Elizabeth Warren: An Okie in Washington riles Wall Street Oklahoma native Elizabeth Warren is among the leading candidates to head the newly minted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Some financial insiders are not pleased.

BY DON MECOY
Oklahoman   
Published: August 1, 2010

NORMAN — At ease amid noisy young relatives and family photos in her brother's Norman home, Elizabeth Warren doesn't seem like a person at the center of a fierce political battle that stretches from Wall Street to the White House.

But Warren, an Oklahoma native who is a leading candidate to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she helped create, has been the target of invective from financial insiders who fear her ideas.

Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisers, last week said in a Reuters story: "I get disgusted every time I hear her speak." Warren, 61, is baffled by the invective.

"I have never run into anything like what has happened the past few weeks," she said. "I found myself thinking: So what is it I say? I'd really like the content."

Her goal, she said, is what it has been throughout the 20 years that she's been researching financial data, particularly as they relate to American consumers, whom she believes have been victimized by predatory practices.

"I want to make it so regular families can read a credit card agreement in four or five minutes and fully understand what the terms are. No tricks. No traps. No things that you don't figure out what's happening until after it bites you and they charge you the $39 and raise your interest rate to 29 percent," she said.

Financial insiders point to Warren's lack of industry experience as evidence that she doesn't grasp the complexities of their business or the impact regulatory changes would have.

"I do understand," she said. "It's that we disagree. There are some things that I don't think are all right, and people who are making money off of it think it's just fine."

Last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs labeled Warren "a terrific candidate" to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Asked if "Wall Street opposition" to Warren's potential nomination would factor into the president's decision, Gibbs said: "I don't think any criticism in any way by anybody would disqualify her."

Always an Okie

Warren attended grade school in Norman, then skipped sixth grade when her family moved to Oklahoma City. Living on NW 25 Street, she learned to drive the family Studebaker in the parking lot of the brand new Shepherd Mall.

She graduated from Northwest Classen at 16 as a debate champ, which earned her a college scholarship.

She became a teacher to brain-injured children, but felt stifled by the administrative constraints of the New Jersey public school where she worked. During a Christmas visit to Oklahoma City, her former high school debate classmates urged her to attend law school.

After operating a private law practice, Warren returned to her first love of teaching.

"As a teacher at that level, you do research — that's just part of the job," she said. "The area where I was teaching were all the money courses — commercial law, contract law, bankruptcy law. That's where my research was, and that's when I started doing research on families that went broke."

It's a topic she knows something about. Before Warren was born, her parents lost most of their savings when a partner in a planned car dealership in Seminole absconded with their money.

Her father, a self-taught pilot who was a flight instructor in Muskogee during World War II, worked as a traveling salesman and in Oklahoma City, at Montgomery Ward. He was demoted after suffering a heart attack, and later took a job as a maintenance worker at an apartment house. The working-class family couldn't afford to send Warren to kindergarten, which at the time was offered only at private schools.

"Sure it was partly about my family, but it was about millions of other families," the Harvard law professor said of her research. "That was the work I started doing. That's how I ended up where I am today."

Warren has written numerous books and academic articles. Her work uncovered the fact that most American consumer bankruptcies are not filed by financial freeloaders, but by people whose finances have unraveled due to divorce, death or health crises.

Not a politician

Warren's public profile grew through her consumer advocacy, although she was unsuccessful in her attempts to derail the 2005 bankruptcy reform pushed by the financial industry.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Warren was appointed to head the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with reviewing the Treasury Deparment's implementation of the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, commonly called TARP.

Her Oklahoma upbringing is evident in the blunt, basic questions she asks during hearings, and she recognizes her style differs from the typical Washington way.

"These people aren't used to simple questions. They don't expect to hear them and they somehow, when you do (ask them), act like you're not half-bright or you're somehow asking something nasty," she said.

When asked if TARP has been a successful use of taxpayer dollars, Warren doesn't evoke economic theories or delve into the fallout from overly complex financial instruments.

"It's like having a garage sale and you know what you paid for each thing you're now going to resell and the good stuff is resold at a profit so it looks like you're making good money. Yeah, but how about the stuff that's still left behind? That's where the problem is — AIG, GMAC, GM, Chrysler, Citi," she said. "How fully the American taxpayer gets paid back, we don't have enough information to tell for sure."

While her plainspoken ways may annoy some, Warren is no fan of business as usual in Washington.

"What's begun to hit me is that people have enormous power and yet nobody's ever responsible," she said. "How does that happen? Nobody's ever accountable. Nothing is ever anybody's fault. I hope that the way this new agency works out is not just that it has the tools to get things done — it's accountable for making change."

Warren pushed for agency

For several years, Warren has called for the creation of a government agency charged with protecting American consumers on financial matters. She repeatedly has noted that toasters are more strongly regulated than financial products.

She admits her major role in the creation of such an agency is "pretty cool." While reluctant to discuss her potential nomination as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she acknowledges that the choice of who leads the agency is an important one.

"I care about the changes that need to be made for middle-class families," she said. "That's what this new agency is all about. It's what my work has been about for 20 years. ... the lights suddenly come on because we're talking about Washington and some big stir there, but the truth is, for me this is just a logical extension of what I've been working on for more than 20 years."

However the political matters work out, Warren will continue to return to Oklahoma several times a year.

"My brother David is the best storyteller God has put on this earth," she said. "There's nothing I'd rather do than sit on the back porch and listen to him tell the story of the time they put the pig on the motorcycle and ran it down the main hall of Norman High."

"I'll always be an Okie."



ELIZABETH WARREN

Age: 61

Occupation: Harvard Law School Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, currently on leave. Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel that reviews implementation of the government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Previous employers: The University of Pennsylvania Law School, 1990-95; The University of Texas School of Law, 1981-87; The University of Houston Law Center, 1978-83. The University of Michigan, 1985. Rutgers School of Law (Newark). 1977-78.

Books written: "All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan," 2005 (A New York Times bestseller). "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke," 2003. "The Fragile Middle Class: Americans In Debt," 2000. "As We Forgive Our Debtors: Consumer Credit and Bankruptcy in America," 1989. Plus about a dozen academic legal books.

Recognition: Named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2009 and 2010. Named "Bostonian of the Year" in 2009.


Read more: http://newsok.com/elizabeth-warren-an-okie-in-washington-riles-wall-street/article/3481388#ixzz14mqDCByt
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2011 Tax Increases


September 3, 2010

Q: Will "the largest tax hikes in the history of America" take effect next year? Will ordinary taxpayers see taxes "skyrocket"?
A: That’s not likely. A scary e-mail lists "Tax hikes in 2011" that probably won’t take effect, or won’t apply to families making under $250,000 a year. One "tax hike" is pure fiction.


FULL QUESTION

Hello, I’m forwarding an e-mail apparently from the conservative bureau of misinformation. My friend who forwarded it isn’t very up on the news and politics and was scared to death that her tax will skyrocket next year… even though she makes way less than $250,000.
Thanks for all the great works you guys and gals do!
Subject:Tax Hikes in 2011
In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:
First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief
In 2001 and 2003, the Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families.
These will all expire on January 1, 2011:
Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates. ⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full text ⬏
FULL ANSWER
We’ve been flooded with inquiries about various versions of this chain e-mail, which has been circulating since July. It grafts together a set of misleading claims issued by the conservative Americans for Tax Reform with a fictional claim about taxation on health insurance benefits.
The W-2 Fiction, Again
Let’s dispose of the bogus health insurance claim first. It’s not true that "you will be required to pay taxes" on the value of employer-paid health insurance benefits. This is a falsehood that circulated earlier as a separate chain e-mail. See our May 22 article, "Health Care Law and W-2 Forms," for full details.
It’s true that the new health care law requires employers to report the value of health insurance benefits on W-2 forms starting next year, but that’s for informational purposes only.
The remainder of the chain e-mail message contains misleading claims about what "will" happen next year that were copied and pasted — nearly word for word — from an Americans for Tax Reform document dated July 1. (The garish colors were added by the anonymous author of the e-mail message.) For the most part, these are "hikes" that the president and Democratic leaders in Congress have long said they won’t allow to take effect, except for individuals making more than $200,000 a year, or couples jointly making more than $250,000.
Bush Tax Cuts: Mostly Slated for Extension
Both the e-mail and the ATR document claim that all the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 and signed by President Bush "will all expire on January 1, 2011." Actually, that’s not what’s expected to happen at all. It’s true that the cuts are scheduled to expire, but they will expire only if Democrats who control the White House and Congress fail to do what they’ve promised.
Particularly misleading are the claims that "[t]he child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child" and that "marriage penalty" relief will expire. As veteran congressional reporter David Rogers, who writes for Politico, put it back in July: What Democrats are debating is not whether, but "when — and for how long" to extend the Bush tax cuts that apply to lower and middle-income taxpayers.
In fact, some key Democrats now favor extending all the Bush tax cuts for at least one more year — even for upper-income taxpayers. Those lawmakers include Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, as well as some Democratic House members. So unless Congress deadlocks (always a possibility), the most likely outcome now is that Congress will either extend most of the cuts — as President Obama promised again and again during the 2008 campaign and since — or extend all of them, at least for a while longer.
‘Death Tax’: Only on Multimillion-Dollar Estates
The message is also misleading in what it says about the temporary repeal of the federal estate tax — which Republicans like to call the "death tax." Under terms in the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax was phased down over several years and eliminated entirely for those who die in 2010, but it’s set to return in 2011 at levels that prevailed before 2001. So just as the message says, for those dying after Jan. 1 next year, estates of more that $1 million would be subject to taxation at rates as high as 55 percent on amounts over that threshold. But that will happen only if Congress fails to act, and there’s little sentiment in Congress, even among Democrats, for allowing that to happen.
In fact, last December the House passed a bill that would have permanently exempted estates of up to $3.5 million from taxation (effectively, $7 million for couples). The top rate would have been 45 percent. All 225 House members who voted for that were Democrats; Republicans opposed the measure because it would have frozen the estate tax at the 2009 level called for in Bush’s phase-down, and would have canceled Bush’s one-year repeal in 2010.
In the Senate, several Democrats want to bring back the estate tax with an even higher exemption and a lower rate. In April 2009, the Senate adopted an amendment to a budget bill that would have set as a target a $5 million exemption ($10 million for couples) and a top rate of 35 percent. The bipartisan amendment was sponsored by Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona. It passed with 51 votes in favor — 10 of them from Democrats, even though the Senate’s Democratic leadership (and President Obama) had set $3.5 million as a target. The Senate amendment wasn’t accepted by the House, which insisted on keeping the $3.5 million threshhold in the budget bill. With its Democrats divided, the Senate ultimately failed to act on the estate tax, allowing it to expire entirely for 2010.
So Congress has yet to agree on whether to bring back the estate tax only for estates worth more than $3.5 million, or only for those over $5 million. Few if any voice support for bringing it back for estates of more than $1 million. That could happen if the deadlock on this issue continues (again, always a possibility). But majorities in the House and Senate have voted to impose the so-called "death tax" only on multimillionaires.
A ‘Wave’ of ‘Obamacare’ Taxes?
The e-mail describes a "second wave" of tax increases that it says will take effect Jan. 1 under the new health care law. But this "wave" consists of three relatively minor tax changes that affect relatively few people.
  • What the e-mail describes as a "Medicine cabinet tax" simply aligns rules governing health savings accounts (HSAs), Flexible Spending Arrangements (FSAs) and Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) with the tax rules that apply to deducting medical expenses generally. Under current law, taxpayers in general are not allowed to deduct the cost of non-prescription drugs as a medical expense. The only exception is for insulin. But those with HSAs, FSAs and HRAs were allowed to use pre-tax dollars to buy aspirin, over-the-counter cold and allergy medications, and other drugs available without a doctor’s prescription. The new "tax" simply says HSAs, FSAs and HRAs can’t be used to buy these medications — except for insulin — after December 31. (See pages 69 and 70 of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s "technical explanation" of the revenue measures in the new health care law, which can be downloaded from the committee’s website. This will affect a small proportion of taxpayers. For example, the health insurance industry says 10 million persons were covered by HSAs as of January of this year, roughly 3.2 percent of the population. For that relatively small group, the change does amount to a tax increase. It will bring in a total of $5 billion over the next 10 years, the JCT estimated in its "Estimated Revenue Effects" of the new law.
  • The "HSA withdrawal tax hike" refers to a doubling of the current 10 percent penalty that must be paid on any HSA funds spent for something that’s not a qualified medical expenditure. (See pages 71 to 73 of the JCT technical explanation.) The JCT expects that to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years.
  • The "special needs kids tax" refers to a cap of $2,500 that the new law places on spending from FSAs. (See pages 74 to 77 of JCT’s technical explanation.) The argument made in the e-mail is that "many" families with special needs children now use FSAs to pay tuition at private schools catering to special needs children, schools that ATR says "can easily exceed $14,000 per year" in Washington, D.C. Perhaps so. IRS rules do allow use of FSA funds to pay for such expenses with pre-tax dollars. But the e-mail message offers no evidence of how many families might be taking advantage of this tax break currently. The claim is copied from the website of Americans for Tax Reform, but as ATR itself says: "For most people, the $2500 cap won’t be noticed." As ATR concedes, FSAs "tend to be used for things like small deductibles, co-payments, eyeglasses, over-the-counter medicines, and laser eye surgery." The amount deferred in the typical FSA is probably much less than $2500 today, ATR says. The JCT expects the change will bring in $13 billion over 10 years, but says nothing about how much of that is likely to come from the pockets of parents of special needs children.
We don’t argue for or against any of these three tax increases. We simply point out that, even taken together, they amount to less than $2 billion per year and, therefore, don’t constitute anything close to a "wave" of historically large tax increases taking effect next year.
Alternative Minimum Tax
The message flatly claims that the Alternative Minimum Tax will suddenly "ensnare over 28 million families," forcing them all to pay higher taxes. But historically, Congress has repeatedly refused to allow that to happen.
The AMT was originally enacted in 1969 to cover a few very high-income individuals, but it was not indexed for inflation. So it has come to be a headache for several million taxpayers, and would hit even more if Congress had not enacted a series of "patches" each year since 2001.
The Tax Policy Center calculates that next year 28.5 million taxpayers would have to pay higher taxes on their 2010 returns if the usual patch is not extended. But Obama’s stimulus bill extended the patch through 2009, holding down the number of taxpayers affected to just 4 million. And there’s no reason to think that Congress will fail to extend the patch for 2010 taxes. In fact, President Obama’s budget assumes that a permanent fix will be enacted, holding the AMT to levels in place for 2009. That’s something President Bush never proposed.
Tax Extenders
The message goes on to claim that businesses will lose a host of tax benefits, including a research tax credit; that teachers will no longer be allowed to deduct classroom expenses (high-school and grade-school educators can now deduct up to $250 a year); and that persons with Individual Retirement Accounts will no longer be able to use them to make charitable donations. But these are tax provisions that have been routinely renewed in the past, and Congress has strongly signaled that it intends to renew them for 2011 as well.
The fact is that on Dec. 9 last year, the House voted 241 to 181 to approve the "Tax Extenders Act of 2009." That bill called for extending for one more year a long list of expiring tax breaks, including the business research tax credit (Section 111, page 6),  the $250 deduction for teachers buying classroom supplies (Section 104, page 6), and tax-free distributions from individual retirement plans for charitable donations (Section 135, page 14).
The Senate passed the bill on March 10, by a vote of 62 to 36, leaving the extenders intact. The fate of those extenders is still in limbo — but majorities in both houses are clearly on record favoring them.
–Brooks Jackson
SOURCES
Ellis, Ryan. "Six Months to Go Until The Largest Tax Hikes in History." Americans for Tax Reform. 1 Jul 2010.
Rogers, David. "Dems tiptoe around Bush tax cuts." Politico.com. 14 Jul 2010.
Vaughan, Martin and John D. McKinnon. "Democrats Dissent on Bush Cuts." The Wall Street Journal. 22 Jul 2010.
Bolton, Alexander. "Dems may keep Bush tax cuts." The Hill. 22 Jul 2010.
"House Votes to Extend Tax on Estates of the Wealthy." The Associated Press. 3 Dec 2009.
 U.S. Senate 111th Congress - 1st Session. Vote #146. 15 Jan 2009.
Center for Policy and Research, America’s Health Insurance Plans. "January 2010 Census Shows 10 Million People Covered by HSA/High-Deductible Health Plans." May 2010.
Ellis, Ryan. "Senate Health Bill Raises Taxes On Special Needs Kids and Their Families." Americans for Tax Reform. 20 Nov 2009.
Burman, Len and Jeff Rohaly. "Alternative Minimum Tax: What is the AMT?" Tax Policy Center. 7 Oct 2009.
"Historical AMT Legislation." Tax Policy Center. 16 Mar 2009.
 "Aggregate AMT Projections, 2009-2020," Table T10-0106. Tax Policy Center. 3 May 2010.
 "2011 Budget Tax Proposals; Index 2009 parameters of the AMT to inflation." Tax Policy Center. Undated Web page, accessed 3 Sep 2010.
U.S. House of Representatives 111th Congress - 1st Session. Vote #943. 9 Dec 2009.
111th Congress - 1st Session; H.R. 4213 "Tax Extenders Act of 2009" (As approved by the House). 9 Dec 2010.
U.S. Senate 111th Congress - 2nd Session. Vote #48 10 Mar 2010.
111th Congress - 1st Session; H.R. 4213 "Tax Extenders Act of 2009" (As approved by the Senate). 10 Mar 2010.
 Sahadi, Jeanne. "100-plus tax breaks on the line." CNNMoney.com. 25 Aug 2010.
 
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Anne Rice asks us, ‘What does it mean to be Christian anyway?’

J. Bennett Guess
August 2, 2010
http://www.ucc.org/news/anne-rice-asks-us-what-does.html
 
When a public figure makes a public statement on a controversial topic, it invites — even encourages — a public conversation.

Such was the case last week when famed novelist and seemingly-former Roman Catholic Anne Rice renounced her ties to the entire Christian church because, according to Rice, she could no longer tolerate the church's anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-science, and anti-birth control views.

By lumping all Christians together with the more-specific faith tradition she was repudiating, Rice triggered a response from many. Some Christians agreed with Rice that she couldn't authentically remain Christian and hold views that were so divergent from Roman Catholic social teachings. Other Christians — especially members of the United Church of Christ and other mainline Protestant denominations — felt, once again, that all of Christianity was being cast publicly as monolithic in its outlook when, in reality, many of Rice's more-liberal views are shared by many Christians in the United States and around the world. The rub is that too few know this.

The UCC's general minister and president, the Rev. Geoffrey A. Black, said it this way: "We have unnecessarily insisted that we must be of one mind, instead of one heart. … I, along with many in the UCC, share Anne Rice's commitment to a personal relationship with Christ that affirms life in its fullness and diversity, not denies its beautiful and sometimes complex realities."

On July 30, when the UCC launched a Facebook campaign called "You'd Like the UCC, Anne Rice!" more than 3,400 joined the effort in less than 48 hours, exclaiming how they wanted Rice — but more so, all people — to know that many church-going Christians can and do believe in science, support women's equality, affirm LGBT people, and encourage the use of full-options birth control.

A few, however, misinterpreted the effort as a full-court press to win Anne Rice personally to the UCC. That was never the intent and not our style. While she is warmly invited to explore the UCC and attend worship with one of our congregations, the larger goal lies beyond Anne Rice herself and speaks to the church-questioning despair felt by millions that Anne Rice so eloquently articulated in her series of Facebook posts.

Every day, in my office and around the UCC, we hear a similar sentiment expressed: "I never knew a church like this existed!" You can hear the hopefulness in that statement, but you also detect the frustration. If only we had spoken up sooner — or louder.

As a denomination deeply rooted in ecumenical, interfaith commitments, it has not been easy for the UCC to talk about its distinctiveness in the marketplace of religious ideas. And, therefore, it's not surprising that our viewpoints often get swallowed up by the world's broad-brush perceptions of what being Christian means.

One thing, for sure, Christianity is not a religion rooted in individualism. We don't have the luxury of believing in isolation from others, even those with whom we disagree. As Christians, we share one another's hopes and struggles. Our faith — and even those frustrating social policy statements — are shaped in discernment with the larger body. We are baptized not unto ourselves, but into the community of Jesus Christ. To go it alone has never been a faithful option as tempting as it may sometimes feel.

But to the degree that evangelism is nothing more than one hungry person telling other hungry persons where they can find bread, it is imperative that UCC people, as well as others, tend to the spiritual hunger we see around us. As Rice has demonstrated, not all spiritual appetites are sustained by the same nourishment.

Anne Rice's visible platform brings this topic to light, but perhaps only temporarily. Her high profile offers credibility and urgency. To the degree that we keep the spotlight on the conversation, we encourage not only Anne Rice, but all of us, to keep the search for God alive — and honest.The Rev. J. Bennett Guess is director of publishing, identity and communication for the United Church of Christ.
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Oxfam America reaction to US-Brazil WTO cotton case development — Oxfam America

Jun 17, 2010

Washington, DC—The Brazilian government announced today that they willpostpone their right to retaliate against the US until the 2012 Farm Bill. In reaction, Laura Rusu, spokesperson for Oxfam America said:

“This agreement lets the US off the hook for now. But with each day that passes with no reform, millions of poor cotton farmers around the world continue to struggle. Eliminating US cotton subsidies could result in additional income that would literally feed an additional million children for a year or pay school fees for at least two million children living in extremely poor West African cotton growing households.

“The case against American cotton subsidies has been proven time and time before. The onus is on the US Congress to deliver the needed reform, in the next Farm Bill if not before.

“Until then, US taxpayers will be paying not just for wasteful subsidies to large scale US cotton producers, but also compensating Brazilian farmers for the losses incurred thanks to misguided US farm policies. If the US Congress fails to make these reforms, Brazil’s retaliation is likely to be much costlier.”

For more information, contact:
    * Laura Rusu, Policy and Campaigns Media Manager
      (202) 496-1169 (office)
      (202) 459-3739 (mobile)
      lrusu@oxfamamerica.org
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Financial Reform: the Train That Passed Us By

June 24
Stan G. Duncan

The house and Senate have finally passed their legislation on financial reform and now the two bills are in the “reconciliation process. “ That’s where they hammer out the differences and produce a single bill that both houses will then have to pass. Some changes may be made, but we’re pretty clear by now what will be in the final bill and it isn’t pretty. All of you who were hoping that finally we had a tragedy large enough for government to act like adults and pass some meaningful reform will be disappointed.

What’s in it?


Here’s a run-through of some of the things in the new legislation:

First it calls for Banks to have more capital on hand to borrow against when making investments. It’s like when you borrow money for a house, the bank wants to know how much of your own money you have to put down. Similarly, banks should have a big stash of cash on hand when they borrow money in case the deal goes bad and they have to cover some of it with their own money. So the new bill requires that they have something in the range of 10 to 12 percent of what they are borrowing before they borrow. The good news is that they will now be required to have it. The bad news is that most economists have been recommending around twenty to thirty percent. Twelve percent collateral is what Lehman Brothers had on hand when it bellied up a couple of years ago. It’s a paltry, almost humorously small amount of collateral.

Second, it calls for stronger oversight of derivatives, especially “credit default swaps,” which have been described as essentially bets against the success of a business transaction. If two companies hook some kind of deal, other companies who are unrelated to the transaction can make bets on its success. If too many bets are made against it, it begins to look weak and investors will start pulling their money out and both the transaction and the company can go under. And all of the bystanders who made the bets on its failure get paid. Credit Default Swaps were one of the most insidious of the tools that nearly took down Wall Street and the world in 2008. So a new provision in the law, drawn up primarily by Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas is a good thing.
However, the Wall Street lobby monster has become a major player in the negotiations and at present liberals, conservatives, Republicans, and Democrats have been working very hard to “compromise” the provision down. And the Treasury and Obama Administration has shown no interest in tightening or enforcing the existing regulations against derivatives. God only knows why, but I have my suspicions.[1]

Third, the bill calls for “More transparency and disclosure.” Transparency is always good. It’s a common piece put in this kind of legislation. But it seldom does much in practice. There were clear rules for transparency put into the new regulations for corporate disclosure following the horrible Enron scandal of the early 2000s, but all it mean was that the Annual Reports disclosed the obscure, arcane, Byzantine deals and swindles in even denser language and smaller print.

What is not in it?


Missing from the bill are new anti-trust tools or strengthening of the old ones. And at this point the reconciliation conference looks likely to deny them the self-funding. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC), for example, both collect a portion of their fees from the industry they should be regulating.

Another missing piece is any way for “winding down large global firms” (a line included in the bill). There is language in the bill saying this should happen, but no mechanism to make it a reality. Just how, exactly will the President or the US trade Representative go to Spain, whose Santander Bank just bought up the U.S. Sovereign Bank and say they ought to shrink the company. Actually there are ways that we could do that by capping the size of banks, splitting them up, and making smaller banks. Caps could also be placed on the size that foreign owners could expand their holdings here. That would address the “Too Big to Fail” problem. There’s something inherently unhealthy about the wealth of four or five firms on Wall Street being larger than the Gross Domestic Product of thirty or forty countries in the world. Senators Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman pulled yeo-person’s duty trying to get a mechanism for breaking up the behemoth banks, but the Treasury and White House pushed against them and ultimately language for the change was removed.[2]

The “BP Clause”: Finally, there’s provision the White House asked for that sounds eerily like it was designed with the BP disaster in the backs of their minds. According to economist Simon Johnson at MIT, the bill includes “principles for the financial sector to make a fair and substantial contribution towards paying for any burdens.”[3] That provision is absurd. I’m not convinced that BP will in the long run be able to make a “substantial contribution” to paying of the cataclysmic tragedy that is unfolding in the gulf. It would have been even more impossible—fundamentally impossible—for Wall Street financial institutions to have socked enough money aside to pay off the damage they have done to every country on the planet. Countries large, small, and middle stumbled; companies, families, farms, individuals everywhere were damaged. Schools, libraries, clinics, were closed in every country. Churches—who were often very precarious before—are failing now at an unprecedented rate. With their members out of work or living on reduced pay, their pledges have shrunk. In turn, they can’t make their donations to Seminaries and they are bleeding or closing. Many are merging to stay alive just a little while longer. What will all of this mean for the future of the church and theological education for our children? World Hunger organizations also, who were for generations a major recipient of donations from churches, are also closing, merging, or shrinking. Think how many people in poor countries will be damaged by the loss. The “straight up” cost of the global destruction meted out by Wall Street activities has been estimated at somewhere around twenty trillion dollars.[4] The “collateral” damage to the innocent bystanders near and far is inestimable. The planet and its culture, climate, and heritage, will never be the same. It will take generations to pull ourselves back up to the level we were just pushed down from. And that’s assuming we have sufficient renewable energy to do so.

So, just what, exactly, does the president have in mind when he says that Wall Street is going to make a “substantial contribution” toward fixing the damage done? It can’t be done. He is dreaming if he believes that.

Why is the White House so reserved about meaningful reform and why is it so deferential to the Wall Street tycoons who plundered your grandmother’s pension for their billion dollar incomes? My guess has always been that Obama made a big mistake in the early parts of his administration and populated it with economists of the right who love--or even worked in--Wall Street. People like Robert Rubin-Former Treasury Secretary (1995-1999), Gene Sperling-Former National Economic Adviser (1997-2001), Lawrence Summers-Former Treasury Secretary (1999-2001) (and fired Harvard president). And he left out well known and respected progressives like Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute (and now economic advisor to Vise President Joe Biden), Robert Reich former labor secretary (1992-1996), now at Berkeley, Paul Krugman at Princeton, Joe Stiglitz at Columbia, or Simon Johnson at MIT, Dani Rodrik at Harvard, Robert Shiller at Yale, Edie Rasell at the UCC, and so on. There is no clear, articulate voice in his cabinet (except for Joe Biden) who speaks for Main Street and I think that that has had a major impact on policy decisions. And it may leave its impact on the nation and the globe for as long as we all will live. 

Frankly, it may be too late. The financial reform train may have left the station. The Wall Street firms that survived are stronger than ever, smug in their power, and newly armed with a Supreme Court decision saying they can spend more money than God to buy and sell politicians to do their bidding. And you and I will have to just adjust to a new diminished democracy and living standard, with an ever stronger oligarchy running our country.

Some organizations have launched campaigns to get key Senators and Representatives to stand up for the values of the American public (not to mention those of the equally damaged international community), and make major changes in the reconciled bill. One of the more significant is Public Citizen, a forty-year-old corporate watchdog group. Click here to go to their "Strengthen Wall Street Reform" page and send a letter to your representatives.
 
Do it now. If it doesn't happen now, it may be too late.
 
 
[1] “A.I.G., Greece, and Who’s Next?” The New York Times, March 4, 2010, p. A 26.
[2] Interview with Sen. Ted Kaufman, The American Prospect, April 30, 2010, web edition: www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=tap_talks_financial_reform_with_ted_kaufman.
[3]http://baselinescenario.com/2010/06/21/dead-on-arrival-financial-reform-fails/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BaselineScenario+%28The+Baseline+Scenario%29
[4] A good survey of the costs of the destructive force of Wall Street gambling is Anup Shah’s “Global Financial Crisis” page. It’s a year or so old, but still good for background, http://www.globalissues.org/article/768/global-financial-crisis
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Globalization and Workers

Stan G. Duncan

Dani Rodrik, a very thoughtful economist at Harvard (yes, it's possible), posted the chart below the other day (his original is here) and it got me thinking.

It's a little confusing, but here's what you want to look at. There are three bars. The bottom bar represents the growth in labor productivity before the modern leap into globalization, 1950 to 1975. He refers to this as the era of "Import Substitution," when countries tried to substitute imports with their own internal manufacturing.

The middle bar is the time during the heart of the debt crisis, when the Reagan and Thatcher administrations and the IMF were trying to use the debt of poor countries as a tool to launch the world into a radical "free" market economy, 1975 to 1990. And the top bar represents full bore, "Washington Consensus" economic globalization, 1990 to 2005.

I might argue a bit with his dates (he puts the beginning of the debt crisis with when they started borrowing. I would have set it at when they had to start paying the debts back) but basically I get his point.)

Now look at the shading. The movement of labor within one sector of the economy is the gray area, between sectors, say farming and manufacturing is black and across both is white.

Ignore the middle period for now and note that the growth of workers within one sector didn't change much in the bottom and top. But the really interesting thing to look at is the black band.

The chart measures the amount of labor productivity of the two eras. The first thing to notice is that labor productivity in the pre-globalization era, which was based on import substitution, is almost twice as large as the era of extreme globalization. Even more interesting to me is the growth in workers who move around between industries. In the pre-globalization age, labor is about seven times larger than in the globalized age.

Here's why. During both eras people moved from the farms to the cities. That's not always a good thing, but in the first era they at least moved off the farm and into productive work. They then moved around within the jobs. They advanced. Their incomes by and large went up . In the era of rapid globalization, they also moved from the farms to the cities, but then they got a job with pud wages and eventually when their wages were about to go up they got laid off and the plant hired somebody else just off the farm and hungry enough to work for pud wages again. The age of globalization brought very high productivity (mainly for exports) but with seven times less employment. People came to the cities, took a job, lost it, then moved to the beaches to sell tee-shirts and Chiclets, or sell drugs, or beg, or move to the US to pick water melons or clean houses. The human cost of globalization has been catastrophic. And in it's own geeky simple way, this chart shows that.


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Weak Savings Numbers


This week the Commerce Department released its May data on retail spending. And the numbers were very weak. Some of the pundits and economists interviewed in the Post and the Times were concerned about that, but don’t get scared. Actually the numbers strike me as normal, based on what we have gone through recently.

Before the collapse of 2007-8, consumer spending was wildly out of proportion to our actual wealth. It was expanded by the $8 trillion in (inflated) housing wealth. People believed that they had beau coups of extra money because the real estate pages told them that the price of their homes had doubled in the last five years, so gobs of them took equity out of their homes in the form of refinancing and spent that money, which then sent consumption sky high and pushed saving rates down to record lows.

But now we’re on the down hill side of all of that and consumption is returning to more normal levels. As a rule of thumb, consumption typically increases by 5-7 cents for every dollar that the value of your house goes up. This is sometimes called the “Housing Wealth Effect.” During the housing bubble, that consumption number took flight into Twilight Zone numbers, but now it’s back down to roughly where it should be.

The bigger concern to me is that the savings rate is around 4.0 percent, and that is below its levels before the stock and housing bubbles, which averaged more than 8.0 percent. In fact, with most of the huge baby boom generation in its 50s and early 60s, and with bupkis saved up for retirement, one would think that there would be a lot of people stashing away more money right now to save their butts later. But we aren’t Consumption is still relatively high, even as out incomes have gone down and the values of our houses have gone down.
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The Problem with Greece (and us)


Greece is beginning to remind me of one of those old movies of the fifties where Uncle Charlie in the big extended family is up to gambling shenanigans that embarrass the family and threaten the father’s business deals. Everyone tells him to stop but Charlie has gotten in too deep and both “Big Al” and the police are after him. If he gets arrested it will be in the papers and the father will lose millions because his investors will pull out and if he gets killed by Al, the family will be in disarray and collapse. Of course, in the old Hollywood movies, at the last minute the father goes to the legitimate creditors and pays them off and then the police arrest Al and his “collectors.” Charlie repents his foolish ways and everybody is happy. Don’t expect that to happen in Europe anytime soon.

My hunch is that Greece, Europe’s “Uncle Charlie,” is eventually going to have to do some jail time (in terms of severe economic punishment), it will default on many of its bad debts, and will eventually either pull out or be thrown out of the Euro family, and that would throw the entire “family” into disarray. The Euro Zone created some of this mess by letting in let in too many countries who had too little capability of sustaining their membership. Some of them, most notably Greece, tried to look like they were wealthy enough to walk with the big kids by (dishonestly, deceitfully, illegally) borrowing most of its wealth and putting on a show. When the global economy slumped, creditors called in their investments and Greece had to admit that it didn’t actually own the money it had been throwing around and it imploded. Now it threatens to pull the whole of the EU down with it. Hence my guess that it will eventually leave the union.

One very ominous sign of just how serious is its condition was that when the rest of Europe pull together a one trillion dollar bail out, the market tanked. I think investors looked at that and said, “Jeez, if they’re trying to fix Greece with that much money, then it must have been lot worse than we suspected. Let’s pull our money out just to be safe.”

So, what would help? One thing being talked about is for Greece to do a partial default on all of its debts, just stop paying on its commitments. But the majority of its present outgo is unrelated to debt, so that wouldn’t help much. Cancelling totally all of its loans will not solve the total package of its problems. It would still need to make enormous, horrific, painful cuts in its budget that will drive a whole lot of people into poverty.

The only big thing that could bring it back from this disaster would be a general (and international) economic recovery. If the tide rose, it would lift the boats. The US is in an analogous position, though not nearly as bad. Thought it’s hard to believe from listening to Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Fox News, most of our recent Federal deficit has come from the recession. People lost their jobs or their incomes went down and then tax revenues went down. So if we ever recover from the recession, our tax income will come up and that will make paying down the deficit a whole lot easier.

However, Greece has some other very serious problems, one of the biggest is that the Euro-Zone doesn’t have a central government. What that means is that in the US, if we have a state that goes under (like California), then Social Security, Medicare, and other federal revenue checks still flow in. But if a European Union state goes under (like Greece), nothing outside comes in, and people starve.

A second problem of being in the Euro Zone is that it doesn’t have any control over its own currency. Right now the Euro is “strong” (that is, expensive) and that means among other things that tourists are more likely to go to neighboring Turkey rather than the Parthenon and no one can afford its exports. If Greece had its own currency, it could devalue it and make its exports look cheaper and therefore sell more. That would go a long way toward helping it dig its way out of its deficit hole. Countries in Southeast Asia did this following their deep recession of 1997. They lowered the value of their money, which lowered the costs of their products and they sold boatloads of computers, CDs, TVs and, well, drugs to the US and the West. China is in fact still doing that, which has been hard on our domestic producers, but it has been good for them.

However, since Greece is a member of the European Union, it has the added problem of not owning its own currency and therefore doesn’t have the option of devaluing it. It would be like Texas saying it wanted to devalue the Dollar to lower the price of oil. It could never happen. Greece’s currency is the Euro and it can’t go down unless the entire union goes down (and don’t even think about that).

Our US situation is slightly different. We could devalue our currency a little bit but we don’t have too much to export any longer. For the last twenty-five years or so we have been supporting policies that encourage industries to move to places like China, and in the process we have been sliding steadily toward becoming a service income economy. That has helped the home offices of those industries and it has helped the international financial sectors, mainly on Wall Street, but it hasn’t been good in terms of producing anything. So, now, if we wanted to sell a bunch of stuff to help pay down our deficit, we have fewer things to sell.

Which brings me back to the conclusion that Greece’s days on the Euro are limited. The amount of spending they would have to cut to balance the national check book would be beyond imagination. You can talk all day about how they have too many government workers making too much money (and they do), but to now fire or cut all of them sufficiently to have a balanced budget would drive their economy into the stone age. If you think the riots look bad, imagine civil war. It would be ugly and the suffering brutal.

One parallel to what I’m imagining would be Argentina. You may recall that Argentina fell into an economic black hole in the early 2000s, because it had over spent and was too closely tied to the economies of South East Asia, which had tanked in 1997. Their local currency was tied to the US dollar in a way that was functionally similar to how Greece is tied to the Euro. If our economy went up, theirs went up and if ours went down, theirs went down. Usually. Under normal circumstances it would be inconceivable for them to break with the dollar. But their crisis was so severe that they were forced into inconceivable policies, one of which was to break with the dollar. They went to hell and back over the next couple of years and emerged at the end a much healthier, much more vibrant economy. Which brings me again to say to Greece: blow off the euro and save yourself from oblivion.

But I’m just a preacher from Quincy, so what do I know.
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The Problem with Greece (and us)

Greece is beginning to remind me of one of those old movies of the fifties where Uncle Charlie in the big extended family is up to gambling shenanigans that embarrass the family and threaten the father’s business deals. Everyone tells him to stop but Charlie has gotten in too deep and both “Big Al” and the police are after him. If he gets arrested it will be in the papers and the father will lose millions because his investors will pull out and if he gets killed by Al, the family will be in disarray and collapse. Of course, in the old Hollywood movies, at the last minute the father goes to the legitimate creditors and pays them off and then the police arrest Al and his “collectors.” Charlie repents his foolish ways and everybody is happy. Don’t expect that to happen in Europe anytime soon.

My hunch is that Greece, Europe’s “Uncle Charlie,” is eventually going to have to do some jail time (in terms of severe economic punishment), it will default on many of its bad debts, and will eventually either pull out or be thrown out of the Euro family, and that would throw the entire “family” into disarray. The Euro Zone created some of this mess by letting in let in too many countries who had too little capability of sustaining their membership. Some of them, most notably Greece, tried to look like they were wealthy enough to walk with the big kids by (dishonestly, deceitfully, illegally) borrowing most of its wealth and putting on a show. When the global economy slumped, creditors called in their investments and Greece had to admit that it didn’t actually own the money it had been throwing around and it imploded. Now it threatens to pull the whole of the EU down with it. Hence my guess that it will eventually leave the union.

One very ominous sign of just how serious is its condition was that when the rest of Europe pull together a one trillion dollar bail out, the market tanked. I think investors looked at that and said, “Jeez, if they’re trying to fix Greece with that much money, then it must have been lot worse than we suspected. Let’s pull our money out just to be safe.”

So, what would help? One thing being talked about is for Greece to do a partial default on all of its debts, just stop paying on its commitments. But the majority of its present outgo is unrelated to debt, so that wouldn’t help much. Cancelling totally all of its loans will not solve the total package of its problems. It would still need to make enormous, horrific, painful cuts in its budget that will drive a whole lot of people into poverty.

The only big thing that could bring it back from this disaster would be a general (and international) economic recovery. If the tide rose, it would lift the boats. The US is in an analogous position, though not nearly as bad. Thought it’s hard to believe from listening to Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Fox News, most of our recent Federal deficit has come from the recession. People lost their jobs or their incomes went down and then tax revenues went down. So if we ever recover from the recession, our tax income will come up and that will make paying down the deficit a whole lot easier.

However, Greece has some other very serious problems, one of the biggest is that the Euro-Zone doesn’t have a central government. What that means is that in the US, if we have a state that goes under (like California), then Social Security, Medicare, and other federal revenue checks still flow in. But if a European Union state goes under (like Greece), nothing outside comes in, and people starve.

A second problem of being in the Euro Zone is that it doesn’t have any control over its own currency. Right now the Euro is “strong” (that is, expensive) and that means among other things that tourists are more likely to go to neighboring Turkey rather than the Parthenon and no one can afford its exports. If Greece had its own currency, it could devalue it and make its exports look cheaper and therefore sell more. That would go a long way toward helping it dig its way out of its deficit hole. Countries in Southeast Asia did this following their deep recession of 1997. They lowered the value of their money, which lowered the costs of their products and they sold boatloads of computers, CDs, TVs and, well, drugs to the US and the West. China is in fact still doing that, which has been hard on our domestic producers, but it has been good for them.

However, since Greece is a member of the European Union, it has the added problem of not owning its own currency and therefore doesn’t have the option of devaluing it. It would be like Texas saying it wanted to devalue the Dollar to lower the price of oil. It could never happen. Greece’s currency is the Euro and it can’t go down unless the entire union goes down (and don’t even think about that).

Our US situation is slightly different. We could devalue our currency a little bit but we don’t have too much to export any longer. For the last twenty-five years or so we have been supporting policies that encourage industries to move to places like China, and in the process we have been sliding steadily toward becoming a service income economy. That has helped the home offices of those industries and it has helped the international financial sectors, mainly on Wall Street, but it hasn’t been good in terms of producing anything. So, now, if we wanted to sell a bunch of stuff to help pay down our deficit, we have fewer things to sell.

Which brings me back to the conclusion that Greece’s days on the Euro are limited. The amount of spending they would have to cut to balance the national check book would be beyond imagination. You can talk all day about how they have too many government workers making too much money (and they do), but to now fire or cut all of them sufficiently to have a balanced budget would drive their economy into the stone age. If you think the riots look bad, imagine civil war. It would be ugly and the suffering brutal.

One parallel to what I’m imagining would be Argentina. You may recall that Argentina fell into an economic black hole in the early 2000s, because it had over spent and was too closely tied to the economies of South East Asia, which had tanked in 1997. Their local currency was tied to the US dollar in a way that was functionally similar to how Greece is tied to the Euro. If our economy went up, theirs went up and if ours went down, theirs went down. Usually. Under normal circumstances it would be inconceivable for them to break with the dollar. But their crisis was so severe that they were forced into inconceivable policies, one of which was to break with the dollar. They went to hell and back over the next couple of years and emerged at the end a much healthier, much more vibrant economy. Which brings me again to say to Greece: blow off the euro and save yourself from oblivion.

But I’m just a preacher from Quincy, so what do I know.

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Obama hews to status quo on finance



Simon Johnson
May 19, 2010 11:39 PM EDT
The consensus on President Barack Obama is that he seeks consensus. He’s always been a centrist, we are told by his many biographers, so it is no surprise — they say — that he hews to the center on issues like financial reform.

His staff reinforces the message that Obama is all about moderation: The president wants reform, but not in a way that would disrupt the recovery or prospects for longer-run sustainable growth.

There is just one fly in this ointment. In the current Senate debate about reforming the financial system, the push for stronger measures has come largely from the center — not from any radical wing.

But this is not the center that Obama claims. Obama’s moderation is quite conservative on finance — i.e., stick with the devil you know.

Centrist senators like Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), among others, have pushed hard to strengthen the financial reform legislation — working with little or no support from the White House.

These moderates have championed reform because they see extreme dangers posed by our existing financial system. In stark contrast to the president’s view, their attitude is: “Hey, it’s quite a devil.”

Even the centrist Democratic leadership — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Dick Durbin of Illinois — all supported (or still support) amendments that would have made the legislation far more effective.

Among Obama appointees, it is Gary Gensler at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — not the core White House-Treasury team, and, of all things, a former Goldman Sachs executive — who has pushed hardest, with some success, for stronger rules on derivatives.

And it is Mary Schapiro who took the risk to pursue Goldman Sachs — against the votes of the GOP appointees at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

With them all, of course, stands the intellect and vision of Paul Volcker — the man who remained apart, with apparent diffidence, from the initial reform effort last summer. But he then launched an effective sub rosa campaign that culminated in the “Volcker rules” that, at least initially, proposed a hard size on our largest banks and would still force megabanks to drop “proprietary trading” activities — the big speculative bets they make that are implicitly backed by the taxpayer.

No one has yet accused Volcker of being a left-wing radical.

It becomes increasingly clear that the divide is not left-right within the Democratic Party, or even across the aisle but, rather, between people who want to rein in the power of our largest banks vs. those broadly comfortable with the status quo.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, chief White House economic adviser Larry Summers and the White House-Senate core — which includes some Democrats and most Republicans — are all about not being too tough on the Big Six banks.
But what is “too tough” at this point? The big banks have no good arguments. They are reduced to asserting that being able to take risks in their current manner makes the financial system more stable — a point directly contradicted by their actions in the run-up to September 2008.

It was these banks’ own holdings of “toxic assets” that were the focus of rescue attempts organized by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Geithner. Holdings at this scale were not acquired in the mundane business of bringing buyers and sellers together. Instead, very smart people at the big banks saw this as a good investment, which proved devastatingly wrong.

The idea that our economy needs banks at the scale and with the characteristics of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley is preposterous.

Try finding someone in the financial markets or otherwise well informed about how global banking really operates (say, the CEO of a big nonfinancial company) who thinks there are economies of scale in banking more than $100 billion in total assets.
The megabanks — with assets between $500 billion and $2.5 trillion, leaving aside their true derivative exposures, which no one knows — are far beyond the size needed by society. They are so big that their size has become very dangerous.

To be fair, the Senate bill most likely will include steps in the right direction.

On consumer protection, Elizabeth Warren paved the way, and the administration — to its credit — largely followed her lead. On derivatives, Gensler has brought us to a better — though far from ideal — set of rules. On compliance, Schapiro is picking the SEC up off the floor.

The White House supports Warren consistently, has been brought around to Gensler’s approach and hopefully will stick by Schapiro.

But the biggest banks have simply proved too powerful to overcome without sustained and intense counterlobbying by the White House.

A moderate reformist president could have taken, and held, the center ground by putting greater limits on any future damage that our biggest banks can cause.

But, for whatever reason, this is not what Obama chose to do. He presumably had his reasons. But they have nothing to do with being a centrist in general.

As a result, the financial system could well remain largely as it was before September 2008. Perhaps the megabanks will be slightly constrained in their activities; most likely not — at least for Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.

Prepare now for new extremes.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is now the Ronald A. Kurtz professor of entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the co-author of “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.”
© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC
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