Thursday, February 11, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010


Another day, another newsbites thread!

On to the Comments...!
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14 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f90bca10-1679-11df-bf44-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate.

What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy – zero interest rates plus quantitative easing – did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect

For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.

Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven”. US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.

* To be continued in the next post...

BILL

February 11, 2010 at 9:53 AM
William R. Barker said...

* Continuing from the previous post...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f90bca10-1679-11df-bf44-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

Even according to the White House’s new budget projections, the gross federal debt in public hands will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years’ time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never.

Explosions of public debt hurt economies in the following way, as numerous empirical studies have shown. By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted – as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.

Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.

But now the Fed is phasing out such purchases and is expected to wind up quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have sharply reduced their purchases of Treasuries from around 47 per cent of new issuance in 2006 to 20 per cent in 2008 to an estimated 5 per cent last year. Small wonder Morgan Stanley assumes that 10-year yields will rise from around 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent this year. On a gross federal debt fast approaching $1,500bn, that implies up to $300bn of extra interest payments – and you get up there pretty quickly with the average maturity of the debt now below 50 months.

The Obama administration’s new budget blithely assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4 per cent. But with rising real rates, growth might well be lower. Under those circumstances, interest payments could soar as a share of federal revenue – from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter.

Last week Moody’s Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers’ killer question (posed before he returned to government): “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”

On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in Greece, the birthplace of western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.

February 11, 2010 at 9:54 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100210/ap_on_bi_ge/us_what_jobs_11

It's a bipartisan jobs bill that would hand President Barack Obama a badly needed political victory and placate Republicans with tax cuts at the same time. But it has a problem: It won't create many jobs.

Even the Obama administration acknowledges the legislation's centerpiece — a tax cut for businesses that hire unemployed workers — would work only on the margins.

As for the bill's effectiveness, tax experts and business leaders said companies are unlikely to hire workers just to receive a tax break. Before businesses start hiring, they need increased demand for their products, more work for their employees and more revenue to pay those workers.

Obama's plan...[would, according to CBO scoring] cost $33 billion. The Senate proposal, which is more narrow...is estimated to cost about $10 billion.

In addition to a tax break for hiring workers, the Senate package would extend unemployment payments for people without jobs for more than six months as well as subsidies to help the jobless continue paying premiums for health insurance they had been getting through their former employers.

It also would extend through 2010 about $33 billion in popular tax breaks that expired at the end of 2009, including an income tax deduction for sales and property taxes and a business tax credit for research and development.

Those tax cuts make Republicans willing participants in the bill, despite skepticism in both parties that it will produce an abundance of jobs.

* AND THUS THE REASON MANY OF US STILL CAN'T TRUST THE GOP. YES, THEY'RE THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS, BUT "LESS" STUPID AND "LESS" IRRESPONSIBLE STILL MEANS... er... STUPID AND IRRESPONSIBLE.

February 11, 2010 at 10:24 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.baynews9.com/content/36/2010/2/10/581592.html

The Polk County (FL) school district is giving away iPods to some parents.

The school district is using the device to reward parents of children with disabilities who fill out a 10-minute online survey. The district wants to know how well it's connecting with the parents and how to get parents involved in their children's education.

The district is spending about $350,000 in federal stimulus money for the iPods.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100211/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bailout_watchdog

Over the next several years, failed commercial real estate loans could litter American cities with empty stores and office complexes, cause hundreds of bank failures and weaken the economy, a watchdog report says.

Banks face up to $300 billion in losses on loans made for commercial property and development, according to a report released Thursday by the Congressional Oversight Panel. The panel monitors the government's efforts to stabilize the financial system.

The report says the defaults could lead to reduced lending and cause the eviction of families from rental properties. Bank failures also could contribute to job losses and hurt the economic recovery.

Small- and mid-size banks have been failing at the fastest rate since the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. The failures are due mostly to bad loans they made for commercial projects.

Banks often lent too much for land and buildings whose prices were inflated by a real estate bubble. They also relied on rosy assumptions about the profitability of retail and office projects and did not consider the possibility of a severe recession.

Commercial property values have fallen more than 40 percent in the past three years, the report notes.

Unlike residential mortgages, commercial loans are refinanced every three to five years. Between 2010 and 2014, about $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans will come due for refinancing, the report says. For nearly half of them, borrowers could struggle to get new financing because they'll owe more than the properties are worth.

The panel criticizes the Treasury Department and bank supervisors for not putting smaller banks through "stress tests" like those done last year on the nation's 19 largest banks. Warren notes that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner resisted calls to conduct public stress tests of smaller banks.

[Even] last year's ["large bank"] tests gauged banks' strength only through 2010. The commercial real estate threat looms largest in 2011 and beyond.

The bipartisan panel is one of three oversight bodies Congress mandated for the bailout at the height of the financial crisis in October 2008. ... The report offers no specific recommendations.

February 11, 2010 at 10:24 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704820904575055413176800990.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

President Obama sold the $862 billion in stimulus spending as "targeted, timely and temporary." Critics said that was highly unlikely, and now the 2011 Obama budget has proven them right.

To wit, the White House is proposing to convert spending sold as a one-time economic boost into a permanent feature of future government growth. As both the Tax Policy Center and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have pointed out, supposedly temporary parts of the stimulus—expansions of the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit and Pell Grants for college students—have now found their way into the budget baseline.

True to the way Mr. Obama has honored his campaign pledge of transparency, this news was buried in a footnote on page 170 of the budget's Analytical Perspectives. [President Obama] chose to smuggle these stimulus items into its definition of the "current policy" baseline and hoped that no one would notice. The Responsible Federal Budget folks estimate that this fiscal sleight-of-hand would cost about $266 billion over 10 years...

The President's budget also asks for $25.5 billion to extend by six months the stimulus Medicaid bailout. The 4.9% federal spending increase was pitched as short-term relief for the states, but the White House seems to be trying to convert it, too, into a permanent part of the fisc. Keep in mind that this is separate from ObamaCare and arrives as the government's share of U.S. health spending crosses the 50% threshold.

Mr. Obama likes to pretend that he is the victim of a budget hit-and-run, as if the projected $1.3 trillion deficit in 2011 is all the fault of his predecessor. But President Bush didn't force the White House to request 1.8% of GDP more in new spending in 2011 than it did in 2010. Nor did Mr. Bush force the White House to assume that the stimulus transfer payments it created will be paid out into perpetuity.

What these budget details really show is that the stimulus was always more about promoting liberal policies than spurring economic recovery...

February 11, 2010 at 11:26 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704140104575057163247687930.html

[Republican Health Insurance/Health Care reform proposals] include allowing small businesses to band together to get the same insurance discounts big companies get, passing tort reform to eliminate junk lawsuits that drive up the price of health care, and enacting reforms that would make health insurance portable for workers. They also include allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines, giving families the same health insurance tax breaks companies get, and empowering patients by making health prices more transparent.

Republicans want Americans to be able to save more money tax free for health-care expenses. Democrats would reduce the existing amount that can be saved tax free, which this year is $3,050 for individuals, and tax people for using their savings to pay for over-the-counter drugs.

Obama claim(s) the legislation he wants [will] allow people to buy health insurance across state lines. But that's not exactly accurate. His approach is to allow states to do what they can already do: pass a law authorizing residents to buy insurance in another state. The problem is that this doesn't create a national market and, in any case, if Washington imposes mandates on what health insurance must cover, there won't be robust competition among insurers.

There are plenty of weaknesses in ObamaCare that Republicans can hone in on. They can point out that 10 years of tax increases and Medicare cuts pay for only four full years of new entitlements and that the projections for savings and tax revenues are based on gimmicks.

They can question whether congressional Democrats will actually cut Medicare by roughly $500 billion, as their bills call for. Why don't Democrats take up these Medicare cuts as a stand-alone bill? Passing such a bill would be a "confidence building measure," as Henry Kissinger might say.

Republicans can ask how Mr. Obama squares his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year with $20 billion in new taxes on medical devices and $80 billion on drugs. Even Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf has admitted in congressional testimony that these taxes will be passed on to patients.

Mr. Obama's demand that insurers be required to cover people with a pre-existing condition is problematic. [TO SAY THE LEAST!] Imposing such a mandate would encourage people to wait until they are sick to buy insurance when what we need to lower costs is more healthy people buying insurance.

In a respectful but pointed tone, Republicans should question the special-interest provisions Democrats used to advance their bills in the House and Senate, such as exempting health plans provided to union members from a tax on Cadillac insurance plans. The public is already outraged by these special deals, and we may not yet know about all of them. For example, commentators first thought only Florida seniors would be protected from cuts in government support for Medicare Advantage policies. But it turns out that Democratic senators in New Jersey and New York won similar protections for seniors in their states.

February 11, 2010 at 11:27 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/02/10/dr-frankenstein-on-his-creation-its-all-the-monsters-fault/

[S]upporters of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) – which would end federal guaranteed student loans, turn everything into lending direct from Uncle Sam, and spend the resulting savings and way much more — have often shamelessly promoted the bill as a boon to taxpayers when it will almost certainly cost them tens-of-billions.

* See -- http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/09/14/full-house-to-vote-on-lie-of-a-bill/

The bill that sponsor George Miller (D-CA) shamelessly says will be a taxpayer-money saver continues to be exposed as very much the opposite.

Miller has been touting SAFRA as legislation that would fund all kinds of new or expanded federal programs while allocating $10 billion to deficit reduction. But the CBO has never agreed with that. First, the CBO identified a likely net cost to taxpayers of about $6 billion over ten years, and that was without including any deficit reduction. Then it estimated that SAFRA would cost an additional $33 billion after accounting for lending risk. And now, CBO estimates that the cost of expanding Pell grants could be almost $11 billion greater than originally estimated. If you add all of those things together, the cost of SAFRA has flipped from a promised $10 billion savings to a $50 billion loss.

[T]his just adds to a very clear message about SAFRA: Far from relieving taxpayers, it’s going to deliver yet one more punishing blow.

February 11, 2010 at 2:20 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520815

The Education Department is getting one of its largest spending increases under the president's proposed budget. And what can the country expect in return for all this added spending? Not much.

At a briefing last week, [Secretary of Education] Duncan noted that "the proposed budget," which is exempt from the administration's spending freeze, "also reflects the president's broader commitment to efficiency, cutting red tape and holding ourselves accountable for results."

Sounds like a promise that the taxpayers will be getting something back for the billions the bureaucrats will be spending.

But it's a promise that won't be kept.

History shows us that spending increases do not equate with improved results. Though there are a lot of problems in America's public school system, a lack of funding is not one of them.

The Heritage Foundation says that since 1985, five years after the Education Department was established, "inflation-adjusted federal spending on K-12 education has increased 138%." Yet during that time, enough time for bright minds to put a lot of money to use, "indicators of educational improvement such as increases in academic achievement and graduation rates have remained flat."

Yearly spending on public education, including state and local dollars, on grades kindergarten through 12 is now well beyond a half-trillion dollars. That's a big chunk of the economy. For that amount of money, our kids should be getting far better educations.

But Washington's spending habits are based on politics, not results, and the White House's proposed education spending hike has the rancid smell of a political payoff.

Almost every dollar — 95% — of the $5.4 million that the teachers' unions gave in the 2008 election cycle went to Democrats.

February 11, 2010 at 2:20 PM
William R. Barker said...

* This is a long one - it'll probably have to post it in three parts - but it's worth reading.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/china-cyber-war

When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon—China doesn’t even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar. Attacks—not just from China but from Russia and elsewhere—on America’s electronic networks cost millions of dollars and could in the extreme cause the collapse of financial life, the halt of most manufacturing systems, and the evaporation of all the data and knowledge stored on the Internet.

The cyber threat is the idea that organizations or individuals may be spying on, tampering with, or preparing to inflict damage on America’s electronic networks. Google’s recent announcement of widespread spying “originating from China” brought attention to a problem many experts say is sure to grow. China has hundreds of millions of Internet users, mostly young. In any culture, this would mean a large hacker population; in China, where tight control and near chaos often coexist, it means an Internet with plenty of potential outlaws and with carefully directed government efforts, too. In a report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last year, Northrop Grumman prepared a time line of electronic intrusions and disruptions coming from sites inside China since 1999. In most cases it was impossible to tell whether the activity was amateur or government-planned, the report said. But whatever their source, the disruptions were a problem. And in some instances, the “depth of resources” and the “extremely focused targeting of defense engineering data, US military operational information, and China-related policy information” suggested an effort that would be “difficult at best without some type of state-sponsorship.”

February 11, 2010 at 3:57 PM
William R. Barker said...

* Continuing from previous post...

[N]early everyone in the [cyber security] business believes that we are living in, yes, a pre-9/11 era when it comes to the security and resilience of electronic information systems. Something very big—bigger than the Google-China case—is likely to go wrong, they said, and once it does, everyone will ask how we could have been so complacent for so long. Electronic-commerce systems are already in a constant war against online fraud. “The real skill to running a successful restaurant has relatively little to do with producing delicious food and a lot to do with cost and revenue management,” an official of an Internet commerce company told me, asking not to be named. “Similarly, the real business behind PayPal, Google Checkout, and other such Internet payment systems is fraud and risk management,” since the surge of attempted electronic theft is comparable to the surge of spam through e-mail networks.

“Cyber crime is not conducted by some 15-year-old kids experimenting with viruses,” Eugene Spafford, a computer scientist at Purdue, who is one of the world’s leading cyber-security figures [states]. It is well-funded and pursued by mature individuals and groups of professionals with deep financial and technical resources, often with local government (or other countries’) toleration if not support. It is already responsible for billions of dollars a year in losses, and it is growing and becoming more capable. We have largely ignored it, and building our military capabilities is not responding to that threat.

With financial, medical, legal, intellectual, logistic, and every other sort of information increasingly living in “the cloud,” the consequences of collapse or disruption are unpleasant to contemplate. A forthcoming novel, Directive 51, by John Barnes, does indeed contemplate them, much as in the 1950s Nevil Shute imagined the world after nuclear war in On the Beach. Barnes’s view of the collapse of financial life (after all, our “assets” consist mostly of notations in banks’ computer systems), the halt of most manufacturing systems, the evaporation of the technical knowledge that now exists mainly in the cloud, and other consequences is so alarming that the book could draw attention in a way no official report can.

Next, the authorities stressed that Chinese organizations and individuals were a serious source of electronic threats—but far from the only one, or perhaps even the main one. You could take this as good news about U.S.-China relations, but it was usually meant as bad news about the problem as a whole. “The Chinese would be in the top three, maybe the top two, leading problems in cyberspace,” James Lewis, a former diplomat who worked on security and intelligence issues and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, [says]. “They’re not close to being the primary problem, and there is debate about whether they’re even number two.” Number one in his analysis is Russia, through a combination of state, organized-criminal, and unorganized-individual activity. Number two is Israel—and there are more on the list. “The French are notorious for looking for economic advantage through their intelligence system,” [according to] Ed Giorgio, who has served as the chief code maker and chief code breaker for the National Security Agency. “The Israelis are notorious for looking for political advantage. We have seen Brazil emerge as a source of financial crime, to join Russia, which is guilty of all of the above.” Interestingly, no one suggested that international terrorist groups—as opposed to governments, corporations, or “normal” criminals—are making significant use of electronic networks to inflict damage on Western targets, although some groups rely on the Internet for recruitment, organization, and propagandizing.

* To be continued...

February 11, 2010 at 3:58 PM
William R. Barker said...

* 3rd of three postings

This led to another, more surprising theme: that the main damage done to date through cyberwar has involved not theft of military secrets nor acts of electronic sabotage but rather business-versus-business spying. Some military secrets have indeed leaked out, the most consequential probably being those that would help the Chinese navy develop a modern submarine fleet. And many people said that if the United States someday ended up at war against China—or Russia, or some other country—then each side would certainly use electronic tools to attack the other’s military and perhaps its civilian infrastructure. But short of outright war, the main losses have come through economic espionage. “You could think of it as taking a shortcut on the ‘D’ of R&D,” research and development, one former government official said. “When you create a new product, a competitor can cherry-pick the good parts and introduce a competitive product much more rapidly than he could otherwise.” Another technology expert, who serves on government advisory boards, [added], when referring to the steady loss of technological advantage, “We should not forget that it was China where ‘death by a thousand cuts’ originated.” I heard of instances of Western corporate officials who arrived for negotiations in China and realized too late that their briefing books and internal numbers were already known by the other side. (In the same vein: security officials [when asked] whether the laptops and BlackBerry used [by foreigners] while living in China would have been bugged in some way, the answers were variations on “Of course,” with the “you idiot” left unsaid.)

The final theme was that even though these cyber concerns are not confined to China, the Chinese aspects do deserve consideration on their own, because China’s scale, speed of growth, and complex relationship with the United States make it a unique case. Hackers in Russia or Israel might be more skillful one by one, but with its huge population China simply has more of them. The French might be more aggressive in searching for corporate secrets, but their military need not simultaneously consider how to stop the Seventh Fleet. According to Mike McConnell, everything about China’s military planning changed after its leaders saw the results of U.S. precision weapons in the first Gulf War. “They were shocked,” he told me. “They had no idea warfare had progressed to that point, and they went on a crash course to take away our advantage.” This meant both building their own information systems—thus China’s aspiration to create a Beidou (the Chinese name for the Big Dipper) system of satellites comparable to America’s GPS—and being prepared in time of war to “attack what they see as our soft underbelly, our military’s dependence on networking,” as McConnell put it, noting the vast emerging PLA literature on defending and attacking data networks.

Ed Giorgio, formerly of the NSA, has prepared charts showing the points of “asymmetric advantage” China might have over the long run in such competition. Point nine on his 12-point chart: “They know us much better than we know them (virtually every one of their combatants reads English and virtually none of ours read Mandarin. This, in itself, will surely precipitate a massive intelligence failure).”

February 11, 2010 at 3:59 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/11/the_fight_for_responsible_limited_government.html

[By Mark Davis, columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Radio Host]

The Tea Party movement is not a nascent third party. Most tea partiers know that splitting the voters looking for less spending and lower taxes is a guarantee of more domination by Democrats with no interest in either.

The Tea Party movement is not "anti-tax." It is against confiscatory taxes, outlandish taxes, excessive taxes - choose your adjective. But this "anti-tax" nonsense is the same kind of obnoxious slander as calling people who favor strong borders "anti-immigration."

The Tea Party movement is not driven by social conservatism. That doesn't mean you won't find plenty of tea partiers who are devout advocates of protecting the unborn and traditional marriage - it's just that the Tea Party engine is driven first and foremost by a desire to return government to its proper constitutional limits and run it with a lot less money. Anyone driven by that passion is welcome in any roomful of tea partiers, no matter what views they may hold about God and gays.

That is, by the way, part of why the movement is so strong. If it were to adopt some litmus tests for admittedly important social issues, it would see its ranks dwindle mightily. Electing people to bring back fiscal sanity in 2010 and 2012 will require the help of millions of voters who may be centrist, libertarian or even socially liberal. How do you think Scott Brown won in Massachusetts?

Finally, the Tea Party movement is not some subculture of bug-eyed lunatics. Any political movement is going to have some characters ranging from colorful to occasionally unhinged, but the insulting tone of much of the coverage of the movement would have you believe that these are fringe extremists who could snap at any moment.

The people drifting toward the Tea Party movement are not extreme. They are, in fact, fighting extremism - the extremism that has brought us a government that takes far too much, spends far too much and runs our lives far too much.

At long last, people who might disagree on a number of other things are uniting in a fight for strong but limited government, run responsibly and frugally. It took Democrats and Republicans to create this mess, and entrenched members of both parties could soon find themselves back in the private sector if the enthusiasm of tea parties and town halls carries all the way to the November elections.

With participants from so many walks of life, and no rigid structure or leadership, it can be a challenge to define exactly what the Tea Party movement is. But I'll tell you one more thing that it is not: It is not going away.

February 11, 2010 at 3:59 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/David-R.-Francis/2010/0208/Big-banks-are-too-big-and-unproductive

The American financial industry has become too big for its britches.

And that bloated growth has not contributed much to the real economy in the past two decades, some economists hold.

Indeed, it is "making the mainstream economy harder to function," says Ann Lee, a finance professor at New York University. Before the financial crisis, a huge portion of Wall Street had become a kind of giant casino, with traders raking in huge profits at the expense of investors such as pension funds, mutual funds, etc. Instead of just taking savers' bank deposits and loaning them to business for productive activity, financial firms were creating trillions of dollars of shaky financial paper – derivatives – that provided rich fees to reward the paper pushers. "A hundred trillion [dollars] of worthless activity," says Ms. Lee.

Already by the late 1990s [during the Clinton administration], total borrowing by the financial sector was high by historical standards: equivalent to 54 percent of the gross domestic product, the nation's output of goods and services.

By 2007 [Bush administration], the borrowing amounted to 117 percent of GDP...

Something similar happened in Britain. Some of the financial industry's growth was illusory, according to Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England. Like former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and President Obama, he has called for splitting up big banks. He says they should break off their higher-risk trading and investment banking wings from their government-guaranteed, deposit-taking business.

* I AGREE.

[Professor Lee] wants regulators to limit the leverage of investment banks. Instead of being able to borrow and invest 30 or 40 times their owned capital, they should be limited to perhaps 12 times their capital, she says.

In general, Wall Street advocates argue that some speculation is needed to provide market "liquidity" – enough buyers and sellers to move large quantities of stocks and bonds quickly when an order is received. Conservatives, wary of more regulation, also tend to support the status quo.

Lee, however, maintains that the five "too big to fail" US banks have such a large proportion of buying and selling orders that their traders have an unfair information advantage in the market. There is not enough competition.

* AGAIN... I AGREE.

February 11, 2010 at 3:59 PM
Rodak said...

"strong but limited government"

A pretty good description of an oligarchy. Or a Central Committee. Or any "inner circle"...e.g.--Hitler and a few of his closest friends.

February 12, 2010 at 8:25 AM

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