Too Big to Jail

Our Banking System's Latest Disgrace

By Neil Barofsky

You can be forgiven if you watched the Department of Justice’s announcement yesterday of a $1.92 billion settlement with HSBC with a sense of disappointment--and déjà vu. The event checked all the boxes in a theatrical routine that has become all too familiar.

Descriptions of breathtaking misconduct involving the facilitation of massive drug trafficking and transactions with rogue terror-sponsoring nations? Check.

Broad boasts about the "historic" nature of the settlement that will certainly end the type of criminal misconduct alleged? Check.

Mea culpas from the offending institution with promises that it has really learned its lesson this time and will never ever engage in dastardly conduct again? Yep, that too. 

Nothing, however, was quite as it appeared. Sure, HSBC paid a record fine, but there was something vitally important missing from yesterday's press conference: actual criminal charges for obvious criminal conduct.

Some perspective: HSBC sent more than $800 million in bulk cash from Mexico to the United States, a good chunk of which apparently represented proceeds from some of the most notorious Colombian drug cartels. As someone who tried the first narcotics money laundering case involving extradition from Colombia, let me assure you that this is a lot of money, the discovery of which usually generates vigorous prosecutions and lengthy prison sentences. And it wasn’t HSBC’s only dirty business: There were also hundreds of millions of more dollars of illegally disguised transactions with rogue nations such as Iran and Sudan.

The Federal Reserve's Zombie Economy

Crony capitalism is remaking American business to be more like government

By Elizabeth MacDonald

Deutsche Bank is out with a new warning that says the Federal Reserve’s latest round of an estimated $1.02 trillion in total annual purchases of U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities is creating lemon socialism, a U.S. economy filled with the financially undead.

Deutsche notes that stock markets are based on winners and losers, but there are neither right now. That’s because the Fed keeps pumping liquidity into the system, so everyone wins. When everyone wins, no one makes money, a bridge to nowhere Japan has already crossed.

The Fed’s balance sheet could rise from $2.8 trillion currently to $4 trillion by the end of the year, even $6 trillion by the time the U.S. jobless rate gets down to the new 6.5% level the central bank wants, as the Fed stuffs a lot of paper padding at the foot of the fiscal cliff.

“Central banks should be more selective with their intervention,” says Deutsche’s equity research team. “Normally, weak companies fail, leaving the winners to advance and new companies to enter; but at the moment no company can win because the losers never leave the field as they receive support through continuous liquidity injections.”

Deutsche's equity team adds if the Fed were to “let markets decide, then equity markets would probably fall." It also notes: "But, as it is, if real investors can’t predict which way markets will go, then they will stay on the sidelines."

Deutsche also says that all of this government help essentially turns into government resentment, and it turns profits--or your wallets--into sitting ducks, a bulls-eye painted on them.

"Capital is rewarded through profits, but currently high profits can either appear socially unacceptable or as easy targets for taxation," Deutsche says.

How the Fed Rules and Inflates

The American banking system now comprises two sets of inverted pyramids

by Murray N. Rothbard

Pursuant to its essence as a post-Peel Act Central Bank, the Federal Reserve enjoys a monopoly of the issue of all bank notes. The U. S. Treasury, which issued paper money as Greenbacks during the Civil War, continued to issue one-dollar "Silver Certificates" redeemable in silver bullion or coin at the Treasury until August 16, 1968. The Treasury has now abandoned any note issue, leaving all the country's paper notes, or "cash," to be emitted by the Federal Reserve. Not only that; since the U.S. abandonment of the gold standard in 1933, Federal Reserve Notes have been legal tender for all monetary debts, public or private.

Federal Reserve Notes, the legal monopoly of cash or "standard," money, now serves as the base of two inverted pyramids determining the supply of money in the country. More precisely, the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks consist largely of two central items. One is the gold originally confiscated from the public and later amassed by the Fed. Interestingly enough, while Fed liabilities are no longer redeemable in gold, the Fed safeguards its gold by depositing it in the Treasury, which issues "gold certificates" guaranteed to be backed by no less than 100 percent in gold bullion buried in Fort Knox and other Treasury depositories. It is surely fitting that the only honest warehousing left in the monetary system is between two different agencies of the federal government: the Fed makes sure that its receipts at the Treasury are backed 100 percent in the Treasury vaults, whereas the Fed does not accord any of its creditors that high privilege.

On The Fiscal Cliff And A Constitution In Crisis

Out of a population of 315 million, presently only 115 million Americans have full time, non-government funded jobs

by Gordon T. Long

The Political Foundation of the status quo in America is based on a Grand Bargain of Complicity between the top 25% who pay approximately 90% of the taxes, and the bottom 50% who draw on the benefits that come from government. James Madison in the "Federalist Papers" outlined this complicity in the "Tyranny of the Majority". What is becoming painfully evident is that the political elite in America have falsely over-promised on the entitlements that can be delivered, which is now surfacing in the political turmoil of the Fiscal Cliff negotiations and has the potential to quickly lead towards a constitutional crisis.

Meanwhile the very top 1% of Americans, that pay 25% of the taxes and control most of the productive wealth in the nation, are securing and exercising increasing powers within the government, through what is becoming increasingly identified as 'Crony Capitalism" and "Corporatocracy". Thomas Jefferson also warned us about this potential constitutionally destabilizing influence which could emerge within the structure of the 'separation of powers'.

Out of a population of 315 million, presently only 115 million Americans have full time, non-government funded jobs. This is the same as 12 years ago and before an additional 33 million students, immigrants, single parents of others attempted to enter the workforce. It is now fracturing the social compact and the revealing the delusion of the American dream being available to all who are willing to work for it. There is no work, and certainly insufficient work which pays a wage which will support what is expected as a middle class standard of living.

This Grand Bargain is now rapidly fraying as 75 million baby boomers begin retiring and find the promises made to everyone cannot possibly be met. As the Fiscal Cliff crisis is blatantly bringing to the public's attention, for those who can read between the carefully crafted lines, funding for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, National Security and Interest on the debt is consuming more than can be realistically raised through taxation.

To collect enough tax revenue to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8 trillion in tax collections annually. Expropriating the entire income of the top 25% of households that pay almost 90% of the tax and all corporate taxes would only bring in $6.7 trillion.

"The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees' future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion"

               Chris Cox and Bill Archer, Former Congressmen - WSJ 11-26-12

Claims on welfare and disability programs are skyrocketing at the same time that the demographics of an aging populace are causing 10,000 people a day to enter Social Security and Medicare, the two costliest government programs. Meanwhile, the upper-middle class that pays most of the taxes has been slammed with lower income and a devastating drop in their housing-based net worth. Compounding this is the fact that the disillusioned wealthy have slowed dramatically their invested CAPEX (Capital Expenditures) in productive assets in the US.

This above confluence and much more indicates that is leading to a Constitutional Crisis by the end of the decade.

Why it’s wrong to censor Holocaust deniers

History, including the history of the Holocaust, should be determined in open, public debate, not in the courts

by Angus Kennedy 

I want to talk about genocide affirmers rather than genocide deniers – and I’ll try to explain what I mean by that.

Firstly, I think that genocide denial has always been something of a shrill brand rather a real force in the world. It had it’s hey day in 1970s France with Robert Faurisson, a rather lame literary critic in the south of France who denied the Holocaust, and was taken apart by, among other people, the French classicist and structuralist Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who was also a left-winger. Vidal-Naquet did not call for the legal prohibition of denial; instead he argued that contempt is a much more effective weapon. Similarly, Deborah Lipstadt, the author of History on Trial: My Day In Court With David Irving (2005), rails against genocide denial but is still opposed to criminalising it, shuddering at the thought ‘that politicians might be given the power to legislate on history’. I think that is a useful point to bear in mind.

The decision of whether or not to criminalise genocide denial is, in a way, the key free speech issue, the fundamental taboo. In that sense, it’s interesting that there continue to be movements by governments to make genocide denial illegal. France will probably try to push through the genocide denial law, despite it being overturned by its constitutional court, and argue for restrictions on what the French can and cannot say.

To make it clear, I’m completely opposed to criminalisation of speech or, to be more accurate, criminalisation of an idea – because that’s what this is. This is governments saying that a certain idea – genocide denial – should be illegal. I don’t think history is a matter for judges; it’s a matter for historians. I think that the completely unrestricted and absolute right to free speech is simply the best method we’ve got for getting closer to historical truth with a capital ‘T’. We should not be criminalising ideas; we should never be pragmatic about where we extend tolerance – it is a principal to be defended at all costs.

I am, however, concerned about the rapid expansion of the category of what you might call ‘deniers’. We started with Holocaust deniers - now there are genocide deniers, climate-change deniers and rape deniers. I think this is the case because there’s a growing set of people who are affirmers. The deniers are, if you like, the flipside of the intolerance of the affirmers, who are intolerant of those who do not take the orthodox position on rape, climate change, genocide or the Holocaust. When you brand somebody a denier you refuse to discuss the issue. I’m not suggesting that bringing David Irving up here on the panel would be in any way illuminating – trust me, it would not – but I am saying that society should be free to discuss, in this case, the Holocaust in a completely unrestricted way. No idea should not be off the table.

Too Big To Understand

Bigger and more extensive regulation can make a system less well-regulated

By John Aziz

One thing that has undergone hyperinflation in recent years is the length of financial regulations:

The Dodd-Frank regulatory hyperinflation crowds out those who cannot afford teams of legal counsel, compliance officers, and expansive litigation. Dodd-Frank creates new overheads which are no challenge for large hedge funds and megabanks armed with Fed liquidity, but a massive challenge for startups and smaller players with more limited resources.

As BusinessWeek noted in October:

The law requires Hedge Funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, supply reams of sensitive data on trading positions, carefully screen potential investors, and hire compliance officer after compliance officer.

So, is this expansion in volume likely to improve financial stability? No — the big banks are bigger and more interconnected than ever, which was precisely the problem before 2008, and they are still speculating and arbitraging with very fragile strategies that can incur massive losses as MF Global’s breakdown and more recently the London Whale episode proves.

Andy Haldane laid out the problem perfectly in his recent paper The Dog and the Frisbee:

Catching a frisbee is difficult. Doing so successfully requires the catcher to weigh a complex array of physical and atmospheric factors, among them wind speed and frisbee rotation. Were a physicist to write down frisbee-catching as an optimal control problem, they would need to understand and apply Newton’s Law of Gravity.

Yet despite this complexity, catching a frisbee is remarkably common. Casual empiricism reveals that it is not an activity only undertaken by those with a Doctorate in physics. It is a task that an average dog can master. Indeed some, such as border collies, are better at frisbee-catching than humans.

We’re no longer citizens, we’re suspects

The new Communications Data Bill continues the trend away from privacy to giving the state full access to our private lives

by Luke Gittos 

Following complaints in the halls of Westminster over the past week, UK prime minister David Cameron announced yesterday that the Communications Data Bill will have to be redrafted. The bill - which would have granted draconian, almost open-ended snooping powers to the home secretary to monitor our communications - will now have to be rewritten with greater ‘safeguards’ to protect our privacy.

We should be clear that the retreat on this bill has little or nothing to do with a commitment to safeguarding privacy. Undoubtedly, it is an affordable concession by the Tories to the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who indicated that his party had ‘serious concerns’ around the scope of the bill. Clegg’s concerns were typical of the governmental furore over the last week, which has been narrowly focused on the scope of the powers granted under clause 1 of the bill, but which has said nothing about its stated purpose: to facilitate greater disclosure of data from private companies to the state.

The anticipated powers under clause 1 were absurdly broad. It would have given the home secretary an almost open-ended power to make orders, outside the scrutiny of parliament, requiring communications companies to retain and provide communications data.  It would have allowed for disclosure of an absurd amount of information regarding our communication, even down to the device upon which a communication was made (assuming this information is available).

But because the criticism of the bill simply targeted the scope of these ludicrously wide powers, it is likely that the redraft will simply reflect the recommendations of the cross-party committee which scrutinised the bill. The committee, in a report published last week, recommended that the power under clause 1 be restricted in order that the home secretary only be granted the power to make orders through the ‘super affirmative’ procedure. This means that the minister will have to go through more parliamentary committees if he or she wants to extend their own powers under any future act.

Drink up while you can

When being green isn’t enough

BY FRACK GORDON

Statism rests on a fairly simple conceit: the free market is ruled by greed and exploitation, so government intervention is necessary to level the playing field. Inherent in that mindset is the assumption that the government is benevolent, and its actors are without their own selfish motivations. A selective naivety is necessary to maintain this wishful worldview against the constant barrage that is reality, and it leads to some fascinating contradictions. For example, the same group that believes George W. Bush started a war in order to drive up Halliburton’s stock price (or something), never stops to think about the potential pitfalls of handing the government other immense powers, such as defining what the term “health care” will mean.

Politicians are happy to exploit this naivety to accumulate power, feigning self-righteous idealism to mask their ulterior motive. Getting away with anything is possible as long as you claim that you’re doing it for the children, or to uplift the disadvantaged worker, or to strengthen the middle class, or to protect… the bottled soda industry?

We’ll get to that in a second. First, recall O’Brien’s dark reveal at the end of George Orwell’s classic1984: 

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites…  They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. 

We’ll quickly slide past how Egypt is providing a very depressing recent real world example of that last line, and transition into Mark Steyn’s response to the Chick-fil-A-permitting absurdity in Chicago this past summer:

Pat Finucane wasn’t the only victim of state terror

Observers ‘shocked’ to discover that Britain colluded with loyalist death squads: where have you been for the past 30 years?

by Brendan O’Neill 

There were ‘shocking levels of collusion’ in the murder of the Irish republican lawyer Pat Finucane, said prime minister David Cameron yesterday.

Launching a long-awaited report into the 1989 killing, in which Finucane was shot dead in front of his family in his north Belfast home by loyalist gunmen, Cameron said he was ‘deeply sorry’ over the whole incident. He confirmed that the Pat Finucane Review, set up last year by the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, had found that ‘agents of the state’ were involved in the killing of Finucane; indeed, ‘state employees played key roles’ in the murder, providing assistance and information to the Ulster Defence Association which pulled the trigger in Finucane’s home. After the killing, members of both the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) lied to investigators, in a ‘relentless attempt to defeat the ends of justice’, says the review.

Cameron’s use of the word ‘shocking’ has been splashed across the media coverage. Yet while the report of the Pat Finucane Review might make for disturbing reading - highlighting a sordid instance when the British state assisted in the murder of someone it considered a pest - is it really shocking? It is well known, at least among those who looked beyond the headlines during the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1994, that Britain’s security services colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. Some of the families of those murdered by loyalists, including Finucane’s, have been demanding inquiries into collusion for ages. In the Eighties and Nineties, radical journalists, mainly in Ireland but also a few in Britain, frequently reported on acts of collusion between the British state and loyalist death squads. Yet back then, nobody in the mainstream wanted to talk about it, much less employ a QC backed by the PM to investigate the claims and write a ‘shocking’ official report about them.

How the ‘peace process’ provokes violence

Recent riots in Belfast confirm that the politics of cultural identity does little more than reinforce sectarian divisions

by Jason Walsh 

A week of riots in Belfast is nothing new. But isn’t the peace process supposed to have put an end to all this? Think again.

The trouble started last Monday when Belfast City Council passed a motion to fly the Union flag on 18 to 20 state occasions annually, rather than on 365 days a year, as it had done previously. The motion, proposed by the liberal unionist Alliance Party, was a compromise measure; the original motion, tabled by the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and supported by Sinn Fein, had sought to stop flying the flag entirely.

Predictably, given mainstream Unionist parties had been leafleting on the matter, an angry mob appeared at Belfast City Hall. Perhaps less predictably, and certainly not predicted by the police, a riot broke out and the building was stormed. This was followed by five further nights of violence, burnt-out cars and death threats, before it all finally tapered out on Saturday.

Press coverage has focused on outrage among the middle classes and the threat that the violence poses to traders and wider investment in the ‘New Northern Ireland’. Neither of these claims is inaccurate, but both are beside the point. The most revealing thing about the riots is that they show the vacuity of identity politics – on both sides of the sectarian divide.

A properly republican response to British sovereignty in Northern Ireland would not be to dispute the fact of its existence by lowering flags, but rather to question it and argue for Irish sovereignty. Alas, the SDLP’s motion, which is hard to read other than as an attempt to out-‘green’ Sinn Féin, focused on the cultural trappings of sovereignty - identity - rather than its reality.

War-making for Losers

Shooting Blanks

By Mark Steyn

The new U.S. Army manual for troops heading east apparently blames the tendency of Afghanistan’s U.S.-trained soldiers and policemen to shoot their Western “allies” on “American cultural ignorance.” Fortunately, the manual offers a solution:

The draft leaked to the newspaper offers a list of “taboo conversation topics” that soldiers should avoid, including “making derogatory comments about the Taliban”…

I mean, it’s not like they’re the enemy or anything.

. . . “advocating women’s rights,” “any criticism of pedophilia,” “directing any criticism towards Afghans,” “mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct” or “anything related to Islam.”

Stick to safe topics like the weather, the impressive increase in opium production, and how hot the local warlord’s child bride looks now she’s back in the burka. Then, after handing your trainee his weapon, try to back out of the room slowly without catching his eye.

As Scaramouche says, don’t let’s be beastly to the Taliban.

China is now world’s No. 1 manufacturer

America’s long reign as the world’s No. 1 manufacturer has finally come to an end

By Mark J. Perry

The United Nations updated its National Accounts Main Aggregates Database today with data for 2011.  The chart above compares the annual manufacturing output of the US and China from 1970 to 2011 measured in current US dollars.  Before 2004, the United Nations only reported “Mining, Manufacturing and Utilities” for China, so the comparison above is for that measure of manufacturing in both countries, rather than just “manufacturing.”

In 2010, the manufacturing output of both countries was almost exactly equal, with China at $2.373 trillion and the US at $2.365 trillion.  But in 2011, China’s manufacturing output surged by 23% while manufacturing output in the U.S. only increased by 2.8%.  That brought China’s manufacturing output last year to more than $2.9 trillion, which was almost half a trillion dollars (and 20%) more manufacturing output than the $2.43 trillion of manufacturing output that was produced in the U.S. last year.

Looking at just manufacturing (without mining and utilities) in 2011, China’s factories produced $2.34 trillion of output, which was 23% higher than factory output in the US at $1.9 trillion.

Bottom Line: In 2010 the U.S. and China produced roughly the same amount of manufacturing output, but in 2011 China clearly overtook the U.S. to become the world’s largest manufacturer.  America’s long reign as the world’s No. 1 manufacturer has finally come to an end. 

Oscar Niemeyer, R.I.P.

His Inhuman Elegance

BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Can an architect design a beautiful building by luck or accident, and if he does so, is it enough to redeem his life’s work? There is no doubt that Oscar Niemeyer, who has died at the venerable age of 104, built several beautiful buildings, the best of them (of all that I know) the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia, the seat of the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations. It was not his fault that his original conception, which included the palace’s setting, was comprehensively ruined by the addition of a banal office block behind it, built to accommodate additional bureaucrats. And to mold concrete into beautiful forms, as Niemeyer did in this building, depriving it of its usual inhuman quality, took imagination and ability. Indeed, it is a feat that I’ve not seen equaled or even approached elsewhere.

An author has a right to be judged by his best book, but does an architect have the right to be judged by his best building? The cases are not analogous, for while bad books can be ignored, bad buildings cannot, and Niemeyer built many of them. An artist whose work obtrudes itself on the public cannot be judged by the same criteria as one whose work is easily avoided.

Among the terrible buildings Niemeyer built are the Edificio California in São Paulo and the National Theatre in Brasilia, the former worthy of a Soviet provincial capital and the latter more like a giant nuclear fallout shelter than like a resort of entertainment or culture. That Niemeyer was a man of talent, as his best work proves, only makes his considerable contribution to ugliness all the more unfortunate.

His greatest monument was Brasilia, where one can see his most elegant and ugliest work, the latter combining banality and brutality. The city was a joint enterprise of Niemeyer and the urbanist Lucio Costa; Costa planned the city, Niemeyer built the buildings. The overall effect is, in my opinion, inhuman (though it is only fair to mention that people who have spent their lives there love it), and the inhumanity was connected with their ideology.

As is well-known, Niemeyer was a Communist for most of his adult life and never recanted. Even at its best, his architecture lacks human warmth. The Palácio da Alvorada, the seat of the Brazilian president, is elegant in form, but no one who didn’t already know its function would dream that it was a residence. It would be suited to that purpose if man had the coldly streamlined form of the praying mantis. Niemeyer’s creations would be perfect if only no one had to live in them; people spoil them so. Attempts to humanize the interiors of his architectural forms are unavailing and look tawdry. An upholstered sofa in this setting serves the same function as a child’s teddy bear in a threatening or incomprehensible world: it is something to hang on to in an emotionally cold environment.

Niemeyer was by all accounts a charming man, and he never used his fame or position to accumulate a fortune, as he could easily have done. He was disinterested. Like many architects of the twentieth century, he built for humanity; as for men, he knew them not.

The Efficient Subsidize The Inefficient

Borrowing money becomes the only way to prop up the Status Quo, inevitably leading to insolvency

by Charles Hugh-Smith

Consider the consequences of the efficient subsidizing the inefficient. As long as the surplus generated by the efficient is larger than the cost of supporting the inefficient, the system can continue.

But once the cost of subsidizing the inefficient exceeds the surplus generated by the efficient, the system is doomed to eventual insolvency.

There is one way to fill the deficit, of course: borrow money. This is the strategy being pursued by the Status Quo in developed and developing economies alike.

Identifying the efficient and inefficient sectors is not straightforward, as everyone reports they are being highly efficient. Since most of the economy is controlled by the State (a monopoly) and its favored private monopolies/cartels, the market has few opportunities to exert competition.

How much competition is there in the higher education cartel or the sickcare (a.k.a. healthcare) cartels? Very little.

As long as the inefficient are protected from competition and amply subsidized, there are no incentives to become more efficient. In effect, becoming more inefficient is rewarded.

One broad measure of efficiency for nations which do not own the global reserve currency is trade. Nations with highly efficient sectors tend to export the products of those sectors, while nations with inefficient sectors tend to import more than they export. (Owning the reserve currency creates a unique situation I have discussed elsewhere: Understanding the "Exorbitant Privilege" of the U.S. Dollar November 19, 2012)

The Conservative Crisis

The GOP's only hope is to offer a real alternative after the inevitable overreach of liberal government

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

As the white flag rises above Republican redoubts, offering a surrender on taxes, the mind goes back to what seemed a worse time for conservatives: December 1964.

Barry Goldwater had suffered a defeat not seen since Alf Landon. Republicans held less than one-third of the House and Senate and only 17 governorships. The Warren Court was remaking America.

In the arts, academic and entertainment communities, and national press corps, conservatives were rarely seen or heard. It was Liberalism’s Hour, with America awash in misty memories of Camelot and great expectations of the Great Society to come in 1965.

That year, however, saw escalation in Vietnam, campus protests, and civil disobedience against the war. That August, there exploded the worst race riot in memory in the Watts section of Los Angeles, with arson, looting, the beating of whites, and sniper attacks on cops and firemen.

A year after LBJ’s triumph, black militants and white radicals were savaging the Liberal Establishment from the left, while Gov. George Wallace had come north in 1964 to win a third of the vote in the major Democratic primaries with an assault from the populist right.

Below the surface, the Democratic Party was disintegrating on ethnic, cultural and political lines. Law and order and Vietnam were the issues. Richard Nixon would see the opening and seize the opportunity to dismantle FDR’s coalition and cobble together his New Majority.

Today, the GOP strength in the House, Senate and governorships is far greater than anything Republicans had in the 1960s. The difference is that, then, we could visualize a new majority of centrist Republicans, Goldwater conservatives, Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant Democrats.

The charge of the anti-enlightenment brigade

Far from heralding a new dawn of reason, today’s New Atheists are at the vanguard of the counter-Enlightenment

by Michael Fitzpatrick 

I don’t know if many of you saw the Atheist Bus a few years ago. It toured around London for a while and on its side an advert read: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

I was reminded of this when I was reading a new book by Francis Spufford called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. He asked the interesting question: what is the most objectionable word in that bus-side slogan? There was controversy in the humanist world about the ‘probably’; however, Spufford’s main objection was to the word ‘enjoy’ - ‘stop worrying and enjoy your life’. The point that Spufford made was that the underlying implication of this statement is that enjoyment is a natural state of affairs that’s only being disturbed by people being worried by preachers and believers - a point of view he briskly dismisses as complete bollocks. ‘Enjoy’ doesn’t really connect with a whole vast range of problems of human experience. That statement seems to be pitched to an idealised consumer. What would it mean to someone experiencing loss, bereavement, illness, death, indeed all the vicissitudes of life? It leaves people with no sense of any hope or consolation.

But the Atheist Bus was a great success. Beginning with a Guardian blog by Ariane Sherine – a reaction to evangelical Christian propaganda that claimed all non-believers were going to hell – it raised £144,000 in a fortnight and soon went global. The Atheist Bus is now, as you can see on the campaign website, in every country in the world, complete with a whole host of celebrity endorsements.

But here’s the question that interests me about this: the guy with the sandwich board saying ‘repent, the end is nigh’, that sort of religious propaganda, has been around all our lives. Why, suddenly, at this stage in history, has this become the focus of a major campaign among the thoughtful sections of society? Moreover, why does the campaign have such a shouty character?

What is wrong about the euro, and what is not

Hard money has a tendency to expose illusions

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

Every Monday morning the readers of the UK’s Daily Telegraph are treated to a sermon on the benefits of Keynesian stimulus economics, the dangers of belt-tightening and the unnecessary cruelty of ‘austerity’ imposed on Europe by the evil Hun. To this effect, the newspaper gives a whole page in its ‘Business’ section to Roger Bootle and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who explain that growth comes from government deficits and from the central bank printing money, and why can’t those stupid Europeans get it? The reader is left with the impression that, if only the European states could each have their little currencies back and merrily devalue and run some proper deficits again, Greece could be the economic powerhouse it was before the Germans took over.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (AEP) increasingly faces the risk of running out of hyperbolic war-analogies sooner than the euro collapses. For months he has been numbing his readership with references to the Second World War or the First World War, or to ‘1930s-style policies’ so that not even the most casual reader on his way to the sports pages can be left in any doubt as to how bad this whole thing in Europe is, and how bad it will get, and importantly, who is responsible. From declining car sales in France to high youth-unemployment in Spain, everything is, according to AEP, the fault of Germany, a ‘foolish’ Germany. Apparently these nations had previously well-managed and dynamic economies but have now sadly fallen under the spell of Angela Merkel’s Thatcherite belief in balancing the books and her particularly Teutonic brand of fiscal sadism.

Blame it on ze Germans

The pending bankruptcy of France’s already semi-nationalized car industry is, of course, not to be blamed on high French taxes, strangling French labour market regulation, increasingly uncompetitive French wages, and grave business errors – French car companies have been falling behind their German rivals for years -, but the result of French ‘austerity’, which hasn’t even started yet and will culminate in – quote AEP, and drum roll please! – a ‘shock therapy’ next year of 2 percent. Mind you, France’s state has a 57% share in GDP, and the economy deserves the label socialist more than capitalist. Does France really need more state spending, or even unchanged state spending? Another government stimulus? I bet you could cut the French state by 10 percent instantly, and in a year or two you had faster growth, not slower growth!

The Terminator

A paean of praise to the humble cockroach

By Tim Price

“Our Russian psychosis has two curious features. Firstly, that an 80 per cent Christian Orthodox society for some reason reacts to a Mayan calendar which no one has ever seen. And secondly, that the end of the world is perceived as an economic crisis that can be survived on the banal level of consumption.”

Russian broadsheet ‘Vedomosti’, quoted in The Daily Telegraph last Friday in an article entitled ‘Russian residents buy up tinned goods and matches ahead of apocalypse’.

Speaking of apocalypse, there is an increasingly urgent debate occurring in what’s left of the financial markets over the stability of that mountain of government debt that sets its long shadow over everything. The mountain is not localised or restricted to any one region. As befits the current economic climate, it’s global in scale and intractable in structure. As Kyle Reese remarks of The Terminator in the film of the same name, the debt mountain,

“… is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever…”

A bond fund manager makes the following comment on David Fuller and Eoin Treacy’s excellent Fullermoney strategy website:

“If this is a bond bubble it is the most widely anticipated ‘bubble’ I have ever seen; everyone is identifying it. A second point is that the debt de-leveraging process and time frame is not like emerging from a less leveraged recession. It is a pernicious and deflationary phenomenon. Witness that for all the stimulus the CBs [central banks] are throwing at the issue, it has been terribly hard to create growth, inflation or cause rates to rise. We are getting minimal aggregate GDP growth in the developed world even with historically unprecedented base money creation.

Bond in Bankruptcy

A Godzilla movie without the  happy ending

By mark steyn

For some reason, the quadrennial humiliation of the Republican presidential candidate now coincides with the release of the new Bond movie. Don't ask me why; probably a constitutional amendment I missed along the way. Last time round, Kevin Sessums interviewed Daniel Craig and, as a final question, asked which presidential nominee would make the better 007:

Craig doesn't hesitate. "Obama would be the better Bond because — if he's true to his word — he'd be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe to toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M," he adds, mentioning Bond's boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. "There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain."

A few readers may recall my response in this very space four years ago:

Oh, great. John McCain has survived plane crashes, just like Roger Moore in Octopussy. He has escaped death in shipboard infernos, just like Sean Connery in Thunderball. He has endured torture day after day, month after month, without end, just like Pierce Brosnan in the title sequence of Die Another Day. He has done everything 007 has done except get lowered into a shark tank and (as far as we know) bed Britt Ekland and Jill St. John.

And yet Daniel Craig gives him the desk job.

How A Handful Of Unsupervised MIT Economists Run The World

They are accountable to absolutely nobody

by Tyler Drusden

Ever get the feeling that the entire global economy is one big experiment conducted by several former Keynesian economists from MIT with a bent for central planning, who sit down in conspiratorial dark rooms in tiny Swiss cities and bet it all on green until they double down so much nobody even pays attention to the game? No? You should. Jon Hilsenrath, of all people, explains why.

From the WSJ:

Every two months, more than a dozen bankers meet here on Sunday evenings to talk and dine on the 18th floor of a cylindrical building looking out on the Rhine.

The dinner discussions on money and economics are more than academic. At the table are the chiefs of the world's biggest central banks, representing countries that annually produce more than $51 trillion of gross domestic product, three-quarters of the world's economic output.

Of late, these secret talks have focused on global economic troubles and the aggressive measures by central banks to manage their national economies. Since 2007, central banks have flooded the world financial system with more than $11 trillion. Faced with weak recoveries and Europe's churning economic problems, the effort has accelerated. The biggest central banks plan to pump billions more into government bonds, mortgages and business loans.