http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/inaugural-hope-but-americ_b_156098.html
Inaugural Hope, but America Is in Shock By Nathan Gardells HuffPost: Jan 7, 2008 America is in shock. It is not because of the unusual sight of the first black president taking up residence in the White House. Barack Obama's profile, after all, is more familiar to the diverse population of today's ethnically and racially hybrid America than the fast-disappearing WASP identity of George W. Bush. Sooner or later, but always, politics codifies cultural change, not the other way around. America is in shock because our economic and financial landscape is suddenly unrecognizable. In the space of a few short months, we have morphed from the citadel of free-market capitalism and freewheeling consumerism -- from a land of high-flying hedge funds, Hummers and homes that doubled as ATMs -- to a system in which the banks, insurance companies, mortgage industry and auto manufacturers are quasi-socialized. Adding to that shock is the fact that middle-class investors have seen their portfolios, upon which they depended for retirement, diminished nearly by half. The tax-and-spend epithet that defined America's partisan politics for decades has been replaced overnight with a bipartisan mantra calling for a nearly trillion-dollar fiscal stimulus. No sooner had Milton Friedman been laid to rest (he died in 2006) than John Maynard Keynes was resurrected. Amazingly, even the historical aversion to state-guided industrial policy in the United States has yielded to urgent demands for political oversight of private enterprise, starting with the Big Three automakers in Detroit. The year 2008 is thus likely to go down in American history as an even more pivotal one than 2001, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, because the life of the average American is going to be shaped far more by the consequences. We're not talking about the inconvenience of lining up to go through metal detectors at the airport. We're talking about the transformation of the American model itself. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was not exaggerating when he quipped to me earlier this year that "the fall of Wall Street is to market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism." Just like that, we're in a different era. In this circumstance, Barack Obama will not be judged by the color of his skin, or even the content of his character. He will be judged by the quality of his leadership and the success of his policies in staving off depression and putting America back on the path to prosperity. A lot depends now on how deep the recession bites. The harder you fall, the harder you come back. Given the continually mounting bankruptcies, foreclosures and unemployment levels, there seems little question that the years ahead will see such a vastly expanded government role that the New Deal will look modest in comparison. If the wise vision articulated so far by Obama and his team pans out in practice, we'll come out on the other side of the avalanche of new laws and the billions spent with a disciplined financial sector constrained by the public hand, a refurbished and greener infrastructure, fuel-efficient cars, a radical expansion of broadband penetration, universal health care and a reawakened housing market. In the meantime, it will be no easy task to de-leverage the American Dream. Since the 1950s, when Nixon bested Khrushchev in the famous "kitchen debate," our answer to the equalized deprivation of socialism has been consumer plenitude beyond compare. Khrushchev may have emptily blustered in those years about burying us, but it was the Communist Chinese, in the end, who gave us enough credit to hang ourselves when our consumer society desired more than we could pay for with our own savings. "Unlike other times of turmoil in the market, the current stress wasn't precipitated by problems in the real economy," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told me at the outset of this crisis in 2007. "The current problems were precipitated by excesses in the form of undisciplined lending practices which came about, in part, because of great liquidity available from Chinese savings and other sources, such as the Gulf states, as well as a strong American economy. In a number of markets, lenders reached for yield at a time when risk premiums and interest rates were at historic lows." This was particularly true in the sub-prime mortgage market. It was the flow of Chinese dollar reserves earned from trade back into U.S. Treasury bills and mortgage-backed securities that held down long-term interest rates in the U.S. and enabled and sustained the asset bubble. Widespread single-family home ownership has long been proof of the superiority of our ideology, the brick-and-mortar realization of the American Dream itself. Thanks to innovative finance and the easy credit Paulson talked about, no dream need be deferred if it could be mortgaged. That is where the problem began, though not where it has ended. In a conversation with me in November, financier George Soros filled out the picture. "The current situation is not just about the housing bubble," he said. "The housing bubble was merely the trigger that detonated a much larger bubble. That super-bubble, created by the ever-increasing use of credit and debt leverage across the economy, combined with convictions that markets are self-correcting, took more than 25 years to grow. Now it is exploding." As a result, according to Soros, we are now witnessing a power shift from the deeply indebted American superpower to Asian creditors flush with cash, "a consequence," he says, "of the sins of the last 25 years." (Already as I write this, waves of Chinese investors are scouring Southern California in search of real-estate deals.) Whatever else is on his immediate plate, Obama's overarching challenge is to figure out the conundrum of how to unwind this global imbalance, particularly with China, while at the same time re-igniting American growth. Inevitably, as China shifts the investment of its vast reserves to stimulate its own lagging economy instead of purchasing U.S. Treasury bills, the dollar will start to plummet. If Americans are in shock today over how rapidly their fortunes can turn on the domestic front, they will be no less stunned tomorrow when they realize the high costs on the global stage of putting the house of the American dream back in order. *** http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/opinion/09krugman.html?th&emc=th The Obama Gap '...the Obama plan just doesn't look adequate to the economy's need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy's potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama's stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan.' By PAUL KRUGMAN NY Times Op-Ed: January 9, 2009 "I don't believe it's too late to change course, but it will be if we don't take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years." So declared President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday, explaining why the nation needs an extremely aggressive government response to the economic downturn. He's right. This is the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it could all too easily turn into a prolonged slump. But Mr. Obama's prescription doesn't live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he's offering isn't as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what's needed. Bear in mind just how big the U.S. economy is. Given sufficient demand for its output, America would produce more than $30 trillion worth of goods and services over the next two years. But with both consumer spending and business investment plunging, a huge gap is opening up between what the American economy can produce and what it's able to sell. And the Obama plan is nowhere near big enough to fill this "output gap." Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office came out with its latest analysis of the budget and economic outlook. The budget office says that in the absence of a stimulus plan, the unemployment rate would rise above 9 percent by early 2010, and stay high for years to come. Grim as this projection is, by the way, it's actually optimistic compared with some independent forecasts. Mr. Obama himself has been saying that without a stimulus plan, the unemployment rate could go into double digits. Even the C.B.O. says, however, that "economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential." This translates into $2.1 trillion of lost production. "Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity," declared Mr. Obama on Thursday. Well, he was actually understating things. To close a gap of more than $2 trillion - possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic - Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that's not enough. Now, fiscal stimulus can sometimes have a "multiplier" effect: In addition to the direct effects of, say, investment in infrastructure on demand, there can be a further indirect effect as higher incomes lead to higher consumer spending. Standard estimates suggest that a dollar of public spending raises G.D.P. by around $1.50. But only about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts - and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.) Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summed it up in the title of a recent blog posting: "lots of buck, not much bang." The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job. Why isn't Mr. Obama trying to do more? Is the plan being limited by fear of debt? There are dangers associated with large-scale government borrowing - and this week's C.B.O. report projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for this year. But it would be even more dangerous to fall short in rescuing the economy. The president-elect spoke eloquently and accurately on Thursday about the consequences of failing to act - there's a real risk that we'll slide into a prolonged, Japanese-style deflationary trap - but the consequences of failing to act adequately aren't much better. Is the plan being limited by a lack of spending opportunities? There are only a limited number of "shovel-ready" public investment projects - that is, projects that can be started quickly enough to help the economy in the near term. But there are other forms of public spending, especially on health care, that could do good while aiding the economy in its hour of need. Or is the plan being limited by political caution? Press reports last month indicated that Obama aides were anxious to keep the final price tag on the plan below the politically sensitive trillion-dollar mark. There also have been suggestions that the plan's inclusion of large business tax cuts, which add to its cost but will do little for the economy, is an attempt to win Republican votes in Congress. Whatever the explanation, the Obama plan just doesn't look adequate to the economy's need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy's potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama's stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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