Imagine a true free market,what would have happened?
This is the LOGICAL SCENARIO:
1) the banks who received the bail-outs failed
2)the self-correcting power of free markets fixed everything
3)???? everyone profits
Let's break this down. Keep in mind Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, and Countrywide- all the major banks- were insolvent. 734 banks received TARP funds.
In your scenario, we let these banks all fail. Banks that hold a majority of all the personal- and a huge number of the commercial- accounts in the US.
So then what? Either all accounts up to the maximum covered under FDIC are repaid to the account holders, via the FDIC- which had been massively underfunded. So where does the government get the money to repay all those accounts? Borrowing and revenue; i.e. from the taxpayer. The only plus is that the banks weren't rewarded for being too-big-to-fail. The downside is instead of loaning hundreds of billions, you just simply paid it out. Plus your infrastructure for mortgages, lending, banking, and business just collapsed. So there's that little problem.
The other scenario- where Libertarians take control and rescind FDIC insurance- in that scenario most of the US just lost everything they had in the banks. Including most businesses. Now what?
The US economy is largely dependent on consumer spending. Consumers depend on getting paid from their jobs. All surety that you will get paid? Gone. All reason to spend on anything but essentials? Gone. Reasons to employ people to make products no one is buying? None. The economy would actually collapse. Unemployment far beyond the Great Depression.
Your plan is to implode demand, crush businesses, and beat the weakened economy to death.
So now let's talk about, "the self-correcting power of the free markets."
First, of course, we have to make-believe free markets ever existed or that one existed in the US. Take your time, you may need to drink a lot first, or suffer some head trauma to get there.
Okay. Are you drunk enough? Great. Poof! The US now has a free market. Free market! Save us!
Well, let's see, new banks will spring up to compete on a level playing field and vie to hold your money for you.
Only no one has any money. Nor any jobs. No would-be banker can get a loan to start a would-be bank. Who is issuing credit in an economy that makes the Great Depression look like good times? Why would I need to put my bartered cabbages in a bank, anyway?
The invisible hand is not your friend.
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Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian
What happened:
1)Big Government pushed for the bail-out,Obama and Keynesian economics(Krugman,DeLong,Stiglitz...all usual suspects)were the Master-head behind this
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008.
You have got to be shitting me. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson built the plan, and George Bush signed it into law. In October 2008- before the presidential election had even been held. Also, please call the Keynesian economists and let them know they have some influence in this or the last administration, because it will definitely be news to them. Both administrations have roundly rejected their policy suggestions, or massively underfunded stimulus at best.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian
2)The banks were forced to accept the bailout and make more risks
The banks certainly made public mouth noises about how they didn't really need the money and they were only taking it because they had to, blah blah. The thing is, the banks were lying. Bloomberg, Nov 2011:
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The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
...>snip<... Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.
‘Motivate Others’
JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.
The banks weren't forced into this, nor forced to take risks. The fact that they are still overexposed after paying back the TARP funds, still deal in derivatives, in sub-prime mortgages, and still play with other people's money in risky markets is their choice. Every attempt to curb this has been lobbied against by the banks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian
3)?????economics failure
There were many failures of the bank bail out. I still think that it was better than letting the banks fail; the main problem is that the too-big-to-fail banks all came out of the collapse even bigger, still underwritten so that they retain private profit on public risk, and still have outsized risks:
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NEW YORK — Moody’s Investors Service has lowered the credit ratings on some of the world’s biggest banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, reflecting concern over their exposure to the violent swings in global financial markets.
The downgrades late Thursday ultimately are a measure of Moody’s view on the ability of the banks to repay their debts.
As well the bailout did little for the homeowners impacted, and was a bandage on a larger problem.
It would have been less of a moral hazard and cost to the public if the government had instead bailed out or bought the sub-prime mortgages and underwater mortgages and repackaged them, and forgave some debt. That would have saved homeowners and shored up the banks, who would no longer be holding toxic assets. It would have been much better if the last two administrations had prosecuted the numerous instances of actual criminal fraud by investment banks, instead of what has happened: no significant prosecutions, and Obama's Administration letting the clock run out. If we seriously wanted to prevent this from happening again, we would have reinstated Glass-Steagall, and regulated the massive derivatives market. And we would have required the too-big-to-fail banks to split until they were no longer too-big-to-fail gorillas holding our economy hostage.
But back to your economics failure: this again goes back to the failure to recognize austerity as anything but a downward spiral of decreased demand, decreased revenues, and increased hardship, repeated over and over. Our economy is in bad shape. It could be a lot better. But there is no Libertarian economic policy that is helping. Instead Libertarian tropes about regulation being the problem and the faux-meritocracy of wealth are instead hurting the economy and drawing out the depression.
black markets are true free markets because there is 0 government government intervention
suppose you meet an illegal immigrant and you buy something from him illegally: that is free market
the child with a lemonade stand who sell a cup of lemonade for 0.25€: free market
You're conflating an example of an economic transaction with an entire economic system. One that doesn't exist, that no country has used.
You're also conflating black market with free market. In a black market, I can buy cigarettes without paying tax, or maybe I can buy stolen goods or drugs; or maybe I can hire a thug to burn down my competitor, or a hit man to do murder; is the black market a level playing field where competitors vie for trade, and people who are poor businesspeople are automatically sorted by the market? It is definitely fucking not.
They believe you can change human nature. They believe in the old Savage Myth that "oooh people are born good,capitalism makes them greedy and nasty". IT IS NOT. People are greedy and nasty because it is human nature to care only for themself and some family members and few friends and fuck everyone else.
OPEN A FUCKING HISTORY OR ECONOMICS BOOK.
FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM IS THE ONLY SYSTEM COHERENT WITH HUMAN NATURE
So give greedy nasty people free reign, and somehow they'll create a harmless, violence free and corruption free marketplace? Is that how you think it works?
so if you tax the rich they will simply stop to produce for all of us
More stupidity.
New York City (and state) have some of the highest taxes in the entire USA. Why do so many rich people live and work there?
Do you even stop for 10 seconds to test-drive these little gems of wisdom you spout, to see if they pass the real-world sniff test?
Also, this proving that the rich will *not* simply stop working, as AML mindlessly repeats:
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Higher Taxes Won’t Discourage Wealthy From Working Harder
By Rich Miller - May 1, 2012
Atlas won’t shrug.
That’s the view of economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty: They argue higher taxes will not discourage the wealthy from working harder or slow the economy, unlike in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” Its hero, John Galt, led a strike by industrialists and others against the government, partly because they thought they were too highly taxed.
“Top 1 percent earners now make 20 times the average, while they made only 10 times the average in the 1970s,” Saez, winner of the John Bates Clark young economist award in 2009, said in an e-mail. “If they worked hard then, they should continue working hard today, even if they are taxed at 50 percent.” The top federal tax rate is now 35 percent.
[...]
'Just Crazy’
“The idea that we need to pay people many millions of euros per year to get them to work harder is just crazy,” Piketty said in a telephone interview.
He and Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California-Berkeley, agreed in a November 2011 paper that the rich do behave differently when their taxes are raised. They pursue financial strategies to reduce their taxable incomes and bargain for higher compensation, instead of cutting back on how much they work and save or becoming less entrepreneurial.
Peter Diamond, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in economics, also sees little evidence that raising rates on the top 1 percent of income earners -- households making about $350,000 or more a year in 2010 -- would restrict growth.
‘Overwhelming Likelihood’
“The overwhelming likelihood is that the revenue- maximizing federal tax rate is somewhere in the 50 to 70 percent range,” said Diamond, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “If you are reluctant to overshoot, well okay, you can only go up to 50 percent, which I like to refer to as the Reagan tax rate.”
And this proving that the rich also don't flee higher-tax states:
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But two new studies show there is little evidence that the rich flee high-tax states.
"Taxes [have] essentially no impact on causing people to leave a state," says Jeff Thompson, of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In a study tracking 18 years of migration between states in New England, Thompson found that people mostly move for job-related reasons. They go where the jobs are, regardless of whether it's low-tax New Hampshire or higher-tax Maine.
"If you're living in a state and your tax bill goes up by a thousand or two thousand dollars," he says, "that ... pales in comparison to what it would cost you to actually move. And it might not be worth it to have to be farther away from your job, farther away from your friends."
And Thompson says the stickiness of where you live is just as strong for those with higher incomes. In fact, they often have bigger houses, and businesses they can't move, and more ties to a community.
__________________ In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...
I picked out one section to highlight below because it is a good point and generally not connected to what is happening in media reports about Europe or here. It may apply equally to the austerity thread.
Bolding and any transcription errors below are my own.
Yves Smith goes on to say that the culture of Wall Street was formerly of the attitude that while you certainly wanted to maximize returns, you did not want to do that at the expense of "killing the golden goose." But this has changed to a much more predatory model, and in her estimation this is largely related to the massive expansion of the derivatives markets which are extremely complex and ideal for hiding predatory profiteering that destroys the clients, and with it the structures and systems many depend on.
The greeks,spain and italian are are the most corrupted countries in the EURO ZONE
the problem is the GOVERNMENT and the population of these countries,not some fucking conspiracy theory
__________________
"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."(Murray N.Rothbard)
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."(Ayn Rand)
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"(Margaret Thatcher)
You're oversimplifying. National economies and governments are not household budgets, nor should they be run like one. Macroeconomics and the printing of currency are not included in your piggy-bank analysis.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian
and stop blaming the banks
Do you have specific examples of what caused the debt crisis? What caused the housing bubble and collapse? Because so far you've failed to even identify the timeline correctly, let alone the players.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian
The greeks,spain and italian are are the most corrupted countries in the EURO ZONE
the problem is the GOVERNMENT and the population of these countries,not some fucking conspiracy theory
Investment banks committed fraud. They sold financial instruments that they knew were a massive liability, and they unloaded them as fast as they could on their clients. In many cases they took out huge bets against these financial instruments, that they were telling their clients to buy. In specific cases banks helped profiteers sell instruments that were clearly built of the most toxic, shakiest, most inaccurately rated CDOs, purposefully built to fail, on which they knew the architects had taken out massive positions against, in which they would hugely profit by the failure. It is not conspiracy theory. It is factual.
The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich "consuming" countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn "producing" nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.
These countries had 10. Until the banking crisis took it all way and gave them -5.
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and stop blaming the banks
The banks are the ones who caused the crisis.
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The greeks,spain and italian are are the most corrupted countries in the EURO ZONE
No, they aren't.
Quote:
the problem is the GOVERNMENT and the population of these countries,not some fucking conspiracy theory
If banks lie about the quality of their investments, collude with the ratings agencies, and then sell those investments to unsuspecting buyers, then they have committed fraud.
Ordinarily self-confessed libertarians care about such things as fraud. Except when it's inconvenient to do so.
__________________ In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...
They reject the science of economics(chomsky once said that economics is a pseudoscience),the science of Psychology(Foucault blame psycologists for all the evil in the world),of evolutionary psychology
We've already covered your poor understanding of whether economics is a soft science or hard science. It is soft. And I have no idea what the fuck evolutionary psychology is.
Many hardcore libertarian economists (I regularly listen to Russ Roberts, for example) are painfully aware that economic is not a hard science, especially macroeconomics.
They would very much like it to be, and strive very hard to make it as formal as they can, but there are limitations to what you can do.
So banks lend each other money. They have a way to set the rate for that; one of the primary means is LIBOR.
Quote:
Libor is derived from a survey of banks conducted each day on behalf of the British Bankers’ Association in London. Lenders are asked how much it would cost them to borrow from each other for 15 different periods, from overnight to one year, in currencies including dollars, euros, yen and Swiss francs. After a set number of quotes are excluded, those remaining are averaged and published for each currency by the BBA before noon.
Another similar means of establishing borrowing rates is the EUROBOR, which essentially does the same thing for Eurozone banks.
Why is LIBOR and EUROBOR important? A massive portion of investments are pegged to these daily figures. If one were to manipulate those figures, this would impact the amount of earnings worldwide.
Barclays Plc (BARC)’s record $451 million fines for interest rate manipulation sent bank shares plunging as U.S. and U.K. authorities pursue sanctions in a global investigation of more than a dozen lenders.
Barclays shares slid as much as 18 percent. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne called for a criminal probe amid speculation that lenders could face billions of dollars in lawsuits, while Prime Minister David Cameron called on Chief Executive Officer Robert Diamond to show accountability.
Traders at the U.K.’s second-biggest bank by assets routinely coordinated with counterparts from at least four other banks in an attempt to move interest rate benchmarks, according to documents released yesterday by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.K. Financial Services Authority. The benchmarks included the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and Euribor, a related euro- denominated rate. In both cases, the goal was to generate profits on derivatives held by the banks, the agencies said.
This is unbelievable, shocking stuff. A sizable chunk of the world’s adjustable-rate investment vehicles are pegged to Libor, and here we have evidence that banks were tweaking the rate downward to massage their own derivatives positions. The consequences for this boggle the mind. For instance, almost every city and town in America has investment holdings tied to Libor. If banks were artificially lowering the rates to beef up their trading profiles, that means communities all over the world were cheated out of ungodly amounts of money.
The CFTC order mentions $350 trillion of OTC swaps, $10 trillion of loans, and $437 trillion of CME eurodollar contracts indexed to Libor alone.
I don't know how to wrap my head around the idea that there are hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives in the first place, but then let's find out that banks are fucking with the returns on most of them so they can personally profit on their derivatives portfolio. And not just Barclays, by any means. Investigators are also looking at West LB, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Canada, Norinchukin Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Rabobank, and UBS. Every indicator is that a good number of these banks were violating the Sherman Act in colluding to manipulate rates.
Looks like the losses for JPMorgan Chase that were going to be $2 or $3 billion on their huge gambling and losses-smoothing operation? More likely $4-$6 billion.
I don't know if this specifically belongs in the Banks thread, but Jon Corzine has still not been charged after eight months; in fact no one has been charged from MFGlobal, and customers are still out a substantial portion of the $1.6 billion that MFGlobal stole from their accounts. Edith O'Brien pleaded the fifth and Corzine and his CFOs are all about how they didn't know customer funds could have been ripped off until a few hours before declaring bankruptcy. "We're not criminals! We're incompetents! This is really complex and beyond the ken of mortal man! No one could have known!"
It is positively goddamn crickets from the Justice Department.
LONDON — Marcus Agius, the chairman of Barclays, resigned on Monday, less than a week after the big British bank agreed to pay $450 million to settle accusations that it had tried to manipulate key interest rates to benefit its own bottom line.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has sacked four of its traders over their alleged role in the Libor-fixing scandal, sources said.
The revelation comes after the bank, which is backed by taxpayers' money, confirmed it is being investigated for allegedly manipulating the rates at which banks lend to each other.
Two of the traders were removed from their posts in October and a third the following month. RBS has not commented on the sackings, although initial reports suggested that ten traders had been removed from their posts.
I'd like better info than "sources said," and that two were fired in October, one in November, and the fourth isn't explained; it is not clear that the reasons the unnamed were even fired was in relation to Libor.
It does appear that the Libor and Eurobor price-fixing is expanding into a full-scale scandal in the UK. And the 15 other banks beyond RBS and Barclays haven't had their roles exposed yet.
Once again, this is obviously just a few bad apples, and there is no reason whatsoever to conclude that huge multinational banks and financial firms have anything other than your best interests at heart. Certainly nothing to suggest that they exercise a malignant and near-total dominion over the global economy that is entirely disproportionate to their social utility. And it would be most job-killingly inappropriate even to consider anything other than continuing to roll back job-killing regulations, because the government just should not prevent private sector job-creators from engaging in constant and globally destructive rapine, because of jobs.
Marcus Agius, the chairman of Barclays, is really just a scapegoat. Most of the public had never heard of him till he resigned. The man who's run Barclays in recent years, is Bob Diamond.
We're still waiting to see his head on a stick him resign and retire to a life of luxury with a huge cash lump sum and unbelievably generous pension.
Re: Official fuck the banks thrad
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