okay with identity politics, so you can make gains there. Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it can be done.

But the real fight is over the NEXT period, the transition. Key ideologues created neoliberal thought long before Thatcher and Reagan. When things go to hell (stagflation is the end point of the 70s) for long enough, people become willing to change ideologies.

They choose from the available ideas. Ideas with muscle and money, or which appeal to elites (if the elites aren’t being changed), have a better chance. But the key point is that if your ideas aren’t there, and being considered in the crisis period, you’ve already lost.

The conservatives were and are right: Ideas have consequences. Ideas are powerful. Next to physical facts, they are probably the most important factors in human existence (every invention is an idea first).

We are probably in a transition period. If we aren’t, we will be soon. Take this into account: Whoever wins this transition period will rule, if not the world, then a significant chunk of it. Everyone else will either be working out their ideas, resisting them, or trying to do something orthogonal to avoid them.

Finally, there are different types of ideas. Technological ideas are one subset. They aren’t as determinative as we moderns think. They determine the possibilities, but possibilities can lie fallow for a long time. Certain societies are possible with the steam engine, or the internal combustion engine. Composite bows and stirrups make other societies possible. The stirrup and composite bow were around for a long time before Genghis Khan showed what they could truly do. The Chinese invented gunpowder, the Ancient Greeks had toy steam engines.

So beware of over-determination, and also beware of the idea that histories and societies which didn’t happen–or have not happened–were therefore impossible.

Meantime, transition period, ho. Get to work, your enemies (and you have enemies) are.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why Labour Unions Matter(ed)

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On September 2, 2019

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Since it’s coming up on Labour Day weekend here in Canada, I thought I’d write a basic post on labour unions.

There’s been a vast effort, funded by huge amounts of money, to discredit unions and say they’re bad for workers.

That’s simple nonsense, but as with things like climate change denial, nonsense backed with billions of dollars is effective.

So, let’s run through the simple logic.

When we negotiate to get a job, or for a raise, in almost all cases we are negotiating with a group–the people who control a company, who are more powerful than us. They have more money (d’uh), and we need the job more than they need us. There are exceptions, of course, and it’s a lovely position to be in, but the number of exceptions is minute in a job-based economy like ours.

Corporations hire workers to do something which, combined with the effort of other workers, will make money.

The amount of money they make from a worker is “what the worker produces,” or “what the worker is paid.”

In other words, a corporation wants to make as much money as possible from your work, while paying you as little as possible, because that is their profit: That’s what they make.

You want the opposite.

This is a straight up conflict of interest. There can be a compromise which satisfies both, but really, the group hiring you wants you to make as little as possible so they can make as much as possible.

And they are more powerful than you. Also, you need the job, more than they need you. Without a job, you will be homeless and probably die; without any individual worker, they can usually just hire someone else.

So there is an imbalance of both power and consequences: Your BATNA (Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement) is often shit.

Now, it isn’t always shit. In a really tight economy, which most western countries haven’t had since the early 70s, you can just get another job. There are less workers than jobs. But that hasn’t been the case for a long time–except for brief periods in specific locations or jobs, for decades. Where it is the case, companies work to change that, as fast as possible because they don’t want you to have alternatives.

This stuff is important for people who are not in management (which, in the old days, included bottom-level supervisors.) It is unimportant to senior executives, who are usually the people really running the company, and who are in effect negotiating with themselves for compensation. You’ll notice that they reward themselves well.

So, people who don’t control the company, and who are easily replaceable (again, most of us, despite many people’s over-inflated sense of self-worth), need to group up in order to have power. One person, or a few, are easy to replace.

If every line worker walks off the job and then pickets to prevent any other workers (scabs) coming in, the power equation changes.

Because most of us don’t study history, we have forgotten what unions won. At the start of the industrial revolution, people worked 12 hour days, 6 1/2 days a week. The jobs were dangerous, with maiming common, and badly paid. Peasants resisted being thrown off the land because being a feudal tenant with rights to the commons was vastly better than going to a city and working in a factory job (or even most clerk jobs). You worked less, controlled your own work, were less likely to be maimed and had a ton more days off.

It took over a century to turn jobs into what they are now, with the 40 hour week, a lot less maimings, and so on.

Corporations are groups. When they negotiate against an individual they have an advantage.

Corporations almost always have more resources and power than any individual or small group with whom they are negotiating over a job. If you were richer, or more powerful than them, you probably wouldn’t be going to them for a line job.

So what corporations want is to negotiate as a group, with more money and power, against individuals.

Only a complete bloody moron would find it either smart or fair for workers to acquiesce to this. It is not in their interests. The people who control corporations (not own, control) want to make the most money possible, so do workers.

Corporate officers, notoriously ruthless, understand this. Workers should too.

As for those not in a union, and jealous: Unions raise the wages of workers around them. Plus, get in a union if you can.

Don’t be a bloody sucker. Corporations hate unions because when unions are effective, they make less money and workers make more. That is all.

And if you want to know why workers keep having shittier and shittier lives in the US, well, here’s a lovely chart for you.

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Support unions. Unless you’re a greedy, asshole boss, who thinks CEOs should earn 300x more than workers, in which case, rot in Hell.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

What Negative Interest Rates Mean and What We Should Do

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On August 21, 2019

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Alright, so Germany has now introduced a zero interest bond. That means, given inflation, people will get back less effective money than they started with.

At this point, outside the US, the average interest rate is negative.

As Stoller pointed out, that means that people with money can’t figure out anything productive to do with it which will make a profit.

That means that capitalists and banks, including central banks, have failed. It is their function, in a capitalist society, to allocate resources. Money represents resources: people, stuff, and land.

Now if we lived in a utopia, with no real problems, this would make sense, but we don’t. There are tons of real problems which need solving, lots of money floating around, and other capacity indicators show there are people and resources which are not being used, or which could be redeployed.

So capitalism is failing to do what it’s supposed to do, and so are capitalists.

The correct action in a situation like this is to get that money working. The government could borrow it massively, and do what needs to be done. It could (and I would suggest this is the better option) tax it away, and then spend it.

If capitalists absolutely insist on private enterprise doing the work, then they should massively raise taxes on any income or capital gains not used productively, and not count less productive things like loans–they should stipulate that the money must be invested into business activity. They should make stock option grants, stock buy-backs, and all similar activities intended to allow cash-outs impossible. They should get rid of private equity; just make it illegal. Almost all of its activity destroys viable business to create a pay day for a few people.

Heck, you should do away with all those things anyway.

People are very confused about profit. Profit is mostly socially constructed. It is not an independent variable. Taxes, laws, and regulations determine what is profitable and what isn’t. Billions of subsidies, tax breaks, and favorable land deals make extraction industries profitable, for example. Banks get to print money. Media companies like Disney rely on characters and ideas which, in the past, they would long have lost control over. Companies are allowed to pollute for free, to use vast amounts of water for nominal prices, and so on.

Meanwhile, a vast array of regulations and nickel and dime costs makes it impossible for small business to compete. Try starting a bank. Yeah, good luck with that.

This, too, is by design. Before Reagan, regulations were set up to make small businesses easier to start and keep running.

The point is that if investors can’t find anything in which to invest, government has failed to tweak profits correctly. You shouldn’t get rich in land speculation unless you’re building stuff that should be built. You should get rich in alternative energy, but mostly you don’t. You should get rich in making homes that are healthy and energy neutral, but instead we keep building unhealthy and environmentally-degrading housing.

You should make money rebuilding infrastructure, or building high speed trains, or reducing carbon, or reforesting, or making fish and phytoplankton stocks recover.

Yet, you don’t, so these things which need to be done in order to, like, avoid a few billion deaths, don’t get done.

That’s government failure.

Capitalism does not work without effective government control, if it is the dominant economic mode in a society.

So. We have lots of stuff that needs to be done. We have lots of resources and money which aren’t doing those things and, indeed, resources and money which apparently can’t find anything to do

Only a moron can’t look at those facts and know what to do.

Oh, and the 2008/9 bailouts made this situation far, far worse than it should have been. This endless printing of money is only to keep the useless rich afloat when they serve no useful, productive function. They are actually counterproductive, as they are actively stopping productive activity from happening.

Tax them. Stop propping them up and let incompetents die. Destroy, utterly, those members of the ruling class who are actively destructive, like Private Equity. Alter the rules so that productive activity is profitable, and while you’re doing all that, just have governments do the most important stuff themselves, with negative real interest rate loans.

None of this isn’t obvious to anyone who pays any attention.

Yet we don’t do it, because governments have been captured by failed rich people.

Normal. But not acceptable when the cost of inaction could be billions of dead people.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

A Few Words About Argentina

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On August 13, 2019

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Okay, so Argentina elected a neoliberal president. He went to deep austerity, removed capital controls, and sought an IMF bailout.

Now it looks like a socialist may win and markets are freaking out, because he may default on some of the debt and re-institute capital controls.

Argentina’s problems have a long history, but it’s worth remembering this: Before WWII, it was a first world country, with a standard of living about equal to Canada’s.

Argentina partially defaulted in 2001. We should remember that that default was caused by following the conservative policy of pegging the Peso to the dollar, which any moron should have known would eventually backfire.

It is also worth remembering that, when Argentina defaulted in 2001, it wasn’t actually allowed to. American courts wouldn’t let Argentina pay the creditors who allowed their debt to be reduced unless they also paid those debtors who didn’t take the deal.

We live in a stupid, perverse world where people don’t understand that there has to be a balance between debtors and creditors. Creditors are making a bet, and if they lend to the wrong entity, and that entity eventually can’t pay back the debt, they should have to eat their losses. Don’t lend to people who can’t pay you back. Everyone knew that Argentina was going to have debt problems, every time, but they took the chance because they wanted high returns.

But the central financial system, the NY and London courts, and the IMF act as debt collectors for people who want the upside of high payments from distressed borrowers without the downside of possibly losing the money.

Worse, they act as enforcers for bad actors, who won’t cut deals, and expect to litigate.

Debtors may lose some money, but leg-breaking countries for rich debtors kills and impoverishes poor people.

Now, none of this is to say Argentina hasn’t made mistakes. Flipping back and forth between neoliberals and socialists is stupid. Pick one, and suck it up. Electing Macri was stupid, but then being outraged when he does what a neoliberal technocrat would do (i.e., austerity and sucking up to the IMF) is equally stupid.

Pick a governing philosophy and elect governments that adhere to that philosophy until the leading parties all follow it (like when Labour became neoliberal under Blair, cementing Thatcher’s victory).

Right now, Argentina is getting the worst of both worlds.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why We Need to End Banks and Shadow Banks

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On August 8, 2019

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Banks and various other financial companies have one important privilege: They can create money. When a bank lends you money, they don’t take it from another account and apply it to yours, they just put a number into a ledger, and voila, the money exists, created as debt.

Now, there are those who argue that creating all money as debt is stupid, but let’s move on from that and emphasize the important point:

Banks and other financial companies create money out of thin air.

Now, there are various caveats, and the amount they can create isn’t unlimited (though for practical purposes it’s close), but this is the bottom line.

They then get paid back by the people they loaned money to on money they created out of thin air.

It takes a special sort of genius to run a business which can actually create money, yet still lose money.

This chart gives an idea of how much genius:

I mean, you create the money out of nothing, and then you charge 17 percent returns (which underestimates the real rate of return, because of all the charges), and you still manage to cause a financial crisis because your liabilities wind up higher than your assets?

Wonderment aside, let’s circle back to the ability to create money.

Let’s say you’re Joe, guy who wants to start a business or buy a house. You go to a bank, and the bank decides whether you can do that.

Banks have the ability to create money in exchange for doing something: They decide who should get to do things. They give permission.

If a bank lends you 5o million, that’s the right to command 5o million dollars worth of other people’s labor: To hire them, or to buy the goods created by them. You get to choose what those people do.

Resources, especially people, aren’t infinite. Banks choose who gets to use them. The deal, spelled out is, “Give us the right to create money, and we’ll choose the people who do the most good with society’s resources to control those resources.”

And the banks have failed–over and over again they’ve failed. They don’t even actually make their returns (see 2007/8), let alone actually make good choices about how we should use our resources–with labour or other limited resources. I trust I don’t need to spell all of this out: Look at ecological collapse, climate change, and so on.

So banks, in their current form, shouldn’t have this incredible privilege, because they’ve repeatedly used it badly. This isn’t the first time, or even the second, or the tenth. Among others was the collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression, which effectively caused WWII. We thought we’d fixed the banking sector after that, and we were wrong, because rich people bought out government and undid all the fixes put in by FDR and the New Dealers.

So banks can’t be fixed, they do near apocalyptic damage, plus they suck at their actual job.

We need to find another way to give people permission to use scarce resources, including other people’s labor.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Who Bans or Encourages Crypto?

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On July 24, 2019

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Iran, apparently, intends to legalize crypto.

India intends to ban it.

Iran needs a way to get money and resources in and out of the country, because it is under sanctions.

India has had a huge war on cash, ostensibly to crack down on corruption. (Well, partially that, but partially to give corporations a cut of every transaction.)

It’s fairly clear who is doing what, why.

Also, anyone who cracks down against cash is anti-freedom. This includes our otherwise decent Nordic brothers. Crypto isn’t actually a freedom technology, by the very nature of the ledger (tracking every transaction). It’s more naturally a totalitarian technology, we just haven’t caught up to the fact (just as drones are a weapon of the weak).

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Is Turkey Going to Exit NATO?

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On July 23, 2019

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Turkey has NATO’s second largest army.

Turkey recently bought Russian s-400 air and missile defense systems. The US had warned that if Turkey did so, it would not be able to have F-35 fighters. Of course, part of this is that Turkish companies producing parts also lost those contracts. The companies will be compensated by helping produce the s-400.

No big deal. The F-35, if not the biggest, errrr, turkey in US defense appropriation history, is certainly part of the pantheon. I wish Canada hadn’t bought them. It’s just a pork operation, and a lot of arm-twisting and bribes were required to make anyone buy them.

But as Buchanan points out:

Under U.S. law, the administration is also required to impose sanctions on Turkey for buying Russian weaponry…

..US hawks are already calling for the expulsion of Turkey from NATO. And the withdrawal of American forces and nuclear weapons from the Incirlik air base in Turkey in retaliation is not out of the question.

I cannot imagine Erdogan’s response to US sanctions–that alone would stand a good chance of ending Turkey’s NATO membership.

But context is important here. Turkey has increasingly been swinging into the anti-Saudi alliance, with Iran and Qatar. Turkey made sure to get Qatar supplies, and Qatar and Iran also became close.

Meanwhile, there is the China factor: An important chunk of China’s Belt and Road Initiative needs to go through Turkey.

More context. For decades, the Turks, under the old secular government, effectively on their knees, begged the Europeans to let them join the EU. The Europeans dragged their feet, and dragged their feet, and dragged their feet.

The secular Turks saw themselves as part of Europe. Europe didn’t want them. Eventually, the Young Turks, having failed because Europe made them fail, turned to a populist Islamist government.

Membership in NATO was part of Turkey saying: “We are one of you.”

Now that Turkey knows it isn’t part of Europe, and knows that Europe would never let it be part of Europe (the same lesson Russia learned after Communism’s collapse, and, oh, did they want to be Westerners, and oh, did we fuck them over), it is moving to a different world with different economic and military ties.

You can only spurn someone for so long.

If the West wanted a secular Turkey which was a solid ally, it needed to make the economy part of the equation work for Turkey, and it needed to let Turkey in. Instead, over and over, it made it clear that Turks weren’t really Westerners.

Erdogan, and now this turn to the East, are the results of Western policy and prejudice. The Turks gave us many many decades to welcome them to the family.

Having failed to do so, we can hardly complain now.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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