The end of Japan as we know it

Japan is on its last stretch as a major global economy

By Chan Akya
A few weeks ago, my Asia Times Online colleague Spengler wrote a missive on the eve of the US elections entitled "Barack Obama and America's Decline" , which included a plaintive plea for voters to cast their ballots on issues over and above their narrow personal interests. Predictably, my cynical response to him was on the lines of "why would turkeys vote FOR Thanksgiving?"; this being a family publication I shall not delve on his response to that missive.

As it turned out, the turkeys did vote against thanksgiving, and Obama is back in the White House to give Keynesian policies another shot. Specifically, the arguments that will be aired in the next few weeks and months will echo those of Professor Paul Krugman, who has himself filched a lot of ideas from the work of Professor Richard Koo and his book, the very modestly titled The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics" which I have reviewed in this column many moons ago. (See We are all Japanese now)

The central thesis of the book is that Japan failed to enact appropriate monetary and fiscal easing to counter the collapse in leverage engendered in the household and corporate sectors after the collapse of the economy in the late eighties and early nineties. Since the late '90s though, Japan's government has run a series of deficits while the central bank has kept interest rates at below zero through the liberal use of quantitative easing measures.

In fits and starts, the strategy has allowed Japan to remain afloat; however as the most recent trade deficit numbers make clear last week (a horrifying collapse in exports) and the travails of electronics giants Sony and Panasonic (both downgraded to junk credit rating last week by the Fitch agency), the path is nowhere near smooth; and indeed results appear to run counter to the best intentions of both Koo and by extension, Krugman.

At many levels, I have a deep admiration for the Japanese people; their work ethic, aesthetic values and personal discipline all set them apart from the globalized mainstream. Equally, a lot of people have called the death of Japan already; somehow the old lady didn't notice those obituaries and has continued to plod on despite all the deprivations that two decades of economic recession bring. A cat with the proverbial nine lives, in some ways.

Economics though is an unforgiving taskmaster, and eventually extracts change from the most obdurate societies. There are in particular a few specific factors that argue that the cat's nine lives are indeed up this time around.

Bernanke's Easy Money Death Spiral

On the Road to Zero Growth

By Vince Foster

It seems that big sucking sound signaling a precipitous drop off in the demand for money that I have been warning about for a few weeks is starting to get some more attention. This past Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story headlined Investment Falls Off a Cliff:  US Companies Cut Spending Plans Amid Fiscal and Economic Uncertainty. According to the article:

Nationwide, business investment in equipment and software -- a measure of economic vitality in the corporate sector -- stalled in the third quarter for the first time since early 2009.

Corporate executives say they are slowing or delaying big projects to protect profits amid easing demand and rising uncertainty. Uncertainty around the US elections and federal budget policies also appear among the factors driving the investment pullback since midyear.

Companies fear that failure to resolve the fiscal cliff will tip the economy back into recession by sapping consumer spending, damaging investor confidence and eating into corporate profits.

Ben’s debt binge to detonate retirement funds

Bond bubble bust

by JONATHON TRUGMAN

There goes the nest egg.

There’s a record $16.3 trillion of US debt and a good portion of that is sitting in baby boomers’ portfolios like a ticking time bomb ready to explode, and most investors know little about it.

“It’s my worst nightmare,” says a long-only bond fund manager. “There’s nothing I can do — the checks come in [from clients] every day, and I have to invest it.”

With Ben Bernanke’s debt paper floating through the market and the Fed chief vowing to keep rates low until 2015, some bond managers are hoping to get out before the bubble bursts and Armageddon hits.

And rates would not have to go through the roof to take out billions in principal for investors, most of whom are in bonds because they are nearing retirement.

“If the 10-year [bond] goes up 100 basis points, that could mean more than $35 billion is lost,” says one bond trader.

One hundred basis points is just a 1 percent increase, which would put the 10-year at about 2.6 percent. The average rate of return over the last decade is roughly 4 percent, which, if we return to that yield, could put principal losses close to $500 billion, says a bond manager.

How Partisans Fool Themselves Into Believing Their Own Spin

Science shows that we often allow our moral judgment to overshadow factual arguments

By Alesh Houdek

This month's presidential election was between two fairly centrist candidates. And yet political discourse between ordinary Republicans and Democrats is more contentious and hostile than it's been in decades. I bet you strongly agree with one of these statements:

• If you're a Democrat: The Obama campaign for reelection was run largely based on telling the truth. The Romney campaign was laregely based on lies.
• If you're a Republican: All political campaigns stretch the facts from time to time to make a point. Romney and Obama both did.

I'd like to suggest that both these statements are false. 

Let's first take on the claim that the Obama reelection team did not lie. During the campaign President Obama said, directly and through campaign advertising, that Romney opposed gay adoption, opposed abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and that Romney's plan could take away middle-class tax deductions. He claimed that during his first term we doubled our use of renewable energy, doubled exports, and that 30 million Americans are going to get health care next year because of Obamacare. And that's before we even get to how the campaign twisted the facts around when Romney left Bain Capital to make him look bad.

Is the Enemy Us?

Fat Studies For Thin Minds

BY CLAIRE BERLINSKI

In his new book, Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.” The academy, he observes, is “the font of the perfidious multicultural idea and the setting in which it is implanted into the minds of American youth.”

In what must be reckoned a martyrdom operation, Bawer has spent countless hours not only reading the collective oeuvre of the leading luminaries in Black, Women’s, Gender, Queer, Fat, and Chicano Studies, but also traveling America to attend their conferences. At a gathering of the Cultural Studies Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, Bawer encounters the young Michele, who’s “like, a grad student at UC Davis?” She’s “sort of reviving a Gramschian-style Marxism,” involving the idea that global warming is “sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” Bawer claims that his heart goes out to her. (His heart is bigger than mine.)

Texas Schools Teaching Boston Tea Party As Terrorist Act

Neither Liberty Nor Security

By CBS News

The most historical instance of protesting against taxation without representation is now being taught in Texas schools as a terrorist act.

As recently as January of this year, the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative included a lesson plan that depicted the Boston Tea Party, an event that helped ignite the American Revolution, as an act of terrorism. TheBlaze reports that in a lesson promoted on the TESCCC site as recently as January, a world history/social studies class plan depicted the Boston Tea Party as being anything but patriotic, causing many people to become upset with the lack of transparency and review for lessons.

Your Perception Is Your Reality

Capital Formation and the Fiscal Cliff 

By John Mauldin

There’s a very interesting article in The Atlantic this week, called “How Partisans Fool Themselves Into Believing Their Own Spin.”  While the author, Alesh Houdek, engages in some spin of his own, he makes some very good points that we should keep in mind not only as we look at the potential effects of a tax increase but as we tackle new ideas and accompanying “facts” in general. And he has pointed us to a very interesting study, or at least it’s interesting for those of us who are fascinated by behavioral psychology and behavioral economics:

We weigh facts and lines of reasoning far more strongly when they favor our own side, and we minimize the importance and validity of the opposition's arguments. That may be appropriate behavior in a formal debate, or when we're trying to sway the opinion of a third party. But to the extent that we internalize these tendencies, they injure our ability to think and see clearly. And if we bring them into the sort of open and honest one-on-one political debates that we'd like to think Americans have with each other, we strain our own credibility and undermine the possibility of reaching an understanding.

A defense attorney presents the best case for his client's innocence in court, but he's realistic with himself about what he believes the truth of the matter is. Too often in political arguments we have drunk our own Kool-Aid.”

Stop the Madness

Washington is spending the country into economic decline

By PETE DU PONT

Summer is almost ended, and Americans are growing more and more skeptical about the coming fall--about our lack of jobs, our bigger and more expensive government, the higher taxes that will be coming soon, more expensive and less personal health care, and, most important, our declining economy.

A look at specific trends makes it seem very bad indeed. As Mortimer Zuckerman recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal: "Now there are at least 14.5 million Americans still searching for work: 1.4 million of them have been jobless for more than 99 weeks, 6.5 million have been jobless for over 27 weeks."

Pessimism is on the increase, and people are losing confidence in the president. In health care, while 39% of people believe Barack Obama's performance is up to expectations, 55% say that he has fallen short. Regarding our economy it is 29% positive and 66% negative. And the budget deficit? Only 25% of people think the government has done well controlling the deficit, while 67% believe it is too big and will not be cut.

Privatizing Greece, Slowly but Not Surely

Greece demands philanthropy, not investment

By LIZ ALDERMAN

THE government inspectors set out from Athens for what they thought was a pristine patch of coastline on the Ionian Sea. Their mission was to determine how much money that sun-kissed shore, owned by the Greek government, might sell for under a sweeping privatization program demanded by the nation’s restive creditors.

What the inspectors found was 7,000 homes — none of which were supposed to be there. They had been thrown up without ever having been recorded in a land registry.

“If the government wanted to privatize here, they would have to bulldoze everything,” says Makis Paraskevopoulos, the local mayor. “And that’s never going to happen.”

Athens agreed. It scratched the town, Katakolo, off a list of potential properties to sell. But as Greece redoubles its efforts to raise billions to cut its debt and stoke its economy, the situation in Katakolo illustrates the daunting hurdles ahead.

'Smart Austerity' and the Latvian Turnaround

Smart austerity is economic stimulus, but not of the "borrow and print money" sort

An economic policy that combines growth—setting correct incentives—and austerity—getting rid of wrong and excessive spending—was key to our economic recovery

By DANIELS PAVLUTS

The recent trend-defying economic growth in Latvia is good news for our country. It is not good news for those who decry the Latvian government's policies of radical fiscal consolidation and sweeping structural reforms as too focused on "austerity" and not focused enough on "growth."

I think "smart austerity" is a much more accurate description of our policy. Smart austerity is economic stimulus, but not of the "borrow and print money" sort. Smart austerity means reviving the business environment by making it more competitive. It means creating a macroeconomic framework that restores confidence and directs the economy away from debt-driven financial services and construction. It also means safeguarding social stability and protecting education spending from cuts, thereby preserving our long-term competitiveness.

If deficit spending were stimulus, France would be king

Les Moody Blues

Moody's stripped France of its triple-A rating last week, citing "deteriorating economic prospects," the "long-standing rigidities of its labor, goods and services markets" and "exposure to peripheral Europe." And it could get worse: "We would downgrade the rating further in the event of an additional material deterioration in France's economic prospects," says Dietmar Hornung, Moody's lead analyst for France.

Don't think, however, that the French government is unduly alarmed. Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici insisted that the downgrade did not "call into question the economic fundamentals of our country." We've never made a fetish of the opinions of the ratings agencies, which tend to be lagging indicators. Nonetheless, the "fundamentals" Mr. Moscovici points to are worth a closer look.

In 1981, when the Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand took office, France's national debt amounted to 22% of GDP. In the intervening years France's economy has grown by an inflation-adjusted 73%, while the national debt—now at 90% of GDP—grew by 609% in real terms. In raw numbers, that comes to about €1.7 trillion in additional debt. At no time in those 31 years did any French government balance a budget, much less run a surplus.

On its current trajectory, America will look like France or Greece before long

Hello, Europe

By PETE DU PONT

The election is behind us, with President Obama's strong victory over Mitt Romney. Mr. Obama did not do as well this time, winning by 3.3 million votes compared with 9.5 million in 2008. But he overcame a weak economy and some unpopular policies to win a second term, and that is no small feat.

Still, one could argue his greatest challenge is in front of him, because America's economy continues to do very poorly. Employment levels are still 3% lower than before the recession that began almost five years ago, meaning our so-called recovery of the last few years is far below other recoveries dating back through the 1950s.

People of all income levels feel the impact of economic weakness. The number of people receiving food stamps has increased by 15 million, or almost 50%, in the past four years. The number of taxpayers earning $1 million or more per year was just below 400,000 in 2007 (having risen quite a bit from 170,000 in 2002), but it has plummeted and was only around 268,000 in 2010.

Things may get worse before they get better. Just a few days ago, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the "fiscal cliff" we face in January, if the president and Congress don't do something very soon, would push us back into recession and raise the unemployment rate above 9% by the end of next year.

Facing austerity, Europe's bureaucrats chafe

The EU operates in a bubble

By Sebastian Moffett and Claire Davenport

Workers protesting austerity on the streets of southern Europe weren't to know it, but earlier this month there was also a strike at the heart of the European Union - by bureaucrats fighting possible cuts.
For an increasing number of Europeans, cuts in Brussels are what is needed.
The European capital has told member states to reduce spending, but as millions in Spain, Portugal and Greece feel the pain in pay, pensions, and social services, people are looking to the centre and finding what looks like fat.

Britain has led the way. Newspapers there have for decades carped at cosy 'eurocrats', as they call Europe's civil servants. Prime Minister David Cameron need only mention the EU and generous spending to produce a sea of nods and chants of "hear, hear!" around parliament.

"We can't have European spending going up and up and up when we're having to make difficult decisions in so many different areas," Cameron told reporters at the last summit of EU leaders in October, going on to express his frustration at the salaries of civil servants in Brussels.

Separatists winning in Catalonia, Spain: early results

Tough times ahead for Mariano Rajoy

By Fiona Ortiz and Braden Phillips

Four separatist parties in Spain's Catalonia looked set to win a majority in regional elections on Sunday, partial results showed, but the main one was on course to lose some seats, possibly undermining its bid to call an independence referendum.
With half of votes counted, the ruling Convergence and Union alliance, or CiU, was winning 48 seats in the 135-seat local parliament, well down from its current 62 seats
The separatist Republican Left, or ERC, was winning 20 seats, with two other smaller separatist parties taking a total of 16 seats, giving the four parties 60 percent between them.
Regional President Artur Mas, of CiU, had campaigned on a pledge to hold a referendum on independence, in response to a resurgent separatist movement among Catalans who are frustrated with Spain in a deep economic crisis.

America’s Addled Puritanism

Τhe authorities American society listens to most on the subject of sex are Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Nobody in human history has ever been entirely sensible and rational about the Big Five subjects, at least not for long: sex, power, children, money and God have been agitating and confusing human beings since time began.

Note which comes first on the list: sex is both inescapable and inescapably confusing.

America’s own peculiar forms of sex craziness were beautifully on display this week. There is the sad and very shocking news that David Petraeus has stepped down as the head of the CIA due to an adulterous affair with his biographer. And over in another wing of what has clearly been a very active military-industrial complex recently, Lockheed Martin’s CEO-designate Christopher Kubasik has been forced to give up his post following the revelation that he was conducting an “improper” relationship with a female employee of the company.

The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Germany's Capital

The Late Bloomer

It wasn't until 1871, with the establishment of the German Reich, that Berlin finally took its place among other European capitals. Its wild race to catch up was cut short by World War II and then hindered by division. Now, more than a century later, Berlin is still trying to find itself

By Michael Sontheimer

One might be tempted to draw comparisons, but it can also become an obsession. Still, that's exactly what Berliners tend to do, at least when it comes to their city.

Whenever it happens, Berlin suddenly isn't good enough for them, and they constantly feel compelled to draw comparisons -- not with just any old cities, but with the crème de la crème. "Berlin, the German metropolis, can once again measure up to the likes of London, Paris and New York," the city's then-mayor said shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The die-hard residents of the German capital don't like to aim any lower than that. They see Berlin as the sassy little sister of London, Paris and New York, a city that successfully contended for a spot in the exclusive family of cosmopolitan cities in the 1920s.

What Fukushima ?

India Pursues Massive Nuclear Expansion

The 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima plant led many countries to turn away from nuclear power. But a growing population and rising economy has prompted India to massively expand its nuclear program -- even in the face of technological worries and fervent opposition

By Wieland Wagner

They placed the photo of the dead man in the entrance of the hut. A lightbulb illuminating his face makes it look like that of a saint. The bereaved widow has her four children stand in front of the photo. They have lost their breadwinner, and now they can only hope that he will continue to somehow feed them even after death. Opponents of nuclear power in India view him as a martyr and are collecting donations for the family.

Sahayam Francis was only 42, and now his picture is displayed everywhere on the straw-roofed houses of Idinthakarai, a fishing village in the state of Tamil Nadu, on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. It looks like an idyllic place, where fisherman spread their catches out to dry on the beach and repair their nets while sitting under palm trees. But it's a deceptive paradise.

The Faustian Bargain between States and Banks

Inevitability of Debt

States and banks have made a deal with the devil. Banks buy the sovereign bonds needed to prop states up in the tacit understanding that the states will bail them out in a pinch. But experts warn that this symbiotic arrangement might be putting the entire financial system at risk.

By Stefan Kaiser

When he presented his proposals for taming banks in late September, Peer Steinbrück was once again spoiling for a fight. The Social Democratic candidate for the Chancellery in next year's general election railed against the chase for short-term returns and excesses within the sector and harshly criticized the "market-conforming democracy" in which politics and people's lives had become mere playthings of the financial markets.

Steinbrück's speech lasted half an hour, or a minute for each of the pages of a document he had prepared on the same issue. The paper lists a whole series of suggested regulations, most of which seem entirely sensible. Most interesting, however, is what's missing from the paper -- and what has thus far been absent from almost all of the proposals of other financial reformers: the disastrous degree to which countries are now dependent on banks.

Prison of Debt Paralyzes West

Betting with Trillions

Be it the United States or the European Union, most Western countries are so highly indebted today that the markets have a greater say in their policies than the people. Why are democratic countries so pathetic when it comes to managing their money sustainably?

By Cordt Schnibben
In the midst of this confusing crisis, which has already lasted more than five years, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt addressed the question of who had "gotten almost the entire world into so much trouble." The longer the search for answers lasted, the more disconcerting the questions arising from the answers became. Is it possible that we are not experiencing a crisis, but rather a transformation of our economic system that feels like an unending crisis, and that waiting for it to end is hopeless? Is it possible that we are waiting for the world to conform to our worldview once again, but that it would be smarter to adjust our worldview to conform to the world? Is it possible that financial markets will never become servants of the markets for goods again? Is it possible that Western countries can no longer get rid of their debt, because democracies can't manage money? And is it possible that even Helmut Schmidt ought to be saying to himself: I too am responsible for getting the world into a fix?

The Twinkie That Broke The Economy's Back

Large numbers of once thriving businesses are either shutting down or laying off workers

By Michael Snyder

Can you hear that sound?  It is the sound of the air being let out of the economy.  Since the election, there has been a massive tsunami of layoffs and business failures.  Of course the company that is making the biggest headlines right now is Hostess.

On Monday, Hostess will be in a New York bankruptcy courtroom as it begins the process of liquidating itself.  Needless to say, Twinkie lovers all over America are horrified.  Many are running out to grocery stores and hoarding as many as they can find, and some online sellers are already listing boxes of 10 Twinkies for as much as $10,000 on auction websites such as eBay.  Well, there is really no reason to panic.  It is very likely that another company will purchase the Twinkie brand and continue to produce them.  In fact, it is already being rumored that a Mexican company may have the inside track.

But even though the Twinkie may survive, the failure of Hostess is yet another sign of how weak the U.S. economy has become.  Approximately 18,500 Hostess workers will be losing their jobs, and even if some of them are rehired by the company that takes over the Twinkie brand, the truth is that those workers will almost certainly be looking at greatly reduced pay and benefits.  Sadly, we are seeing this kind of thing happen all over America.  Large numbers of once thriving businesses are either shutting down or laying off workers.

Overall, the failure of Hostess is not that big of a deal for the U.S. economy.  But we may look back someday and remember Hostess as a symbol of the economic problems that were unleashed by the election of 2012.  Since November 6th, a wave of pessimism has swept over the economy and we are now seeing some of the worst economic numbers that we have seen in more than a year.  Many fear that we may have reached a tipping point and that things are only going to get worse from here.

Sadly, the reality is that Hostess is not the only iconic American company that is in a huge amount of trouble right now.  Sears just announced a loss of nearly 500 million dollars in the third quarter.  Sears has been bleeding money like this for a couple of years, and if they continue to do so it will just be a matter of time before Sears is headed for liquidation as well.