Folks-
Back in October I had a letter posted in the New York Times about a bunch of people in Los Angeles who were fired by a clothing company because they could not prove that they were here legally. My letter was in favor of the firings, which could probably lead to some confusion for people, since I seem unfailingly liberal, and it has been a stereotype that liberals love illegal aliens for some reason.
Here's the deal: I don't hate immigrants. I do very much differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants. My wife is from the Philippines, and came here legally. We were married in Manila almost 14 years ago. At least in part, due to the Republicans shutting down the government several times that year, it took 13 months to bring her here to this country. That was a royal pain, but it was done legally. We later were able to bring both my mother-in-law and sister-in-law here legally. The government's metering of immigrants helps to make sure that our job market is not oversaturated. Why would this be of any interest to me? Because when the job market is oversaturated, as it is now, salaries suffer and we see companies, like the one I work for, start pressuring managers into firing experienced employees in order to hire cheaper inexperienced ones (I'm not joking.) In short, allowing unfiltered and unmetered immigration into this country, even in good times, means a kind of constant recession for our labor force, and in a recession things become depressionlike.
By setting some kind of basic employer sanctions for hiring illegal immigrants we help our economy. Yes, I know that many conservatives will claim that by lowering payroll we improve the economy, but there is absolutely no truth to that myth. The economy of the United States is NOT a Capitalist economy, it is a Consumerist economy. Without consumers buying the items sold by corporations you cannot support those corporations. No amount of capital sunk into a corporation will save it if consumers can't or won't buy it's products. And employees are the consumers.
So, illegal immigrants are saturating the jobs market and depressing the average income in the country, which decreases buying power of the consumers and contributes to a depressed economy. Got it?
In addition, there's the safety issue. My family didn't put themselves or anyone else at risk when they came here, which can't be said of illegal immigrants crossing the Sonoran Desert, many of whom die each year out there. Why would someone risk their lives to come here? Is it the health care system? Are you kidding? How about the welfare? Not eligable. Could it be the income they can get here, even depressed as it is, is still better than what they could get at home? Bingo.
So, what is the best way to keep these people from risking death and depressing our economy? Employer sanctions are the key. If nobody will hire you once you've gotten here, why bother coming? Canada does it and has no serious illegal immigrant problem. Is it possible to emulate a system that works?
Maybe, if the firings in Los Angeles are any indication.
[12-16-2009] Paul Krugman has blogged about a proposed decrease in minimum wage and it's likely effects over at the New York Times. Very timely.
-Ed Smallwood
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Going against the CW
I should mention to you that I probably write three blog/diary entries for every one I post. One common reason for not posting something I’ve written is that the situation I was writing about has changed. The other common reason is because I’ve lost interest in the subject. I would guess that eventually my hard drive is going to become clogged with unfinished blog entries. I do expect to finish this entry, because it’s important to me personally. [Note: I was pretty much finished writing this entry a month ago, but because I lost my internet connection during my self-imposed editing period, I have not been able to post it until now.]
If you read my bio you’ll notice I’m a manager at a large movie theater in
One of my personal traits that often causes me trouble is that I’m pretty good at focusing on what needs to be done now to the detriment of things that need to be done later. Short description: I procrastinate a lot. I’m especially bad about paperwork. This doesn’t necessarily make either my boss or my employees happy. It’s probably a good thing I don’t do hiring at my location, because we’d probably only have three employees and a hamster running the place if it was up to me to get the paperwork done.
My boss had to give me a deadline to get my employee reviews finished because I was procrastinating like heck about getting them done. However, I did get to thinking about it a lot.
I tend to follow the New York Times. I find that the economic coverage is quite good, especially Paul Krugman’s work. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that we’re in an economic “downturn,” which is the tepid way of saying that the economy is going down in flames at the moment. For once (make note) I’m not going to assign blame to any politician or political party, okay. This might be the only time, so pay attention. This has affected the theater where I work in surprising ways. I wouldn’t have been more than marginally aware of them if I hadn’t been paying attention.
Several of the major theater chains have gotten together in a consortium to borrow money in order to buy digital 3D projectors for their theaters. Often banks will be more willing to lend money to consortiums, thinking there’s less of a likelihood of them defaulting on the debt if you have several of the majors involved. This hasn’t completely been the case this time. Although the banks have loaned some money to the theaters for digital 3D roll-outs, the theaters have had to cut back on the rate of installs because the banks just aren’t willing to loan as much as the theaters need for the ambitious plans they had. Dreamworks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg is definitely aware of this if industry emails are to be believed, and is trying to get the banks more motivated into loaning the money.
If you’ve read some of my past entries, such as the one about my financial situation (which hasn’t changed much at this time,) you’ve probably read my speculations that bankers are so freaked out about the economy that they’re just psychologically shutting down. To me it seems that they’ve traded out years of a “lend any amount of money to anyone, regardless of ability to pay!” attitude to replace it with a “don’t lend anything to anyone, regardless of who, why, or ability to pay!” attitude. They don’t seem to realize that neither attitude is going to help them. You can’t make money as a lending institution if you lend it out to people who don’t repay it, or if you refuse to lend it out to people who can. Basically, bankers, and a whole lot of other businesspeople have decided to hunker down, save as much as they possibly can, and hope for the best. They can hardly be expected to do differently, since the common wisdom (or CW) says that’s what you’re supposed to do. Professor Krugman calls this “Irving Fisher’s theory of debt deflation.” In his blog at the New York Times, he says: “As everyone tries to work off excessive debt, the combination of a contracting economy and falling prices puts everyone deeper in the hole.”
Professon Krugman describes this more fully in his editorial in the New York Times on Monday, Februrary 16th, 2009:
And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.
The CW also says that movie theaters tend to thrive in bad economic times. People want to go out for entertainment, and if concerts and other promotions get to be too expensive, well, movies are still a good bargain. There has been some speculation that this time is different, that people will instead stay home and watch TV on their new big-screen HDTVs. I decided to analyze our box office for the month of January for both 2008 and 2009 a little while ago on a lark. In fact, I didn’t even have a reason in my mind for doing so other than I found out how easy it was to do it a few weeks ago while playing around with the company software in the office. My discovery was that, at least for our location, the CW was right. Year on year we saw a significant increase in attendance and box office gross. I feel that I can’t say exactly how much the increase was, but the percentage difference was in the low double digits. This is remarkable to me considering how much weaker I feel the movies were this January over last (that’s just my opinion.) I’m at least partly attributing the increase to having two different 3D titles that month at our theater. The industry as a whole is also reporting a record month this last January, so I know it’s not just us. Also, the increase isn’t just in gross or net income, it’s in overall attendance as well, so we know more people are coming to see movies.
So, in my opinion, and with the limited data I have at hand, the bankers are making a bad decision in deciding not to loan more money to the theater chains to install these projectors.
Reading the New York Times online has gotten me thinking a bit differently about how my actions affect things and people around me, especially the economy. As I started working on my employee reviews I found that I had to make a choice about how much of a raise I was going to give them. My opinion has been, and this is just my opinion, that if someone is doing a bad enough job that they don’t deserve a raise at all, I should fire them. That means that everyone I give a review to gets some kind of a raise. Confronted with the information above I had to then make a decision on how much of a raise to give my people.
The theater is doing pretty well right now, but that could change if the economic situation gets worse and people decide to stay home and watch TV. So, it might make sense to lower the minimum raise amount I give my employees so we can save payroll in case of a downturn in receipts later this year or next.
But what effect would giving my employees a smaller raise have?
My employees tend to be younger. Most are college age (with some of them going to college, and many not), with a few high-school age employees (some going to school, some not), and a few of them shooting for retirement. What is likely to become of the extra money my employees make?
The ones that are retirement bound are likely to save the extra money, or use it to pay off debts. That’s not such a bad thing. If they save the money in bank accounts, that means the banks have more money to work with which is likely to calm them a bit. They are just a little bit more likely to start lending money out.
Well, the ones that are high-school or college age are likely to spend that money for the most part. That money doesn’t disappear. It is mostly going to go into the local economy. That could mean that some local businesses that may be on the brink of bankruptcy, especially restaurants near the theater, may avoid that fate. Their employees could keep their jobs and continue to see movies at my theater.
That’s a big plus for my company.
So, what did I decide to do? I decided to increase the raise I gave to my employees by a lot. The employee that did the worst (which isn’t saying much since I have a good staff right now) is going to get a larger raise than I gave to my best employee last year. My best employee is getting a raise nearly twice what they got last year. And now my employees are going to have more money to plunge into the local economy. In addition I hired more employees in my department to deal with upcoming movies.
And this year the company changed from yearly reviews to biannual reviews, so in six more months I’m going to be doing this all over again. So, even if I go back to my usual raise amounts they’ll have gotten a nice one already this year. But hopefully I won’t have to, especially for the sake of the new employees I’m hiring who will be getting their first reviews at that time.
Here’s the thing, though. Even if I do this, and it has a small stimulative effect on my local economy, it’s not going to be enough to really get the economy out of the doldrums. One theater can’t stimulate the economy by itself. In order for this to have much of an effect more people will have to do the same thing. I’m sure there are a lot of middle managers out there who, like me, only have spending authority over their employee payroll and maybe some petty cash. Those of us that are looking at a good year, which should include almost all movie theater managers, should strongly think about increasing the amount that we pay our employees. If we don’t, we risk Irving Fisher’s theory coming back to bite us.
Sources:
Paul Krugman’s Editorial, Monday, Feb. 16th, 2009: “Decade at Bernie’s”, link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/opinion/16krugman.html?_r=1
Paul Krugman’s Blog, Sunday, Feb. 15th, 2009: “Debt in Wartime”, link: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/debt-in-wartime/
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Republican Hypocrisy Continues…
I’m going to keep this one short. I’ve got a much longer post that will be coming soon (I was working on the longer post, but a computer failure brought it to a standstill for over a week.)
On February 25th, the New York Times published an article on how the Democrats wanted to push the President’s agenda forward. In response, Mr. John Boehner (pronounced “BAYnor” not “BOHner”, no matter how much we wish it were), the MINORITY leader of the House, said the following at a meeting with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor:
You’ve all heard all the talk about fiscal responsibility. And based on everything I’ve seen, it looks like the era of big government is back. My questions for my Democratic colleagues are how are you going to pay for this?
My questions for Mr. Boehner are these: Why didn’t you show one tiny little bit of fiscal responsibility in the six years that the Republicans had control of all three branches of the federal government? Why did you let Mr. Bush increase the size of our government more than any previous President, even Mr. Reagan? Why didn’t you oppose the largest deficit in the history of the country, more than all previous Presidents combined? Why did you spend using credit like there was no tomorrow while decreasing revenue (taxes) for six straight years, and what did you expect the outcome to be?
And last, but not least, what makes you think you or your party have any credibility at this point?
New York Times article:
Democrats Vow Swift Action on Obama’s Agenda, By CARL HULSE
Published: February 25, 2009. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/us/politics/26web-obama.html?hp
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Bad Assumptions—“The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace” Edition
Folks-
It’s past time to go over some of the bad assumptions that have been made that allowed some of us to make bad decisions, and why these assumptions are so wrong. I’ll tackle two of the biggest ones in this essay.
For several years now I’ve been saying that Communists and Free-Marketeers (often Neo-Cons) make the exact same fundamental error in their respective basic assumptions. Both are great theories, but completely fail in real life. They fail because they both make the assumption that everyone will do what is best for everyone all the time, instead of taking advantage of anyone, and that policing is not necessary. Communists claim that the government, once in control of the marketplace, will police itself. Oddly, Free-Marketeers claim that once the government gets out of the marketplace, the marketplace will police itself. Both are completely, and very obviously, wrong.
The big problem with a completely free market, and Adams’ “Invisible Hand of the Marketplace,” is that it requires transparency in order to work. If you have no policing mechanism, or one that is ineffective for any one of dozens of reasons, then all you need is one person near the top, or a few lower down, to be dishonest or incompetent to bring the entire system down. Just ask Bernard Madoff’s investors. Communists put that trust into the hands of just a few people in political power, which is why the Soviet Union is no longer with us. Free-Marketeers put that power into the hands of corporate heads without supervision, which is why we’re in our current economic mess, not to mention the last several economic messes, including the tech bubble, the S&L collapse, the Great Depression, and so on.
The assumption by the Free-Marketeers is that “The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace” will punish the dishonest, corrupt, or incompetent through the customers and investors that would avoid them. The reality, which any neutral observer would report, is that the people that the “Invisible Hand” is supposed to punish when they are incompetent or corrupt are the ones in control of the information that the investors and customers need to make sound decisions. Distort the information and prevent the punishment until it’s too late.
Another important assumption of the Free-Marketeers that is wrong is that increases in efficiency are always a good thing. You often hear when one company takes over another that the increase in efficiency by eliminating redundancy will improve things. Often you won’t hear what things will improve. What it really translates as is firing people that have the same job at the other company will improve the bottom line of the combined company. That’s true, it probably will. If this kind of combination happens when the economy is in a boom cycle, the effect of people losing their job can even be fairly benign. However, this isn’t always, or even usually, the case. Often the effect of people losing their job is that these people have less money to throw around to buy things—like the things their former company made, or services they provide, and decrease their participation in our economy.
Let’s just take the efficiency argument out to it’s logical conclusion. An increase in efficiency is an attempt to reduce the capital outflow while maintaining income, or in other words, you don’t pay as much out as you get paid. This sounds good at first. Companies can increase efficiency by using less material or by eliminating jobs that don’t help the company as much. The problem is as a company starts getting significantly more efficient, the economy starts to feel the burden. More money from the economy tends to go to the company, and less comes out. In fact, a company that is 100% efficient has no capital outlays, just income. It would have no employees, even executives (hence, no payroll) and would produce nothing (so no cost of manufacturing or providing a service,) while paying no taxes or dividends. This kind of company would simply suck money out of the economy without contributing anything, being a kind of economic black-hole. Conservatives would argue that Government fits this description, but a company of this kind has no employees and produces nothing, and the government does not fit either definition by a large amount. A religion might come closer, but still doesn’t hit that target (too many employees.)
This is what most companies strive for. One of our problems that we are facing is that we won’t have a sufficient proportion of our population working and participating in our economy to keep it going, meaning fewer people are buying products and services, making companies get rid of employees, causing our economy to spiral downward. As large companies consider downsizing, or whatever they are calling layoffs today, the executives need to be asking themselves the question Henry Ford (yeah, I know) asked when someone pointed out to him that he didn’t have to pay his workers so much: “Then who would buy my cars?”
The reality is that the economy works best with a certain amount of inefficiency, and the hardest part of this to explain to people is that the amount of inefficiency that economy works best with is a constantly moving target. Most people want to hear a specific number, but that number will change depending on economic circumstances, specifically the ratio of jobs to labor. If there are a lot of jobs openings going unfilled, you can have an efficiency level that is high, because most people who want to work are doing so. If there are few jobs available, a greater amount of inefficiency will help to absorb these people and keep them participating in our economy. This may involve taking pay cuts at the executive level, or giving up hours or benefits at the worker level. Flexibility is key.
So, what are the solutions to these issues? Giving money without strings attached to corporations is not going to make the situation better. The New York Times has reported several times that the original bank bailout money is being used not to free up the credit market for either homeowners or businesses, but rather to pay off debt, buy other banks, and hang onto for later. We need more than this to improve our situation. We need money to be used to create jobs and improve our country. We need oversight of our corporations. The SEC and FDIC need to be doing their jobs, and we need to be certain that the next time money is handed to these people that it goes to where it is needed by our definition, not theirs.
To constantly keep the correct efficiency level of our corporations, the best way is to pass the “Employee Free Choice Act.” Negotiations are the best way to make sure we have the right staffing level, not simple corporate decision making, because corporations will always try to reduce staffing levels and payroll. Unions prevent that, but sometimes even they get out of hand. The best way is for Unions and businesses to negotiate often, at least yearly. This may seem a waste of time, but how else are you going to make sure employment levels are optimal?
In addition we need to be investing money as a country. This is what most conservatives, whether crackpot Free-Marketeers or not, would say individuals do when they get tax breaks, while failing to acknowledge that Governments can invest as well. Most of them fail to see that putting money into infrastructure or education is the way governments invest. We all benefit when we can contact each other more easily, when we can travel faster and with less damage to our vehicles, when power sources are steady, and when someone who otherwise couldn’t afford an education gets it and invents something we need, like a new cure. We have to fix our roads, bridges, communications, and educate our people. In short, corporate aid needs to have strings attached and can’t by itself be expected to pull us out of this depression.
Higher education is a good solution both short-term and long-term to our problems. Giving people grants to stay in school in the short term reduces the labor pool, increasing wages, and in the long term increases the number of job options for those people and their wages when they attain them. It also makes them a bigger asset to the company that employs them. This is a win-win for the country.
Most importantly, we need to call those who insist on sticking to the completely free market idea crackpots, just as we do with Communists. Brand them with a catchy name, such as the “Free-Marketeers” as I have (feel free to copy me.) They have been completely discredited in the last couple of years, and we need to make sure they do not try to regain their respectability, or they will. Theirs is a simple and seductive chant. If we don’t make sure our children are aware of the dangers, then they will surely try to repeat our mistakes under the spell of these snake oil salesmen.
It’s past time to go over some of the bad assumptions that have been made that allowed some of us to make bad decisions, and why these assumptions are so wrong. I’ll tackle two of the biggest ones in this essay.
For several years now I’ve been saying that Communists and Free-Marketeers (often Neo-Cons) make the exact same fundamental error in their respective basic assumptions. Both are great theories, but completely fail in real life. They fail because they both make the assumption that everyone will do what is best for everyone all the time, instead of taking advantage of anyone, and that policing is not necessary. Communists claim that the government, once in control of the marketplace, will police itself. Oddly, Free-Marketeers claim that once the government gets out of the marketplace, the marketplace will police itself. Both are completely, and very obviously, wrong.
The big problem with a completely free market, and Adams’ “Invisible Hand of the Marketplace,” is that it requires transparency in order to work. If you have no policing mechanism, or one that is ineffective for any one of dozens of reasons, then all you need is one person near the top, or a few lower down, to be dishonest or incompetent to bring the entire system down. Just ask Bernard Madoff’s investors. Communists put that trust into the hands of just a few people in political power, which is why the Soviet Union is no longer with us. Free-Marketeers put that power into the hands of corporate heads without supervision, which is why we’re in our current economic mess, not to mention the last several economic messes, including the tech bubble, the S&L collapse, the Great Depression, and so on.
The assumption by the Free-Marketeers is that “The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace” will punish the dishonest, corrupt, or incompetent through the customers and investors that would avoid them. The reality, which any neutral observer would report, is that the people that the “Invisible Hand” is supposed to punish when they are incompetent or corrupt are the ones in control of the information that the investors and customers need to make sound decisions. Distort the information and prevent the punishment until it’s too late.
Another important assumption of the Free-Marketeers that is wrong is that increases in efficiency are always a good thing. You often hear when one company takes over another that the increase in efficiency by eliminating redundancy will improve things. Often you won’t hear what things will improve. What it really translates as is firing people that have the same job at the other company will improve the bottom line of the combined company. That’s true, it probably will. If this kind of combination happens when the economy is in a boom cycle, the effect of people losing their job can even be fairly benign. However, this isn’t always, or even usually, the case. Often the effect of people losing their job is that these people have less money to throw around to buy things—like the things their former company made, or services they provide, and decrease their participation in our economy.
Let’s just take the efficiency argument out to it’s logical conclusion. An increase in efficiency is an attempt to reduce the capital outflow while maintaining income, or in other words, you don’t pay as much out as you get paid. This sounds good at first. Companies can increase efficiency by using less material or by eliminating jobs that don’t help the company as much. The problem is as a company starts getting significantly more efficient, the economy starts to feel the burden. More money from the economy tends to go to the company, and less comes out. In fact, a company that is 100% efficient has no capital outlays, just income. It would have no employees, even executives (hence, no payroll) and would produce nothing (so no cost of manufacturing or providing a service,) while paying no taxes or dividends. This kind of company would simply suck money out of the economy without contributing anything, being a kind of economic black-hole. Conservatives would argue that Government fits this description, but a company of this kind has no employees and produces nothing, and the government does not fit either definition by a large amount. A religion might come closer, but still doesn’t hit that target (too many employees.)
This is what most companies strive for. One of our problems that we are facing is that we won’t have a sufficient proportion of our population working and participating in our economy to keep it going, meaning fewer people are buying products and services, making companies get rid of employees, causing our economy to spiral downward. As large companies consider downsizing, or whatever they are calling layoffs today, the executives need to be asking themselves the question Henry Ford (yeah, I know) asked when someone pointed out to him that he didn’t have to pay his workers so much: “Then who would buy my cars?”
The reality is that the economy works best with a certain amount of inefficiency, and the hardest part of this to explain to people is that the amount of inefficiency that economy works best with is a constantly moving target. Most people want to hear a specific number, but that number will change depending on economic circumstances, specifically the ratio of jobs to labor. If there are a lot of jobs openings going unfilled, you can have an efficiency level that is high, because most people who want to work are doing so. If there are few jobs available, a greater amount of inefficiency will help to absorb these people and keep them participating in our economy. This may involve taking pay cuts at the executive level, or giving up hours or benefits at the worker level. Flexibility is key.
So, what are the solutions to these issues? Giving money without strings attached to corporations is not going to make the situation better. The New York Times has reported several times that the original bank bailout money is being used not to free up the credit market for either homeowners or businesses, but rather to pay off debt, buy other banks, and hang onto for later. We need more than this to improve our situation. We need money to be used to create jobs and improve our country. We need oversight of our corporations. The SEC and FDIC need to be doing their jobs, and we need to be certain that the next time money is handed to these people that it goes to where it is needed by our definition, not theirs.
To constantly keep the correct efficiency level of our corporations, the best way is to pass the “Employee Free Choice Act.” Negotiations are the best way to make sure we have the right staffing level, not simple corporate decision making, because corporations will always try to reduce staffing levels and payroll. Unions prevent that, but sometimes even they get out of hand. The best way is for Unions and businesses to negotiate often, at least yearly. This may seem a waste of time, but how else are you going to make sure employment levels are optimal?
In addition we need to be investing money as a country. This is what most conservatives, whether crackpot Free-Marketeers or not, would say individuals do when they get tax breaks, while failing to acknowledge that Governments can invest as well. Most of them fail to see that putting money into infrastructure or education is the way governments invest. We all benefit when we can contact each other more easily, when we can travel faster and with less damage to our vehicles, when power sources are steady, and when someone who otherwise couldn’t afford an education gets it and invents something we need, like a new cure. We have to fix our roads, bridges, communications, and educate our people. In short, corporate aid needs to have strings attached and can’t by itself be expected to pull us out of this depression.
Higher education is a good solution both short-term and long-term to our problems. Giving people grants to stay in school in the short term reduces the labor pool, increasing wages, and in the long term increases the number of job options for those people and their wages when they attain them. It also makes them a bigger asset to the company that employs them. This is a win-win for the country.
Most importantly, we need to call those who insist on sticking to the completely free market idea crackpots, just as we do with Communists. Brand them with a catchy name, such as the “Free-Marketeers” as I have (feel free to copy me.) They have been completely discredited in the last couple of years, and we need to make sure they do not try to regain their respectability, or they will. Theirs is a simple and seductive chant. If we don’t make sure our children are aware of the dangers, then they will surely try to repeat our mistakes under the spell of these snake oil salesmen.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Odd Financial Situation I'm In
Folks-
It's hard for me to believe that it's been over a month since I've updated this blog. In that time I've been entering a diary over at The Daily Kos, mostly because most of those entries fit better there, but also because more people check out my entries there. I will, for now, continue to update my blog here, but I will also continue to evaluate my using this blog from time to time.
Now, here's my most recent entry. It's also probably my most personal one.
I’m going to do something I haven’t done before. I’m going to open up about my current financial situation. The main reason I’m going to open up here is because in all of my years, I find myself in a bizarre situation that I haven’t ever been told to expect.
Whenever I’ve committed thoughts to keyboard, I’ve always held back a little bit from my private life, which I understand includes ones financial life as well. I’ve not understood why this should be the case, since politicians and celebrities seem to have so little financial privacy, but I’ve held back in order to protect those around me from some… unknown, unseen, possibly legal liabilities.
So, with no further beating around the bush, here’s the background of my situation. Like many Real Estate Agents in the last few years, I got duped into taking one of those toxic loans out in order to buy a nice new home that I should have known I wouldn’t be able to afford once the loan recast. I can’t really remember the reasons why I would do something that seems so dumb in hindsight, but I’m betting the banks are thinking the exact same thing right now, only from the other side (“Why did it seem like such a good idea to loan money to people while making such a point to make sure we knew nothing about their finances?”)
So, about a year ago, under mounting financial debt and looking at a home value about 2/3 what we paid, we looked at our choices. We could file for bankruptcy, go through credit counseling, have the counselors tell the judge that we couldn’t pay the debt, have the court auction off everything, etc., or try something else. The something else that seemed most honorable to us was to pay off our credit cards, which in hindsight seems like the best thing we could do (Citibank recently increased their lowest credit card interest rate to over 20%!) while negotiating with our mortgage company in order to see if we could change the terms of our mortgage.
I’m going to do something I really didn’t want to do at this point: Name the bank. I think you’ll understand why later. To the credit of Indymac Federal Bank, even while they were going through all of their problems, they kept working with us. At least they did until last September. They asked us to get our financial information together for them and call them back with the information. I got the information, just as they asked, and called them back at the number they gave me, and ended up leaving them a voice-mail message. Next day, I left them another one. I waited a few days, called them back, and left another voice mail message. Then I did the same the next week. The week after that, I did the same thing. No replies came. No calls, no letters, no emails, no faxes, nothing. I called again the next week. I kept this up until around the middle of October, figuring they were backlogged, and would get back to me when they had the time.
Then came mid December. I got a letter from Indymac telling me I owed them roughly half of our joint household income by January 19th, or they would start foreclosure proceedings. I called them back at the number provided…and left them a voice mail message. And another one. Same thing the next week.
I figured it was time to up-the-ante, so I contacted my Congresswoman’s office and left a voice mail for her assistant who handles these things…and got no response.
So last week, we contacted a company that supposedly will negotiate with our mortgage company for an up-front fee, and I was going to go with them until I went to the California Attorney General’s webpage and found out that it was illegal for them to take a fee from us until after they had provided the services. Yesterday I called Indymac and after leaving my voice mail message in disgust, I called the Consumer Credit Counseling Service in my area, as suggested by the AG’s office, and was surprised to hear only confusion on their end. They suggested that I try to find a branch of Indymac and go in and talk to them, even though there are no branches in my area (in fact, the nearest branch is an 8 hour drive away). That was their best suggestion after a roughly 20 second phone call. No service from them was suggested or provided to this consumer regarding credit or counseling, so I’d say they failed completely.
To me, this is a bizarre situation. In my experience, and in all of the classes I’ve taken from high-school on, I’ve been told that the person who is owed money is the one that constantly tries to contact the person who owes them money. This is completely the opposite of my current situation. I’ve been calling them for MONTHS, and I haven’t even gotten any kind of confirmation that I’ve contacted them. I feel like I’m hounding them. I imagine them cowering in some room someplace, saying “Don’t answer the door, that guy owes me money!” It’s nuts. We hear all the time that if you’re in financial trouble that the worst thing to do is to stop talking to your lenders. That’s not my problem. They have stopped talking to me, even before we could talk about a possible solution! Is this the Indymac Federal Bank who was supposed to be a model of working things out with their customers, as was reported just a few months ago?
I hate to say it, but the real feeling I have is that this problem is so large for these people that they actually have no idea how to tackle it. Indymac can’t figure out what they can do, Congress can’t figure out what they should do, and the CCCS doesn’t know who they are, what day it is, or remember how they got to work (“What’s that ringing thing? What happens if I pick this thing up?”) The problem of foreclosures has gotten so huge that they are unable to figure a way out, and have decided to simply shut-down all thought and hope the automatic systems take care of the problem, or that by some miracle, it simply vanishes; the nightmare over with the dawning of a beautiful new day. Unfortunately, the dawning morning is the dream, and the financial crisis is real.
My family and I would like to keep the house, but we have completely lost our investment in it. The question is: “Should I keep plunging money into an investment that is currently, and probably always will have a negative return on my investment?” The businessman in me says no. Any further investment is money lost, unless Indymac can reduce our payments to a reasonable level. No offense intended, but that’s the right business decision. However, this is about family. If I could work out something else, I would, but it’s going to require Indymac to at least return my phone calls. The question for them is: “Do you want to definitely lose 2/3 of your investment, or find some way to lose ¼ or less (or possibly nothing, but no more than 2/3)?” Their current actions say they would rather definitely lose big than risk losing small. They know where I live and have all of my contact phone numbers.
I would love to hear from other people. Do you have any suggestions on what to do next? Are you in or have you been in a similar situation? Do you work at Indymac and know what is happening? I’m completely at a loss, and for once in my life, I have no idea what to do next.
It's hard for me to believe that it's been over a month since I've updated this blog. In that time I've been entering a diary over at The Daily Kos, mostly because most of those entries fit better there, but also because more people check out my entries there. I will, for now, continue to update my blog here, but I will also continue to evaluate my using this blog from time to time.
Now, here's my most recent entry. It's also probably my most personal one.
I’m going to do something I haven’t done before. I’m going to open up about my current financial situation. The main reason I’m going to open up here is because in all of my years, I find myself in a bizarre situation that I haven’t ever been told to expect.
Whenever I’ve committed thoughts to keyboard, I’ve always held back a little bit from my private life, which I understand includes ones financial life as well. I’ve not understood why this should be the case, since politicians and celebrities seem to have so little financial privacy, but I’ve held back in order to protect those around me from some… unknown, unseen, possibly legal liabilities.
So, with no further beating around the bush, here’s the background of my situation. Like many Real Estate Agents in the last few years, I got duped into taking one of those toxic loans out in order to buy a nice new home that I should have known I wouldn’t be able to afford once the loan recast. I can’t really remember the reasons why I would do something that seems so dumb in hindsight, but I’m betting the banks are thinking the exact same thing right now, only from the other side (“Why did it seem like such a good idea to loan money to people while making such a point to make sure we knew nothing about their finances?”)
So, about a year ago, under mounting financial debt and looking at a home value about 2/3 what we paid, we looked at our choices. We could file for bankruptcy, go through credit counseling, have the counselors tell the judge that we couldn’t pay the debt, have the court auction off everything, etc., or try something else. The something else that seemed most honorable to us was to pay off our credit cards, which in hindsight seems like the best thing we could do (Citibank recently increased their lowest credit card interest rate to over 20%!) while negotiating with our mortgage company in order to see if we could change the terms of our mortgage.
I’m going to do something I really didn’t want to do at this point: Name the bank. I think you’ll understand why later. To the credit of Indymac Federal Bank, even while they were going through all of their problems, they kept working with us. At least they did until last September. They asked us to get our financial information together for them and call them back with the information. I got the information, just as they asked, and called them back at the number they gave me, and ended up leaving them a voice-mail message. Next day, I left them another one. I waited a few days, called them back, and left another voice mail message. Then I did the same the next week. The week after that, I did the same thing. No replies came. No calls, no letters, no emails, no faxes, nothing. I called again the next week. I kept this up until around the middle of October, figuring they were backlogged, and would get back to me when they had the time.
Then came mid December. I got a letter from Indymac telling me I owed them roughly half of our joint household income by January 19th, or they would start foreclosure proceedings. I called them back at the number provided…and left them a voice mail message. And another one. Same thing the next week.
I figured it was time to up-the-ante, so I contacted my Congresswoman’s office and left a voice mail for her assistant who handles these things…and got no response.
So last week, we contacted a company that supposedly will negotiate with our mortgage company for an up-front fee, and I was going to go with them until I went to the California Attorney General’s webpage and found out that it was illegal for them to take a fee from us until after they had provided the services. Yesterday I called Indymac and after leaving my voice mail message in disgust, I called the Consumer Credit Counseling Service in my area, as suggested by the AG’s office, and was surprised to hear only confusion on their end. They suggested that I try to find a branch of Indymac and go in and talk to them, even though there are no branches in my area (in fact, the nearest branch is an 8 hour drive away). That was their best suggestion after a roughly 20 second phone call. No service from them was suggested or provided to this consumer regarding credit or counseling, so I’d say they failed completely.
To me, this is a bizarre situation. In my experience, and in all of the classes I’ve taken from high-school on, I’ve been told that the person who is owed money is the one that constantly tries to contact the person who owes them money. This is completely the opposite of my current situation. I’ve been calling them for MONTHS, and I haven’t even gotten any kind of confirmation that I’ve contacted them. I feel like I’m hounding them. I imagine them cowering in some room someplace, saying “Don’t answer the door, that guy owes me money!” It’s nuts. We hear all the time that if you’re in financial trouble that the worst thing to do is to stop talking to your lenders. That’s not my problem. They have stopped talking to me, even before we could talk about a possible solution! Is this the Indymac Federal Bank who was supposed to be a model of working things out with their customers, as was reported just a few months ago?
I hate to say it, but the real feeling I have is that this problem is so large for these people that they actually have no idea how to tackle it. Indymac can’t figure out what they can do, Congress can’t figure out what they should do, and the CCCS doesn’t know who they are, what day it is, or remember how they got to work (“What’s that ringing thing? What happens if I pick this thing up?”) The problem of foreclosures has gotten so huge that they are unable to figure a way out, and have decided to simply shut-down all thought and hope the automatic systems take care of the problem, or that by some miracle, it simply vanishes; the nightmare over with the dawning of a beautiful new day. Unfortunately, the dawning morning is the dream, and the financial crisis is real.
My family and I would like to keep the house, but we have completely lost our investment in it. The question is: “Should I keep plunging money into an investment that is currently, and probably always will have a negative return on my investment?” The businessman in me says no. Any further investment is money lost, unless Indymac can reduce our payments to a reasonable level. No offense intended, but that’s the right business decision. However, this is about family. If I could work out something else, I would, but it’s going to require Indymac to at least return my phone calls. The question for them is: “Do you want to definitely lose 2/3 of your investment, or find some way to lose ¼ or less (or possibly nothing, but no more than 2/3)?” Their current actions say they would rather definitely lose big than risk losing small. They know where I live and have all of my contact phone numbers.
I would love to hear from other people. Do you have any suggestions on what to do next? Are you in or have you been in a similar situation? Do you work at Indymac and know what is happening? I’m completely at a loss, and for once in my life, I have no idea what to do next.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Deflation redux
Folks-
Paul Krugman pointed out today in his blog one reason why deflation is bad for the economy-corporate cost to borrow money goes up. Read it at his site at The New York Times.
-Edly
Paul Krugman pointed out today in his blog one reason why deflation is bad for the economy-corporate cost to borrow money goes up. Read it at his site at The New York Times.
-Edly
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Economics and the Auto Industry Bailout
Folks-
In case you weren't aware (and since I haven't mentioned this on my blog, why would you be?) I am becoming a devotee of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. He writes a column over at The New York Times several times a week, and has written several books. He is a self-labeled liberal, as am I, which is somewhat rare amongst high-profile economists, ([Edited 11-21-08: as I am not.]
In addition to his column at the New York Times, he also has a blog over there that I check out several times a week. He usually posts short entries there daily, including links to other sites with good information. That is where the first of two topics I'm going to mention come from.
Johnathan Cohen over at The New Republic has published an article titled Panic in Detroit arguing that we should bail out the big three automakers. His arguments are persuasive: The big three aren't the dinosaurs they used to be--the Chevy Volt, slated to come out in 2010 is a good example. Nothing like it is scheduled to come out of Japan, or any other country on any timescale. He also argues that the big three are coming up with cars of better quality than they have in decades, and according to Consumer Reports, better than the Japanese. In addition he argues that allowing GM to go under means not that they would reorganize, that is unlikely considering their position, but rather that they would be liquidated, meaning a loss of jobs not less than 500 thousand, but probably closer to 1.5-2.5 million, increasing the jobless rate by about a third immediately, and forcing the other two automakers to go to sources outside the U.S. for parts. That's only counting the economic hit for GM and it's parts suppliers, not the surrounding businesses, such as restaurants, hospitals, etc.
I've gone on too long about the article. Check it out for yourself and see if it changes your mind about letting GM go down.
The second topic here is also from the New York Times. It seems that for the first time in recorded history, the U.S. is looking at deflation instead of inflation happening. Jack Healy writes a report titled "Consumer Price Decline Prompts Fear of Deflation." This article is shy of some background information, which I'll try to provide here.
Economists of all stripes consider deflation, the increased value of money, to be more damaging than inflation, the devaluation of a currency. In our case it means that the value of a dollar is increasing, rather than decreasing, as it usually does. Why would this be a problem? If you have a whole lot of dollars stuck in a mattress, it isn't much of one. However, if you are working for a living, or have your money saved in any kind of interest paying instrument, such as a savings account or bonds, it means you will be getting no interest paid on your money, and you are likely to take a pay cut. It also means that there is less investment in the economy. In fact, deflation usually means that the economy is shrinking significantly. In most situations the Federal Reserve could stop deflation by decreasing interest rates and loaning more money, but at this moment the interest rates are already as low as possible. Doubt me? About a month ago yields on U.S. government bonds actually went negative for a short while (interest rates of less than 0%.) An example of negative interest would be buying a bond for $100 that was only worth $97 (these numbers are illustrative only.) That might seem an odd thing to invest in, something you know is going to lose money over the long term, but investors were so worried about the money they were losing anyway that they were willing to lose a small amount over the long term instead of losing their entire fortune immediately.
Now you're ready to read the article. Go ahead and check it out.
-Edly
In case you weren't aware (and since I haven't mentioned this on my blog, why would you be?) I am becoming a devotee of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. He writes a column over at The New York Times several times a week, and has written several books. He is a self-labeled liberal, as am I, which is somewhat rare amongst high-profile economists, ([Edited 11-21-08: as I am not.]
In addition to his column at the New York Times, he also has a blog over there that I check out several times a week. He usually posts short entries there daily, including links to other sites with good information. That is where the first of two topics I'm going to mention come from.
Johnathan Cohen over at The New Republic has published an article titled Panic in Detroit arguing that we should bail out the big three automakers. His arguments are persuasive: The big three aren't the dinosaurs they used to be--the Chevy Volt, slated to come out in 2010 is a good example. Nothing like it is scheduled to come out of Japan, or any other country on any timescale. He also argues that the big three are coming up with cars of better quality than they have in decades, and according to Consumer Reports, better than the Japanese. In addition he argues that allowing GM to go under means not that they would reorganize, that is unlikely considering their position, but rather that they would be liquidated, meaning a loss of jobs not less than 500 thousand, but probably closer to 1.5-2.5 million, increasing the jobless rate by about a third immediately, and forcing the other two automakers to go to sources outside the U.S. for parts. That's only counting the economic hit for GM and it's parts suppliers, not the surrounding businesses, such as restaurants, hospitals, etc.
I've gone on too long about the article. Check it out for yourself and see if it changes your mind about letting GM go down.
The second topic here is also from the New York Times. It seems that for the first time in recorded history, the U.S. is looking at deflation instead of inflation happening. Jack Healy writes a report titled "Consumer Price Decline Prompts Fear of Deflation." This article is shy of some background information, which I'll try to provide here.
Economists of all stripes consider deflation, the increased value of money, to be more damaging than inflation, the devaluation of a currency. In our case it means that the value of a dollar is increasing, rather than decreasing, as it usually does. Why would this be a problem? If you have a whole lot of dollars stuck in a mattress, it isn't much of one. However, if you are working for a living, or have your money saved in any kind of interest paying instrument, such as a savings account or bonds, it means you will be getting no interest paid on your money, and you are likely to take a pay cut. It also means that there is less investment in the economy. In fact, deflation usually means that the economy is shrinking significantly. In most situations the Federal Reserve could stop deflation by decreasing interest rates and loaning more money, but at this moment the interest rates are already as low as possible. Doubt me? About a month ago yields on U.S. government bonds actually went negative for a short while (interest rates of less than 0%.) An example of negative interest would be buying a bond for $100 that was only worth $97 (these numbers are illustrative only.) That might seem an odd thing to invest in, something you know is going to lose money over the long term, but investors were so worried about the money they were losing anyway that they were willing to lose a small amount over the long term instead of losing their entire fortune immediately.
Now you're ready to read the article. Go ahead and check it out.
-Edly
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Barack Obama's Same Path Ad
Folks-
I'm not certain if I have mentioned that I am a supporter of Barack Obama. In case that isn't obvious, I am.
I do not believe that he is perfect. I'm not sure we share the same sense of urgency about the environment and alternative power, but I am very certain that McCain't and I are on different plains of existence about these subjects. Mr. Obama believes that something should be done, while McCain't thinks we don't have to change at all, except maybe by making it easier to pollute.
When it comes to the economy, Mr. Obama and I seem to be in greater agreement. I would like to see more details in his plan, like what he intends to do about the mortgage mess. Where McCain't is concerned, I would like to see him stay the heck away from the mortgage mess, since he obviously has no idea just what the heck he should be doing. Throwing money at rich people will only make them richer, not improve the economy. "Trickle-down economics," what used to be called "Reaganomics," has been an utter failure. That's what is responsible for our economic woes right now.
I'm not sure if Mr. Obama would agree with me about what to do to increase investment by rich people in America. Personally, I would tax those making 7 figures or more at a much higher rate, perhaps as high as 70%. No joke. That's still not the highest rate we have ever had. In the '60's the highest rate was 90%, and the net effect was that people who made the most money did what they could to stay under that tax rate. Think about that for a second. Imagine these CEOs suddenly trying desperately to avoid making tens-of-millions of dollars. Where do you think the money would go? Back in the '60's it went back into the business. Imagine just how solid American businesses would be if suddenly each one of these major companies had another $50-100 Million available per year, just from executives not taking such large salaries. Is it possible that this one change would fix our economy? Probably not, but it wouldn't hurt.
I'm certain that Mr. Obama agrees with me that education is the best buffer against a bad economy. McCain't clearly disagrees with us. Just this year, McCain't voted against a bill that would give Iraq War Veterans full tuition at any college or university in the U.S. because he thought it would lead to fewer soldiers re-enlisting. He didn't account for the fact that it could lead to more people enlisting in the first place. Right now, that's the problem our military is facing.
In any case, Mr. Obama has released a new short video on his economic plan. I'm including the link to that video here. Please take the time to watch it, and then read the comparison of his economic plan to that of McCain't's at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/sidebyside.php.
-Edly
I'm not certain if I have mentioned that I am a supporter of Barack Obama. In case that isn't obvious, I am.
I do not believe that he is perfect. I'm not sure we share the same sense of urgency about the environment and alternative power, but I am very certain that McCain't and I are on different plains of existence about these subjects. Mr. Obama believes that something should be done, while McCain't thinks we don't have to change at all, except maybe by making it easier to pollute.
When it comes to the economy, Mr. Obama and I seem to be in greater agreement. I would like to see more details in his plan, like what he intends to do about the mortgage mess. Where McCain't is concerned, I would like to see him stay the heck away from the mortgage mess, since he obviously has no idea just what the heck he should be doing. Throwing money at rich people will only make them richer, not improve the economy. "Trickle-down economics," what used to be called "Reaganomics," has been an utter failure. That's what is responsible for our economic woes right now.
I'm not sure if Mr. Obama would agree with me about what to do to increase investment by rich people in America. Personally, I would tax those making 7 figures or more at a much higher rate, perhaps as high as 70%. No joke. That's still not the highest rate we have ever had. In the '60's the highest rate was 90%, and the net effect was that people who made the most money did what they could to stay under that tax rate. Think about that for a second. Imagine these CEOs suddenly trying desperately to avoid making tens-of-millions of dollars. Where do you think the money would go? Back in the '60's it went back into the business. Imagine just how solid American businesses would be if suddenly each one of these major companies had another $50-100 Million available per year, just from executives not taking such large salaries. Is it possible that this one change would fix our economy? Probably not, but it wouldn't hurt.
I'm certain that Mr. Obama agrees with me that education is the best buffer against a bad economy. McCain't clearly disagrees with us. Just this year, McCain't voted against a bill that would give Iraq War Veterans full tuition at any college or university in the U.S. because he thought it would lead to fewer soldiers re-enlisting. He didn't account for the fact that it could lead to more people enlisting in the first place. Right now, that's the problem our military is facing.
In any case, Mr. Obama has released a new short video on his economic plan. I'm including the link to that video here. Please take the time to watch it, and then read the comparison of his economic plan to that of McCain't's at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/sidebyside.php.
-Edly
Sunday, September 21, 2008
The Current Financial Situation, and Some Solutions
By Ed Smallwood
Yesterday I was watching CNN. Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd was being interviewed, I can’t remember who it was that was asking the questions. What stuck out in the interview was what he said about a closed-door briefing the Senate got from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He wouldn’t comment on the exact content, after all it wouldn’t be terribly useful to keep the information in a closed-door briefing if it was all going to become public immediately afterward. What Senator Dodd said was that after Mr. Bernanke was done talking, there was stunned silence for 10-15 seconds in the room.
That’s significant. It’s also very frightening, either way you look at it.
I have known for some time that things were going very wrong with the economy. I remember an interview last March with Paul Krugman in Fortune magazine where he said that he thought we would hit 6-7 Trillion Dollars in capital losses in the housing industry this year, a 25% reduction in equity throughout the United States. That is what we are just beginning to see right now. Congress is talking about an 800 Billion Dollar bailout. You can see that what Congress is talking about is roughly an order of magnitude too small to cover what Paul Krugman was talking about. In short, 88% of the losses aren’t being addressed by Congress.
Now, we also have to take into account that the International Monetary Fund is estimating our GDP at roughly 13 Trillion Dollars. The losses we are talking about are more than half of the Gross Domestic Product of the entire United States. Nobody alive has ever faced a financial disaster of this magnitude.
Is that what Chairman Ben Bernanke was telling the Senators in that closed-door briefing? Numbers so large that it stunned veteran Senators into silence? I think that’s exactly what happened.
Here’s the real problem: The simple answer to this problem was to avoid deregulating the banking industry in the first place. Don’t let this debacle happen. Unfortunately several years ago the “Regulation is Bad for the Economy” branch of the Republican party got it’s way, with Senator John McCain cheering it on. The easy and simple answers to this problem are all gone now. There is no choice but to see our economy slide downward. It’s simply too late to prevent that.
So, what do we do now?
We’re going to have to bail out Wall Street. We don’t have a choice about this. That’s what Congress is doing to some extent now. The problem with how they are doing it is that they are diluting the shares that investors have by taking majority stakes of the companies they are bailing out and putting it under Government control. They are allowing the investors a chance to keep some of the value, but not most of it. This is unlikely to work in the long term. People’s retirement savings are going to suffer, even though it isn’t as much as they could. In short, the government is bailing out the executives of the companies more than the investors.
The landscape for homeowners is even bleaker. Nothing whatsoever has been done to address their concerns. Foreclosures are happening at an even greater pace than before. More properties are going “upside down” in value than they were before, and the Santa Clara County Association of REALTORS is estimating that this will be the case until at least 2010. Some estimates I have been reading put it at 2012 or later.
Now, with it harder than ever to declare bankruptcy (thank you Republicans,) and savings evaporating, the backbone of the American Economy, the Consumer, has almost no money to buy anything. We can see this through the fact that spending is decreasing while savings are simultaneously decreasing. Until something is done to address the concerns of the average person on the street, the economy can do nothing but spiral downward at an ever increasing rate.
This is where we stand now.
What are we going to have to do?
We are going to have to make peace with the fact that our economy is going to crash first of all. We can’t prevent it. Next, we have to do what we can to prevent it from crashing so bad that it can’t recover. This is a real possibility. There is nothing magical about the economy of the United States. Other countries in a similar state that did nothing saw their economies die outright. Most of them are third-world countries now, or failed states. That’s the danger.
We have to bring back the regulations that prevented this problem from happening decades ago. This is an absolute must. Doing any less than this means that nobody will trust banks enough to loan them money to make loans. That’s how the system works. Without that key part the system collapses and doesn’t recover.
We have to protect the money of the average person as much as possible right now. We can’t expect someone to pay back a bad mortgage at an ever increasing rate for the rest of their lives, tying up their spending power in servicing bad debt just because some company got greedy. If these homeowners decide to allow the banks to foreclose, they will find it harder to buy another home later. The inventory of foreclosed homes will increase, because there will be fewer qualified buyers (you can’t have a foreclosure in at least the last 2 years to qualify for a home loan). This is dangerous in several ways. First, unoccupied homes bring down property values. Second, they are fire dangers. Houses are fuel. If you have enough of them you can end up with a wildfire in the middle of a city. Oakland can tell you why this is bad.
This means we have to do at least one of two things, probably both: we will have to forgive at least part of the bad debt to keep people in their homes, or we will have to allow people with foreclosures on their record to get credit anyway. The former is preferable, and while the FHA is doing this to a small extent, the program needs to be massively expanded. The latter solution will probably have to be put into effect as well. Why should we do this? Why not let the people who took out these loans just hang? If we allow our spite to get ahead of our pity (or self interest), making sure these people pay back their loans, our economy suffers from having too little money left over to buy the things that we sell. All of us suffer if we make any one segment of the population suffer too much.
In addition, we really need to start working on our infrastructure, and I don’t mean just roads, bridges, ports, electricity grid, and communications grid. I mean the workforce as well. For most of my life we have seen a growing battle against the workforce. McCain’t has been talking a big game over how strong our workforce is, but the reality is he has actively been working on weakening it.
The big secret that allows the American economy to be so strong has been our educational system. Public education was invented here. We have expanded it ever sense the Brotherhood of Friends (often referred to as “The Quakers”) introduced the concept. All of my life the Republican Party has been trying to weaken it. Vouchers. Increasing tuition in Universities. Destruction of vocational schools. Even “No Child Left Behind” which is decreasing Federal funding to elementary schools. Recently when Democrats tried to bring back full tuition for all Iraq War Veterans, McCain’t voted against it. He said it would reduce the incentive for our Servicepeople to reenlist. This attitude is going to prevent our economy from recovering.
We need a top of the line communications grid to allow educated people to build products using electricity that will be shipped to the consumer through working ports and over working roads and bridges. If any one of those things isn’t working, our economy dies and stays that way.
Why wouldn’t our economy recover? Really, why would it? People with money are under no obligation to invest it in our country. If our economy is wrecked, they would be dumb to put good money after bad. They’ll invest it elsewhere, in economies that are booming. China is a good example. With no money being invested in our country, no educated people to design new products or services, a 20th century communications grid expected to help them design them, no energy to build them, and deteriorating ports, roads, and bridges to ship them our economy will stay sunk.
What we really need to get us through this crisis is a leader that believes in our future, not one that is trying to bring us back to a failed past, namely the “Roaring ‘20s.” Let’s all make sure we work toward our country’s future.
Links:
Fortune Magazine interview with Paul Krugman: March 17th, 2008 by Jia Lynn Yang http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/14/news/economy/krugman_subprime.fortune/index.htm
Yesterday I was watching CNN. Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd was being interviewed, I can’t remember who it was that was asking the questions. What stuck out in the interview was what he said about a closed-door briefing the Senate got from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He wouldn’t comment on the exact content, after all it wouldn’t be terribly useful to keep the information in a closed-door briefing if it was all going to become public immediately afterward. What Senator Dodd said was that after Mr. Bernanke was done talking, there was stunned silence for 10-15 seconds in the room.
That’s significant. It’s also very frightening, either way you look at it.
I have known for some time that things were going very wrong with the economy. I remember an interview last March with Paul Krugman in Fortune magazine where he said that he thought we would hit 6-7 Trillion Dollars in capital losses in the housing industry this year, a 25% reduction in equity throughout the United States. That is what we are just beginning to see right now. Congress is talking about an 800 Billion Dollar bailout. You can see that what Congress is talking about is roughly an order of magnitude too small to cover what Paul Krugman was talking about. In short, 88% of the losses aren’t being addressed by Congress.
Now, we also have to take into account that the International Monetary Fund is estimating our GDP at roughly 13 Trillion Dollars. The losses we are talking about are more than half of the Gross Domestic Product of the entire United States. Nobody alive has ever faced a financial disaster of this magnitude.
Is that what Chairman Ben Bernanke was telling the Senators in that closed-door briefing? Numbers so large that it stunned veteran Senators into silence? I think that’s exactly what happened.
Here’s the real problem: The simple answer to this problem was to avoid deregulating the banking industry in the first place. Don’t let this debacle happen. Unfortunately several years ago the “Regulation is Bad for the Economy” branch of the Republican party got it’s way, with Senator John McCain cheering it on. The easy and simple answers to this problem are all gone now. There is no choice but to see our economy slide downward. It’s simply too late to prevent that.
So, what do we do now?
We’re going to have to bail out Wall Street. We don’t have a choice about this. That’s what Congress is doing to some extent now. The problem with how they are doing it is that they are diluting the shares that investors have by taking majority stakes of the companies they are bailing out and putting it under Government control. They are allowing the investors a chance to keep some of the value, but not most of it. This is unlikely to work in the long term. People’s retirement savings are going to suffer, even though it isn’t as much as they could. In short, the government is bailing out the executives of the companies more than the investors.
The landscape for homeowners is even bleaker. Nothing whatsoever has been done to address their concerns. Foreclosures are happening at an even greater pace than before. More properties are going “upside down” in value than they were before, and the Santa Clara County Association of REALTORS is estimating that this will be the case until at least 2010. Some estimates I have been reading put it at 2012 or later.
Now, with it harder than ever to declare bankruptcy (thank you Republicans,) and savings evaporating, the backbone of the American Economy, the Consumer, has almost no money to buy anything. We can see this through the fact that spending is decreasing while savings are simultaneously decreasing. Until something is done to address the concerns of the average person on the street, the economy can do nothing but spiral downward at an ever increasing rate.
This is where we stand now.
What are we going to have to do?
We are going to have to make peace with the fact that our economy is going to crash first of all. We can’t prevent it. Next, we have to do what we can to prevent it from crashing so bad that it can’t recover. This is a real possibility. There is nothing magical about the economy of the United States. Other countries in a similar state that did nothing saw their economies die outright. Most of them are third-world countries now, or failed states. That’s the danger.
We have to bring back the regulations that prevented this problem from happening decades ago. This is an absolute must. Doing any less than this means that nobody will trust banks enough to loan them money to make loans. That’s how the system works. Without that key part the system collapses and doesn’t recover.
We have to protect the money of the average person as much as possible right now. We can’t expect someone to pay back a bad mortgage at an ever increasing rate for the rest of their lives, tying up their spending power in servicing bad debt just because some company got greedy. If these homeowners decide to allow the banks to foreclose, they will find it harder to buy another home later. The inventory of foreclosed homes will increase, because there will be fewer qualified buyers (you can’t have a foreclosure in at least the last 2 years to qualify for a home loan). This is dangerous in several ways. First, unoccupied homes bring down property values. Second, they are fire dangers. Houses are fuel. If you have enough of them you can end up with a wildfire in the middle of a city. Oakland can tell you why this is bad.
This means we have to do at least one of two things, probably both: we will have to forgive at least part of the bad debt to keep people in their homes, or we will have to allow people with foreclosures on their record to get credit anyway. The former is preferable, and while the FHA is doing this to a small extent, the program needs to be massively expanded. The latter solution will probably have to be put into effect as well. Why should we do this? Why not let the people who took out these loans just hang? If we allow our spite to get ahead of our pity (or self interest), making sure these people pay back their loans, our economy suffers from having too little money left over to buy the things that we sell. All of us suffer if we make any one segment of the population suffer too much.
In addition, we really need to start working on our infrastructure, and I don’t mean just roads, bridges, ports, electricity grid, and communications grid. I mean the workforce as well. For most of my life we have seen a growing battle against the workforce. McCain’t has been talking a big game over how strong our workforce is, but the reality is he has actively been working on weakening it.
The big secret that allows the American economy to be so strong has been our educational system. Public education was invented here. We have expanded it ever sense the Brotherhood of Friends (often referred to as “The Quakers”) introduced the concept. All of my life the Republican Party has been trying to weaken it. Vouchers. Increasing tuition in Universities. Destruction of vocational schools. Even “No Child Left Behind” which is decreasing Federal funding to elementary schools. Recently when Democrats tried to bring back full tuition for all Iraq War Veterans, McCain’t voted against it. He said it would reduce the incentive for our Servicepeople to reenlist. This attitude is going to prevent our economy from recovering.
We need a top of the line communications grid to allow educated people to build products using electricity that will be shipped to the consumer through working ports and over working roads and bridges. If any one of those things isn’t working, our economy dies and stays that way.
Why wouldn’t our economy recover? Really, why would it? People with money are under no obligation to invest it in our country. If our economy is wrecked, they would be dumb to put good money after bad. They’ll invest it elsewhere, in economies that are booming. China is a good example. With no money being invested in our country, no educated people to design new products or services, a 20th century communications grid expected to help them design them, no energy to build them, and deteriorating ports, roads, and bridges to ship them our economy will stay sunk.
What we really need to get us through this crisis is a leader that believes in our future, not one that is trying to bring us back to a failed past, namely the “Roaring ‘20s.” Let’s all make sure we work toward our country’s future.
Links:
Fortune Magazine interview with Paul Krugman: March 17th, 2008 by Jia Lynn Yang http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/14/news/economy/krugman_subprime.fortune/index.htm
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Political Anchors Dragging Down John McCain
By Ed Smallwood
Senator John McCain has problems. He has been trying to distance himself from an unpopular President in G.W. Bush. He has been trying to convince you that because he is a former POW from the Vietnam War that he is a military supporter. He also wants you to believe that the economy is going well. Each of these issues is weighing him down like anchors around his neck.
It came out recently that former Senator Phil Gramm, who was a lobbyist for UBS, and who lobbied hard for deregulation of the mortgage industry, is a leading economic advisor to Senator John McCain. That’s right; the architect of the current “Mortgage Meltdown” is a senior advisor for Mr. McCain’s economic policy. We’ve already seen what happens when the President’s closest advisors are former industry big-wigs—you get $4 per gallon oil, manipulation of the electricity market in
Right now the Senate and the House of Representatives are in conference to put the finishing touches on a new G.I. Bill that the President has vowed to veto. It would allow veterans to go to college after their service is completed. Many of our Military Servicemen and Servicewomen went into their branches of the service with the understanding that they would get monetary assistance in college as a result of their service to our country. All of the major veteran’s groups have come out in favor of this bill.
John McCain has publicly come out against the new G.I. Bill, in opposition to many of his peers in the Republican Party. He says it will cost too much. I’m not joking. Mr. McCain has said in no uncertain terms that he is not willing to give an education to people who are willing to give their lives for him and us. The cost of the lives of those over 4,000 dead in all of the branches of the military including the National Guard is not enough to make sure the rest get an education. Over 30,000 have been wounded, and that is not payment enough, according to John McCain and G.W. Bush, to make sure they and their compatriots get an education. Mr. McCain says he is afraid that one of the main recruiting tools that the military has, the offer of a free education in exchange for military service, will encourage current military personnel to leave the military instead of spurring more enlistment, and that could make a difference in his 100-year-war. Is that supporting our military?
Relying on industry to give input on how it should be regulated. Giving military support lip service. Allowing the economy to fall into disrepair from neglect. Don’t these all sound like the methodology of G.W. Bush? Can McCain really distance himself from Bush while using these tactics?
More importantly, can we vote for McCain while knowing all of this? For myself, I know that the answer is an emphatic “No!”
Sources:
Military Casualties:
http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/
McCain’s Veteran’s Problems:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1808161,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
http://washingtonindependent.com/view/mccains-gi-bill
Sen. Phil Gramm’s lobbying:
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/05/26/daily15.html
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