Vocabulary > Economy, Economics

Tim Eagan

Deep Cover

Cagle

8 November 2010

Doctor = G.O.P leader John A. Boehner
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/us/politics/12boehner.html

NYT

7.6.2008

Schrank

The Independent

19th October 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/the-daily-cartoon-760940.html?ino=41

British Prime Minister (2007-2010) Gordon Brown
 

economics
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/d/deflation_economics/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/01/how-to-teach-economics-after-the-financial-crisis
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/opinion/rabbit-hole-economics.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/20/governmentborrowing-economics
http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/article3165056.ece
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/0,,604659,00.html

economic doctrine > austerity policies
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/opinion/krugman-death-of-a-fairy-tale.html

teach economics
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/01/how-to-teach-economics-after-the-financial-crisis

neuroeconomics
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/19/neuroeconomics-women-city-financial-crash

behavioral economics
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/business/economy/16fed.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15loewenstein.html

John Maynard Keynes        1883-1946
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/
john-maynard-keynes-can-the-great-economist-save-the-world-994416.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/20/economy-recession-treasury-energy-housing
http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/keynes.html

Keynesian economics / policy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/27/recession-creditcrunch

Keynesians
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/14/keynesian-economic-recovery-brown-germany

Bretton Woods        1944
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/nov/14/bretton-woods-1944-keynes-imf

gold standard        1946-1971
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/337802.stm
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2006/cr021506.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o

Bubblenomics        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/weekinreview/21leonhardt.html

Barack Obama > Obamanomics        USA
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/has-obamanomics-vanquished-reaganomics/

Ronald Reagan > Reaganomics        USA
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/jun/08/usnews.economicdispatch
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/apr/20/globalrecession.globalisation
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924952,00.html

'freeconomics'
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/
how-can-youtube-survive-1734267.html

economic policy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/economy

 economic policy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/opinion/15krugman.html

economic might
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/opinion/21krugman.html

economic superpower
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/opinion/21krugman.html

economic security        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/opinion/how-do-you-say-economic-security.html

downbeat economic reports

global economic disaster

economic growth        GDP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2008/oct/22/creditcrunch-recession
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economicgrowth

growth        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/business/global/imf-slashes-growth-outlook-for-us-and-europe.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-imf-idUSTRE75G2VD20110617

slow growth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jul/12/economic-growth-recession-uk

UK GDP since 1948
Gross Domestic Product is the output of Britain.
Find out how this recession compares to the others
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/nov/25/gdp-uk-1948-growth-economy

Gross Domestic Product        GDP        USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/gross_domestic_product/index.html

economic data        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/business/07oil.html

sagging economy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/business/07leon.html

economic woes

economic pain        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/us/politics/08obama.html

hard economic times        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/washington/21lameduck.html

economy forecast
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/09/creditcrunch.economy1

forecast        USA
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-imf-idUSTRE75G2VD20110617

dire forecast        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10turow.html

forecaster        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/business/economy/03econ.html

economy        2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3934412/
Economy-must-be-driven-by-moral-obligation-says-Archbishop-of-Westminster.html
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4363962.ece

economy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/opinion/brooks-the-two-economies.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/economy-contributes-to-slowest-population-growth-rate-since-1940s.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-us-usa-economy.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/business/07econ.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2060561020080320
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-03-17-bush-economy_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/topstories/2008-01-12-1690152503_x.htm

global economy        2008
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Economy/idUSTRE4A966O20081110

real economy        USA
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-CreditCrisis/idUSTRE51C09P20090213

faltering economy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04econintro.html

New York Times > Topics > United States Economy
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/index.html

economy > Cagle cartoons        USA        2008
http://www.cagle.com/news/Economy08/main.asp

the economy's strength

buoyant economy

be considered a bellwether for the American economy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/17bank.html

have a significant effect on the economy

fundamentals        USA
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSWBT00802120071205

"the great moderation"        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/business/23leonhardt.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/business/23leonside.html
http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2004/20040220/default.htm
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~JStock/pdf/stock&watson_macroannual.pdf

spur        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/business/economy/16fed.html

stimulus        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29tyson.html

Economic Stimulus (Jobs Bills)        USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/economic_stimulus/index.html

economic stimulus package        USA
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-01-22-paulson_N.htm

economic indicator        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04econintro.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/opinion/05sat1.html

economic fears        USA        2008
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1041396220080410

economic cycle        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/us/politics/02bai.html

economic growth

economic outlook        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/2011-economy-sentiment.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/business/global/imf-slashes-growth-outlook-for-us-and-europe.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/economy/26housing.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE49J5EE20081020
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/business/economy/16data.html
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/testimony/bernanke20071108a.htm

bleak

gloomy outlook
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5196112.ece

dire        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/economy/26housing.html

shrinking economy

stalled economies
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5349277.ece

ailing economy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/business/economy/17econ.html

failing economy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/business/25safe.html

thrift economy        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/25garage.html

informal economy / grey economy / underground economy / parallel economy        USA
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2009-02-25-barter_N.htm
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2766310

black economy
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1811214.ece

money laundering
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2030804,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2030804,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1944571,00.html

sustained economic weakness

economist
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/business/american-economists-share-nobel-prize.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/business/economy/06deflation.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/15/unemploymentdata-workandcareers

Walter Isard        1919-2010
economist who founded the field of regional science,
inspiring social scientists to study the relationships between
such factors as geography, migration and land use in local or regional economies
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/business/economy/11isard.html

economist > Paul A. Samuelson
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/paul-samuelson-rip/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/economy/14samuelson.html

Stephen Stanley, chief economist with RBS Greenwich Capital

Simon Hayley, senior international economist for Capital Economics

monetarist guru > Milton Friedman        1912-2006
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1950327,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1950303,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1949904,00.html

supply

demand

outstrip

business cycle
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/18/business/20081019-metrics-graphic.html

bubble        2008
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/series/the_reckoning/index.html

crisis
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-11-03-economy-depression-recession_N.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/opinion/25herbert.html

crises (plur)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/opinion/05adouthat.html

handling of the financial crisis
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/20/polls-economy

causes of the financial crisis        2008
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/series/the_reckoning/index.html

Hard times: How the financial crisis is affecting public services        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/series/hard-times

manufacturing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2008/oct/07/interestrates.creditcrunch

service sector        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/02/03/us/AP-US-Economy.html

service sector
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2008/oct/07/interestrates.creditcrunch

housing market
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2008/oct/07/interestrates.creditcrunch

American dream        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html

the state of the economy

President Bush's handling of the economy        USA

economic data

global financial system

anti-globalisation group

Financial Times        FT
http://news.ft.com/home/europe

trade
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10turow.html

trade

trademark
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2006471,00.html

fair trade

global trading system

trade gap
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2784281

Dave Brown

The Independent

13 November 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/the-daily-cartoon-760940.html?ino=16

British Prime Minister (2007-2010) Gordon Brown

UK public spending        1948-2010
graphic shows total public spending in post-war Britain
as a percentage of GDP, and where the money has been spent
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2010/oct/15/comprehensive-spending-review-2010-public-spending

spending review        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/spending-review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/20/spending-review-2010-osborne-cuts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/20/spending-review-2010-key-points
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2010/oct/20/spending-review-report-in-full

spending review report        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2010/oct/20/spending-review-report-in-full

public spending        2008-2009
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2008/09/12/13.09.08.Public.spending.pdf

public finances        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/20/governmentborrowing-economics
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2008/09/12/13.09.08.Public.spending.pdf

council spending cuts        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/nov/07/children-old-lonely-council-spending-cuts

public spending cuts / public sector cuts        2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/30/public-spending-cuts

overhead

welfare        USA        2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/opinion/krugman-moochers-against-welfare.html

welfare cuts        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/20/spending-review-2010-osborne-cuts

welfare shakeup        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/11/welfare-unemployment-benefits-tougher-rules

Brown's guarded giveaway:

• £200 council tax rebate for pensioners
• Moves on stamp duty, inheritance tax
• Vote now pay later jibe from Tories
• £200 council tax rebate for pensioners
• Moves on stamp duty, inheritance tax

The Guardian        p. 1

17.3.2005
http://money.guardian.co.uk/Budget2005/story/0,15838,1439840,00.html

Dave Brown

The Independent

Monday 24 November 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/the-daily-cartoon-760940.html?ino=2

Chancellor Alistair Darling

Chancellor of the Exchequer
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/chancellors_of_the_exchequer.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/24/pre-budget-report-alistairdarling2
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/budget_2007/article1548726.ece

Chancellor's speeches: index
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/5516.htm

11 Downing Street
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/downing_street_11_about_us.htm

the Treasury / HM Treasury
The Treasury is the United Kingdom's economics and finance ministry.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4976992.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/08/creditcrunch.banking1
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/about/about_downingst/about_downingst_intro.cfm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/17/northernrock.nationalisation

budget

budget deficit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/18/budget-deficit-record

Eleven years of budget from Gordon Brown
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,2037555,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,2039444,00.html

pre-budget report        PBR
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/pre-budget-report
http://www.ft.com/indepth/prebudget2007
http://business.guardian.co.uk/prebudgetreport2007/story/0,,2187051,00.html
http://www.ft.com/indepth/prebudget2006

Budget glossary        2008
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/47a1478c-eec6-11dc-97ec-0000779fd2ac,dwp_
uuid=14a3abee-c8e8-11dc-b14b-0000779fd2ac.html

Budget 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/24/budget-2010-darling-shortsighted-cuts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/24/budget-2010-key-points
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/24/budget-2010-tax-havens-belize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/24/budget-green-investment-bank
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/24/budget-2010-bank-bonus-tax
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2010/mar/24/budget-2010-state-britain-finances

Budget 2010: The state of Britain's finances
This graphic shows Britain's income, expenditure and debt, as laid out in today's budget.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2010/mar/24/budget-2010-state-britain-finances
 

A decade of Budgets: key points
Review the major changes made in Budgets since 1998 in the following areas:
Business    Direct Taxation    Indirect Taxation    Transport    Elderly
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/39a8c022-e47d-11dc-a495-0000779fd2ac,dwp_
uuid=14a3abee-c8e8-11dc-b14b-0000779fd2ac.html

Budget 2009
http://www.ft.com/indepth/budget-2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9b91c700-2f60-11de-a8f6-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6155378.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/22/budget-2009-alistair-darling-speech
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/22/budget-2009-darling-glance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/22/budget-2009-tax-rich-alistair-darling

Budget 2008
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/budget_2008/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/budget
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/audio/2008/mar/12/guardian.daily.budget.special
http://uk.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/budget2008
http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL1244846920080312
http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKMOL25001620080312
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/abb2fc44-ee9d-11dc-97ec-0000779fd2ac,dwp_
uuid=14a3abee-c8e8-11dc-b14b-0000779fd2ac.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3e9d54d4-f02c-11dc-ba7c-0000779fd2ac,dwp_
uuid=14a3abee-c8e8-11dc-b14b-0000779fd2ac.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/87f35ee4-f022-11dc-ba7c-0000779fd2ac,dwp_
uuid=14a3abee-c8e8-11dc-b14b-0000779fd2ac.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c1539c26-f02c-11dc-ba7c-0000779fd2ac,dwp_
uuid=14a3abee-c8e8-11dc-b14b-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
http://media.ft.com/cms/b937c8ec-f044-11dc-ba7c-0000779fd2ac.pdf

Budget 2007
http://www.ft.com/indepth/budget2007
http://business.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/0,,2028552,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039555,00.html
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/budget_2007/article1548484.ece
http://business.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039269,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039286,00.html
http://education.guardian.co.uk/policy/story/0,,2039297,00.html
http://money.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039277,00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,,2039280,00.html

Budget 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/budget2006
http://www.ft.com/indepth/budget2006

Budget 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/budget2005
http://www.ft.com/indepth/budget2005

Budget 2004
http://money.guardian.co.uk/thebudget2004/0,,,00.html
http://www.ft.com/indepth/ukbudget2004

Budget 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/budget2003

Budget 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/budget2002

Budget 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/budget2001

Budget 2000
http://www.guardian.co.uk/budget2000

Budget 1999
http://www.guardian.co.uk/budget99

Commerce Department        USA
http://www.commerce.gov/

Chicago Board of Trade        USA
http://www.cbot.com/

Chicago Mercantile Exchange        CME    USA
http://www.cme.com/

counterfeit

counterfeiter

counterfeit money
http://www.usatoday.com/money/2007-02-27-counterfeit-usat_x.htm

counterfeit goods / fake goods

fake branded product

black market in counterfeit goods
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1125753,00.html

smuggle into

pirated media

fake CD

piracy
http://www.fact-uk.org.uk/

commercial piracy

anti-piracy trade body

Federation Against Copyright Theft        Fact
http://www.fact-uk.org.uk/

buy
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1931210,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2006-10-16-walmart-china_x.htm

buyer

buyout
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2006-11-29-ford-buyouts_x.htm

sell

break even

book

public expenditure

provide

provider

competition

competitive
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2006-11-10-ford-ceo-interview_x.htm

anti-competitive behaviour
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1783435,00.html

compete

hot up

global economy

lacklustre global economy

slowdown

suffer a sharp slowdown in activity and employment

market

markets
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2007-11-08-bernanke-economy_N.htm

stock
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/stocknews/2007-10-08-google-stock_N.htm

stock market

the course of the stock market

car market

art market
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2109454,00.html

commodity markets
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article3174754.ece

black market

market valuation
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1927649,00.html

value
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1927649,00.html

market rally

market research
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1069731,00.html

rapidly expanding market

increase market share

lose market share

weak market conditions

flexible labour markets
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1481879,00.html

indicator

emerging-market indicator

economic and financial indicators

economic doldrums        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/business/22dollar.html

remain in doldrums
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1745867,00.html

bear

Robust consumer spending
on cars, furniture and food helped the U.S. economy
advance faster than first thought in the third quarter,
a government report showed, while underlying inflation was the tamest in decades.

The Commerce Department said on November 30, 2004 that gross domestic product,
the measure of all goods and services produced within U.S. borders,
grew at a 3.9 percent annual pace in the three months from July through September,
up from 3.7 percent estimated a month ago.

Photo by Reuters Graphic.

Consumers Fuel Faster Economic Growth
R

Tue Nov 30, 2004        04:27 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=
SYSME0UT5CG4KCRBAELCFEY?type=businessNews&storyID=6958311

the City
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/24/financial-crisis-city-banking-money
http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,1456,1334281,00.html

11 Downing Street
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/about/about_downingst/about_downingst_intro.cfm

U.S. gross domestic product         GDP        USA

the widest measure of all goods and services produced in the United States /
the measure of all goods and services produced within U.S. borders        USA

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/27/us-economy-gdp-recession
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/business/economy/28econ.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/reuters-gdp.html
http://bea.gov/bea/newsrelarchive/2006/gdp206a.pdf
http://bea.gov/bea/newsrel/gdpnewsrelease.htm

nondurable goods - items like food and paper products

durable goods / durables - goods lasting three years or more

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/03/25/business/business-us-usa-economy-durables.html

U.S. Department of Commerce > Bureau of Economic Analysis        USA

http://bea.gov/bea/newsrelarchive/2006/gdp206a.pdf

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission        USA

http://www.sec.gov/index.htm

The Federal Reserve / Fed      USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_reserve_system/index.html

Treasury Department        USA

The Treasury Department
traces its history back to the tumult of the opening days of the Revolutionary War,
when a cash-strapped Continental Congress decided in 1775 to issue paper money
backed by nothing more than the promise of eventual repayment in coin,
and enlisted residents of Philadelphia to number and count the bills.
The department was formally created by Congress in 1789.
The first Secretary of the Treasury was Alexander Hamilton,
who shortly after being appointed took the bold move
of proposing that the federal government
assume the wartime debt of the states and pay them off in full.

In the more than 200 years since,
Hamilton's heirs have at times been among
the most powerful figures in government, for better or worse.
During the Civil War, Salmon P. Chase created
the "greenback" paper currency that fueled the North's victory;
Andrew W. Mellon helped bring on
the Great Depression by his advice to President Hebert Hoover
to cut spending and raise taxes during an economic downturn;
after World War II,
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., helped create a new system of international finance
by leading the conference that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/treasury_department/index.html


http://www.ustreas.gov/
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/treasury_department/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Meltdown-Treasury.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/business/29bill.html
http://www.treasury.gov/press/releases/hp1149.htm

Treasury Secretary        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/us/politics/26paulson.html
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/25/business/economy/
1194833897260/paulson-answers-questions-part-1.html
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/25/business/businessspecial6/
1194833900695/paulson-on-new-moves-in-rescue-plan.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/business/01regulate.html

House of Representatives Financial Services Committee        USA

http://financialservices.house.gov/

Federal Reserve / The Fed        USA

http://www.federalreserve.gov/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/business/economy/28fed.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/business/economy/25fed.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/economy/24fed.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/business/economy/11fed.html
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20090310a.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4AO69T20081125
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-11-25-fed-bailout_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/2008-10-07-commercial-paper_N.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/business/08fed.html

White House Council of Economic Advisers        USA

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/
organizations/w/white_house_council_of_economic_advisers/index.html

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/christina_d_romer/index.html

growth

economic growth

economic outlook
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/testimony/bernanke20071108a.htm

outlook

investor

investment guru

recoup

thinktank

drop

boost

boost

asset

contract

debt

debt yields

Bank of England / The Central Bank of the United Kingdom
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/05/interest-rates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/19/interest-rates-bank-of-england-cbi
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/06/interestrates-interestrates2

Bank of England > Monetary policy committee
http://business.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,2076686,00.html

cost of borrowing

interest rates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interestrates

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/business/economy/25fed.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/05/interest-rates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/dec/04/interest-rates-mortgages-savings
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/04/interestrates-interestrates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/dec/04/mortgages-property
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/04/interest-rates-bank-of-england
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/19/interest-rates-bank-of-england-cbi
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/06/interestrates-interestrates2
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2008/oct/22/creditcrunch-recession

interest rates and inflation
Interest rates influence spending and saving
in the economy and the prices we pay for goods and services.
Low inflation helps to maintain a stable economy and the value of our money

level

cut

base rate cut
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/dec/04/interest-rates-mortgages-savings

rate cut
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/dec/04/mortgages-property
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/04/interest-rates-bank-of-england1

cut

ease rates

pass on to the consumer
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5292173.ece

set

interest rates through the ages
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2008/nov/05/interest-rates-history

production

factory

factory orders
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/production/2006-07-05-factory-orders_x.htm

deal

utilities

utility service

personal loan

pay off

lend

lender
http://money.guardian.co.uk/creditanddebt/loans/story/0,,1790469,00.html

borrow

borrower

call in the administrators / the receivers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/car/story/0,7369,1454943,00.html

bankruptcy
http://money.guardian.co.uk/creditanddebt/debt/story/0,,1701543,00.html
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3860106

file for bankruptcy
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1923597,00.html

bankruptcy court

Carey Street
http://www.coventgarden.uk.com/careystr.html
http://money.guardian.co.uk/creditanddebt/story/0,1456,1237744,00.html

trade

export

exports
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/politics/13agriculture.html

import

imports
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/business/30currency.html

tariffs
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/business/30currency.html

exports

rise in exports
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/business/11cnd-econ.html

the USA's trade deficit
U.S. trade deficit > The gap between what Americans import and export
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/opinion/l17trade.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10Tonelson.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/business/economy/14econ.html
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/trade/2010/pdf/trad0710.pdf
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/trade/tradnewsrelease.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/business/worldbusiness/10cnd-trade.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/business/11cnd-econ.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-01-11-trade_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2006-12-12-trade-deficit-oct_x.htm

trade balance report        USA
U.S. INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN GOODS AND SERVICES        May 2006
U.S. Census Bureau > U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
http://bea.gov/bea/newsrelarchive/2006/trad0506.pdf

trade gap        USA        2006
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/trade/2007-02-13-trade-gap_x.htm

trade barriers

rebound in world trade

trend

underlying trend

shortfall
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/mf-global-trustee-estimates-shortfall-could-be-more-than-1-2-billion/

the third highest shortfall on record

hedge funds

life insurance funds

blue chips

triple

return

slim down

selloff / sell-off

slide

fall

dive
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1777279,00.html
http://markets.usatoday.com/custom/usatoday-com/html-story.asp?markets=
Domestic&guid=%7B0AE18C7A-B8F7-42BB-A121-953EC219D69E%7D

burst

turmoil
http://business.guardian.co.uk/markets/story/0,,2171652,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1689541,00.html

panic

jitters

collapse
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f09ec422-6294-11dc-b3ad-0000779fd2ac.html

confidence
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f09ec422-6294-11dc-b3ad-0000779fd2ac.html

state monopoly

nationalisation
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4c6591be-7d3d-11dd-8d59-000077b07658.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ea8005ba-ddff-11dc-9de3-0000779fd2ac.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/18/northernrock

partial nationalisation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/08/creditcrunch.banking4

nationalise / nationalize    (USA)
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article4933657.ece
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1e5b888c-8c06-11dd-8a4c-0000779fd18c.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/17/northernrock.nationalisation

protectionism
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/opinion/19sat1.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE51C5DU20090213

regulation        USA
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/obama-orders-review-of-business-regulations/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fed-Overhaul.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120631764481458291.html?mod=hpp_us_pageone

Financial regulatory reform        USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/financial_regulatory_reform/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/opinion/14tue1.html

welfare
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/20/spending-review-2010-osborne-cuts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/28/welfare-incapacity-benefit-claimants-assessment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/28/poverty-yardstick-equality-spirit-level
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/27/new-model-welfare-state
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/22/budget-2010-vat-rise-osborne

welfare crackdown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/28/welfare-incapacity-benefit-claimants-assessment

welfare state
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/welfare
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/27/new-model-welfare-state
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/26/iain-duncan-smith-interview-welfare

nanny state
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2165455,00.html

State benefits
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/statebenefits

Directgov
Public services all in one place
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/index.htm

deregulation

free-marketeers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/23/economy.politics
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/14/keynesian-economic-recovery-brown-germany

free-market fundamentalists
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20krugman.html

free trade
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/02/20/world/AP-Obama-Canada.html

privatise

privatisation
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article5342303.ece

partial privatisation
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article5349280.ece

break-up
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article5349280.ece

sell off
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1939402,00.html

sell-off
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5338121.ece

world economy

wealth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/28/uk-economy-recession-gdp-2009
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2128034,00.html

the wealthy countries

poor countries

the world's poorest countries

debt relief

G7 / Group of Seven / the Group of Seven economic powers

at a meeting of the Group of Seven major economic powers

cut / reduce global economic imbalances

G7 /  G-7 nations / the world's richest nations / the world's major economies
the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.K.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/group_of_seven/index.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE49A43L20081012
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/10/11/bush-statement-on-financial-crisis/
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE49992Z20081011
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE49999F20081010?virtualBrandChannel=10112

G8
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/3777557.stm

Group of Twenty        G20        2009-2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/g20_protests_in_toronto.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/group_of_20/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/28/g20-commits-to-halving-budgets
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/business/global/28summit.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/28/world/AP-World-Summit-Analysis.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/world/americas/28security.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/business/global/27summit.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/06/26/news/news-us-g20.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/world/26summit.html

G-20 / G20        2008
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/group_of_20/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/worldbusiness/16summit.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/washington/summit-text.html?ref=worldbusiness
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Economy/idUSTRE4A966O20081110
http://www.reuters.com/news/factbox?fj=20081110195815.js&fn=The%20Day%20Ahead:%20Tuesday
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/10/11/financial-crisis-emphasizes-importance-of-g-20/

the G8 group of industrialised countries
http://www.guardian.co.uk/debt/Story/0,,2064919,00.html

G8 summit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,,743694,00.html

International Monetary Fund        IMF
http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/imf
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/international_monetary_fund/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/20/austerity-warning-international-monetary-fund
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/15/imf-world-risks-1930s-style-slump
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/business/global/imf-slashes-growth-outlook-for-us-and-europe.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-imf-idUSTRE75G2VD20110617
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/18/ireland-imf-bailout-mixed-feelings
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/business/global/09imf.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5291O520090310
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5349277.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/02/saudiarabia-creditcrunch
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKTRE49A45B20081011?virtualBrandChannel=10338
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/09/creditcrunch.economy1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,,548410,00.html

stall

slacken

gazump

bear the brunt of the increases

Graphic > The Guardian's Leo Hickman and award-winning design agency Grundy Northedge

The Guardian        G2        pp. 4-5

26.9.2005

Death of a Fairy Tale

April 26, 2012
The New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN

This was the month the confidence fairy died.

For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

None of this should come as news, since the failure of austerity policies to deliver as promised has long been obvious. Yet European leaders spent years in denial, insisting that their policies would start working any day now, and celebrating supposed triumphs on the flimsiest of evidence. Notably, the long-suffering (literally) Irish have been hailed as a success story not once but twice, in early 2010 and again in the fall of 2011. Each time the supposed success turned out to be a mirage; three years into its austerity program, Ireland has yet to show any sign of real recovery from a slump that has driven the unemployment rate to almost 15 percent.

However, something has changed in the past few weeks. Several events — the collapse of the Dutch government over proposed austerity measures, the strong showing of the vaguely anti-austerity François Hollande in the first round of France’s presidential election, and an economic report showing that Britain is doing worse in the current slump than it did in the 1930s — seem to have finally broken through the wall of denial. Suddenly, everyone is admitting that austerity isn’t working.

The question now is what they’re going to do about it. And the answer, I fear, is: not much.

For one thing, while the austerians seem to have given up on hope, they haven’t given up on fear — that is, on the claim that if we don’t slash spending, even in a depressed economy, we’ll turn into Greece, with sky-high borrowing costs.

Now, claims that only austerity can pacify bond markets have proved every bit as wrong as claims that the confidence fairy will bring prosperity. Almost three years have passed since The Wall Street Journal breathlessly warned that the attack of the bond vigilantes on U.S. debt had begun; not only have borrowing costs remained low, they’ve actually fallen by half. Japan has faced dire warnings about its debt for more than a decade; as of this week, it could borrow long term at an interest rate of less than 1 percent.

And serious analysts now argue that fiscal austerity in a depressed economy is probably self-defeating: by shrinking the economy and hurting long-term revenue, austerity probably makes the debt outlook worse rather than better.

But while the confidence fairy appears to be well and truly buried, deficit scare stories remain popular. Indeed, defenders of British policies dismiss any call for a rethinking of these policies, despite their evident failure to deliver, on the grounds that any relaxation of austerity would cause borrowing costs to soar.

So we’re now living in a world of zombie economic policies — policies that should have been killed by the evidence that all of their premises are wrong, but which keep shambling along nonetheless. And it’s anyone’s guess when this reign of error will end.

    Death of a Fairy Tale, NYT, 26.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/opinion/krugman-death-of-a-fairy-tale.html

The Two Economies

April 9, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

The creative dynamism of American business is astounding and a little terrifying. Over the past five years, amid turmoil and uncertainty, American businesses have shed employees, becoming more efficient and more productive. According to The Wall Street Journal on Monday, the revenue per employee at S.&P. 500 companies increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011.

These efficiency gains are boosting the American economy overall and American exports in particular. Two years ago, President Obama promised to double exports over the next five years. The U.S. might actually meet that target. As Tyler Cowen reports in a fantastic article in The American Interest called “What Export-Oriented America Means,” American exports are surging.

Cowen argues that America’s export strength will only build in the years ahead. He points to three trends that will boost the nation’s economic performance. First, smart machines. China and other low-wage countries have a huge advantage when factory floors are crowded with workers. But we are moving to an age of quiet factories, with more robots and better software. That reduces the importance of wage rates. It boosts American companies that make software and smart machines.

Then there is the shale oil and gas revolution. In the past year, fracking, a technology pioneered in the United States, has given us access to vast amounts of U.S. energy that can be sold abroad. Europe and Asian nations have much less capacity. As long as fracking can be done responsibly, U.S. exports should surge.

Finally, there is the growth of the global middle class. When China, India and such places were first climbing the income ladder, they imported a lot of raw materials from places like Canada, Australia and Chile to fuel the early stages of their economic growth. But, in the coming decades, as their consumers get richer, they will be importing more pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, planes and entertainment, important American products.

If Cowen’s case is right, the U.S. is not a nation in decline. We may be in the early days of an export boom that will eventually power an economic revival, including a manufacturing revival. But, as Cowen emphasizes, this does not mean nirvana is at hand.

His work leaves the impression that there are two interrelated American economies. On the one hand, there is the globalized tradable sector — companies that have to compete with everybody everywhere. These companies, with the sword of foreign competition hanging over them, have become relentlessly dynamic and very (sometimes brutally) efficient.

On the other hand, there is a large sector of the economy that does not face this global competition — health care, education and government. Leaders in this economy try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower.

A rift is opening up. The first, globalized sector is producing a lot of the productivity gains, but it is not producing a lot of the jobs. The second more protected sector is producing more jobs, but not as many productivity gains. The hypercompetitive globalized economy generates enormous profits, while the second, less tradable economy is where more Americans actually live.

In politics, we are beginning to see conflicts between those who live in Economy I and those who live in Economy II. Republicans often live in and love the efficient globalized sector and believe it should be a model for the entire society. They want to use private health care markets and choice-oriented education reforms to make society as dynamic, creative and efficient as Economy I.

Democrats are more likely to live in and respect the values of the second sector. They emphasize the destructive side of Economy I streamlining — the huge profits at the top and the stagnant wages at the middle. They want to tamp down some of the streamlining in the global economy sector and protect health care, education and government from its remorseless logic.

Republicans believe the globalized sector is racing far out in front of government, adapting in ways inevitable and proper. If given enough freedom, Economy I entrepreneurs will create the future jobs we need. Government should prepare people to enter that sector but get out of its way as much as possible.

Democrats are more optimistic that government can enhance the productivity of the global sectors of the economy while redirecting their benefits. They want to use Economy I to subsidize Economy II.

I don’t know which coalition will gain the upper hand. But I do think today’s arguments are rooted in growing structural rifts. There’s an urgent need to understand the interplay between the two different sectors. I’d also add that it’s not always easy to be in one of those pockets — including the media and higher education — that are making the bumpy transition from Economy II to Economy I.

    The Two Economies, NYT, 9.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/opinion/brooks-the-two-economies.html

Welcome to the inescapable era of no money

For the next ten years British politics is going to be
about living with the consequences of the State being flat broke
 

March 11, 2009
From The Times
Daniel Finkelstein

We are insolvent. Out of money. Financially embarrassed. Strapped. Cleaned out. We are skint, borassic lint, Larry Flynt, lamb and mint. We are lamentably low on loot. We are maxed out. We are indebted, encumbered, in hock, in the hole. We are broke, hearts of oak, coals and coke. It doesn't matter whether money can buy us love, because we haven't got any.

Welcome to the era of no money. The central fact of British politics in the next ten years, and perhaps longer, is not hard to spot. British politics isn't going to be dominated by interesting debates on the future of capitalism. It isn't going to be the stage for a revival of interest in democratic socialism. It isn't going to play host to the interplay of competing ambitious projects. No. We're in for a hard slog. Because what British politics is going to be about in the next ten years is living with the consequences of the State being broke, of the Government running out of money.

I don't mean to make a meal of this. It's just that sometimes when I listen to the political debate, I wonder if everyone is still connected with reality. They're all busy announcing new schemes and White Papers or dreaming of tax cuts and so forth, and no one seems to talk much about the cash. La la la la (fingers in ears). The Conservatives occasionally bring it up, a little gingerly. They think the problem is going to land on their plate, after all. But they are also worried about being seen as gloomy, so they try not to bang on about it.

Let's look at a few figures. In January the Institute for Fiscal Studies published its 2009 Green Budget. Having described the incredibly painful cuts in projected public spending that have already been announced, the IFS says: “If the public finances evolve as the Treasury hopes, this tightening would have to remain in place until the early 2030s before debt returns below the ceiling of 40 per cent of national income Gordon Brown set as one of his two fiscal rules in 1997.”

Only one thing: the IFS - like most informed observers - does not think the public finances will evolve as the Treasury hopes. Things will be far worse. The Government or its successor will need a further £20billion a year. A further £20billion of tax rises or spending cuts on top of its already very difficult, tough plans. And, adds the IFS, “even if it acts, public sector debt may well not return to pre-crisis levels for more than 20 years”.

Twenty years is a political age. Twenty years ago Tony Blair was Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and George Osborne was studying for his A levels. The era of no money will define politics long into the distance, as far as the eye can see.

If you want to understand what this will mean for the Left then consult the books of the Labour thinker, Tony Crosland. On this point they bear rereading even if some of them are more than 50 years old. Crosland insisted that the future of socialism depended on being able to raise the level of economic growth and state spending. Without growth Labour would not be able to redistribute, or at least it would face a titanic struggle trying to do so. As it pursued equality it would be fiercely resisted by an army of losers.

This has not been a merely theoretical point. Every Labour government has kept its unstable coalition of leftist dreamers, truculent union men and hard-nosed managerialists together by spending money. Money is how the NHS was created as Nye Bevan bought off the doctors and, more than 50 years later, money was how Mr Blair kept his Government afloat.

New Labour was made possible because steadily increasing state spending allowed important choices to be avoided. The Government could give out more in benefits to the low paid, spend cash on the NHS to cover up its failures, buy off the unions and all without alienating the middle class too badly. If it proposed market reforms, to burnish its credentials as a progressive party, it could buy off the left-wing critics with taxpayers' cash. No more. In the era of no money, the Left will have to choose. And choosing will be grim.

But things will be grim for the Right, too. Many Conservatives have lived in a dreamworld. Cutting spending would be easy. Cutting tax is a moral necessity. They are about to find out just how difficult it is even to control the amount Government pays out. Consumers of public services have rising expectations and most of the services are labour intensive. Both these things keep pushing up costs, even if government does nothing.

And Tory ideology robs them of the one escape route that the Left retains. They can't very well start putting up taxes - at least not greatly, at least not for an extended period. The party leadership is going to find it hard enough restraining the demand for tax cuts from activists and newspapers, tax cuts that the era of no money make impossible.

The Tories will aim, of course, to make services more efficient and to get government out of wasteful projects altogether. Yet even this will prove hard. Reform costs money. Making people redundant, moving offices, sending out circulars full of new instructions, keeping interest groups happy while making controversial changes - it all costs money. And (here's a point I may not have mentioned) there is no money.

It will not be open to David Cameron to be the mirror image of Mr Blair - to move gently towards Tory goals while using spending to keep his opponents always, always slightly off balance. In the era of no money a much more bloody clash will prove almost impossible to avoid. The Left will not find themselves, as the Right did in 1997, confused and with little to say. The battle with the Tories over tax and public spending will seem familiar. Then again, they might like to recall that when those were the battlelines, they lost.

    Welcome to the inescapable era of no money, Ts, 11.3.2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article5883988.ece

Fed Cuts Key Rate to a Record Low

December 17, 2008
The New York Times
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve entered a new era on Tuesday, lowering its benchmark interest rate virtually to zero and declaring that it would now fight the recession by pumping out vast amounts of money to businesses and consumers through an expanding array of new lending programs.

Going further than expected, the central bank cut its target for the overnight federal funds rate to a range of zero to 0.25 percent and brought the United States to the zero-rate policies that Japan used for years in its own fight against deflation.

Though important as a historic milestone, the move to an interest rate of zero from 1 percent is largely symbolic. The funds rate, which affects what banks charge for lending their reserves to each other, had already fallen to nearly zero in recent days because banks have been so reluctant to do business.

Of much greater practical importance, the Fed bluntly announced that it would print as much money as necessary to revive the frozen credit markets and fight what is shaping up as the nation’s worst economic downturn since World War II.

In effect, the Fed is stepping in as a substitute for banks and other lenders and acting more like a bank itself. “The Federal Reserve will employ all available tools to promote the resumption of sustainable economic growth,” it said. Those tools include buying “large quantities” of mortgage-related bonds, longer-term Treasury bonds, corporate debt and even consumer loans.

The move came as President-elect Barack Obama summoned his economic team to a four-hour meeting in Chicago to map out plans for an enormous economic stimulus measure that could cost anywhere from $600 billion to $1 trillion over the next two years.

The two huge economic stimulus programs, one from the Fed and one from the White House and Congress, set the stage for a powerful but potentially risky partnership between Mr. Obama and the Fed’s Republican chairman, Ben S. Bernanke.

“We are running out of the traditional ammunition that’s used in a recession, which is to lower interest rates,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference Tuesday. “It is critical that the other branches of government step up, and that’s why the economic recovery plan is so essential.”

Financial markets were electrified by the Fed action. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 4.2 percent, or 359.61 points, to close at 8,924.14.

Investors rushed to buy long-term Treasury bonds. Yields on 10-year Treasuries, which have traditionally served as a guide for mortgage rates, plunged immediately after the announcement to 2.26 percent, their lowest level in decades, from 2.51 percent earlier in the day.

Yields on investment-grade corporate bonds edged down to 7.215 percent on Tuesday, from 7.355 on Monday. Yields on riskier high-yielding corporate bonds remained in the stratosphere at 22.493 percent, almost unchanged from 22.732 on Monday.

By contrast, the dollar dropped sharply against the euro and other major currencies for the second consecutive day — a sign that currency markets were nervous about a flood of newly printed dollars. Some analysts predict that the Treasury will have to sell $2 trillion worth of new securities over the next year to finance its existing budget deficit, a new stimulus program and to refinance about $600 billion worth of maturing government debt.

For the moment, Mr. Obama and Mr. Bernanke appear to be on the same page, though that could abruptly change if the economy starts to revive. Fed officials have already assumed that Congress will pass a major spending program to stimulate the economy, and they are counting on it to contribute to economic growth next year.

In more normal times, the Fed might easily start raising interest rates in reaction to a huge new spending program, out of concern about rising inflation.

But data on Tuesday provided new evidence that the biggest threat to prices right now was not inflation but deflation.

The federal government reported on Tuesday that the Consumer Price Index fell 1.7 percent in November, the steepest monthly drop since the government began tracking prices in 1947. The decline was largely driven by the recent plunge in energy prices, but even the so-called core inflation rate, which excludes the volatile food and energy sectors, was essentially zero.

Mr. Obama’s goal is to have a package ready when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 6. His hope is that the House and Senate, with their bigger Democratic majorities, can agree quickly on a plan for Mr. Obama to sign into law soon after he is sworn into office two weeks later.

The Fed, in a statement accompanying its rate decision, acknowledged that the recession was more severe than officials had thought at their last meeting in October.

“Over all, the outlook for economic activity has weakened further,” the central bank said.

“Labor market conditions have deteriorated, and the available data indicate that consumer spending, business investment and industrial production have declined.”

The central bank added: “The committee anticipates that weak economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for some time.”

With fewer than 10 days until Christmas, retailers from Saks Fifth Avenue to Wal-Mart have been slashing prices to draw in consumers, who have sharply reduced their spending over the last six months. On Tuesday, Banana Republic offered customers $50 off on any purchases that total $125. The clothing retailer DKNY offered customers $50 off any purchase totaling $250.

Ian Shepherdson, an analyst at High Frequency Economics, said falling energy prices were likely to bring the year-over-year rate of inflation to below zero in January.

The Fed has already announced or outlined a range of unorthodox new tools that it can use to keep stimulating the economy once the federal funds rate effectively reaches zero. On Tuesday, Fed officials said they stood ready to expand them or create new ones to relieve bottlenecks in the credit markets.

All of the tools involve borrowing by the Fed, which amounts to printing money in vast new quantities, a process the Fed has already started. Since September, the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned from about $900 billion to more than $2 trillion as it has created money and lent it out. As soon as the Fed completes its plans to buy mortgage-backed debt and consumer debt, the balance sheet will be up to about $3 trillion.

“At some point, and without knowing the timing, the Fed is going to have to destroy all that money it is creating,” said Alan Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

“Right now, the crisis is created by the huge demand by banks for hoarding cash. The Fed is providing cash, and the banks want to hoard it. When things start returning to normal, the banks will want to start lending it out. If that much money is left in the monetary base, it would be extremely inflationary.”

Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting from New York.

    Fed Cuts Key Rate to a Record Low, NYT, 17.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/business/economy/17fed.html

In Private Equity, the Limits of Apollo’s Power

December 7, 2008
The New York Times
By JULIE CRESWELL

LEON BLACK, one of Wall Street’s buyout kingpins, is having a tough year.

In the spring, the home furnishings retailer Linens ’n Things went bust, costing the Apollo Group, the private equity firm that Mr. Black co-founded 18 years ago, its entire $365 million investment.

Apollo’s attempt to disentangle itself from another potentially bad deal — an acquisition of Huntsman, the chemical company — has resulted in a messy flurry of lawsuits.

The sagging economy and piles of debt, meanwhile, are causing several other companies that Apollo owns, including Harrah’s, Claire’s and a real estate entity that controls Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, to struggle — putting at risk about a third of some $10 billion Mr. Black raised years ago during the buyout boom.

On top of all that, a gymnasium that housed Mr. Black’s indoor tennis courts on his 90-acre Westchester County estate burned to the ground in October. And just last week, in a new twist on the term “frenemies,” Mr. Black’s good buddy and longtime tennis partner Carl C. Icahn sued another Apollo company because he was unhappy with its plans to restructure debt.

So it just ain’t easy being Leon Black — or any other Master of the Universe — these days.

“Traditional private equity is dead and has been for a year,” says Mr. Black, seated at a round conference table in an office once occupied by L. Dennis Kozlowski, who was ousted as chief executive of Tyco International. “It will probably remain so for a couple of years.”

Part of the allure of private-equity honchos like Mr. Black is that they made an art out of making money during the boom years. Their fist-pounding negotiations were legendary. Their corporate turnarounds became Harvard Business School case studies. Their multiple homes, black-tie parties, sports cars and yachts were alternately envied and vilified.

Today, with Wall Street in tatters and the easy money long gone, the question now for Mr. Black and his peers is whether they have enough moves left to turn the bleak outlook for private equity into something rosier for themselves, their companies, their investors and the legions of workers they employ.

Achieving that will hinge on whether Mr. Black and his peers can persuade banks and investors to give their companies more time to make good on their debts, something that Mr. Icahn’s lawsuit suggests is not always easy.

The other parts of the equation — how long the economic malaise lasts and how deep it becomes, as well as its ultimate impact on the companies they own — are something that even the Wall Street power brokers can’t control.

Over the last year, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, has watched his company’s high-profile stock plunge 71 percent. And Henry R. Kravis has yanked copycat plans for his storied firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, to go public as well.

Several other superstars in the private-equity universe, including TPG and the Carlyle Group, are scrambling as some of their companies collapse — firms for which they paid top dollar during the recent buyout boom.

Those mounting losses — and the dearth of cheap and easy financing that fueled private equity’s rocketing returns over the years — have some people wondering what the future holds for private-equity firms and the companies they have acquired.

Mr. Black has an answer. His shirt wrinkled and his tie askew, he calmly says that the outlook for him and his competitors is not as bleak as it seems. In fact, he says his firm is poised to take advantage of the turbulence.

Apollo has just raised $20 billion in new money that he says will go, in part, toward buying cheap debt.

“We’ve totally turned into a bond house,” he declares.

MR. BLACK says the big money over the next few years will be made in vast restructurings — the financial, operational and structural changes that companies will need to make if they hope to survive the economic malaise.

Of course, the question is how many of these overhauls will involve Mr. Black’s own companies.

Apollo thought it had a home run with Linens ’n Things. It bought that struggling retailer in 2005 for $1.3 billion — $365 million of its own money, the rest from co-investors and banks — and installed a retail industry veteran as its chief executive.

The deal, however, soured quickly. Sales continued to slide and nervous investors who held its debt started to dump it. In May, a mere two years after Apollo acquired the company, Linens ’n Things filed for bankruptcy.

“It was an incredibly fast implosion,” said Kim Noland, the director of high-yield research with Gimme Credit.

Some point to the collapse of Linens ’n Things as an omen for the private-equity industry and some of the companies these firms acquired during the gold rush.

Armed with cheap bank funding, private-equity firms — just like consumers who bid up home prices on the back of cheap mortgages — paid sky-high prices for troubled companies that they promised they could streamline and make more efficient.

They piled layers and layers of debt — “leverage,” in Wall Street parlance — onto these companies just before the economy came screeching to a halt.

“The idea was that Apollo was going to turn it around and fix whatever was causing the issues, but operations just got worse and worse and then there was the overleverage,” Ms. Noland said of Linens ’n Things. “They just didn’t have too much of a chance.”

Mr. Black calls the Linens collapse “unusual,” saying that Apollo “underestimated the severity of the downturn of the housing market.”

Besides, he says, the Linens bankruptcy barely singed his investors, costing them half a percentage point on returns. (The Apollo fund that held Linens has returned 49 percent to investors, net of fees, since its inception in 2001.)

The promise behind private-equity firms like Apollo is that they can fix broken companies far from the bright glare of the public eye. No longer tied to meeting investors’ quarterly earnings expectations, company management can focus instead on improving operations.

Private-equity firms raise huge sums from investors like pension funds and endowments and then borrow more from banks and other lenders so they can put ever larger sums to work.

During the period when they own a company, private-equity firms pay out some of the company’s profits to their investors — and the buyout firm itself — sometimes recouping several times their original investment in dividends before they either sell the company or take it public again.

One of the longstanding criticisms of buyout firms is that they engorge targets with debt and skim the profits for themselves. That image was reinforced during the boom with stories about buyout executives’ over-the-top birthday parties and other lavish excesses.

The notion that buyout firms were only on the hunt for quick gains was further strengthened by actions of Apollo and some of its peers. Sometimes within just a year of acquiring a company, they issued debt that was used to pay fat dividends to the funds themselves.

Besides layering more debt onto the companies, the move effectively allowed Apollo and its competitors to handily recoup some, if not all, of their initial investments.

Earlier this year, a major ratings agency, Moody’s Investors Service, said that Apollo and a handful of other buyout firms were particularly aggressive about yanking out nearly all of their initial investments.

“We saw some firms taking out a large amount of the equity they put in, and they were doing this less than a year after announcing the buyouts,” said John Rogers, an analyst at Moody’s. “It would be rare that the performance of the business had improved so much during that time.”

Mr. Black defends the payouts.

“In some cases, we took 60 percent, 85 percent or even 100 percent of our investment out,” says Mr. Black, adding that Apollo can put more money into the deals if necessary. “It was the right thing to do for our investors.”

Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied private equity, says it is too soon to say whether those debt deals further weakened the affected companies.

“So far,” he said, “I think it’s hard to find any statistical difference between the performance of companies that did the dividend deals and those that didn’t.”

But do these deals remove the incentive that Apollo and others have to stick around and fix troubled companies, when they have already cashed out?

“There is a fundamental conflict in private equity between taking steps that generate a good return for investors and doing things that are in the best interests of the companies,” Mr. Lerner says. “In an ideal world, those are aligned. But in the real world, they aren’t always.”

Some data suggests that that disconnect is causing trouble.

In a report by the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, 86 companies weren’t meeting their debt obligations through mid-November of this year, with 53 of those, or 62 percent, having ties to private-equity firms at one point in their lives.

The firm’s analysts anticipate that an additional 125 companies could default by next fall, raising the nation’s default rate to 7.6 percent from current levels of 3.2 percent.

Whatever transpires, Mr. Black says he’s not planning to walk away from his stable of companies.

“Most of the companies we own are businesses or industries that we really like,” he says. In the same breath, however, he concedes that that won’t be the case with every company.

“There are going to be cases like Linens ’n Things,” he says. “We didn’t put more money into Linens because it would have been just putting good money after bad.”

That argument could be sorely tested with Apollo’s troubled sixth fund, which raised about $10 billion from investors and went on a spending spree from 2006 through this year.

It acquired a broad range of companies — cruise lines, paper companies and grocery store chains. Mr. Black allows that five of those companies are “cyclically challenged.”

Those five are the hot-tub manufacturer Jacuzzi; the accessories retailer Claire’s; Realogy (which owns Century 21 and Coldwell Banker) and the Countrywide real estate firm in Britain; and a gambling company, Harrah’s.

WHILE Mr. Black remains upbeat about the prospects for those companies, some analysts say most of them are severely indebted and are crumbling quickly because of the economy.

That has had an impact on Apollo’s 2006 fund. The fund has had a net internal rate of return of negative 12.8 percent from its inception through the end of September, according to someone with direct knowledge of its performance who was not authorized to release the data. The fund didn’t disclose its more recent performance to investors in a November letter.

That letter did state that the fund has returned $1.3 billion to investors through dividends, but that it marked down the overall value of its holdings by $789 million.

In an effort to conserve cash and give themselves some breathing room, Harrah’s and Realogy are trying to persuade investors to exchange the securities for new debt that will reduce overall leverage or lengthen maturities. Currently, Harrah’s, Realogy and Claire’s are keeping up with some of their debt payments by issuing more debt to investors rather than paying them in cash — a maneuver made possible by agreements reached during the boom.

Some analysts see these moves as little more than putting off the inevitable.

“What they’re doing is putting more debt on a company at a time when we are in a recessionary environment. Also, the companies that we’re talking about are some of the lowest-rated companies out there, so the margin for error is razor thin,” says Diane Vazza, head of global fixed-income research at Standard & Poor’s. “What this does is buys them a little bit of time, but the day of reckoning is around the corner.”

Mr. Black has one of the financial world’s most interesting and varied pedigrees. And some of his past is rooted in tragedy.

On Feb. 3, 1975, his father, Eli M. Black, strode into his office on the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in Manhattan. He then used his heavy attaché case to smash through his office window and leapt to his death.

It was later revealed that regulators were investigating whether payments made by the company Mr. Black led, United Brands (predecessor to Chiquita), to a Honduran official were illegal.

Until that moment, Leon Black had led a fairly serene and even gilded life. His mother is an artist and a beloved aunt owned a Manhattan gallery, which he says influenced his early appreciation of the arts.

Today he is one of Manhattan’s best-known collectors. “Art and literature are what differentiate us from barbarians,” he says, adding that he will probably give away most of his collection eventually. Mr. Black and his family have also given or committed more than $150 million to various educational, health care and cultural institutions.

After studying history and philosophy at Dartmouth, Mr. Black envisioned himself someday teaching at Oxford, but his father convinced him to give business school a try. He was in his second year at Harvard Business School when his father died. (Mr. Black has financed chairs at Dartmouth in Shakespearean studies in his own name and Jewish studies in his father’s honor.)

“After my father died, we were pretty much wiped out, financially, as a family,” Mr. Black says. “So I decided to give finance a try.”

AFTER Harvard, Mr. Black landed on the steps of the investment banking firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, where he had a rocky start.

His boss at the time said Mr. Black wanted to jump immediately into big-picture planning, but he believed Mr. Black needed to understand the basics first. He “wasn’t working as hard as we had hoped, so I had some harsh discussions with him,” recalls Frederick H. Joseph, the former head of Drexel.

Not long after that little heart-to-heart, Mr. Black began climbing the ranks at the firm and became an influential financier as Drexel began financing megabuyouts.

“He would work all day, party all night and come back and do it again the next day,” Mr. Joseph says. “But he brought a lot more brains and a lot more strategic capacity to his deals than a lot of other guys on Wall Street at the time.”

Mr. Black and Drexel financed deals orchestrated by the likes of Mr. Icahn, Ted Turner and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, particularly in its famed takeover of RJR Nabisco.

Although Mr. Black comes across as a quiet, introverted man, he has a famous temper. Mr. Joseph recalls seeing that temper flare a few times at Drexel when he disagreed with co-workers over whether to get involved in deals.

But Mr. Black said that what he loved most in his 13 years at Drexel was the frenetic pace.

“The day they closed the doors was a bad day,” he says, nodding ruefully.

Drexel collapsed in 1990 after investigations into illegal activities in the bond market, driven by one of Mr. Black’s close associates, Michael Milken, who was eventually imprisoned for securities violations.

“I think what happened to the firm was unfair, but we were very politically naïve,” Mr. Black says. “I’m not sure fairness was relevant.”

Mr. Black, who was the head of Drexel’s huge mergers-and-acquisitions group at the time of its demise, walked away from the collapse unscathed. Along with two other Drexel refugees, he started Apollo in 1990.

Armed with the experience he and his team earned at Drexel in tearing apart balance sheets and understanding complex credit structures, Mr. Black and Apollo emerged as one of the shrewdest investors of the 1990s, specializing in distressed companies.

“When we do distressed-debt investing, we have made money in 98 percent of those deals,” he says.

In Apollo’s early days, Mr. Black sought to distance himself and his firm from the bad-boy image of leveraged buyout firms in the 1980s. His message was that he was a long-term investor, not a raider out for short-term gains.

“We want to be like Warren Buffett,” Mr. Black said in an interview with The New York Times in 1993. In that same interview, Mr. Black also eschewed the notion of investing in high-tech companies and said that any future leveraged buyouts would be “more rational” and involve “less leverage, more equity.”

Yet, over time, Mr. Black would venture again into leveraged buyouts — and those buyouts would involve, in more recent deals, gobs of debt.

Over the years, Apollo has built up a strong track record, posting net internal rates of return of 27 percent, on average, after fees, according to filings Apollo made with the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer.

That compares with about 19 percent for Blackstone and 20 percent for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Today, of course, the returns at Apollo are threatened, and the company is also mired in a legal fracas.

In July 2007, the Hexion Specialty Chemicals unit of Apollo offered $28 a share, plus assumption of debt, to buy Huntsman in a deal valued at $10.6 billion. Hexion was buying a company twice its size in a deal financed almost entirely by two banks, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse.

But earlier this year when soaring commodity prices and the sharply declining dollar took a huge bite out of Huntsman’s profits, Hexion tried to pull out of the deal, citing earnings declines.

Huntsman’s management said that Apollo merely had cold feet and regretted the bidding war that forced it to pay handsomely to get the deal done. In court, Hexion argued that if the two entities were combined, the resulting company would be insolvent.

The Delaware Chancery Court ordered Hexion to move forward with the merger, but by then nervous banks wanted no part of the deal. Huntsman has sued the banks in Texas to force them to back the deal.

NOW Apollo is stuck trying to figure out how to make an unwanted marriage work out and how to persuade the banks to be a part of the nuptials, analysts say. Mr. Black declined to speak about the deal other than in generalities.

“Sure, I regret where things stand now. But there was originally a very good industrial logic to doing the deal,” he says. “I’m not smart enough to predict how things will turn out.”

As for the rest of the companies he now oversees, Mr. Black acknowledges that the markets have all but written off some of them.

But he’s been in tight corners before, Mr. Black notes, saying that he has overcome previous downturns and produced solid returns.

“I don’t believe in the notion of Masters of the Universe. People either do their job or they don’t,” he says, shrugging. “It’s ultimately all about performance.”

    In Private Equity, the Limits of Apollo’s Power, NYT, 7.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/business/07leon.html?hp

Bank of England cuts rates to 2%

Published: December 4 2008 12:00
Last updated: December 4 2008 16:20
The Financial Times
By Norma Cohen

Signs that the economic downturn is gathering pace prompted the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee to cut interest rates on Thursday by a full percentage point to 2 per cent, the lowest level for nearly four decades.

The last time interest rates were at 2 per cent was in the final days of George VI’s reign in 1951 and the previous time lending costs were cut from 3 to 2 per cent was October 26 1939, after Britain entered the second world war.

Explaining its move, the Bank said in a statement that it believed demand was now so weak that “there remained a substantial risk of undershooting the 2 per cent CPI inflation target in the medium term.”

The rate cut, while much larger than the Bank is accustomed to, is smaller than the 1.5 percentage point reduction made at the MPC’s last meeting in November and smaller than the money markets had begun to expect.

The Bank’s move was followed by the European Central Bank which cut its key policy rate by ¾ per cent to 2.5 per cent as central banks around the world attempt to tackle slowing rates of growth. The Riksbank in Sweden cut its interest rates by an unprecendented 175 basis points to 2 per cent and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand cut its main lending rate by 150 basis points to 5 per cent.

The cut by the Bank suggests either that the MPC is less convinced than many private sector economists that deflation is a real possibility, or that it has other concerns about the impact of much lower rates, including worries over the slide in the pound. Sterling on Thursday fell to the lowest level against the dollar for six and a half years and to a record low against the euro.

In its announcement, the Bank pointed to “a number of fiscal measures in train”, both in the UK and abroad, aimed at boosting demand to counteract the current downturn. The minutes of the last MPC meeting showed that some members expressed a desire to see how the fiscal stimulus outlined in the government’s pre-Budget Report might affect demand before making any exceptional moves in interest rates.

The move comes after key purchasing managers’ index readings for the construction, manufacturing and services sectors hit record lows in recent days, with the future orders component of each index predicting that worse is to come.

In making its interest rate decision, the Bank expressed concerns about the flow of credit to businesses and households. “Despite the actions taken to raise bank capital, ease funding and improve liquidity, conditions in money and credit markets remain extremely difficult,” it said.

Ominously, the Bank concluded that it was “unlikely that a normal volume of lending would be restored without further measures.”

Interbank lending markets have seized up again, after a brief breathing spell following the government’s move to provide a £37bn taxpayer-funded lifeline to the nation’s banks. That suggests that the woes of the financial sector are still too great to allow it to resume its normal pattern of lending to households and businesses.

The Bank noted that while CPI inflation remains high at 4.5 per cent, the weaker outlook for activity in the near term and further falls in commodity prices have lowered that profile. The recent decision to cut value-added tax temporarily should also bear down on inflation in the near term, although that effect will be reversed in 2010.

Andrew Smith, chief economist at KPMG, said: ”The battle against deflation is on. Rates are set to fall further, possibly to zero, and soon, as policymakers try to counteract the powerful contractionary forces at work in the economy.

“However, it is unlikely that low interest rates alone will achieve the desired result and the UK may well have to follow the US with unorthodox measures, such as buying up mortgage and commercial debt, to free-up lending and re-liquefy the financial system.”

Ian McCafferty, chief economic adviser to the CBI, the employers’ body, welcomed the cut.

“The economy needs a significant monetary stimulus and the Bank has clearly decided this will be best achieved by another big cut in interest rates. What is critical for business and consumers alike is that this reduction is passed on,” he said.

Stephen Robertson, director general of the British Retail Consortium, said: “This is exactly the type of decisive action we need during these uncertain times. With the threat of inflation fading, the Bank is right to concentrate on jump-starting the economy.

He added: “The Bank’s job is not done. It must continue to cut rates in the new year to get the economy heading in the right direction again.”

Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, was more guarded. While describing the cut as a “bold move”, he added: “In our opinion it will not on its own be sufficient to bolster confidence given the scale of the current financial crisis.

“Further significant job losses will be announced in the run-up to Christmas and into the first half of 2009, putting pressure on the Bank to cut rates further. We expect rates to fall to 1 per cent by the end of the first quarter of 2009.”

    Bank of England cuts rates to 2%, FT, 4.12.2008,
    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/07ee3a02-c1eb-11dd-a350-000077b07658.html

Op-Ed Columnist

All Fall Down

November 26, 2008
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I spent Sunday afternoon brooding over a great piece of Times reporting by Eric Dash and Julie Creswell about Citigroup. Maybe brooding isn’t the right word. The front-page article, entitled “Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk,” actually left me totally disgusted.

Why? Because in searing detail it exposed — using Citigroup as Exhibit A — how some of our country’s best-paid bankers were overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling, or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye. But it wasn’t only the bankers. This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.

So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.

Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank’s executives, including, sad to see, the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were clueless about the reckless financial instruments they were creating, or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank’s risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it.

These are the people whom taxpayers bailed out on Monday to the tune of what could be more than $300 billion. We probably had no choice. Just letting Citigroup melt down could have been catastrophic. But when the government throws together a bailout that could end up being hundreds of billions of dollars in 48 hours, you can bet there will be unintended consequences — many, many, many.

Also check out Michael Lewis’s superb essay, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” on Portfolio.com. Lewis, who first chronicled Wall Street’s excesses in “Liar’s Poker,” profiles some of the decent people on Wall Street who tried to expose the credit binge — including Meredith Whitney, a little known banking analyst who declared, over a year ago, that “Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust,” wrote Lewis.

“This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt,” he added. “She was saying they were stupid. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale... For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.”

Lewis also tracked down Steve Eisman, the hedge fund investor who early on saw through the subprime mortgages and shorted the companies engaged in them, like Long Beach Financial, owned by Washington Mutual.

“Long Beach Financial,” wrote Lewis, “was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, Calif., a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.”

Lewis continued: Eisman knew that subprime lenders could be disreputable. “What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism... ‘We always asked the same question,’ says Eisman. ‘Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.’ He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says.”

That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins. I used to say our kids will pay dearly for this. But actually, it’s our problem. For the next few years we’re all going to be working harder for less money and fewer government services — if we’re lucky.

Maureen Dowd is off today.

    All Fall Down, NYT, 25.11.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/opinion/26friedman.html?ref=opinion

FACTBOX:

Fed launches $200 billion consumer credit facility

Tue Nov 25, 2008
11:42am EST
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve, with the backing of the Treasury, launched a $200 billion lending facility to support the market for consumer debt securities.

Following are details of the plan, called the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF):

* Federal Reserve Bank of New York will lend up to $200 billion on non-recourse basis to holders of certain triple-A rated asset backed securities backed by newly originated and recently originated consumer and small business loans.

* ABS issuance in consumer categories such as auto loans, student loans and credit cards were roughly $240 billion in 2007 but essentially ground to a halt in October, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

* The new Fed facility is intended to assist credit markets by facilitating issuance of ABS and improving ABS market conditions.

* The Treasury will provide $20 billion in credit protection to the New York Fed for the program. The Treasury will purchase subordinated debt issued by a New York Fed special purpose vehicle to finance the first $20 billion of asset purchases. The New York Fed will fund any purchases above that amount by lending additional funds to the vehicle up to $200 billion.

*The Treasury funds will come from the unallocated portion of the first tranche of its $700 billion financial rescue fund, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The action leaves the Treasury just $20 billion in unallocated funds before it must seek Congressional approval to access the TARP's second $350 billion.

* All cash flows from assets in the program will be used to first repay principal and interest to the New York Fed, and second, to repay principal and interest on the $20 billion from the Treasury TARP fund. Any residual returns will be shared between the New York Fed and the Treasury.

* The New York Fed will apply a "haircut" to the value of the securities used as collateral for loans under the program, based on the rpice volatility of each class of eligible collateral.

* The New York Fed will offer a fixed amount of loans from the facility on a monthly basis. These loans will be awarded to borrowers each month based on a competitive, sealed bid auction process and the bank will set minimum interest rate spreads for bidding.

(Reporting by David Lawder, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

    FACTBOX: Fed launches $200 billion consumer credit facility, R, 25.11.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4AO5A720081125

Billions coming for mortgages,

credit cards, student, car loans

25 November 2008
USA Today
By Sue Kirchhoff and Barbara Hagenbaugh

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve on Tuesday unveiled $800 billion in programs designed to relieve severe pressures in financial markets, and ensure that mortgages, student loans, car loans and other forms of consumer credit remain available at reasonable prices.

"Millions of Americans cannot find affordable financing for their basic credit needs," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said, announcing the moves jointly with the Federal Reserve. "This lack of affordable consumer credit undermines consumer spending and as a result weakens our economy."

In the latest in a series of increasingly dramatic announcements, the Federal Reserve said Tuesday that it would buy up to $600 billion in mortgage-related assets, including $100 billion in bonds or other debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks, and $500 billion in other mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by the government entities, including Ginnie Mae, which oversees Federal Housing Administration mortgages.

The move is intended to pump cash back into the mortgage lending process and increase the availability and affordability of mortgage financing. Paulson said "nothing is more important" to housing and the overall economy than making mortgages easier and more affordable to obtain.

The Fed also said it would lend up to $200 billion to securities dealers and other financial firms that hold Triple-A rated securities backed by "newly and recently originated" consumer loans, such as credit cards and auto loans. The program will also cover loans originated by the government's Small Business Administration.

The Treasury will provide $20 billion from the recently enacted $700 billion financial rescue package to cover potential losses from the program. The first losses will be borne by borrowers under criteria yet to be determined.

Paulson called the $200 billion a "starting point," and said the amount could be increased and the program expanded to other kinds of securities, such as commercial mortgage-backed securities.

The program will "enable a broad range of institutions to step up their lending, enabling borrowers to have access to lower cost consumer finance and small business loans," Paulson said. He declined to say when consumers might see the effect of the programs, arguing the USA is currently in a "twice in a hundred years historic situation" marked by "unpredictability."

A secondary effect of the programs announced Tuesday is that they will pump cash into the financial system, increasing bank reserves. That could help inflate the economy at a time when officials are increasingly worried about possible deflation — widespread falling prices that can cripple economic activity.

Officials said larger bank reserves are a side effect of the program, however, not a central aim. The program will essentially be financed by having the government increase the money supply.

"This action is being taken to reduce the cost and increase the availability of credit for the purchase of houses, which in turn should support housing markets and foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally," the Fed said.

The announcements came amid fresh evidence the economy is rapidly deteriorating, despite aggressive Fed efforts the past year, including sharp interest rate cuts and expanded lending to financial firms.

The government issued revised data showing the economy contracted at a faster pace than initially thought in the July-September quarter, while a key measure of housing in 20 major markets found prices down a sharper-than-expected 17.4% from last year. Consumer confidence improved modestly this month after hitting the lowest on record in October but it points to continued pessimism.

Paulson said he had worked through the weekend on the proposal with officials including New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, who was nominated by Obama Monday to be his Treasury secretary. Paulson said Geithner is "very well-positioned" for the job because he has worked with Treasury officials throughout the crisis.

A main goal of the sweeping initiatives announced Tuesday is to reduce market risk so investors will be more willing to buy securities and consumers will have access to loans at rates and under conditions closer to those before the financial crisis.

The Fed noted that the level of asset-backed securities being issued to provide cash for consumer loans "declined precipitously in September and came to a halt in October." At the same time, consumer interest rates rose as the interest-rate risk premiums for the asset-backed products soared.

Credit is essential to consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity. In the July-September quarter, consumer spending fell at the fastest pace in 28 years, the Commerce Department said.

Fed officials said the program announced Tuesday is different from the $700 billion financial rescue package passed by Congress, which was originally designed so the government would buy troubled assets and take them off lenders' balance sheets.

The government is seeking to bolster quality assets through the new programs, making up for a lack of balance sheet capacity and lack of buyers in the financial system, due to continuing stresses and the fact some major financial players are no longer in business, such as some securities lenders and bank affiliates.

The $100 billion in Fannie and Freddie debt will be purchased by the Fed via the mortgage-backed securities through money managers.

With nearly all of the first $350 billion in the $700 billion program spoken for, speculation has risen that the Bush administration will need to ask Congress for the rest of the money. But Paulson said Treasury has "no timeline" to seek congressional approval. "When the time is right, we will avail ourselves," he said.

Lawmakers may try to attach strings to the second $350 billion, such as requiring Treasury to lend money to automakers or force Paulson to use government money to help prevent mortgage foreclosures.

Paulson said the administration is continuing to work on a foreclosure mitigation program, but noted the challenge is to avoid using government money to help homeowners who do not need help or whose mortgages could have been reworked without government aid.

"It's a challenging area," Paulson said.

Rebuffing criticism that the administration was going to pass off the issue to the Obama administration in January, he said, "I am going to run right until the end."

    Billions coming for mortgages, credit cards, student, car loans, UT, 25.11.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-11-25-fed-bailout_N.htm

Op-Ed Columnist

Bailout to Nowhere

November 14, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target. The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth. Over time, American government built a bigger safety net so workers could survive the vicissitudes of this creative destruction — with unemployment insurance and soon, one hopes, health care security. But the government has generally not interfered in the dynamic process itself, which is the source of the country’s prosperity.

But this, apparently, is about to change. Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. They have decided to follow an earlier $25 billion loan with a $50 billion bailout, which would inevitably be followed by more billions later, because if these companies are not permitted to go bankrupt now, they never will be.

This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends.

Granting immortality to Detroit’s Big Three does not enhance creative destruction. It retards it. It crosses a line, a bright line. It is not about saving a system; there will still be cars made and sold in America. It is about saving politically powerful corporations. A Detroit bailout would set a precedent for every single politically connected corporation in America. There already is a long line of lobbyists bidding for federal money. If Detroit gets money, then everyone would have a case. After all, are the employees of Circuit City or the newspaper industry inferior to the employees of Chrysler?

It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.

If ever the market has rendered a just verdict, it is the one rendered on G.M. and Chrysler. These companies are not innocent victims of this crisis. To read the expert literature on these companies is to read a long litany of miscalculation. Some experts mention the management blunders, some the union contracts and the legacy costs, some the years of poor car design and some the entrenched corporate cultures.

There seems to be no one who believes the companies are viable without radical change. A federal cash infusion will not infuse wisdom into management. It will not reduce labor costs. It will not attract talented new employees. As Megan McArdle of The Atlantic wittily put it, “Working for the Big Three magically combines vast corporate bureaucracy and job insecurity in one completely unattractive package.”

In short, a bailout will not solve anything — just postpone things. If this goes through, Big Three executives will make decisions knowing that whatever happens, Uncle Sam will bail them out — just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In the meantime, capital that could have gone to successful companies and programs will be directed toward companies with a history of using it badly.

The second part of Obama’s plan is the creation of an auto czar with vague duties. Other smart people have called for such a czar to reorganize the companies and force the companies to fully embrace green technology and other good things.

That would be great, but if Obama was such a fervent believer in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats, he should have mentioned it during the campaign. Are we really to believe there exists a czar omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent enough to know how to fix the Big Three? Who is this deity? Are we to believe that political influence will miraculously disappear, that the czar would have absolute power over unions, management, Congress and the White House? Please.

This is an excruciatingly hard call. A case could be made for keeping the Big Three afloat as a jobs program until the economy gets better and then letting them go bankrupt. But the most persuasive experts argue that bankruptcy is the least horrible option. Airline, steel and retail companies have gone through bankruptcy proceedings and adjusted. It would be a less politically tainted process. Government could use that $50 billion — and more — to help the workers who are going to be displaced no matter what.

But the larger principle is over the nature of America’s political system. Is this country going to slide into progressive corporatism, a merger of corporate and federal power that will inevitably stifle competition, empower corporate and federal bureaucrats and protect entrenched interests? Or is the U.S. going to stick with its historic model: Helping workers weather the storms of a dynamic economy, but preserving the dynamism that is the core of the country’s success.

    Bailout to Nowhere, NYT, 15.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/opinion/14brooks.html

Gordon Brown in the Middle East

Brown hopeful of Saudi cash for IMF

Sunday November 02 2008 15.30 GMT
Guardian.co.uk
Allegra Stratton in Riyadh
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Sunday November 02 2008.
It was last updated at 15.30 on November 02 2008.

Gordon Brown said today he was hopeful of success in his attempts to persuade dollar-rich Gulf states to prop up ailing national economies through a massive injection of capital into the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The prime minister spent three hours in one-to-one talks with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, trying to persuade the monarch to invest in a revamped IMF.

On the first leg of a four-day visit to the Middle East, and aiming to secure hundreds of billions of dollars for the fund, Brown called off a planned dinner with business leaders accompanying him so as to allow maximum negotiating time with the Saudi king.

The IMF currently has around $250bn in its emergency reserves but there are fears that, with Hungary, Iceland and Ukraine having already sought assistance and more nations expected to follow, the sum might not be sufficient.

Brown hopes to persuade Gulf leaders to use some of the estimated $1tn they have made from high oil prices in the last few years to boost the reserves, indicating that he would like to see the current sum increased by "hundreds of billions" of dollars.

The prime minister said following the talks that he was hopeful of having secured Saudi backing.

Speaking on the BBC television's Sunday AM programme, Brown said: "I think people want to invest both in helping the world get through this very difficult period of time but I also think people want to work with us so we are less dependent on oil and have more stability in oil prices."

He added: "The Saudis will, I think, contribute, so we can have a bigger fund worldwide."

However, a senior government source party to the negotiations said the Saudis were very sensitive about being regarded as a "cash cow" and that the country, in which two thirds of the population are below the age of 25, would prioritise domestic investment if necessary.

The business secretary, Peter Mandelson, accompanying Brown on the trip, echoed this caution. He played down expectations, indicating that the government was unlikely to learn whether the Saudis would contribute towards the IMF fund until a meeting of 20 countries in Washington on November 15. Mandelson told reporters that talks with the Saudis were a "process not an event".

Both Brown and Mandelson indicated that the Saudis would only buy into the scheme if significant reform of the global institutions was achieved to bring on board rising powers such as Saudi Arabia, India and Brazil.

Business leaders on the trip - described by Brown as the "highest profile group of business leaders ever to accompany a delegation overseas" - said the prime minister was receiving something of a "hero's welcome" for his part in the global response to the recent economic downturn, and that this was softening his dealings with Saudis.

Brown arrived later in the afternoon in Doha, Qatar for the second leg of his tour.

    Brown hopeful of Saudi cash for IMF, G, 2.11.2008,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/02/saudiarabia-creditcrunch

Cost of crash: $2,800,000,000,000

• Bank of England calls for reform
• Markets jittery after Asian losses
• Brown defends borrowing

Tuesday October 28 2008
The Guardian
Larry Elliott, Phillip Inman and Nicholas Watt
This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday October 28 2008
on p1 of the Top stories section.
It was last updated at 08.17 on October 28 2008.

A worker walks past a screen displaying stock market movements at a window of the London Stock Exchange in the City of London, October 27, 2008. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters

Autumn's market mayhem has left the world's financial institutions nursing losses of $2.8tn, the Bank of England said today, as it called for fundamental reform of the global banking system to prevent a repeat of turmoil "arguably" unprecedented since the outbreak of the first world war.

In its half-yearly health check of the City, the Bank said tougher regulation and constraints on lending would be needed as policymakers sought to learn lessons from the mistakes that have led to a systemic crisis unfolding over the past 15 months.

The Bank's Financial Stability Report, which will be sent to every bank director in Britain, more than doubled the previous estimate of the potential losses faced by all financial institutions since the spring, but said that given time the actual losses could be pared by between a third and a half.

The £50bn pledged by the government had helped underpin the system, the Bank said, and would provide a breathing space for UK banks so that they did not have to sell assets at cut-price values immediately. The report also expressed cautious optimism about the effectiveness of the recent global bail-out plan.

The Bank's estimate exceeds that made by the International Monetary Fund recently. The IMF concentrated on US institutions and did not include losses from the turmoil of recent weeks. Estimated paper losses from UK banks on mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds are currently £122.6bn, the Bank report said.

Gordon Brown insisted yesterday that it was right for the government to increase borrowing in order to fund investment to help the economy through tough times. But he moved to reassure markets that he would not preside over a reckless increase in borrowing during the recession and said he would reduce it as a proportion of GDP once the economy picks up.

Paving the way for an expected abandonment of the tight fiscal rules he established as chancellor, Brown said: "The responsible course of government is to invest at this time to speed up the economic activity. As economic activity rises, as tax revenues recover, then you would want borrowing to be a lower share of your national income. But the responsible course at the moment is to use the investments that are necessary, and to continue them, and to help people through very difficult times.

"I think that's a very fundamental part of what we are doing."

In another turbulent day yesterday on global markets, there were hefty falls in Asian stockmarkets and a fresh fall in the pound. Japan's Nikkei index closed down more than 6% at a 26-year-low of 7162.9. London's FTSE 100 recovered from an early fall of more than 200 points to close 30 points lower at 3852.6, while the Dow Jones closed down 2.42% at 8,175.77.

Brown and Peter Mandelson, the business secretary, served notice that Britain should brace itself for a downturn when they both warned about rising unemployment. Brown said: "I can't promise people that we will keep them in their last job if it becomes economically redundant. But we can promise people that we will help them into their next job."

Mandelson was more blunt as he warned of the impact of the recession. "We are facing an unparalleled financial crisis," he said during a visit to Moscow. "I don't think yet people have realised what the impact is going to be on our real economy."

The Tories intensified their attacks on the government by depicting Brown as not a man with a plan but a man with an overdraft.

Responding to Brown's remarks, George Osborne, shadow chancellor, said: "What they are talking about is borrowing out of necessity, not out of virtue. Gordon Brown is a man with an overdraft, not a man with a plan. He is being forced into this borrowing. He presents it as a strategy but it is actually a consequence of his great failure that borrowing is already out of control before we even get into the worst of the economic circumstances that we are in."

Brown was speaking as the Treasury finalised plans to rewrite the fiscal rules which have governed his approach to the economy over the past decade. Alistair Darling will use his pre-budget report next month to say that it is time for a more flexible approach in the new economic cycle, which started in 2006-07.

The previous FSR in April envisaged a gradual recovery in global markets and the Bank was careful today not to sound the all-clear despite the coordinated action in Britain, the US and the eurozone this month to recapitalise banks and provide extra liquidity to markets. "In recent weeks, the global banking system has arguably undergone its biggest episode of instability since the start of the first world war," it said.

Sir John Gieve, the Bank's deputy governor for financial stability, added: "With a global economic downturn under way, the financial system remains under strain. But it is better placed as a result of the exceptional package of capital, guaranteed funding and liquidity support. That is helping to underpin the banking system both directly and by demonstrating the authorities' determination to do whatever is needed to restore confidence.

"Looking further ahead, we need a fundamental rethink of how to manage systemic risk internationally. We need to establish stronger restraints on the build-up of risks in the financial system over the cycle with the dangers they bring to the wider economy.

"That means not just increasing capital and liquidity requirements for individual institutions but relating them to the cyclical growth of risk in the system more broadly. Counter-cyclical policy of that sort should complement regulation of companies and broader macroeconomic policy."

The Bank believes that the capital injection from the taxpayer will also prevent banks from slashing their lending too aggressively over the coming months, relieving the recessionary pressure on the economy.

Figures released yesterday, however, from financial data provider Moneyfacts showed banks were failing to pass on interest rate cuts to mortgage borrowers despite making severe cuts in savings rates. It said most institutions had already passed on the last half-point base rate cut to savers while holding back on cuts in home loan interest rates.

"Some providers are using the base rate cut as a way of increasing their margin for risk, by not passing on the full cut to mortgage customers but passing the cut on in full to savings customers," it said.

A separate study last week marked a new low in the number of mortgage products available.

Concerns at widespread job losses across the finance sector prompted unions to demand a "social contract" to protect jobs. Derek Simpson, Unite's joint general secretary, said: "Workers in the financial services are facing insecurity as the world is gripped by economic turmoil. The Unite 'social contract' sets out the principles which employees expect the government and finance companies to now sign up to.

"Unite is calling for the protection of jobs, pensions, the end to short-term remuneration policies and an overhaul of the regulatory structures in the financial services sector. There must be a recognition of the importance of employment in the financial services sector, as many communities now depend on the sector since being decimated by the collapse of the manufacturing industry.

"Workers in the financial services industry are not the culprits of the credit crunch and we are not prepared to allow them to become the victims. The taxpayer must now get firm assurances that the financial lifeline extended to these large organisations will be used to protect jobs and the public. It is not acceptable for the government to socialise the risk without allowing the wider society to capitalise on the rewards in the finance industry."

How much is that?

The Bank of England may have put the paper cost of the global crisis at a staggering $2.8 trillion, but how does one come to grips with such a sum? Think of it like this: it could pay for 46 bail-outs of the kind the Treasury handed to the banks RBS, HBOS group and Lloyds TSB; or pay off the last quarter's public debt 45 times. It is more than three times the sum of UK annual public spending, and also equivalent to the wealth of 100 Oleg Deripaskas - before the credit crunch anyway. It's equal to 138m bottles of 1947 Petrus Pomerol, the bankers' favourite vintage; or, if it's your turn in the coffee round, 773bn lattes - nearly 13,000 each for every UK citizen.

    Cost of crash: $2,800,000,000,000, G, 28.10.2008,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/28/economics-credit-crunch-bank-england

Commodities slide amid demand fears

Published: October 27 2008 10:35
Last updated: October 27 2008 10:35
The Financial Times
By Javier Blas in London


Commodities prices continued to fall sharply on Monday, with oil prices falling to a fresh 17-month low just above $60 a barrel, on growing concern that a potential global recession was unavoidable, raising further fears for raw materials demand.

The fall in oil prices came in spite of last week’s Opec oil cartel agreement to cut its production official limit by 1.5m barrels a day in an effort to put a floor on dropping oil prices. Opec officials said they were monitoring the fall in prices.

Iran said Opec was ready to cut further its production if last week’s reduction does not stop the slide, the country’s Opec governor was quoted as saying in the local media.

“In case the reduction in production does not stabilise the oil market, Opec will again reduce its production ceiling,” Mohammad Ali Khatibi Khatibi was quoted as saying by Farhang-e Ashti newspaper.

In London morning trading, Nymex December West Texas Intermediate fell by a further $1.45 a barrel to $62.82 a barrel having earlier hit a fresh 17-month low of $61.30 a barrel. Heating oil and gasoline in New York also fall sharply.

In London, ICE December Brent crude futures lost $3 to hit an intraday low of $59.05 a barrel, its lowest level since February 2007.

Opec’s decision to cut production sparked criticism from the US and UK governments but the continuing fall for oil prices led to talk that the cartel would try to reduce output further before the end of the year.

Robert Laughlin at MF Global in London said whilst many will not shed a tear for oil producers at present it should be noted that several countries may well be running into a ” nil-margin ” production scenario with oil prices sub $ 60 a barrel

The key signal for prices in the medium term will be Opec’s adherence to its agreement. Many traders doubt that it will fully implement the cuts, noting that historically the group has managed about a 60 per cent adherence rate.

But Chakib Khelil, Algeria’s energy minister and Opec’s president, insisted that the group had “no other choice” and it was having trouble selling its oil as buyers stayed away or were unable to secure letters of credit.

Other commodity prices also fell sharply on Monday as investors continued to unwind positions in what now is seen as a risky asset class.

Oliver Jakob, of Swiss-based Petromatrix consutants, said that financial flows were overall dominated by the closing of bets of raising prices in commodity indices.

“With volatility indices at levels of systemic breakdowns it should be expected that more risk is still to be taken off the table, meaning that the waves of indiscriminate selling across asset classes are not yet necessarily over and will dominate in the near term over fundamental considerations,” he said in a note to clients.

Gold prices also came under pressure, as the strengthening dollar reduced the metal’s appeal as a currency hedge. Spot gold slipped nearly 3 per cent to $717.80 a troy ounce, having hit a low of $712 an ounce.

Base metals were also hampered by the spectre of a global recession and its likely implications for demand. Copper continued its fall under the $4,000 mark, losing almost 5 per cent to $3,645 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange.

Agriculture commodities were also down, with CBOT December corn falling 7 cents to $3.65 ¾ a bushel, its lowest in 11 months.

    Commodities slide amid demand fears, FT, 27.10.2008,
    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aefd7198-a402-11dd-8104-000077b07658.html

Op-Ed Columnist

Crises on Many Fronts

October 25, 2008
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

The closer you look at the current economic crisis, the more harrowing it becomes.

The focus in the presidential campaign has been almost entirely on the struggles faced by the middle class — on families worried about their jobs, their mortgages, their retirement accounts and how to pay for college for their kids.

Each nauseating plunge in the Dow heightens their anxiety. Each company that goes under and each government report showing joblessness on the rise intensifies their fear.

No one knows how to quell the uncertainty. And no one is even talking about the poor.

Alan Greenspan, uncharacteristically befuddled, went up to Capitol Hill on Thursday and lamented that some sort of fissure had erupted in his previously impregnable worldview. For Mr. Greenspan (“I still do not understand exactly how it happened”), this is a moment of intellectual anxiety.

But if we are indeed caught up in the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, the ones who will fare the worst are those who already are poor or near-poor. There are millions of them, and yet they remain essentially invisible. A step down for them is a step into destitution.

Listen to Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund, which he founded with the singer-songwriter Paul Simon to bring health services to poor and homeless children:

“First of all, at least in the short term, we can expect more families will become homeless as foreclosures continue to mount and jobs become harder to hold and more difficult to find. As jobs disappear and employers begin trimming expenses, we can foresee people losing health insurance, swelling the ranks of the medically uninsured.

“I don’t think the health care system can bear another five million or more people uninsured and economically fragile. More people without insurance will crowd into the nation’s hospital emergency rooms when medical problems become too severe to ignore or there is no other access to basic health services. Such a trend will have a seismic impact on our health care system.”

Few Americans have noticed, but a tremendous number of hospitals, from Boston to Los Angeles, are in serious, even dire, financial trouble. A survey of 4,500 hospitals by the New York consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal found that more than half were technically insolvent or at risk of insolvency.

The current economic downturn, combined with an anticipated surge in patients without health insurance, will only worsen what is already a crisis.

The nation’s financial system was all-but-overwhelmed by the mortgage crisis because none of the nation’s leaders paid serious enough attention to the widespread symptoms of what turned out to be a metastasizing disease.

A similar situation exists on a number of important fronts right now: the deteriorating national infrastructure, the woefully inadequate public school system, our self-defeating energy policies, health care. Symptoms of serious trouble are staring us in the face, but no one is mounting an adequate response.

When a new president takes office in January, the temptation will be to delay bold action on these fronts until the overall economic situation improves. That is the kind of mistake (like ignoring the housing and credit bubbles until it was too late or refusing to heed the pre-Katrina warnings in New Orleans) that opens the door to additional crises.

The Alvarez & Marsal study noted that at many community hospitals the physical plant itself is in bad shape because capital funding had to be curtailed because of budget shortfalls. “There are scores of hospitals that are slowly asphyxiating and slipping into insolvency,” the report said, “as they divert capital dollars to fund operations.

“For most of these hospitals, it is only a matter of time before they hit a ‘sudden’ liquidity crisis and cannot make payroll without entering insolvency and being forced into restructuring their finances and operations.”

Dr. Redlener, who is also a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said: “The federal government currently strains to pay hospitals more than $35 billion each year to cover the costs of the uninsured. That money comes from general tax revenue, and it is a budget line that will need to be increased if we don’t want to see an epidemic of hospital closures.”

Most important, of course, is a revamping (in a sane way) of the health insurance system.

There are no good scenarios in the offing. The markets are in turmoil. Banks are being nationalized. The U.S. auto industry has the look of a jalopy with four flat tires.

The evidence of decline and decay is everywhere around us. There has never been a time since World War II when the nation was more in need of a presidential administration with a comprehensive vision and the ability to lead on several fronts at once.

    Crises on Many Fronts, NYT, 25.10.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/opinion/25herbert.html

Fear and Loathing Over Economy Spreads

October 16, 2008
Filed at 1:01 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fear and loathing is spreading as signs mount that the economy is in danger of losing its balance.

And a fresh batch of economic reports due out Thursday is likely to show more problems for the already stumbling economy.

Industrial production is expected to have dropped in September, underscoring the plight of troubled auto makers as well as manufacturers of furniture, construction materials and other goods that have been hard hit by the collapse of the housing market.

The number of new people signing up for unemployment benefits last week may dip slightly but is still expected to top 400,000, a level that usually points to an ailing labor market.

Consumer prices probably will nudge up in September, but will be up sharply over the past year, further pinching Americans already smarting from dwindling nest eggs and sinking home values.

''Given the likely drawn-out nature of the prospective adjustments in housing and financial markets, I see the most probable scenario as one in which the performance of the economy remains subpar well into next year and then gradually improves in late 2009 and 2010,'' Donald Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, concluded Wednesday evening.

Worries about the economy sent the Dow Jones industrials down a staggering 733 points earlier Wednesday, erasing any hopes that the convulsions that have shaken Wall Street for a month were over.

The selling spree carried over to Asia, where stocks fell sharply in early trading Thursday. Japan's key stock index plummeted more than 10 percent, South Korean shares shed 7 percent, while in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Index was down 6 percent.

The plunge in stocks put the nation's economic anxiety front-and-center as the two major presidential candidates, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, squared off in their final debate Wednesday night in Hempstead, N.Y.

McCain used the debate to accuse Obama of waging class warfare by advocating tax increases designed to ''spread the wealth around.'' The Democrat denied it, and countered that he favors tax reductions for 95 percent of all Americans.

Wednesday's daylong stock market sell-off came as retailers reported the biggest drop in sales in three years and as a Federal Reserve snapshot showed Americans are spending less and manufacturing is slowing around the country.

Piling up losses in a rough final hour of trading, the Dow ended the day down nearly 8 percent -- its steepest drop since one week after Black Monday in 1987. The Dow has wiped out all but about 127 points of its record-shattering 936-point gain on Monday of this week.

Earlier this week, after governments around the world announced plans to use trillions of dollars to prop up banks, including a U.S. plan to buy about $250 billion in bank stocks, the market had appeared to be turning around -- or at least calming down.

Instead, relentless selling gave the Dow its 20th triple-digit swing in the past 23 trading sessions, an unprecedented run of volatility. The Dow has finished higher on only one day this month. The loss of 733 points is the second-worst ever for the average, topped only by a 778-point decline Sept. 29.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have expressed confidence that the government's radical efforts to stabilize the financial system and induce banks to lend again will eventually help the economy.

But Bernanke warned that even if the financial markets level off, the nation will not snap back to economic health quickly.

''Stabilization of the financial markets is a critical first step, but even if they stabilize as we hope they will, broader economic recovery will not happen right away,'' Bernanke told the Economic Club of New York on Wednesday. He left the door open to further interest rate reductions.

President Bush plans to speak on the financial crisis early Friday -- before the markets open -- at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters across from the White House. Officials said the speech wasn't intended to put forward new policy actions, but rather would be used by the president to give the nation a more detailed explanation of what the government is doing -- and why -- to combat the crisis.

Some analysts believe the economy jolted into reverse in the recently ended third quarter, while others predict it will shrink later this year or early next. The classic definition of a recession is back-to-back quarters of shrinking economic activity.

Two gloomy economic reports on Wednesday showed that the debate at this point is merely semantic.

The Fed's snapshot of business conditions around the nation, known as the Beige Book, showed economic activity weakening across all of the Fed's 12 regional districts. Consumer spending -- which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity -- slumped in most Fed regions. Manufacturing also slowed in most areas.

As shoppers cut back, retail sales dropped sharply in September. The 1.2 percent decline was the biggest in three years.

Leaders of the world's top economic powers, the Group of Eight, said they would meet ''in the near future'' for a global summit to tackle the financial crisis. The group comprises the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the meeting could be held as soon as next month. He said the discussions should include not only the world's richest nations but also major emerging economies such as China and India.

''I believe there is scope for agreement in the next few days that we will have an international meeting to take common action ... for very large and very radical changes,'' Brown told reporters before a meeting with other European Union leaders for talks in Brussels on the financial crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy also called for a G-8 meeting.

Merkel said reform was needed so that ''something like this can never happen again,'' while Sarkozy said the meeting should be held in New York, ''where everything started.''

The current financial crisis began more than a year ago in the United States when lax lending standards on certain home mortgages came home to roost. Foreclosures skyrocketed, mortgage securities soured and financial companies racked up huge losses.

    Fear and Loathing Over Economy Spreads, NYT, 16.10.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Financial-Meltdown.html

Commodity Prices Tumble

October 14, 2008
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

HOUSTON — The global financial panic and the economic slowdown have put at least a temporary end to the commodity bull market of the last seven years, sending prices tumbling for many of the raw ingredients of the world economy.

Since the spring and early summer, when prices for many commodities peaked amid fears of permanent shortage, wheat and corn — two cereals at the base of the human food chain — have dropped more than 40 percent. Oil has dropped 44 percent. Metals like aluminum, copper and nickel have declined by a third or more.

The swift turnaround is the brightest economic news on the horizon for consumers, putting money into their pockets at a time they need it badly. Gasoline prices in the United States are falling precipitously — by about 24 cents over the last five days, to a national average of $3.21 a gallon on Monday — and analysts said they could go below $3 a gallon nationally this fall, down from a high of $4.11 a gallon in July.

Prices for most commodities remain elevated by past standards, and they rose a bit on Monday amid the broad market rally. But the trend seems to be downward as traders weigh the prospect that the global economic crisis will lead to sharp drops in demand. The big question is whether prices will drop all the way to long-term norms or whether Asia’s continuing economic boom has set a floor.

The rapid commodity decline has eased fears of inflation, a reason central banks were able to lower interest rates around the world last week in an effort to salvage economic growth. It also represents a fundamental shift of view that is driving markets these days.

A scant few months ago, Americans were seen as participants in a bidding war with the emerging Chinese, Indian, Russian and Brazilian middle classes for a basket full of products. But that was before an extreme slowdown in demand for things as diverse as gasoline and aluminum and the retreat of investment money from commodity futures into safer havens like government bonds.

The commodity bust began before last week’s broad market declines, though the panic has exacerbated the pressure on commodities. Oil dropped by 10 percent on Friday alone, but then recovered some of that loss Monday to settle at $81.19 a barrel, far below its high in July of $145.29.

“Commodities followed the euphoria cycle that we had along with housing,” said Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale who specializes in market bubbles. “We had the idea that the world is growing very fast, people are getting very rich and, by the way, we are running out of everything. That theory doesn’t seem so good when the economy is collapsing.”

Some analysts, while welcoming the recent declines, say they believe that prices are likely to remain above long-term norms. Food, in particular, could be a continuing problem: today’s prices are still too high to allow many people in developing countries to afford adequate diets. Nor have the recent declines been passed along in American grocery stores, at least as of yet. The United Nations has projected that global food prices will remain elevated for years.

The price increases of recent years served their economic function, calling forth additional supplies of many commodities — farmers planted every acre they could, mining companies opened new mines and oil companies went to the far corners of the earth to drill wells. In many cases, the prices also caused demand to decline even as supply started rising.

Americans, the world’s largest fuel consumers, have been cutting back on gasoline all year, and the decline is approaching double digits. Motorists pumped 9.5 percent less gasoline for the week ended Oct. 3 compared with the same week a year earlier, according to MasterCard Advisors, which tracks spending. In a report on Friday, the International Energy Agency cut its forecast for global oil consumption yet again, projecting that 2008 would end with the slowest demand growth in 15 years.

Big increases in world wheat production because of increased acreage in the United States, Canada, Russia and much of Europe have brought wheat prices to less than $6 a bushel today from nearly $13 in March.

Soybean prices have dropped to $9 a bushel from $16 since July, in part because of a record crop in China and a slowdown in Chinese imports. Corn prices are also easing amid expanded supply.

A theory among economists is that commodity prices are still at the beginning of a steep fall as the credit squeeze takes the world economy into a deep recession.

“When you have a seven-year bull run, you are going to have more than a four-month correction, and we are just beginning our fourth month,” said Richard Feltes, senior vice president and director of commodity research at MF Global Research. “We have got more deflation coming in the housing sector, in capital assets, and it’s going to continue in commodities as well.”

But many economists say a lasting price collapse is unlikely because the emerging middle class and growing populations in developing economies will continue to have strong appetites for fuels and metals.

Some say that the other commodity bull markets in modern history — approximately spanning 1906 to 1923, 1933 to 1955 and 1968 to 1982 — lasted more than twice as long as the current run. They included some sharp corrections before they ran their course, suggesting that the current drop, however precipitous, could be temporary.

Though the picture is slightly different for every commodity, prices generally hit a low point for the decade soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, then rose as the global economy strengthened in the following years. From late 2001 until mid-2008, the price of oil rose 800 percent, copper rose 700 percent and wheat rose 400 percent.

The decline of recent weeks has taken virtually every major commodity more than halfway back to its late 2001 price, adjusted for inflation. The recent drop has been so rapid that if the pace continued, it would take only a few more weeks to erase the gains of the bull market entirely.

That suggests to some analysts that prices could hit a floor fairly soon. “The underlying fundamentals of strong demand for energy, food and industrial commodities will come back,” said Michael Lewis, global head of commodities research for Deutsche Bank.

Many analysts think oil could fall to $70 a barrel in the next few months, if not sooner. But it is hard for them to believe it will go much lower: oil is not becoming easier to find, as fields in Mexico peter out and suppliers like Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela remain unreliable.

The costs of finding oil in deep waters or mining oil sands in Canada remain high, in the $60 to $70 a barrel range — and since those are now vital sources of supply, they could help put a floor under the oil price. Additionally, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could cut production to try to shore up prices, probably at an emergency meeting it will hold Nov. 18. Analysts note that the credit crisis and economic slowdown will inevitably stall new industrial projects, reducing demand for metals. But the falling prices will also discourage new mining and drilling. When economic growth resumes, that could produce metal shortages that would drive prices back up.

The biggest single factor that will decide whether a prolonged bull market in commodities is over, or just in a lull, is the Chinese economy. The industrial development of that country in recent years was responsible for much of the world’s increased consumption of copper, aluminum and zinc, and almost a third of the increase in oil consumption.

Chinese growth has slowed but is still running above 12 percent, and that country is expected to undertake some huge projects in coming months as it repairs damage from earthquakes and storms.

Kevin Norrish, a senior commodities researcher at Barclays Capital, said that in a recent visit to China he found that domestic demand for copper was still strong but that exports were weakening. Chinese copper wire manufacturers, he said, “are very depressed indeed because their export orders have fallen a long way.”

He said that as high as prices for commodities rose in recent years, the bull run in the late 1970s and early 1980s was even more buoyant. Of all the major commodities, only oil at its peak in July traded at a higher price than in the last bull market, adjusted for inflation.

That previous bull run, stimulated by years of high economic growth and inflation, was followed by nearly two decades of weak prices that accompanied the transition in the United States from an industrial to a service economy. Then China and India appeared on the world stage as major economies at the turn of the new century, followed by the oil-driven economy in Russia and greater consumption in the Middle East the last four or five years. Mr. Norrish is one of many commodities analysts who think that the story of China, India and other developing countries’ spurring commodity demand is not over.

“What we are seeing is a pause in what we see as a very, very long bull run,” Mr. Norrish said.

    Commodity Prices Tumble, NYT, 14.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/business/economy/14commodities.html

Both Sides of the Aisle See More Regulation

October 14, 2008
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules. But that is about to change, now that the government has been forced to intervene in the once high-flying financial industry to avert an economywide crash.

An expansion of the government’s role in financial markets is certain: on Friday the Treasury Department updated its recommended reforms of the existing regulatory structure, which it will leave to the next president and Congress.

Congressional leaders and both presidential candidates already have their own, more far-reaching ideas, from further restricting executives’ pay to remaking the entire regulatory structure so that it better supervises both traditional activities and newer ones like credit-default swaps that are unregulated.

But the pro-regulation climate will probably spill over into other sectors. That seems especially likely now that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are pumping money into corporations of all types to shore up their capital and to finance day-to-day operations until credit markets recover, and with the auto industry separately getting billions in government assistance.

That will give impetus to those who seek new emission curbs and energy limits to address climate change; or who want health care mandates to expand insurance coverage and restrain costs; or who are calling for new safeguards for food, prescription drugs and toys from China and other less-regulated trading partners.

“We now have a collective anger, disgust, over our whole financial system and it’s obvious we’re going to get a regulatory backlash,” said Robert E. Litan, an economist at the Brookings Institution who has studied financial and regulatory issues for decades. “And we know it’s going to come in a big way in 2009.”

Mr. Litan predicts a spillover effect to other industries because voters have the perception that “big companies are animals and they need to be put in their cages.”

He added: “The only open question going forward in this new era is, are we going to overdo it? Is the pendulum going to go completely over in the other direction?”

Whatever policies result, the political fallout of this renewed respect for government regulation is evident in the current election campaigns.

Democrats, who typically have been on the defensive in recent decades as the more pro-regulatory party, now are playing offense. Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, is leading his party’s charge, blaming Republicans and their candidate, Senator John McCain, for the lax oversight that contributed to the financial crisis. Mr. Obama recently charged that Mr. McCain supported an economic theory “that basically says that we can shred regulations and consumer protections.”

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, who is unexpectedly fighting for re-election in Kentucky, is the target of a television ad that says, “Wall Street and the big banks gave Mitch McConnell $4.4 million for his campaigns, and he fought for less regulation of Wall Street.”

Yet Republicans, led by Mr. McCain, are promising that they, too, will support toughened government regulations. “I think we’re going to have to see smarter regulation,” Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said in an interview.

Others are more cautious about the prospect for a major shift in political attitudes toward regulation. Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago professor and free-market conservative who is widely considered the intellectual godfather of deregulation, said the outlook did not depend solely on who was elected. “It depends on the economy itself,” he said, adding that the government, under either party’s control, would most likely not impose costly regulations on business in bad times.

For example, Mr. Peltzman noted that Senators McCain and Obama were both committed to action against climate change, through a mix of regulations and market forces. “But I think it will be put off because of a slowdown in the economy,” he said. As for health care, “that depends a lot on how strong the Democrats are in Congress.”

There will be no putting off the action on re-regulating finance. Both of the presidential candidates and Congressional leaders like Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the Senate banking committee chairman, and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the House Financial Services Committee chairman, would go further than the Bush Treasury. They say they want to overhaul the current system next year to rid it of overlapping regulatory agencies, give other agencies new powers and perhaps create a new overseer for the whole system.

Financial institutions are likely to face tougher rules on maintaining capital and liquidity. Companies and instruments that currently are not regulated could be brought under the government’s thumb; unregulated derivatives, hedge funds, mortgage brokers and credit-rating agencies all have been implicated in the current crisis.

Democrats and Mr. McCain talk of limiting executives’ compensation, while Democrats would also give shareholders more say about who sits on corporate boards. Mr. Obama, if he is elected president, would join with the Congressional Democrats, who are likely to increase their majorities in the House and Senate, to revive their unsuccessful proposals to impose new penalties for predatory lending, including mortgage lending.

There are proposals for a new agency to protect consumers against a variety of financial abuses, involving mortgages, auto and student loans and credit cards. Credit card companies’ marketing, billing and interest rates will very likely be reviewed. The insolvency at the insurance giant American International Group is reviving talk in Congress of federal regulation of the insurance industry, which prefers its current, mostly friendly patchwork system of state oversight.

The financial industry “is not the only area where the deregulation ideology got completely out of hand,” Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in an interview. While Mr. Waxman is already holding hearings on the financial crisis and possible new regulations, he said, “I’m looking forward to working on” issues like climate change and health care insurance in coming years.

Mr. Waxman, who was first elected from California in 1974, said he did not believe the economic downturn would impede new regulations. “Over the years I’ve heard industry after industry come in and say, ‘We cannot survive economically if we have these regulations,’ ” he said. Instead, he argued, studies showed that their compliance was less costly than predicted, and companies emerged more efficient and competitive.

While political stereotypes portray Democrats as favoring regulation and Republicans as deregulators, recent history is more complicated.

A Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, presided over one of the most active regulatory periods of the last half-century, working with the Democrats who controlled Congress in the early 1970s. His legacy includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and, for a time, wage and price controls.

Later in that decade, a Democrat, President Jimmy Carter, began the deregulatory era that has continued with notable breaks to the present. While people in both parties associate his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, with making regulation a dirty word politically, it was the Carter administration that instituted cost-benefit analyses for new regulations and deregulated the airline, railroad and trucking industries.

Mr. Reagan’s record was more antiregulation than deregulatory. He and President George H. W. Bush fought Congressional Democrats’ charges that they were not enforcing environmental regulations, among others.

In political campaigns, the Republicans made gains in part by painting Democrats as the party of big government. Studies showed, however, that the number of federal regulations spiked under the first President Bush, in part because of new rules for banks and thrift institutions after the savings and loan scandals of the late 1980s. Also, Mr. Bush signed into law a new Clean Air Act, a nutrition-labeling law and the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, among others.

A conservative analyst, Bruce R. Bartlett, a Treasury official at the time, recalled that Mr. Bush was so angered by a 1991 magazine report headlined “The Regulatory President” that he ordered a moratorium on all regulations. Sixteen years later, the same magazine, National Journal, ran a similar article about Mr. Bush’s son, calling George W. Bush “the biggest regulator since the Nixon-Ford years.”

That record, however, mostly reflects the many new homeland-security regulations since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In other areas, President Bush has moved more aggressively than his father and President Reagan away from enforcing existing regulations, choosing to rely on the financial services industry and manufacturers, among other groups, to regulate themselves.

    Both Sides of the Aisle See More Regulation, NYT, 14.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/business/economy/14regulate.html?hp

Intervention Is Bold, but Has a Basis in History

October 14, 2008
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR

After a week of mounting chaos in financial markets around the globe, the United States took a momentous step that shifts power in the economy toward Washington and away from Wall Street.

The government’s plan to prop up banks large and small — along with recent bailouts as well as guarantees to support business loans, money markets and bank lending — represents the most sweeping government moves into the nation’s financial markets since the Great Depression, and perhaps ever, according to economists and finance experts.

The high-stakes program is intended to halt the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. If successful, it could long be studied by historians as a textbook case of the emergency role that government can play to rescue a teetering economy.

“It is profound, and it is something of a shift back to the state,” said Adam S. Posen, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “But is this a recasting of capitalism? I think what we’ll see is that the government acts as a silent partner and gets out as soon as it can.”

Indeed, they say, many questions remain. Is the government picking winners in a plan that initially seems tilted toward the nation’s largest banks? What strings are attached to the investment in matters like executive pay? Will the move presage a more forceful government hand to control financial markets or will it be a brief stint as capitalism’s protector?

The package does call for the government investments to be in three-year securities that the banks can repay at any time, when markets settle and conditions improve. “This is clearly a crisis measure in crisis times, but it’s a good thing there is a sunset provision that limits the length of the government’s investment,” said Richard Sylla, an economist and financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

The United States is acting in step with Europe, where governments often take a more interventionist stance in economies and the financial systems are in the hands of a comparatively small number of banks.

Britain took the lead last week, declaring its intention to take equity stakes in banks to steady them. In the last two days, France, Italy and Spain have announced rescue packages for their banks that include state shareholdings.

The government’s plan is an exceptional step, but not an unprecedented one.

The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal, yet the practice strays at times. Over the last century, the federal government has occasionally taken stakes in railways, coal mines and steel mills, and has even taken a controlling interest in banks when it was deemed to be in the national interest.

The corporate wards of the state typically have been returned to private hands after short, sometimes fleeting, stretches under federal stewardship.

Finance experts say that having Washington take stakes in United States banks now — like government interventions in the past — would be a promising move to address an economic emergency. The plan by the Treasury Department, they say, could supply banks with sorely needed capital and help restore confidence in financial markets.

Elsewhere, government bank-investment programs are routinely called nationalization programs. But that is not likely in the United States, where nationalization is a word to avoid, given the aversion to anything that hints of socialism.

In past times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. After the war ended, bondholders and stockholders were compensated and railways were returned to private ownership in 1920.

During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies, including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman seized 88 steel mills across the country, asserting that unyielding owners were determined to provoke an industrywide strike that would cripple the Korean War effort. That nationalization did not last long, though, because the Supreme Court ruled the move an unconstitutional abuse of presidential power.

In banking, the government took an 80 percent stake in the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust in 1984. Continental Illinois failed in part because of bad oil-patch loans in Oklahoma and Texas. As the nation’s seventh-largest bank, Continental Illinois was deemed “too big to fail” by federal regulators, who feared wider turmoil in the financial markets. In the end, the government lost an estimated $1 billion on the bad loans it bought as part of the takeover of Continental, which eventually became part of Bank of America.

The nearest precedent for the Treasury plan, finance experts say, are the investments made by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the 1930s. The agency, established in 1932, not only made loans to distressed banks, but also bought stock in 6,000 banks, at a cost of $1.3 billion, said Mr. Sylla, the N.Y.U. economist. A similar effort these days, in proportion to today’s economy, would be about $200 billion.

When the economy stabilized eventually, the government sold the stock to private investors or the banks themselves — and about broke even, Mr. Sylla estimated. The 1930s program was a good one, experts say, but the government moved too slowly to deal with the financial crisis, which precipitated and lengthened the Great Depression. The lesson of history, it seems, is for Washington to move quickly in times of economic crisis with a forceful government intervention in the marketplace. And Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has studied the Great Depression and the policy miscues in those years.

“The goal is to get the engine of capitalism going as productively as possible,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School. “Ideology is a luxury good in times of crisis.”

The traditional American reluctance for government ownership is not shared in other countries. After World War II, several European countries nationalized basic industries like coal, steel and even autos, which typically remained in government hands until the 1980s, when most Western economies began paring back the state’s role in the economy.

Europe remains far more comfortable with government having a strong hand in business. So when Sweden, for example, faced a financial crisis in the early 1990s, the nationalization of much of the banking industry was welcomed. The Swedish government quickly bought stakes in banks, and sold most of them off later — a model of swift, forceful intervention in a credit crisis, financial experts say.

“In Europe, the concept of the social contract is much more social — that is, socialist — than we’ve been comfortable with in America,” said Robert F. Bruner, a finance expert at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

“The obvious danger with anything that really starts to look like the government taking ownership or control of a significant piece of an industry is, Where do you stop?” Mr. Bruner said. “The auto industry is in dire straits and the airline industry is in trouble, for example.”

“But the spillover effects from the crisis in the financial system are so great, pulling down the rest of the economy in a way that no other industry can, so that the potential cost of not doing something like this is immense,” Mr. Bruner said.

    Intervention Is Bold, but Has a Basis in History, NYT, 14.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/business/economy/14nationalize.html

Krugman Wins Economics Nobel

October 14, 2008
The New York Times
By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday.

“It’s been an extremely weird day, but weird in a positive way,” Mr. Krugman said in an interview on his way to a Washington meeting for the Group of 30, an international body from the public and private sectors that discusses international economics. He said he was mostly “preoccupied with the hassles” of trying to make all his scheduled meetings on Monday and answer a constantly ringing cellphone.

Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.”

He has developed models that explain observed patterns of trade between countries, as well as what goods are produced where and why. Traditional trade theory assumes that countries are different and will exchange different kinds of goods; Mr. Krugman’s theories have explained why worldwide trade is dominated by a few countries that are similar to each other, and why some countries might import the same kinds of goods that it exports.

“There was something very beautiful about the old existing trade theory and its ability to capture the world in a surprisingly simple conceptual framework,” Mr. Krugman said. “And then I realized that some of the new insights coming through in industrial organization could be applied to international trade.”

Mr. Krugman wrote his dissertation, however, on international finance, and credits his professor at M.I.T., Rudiger Dornbusch, with pushing him to study international trade.

“I went to visit him one snowy day in early 1978 and described to him what I’d been thinking about,” Mr. Krugman said. “He turned to me and said, ‘You’ve got to write about that.’ ”

Mr. Krugman has been an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times since 1999.

“For economists, this is a validation but not news. We know what each other have been up to,” Mr. Krugman said. “For readers of the column, maybe they will read a little more carefully when I’m being economistic, or maybe have a little more tolerance when I’m being boring.”

He said that he did not expect his critics to let him off any more easily because of his new accolade, though.

“I think we’ve learned this when we see Joe Stiglitz writing,” Mr. Krugman said, referring to the winner of the economics Nobel in 2001. “I haven’t noticed him getting an easy time. People just say, ‘Sure, he’s a great Nobel laureate and he’s very smart, but he still doesn’t know what he’s talking about in this situation.’ I’m sure I’ll get the same thing.”

In 1991 Mr. Krugman received the John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to “that economist under 40 who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge.” He follows several Clark medal recipients who have gone on to win a Nobel, including Mr. Stiglitz.

“To be absolutely, totally honest I thought this day might come someday, but I was absolutely convinced it wasn’t going to be this day,” Mr. Krugman said. “I know people who live their lives waiting for this call, and it’s not good for the soul. So I put it out of my mind and stopped thinking about it.”

He said he did not participate in any of the economics Nobel betting pools , and that he did not know which day the winner’s name would be released until a colleague told him last week.

Mr. Krugman continues to teach at Princeton. This semester he is teaching a small graduate-level course on international monetary policy and theory, covering such timely subjects as international liquidity crises. In recent years he has also taught courses on the welfare state and international trade, as well as all-freshman seminars on various economic topics.

Monday’s award, the last of the six prizes, is not one of the original Nobels. It was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel’s memory. Mr. Krugman was the sole winner of the award this year, which includes a prize of about $1.4 million.

    Krugman Wins Economics Nobel, NYT, 14.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/business/economy/14econ.html

A Power That May Not Stay So Super

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

AT the turn of the 20th century, toward the end of a brutal and surprisingly difficult victory in the Second Boer War, the people of Britain began to contemplate the possibility that theirs was a nation in decline. They worried that London’s big financial sector was draining resources from the industrial economy and wondered whether Britain’s schools were inadequate. In 1905, a new book — a fictional history, set in the year 2005 — appeared under the title, “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire.”

The crisis of confidence led to a sharp political reaction. In the 1906 election, the Liberals ousted the Conservatives in a landslide and ushered in an era of reform. But it did not stave off a slide from economic or political prominence. Within four decades, a much larger country, across an ocean to the west, would clearly supplant Britain as the world’s dominant power.

The United States of today and Britain of 1905 are certainly more different than they are similar. Yet the financial shocks of the past several weeks — coming on top of an already weak economy and an unpopular war — have created their own crisis of national confidence.

On Friday, as the stock market finished one of its worst weeks by falling yet again, to roughly half of its level just one year ago, the Gallup Poll reported that Americans were substantially more pessimistic about the economy than they have been in more than two decades of polling. Nearly 60 percent say the economy is in poor shape, and 90 percent say it’s still getting worse.

“One thing seems probable to me,” Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, said recently. “The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” At another time, that remark might have sounded like mere nationalist bluster. Right now, it doesn’t seem so ridiculous to ask whether 2008 will come to be seen as the first year of a distinctly non-American century.

At the heart of the troubles, both short term and long term, is debt. Debt helped create the housing bubble and has now left almost one of every six homeowners with a mortgage larger than the value of their home. Debt built up, and then laid low, modern Wall Street, where firms borrowed $30 for every $1 they owned. And in the coming years, debt will constrain the United States government, as it copes with the combined deficits created by the Bush administration’s policies, the ever-more expensive financial rescue and the biggest item of all, Medicare for the baby boomers.

In essence, households, banks and the government have already spent some of their future earnings. The current crisis marks the point at which the bills begin to get paid. Whereas Britain lumbered under the weight of imperial overreach, as the historian Niall Ferguson has written, the United States will be shackled primarily by its financial overreach.

“Given the burden of debt that has accumulated, it’s hard to see the U.S. economy growing as fast as it did over the past few decades,” Mr. Ferguson said. “There is a profound mood shift occurring.”

But he added two caveats. The political language of both presidential campaigns makes clear that many voters, for all the current pessimism, still believe in the idea of American pre-eminence. So, apparently, do many of the world’s investors.

In recent weeks, the dollar has held its own. Stocks in every other major country are down about as much over the last year as they are in the United States, if not much more. America may not be a safe haven anymore, but it does seem to be safer haven.

Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, said that he was recently speaking to a senior Chinese economist, who said that people in his home country — today’s rising economic power — don’t see the sky falling on the American economy. “They know its ability to turn around problems is really unmatched, historically,” Mr. Zoellick said, quoting the economist about the United States. “At the same time, they ask themselves, Will the United States get at some of the root causes that could determine its real strength over the next 10 or 20 or 30 years?”

This is not the first time in recent history that the economic position of the United States has appeared precarious. At various points between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, Europe and Japan each looked like the next great power. Neither turned out to be.

Japan suffered through its own burst bubble and spent years denying the depth of its problems. Europe proved unable to create engines of growth that could match the software, biotechnology or entertainment industries in the United States.

Taken to its extreme, the American preference for a faster, riskier capitalism led directly to the current crisis. But that preference also helps explain why America is weathering the crisis at least as well as other countries.

Compared with many banks elsewhere, American banks uncovered their problems fairly quickly. Consider the case of Mr. Steinbrück, the German finance minister. Only two weeks ago, around the time that he was predicting the end of American financial dominance, he rejected calls for a Europe-wide bailout. The crisis, he said, was largely American. Last Sunday, Mr. Steinbrück and Chancellor Angela Merkel had to go before television cameras to assure Germans that their government was guaranteeing their savings.

(On Friday, Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, seemed to deliver a message to the Germans in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal: “The days of finger pointing and schadenfreude are over.”)

Policy makers in this country have also seemed behind the curve for much of the last year. On Friday, only a week after Ben S. Bernanke, the current Fed chairman, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, dismissed the idea as unwise, Mr. Paulson said the government would buy stock in financial firms. The British government announced a similar plan on Tuesday.

On the whole, though, American officials have been more aggressive than their overseas counterparts, and that has served as a reminder of the American economy’s durable flexibility.

It is possible, then, that the main legacy of the crisis will be some form of corrective to the country’s recent excesses. The economy looks to be heading into a period of more regulated, but still American-style, capitalism, more along the lines of how it operated in the 1950s, 1960s and 1990s. Those three decades happen to have produced the biggest and most widely shared economic gains since World War II.

But if that outcome is possible, it’s not inevitable, and many economists say it isn’t even likely. The debts run up in recent years are particularly unfortunate, because they stole resources from the future without laying the groundwork for future growth. “If you told me we were spending like crazy to build schools and send everyone to college, that would have infinitely different implications than borrowing like crazy to finance current consumption,” said Christina Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Schools, roads, airports and the medical system, as well as the country’s energy policy, all appear to need significant fixing, and yet there will be less money to fix them than there was 5 or 10 years ago. With the coming explosion in Medicare costs, the federal budget deficit could eventually get so large that foreign investors would get spooked. They might then decide that other economies were safer bets and shift more of their lending there. Were that to happen, and the United States struggled to attract financing, the country would face a whole new crisis.

As it is, the Chinese economy has grown so quickly in recent years that it could overtake the American economy as the world’s largest by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. Just three years ago, Goldman predicted that China was unlikely to become No. 1 until at least 2040.

Some of this catch-up is inevitable. As in the British Empire’s day, poorer countries are able to attract investment thanks to their low wages and also copy the successes of their richer rivals, notes Benjamin Polak, an economic historian at Yale. China still seems considerably less advanced, relative to its rivals, than the United States was in 1905. China remains a politically insecure, deeply unequal country.

But it is indeed making enormous progress, and that progress has consequences. Economic might translates quite directly into political and military might.

Will that prospect be enough to galvanize a serious response to the long-term economic problems in the United States? Or are there still more crises to come?

“The political system does not deal well with gradual, long-term problems,” Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said. “It deals with crises, often imperfectly, but it does deal with them. The current experience makes the case.”

    A Power That May Not Stay So Super, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/weekinreview/12leonhardt.html

Across the Country,

Fear About Savings, the Job Market and Retirement

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By LAURA M. HOLSON

A year ago, Robert Paynter was comfortably retired and looking forward to years of refurbishing old cars and boating from his dock on Lake Norman in North Carolina. Over a 17-year career at Wachovia, he amassed a pile of stock and options from the bank that he had assumed would be worth more than $600,000.

But now the options are worthless, and he watched the value of his Wachovia shares shrink to about $15,000 before he sold all of them this week after the bank succumbed to the financial crisis and its stock fell to fire-sale prices. The rest of his investments are in free fall.

“It’s like having an out-of-body experience,” said Mr. Paynter, 61. “It’s like being in a hospital bed and watching yourself dying. Whatever the bottom is going to be, I wish it would just get there. It’s the every day, watching the blood drain out of it, that’s hard to take.”

To be sure, he has enough savings to not worry about missing any meals. But Mr. Paynter is resetting his plans for retirement, and has already canceled a trip with friends to Europe next year. “Today I’m O.K.,” he said. “But a year ago I felt like I was in great shape.”

Across the country, Americans are tallying their many losses from the relentless rout in the markets. Financial message boards on the Internet are filled with confessions of fear — about hits to savings, job security and scuttled retirement plans.

“My plan was to never work again,” wrote one person who posted a comment on Bogleheads.org, a Web site for investors who follow the long-term investing advice of John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard funds. “But somebody called me yesterday to see if I was interested in a job, and I am thinking maybe I will go back to work.”

It is not just the declines in savings that people are feeling, reflected in the shrinking balances on quarterly banking statements now arriving in mailboxes.

Based on interviews around the country last week as the market continued its steep slide, many people say they are sensing losses beyond the short-term hits to their portfolios. Some feel a loss of faith in the United States and its government. Others are lowering their sights for the kinds of lives they expect to lead in coming years.

“Maybe we have to readjust our expectations,” said Nicholas Gaffney, a partner in a San Francisco public relations firm. “No one is entitled to anything.”

Mr. Gaffney describes himself as a buy-and-hold investor, and he has been sensing good opportunities of late. He has plowed more than $10,000 into his funds. The value of his portfolio, now at several hundred thousand dollars, has dropped more than a quarter.

He confesses he has been fighting with himself over how closely he should follow the market’s gyrations. One day, he checked the market on his Treo cellphone about 200 times. “I thought to myself, ‘What am I doing?’ ” he said. “I had to stop because I was driving myself crazy. I think everything is going to be fine if people don’t panic.”

That is wishful thinking at this point. Investors have withdrawn more than $81 billion from stock mutual funds since the beginning of the year, with nearly 40 percent of that coming in the last six weeks, according to AMG Data Services, an industry research firm.

Not everyone is panicking, of course. Some are able to see the big picture or find ways to distance themselves from the crush of news about the market.

“Maybe a shrink would have a field day with me,” said Beth Sparks, 40, a self-employed lawyer in Colorado Springs. “But I have an ability to not think about it.”

A week ago, Ms. Sparks reviewed her investments for the first time since January. All are down roughly 30 percent. But Ms. Sparks said she was not concerned because she and her husband did not have a lot of debt. When her husband inherited $50,000 last year, they used it to pay off their mortgage. Vacations typically mean drives to Arizona to spend time with her parents. “I’m just happy me and my family are healthy,” she said.

Peter Schade, 49, who runs his own ad design firm in Farmington Hills, Mich., said each day of bad news was a blow to the idea that he would ever be able to retire.

“I’ve kind of resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to be working for the rest of my life,” he said.

For the last few weeks, Mr. Schade said, he has been closely monitoring the news on the CNN satellite radio network in his car. “I just feel numb,” he said. “The news is changing every half hour.”

Mr. Schade said he and others in the Detroit area were accustomed to weathering downturns in the economy.

“It doesn’t make it any easier, but we’ve sort of fortified ourselves,” he said. In many ways, he said, the rest of the county is just now starting to feel what Detroit has been going through for years, giving people here a head start in coping. “Detroit was the canary in the mine for this. We started this at least three years ago.”

Tom Drooger, 56, of Grand Haven, Mich., is president of a chapter of BetterInvesting, an investment club affiliated with the National Association of Investors Corporation.

Usually, Mr. Drooger is the type to study stocks closely and track the market’s movement throughout the day. By Friday, he was no longer even paying attention. He has decided to stop watching the market news on CNBC for now and instead puts on easy-listening music.

“There’s nothing you can do about it after a while,” he said.

He compared the financial crisis to a house on fire and said he was merely waiting until the flames die down.

“Once the fire’s out, you go in and do the repairs,” he explained. “To start to try to move things around until the market wrings itself out is pointless. I’m just sitting on the sidelines, leaving everything where it’s at.”

College students are watching from the sidelines, too, since they typically are more concerned about jobs at this stage of their lives than the nest eggs.

Matthew Ehrlich, 23, a second-year law student at Wayne State University in Detroit, is worried about whether the economy will improve before he graduates in 2010.

“If things don’t get better in the next two years, I’m going to have a real tough time,” he said. “My hope is that I can just ride it out until the financial markets get back on track.”

Mr. Ehrlich is still debating what type of law to specialize in and said this crisis might ultimately influence his decision.

“The way things are going, bankruptcy law seems to be pretty hot,” he said.

Beyond the personal toll to their savings, some people said they were concerned about what the financial crisis said about the United States.

“All I can tell you is it is a lack of faith in America,” said Pat Emard, 65, of Aptos, Calif., who now worries she may have to go back to work. “People have lost faith in our government. I don’t know what happens now.”

That sense of uncertainty is also troubling to Renee Snow, 73, a retired teacher who taught in the Chicago public schools for 38 years.

Born during the Depression, Ms. Snow said it was in her DNA to save, save, save. Over her career as a teacher, she did just that, and Ms. Snow, now a widow, lives off her teachers’ pension and income from her tax-exempt savings plan. She says she has always put her money in insured products when she could.

“I never watch the stock market, and now I’m watching it every day,” she said.

She has money socked away in savings accounts in different banks but recently began researching whether her banks were solid.

The economy is a frequent topic of conversation among friends at the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, an organization in Chicago where she volunteers as a board member.

Over the last couple of weeks, a general malaise has taken over, Ms. Snow said. “It’s very hard to have much faith in what the government is doing when they change it every day,” she said. “As you read more and more about how we got into this situation, you have less and less faith of how we’re going to get out of it.”

She has an ominous feeling about the future, she said. “You don’t go through life thinking the bank I do business with could go belly up tomorrow,” she said. “This is a new feeling people are living with.”
 

Nick Bunkley and Crystal Yednak contributed reporting.

    Across the Country, Fear About Savings, the Job Market and Retirement, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/economy/12voices.html

Bailout Plan Wins Approval; Democrats Vow Tighter Rules

October 4, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — After the House reversed course and gave final approval to the $700 billion economic bailout package, President Bush quickly signed it into law on Friday, authorizing the Treasury to undertake what could become the most expensive government intervention in history.

But even as Mr. Bush declared that the measure would “help prevent the crisis on Wall Street from becoming a crisis in communities across our country,” Congressional Democrats said that it was only a first step and pledged to carry out a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system.

The final tally in the House was 263 to 171, with 91 Republicans joining 172 Democrats in favor. That was a wider bipartisan majority than vote-counters in both parties had expected, completing a remarkable turnabout from Monday, when the House defeated an earlier version of the bill by 228 to 205.

The financial markets, however, were not enthusiastic. Already weighed down by another round of bleak economic data, including a report showing that 159,000 jobs were lost in September, the Dow fell 157 points to close at 10,325, or nearly 818 points lower than when the week began, before the House’s initial rejection of the bailout.

Some measures of the credit markets improved after the bill was approved, but only modestly. Analysts said it was too soon to tell whether borrowing rates — the interest rates banks charge each other for loans, and a key indicator of the flow of credit — would fall.

The change in course by the House was prompted by fears of a global economic meltdown, and by old-fashioned political inducements added by the Senate: a portfolio of $150 billion in popular tax provisions, including credits for the production of solar, wind and other renewable energy, and an adjustment to spare middle-class families from paying the alternative minimum tax.

In the end, 33 Democrats and 24 Republicans who had voted no on Monday switched sides on Friday to support the plan. Both Mr. Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, voted for the measure when the Senate approved it on Wednesday, and both hailed Friday’s outcome.

Mr. McCain said that lawmakers had acted “in the best interests of the nation,” while Mr. Obama warned that “a long and difficult road to recovery” might still lie ahead.

In a sign of the urgency surrounding the economic rescue effort, Congressional staff rushed the newly printed legislation into a news conference where Democratic leaders gathered after the vote. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, signed it at 2 p.m., and it was sent to the White House for Mr. Bush’s signature.

Appearing in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush praised Congress for acting just two weeks after the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., requested the emergency bailout legislation with a warning that the American economy was at risk of the worst economic collapse since the Depression.

“We have shown the world that the United States will stabilize our financial markets and maintain a leading role in the global economy,” Mr. Bush said.

But it was a hollow victory for the administration, which after long favoring a hands-off approach toward the financial industry has found itself interceding repeatedly this year to avert one calamity after another.

Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats, who expect to widen their majority in Congress in the November elections, said they intended to tighten controls.

“High-fliers on Wall Street will no longer be able to jeopardize that personal economic security of Americans,” Ms. Pelosi said, “because of the bright light of scrutiny, accountability and the attention given under regulatory reform.”

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said: “We will be back next year to do some serious surgery on the financial structure.”

The Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, had urged his colleagues to vote yes. “We know if we do nothing this crisis is likely to worsen and put us in an economic slump the likes of which we have never seen,” he said. “I am going to vote for this bill because I think it’s in the best interests of the American people.”

Opponents of the bailout called it a costly Band-Aid that did not address the core problems in the financial system. “Some things have changed in this bill but taxpayers will still be picking up the tab for Wall Street’s party,” said Representative Marilyn Musgrave, Republican of Colorado. “I am voting against this today because it’s not the best bill. It’s the quickest bill. Taxpayers for generations will pay for our haste and there is no guarantee that they will ever see the benefits.”

Among House Democrats as well as Republicans, many lawmakers facing the toughest challenges for re-election remained in the no column. Those with easier races were more likely to switch.

Many said they agonized over the decision amid a torrent of calls from constituents. Several who switched to yes cited a provision added by the Senate increasing the amount of savings insured by the Federal government to $250,000 per account, from $100,000.

Fears about the economy also motivated support. “Nobody in East Tennessee hates the fact more than me that I am going to vote yes today after voting no on Monday,” Representative Zach Wamp, a Republican, said.

“Monday I cast a blue-collar vote for the American people,” he continued. “Today I am going to cast a red, white and blue-collar vote with my hand over my heart for this country, because things are really bad and we don’t have any choice.”

Several Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus said they were persuaded to support the bill by Mr. Obama.

Representatives Elijah E. Cummings and Donna F. Edwards, both of Maryland, said they had each spoken to Mr. Obama who helped persuade them to support the bill, in part by assuring them that he would work to achieve a goal that Democrats gave up during negotiations: a change in bankruptcy laws to let judges modify first mortgages.

Mr. Obama, speaking in Abington, Pa., said he had urged lawmakers from both parties to “not make the same mistake twice.” But he warned that passage of the measure should be just “the beginning of a long-term rescue plan for our middle class.”

Mr. McCain, speaking in Flagstaff, Ariz., warned that the bill was not perfect and there was more to be done. “It is an outrage that it’s even necessary,” Mr. McCain said. “But we must stop the damage to our economy done by corrupt and incompetent practices on Wall Street and in Washington.” Mr. McCain said he spoke to House Republicans before Friday’s vote and urged them to approve the bill.

Friday’s vote capped an extraordinary two-week final stretch for the 110th Congress. Lawmakers, eager to get home for the fall campaign season, had intended to wrap up by adopting a budget bill to finance government operations through early March.

Instead, after dealing with the budget, they found themselves still in Washington, just five weeks before Election Day, facing the most important vote of the year — the most important vote of their lives, many lawmakers said — and under extreme pressure by the White House, the presidential nominees, and Congressional leaders of both parties to make a quick decision.

Supporters said the bailout was needed to prevent economic collapse; opponents said it was hasty, ill conceived and risked too much taxpayer money to help Wall Street tycoons, while providing no guarantees of success. The rescue plan allows the Treasury to buy troubled securities from financial firms in an effort to ease a deepening credit crisis that is choking off business and consumer loans, the lifeblood of the economy, and contributing to a string of bank failures.

Officials say the final cost of the bailout will be far less than $700 billion because the government will resell the assets that it buys.

The final agreement disburses the money in parts, with Congress able to block the second $350 billion. It also provides for tighter oversight of the program by two boards, and requires the government to do more to prevent home foreclosures. Lawmakers also included efforts to restrict so-called golden parachute retirement plans for some executives whose firms seek help, and a provision allowing the government to recoup any losses after five years by assessing the financial industry.

Reporting was contributed by Robert Pear and Carl Hulse in Washington;

Steven Lee Myers in Abington, Pa.; and Michael Cooper in Flagstaff, Ariz.

    Bailout Plan Wins Approval; Democrats Vow Tighter Rules, NYT, 4.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/business/economy/04bailout.html

Op-Ed Contributor

This Economy Does Not Compute

October 1, 2008
The New York Times
By MARK BUCHANAN

Notre-Dame-de-Courson, France

A FEW weeks ago, it seemed the financial crisis wouldn’t spin completely out of control. The government knew what it was doing — at least the economic experts were saying so — and the Treasury had taken a stand against saving failing firms, letting Lehman Brothers file for bankruptcy. But since then we’ve had the rescue of the insurance giant A.I.G., the arranged sale of failing banks and we’ll soon see, in one form or another, the biggest taxpayer bailout of Wall Street in history. It seems clear that no one really knows what is coming next. Why?

Well, part of the reason is that economists still try to understand markets by using ideas from traditional economics, especially so-called equilibrium theory. This theory views markets as reflecting a balance of forces, and says that market values change only in response to new information — the sudden revelation of problems about a company, for example, or a real change in the housing supply. Markets are otherwise supposed to have no real internal dynamics of their own. Too bad for the theory, things don’t seem to work that way.

Nearly two decades ago, a classic economic study found that of the 50 largest single-day price movements since World War II, most happened on days when there was no significant news, and that news in general seemed to account for only about a third of the overall variance in stock returns. A recent study by some physicists found much the same thing — financial news lacked any clear link with the larger movements of stock values.

Certainly, markets have internal dynamics. They’re self-propelling systems driven in large part by what investors believe other investors believe; participants trade on rumors and gossip, on fears and expectations, and traders speak for good reason of the market’s optimism or pessimism. It’s these internal dynamics that make it possible for billions to evaporate from portfolios in a few short months just because people suddenly begin remembering that housing values do not always go up.

Really understanding what’s going on means going beyond equilibrium thinking and getting some insight into the underlying ecology of beliefs and expectations, perceptions and misperceptions, that drive market swings.

Surprisingly, very few economists have actually tried to do this, although that’s now changing — if slowly — through the efforts of pioneers who are building computer models able to mimic market dynamics by simulating their workings from the bottom up.

The idea is to populate virtual markets with artificially intelligent agents who trade and interact and compete with one another much like real people. These “agent based” models do not simply proclaim the truth of market equilibrium, as the standard theory complacently does, but let market behavior emerge naturally from the actions of the interacting participants, which may include individuals, banks, hedge funds and other players, even regulators. What comes out may be a quiet equilibrium, or it may be something else.

For example, an agent model being developed by the Yale economist John Geanakoplos, along with two physicists, Doyne Farmer and Stephan Thurner, looks at how the level of credit in a market can influence its overall stability.

Obviously, credit can be a good thing as it aids all kinds of creative economic activity, from building houses to starting businesses. But too much easy credit can be dangerous.

In the model, market participants, especially hedge funds, do what they do in real life — seeking profits by aiming for ever higher leverage, borrowing money to amplify the potential gains from their investments. More leverage tends to tie market actors into tight chains of financial interdependence, and the simulations show how this effect can push the market toward instability by making it more likely that trouble in one place — the failure of one investor to cover a position — will spread more easily elsewhere.

That’s not really surprising, of course. But the model also shows something that is not at all obvious. The instability doesn’t grow in the market gradually, but arrives suddenly. Beyond a certain threshold the virtual market abruptly loses its stability in a “phase transition” akin to the way ice abruptly melts into liquid water. Beyond this point, collective financial meltdown becomes effectively certain. This is the kind of possibility that equilibrium thinking cannot even entertain.

It’s important to stress that this work remains speculative. Yet it is not meant to be realistic in full detail, only to illustrate in a simple setting the kinds of things that may indeed affect real markets. It suggests that the narrative stories we tell in the aftermath of every crisis, about how it started and spread, and about who’s to blame, may lead us to miss the deeper cause entirely.

Financial crises may emerge naturally from the very makeup of markets, as competition between investment enterprises sets up a race for higher leverage, driving markets toward a precipice that we cannot recognize even as we approach it. The model offers a potential explanation of why we have another crisis narrative every few years, with only the names and details changed. And why we’re not likely to avoid future crises with a little fiddling of the regulations, but only by exerting broader control over the leverage that we allow to develop.

Another example is a model explored by the German economist Frank Westerhoff. A contentious idea in economics is that levying very small taxes on transactions in foreign exchange markets, might help to reduce market volatility. (Such volatility has proved disastrous to countries dependent on foreign investment, as huge volumes of outside investment can flow out almost overnight.) A tax of 0.1 percent of the transaction volume, for example, would deter rapid-fire speculation, while preserving currency exchange linked more directly to productive economic purposes.

Economists have argued over this idea for decades, the debate usually driven by ideology. In contrast, Professor Westerhoff and colleagues have used agent models to build realistic markets on which they impose taxes of various kinds to see what happens.

So far they’ve found tentative evidence that a transaction tax may stabilize currency markets, but also that the outcome has a surprising sensitivity to seemingly small details of market mechanics — on precisely how, for example, the market matches buyers and sellers. The model is helping to bring some solid evidence to a debate of extreme importance.

A third example is a model developed by Charles Macal and colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and aimed at providing a realistic simulation of the interacting entities in that state’s electricity market, as well as the electrical power grid. They were hired by Illinois several years ago to use the model in helping the state plan electricity deregulation, and the model simulations were instrumental in exposing several loopholes in early market designs that companies could have exploited to manipulate prices.

Similar models of deregulated electricity markets are being developed by a handful of researchers around the world, who see them as the only way of reckoning intelligently with the design of extremely complex deregulated electricity markets, where faith in the reliability of equilibrium reasoning has already led to several disasters, in California, notoriously, and more recently in Texas.

Sadly, the academic economics profession remains reluctant to embrace this new computational approach (and stubbornly wedded to the traditional equilibrium picture). This seems decidedly peculiar given that every other branch of science from physics to molecular biology has embraced computational modeling as an invaluable tool for gaining insight into complex systems of many interacting parts, where the links between causes and effect can be tortuously convoluted.

Something of the attitude of economic traditionalists spilled out a number of years ago at a conference where economists and physicists met to discuss new approaches to economics. As one physicist who was there tells me, a prominent economist objected that the use of computational models amounted to “cheating” or “peeping behind the curtain,” and that respectable economics, by contrast, had to be pursued through the proof of infallible mathematical theorems.

If we’re really going to avoid crises, we’re going to need something more imaginative, starting with a more open-minded attitude to how science can help us understand how markets really work. Done properly, computer simulation represents a kind of “telescope for the mind,” multiplying human powers of analysis and insight just as a telescope does our powers of vision. With simulations, we can discover relationships that the unaided human mind, or even the human mind aided with the best mathematical analysis, would never grasp.

Better market models alone will not prevent crises, but they may give regulators better ways for assessing market dynamics, and more important, techniques for detecting early signs of trouble. Economic tradition, of all things, shouldn’t be allowed to inhibit economic progress.
 

Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, is the author, most recently,

of “The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught

and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You.”

    This Economy Does Not Compute, NYT, 1.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01buchanan.html

Hedge Funds Are Bracing for Investors to Cash Out

September 29, 2008
The New York Times
By LOUISE STORY

First, the money rushed into hedge funds. Now, some fear, it could rush out.

Even as Washington reached a tentative agreement on Sunday over what may become the largest financial bailout in American history, new worries were building inside the nearly $2 trillion world of hedge funds. After years of explosive growth, losses are mounting — and so are concerns that some investors will head for the exits.

No one expects a wholesale flight from hedge funds. But even a modest outflow could reverberate through the financial markets. To pay back investors, some funds may be forced to dump investments at a time when the markets are already shaky.

The big worry is that a spate of hurried sales could unleash a vicious circle within the hedge fund industry, with the sales leading to more losses, and those losses leading to more withdrawals, and so on. A big test will come on Tuesday, when many funds are scheduled to accept withdrawal requests for the end of the year.

“Everybody’s watching for redemptions,” said James McKee, director of hedge fund research at Callan Associates, a consulting firm in San Francisco. “And there could be a cascading effect, where redemptions cause other redemptions.”

What happens at hedge funds, those loosely regulated private investment vehicles, matters to just about every investor in America. Hedge funds are not just for the rich anymore. Since 2002, the industry has roughly tripled in size, as pension funds, endowments and foundations piled in, hoping for market-beating returns.

Now, the heady returns of the industry’s glory days are over, at least for now. This is shaping up to be the industry’s worst year on record, with the average fund down nearly 10 percent so far, according to Hedge Fund Research. Famous traders like Steven A. Cohen, who runs SAC Capital Advisors, are losing money, and even Kenneth C. Griffin, the head of Citadel Investment Group, is down in one of his funds.

And they are the lucky ones. A growing number of hedge funds are closing down. About 350 were liquidated in the first half of the year. While hedge funds come and go all the time, if the trend continues, the number of closures would be up 24 percent this year from 2007.

Many funds are bracing for trouble. The industry has set aside $600 billion in cash, according to Citigroup analysts, partly because of the uncertainty hanging over the markets but also because of possible redemptions. If redemptions do pour in, hedge funds can freeze the process by not paying investors for a certain period of time, slowing the pace of withdrawals.

One little-known hedge fund barometer is pointing to trouble, however. The alphabet soup of complex investments that Wall Street created in recent years — R.M.B.S.’s, C.D.O.’s and the like — includes C.F.O.’s, short for collateralized fund obligations. Virtually unknown outside the industry, these investments are the hedge fund equivalent of mortgage-backed securities: securities backed by hedge funds.

But last week, credit ratings agencies warned that they might lower the ratings of several C.F.O.’s, in part because of the concern that investors would withdraw money from the funds backing the investments. Standard & Poor’s downgraded parts of nine C.F.O. deals, Fitch placed five on a negative rating watch, and Moody’s put one on a downgrade review.

“The concern is over the redemptions that are happening,” said Jenny Story, an analyst with Fitch Ratings. “The gates are being closed.”

While few in number, C.F.O.’s represent a broad swath of the industry. The vehicles were created by funds of funds, which invest in hedge funds. Each C.F.O. includes stakes in dozens and sometimes hundreds of hedge funds with a variety of investment strategies.

Coast Asset Management, a $5.6 billion fund of funds in Santa Monica, Calif., created three C.F.O.’s in the last few years. The three vehicles raised a total of $1.85 billion, according to Dealogic, and they have a seven-year lock-up on the money. It was that lock-up that appealed to David E. Smith, the firm’s chief executive, who ran into trouble borrowing in 1998, after the collapse of the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management.

Coast executives said they were not particularly concerned about the C.F.O.’s, because they had not seen many hedge funds putting limits on redemptions, or “closing the gates,” as the industry calls it.

“It’s clearly been a very tough year for investors in general,” Mr. Smith said. “But I think hedge funds have done a good job of navigating very tough markets and don’t get the type of recognition that they should.”

Two of the C.F.O.’s put on watch or downgraded by the ratings agencies are run by two units of the British hedge fund Man Group. One is run by Glenwood Capital in Chicago, which saw its multi-strategy fund lose more than 4 percent through July, according to an investor. A spokesman for the funds declined to comment.

Returns are not in yet for September, but hedge fund managers say this month is even worse than the summer. Some funds were hurt by new rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission on short-selling, a tactic for betting against stock prices. The commission made it more difficult to short all stocks and temporarily banned the strategy in more than 800 financial stocks. In particular, this hurt convertible-bond managers, who often buy bonds that can be converted into shares and short the underlying stocks.

The short-selling ban lasts until Thursday evening, but it is widely expected to be extended.

John P. Rigas, the chief executive of Sciens Capital Management, knows firsthand how difficult it can be to get money out of troubled hedge funds. He spotted problems at Amaranth Advisors a year before that fund collapsed because of wrong-way bets in the energy markets, but it took him eight months to retrieve all of his fund of funds’ investment. Mr. Rigas’ firm runs a C.F.O. that is invested in 41 hedge funds, but he said he had put more than 25 percent of his funds’ capital into cash to weather the storm.

He predicts further liquidations in the industry.

“How can I say that the environment is not bad?” Mr. Rigas said. “It’s difficult with hedge funds because they are very fragile. By their nature they’re fragile instruments because investors can ask for their money.”

    Hedge Funds Are Bracing for Investors to Cash Out, NYT, 29.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/business/29hedge.html

Treasury Would Emerge With Vast New Power

September 29, 2008
The New York Times
By FLOYD NORRIS

During its weeklong deliberations, Congress made many changes to the Bush administration’s original proposal to bail out the financial industry, but one overarching aspect of the initial plan that remains is the vast discretion it gives to the Treasury secretary.

The draft legislation, which will be put to a House vote on Monday, gives Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and his successor extraordinary power to decide how the $700 billion bailout fund is spent. For example, if he thinks it wise, he may buy not only mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, but any other financial instrument.

To be sure, the Treasury secretary’s powers have been tempered since the original Bush administration proposal, which would have given Mr. Paulson nearly unfettered control over the program. There are now two separate oversight panels involved, one composed of legislators and the other including regulatory and administration officials.

Still, Mr. Paulson can choose to buy from any financial institution that does business in the United States, or from pension funds, with wide discretion over what he will buy and how much he will pay. Under most circumstances, banks owned by foreign governments are not eligible for the money, but under some conditions, the secretary can choose to bail out foreign central banks.

Under the bill, the Treasury is to buy the securities at prices he deems appropriate. Mr. Paulson may set prices through auctions but is not required to do so.

Rarely if ever has one man had such broad authority to spend government money as he sees fit, with no rules requiring him to seek out the lowest possible price for assets being purchased.

The secretary is supposed to do what he can to maximize the profit or minimize the eventual loss to the federal government as a result of its purchase of mortgages and other financial instruments. But in the case of mortgages controlled by the government, he is required to approve “reasonable requests for loss mitigation measures, including term extensions, rate reductions, principal write-downs” and other possible changes. Such requests could help homeowners at the expense of the government.

Congress forced the Bush administration to agree to a provision requiring financial institutions that sell securities to the program to give an equity or debt stake to the government. But Mr. Paulson will have wide latitude in deciding how large a stake is needed. His discretion in setting those limits could have a major impact on how many institutions choose to participate.

The limits on executive pay in the bill, also added in response to pressure from legislators, appear unlikely to be used very often. The secretary could take such steps if he bought substantial assets “from an individual financial institution where no bidding process or market prices are available.”

Presumably, if there is some kind of bidding process, those limitations, over which the secretary also has considerable discretion, will not apply. However, institutions that receive $300 million or more from the program would face limitations on executive pay.

One of the most important decisions the secretary will make is the price the government pays for securities. Here again, there is wide discretion. He is directed to “make such purchases at the lowest price” that is “consistent with the purposes of this act.”

Those purposes, however, are expansive and leave him room to pay well over the lowest price available if he wishes to do so. The act is designed to “restore liquidity and stability to the financial system of the United States” and protect homeownership, home values and economic growth. If he concludes that a higher price is needed to provide stability in the financial markets, that is evidently acceptable.

When the Bush administration submitted its original proposal, there was an uproar over the lack of oversight of the secretary’s actions. This bill requires frequent reports to Congressional committees, including a Congressional oversight panel; audits by the comptroller general; and appointment of an inspector general for the program.

The bill also sets up an oversight board, which is directed to “ensure that the policies implemented” by Mr. Paulson are proper. Mr. Paulson is to be one of the five members of the board watching over his actions, joined by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Housing Secretary and the director of the Federal Home Finance Agency.

If Mr. Paulson wishes to use his authority to buy financial assets not linked to mortgages, he can do so after consulting the Fed chairman. But he does not need the approval of the Fed chairman or the oversight board.

The bill does allow legal challenges, but attempts to assure they are quickly handled and that the most important decisions can be challenged only on constitutional grounds, not on the ground that they conflict with some other law.

While the bill does not drop the accounting rule that requires banks to report on the market value of their assets — a rule that some banks believe has forced them to report excessive losses — it gives the S.E.C. permission to suspend the rule for any individual company if it thinks that is in the public’s interest. That is likely to lead to intensive lobbying of the commission.

    Treasury Would Emerge With Vast New Power, NYT, 29.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/business/29bill.html

President Issues Warning to Americans

September 25, 2008
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — President Bush appealed to the nation Wednesday night to support a $700 billion plan to avert a widespread financial meltdown, and signaled that he is willing to accept tougher controls over how the money is spent.

As Democrats and the administration negotiated details of the package late into the night, the presidential candidates of both major parties planned to meet Mr. Bush at the White House on Thursday, along with leaders of Congress. The president said he hoped the session would “speed our discussions toward a bipartisan bill.”

Mr. Bush used a prime-time address to warn Americans that “a long and painful recession” could occur if Congress does not act quickly.

“Our entire economy is in danger,” he said.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats said that progress toward a deal had come after the White House had offered two major concessions: a plan to limit pay of executives whose firms seek government assistance, and a provision that would give taxpayers an equity stake in some of the firms so that the government can profit if the companies prosper in the future. Details of those provisions, and many others, were still under discussion.

Mr. Bush’s televised address, and his extraordinary offer to bring together Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Senator John McCain, the Republican, just weeks before the election underscored a growing sense of urgency on the part of the administration that Congress must act to avert an economic collapse.

It was the first time in Mr. Bush’s presidency that he delivered a prime-time speech devoted exclusively to the economy. It came at a time when deep public unease about shaky financial markets and the demise of Wall Street icons such as Lehman Brothers has been coupled with skepticism and anger directed at a government bailout that could become the most expensive in American history.

The administration’s plan seeks to restore liquidity to the market and restore the economy by buying up distressed securities, many of them tied to mortgages, from struggling financial firms.

The address capped a fast-moving and chaotic day, in Washington, on the presidential campaign trail and on Wall Street.

On Capitol Hill, delicate negotiations between Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Congressional leaders were complicated by resistance from rank-and-file lawmakers, who were fielding torrents of complaints from constituents furious that their tax money was going to be spent to clean up a mess created by high-paid financial executives.

On Wall Street, financial markets continued to struggle. The cost of borrowing for banks, businesses and consumers shot up and investors rushed to safe havens like Treasury bills — a reminder that credit markets, which had recovered somewhat after Mr. Paulson announced the broad outlines of the bailout plan last week, remain under severe stress, with many investors still skittish.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the banking committee, said a deal could come together as early as Thursday. “Working in a bipartisan manner, we have made progress,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Representative John A. Boehner, the Republican leader, said in a joint statement.

“We agree that key changes should be made to the administration’s proposal. It must include basic good-government principles, including rigorous and independent oversight, strong executive compensation standards and protections for taxpayers.”

Mr. Bush used his speech to signal that he was willing to address lawmakers’ concerns, including fears that tax dollars will be used to pay Wall Street executives and that the plan would put too much authority in the hands of the Treasury secretary without sufficient oversight.

“Any rescue plan should also be designed to ensure that taxpayers are protected,” Mr. Bush said. “It should welcome the participation of financial institutions, large and small. It should make certain that failed executives do not receive a windfall from your tax dollars. It should establish a bipartisan board to oversee the plan’s implementation. And it should be enacted as soon as possible.”

The speech came after the White House, under pressure from Republican lawmakers, opened an aggressive effort to portray the financial rescue package as crucial not just to stabilize Wall Street but to protect the livelihoods of all Americans.

But the White House gave careful thought to the timing; aides to Mr. Bush said they did not want to appear to have the president forcing a solution on Congress.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Paulson, facing a second day of questioning by lawmakers, this time before the House Financial Services Committee, tried to focus as much on Main Street as Wall Street.

“This entire proposal is about benefiting the American people because today’s fragile financial system puts their economic well being at risk,” Mr. Paulson said. Without action, he added: “Americans’ personal savings and the ability of consumers and business to finance spending, investment and job creation are threatened.”

But it was the comments of Mr. Paulson, a former chief of Goldman Sachs, about limiting the pay of executives that signaled the biggest shift in the White House position and the urgency that the administration has placed in winning Congressional approval as quickly as possible.

“The American people are angry about executive compensation, and rightly so,” he said. “No one understands pay for failure.”

Officials said the legislation would almost certainly include a ban on so-called golden parachutes, the generous severance packages that many executives receive on their way out the door, for firms that seek government help. The measure also is likely to include a mechanism for firms to recover any bonus or incentive pay based on corporate earnings or other results that later turn out to have been overstated.

Democrats were also working to include tax provisions that would cap the amount of an executive’s salary that a company could deduct to $400,000 — the amount earned by the president.

At the same time, Congressional Democrats said they were prepared to drop one of their most contentious demands: new authority for bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of first mortgages. That provision was heavily opposed by Senate Republicans.

In addition, Democrats also are leaning toward authorizing the entire $700 billion that Mr. Paulson is seeking but disbursing a smaller amount, perhaps only $150 billion, to start the program, with future funds dependent on how well it is working.

Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the lead negotiator for Congressional Democrats, said they also planned to insert a tax break to aid community banks that have suffered steep losses on preferred stock that they own in the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That change is in addition to others that already have been accepted by Mr. Paulson that would create an independent oversight board and require the government to do more to prevent foreclosures.
 

Mark Landler and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

    President Issues Warning to Americans, NYT, 25.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/business/economy/25bush.html

Transcript

President Bush’s Speech to the Nation

on the Economic Crisis

September 24, 2008
The New York Times

Following is a transcript of President Bush's address to the nation Wednesday evening, as recorded by by CQ Transcriptions:

Good evening. This is an extraordinary period for America's economy.

Over the past few weeks, many Americans have felt anxiety about their finances and their future. I understand their worry and their frustration.

We've seen triple-digit swings in the stock market. Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse, and some have failed. As uncertainty has grown, many banks have restricted lending, credit markets have frozen, and families and businesses have found it harder to borrow money.

We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.

We boosted confidence in money market mutual funds and acted to prevent major investors from intentionally driving down stocks for their own personal gain.

Most importantly, my administration is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.

Financial assets related to home mortgages have lost value during the house decline, and the banks holding these assets have restricted credit. As a result, our entire economy is in danger.

So I propose that the federal government reduce the risk posed by these troubled assets and supply urgently needed money so banks and other financial institutions can avoid collapse and resume lending.

This rescue effort is not aimed at preserving any individual company or industry. It is aimed at preserving America's overall economy.

It will help American consumers and businesses get credit to meet their daily needs and create jobs. And it will help send a signal to markets around the world that America's financial system is back on track.

I know many Americans have questions tonight: How did we reach this point in our economy? How will the solution I propose work? And what does this mean for your financial future?

These are good questions, and they deserve clear answers.

First, how did our economy reach this point? Well, most economists agree that the problems we're witnessing today developed over a long period of time. For more than a decade, a massive amount of money flowed into the United States from investors abroad because our country is an attractive and secure place to do business.

This large influx of money to U.S. banks and financial institutions, along with low interest rates, made it easier for Americans to get credit. These developments allowed more families to borrow money for cars, and homes, and college tuition, some for the first time. They allowed more entrepreneurs to get loans to start new businesses and create jobs.

Unfortunately, there were also some serious negative consequences, particularly in the housing market. Easy credit, combined with the faulty assumption that home values would continue to rise, led to excesses and bad decisions.

Many mortgage lenders approved loans for borrowers without carefully examining their ability to pay. Many borrowers took out loans larger than they could afford, assuming that they could sell or refinance their homes at a higher price later on.

Optimism about housing values also led to a boom in home construction. Eventually, the number of new houses exceeded the number of people willing to buy them. And with supply exceeding demand, housing prices fell, and this created a problem.

BUSH: Borrowers with adjustable-rate mortgages, who had been planning to sell or refinance their homes at a higher price, were stuck with homes worth less than expected, along with mortgage payments they could not afford.

As a result, many mortgage-holders began to default. These widespread defaults had effects far beyond the housing market.

See, in today's mortgage industry, home loans are often packaged together and converted into financial products called mortgage-backed securities. These securities were sold to investors around the world.

Many investors assumed these securities were trustworthy and asked few questions about their actual value. Two of the leading purchasers of mortgage-backed securities were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.

The decline in the housing market set off a domino effect across our economy. When home values declined, borrowers defaulted on their mortgages, and investors holding mortgage-backed securities began to incur serious losses.

Before long, these securities became so unreliable that they were not being bought or sold. Investment banks, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, found themselves saddled with large amounts of assets they could not sell. They ran out of money needed to meet their immediate obligations, and they faced imminent collapse.

Other banks found themselves in severe financial trouble. These banks began holding on to their money, and lending dried up, and the gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt.

With the situation becoming more precarious by the day, I faced a choice, to step in with dramatic government action or to stand back and allow the irresponsible actions of some to undermine the financial security of all.

I'm a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention. I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business. Under normal circumstances, I would have followed this course. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence, and major sectors of America's financial system are at risk of shutting down.

The government's top economic experts warn that, without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold.

More banks could fail, including some in your community. The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet. Foreclosures would rise dramatically.

And if you own a business or a farm, you would find it harder and more expensive to get credit. More businesses would close their doors, and millions of Americans could lose their jobs.

Even if you have good credit history, it would be more difficult for you to get the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college. And, ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession.

Fellow citizens, we must not let this happen. I appreciate the work of leaders from both parties in both houses of Congress to address this problem and to make improvements to the proposal my administration sent to them.

There is a spirit of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans and between Congress and this administration. In that spirit, I've invited Senators McCain and Obama to join congressional leaders of both parties at the White House tomorrow to help speed our discussions toward a bipartisan bill.

I know that an economic rescue package will present a tough vote for many members of Congress. It is difficult to pass a bill that commits so much of the taxpayers' hard-earned money.

I also understand the frustration of responsible Americans who pay their mortgages on time, file their tax returns every April 15th, and are reluctant to pay the cost of excesses on Wall Street.

But given the situation we are facing, not passing a bill now would cost these Americans much more later.

Many Americans are asking, how would a rescue plan work? After much discussion, there's now widespread agreement on the principles such a plan would include.

It would remove the risk posed by the troubled assets, including mortgage-backed securities, now clogging the financial system. This would free banks to resume the flow of credit to American families and businesses.

Any rescue plan should also be designed to ensure that taxpayers are protected. It should welcome the participation of financial institutions, large and small. It should make certain that failed executives do not receive a windfall from your tax dollars.

BUSH: It should establish a bipartisan board to oversee the plan's implementation, and it should be enacted as soon as possible.

In close consultation with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and SEC Chairman Chris Cox, I announced a plan on Friday.

First, the plan is big enough to solve a serious problem. Under our proposal, the federal government would put up to $700 billion taxpayer dollars on the line to purchase troubled assets that are clogging the financial system.

In the short term, this will free up banks to resume the flow of credit to American families and businesses, and this will help our economy grow.

Second, as markets have lost confidence in mortgage-backed securities, their prices have dropped sharply, yet the value of many of these assets will likely be higher than their current price, because the vast majority of Americans will ultimately pay off their mortgages.

The government is the one institution with the patience and resources to buy these assets at their current low prices and hold them until markets return to normal.

And when that happens, money will flow back to the Treasury as these assets are sold, and we expect that much, if not all, of the tax dollars we invest will be paid back.

The final question is, what does this mean for your economic future? Well, the primary steps -- purpose of the steps I've outlined tonight is to safeguard the financial security of American workers, and families, and small businesses. The federal government also continues to enforce laws and regulations protecting your money.

The Treasury Department recently offered government insurance for money market mutual funds. And through the FDIC, every savings account, checking account, and certificate of deposit is insured by the federal government for up to $100,000.

The FDIC has been in existence for 75 years, and no one has ever lost a penny on an insured deposit, and this will not change.

Once this crisis is resolved, there will be time to update our financial regulatory structures. Our 21st-century global economy remains regulated largely by outdated 20th-century laws.

Recently, we've seen how one company can grow so large that its failure jeopardizes the entire financial system.

Earlier this year, Secretary Paulson proposed a blueprint that would modernize our financial regulations. For example, the Federal Reserve would be authorized to take a closer look at the operations of companies across the financial spectrum and ensure that their practices do not threaten overall financial stability.

There are other good ideas, and members of Congress should consider them. As they do, they must ensure that efforts to regulate Wall Street do not end up hampering our economy's ability to grow.

In the long run, Americans have good reason to be confident in our economic strength. Despite corrections in the marketplace and instances of abuse, democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised.

It has unleashed the talents and the productivity and entrepreneurial spirit of our citizens. It has made this country the best place in the world to invest and do business. And it gives our economy the flexibility and resilience to absorb shocks, adjust, and bounce back.

Our economy is facing a moment of great challenge, but we've overcome tough challenges before, and we will overcome this one.

I know that Americans sometimes get discouraged by the tone in Washington and the seemingly endless partisan struggles, yet history has shown that, in times of real trial, elected officials rise to the occasion.

And together we will show the world once again what kind of country America is: a nation that tackles problems head on, where leaders come together to meet great tests, and where people of every background can work hard, develop their talents, and realize their dreams.

Thank you for listening. May God bless you.

    President Bush’s Speech to the Nation on the Economic Crisis, NYT, 24.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/business/economy/24text-bush.html

Punctured

Bubblenomics

September 21, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

The past week, by any standard, has been an extraordinary one for America’s economy and its financial system. Merrill Lynch, which was founded during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, agreed to be bought for a bargain-basement price, while Lehman Brothers, which dates back to John Tyler’s presidency, simply collapsed.

By the end of the week, the federal government was preparing to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in securities that no bank wanted. It appears to be the government’s biggest fiscal intervention since the Great Depression, designed to get the financial markets working again and keep a credit freeze from sending the economy into a deep recession.

The announcement of the plan changed the mood on Wall Street and sent stocks soaring at the end of the week. But even if the economy avoids a tailspin, the next couple of years aren’t likely to feel especially good. It’s been a long period of excess, and the hangover could be long, as well. For the near future, the most likely outcome remains slow economic growth, scant income gains for most workers and, for investors, disappointing returns from stocks and real estate. If consumers begin to cut back on their debt-fueled spending things could get worse.

On Friday morning, the economists at Lehman Brothers sent out their usual weekly roundup of the news, but it came this time with a short, italicized note, explaining that the report would be the final one to appear under the Lehman banner. That bit of understatement preceded some more: “This episode of financial crisis,” Lehman’s economists explained, “appears to be much deeper and more serious than we and most observers thought it likely to be. And it is by no means clear that it is over.”

Yet, historic though this week has been, there is something familiar about what is happening. Once again, we are seeing the puncturing of a speculative bubble that was the result of asset prices soaring high above the underlying value of the assets. For as long as markets have existed, bubbles have formed. And whenever one of those bubbles begins to leak, it typically needs years to deflate, causing enormous economic damage as it does.

Only now, for instance, are the bubbles of the past decade and a half, first in the stock market and then in real estate, starting to go away. It’s easy to think of the turmoil of the past 13 months as being unconnected to the stock bubble of the 1990s, which appeared to end with the dot-com crash of 2000 and 2001. That crash brought down the overall stock market by more than a third, its worst drop since the 1970s oil crisis. Corporate spending on new equipment then plunged and employment fell for three straight years.

But dramatic though it was, the dot-com crash did not actually come close to erasing the excesses of the 1990s. Indeed, by some of the most meaningful measures, Wall Street after the crash looked a lot more like it was in a bubble than a bust.

As late as 2004, financial services firms earned 28.3 percent of corporate America’s total profits, according to Moody’s Economy.com. That was somewhat lower than it had been over the previous few years, but still almost double the financial sector’s average share of profits throughout the 1970s and ’80s. By 2007, the share had fallen only marginally, to 27.4 percent.

Meanwhile, the share of wages and salaries earned by employees of financial services firms continued to climb and reached a peak last year. Of every dollar paid to the American work force in 2008, almost 10 cents went to people working at investment banks and other finance companies, up from about 6 cents or 7 cents throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

How did this happen? For one thing, the population of the United States (and most of the industrialized world) was aging and had built up savings. This created greater need for financial services. In addition, the economic rise of Asia — and, in recent years, the increase in oil prices — gave overseas governments more money to invest. Many turned to Wall Street.

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.

“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”

Which might serve as a summary of how the current crisis came to pass. Wall Street traders began to believe that the values they had assigned to all sorts of assets were rational because, well, they had assigned them.

Traders sliced mortgages into so many little pieces that they forgot what they were really trading: contracts based on increasingly shaky loans. As the crisis has spread, other loans have started going bad as well. Hyun Song Shin, an economist at Princeton, estimates that banks have thus far absorbed only about one-third to one-half of the losses they will eventually be forced to take.

One of the few pieces of good news is that Wall Street finally seems to be coming to grips with the depth of its problems. You can see that most clearly, perhaps, in stock prices, which have at long last fallen from the stratospheric levels of the past decade.

The classic measure of whether the stock market is overvalued is the price-earnings ratio, which divides stock prices by annual corporate earnings. At the height of the bubble, in 2000, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index were trading at 36 times their average earnings over the previous five years. It was the highest valuation since at least the 1880s, according to the economist Robert Shiller.

By 2004, surprisingly enough, the ratio had dropped only to about 26, still higher than at any point since the 1930s. At the start of last year, it was still 26.

But after the market closed on Friday, the ratio was down to roughly 17, which happens to be about its post-World War II average. At least by this one measure, stocks are no longer blatantly overvalued.

This doesn’t necessarily mean they are done falling. For one thing, corporate profits could decline, particularly if households begin pulling back on spending. The unusually rapid rise of consumer spending over the past two decades is arguably the third bubble confronting the economy. It has happened thanks in part to a huge increase in debt, which may now be coming to an end, just as Wall Street’s love affair with debt appears to be ending as well.

And even if the economy does better than expected, investors may still turn pessimistic. “We tend to go through pendulum swings,” said Joel Seligman, the president of the University of Rochester, a longtime Wall Street observer. There are long periods of overexuberance, in which investors worry that they are missing the next great thing, followed by crises that make those same investors fear that the world as they know it is coming to an end.

That seemed to be the case last Wednesday, when share prices of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley plunged even though the firms were still making money. Glenn Schorr, a UBS analyst, wrote an e-mail message to clients saying, “Stop the Insanity.”

But bubbles inevitably produce insanity, both on the way up and the way down. On Friday, the formerly laissez-faire Bush administration, along with the Federal Reserve, announced that the only way to restore sanity to the markets was for the government to buy an enormous pile of mortgage-related securities. Theoretically, the government could turn a profit on the securities if they can be sold for higher prices when normal conditions return.

But few expect that outcome. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, estimated that the ultimate cost to taxpayers could be in the range of $1 trillion, or about two-and-a-half times as large as this year’s federal budget deficit.

A guiding principle of economic policy in recent years has been that nobody is smart enough to diagnose a bubble until it has already deflated. This was one of Alan Greenspan’s mantras during his tenure as the chairman of the Fed. His successor, Ben Bernanke, said much the same thing when he took office in 2006. As they saw it, no matter how high stock prices rose relative to profits, or no matter how high house prices rose relative to rents, regulators deferred to the collective wisdom of the market.

The market is usually right, after all. Even when it isn’t, Mr. Greenspan maintained, pricking a bubble before it grew too large could stifle innovation and hurt other parts of the economy. Cleaning up the aftermath of a bubble is easier and less expensive, he argued. We’re living through that cleanup now.

    Bubblenomics, NYT, 21.9.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/weekinreview/21leonhardt.html

Clive Crook: Nationalisation in all but name

Published: September 8 2008 03:00
Last updated: September 8 2008 03:00
The Financial Times
By Clive Crook


The "conservatorship" that Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, has announced for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is nationalisation by another name. Give the man some credit for this. It is not an easy thing for a Republican administration to take two such colossal undertakings on to the public sector's balance sheet two months after promising not to.

Recall that Fannie and Freddie - hybrids that are privately owned but "government sponsored" - own or guarantee more than $5,000bn (€3,500bn, £2,825bn) of mortgage-backed securities. Britain's nationalisation of Northern Rock brought some £100bn of loans on to the public sector's balance sheet, and was the biggest in the nation's history. The nationalisation of Fannie and Freddie, in a country less well disposed to public ownership, is more than 25 times bigger.

Under the new plan the Treasury will directly support the housing market by buying mortgage-backed securities. That too requires an ideological flexibility not usually associated with this administration. Two months ago Mr Paulson emphasised the importance of supporting Fannie and Freddie so that they could carry on - as they must, he said - as privately owned entities. So much for that.

It would have been possible to muddle through a while longer. Recent suggestions of new accounting issues, indicating that the agencies' capital was even thinner than supposed, helped bring the announcement forward. The continuing deterioration in their ability to borrow - let alone raise new equity - pushed the same way.

Now that it has decided to move, the Treasury cannot plausibly be attacked for trying to patch and mend. The comprehensive character of the plan contrasts favourably with the evasions and hesitations of the British government's handling of Northern Rock.

The eventual cost to taxpayers is unknown. If the housing market rallies before long, it could be in the low tens of billions of dollars. If things keep getting worse, it could be in the hundreds of billions. But Fannie and Freddie have made themselves indispensable to any housing market recovery: the cost, whatever it is, will have to be paid.

Bearing in mind the staggering scale of this intervention, yesterday's move was surprisingly uncontroversial. Both presidential campaigns back it, recognising the need to keep mortgage finance flowing. Differences are likely to arise over the terms of the nationalisation, however.

Shareholders in the entities are expected to recover almost nothing: rightly so. Both boards (not just the chief executives) should be dismissed.

The plan calls for the agencies' portfolios to be downsized from 2010, but the next administration should aim beyond that to get the government as far as possible out of the housing market. This means breaking Fannie and Freddie into pieces small enough to fail, and privatising them. If the function they discharged - that of providing liquidity to the mortgage market - cannot be profitably undertaken without an implicit public subsidy, then it should not be undertaken at all.

    Clive Crook: Nationalisation in all but name, FT, 8.9.2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4c6591be-7d3d-11dd-8d59-000077b07658.html

News Analysis

A History of Public Aid During Crises

September 7, 2008
The New York Times
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Despite decades of free-market rhetoric from Republican and Democratic lawmakers, Washington has a long history of providing financial help to the private sector when the economic or political risk of a corporate collapse appeared too high.

The effort to save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is only the latest in a series of financial maneuvers by the government that stretch back to the rescue of the military contractor Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and the Penn Central Railroad under President Richard M. Nixon, the shoring up of Chrysler in the waning days of the Carter administration and the salvage of the savings and loan system in the late 1980s.

More recently, after airplanes were grounded because of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress approved $15 billion in subsidies and loan guarantees to the faltering airlines.

Now, with the federal government preparing to save Fannie and Freddie only six months after the Federal Reserve orchestrated the rescue of Bear Stearns, it appears that the mortgage crisis has forced the government to once again shove ideology aside and get into the bailout business.

“If anybody thought we had a pure free-market financial system, they should think again,” said Robert F. Bruner, dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

The closest historical analogy to the Fannie-Freddie crisis is the rescue of the Farm Credit and savings and loan systems in the late 1980s, said Bert Ely, a banking consultant who has been a longtime critic of the mortgage finance companies.

The savings and loan bailout followed years of high interest rates and risky lending practices and ultimately cost taxpayers roughly $124 billion, with the banking industry kicking in another $30 billion, Mr. Ely said.

Even if the rescue of Fannie and Freddie ends up costing tens of billions of dollars, the savings and loan collapse is still likely to remain the costliest government bailout to date, said Lawrence J. White, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

“The S.& L. debacle cost upwards of $100 billion, and the economy is more than twice the size today than it was in the late 1980s,” he said. “I don’t think this will turn out to be as serious as that, when over 2,000 banks and thrifts failed between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.”

Most of those losses were caused by the shortfall between what the government paid depositors and what it received by selling the troubled real estate portfolios it acquired after taking over the failed thrifts.

In the Chrysler case, President Jimmy Carter and lawmakers in states with auto plants helped push through a package of $1.5 billion in loan guarantees for the troubled carmaker, while also demanding concessions from labor unions and lenders.

While Chrysler is remembered as a major bailout, Mr. White says it was minor compared with the savings and loan crisis or the current effort to shore up Fannie and Freddie.

In fact, the government did not have to give money directly to Chrysler, and it actually earned a profit on the deal because of stock warrants it received when the loan guarantees were provided. At the time, Chrysler had a work force of more than 100,000 people.

Still, Mr. Ely makes a distinction between the rescue of Fannie and Freddie and the thrifts versus the aid packages for Chrysler and other industrial companies. “They didn’t have a federal nexus,” he said. “They weren’t creatures of the federal government.”

This effort is also different from the others because of the potential fallout for the broader economy and especially the beleaguered housing sector if it does not succeed.

Unlike a particular auto company or even a major bank like Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust, which was bailed out in 1984, “we depend on Fannie and Freddie for funding almost half of our mortgage market,” said Thomas H. Stanton, an expert on the two companies who also teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

“The government,” he added, “has many less degrees of freedom in dealing with these companies than in the earlier bailouts.”

    A History of Public Aid During Crises, NYT, 7.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/business/07bailout.html

UK economy heads for ‘horror movie’


July 20, 2008
From The Sunday Times
David Smith and Dominic O’Connell

BRITAIN is facing an “economic horror movie” because of a “toxic mixture” of a moribund credit market and volatile oil prices, according to a leading forecasting group.

The Ernst & Young Item club, which uses the Treasury’s economic model, will argue in a report tomorrow that the economy will struggle to avoid recession. This comes as a survey by the Institute of Directors shows that business confidence has slumped to the lowest level ever recorded, with company chiefs increasingly gloomy about the investment climate.

These reports follow an interview with Alistair Darling in which the chancellor admitted the downturn would be more “profound” and last longer than he had expected.

Also, Sir Win Bischoff, chairman of Citigroup, the American financial giant, believes that house prices in Britain and America will keep falling for another two years.

The Ernst & Young Item club predicts growth of only 1.5% this year, slowing to 1% in 2009. It says consumer spending will slow to a standstill, rising by only 0.2%, and forecasts a two-year drop in investment.

It also warns that the chancellor’s budget strategy has been thrown into “turmoil” by the downturn and an unplanned £2.7 billion tax giveaway. It predicts the budget deficit will top £50 billion and the “current” budget deficit, used to determine the golden rule, will remain in the red for at least the next three years.

Peter Spencer, chief economist at the Item club, said: “Both on the high street and in the housing market it is going to get a great deal worse before it gets better. We have already seen a housing crisis that has morphed from a credit crunch to a general collapse in confidence as prices have tumbled.

“Our worry is that without the usual medication from the Bank of England - which would have nasty inflationary side-effects in this environment - consumers will follow suit, moving from their current state of denial into a state of despair.”

Meanwhile, the Institute of Directors’ quarterly business opinion survey shows business optimism at its lowest level since the survey began in 1996. The proportion of company directors “more versus less” optimistic about their company’s prospects fell to -25%, compared with -17% three months ago.

Two-thirds of bosses think their own business is still performing well, though this was down on 74% last time.

Graeme Leach, chief economist at the institute, said that while the fall in business confidence was worrying, the survey’s results were mixed.

“Company directors seem to be saying we are doing okay at present but ask us again in three to six months and it could be hell out there,” he said.

“There are real difficulties in interpreting business confidence at the moment because there is a record gap between actual performance and future perceptions.”

Among the more optimistic signs in the survey, a net 12% of firms plan to increase employment and a balance of 8% think profits will go up. Asked about their investment plans rather than the general climate, a net 11% planned a rise. There was also a small rise in pricing intentions, with a balance of 15% of firms intending rises, against 12% three months ago.

“The sharp fall in overall business optimism is very worrying and points towards a recession,” said Leach. “Other results in the survey suggest we can still escape with a sharp slowdown over 2008-9. The survey suggests the pressure on the corporate sector for a labour shake-out is muted. Whether this situation will hold is the key uncertainty.”

The credit crunch is forcing more businesses into difficulty, according to research by the insolvency specialist Begbies Traynor. It monitors the number of firms reporting “critical” problems - those facing winding-up petitions or more than £5,000 in county-court judgments against them. The figure ballooned in the second quarter to 4,258, nearly seven times more than in the same period last year. The figure is up 30% on the first quarter of this year, with retail, construction and IT firms hit hardest.

Mark Fry at Begbies said the figures reflected companies’ increased willingness to pursue money owed to them. “It shows the general increase in financial pressure. Anyone with a big exposure to property has been severely affected - it has gone into freefall,” he said.

The Federation of Small Businesses is tomorrow expected to say that large groups have extended payment terms to their suppliers in an effort to ease their financial difficulties.

One company likely to be singled out is Alliance Boots, which changed its payment terms at the start of the year. It now takes 75 days to settle invoices, and applies a 2.5% settlement fee. The move has infuriated suppliers.

Justine Thompson, director of MTA International, which supplies staff-training packages, said: “It says on the Boots website that they are committed to treating their suppliers ethically and fairly, but these bully-boy tactics amount to a kind of theft. I think it’s absolutely outrageous.”

    UK economy heads for ‘horror movie’, STs, 20.7.2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4363962.ece

Uncomfortable Answers to Questions on the Economy

July 19, 2008
The New York Times
By PETER S. GOODMAN

You have heard that Fannie and Freddie, their gentle names notwithstanding, may cripple the financial system without a large infusion of taxpayer money. You have gleaned that jobs are disappearing, housing prices are plummeting, and paychecks are effectively shrinking as food and energy prices soar. You have noted the disturbing talk of crisis hovering over Wall Street.

Something has clearly gone wrong with the economy. But how bad are things, really? And how bad might they get before better days return? Even to many economists who recently thought the gloom was overblown, the situation looks grim. The economy is in the midst of a very rough patch. The worst is probably still ahead.

Job losses will probably accelerate through this year and into 2009, and the job market will probably stay weak even longer. Home prices will probably keep falling, shrinking household wealth and eroding spending power.

“The open question is whether we’re in for a bad couple of years, or a bad decade,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, now a professor at Harvard.

Is this a recession?

Officially, no. The economy is not in recession until a panel at a private institution called the National Bureau of Economic Research says so. Unofficially, many economists think a recession started six or seven months ago, even as the economy has continued to expand — albeit at a tepid pace.

Many assume that if the economy expands at all, then it isn’t a recession, but that’s not true. The bureau defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months.” If enough people lose their jobs, factories stop making things, stores stop selling things, and less money lands in people’s pockets, it is probably a recession.

Whatever it is called, it is a painful time for tens of millions of people. Indeed, this may turn out to be the most wrenching downturn since the two recessions in the early 1980s; almost surely worse than the recession that ended the technology bubble at the beginning of this decade; perhaps worse than the downturn of the early 1990s that followed the last dip in real estate prices.

But, despite what some doomsayers now proclaim, this is not the Great Depression, when unemployment spiked to 25 percent and millions of previously working people woke up in shantytowns. Not by any measure, even as your neighbors make cryptic remarks above dusting off lessons passed down from grandparents about how to turn a can of beans into a family meal.

How bad is housing?

Bad in many markets, awful in some, and still O.K. in a few.

The downturn has its roots in the real estate frenzy that turned lonely Nevada ranches into suburban ranch homes and swampland in Florida into condominiums. Speculators drove home prices beyond any historical connection to incomes. Gravity did the rest. After roughly doubling in value from 2000 to 2005, home prices have fallen about 17 percent — and more like 25 percent in inflation-adjusted terms — according to the widely watched Case-Shiller index.

Even so, most economists think house prices must fall an additional 10 to 15 percent to get back to reality. One useful measure is the relationship between the costs of buying and renting a home. From 1985 to 2002, the average American home sold for about 14 times the annual rent for a similar home, according to Moody’s Economy.com. By early 2006, home prices ballooned to 25 times rental prices. Since then, the ratio has dipped back to about 20 — still far above the historical norm.

With mortgages now hard to obtain and speculation no longer attractive, arithmetic has replaced momentum as the guiding force for housing prices. The fundamental equation points down: Even as construction grinds down, there are still many more houses on the market than there are people to buy them, and more on the way as more homeowners slip into foreclosure.

By the reckoning of Economy.com, enough houses are on the market to satisfy demand for the next two-and-a-half years without building a single new one.

The time it takes to sell a newly completed house has expanded from an average of four months in 2005 to about nine months, according to analysis by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

And many sales are falling through — more than 30 percent in some parts of California and Florida — as buyers fail to secure financing, exacerbating the glut of homes, Mr. Baker said.

No wonder that in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Las Vegas, house prices have in recent months declined at annual rates of more than 33 percent.
 

When will banks revive?

So far, they have written off more than $300 billion in loans. Many experts now predict the toll will rise to $1 trillion or more — a staggering sum that could cripple many institutions for years.

Back when home prices were multiplying, banks poured oceans of borrowed money into real estate loans. Unlike the dot-com companies at the heart of the last speculative investment bubble, the new gold rush was centered on something that seemed unimpeachably solid — the American home.

But the whole thing worked only as long as housing prices rose. Falling prices landed like a bomb. Homeowners fell behind on their loans and could not qualify for new ones: There was no value left in their house to borrow against. As millions of people defaulted, the banks confronted enormous losses in a bloody period of reckoning.

In March, the Federal Reserve helped engineer a deal for JPMorgan Chase to buy troubled investment bank Bear Stearns. Many assumed the worst was over. But, this month, the open distress of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two huge, government sponsored institutions that together own or guarantee nearly half of the nation’s $12 trillion in outstanding mortgages — sent a signal that more ugly surprises may lie in wait.

To calm markets, the government last weekend hurriedly put together a rescue package for Fannie and Freddie that, if used, could cost as much as $300 billion. The urgent need for a rescue — together with another round of billion-dollar write-offs on Wall Street — has unnerved economists and investors.

“I was a relative optimist, but I’ve certainly become more pessimistic,” said Alan S. Blinder, an economist at Princeton, and a former vice chairman of the board of governors at the Federal Reserve. “The financial system looks substantially worse now than it did a month ago. If the Freddie and Fannie bailout were to fail, it could get a hell of a lot worse. If we get more bank failures, we have the possibility of seeing more of these pictures of people standing in line to pull their money out. That could really scare consumers.”

In one respect, Mr. Blinder added, this is like the Great Depression. “We haven’t seen this kind of travail in the financial markets since the 1930s,” he said.

More than two years ago, Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said that the housing bubble would give way to a financial crisis and a recession. He was widely dismissed as an attention-seeking Chicken Little. Now, Mr. Roubini says the worst is yet to come, because the account-squaring has so far been confined mostly to bad mortgages, leaving other areas remaining — credit cards, auto loans, corporate and municipal debt.

Mr. Roubini says the cost of the financial system’s losses could reach $2 trillion. Even if it’s closer to $1 trillion, he adds, “we’re not even a third of the way there.”

Where will the banks raise the huge sums needed to replenish the capital they have apparently lost? And what will happen if they cannot?

The answers to these questions are unknown, an unsettling void that holds much of the economy at a standstill.

“We’re in a dangerous spot,” said Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs. “The big threat is more capital losses.”

Banks are a crucial piece of the economy’s arterial system, steering capital where it is needed to fuel spending and power growth. Now, they are holding tight to their dollars, starving businesses of loans they might use to expand, and depriving families of money they might use to buy houses and fill them with furniture and appliances.

From last June to this June, commercial bank lending declined more than 9 percent, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Goldman Sachs.

“You have another wave of anxiety, another tightening of credit,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “The idea that we’ll have a second half of the year recovery has gone by the boards.”

Is my job safe?

Economic slowdowns always mean job losses. Unemployment already has risen, and almost certainly will increase more.

The first signs of distress emerged in housing. Construction companies, real estate agencies, mortgage brokers and banks began laying people off. Next, jobs started being cut at factories making products linked to housing, from carpets and furniture to lighting and flooring.

But as the real estate bust spilled over into the broader economy, depleting household wealth, the impacts rippled out to retailers, beauty parlors, law offices and trucking companies, inflicting cutbacks throughout the economy, save for health care, farming and energy. Over the last six months, the economy has shed 485,000 private sector jobs, according to the Labor Department. Many people have seen hours reduced.

The unemployment rate still remains low by historical standards, at 5.5 percent. And so far, the job losses — about 65,000 a month this year — do not approach the magnitude of those seen in past downturns, particularly the twin recessions at the beginning of the 1980s, when the economy shed upward of 140,000 jobs a month and the unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent.

But Goldman Sachs assumes unemployment will reach 6.5 percent by the end of 2009, which translates into several hundred thousand more Americans out of work.

These losses are landing on top of what was, for most Americans, a remarkably weak period of expansion. From 1992 to 2000 — as the technology boom catalyzed spending and hiring — the economy added more than 22 million private sector jobs. Over the last eight years, only 5 million new jobs have been added.

The loss of work is hitting Americans along with an assortment of troubles — gasoline prices in excess of $4 a gallon, over all inflation of about 5 percent, and declining wages.

“In every dimension, people are worse off than they were,” said Mr. Roubini, the New York University economist.

Are consumers done?

That is a major worry.

The fate of the economy now rests on the shoulders of the American consumer, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of all economic activity.

When people go to the mall and buy televisions and eat out, their money circulates through the economy. When they tighten their belts, austerity ripples out and chokes growth.

Through the years of the housing boom, many Americans came to treat their homes like automated teller machines that never required a deposit. They harvested cash through sales, second mortgages and home equity lines of credit — an artery of finance that reached $840 billion a year from 2004 to 2006, according to work by the economists James Kennedy and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. That allowed Americans to live far in excess of what they brought home from work.

But by the first three months of this year, that flow had constricted to an annual rate of about $200 billion.

Average household debt has swelled to 120 percent of annual income, up from 60 percent in 1984, according to the Federal Reserve.

And now the banks are turning off the credit taps.

“Credit is going to remain tight for a time potentially measured in years,” said Mr. Tilton, the Goldman Sachs economist.

This is the landscape that has so many economists convinced that consumer spending must dip, putting the squeeze on the economy for several years.

“The question is, will it get as bad as the 1970s?” asked Mr. Rogoff, recalling an era of spiking gas prices and double-digit inflation.

Long term, Americans may have no choice but to spend less, save more and reduce debts — in short, to live within their means.

“We’re getting a lot of the adjustment and it hurts,” said Kristin Forbes, a former member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, and now a scholar at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. “But it’s an adjustment we’re going to have to make.”

Who’s to blame?

There is plenty to go around.

In the estimation of many economists, it starts with the Federal Reserve. The central bank lowered interest rates following the calamitous end of the technology bubble in 2000, lowered them more after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then kept them low, even as speculators began to trade homes like dot-com stocks.

Meanwhile, the Fed sat back and watched as Wall Street’s financial wizards engineered diabolically complicated investments linked to mortgages, generating huge amounts of speculative capital that turned real estate into a conflagration.

“At the end of this movie, it’s clear that the Fed will have to care about excesses,” Mr. Barbera said.

Prices multiplied as many homeowners took on more property than they could afford, lured by low introductory interest rates that eventually reset higher, sending many people into foreclosure.

Mortgage brokers netted commissions as they lent almost indiscriminately, offering exotically lenient terms — no money down, no income or job required. Wall Street banks earned billions selling risky mortgage-linked securities around the world, aided by ratings agencies that branded them solid.

Through it all, a lot of ordinary Americans borrowed a lot more money then they could afford to pay back, running up enormous credit card bills and borrowing against the value of their homes. Now comes the day of reckoning.

    Uncomfortable Answers to Questions on the Economy, NYT, 19.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/business/economy/19econ.html

Financial Regulation Plan Proposed

March 31, 2008
Filed at 3:11 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration is proposing the biggest overhaul of financial regulation since the Great Depression. The sweeping plan is already drawing intense criticism -- a debate unlikely to be settled until a new president takes office.

The 200-page document, which was to be released Monday by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, proposes giving broad new powers to the Federal Reserve to combat the type of severe credit crisis currently gripping financial markets.

It would designate the Fed as a ''market stability regulator'' and give it the power to examine the books of any financial institution, not just banks, that might pose a threat to the stability of the financial system.

According to a 22-page executive summary obtained by The Associated Press, the plan would also eliminate the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, merging their functions into other agencies.

The Paulson plan, which the administration has been working on for a year, calls for the eventual creation of three regulatory agencies.

In addition to the Fed as a ''market stability regulator,'' the plan would create a ''prudential financial regulator'' for the nation's banks, thrifts and credit unions, in place of the five agencies that perform that task now.

The third new agency would regulate business conduct and consumer protection, taking over many of the functions of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The proposed overhaul would be the most extensive since the current regulatory system was created in response to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.

It comes at a time when the financial system faces its most severe credit crisis in two decades, one that has resulted in billions of dollars of losses for big banks and investment houses and the near-collapse of the country's fifth-largest investment bank.

The rising tide of bad debt has made it harder for consumers and businesses to get credit, further weighing on an economy struggling with a prolonged housing slump and soaring energy prices. Many economists believe the country is already in a recession.

The market turmoil has presented an opening for critics to make the case for stronger federal rules to prevent abuses. Treasury Secretary Paulson rejects making that link.

''I do not believe it is fair or accurate to blame our regulatory structure for the current turmoil,'' Paulson said in a draft of remarks he was to deliver Monday.

Democrats said the plan wouldn't do enough to crack down on problems in mortgage lending and the sale of complex financial products that have been exposed by the current market turmoil.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said that the administration blueprint ''would do little if anything to alleviate the current crisis.''

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., who is working on his own regulatory revamp, called Paulson's plan a ''constructive step forward'' but said it wouldn't give the Federal Reserve the regulatory authority needed for its broader market stability role.

Frank and others said that given the complexity of the issues, they expect the debate on the Paulson proposal and Democratic alternatives will continue in Congress as the next president takes office.

Business groups are split on the Paulson approach. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the securities industry support the broad outlines, but banking lobbyists are critical of some of the details affecting their industry.

''Dismantling the thrift charter and crippling state banking charters will weaken banking in America,'' said Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association.

    Financial Regulation Plan Proposed, NYT, 31.3.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fed-Overhaul.html

Hard Times Heighten Long - Felt Unease

February 17, 2008
Filed at 12:21 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Even when experts were declaring the economy healthy, many Americans voiced a vague, but persistent dissatisfaction.

True, jobs were relatively plentiful over the last few years. It was easy to borrow and very cheap. The sharp rise in the value of homes and plentiful credit cards encouraged a nation of consumers to get out and buy. But to many people, something didn't feel right, even if they couldn't quite explain why.

Now the economic tide is receding, and the undertow that was there all along is getting stronger.

Take away the easy credit and consumers are left with paychecks that, for most, haven't nearly kept pace with their need and propensity to spend.

The frustration of $3 gas and $4 milk, the worries about health care costs that have risen four times the rate of pay, become much more real. The retirement security that is only as good as the increasingly volatile stock market seems much less certain.

Americans' declining confidence in their economy is triggered by a storm of very recent pressures, including plunging home prices, tightening credit, and heavy debt. But it is compounded by anxiety that was there all along, the result of a long, slow drip of worries and vulnerabilities.

''The economy is currently in recession or arguably close to recession and that's certainly weighing on the collective psyche,'' says Mark Zandi, chief economist of forecaster Moody's Economy.com. ''But ... I do think there is an increasing level of angst that is more fundamental and is not going to go away even when the economy improves.''

Much of that anxiety is the uncomfortable, but expected jolt of the economic roller coaster. During a downturn, people become less confident about keeping their jobs or being able to find new ones, meeting household expenses and about the prospects for the future.

But there may be more to it than just cyclical ups and downs.

What does the economic future hold? Many Americans feel increasingly unable to answer that question with assurance, and they appraise it with a sense that they are less in control of the outcome.

In Westminster, Colo., a Denver suburb, George Apodaca hears that uncertainty from the maintenance workers, drivers and others enrolled in the home budgeting class he teaches. Most have steady jobs, but are just getting by. They talk about challenges like the rising cost of getting to work or medical bills, not as new problems but as a continuing struggle.

''People in my class, they don't know what a recession means or what a boom means,'' says Apodaca, a counselor for Colorado Housing Enterprises. ''They're worried about buying the groceries, buying the gas.''

A year ago -- months before economic alarms went off -- nearly two of three Americans polled by The Rockefeller Foundation said that they felt somewhat or a lot less economically secure then they did a decade ago. Half said they expected their children to face an economy even more shaky.

Other polls have registered similar unease in the past few years, showing large numbers of Americans dissatisfied with the economy, and worried about retirement security, health care costs, and a declining standard of living.

The surprising thing about many of these readings isn't that they've recently skyrocketed. It's that in recent years they've registered consistently high levels of worry without ever seeming to ease.

''This has just been a period of great disconnect between what the aggregate economic statistics show and what leading politicians talk about and what ordinary Americans are feeling,'' said Jacob Hacker, a Yale University professor and author of ''The Great Risk Shift,'' which charts increased economic insecurity. ''I think people are saying, where did the gains go? Where did the boom go? And now that it's gone, what are we going to do?''

Those uncertainties have been submerged for the past few years. The war in Iraq and the threat of terrorism dominated, drawing attention away from day-to-day economic concerns. With employers adding workers, people's appraisal of the economy focused less on jobs, the long-standing measure of financial security.

Many people gauged their well-being in wealth -- looking at the stock market, and much more broadly, the rise of real estate prices, said Susan Sterne, president of Economic Analysis Associates.

Americans borrowed freely against the value of their homes. But now there is nothing left to shield them from the insecurities rooted in the old measures of economic prosperity.

Except for the late 1990s, pay has been stagnant for more than a generation, barely keeping pace with inflation. In 1973, the median male worker earned $16.88 an hour, adjusted for inflation. In 2007, he earned $16.85.

For many families, the stagnation has been moderated by the addition of a second paycheck as more women went to work, and their pay rose over the same period.

But the largest gains went to workers at the top of the pay scale. Now, economic worries are rising fastest in households with smaller paychecks, and that chasm is widening.

''Over the past decades, whether inflation was much higher or lower, or incomes grew faster or more slowly, there has never been such a wide divergence in the experiences'' separating richer households from poorer ones, Richard Curtin, the director of the University of Michigan's consumer survey said in summing up the most recent figures.

That insecurity shows in small, but telling ways. Shoppers at drug store chain Walgreens Inc. are increasingly bypassing name-brand cough syrups and pain relievers and choosing cheaper store brands. Wal-Mart Stores Inc noticed that many people who received its gift cards for the holidays used them in January to buy food and other necessities instead of extras.

The pullback by consumers contrasts with years of continued spending that long seemed to contradict mounting worries.

Worker optimism, which soared in the late 1990s, never fully rebounded after the last, brief recession. Although jobs again were plentiful, it became clear the new economy's opportunities came with few of the old assurances.

Rennie Sawade, the son of a Michigan auto worker, majored in computer science because he saw no future on the assembly line. He was rewarded with a job at Oracle Corp., but lost it in late 2005 when the company shifted his department's work to India. Sawade, who lives in Woodinville, Wash. near Seattle, has been unable to find a full-time replacement, instead jumping from contract job to contract job.

The contractor offers a 401(k), but contributions are entirely up to workers. When Sawade's wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer last year he missed the equivalent of two weeks work -- and pay -- to take care of her. The job has health insurance but still left the family with a bill for more than $2,000. Contractors call to offer other jobs, but the pay is frequently disappointing, he says.

''It was pretty well known when I was working on my bachelor's degree that the auto industry was going to move overseas,'' he says. ''Everybody said get into technology because you'll have a career. Now it looks like the same thing is happening to technology.''

Cutbacks and changes by employers also have pushed heavy responsibilities on to workers, many who find themselves unprepared.

In the past decade, scores of companies have frozen or eliminated benefit plans providing a guaranteed pension. Many have replaced them with 401(k) plans whose future worth depends on workers' investment skill. Almost half of all households are at risk of coming up short in retirement, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Worry also grew about the cost of health care, with good reason. Since 2001, the cost of health insurance has gone up 78 percent -- about $1,500 more per year for the average family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Over the same period, wages rose about 19 percent, and inflation about 17 percent. About four in 10 people polled by the group say they are worried about paying more for health care or insurance.

Even the consumption made possible by easy credit has helped turn up the financial pressure. The number of products -- from air conditioners to cell phones -- that Americans say they can't live without has grown substantially in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center. About 6 in 10 working Americans polled by the group say they don't earn enough to lead the life they want.

Economic confidence is, largely, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more consumers believe the economy is heading downhill, the more likely they'll rein in spending that will contribute to a downturn.

''I think if people were generally more satisfied and less anxious perhaps they would be more resistant to thinking things were deteriorating rapidly,'' says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Maybe the downturn in optimism is temporary. Americans are voracious consumers and persistent optimists.

But some believe a fundamental change in behavior and mind-set is taking place. Since the early 1980s, consumers' contribution to the economy has risen from 63 percent, near where it had long hovered, to 70 percent. Baby boomers spent generously on growing families. Interest rates and inflation dropped, making homes and other assets worth more and cutting borrowing costs. The spread of easy credit promoted spending.

Now, those are drying up and the population is aging. Older households don't spend as much, and often assess the economy more conservatively. Over the next generation, that could drive consumers' contribution to the economy back down to the low-60 percent range, Zandi said.

''There were tail winds behind'' the growth in consumer spending over the last 25 years, he says. ''Now there are headwinds.''

    Hard Times Heighten Long - Felt Unease, NYT, 17.2.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-The-Uneasy-Economy.html

Top Officials See Bleaker Outlook for the Economy

February 15, 2008
The New York Times
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — With the credit markets once again deteriorating, the nation’s two top economic policy makers acknowledged Thursday that the outlook for the economy had worsened, as both came under criticism for being overtaken by events and failing to act boldly enough.

In testimony to Congress, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, signaled that the Fed was ready to reduce interest rates yet again, pointing out that problems in housing and mortgage-related markets had spread more widely and proved more intractable than he predicted three months ago.

His sobering assessment was echoed by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who appeared with him. Both continued to avoid predicting a recession but said they were scaling back the more optimistic forecasts they had issued in November.

Ethan S. Harris, chief United States economist for Lehman Brothers, said that both policy makers had “come clean” about the economy’s problems but that investors were not impressed.

Stock prices, which normally rally when the Fed hints it will lower borrowing costs, tumbled instead. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 175 points, or 1.4 percent; broader stock indexes dropped by similar amounts.

Anxiety is escalating among institutional lenders and major borrowers, as the panic over soaring default rates on subprime mortgages that began last summer continues to spread, freezing up credit for municipalities, hospitals, student loans and even investment funds holding the most conservative bonds.

On Capitol Hill, the economic policy makers found themselves in the line of fire. Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, accused both Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson of having “hit the snooze button.”

Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the Banking Committee, told reporters after the hearing that “it just seems as if they aren’t as concerned about the magnitude of the problem.”

Testifying before the committee, Mr. Bernanke said he still expected the economy to grow at a “sluggish” pace over the next few months and to pick up speed later in the year. But he said “the downside risks to growth have increased,” noting that spiraling losses in home mortgages have dragged down the credit markets and shaken the broader economy.

While trying to be optimistic, Mr. Paulson said that the administration’s forecast “would be less, but I do believe we’ll keep growing.”

Many Wall Street economic forecasters, however, are already estimating that the risks of a recession are at least 50-50, and a growing number of analysts contend that an economic contraction may have already begun.

Fed policy makers will release their newest forecasts on Wednesday, and Mr. Bernanke said they would be more in line with those of private-sector economists.

The Fed has reduced its benchmark interest rate, called the federal funds rate, five times since September, including two cuts within eight days last month. The rate has fallen to 3 percent; as recently as late summer of last year it was 5.25 percent.

Mr. Bernanke assured lawmakers that the Fed would “provide adequate insurance” against a downturn in the form of cheaper money.

But neither investors nor politicians have responded particularly favorably to Washington’s moves. Yields on asset-backed securities that hold mortgages and other debt have risen to levels almost as high as they were last August, when financial markets first seized up in response to soaring default rates on subprime mortgages.

The Fed’s rate cuts have led to a more modest decline in mortgage rates for borrowers with good credit, but they have done little to ease the broader credit squeeze.

Mr. Bernanke agreed that banks and other lenders have been pulling back, both because of increased aversion to risk and because they have been forced to book huge losses from soured loans and to repurchase troubled mortgages and loans they had sold to investors.

The unexpected losses and growing pressures, he continued, have prompted banks to become more restrictive in their lending and more “protective of their liquidity.”

Mr. Bernanke said the economy would grow slowly but pick up speed later in response to both the Fed’s lower interest rates and the $168 billion economic stimulus package that President Bush signed Wednesday.

“At present, my baseline outlook involves a period of sluggish growth, followed by a somewhat stronger pace of growth starting later this year,” he told lawmakers. But in cautioning that his outlook could turn out to be wrong, the Fed chairman left the door open to additional rate reductions.

Mr. Paulson tried to sound less downbeat. “I believe we are going to continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate,” he told the Banking Committee, insisting that the plunge in housing and credit markets was a correction rather than a crisis.

Mr. Bernanke said a wide variety of economic indicators had declined in recent months, as the meltdown in the housing and mortgage markets rippled through the broader economy.

The Fed chairman said the job market had worsened, noting employment fell by 17,000 jobs in January, according to the Labor Department. That was down from an average rise of 95,000 jobs a month in the final three months of 2007. Unemployment, though still comparatively low, at 4.9 percent, has edged up from 4.7 percent a few months ago.

Nationwide, housing prices have declined and show no signs of having hit bottom, while the stock markets have fallen sharply from their highs late last year.

Mr. Dodd has proposed legislation to create an agency to bail out many homeowners by buying up and restructuring troubled mortgages. He painted a particularly bleak picture.

“The current economic situation is more than merely a ‘slowdown’ or a ’downturn,’ ” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence among consumers and investors.”

Mr. Paulson and other administration officials staunchly oppose a government buyout program, arguing that the tax rebates and business tax cuts in the new stimulus package should keep the nation out of a recession.

But Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, predicted the bill’s tax rebates and temporary tax cuts for business would have a negligible impact.

“I have equated it to pouring a glass of water in the ocean and expecting it to make a difference,” Mr. Shelby said.

Though lawmakers welcomed the Fed’s willingness to lower interest rates, investors had already been assuming that events would force the Fed’s hand.

Prices in the federal funds futures market, which allows investors to bet on the coming course of rates, indicate investors expect the central bank to reduce its benchmark overnight rate another full percentage point, to 2 percent, by the end of June.

    Top Officials See Bleaker Outlook for the Economy, NYT, 15.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/business/15econ.html

February 14 1945

A black market in minor necessities

From the Guardian archive

February 14 1945
The Guardian

A campaign has been started on a national scale to put an end to black-market trading in such minor necessities as hair combs, pins, hooks and eyes, hair grips, hair pins, and narrow elastic.

While most households are aware that these things are scarce and are generally only come upon by chance in the usual shops, it is not so widely known that they have been fairly readily obtainable — at a price — in market places and from the baskets of street traders and pedlars.

The price, however, has generally been flagrantly in excess of the controlled figure, and an investigation by the Board of Trade through the local Price Regulation Committees has exposed a "racket" and resulted in concerted action to end it.

Hair pins, for which the fixed ride is 21 for twopence, have sold at a halfpenny each, hair grips that should be four a penny sell at four a shilling; and ordinary steel pins at twenty for threepence, which is eight times their controlled price. Safety pins, instead of being nine a penny, are three halfpence each in this irregular market, and five penny moulded combs are six times their proper price.

Mr. F. W. C. Godden, the North-west Regional Price Regulation Committee's secretary, told a "Manchester Guardian" reporter yesterday that there had been "a stinking ramp" in such small goods. "Take combs" Mr. Godden added. "There seem to be two prices only for the usual comb, either two shillings or half a crown, though the controlled price may be fivepence, eightpence, or tenpence."

The general conclusion is that large quantities of these goods have been cornered by black-market operators, who pass them to the public, through market traders and pedlars; and the first step in combating this trade is by the exhibition of posters in the markets. In the North-west region there are 450 such markets to be warned.

The posters inform the public that the sale of these items of haberdashery is subject to fixed prices and call on the public not to buy hair pins, hair combs, hair grips, and like goods from traders who not display the correct price list. The help of market superintendents and the police is being enlisted so that the law may be enforced.

The first uses of the phrase "black market" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary were about illegal sterling exchanges in the 1930s. By 1943, in wartime, the term had come to mean all "transactions in foodstuffs etc which … were also a matter of grave scandal in the country, particularly to those who could not afford 'black market' prices".

    From the Guardian archive > February 14 1945 > A black market in minor necessities, G,
    Republished 14.2.2007, p. 34, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/02/14/pages/ber33.shtml

On This Day - May 10, 1926

From the Times archive

May 26 1906

Buy almost anything at the Flat Iron

From the Guardian archive

May 26 1906
The Guardian

Everyone in Manchester knows the Flat Iron Market, and a very large number do their fancy shopping there by night.

The market is the hunting-park of the bargain hunters who want, or think they want, or imagine that they may some day want — a rusty old cavalry sword, or a pair of skates, or a bunch of curtain rings, or a pair of half-wellington boots, or a toy engine, or a bank of cord, green or red, or a little round looking-glass, or a pair of cork soles, or a bunch of old keys, or an old rusty lock, or a pink ice-cream, or a handful of hot chestnuts, or a small but cheerfully coloured copy of "The Angelus", or a fuzzy toy animal, or a bottle of medicine that'll cure anything that can be found in a medical dictionary, or a "gigantic penny packet" of notepaper, or a pair of stays — for a penny.

The stay merchant said, "The ribs is right," and a little man with a red nose bought a pair. You can even buy a policeman's helmet. Two heroes got one each, and after buttoning their jackets up to the chin ran through the market like a brace of Merry Andrews, startling mer chants by suddenly popping their helmeted heads round the corners of the stall.

I think I should like to do all my marketing in the Flat Iron. You can swagger aloof, or you can rub shoulders with the best of company, stopping to pass old-fashioned chaff. And when you step to buy you plunge immediately into the old primeval realities of commerce.

Here you do not stand sourly while a pale-faced short-tempered shopman whirls your purchase into a screw of pale brown paper and sends your money trundling in a globe along naked wires. No; here you can slap and thump a thing, and abuse and sneer at it, and the man behind the stall will slap and thump it too, and praise it; and at last you'll get the price down to near to what he will take and you will give.

Then perhaps some old split-the-differ of the market rolls up and makes a bargain between you. Oh, you can enjoy buying in the Flat Iron Market. And you can buy almost anything that heart could wish, but never a flat iron could I see. This surprised me, for you can get petticoats in Petticoat Lane.

The larger priced things, like clothes and oilcloth, are sold by Dutch auction, the auctioneer wheedling or with winks setting the women giggling and the men roaring, or browbeating until he has them at his mercy.


Jack B Yeats

    From the Guardian archive > May 26 1906 > Buy almost anything at the Flat Iron, G,
republished 26.6.2007, p. 36, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/05/26/pages/ber36.shtml

Preliminary number and prospectus, Aug 5th 1843

From The Economist print edition

“If a writer be conscious that to gain a reception for his favourite doctrine he must combat with certain elements of opposition, in the taste, or the pride, or the indolence of those whom he is addressing, this will only serve to make him the more importunate. .”—CHALMERS.

IT is one of the most melancholy reflections of the present day, that while wealth and capital have been rapidly increasing, while science and art have been working the most surprising miracles in aid of the human family, and while morality, intelligence, and civilization have been rapidly extending on all hands;—that at this time, the great material interests of the higher and middle classes, and the physical condition of the labouring and industrial classes, are more and more marked by characters of uncertainty and insecurity. In vain has the hand of ART (led on and guided by a complete glare of SCIENCE, aided by INDUSTRY of unsurpassed intelligence and perseverance, nurtured and fertilized by CAPITAL almost without limit) developed the resources of the human mind and the material creation in a manner which has at once astonished and exalted the world;—in vain have all parts of the earth been brought nearer and nearer to us;—our Indian territory within forty days’ journey, the great American continent within ten days’ sail, our continental neighbours and every part of our own country separated only by a brief space of a few hours;—in vain the producers and consumers of the whole world, the administrators of mutual wants, the encouragers of mutual industries, have been brought in easy and close collision and contact, and thus facilitated the supply of every want, and the demand for every exertion of human skill and industry;—in vain do we acknowledge all these unequalled and undoubted elements of national prosperity: for at this moment the whole country—every interest without exception,—the owner and occupier of the soil, the explorer of our great mineral world, the manufacturer who gives form, shape, and utility to the produce of nature, the artisan, the labourer of every description, the merchant and shipowner (the great links of exchange), and the capitalist who facilitates the operations of all,—every one of these interests stand at this moment CONFESSEDLY in a condition of the most unprecedented depression, anxiety, and uneasiness. And what rather adds to this anomaly than in any way accounts for it, is, that our population has been rapidly increasing, not only in numbers, but also in great skill and productive ability.

But while Art, Science, Intelligence and Enterprise have been thus engaged the last half century in behalf of our country and the human race, in what manner has legislation been occupied? Let cool and calm deliberation determine this question. In the early part of that period the little time which could be spared by the legislature from the excitement of political strife, the struggle for political power and place, was occupied with the stirring events attendant on the long and continued wars in which we were engaged, and the principles of commercial and industrial legislation attracted little of its attention. Under such circumstances it was not difficult for those interests who possessed great political influence to obtain enactments which they supposed would be beneficial to themselves. Unfortunately, however, both governments, and classes, and individuals have been too apt to conclude that their benefit could be secured by a policy injurious to others; and too often the benefit proposed has even been measured by the injury to be inflicted: hence all the laws which were framed under this influence had a tendency to raise up barriers to intercourse, jealousies, animosities, and heartburnings between individuals and classes in this country, and again between this country and all others; and thus, under the plea of protecting individuals or classes against each other, and the whole against other countries, was the system of COMMERCIAL RESTRICTION completed by the enactment of the corn and provision laws, passed in 1815; amid the utter forgetfulness on the part of the legislature, that it had no power or privilege which could enable it to confer a favour or wealth on any part of the community, without abstracting as much from others; in fact, that it possessed no inherent source of productiveness which could enable it to be generous.

The policy of England, always, but especially at this particular time, looked up to by all the world as the highway to greatness, was eagerly followed in her commercial regulations by other countries; navigation laws, hostile tariffs, prohibition of English manufactures, were resorted to by other governments, each in a way according to the notions they had of their own interests, in imitation of, or opposition to, the policy of England, each country inflicting on itself as much mischief and injury as England had done by similar policy.

It was thus while Art, Science, Capital, Commercial Enterprise, and Labour were eagerly demanding a greater arena to multiply and extend their benefits to ALL, that legislation, ignorance, and prejudice associated with short-sighted selfishness, were actively engaged in frustrating all these nobler efforts and designs. And so far had they succeeded in creating a war among the material interests of the world, that in 1819 the collision occasioned thereby threatened the most serious consequences to our Social and Commercial existence. This crisis caused reflecting men to turn their attention to the hitherto neglected science of Political and Commercial Economy. The philosophy of Adam Smith found a clear and able enunciator in Ricardo. The political and legislative application of these great principles, so eloquently put forth to a wondering but ignorant audience by Burke, found an ardent, warm and able echo in Huskisson. The philosopher wrote, and was not refuted. The legislator debated, and by his earnestness, industry, and eloquence, aided no doubt by the pressing exigencies of the time, gained a partial triumph over the ignorance and prejudice which ruled; and shadowed out for the first time the principles of Political Economy into the embodyment of FREE TRADE as their practical result. He saw that our interests and commerce had far out-grown the narrow limits which ignorant legislation had assigned them: that all the up-heavings and convulsions in the country were but the external symptoms of the fierce struggle which was going forward between our rapidly-advancing productive power, earnestly demanding a larger field of exchange, and the principles of restriction and monopoly, blindly and vainly attempting to confine them to their ancient and narrow limit: that it was a severe contest between intelligence, which pressed forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.

He commenced his commercial reform by revising our truly Anti-Commercial Navigation laws; he followed that effort by revising the import duties on the raw materials of manufactures of silk, wool, flax, &c.; he reduced the differential duty on coffee and wine, and by these and various other changes, but far more by the bread, intelligent, and enlightened arguments by which he supported his policy, gave great and cheering hopes that the emancipation of industry and commerce was at hand. Under the salutary influence of these reforms the country recovered, and with returning prosperity, discontent was dispelled—peace was restored. Every measure was attended with eminent success. With reduction of duties he increased the revenue; with protection, removed or lowered, he increased the competition and import, without injury to the producer at home. Increased supply only tended to stimulate demand. The Minister and his principles became equally popular. The silk weavers in Macclesfield, who declared themselves ruined by his policy in 1825, drew his carriage triumphantly into the town in 1830, on his last and fatal journey to Liverpool. The Free-Trade Minister died and left no successor. The progress of his policy was thus arrested at its outset, and was soon forgot in the stormy political events of 1830.

In 1831 commenced the great Reform struggle: fascinated with the excitement, intoxicated with the success, the country totally forgot the ends of good government in the struggle for its means:—its means were obtained, its ends were neglected. The Corn Laws and Commercial restrictions were denounced on the hustings, but unheard of in Parliament; and it is a serious reflection on the intelligence and wisdom of the times, that the greatest popular political influence which ever existed in this country, scarcely achieved one important act of liberation to commerce and industry; that it left the Corn Laws and all the great glaring monopolies and restrictions as it found them: it spent its whole strength in things good, but good only as a means to an end. A succession of a few good harvests, and the development of Huskisson’s then neglected principles, sustained our onward progress for some years,—until we reached the end of 1838,—when the occurrence of a single bad harvest, proved to all thinking men the critical point at which we had arrived. Wealth abounded, useful productions were multiplied beyond all precedent, but the field of exchange had become so narrowed, that the most serious national sacrifices were required to supply the deficiency of the first necessary of life during the three following years.

Twenty years had passed away: six millions had been added to our population: art, science, ingenuity, and industry had been working their miracles—but legislation still sought to confine the country in the same swaddling clothes in which it had been wrapt a quarter of a century before: and, with the exception of the few acts of Huskisson, no means had been taken to afford a wider field for our increasing numbers and powers.

The fierce struggle for more room, for wider markets, for free exchange, visible in 1819, was now again, as before, exhibited by new upheavings and convulsions—productive energy and intelligence were again in keen antagonism with monopoly and restriction. The great manufacturing population was the first to suffer, but that sympathy between all the different parts of the state, the existence of which has always been overlooked in framing restrictive and protecting laws, gradually extended the mischief, until it reached every interest in the country: the lessened means of consumption on the part of the artisans of one class reacted generally on the demand for the produce of their fellow artisans of other classes; which again reacted more strongly on the shopkeepers and small dealers; again affecting the wholesale dealer and importer;—the consumption of articles of foreign growth being thus curtailed in quantity and price, the power of our foreign customers to consume our manufactures was again, in their turn, lessened; and thus reacted once more on the producing classes at home; trade had a constant tendency to contraction; the shipping interest became deeply depressed; capital became profitless; the revenue suffered; new taxes became needful; consumption was thus once more lessened; and at last, though not with less certainty, the agricultural interest, that interest which is most strongly protected by law, but far more strongly by the stern necessity which exists for their produce in priority to all other articles, was involved in the common lot of increased charges, diminished demand, and lower prices: and thus the narrow policy of restriction and protection worked mischief to all, benefit to none; for where is the interest which does not at this moment confess itself in a state of depression without parallel?—It is no longer complaints of a class, or of classes, it is a universal national embarrassment;—an embarrassment which has disturbed and complicated our commercial relations over the whole world.

WHERE IS THE REMEDY?—who is the man that would remain as he is?—who is the man that would go back into greater restrictions, into a narrower field; into less demand? All now begin to feel and acknowledge that want of consumption is the true cause of depression and low prices,—that the real cause of all our evils is found in the want of employment for the labour, energy, and capital of the country as it now is: but how is that to be remedied? Only by extending our markets abroad, by increasing our exports: but we can only increase our exports by being willing to INCREASE OUR IMPORTS, and this can only be done from those large productive countries, the produce of which, at this time, is practically prohibited. No revision of the tariff will be of any practical benefit which will not admit in the greatest abundance all the first necessaries of life, and which does not open the markets of those great countries which produce them. It is of no avail to open freely our ports for articles of small and trifling consumption, to open our trade to small and comparatively unimportant specks on the ocean;—if we will really extend our trade, we must be willing to take freely and regularly articles of extensive consumption from countries of wide and rich territory, having great wants. We must be willing to take the corn of Prussia, Poland, and America; the sugar and coffee of Brazil, Cuba, and Java, and by the acts indicated in these two lines give to our great population, round whose well-being we have discovered all other interests revolve,—the two-fold blessings of ABUNDANCE and EMPLOYMENT.

We must retrace the whole of that narrow and ignorant legislation which seeks falsely and in vain to prop up and protect individual interests—which has only deceived and misled; we must rely alone on the great principles of public good for public prosperity. We must relieve industry and capital from all restrictions; we must know that there is no safety for our great active population but in the freest intercourse with the producers and consumers of all the world; in short, as the only true guarantee for prosperity and peace, we must honestly and fearlessly carry into practice those principles which all parties are ready to advocate in theory involved in FREE TRADE.

To no country in the world that ever did or does exist are these principles of the same first importance that they are to us, for in no country does so large a portion of the population and property depend on commerce and industry alone, in order that they shall have any value. We believe that this important and critical fact has been entirely overlooked, or has never been considered in one tithe of its importance. Let us consider what a huge portion of our property and reliance for employment consists of, and depends upon, the vast variety of factories, mills, and other manufacturing establishments, and their numberless aiders, assistants, contributors, and ministers, found in every variety in manufacturing districts; our extensive and rich kingdom of minerals; our canals, railroads, and various facilities or internal transport; our endless variety of public companies; our huge and splendid commercial marine; our docks, basins, and public warehouses; and our great cities attached to and dependent on the same interests.

Now the important fact to which we wish to draw attention is, that the labour and property thus involved, not only depend on trade, but on a SUFFICIENT EXTENT OF TRADE, to retain any value whatever. As long as they are profitably employed they represent their full amount of cost in the sum of national wealth; and are of their full amount of utility in affording employment, to the population: but with an increasing population and ingenuity always at work, supply must have a constant tendency to increase. If the demand for the produce of our factories be not correspondingly increased, but on the contrary, diminished, competition must become greater and greater, until all profit ceases; the capital is sunk, and until there is a loss competitors will persevere. When that period arrives, when the price of the goods will not repay the labour and cost of the raw material, then the whole of this property vanishes, and its means of giving employment to labour, and its various contributors, ceases: for of what value or utility is a factory, and all its magnificent and complicated machinery and arrangement, with its steam-engine still and motionless? As long as our mines of iron and of coal yield a profit, they represent at least the whole value of the labour employed in exploring them, and generally much more in the form of rent or royalty; but increase the quantity of iron or coal without an increase of demand, and competition will lower the prices, so that first all rent will vanish, and as soon as the price does not pay the expense and labour of raising the mineral, we are no richer with coal or iron fields than if they were beds of quicksand: their power of employing labour is at an end, and all the money invested ceases to be national wealth. As long as railways and canals are profitable, they truly represent in real wealth the capital invested: but diminish the amount of traffic only so much as pays the profit—until the receipts do not cover the necessary wear and tear and expenses—and they are no longer wealth. Increase our number of ships, without proportionably increasing the consumption of articles of foreign growth—first the competition will destroy the merchant’s profit and yield only freight, but next competition will reduce freight, until the wages and expenses are not covered, and then all wealth in ships ceases: and the capital invested in them is so long an absolute abstraction of national wealth. With a given amount of trade all this wealth is secure, with a little less it vanishes. And let us well consider that it is not the mere surplus of these various interests that thus suffers, for no man will consent voluntarily to be the surplus:—no man will close his factory, blow out his furnace, lay by his pit or lay up his ship, until they become a source of loss. It is true the weakest must go first: the worst factory must be closed, the poorest mines must be laid by, and the worst ship must be laid up first; and then follow the next in degree; but the moment a little diminution of supply lessens the loss, a portion of the idle start afresh into competition. It may be coolly said, this state of things must cure itself in time, if it were only by a course of ruin; but, be it remembered, the population still goes on increasing, ingenuity and invention are still at the highest pressure of necessity, and as one class of competitors are destroyed, another class are immediately in their place. We can safely refer to each and all of these interests, if this is not a literal description of their present condition. The want of more trade prevents that trade we have being profitable: the excess of produce beyond the demand lessens the value of the whole producing ability; and this must continue as long a demand keeps not pace with production, as long as no effort is made to extend our markets as our population and productive ability increase. But inasmuch as consumption is only created by production, the two should always in a natural state of things keep pace with each other; the demand for productions should always increase as they become abundant and cheap, for abundance implies great production, and great production an extensive means of consumption. Then why do we find this country so great an exception to this natural law? Because by our RESTRICTIVE SYSTEM we limit the supply of one great class of productions, and thus practically limit the demand for all others, however much we affect to encourage our commerce. During the last thirty years one great class of producers at home has been limited by the nature of the country and Acts of Parliament. The land has given employment to no portion of the increase of the population: the whole additional six millions of our people, since 1821, have been thrown upon other employments. In 1821, 4,790,000 of the population were engaged in producing food for, and consuming the products of, the remaining 9,600,000: in 1842 the number of 4,790,000 of producers of food and consumers of manufactures is somewhat reduced, while the consumers of food, irrespective of the producers, are increased to 14,400,000; but the law practically enacts that the 14,400,000 in 1842 shall be fed by the same means that fed the 9,600,000 in 1821; and moreover, for such is the effect, that in 1842, 14,400,000 manufactures, dealers, various producers, professions, &c., shall only have the same number of customers with whom to exchange for the first great necessaries of life as the 9,600,000 had twenty years ago; and thus there has been a constant tendency for the produce of the rapidly-increasing number to exchange for a smaller quantity of the produce of the stationary number, or, in other words, while agricultural produce has all along maintained a high price, all other kinds of goods have fallen rapidly during the period; and the demand being thus far stationary, while the supplies were increasing so much, there was a constant tendency during the whole period to an excess of production on one hand, only because the same constant tendency existed to a limited and deficient production on the other hand. Had the producers of food kept in the same proportionate increase of numbers and quantity as the other class, there had remained the same relative value and demand for the produce of each, and excess or over-production would not have arisen in the one case nor deficiency in the other. This excess, or what is termed over-production, is precisely that surplus which we have before shown has been so long, and still is, undermining the commercial and industrial existence of the country;—for however great the struggle may be among farmers to occupy, or of labourers to cultivate, this fixed quantity of land, their numbers do not increase: they only require the same number of ploughshares, the same quantity of saddlery, the same number is still only to be shod and booted, still only the fixed number of backs to be clothed, still only the same number of consumers of colonial produce; while the class who depend for food on this fixed number, and who seek to minister their wants of ploughshares, of saddlery, of shoes, of clothing, who import and supply foreign produce, and have other occupations, are six millions more since 1821, and still increase at the rate of one thousand per day. In another eight years, if the increase goes on in the same proportion, in 1851, while the food producers remain at 4,790,000, the other classes will have increased to 17,000,000; and if it be possible that suicidal restriction and monopoly still prevail, it must require a still larger portion of the conflict of the large class to obtain the produce and minister to the wants of the smaller class; and it is an important fact, that the great competition to occupy, and to labour upon, this fixed quantity of land, has a constant tendency to keep the largest portion of even this smallest class in the utmost poverty and depression.

Thus far as regards the power of exchange in the home trade for the first great article of food:—next as to the greatest foreign article of consumption, and therefore of exchangeable ability, SUGAR. Here again the same principle has been acted upon, the same result has followed. Restriction and monopoly have again here attempted to confine the supply of the 27,000,000, which we now are, to the same means which supplied 21,000,000, twenty years ago. In 1821, the quantity of sugar available for the consumption of 21,000,000 of people was 4,176,178 cwts.—in 1842 the quantity similarly available for the consumption of 27,000,000 was only 4,082,312 cwts., being actually 93,866 cwts. less. The competition, therefore, of 27,000,000 to obtain only the same or a less quantity in exchange for their articles of produce, has had the constant tendency to cause a smaller quantity of sugar to exchange for a larger quantity of goods. The same quality of sugar which exchanged, twenty years ago, for a given quantity of manufactures, iron or hardware, will now command at least three times the quantity of those articles. Thus, while the supply of these great necessaries is limited to a given quantity, the chief effect of increased production at home is to lower its exchangeable value for the article of which the quantity is fixed. If the producers of our sugar increased in the same proportion as the consumers have, the same relative value would be always maintained between the goods of this country and that article, because the demand would always increase in proportion to the supply; but the restriction affects us in two ways; first, by making sugar dear, and secondly, by making our goods cheap, inasmuch as we limit our market in other sugar growing countries in consequence of the practical prohibition to consumer their produce. And thus it is, with these restrictions, that we have a constant tendency to that surplus or excess of one class of productions, which weighs down and depresses the great industrial interests of the country; that we have every day a greater tendency to that little trade, which makes trade profitless, and which brings about the exact state of things which at present exist.

There is no cure, there is no remedy, for all these evils but increased demand; there can be no increased demand without increased markets; and we cannot secure larger markets without an unrestricted power of exchange, and by this means add to our territory of land, as far as productive utility is concerned, the corn fields of Poland, Prussia, and above all, the rich and endless acres of the United States; to avail ourselves of the vast and rich productiveness of Brazil, Cuba, Java, &c.; and thus, at the same time that a plentiful and proportionate supply of all the great necessaries of life would be maintained, we should always, in exchange, have a corresponding demand for our increasing productions at home; the equilibrium of the various classes of producers would be restored and maintained. With freed trade we might go on increasing our productions without limit, for in this only natural state of things increased production could only create the power and means of increased consumption. There is no other remedy. It is in vain that deputations of distressed interests pass resolutions merely affirming their distress; seek interviews with Ministers of the Crown only to repeat their resolutions, without an opinion to offer as to the cause or cure; all will be in vain until they have this important truth palpably and at all times before them, that they are increasing by millions, while the law practically prescribes only a fixed, stationary quantity of the great necessaries of life for their consumption, only the same number of customers with whom to exchange their productions, whatever may be the quantity: until this conviction compels them to demand an unrestricted exchange, until they demand FREE TRADE as a simple act of justice and policy.

But we may be told these are all only opinion, well enough reasoned and difficult to answer, and perhaps very like the truth; but the experiment is great—we want something more than opinions. Well, then, we will endeavour to prove and illustrate every opinion we have offered to the full; and that by our own experience in four of the most important articles of the consumption of this country—Coffee and Sugar, as representing the Colonial interests; Wool and Corn, as representing the Home or Agricultural interests.

    Preliminary number and prospectus, Aug 5th 1843, From The Economist print edition,
    The Economist, 8.10.2005, http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1873490

May 9 1829

Situation of the rioting weavers

From The Guardian archive

May 9 1829
The Guardian

It is with feelings of extreme regret that we find ourselves under the necessity of adverting to the riotous proceedings and the lawless and destructive attacks on property of which a portion of the labouring classes in this town and some neighbouring districts have been guilty during the past and the present week.

We deeply lament the state of suffering in which a large portion of the industrious classes are involved; we can form some conception of the growing distress consequent on want of food: we can imagine the feelings with which a parent, himself not obtaining the full sustenance necessary to hard and constant labour, hears his children begging for bread, which he is unable to supply.

These are circumstances that involve an intensity of wretchedness which no person, not destitute of the ordinary feelings of human nature, can contemplate without deep sympathy. But sympathy, of itself, is worth little; and private charity is utterly incompetent to grapple with the mass of distress which prevails.

In some quarters — in the neighborhood of Colne, in the country around Blackburn, and at Burnley — the condition of the hand-loom weavers has reached the extreme of suffering. There is still remaining unappropriated a large balance of the general subscription raised for the relief of the poor in manufacturing districts. We strongly recommend an immediate application to the secretary or officers of the committee for conducting the subscription.

It is several years since we first expressed our opinion that the days of prosperity of hand-loom cotton-weaving are gone by, that the principle of manufacture will still progressively continue to sink; and that whatever tends artificially to prolong its existence can only have the effect of producing more certain misery.

Every friend to the poor, therefore, every person of influence [in] communication with hand-loom weavers should sedulously inculcate the importance of their betaking theirselves, and at least of bringing up their children, to some employment less overstocked and in declension. The wages of labour can never (the improved machinery of the present day renders it absolutely impossible) constitute a desirable trade; but the sufferings attendant on its decline may be mitigated by constant and judicious exertions.

[About this week's disturbances], our first statement is that, at whatever cost, the laws must be supported. We are not advocates for needless severity: but the interest of the poor, even more immediately than that of the rich, requires that that sort of property which has been attacked and placed in jeopardy should be vigilantly guarded.

    From The Guardian archive > May 9 1829 > Situation of the rioting weavers, G,
    republished 9.5.2007, p. 30, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/05/09/pages/ber30.shtml

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