Debt jubilee: Revolutionary change or reform to stabilize capitalism?

Debt has been a crucial lever in implementing austerity, both as an instrument and a moral cudgel. Eliminating debt, private and public, would have transformative effects — but would doing so be revolutionary or merely a reform to stabilize world capitalism?

Those are not the only two choices, of course, and the mere thought of a debt jubilee would send many a set of teeth gnashing. Debt jubilees are not a new idea; in fact they have existed since long before capitalism was born. But given the unprecedented level of debt, a jubilee today would entail unprecedented complexity.

The Australian economist Steve Keen has for several years energetically promoted the concept of a debt jubilee. His concept is to bail out people instead of banks, reasonably arguing that people would spend the money, reviving the economy. So in this formulation, radical as the concept of a jubilee is (and radical as the idea of helping working people instead of the super-wealthy is), it is conceived as a reform.

Professor Keen conceptualizes a jubilee in a form that would not cause damages to debt holders not responsible for the crisis, such as pension funds:

“Whereas only the moneylenders lost under an ancient Jubilee, debt cancellation today would bankrupt many pension funds, municipalities and the like who purchased securitized debt instruments from banks. I have therefore proposed that a ‘Modern Debt Jubilee’ should take the form of ‘Quantitative Easing for the Public’: monetary injections by the Federal Reserve not into the reserve accounts of banks, but into the bank accounts of the public — but on condition that its first function must be to pay debts down. This would reduce debt directly, but not advantage debtors over savers, and would reduce the profitability of the financial sector while not affecting its solvency.”

“Quantitative easing” is a government program of massive buying of assets from banks in an effort to promote increased lending and liquidity through increasing the money supply. A “quantitative easing for the public” would give money to everybody. Those with no debt would be free to spend it as they wish, and those who received more money than the size of their debt would similarly have no obligations once they wiped out their debt. Dramatic as this idea is, Professor Keen is no revolutionary; he seeks to put capitalism on a firmer footing:

“Returning capitalism to a financially robust state must involve a dramatic fall in the level of private debt — and the size of the financial sector — as well as policies that return the financial sector to a service role to the real economy.”

His reasoning is that economic recovery is impossible until private and government debt is paid down:

“The standard means of reducing debt — personal and corporate bankruptcies for some, slow repayment of debt in depressed economic conditions for others — could have us mired in deleveraging for one and a half decades, given its current rate. … That fate would in turn mean one and a half decades where the boost to demand that rising debt should provide — when it finances investment rather than speculation — will not be there. The economy will tend to grow more slowly than is needed to absorb new entrants into the workforce, innovation will slow down, and justified political unrest will rise — with potentially unjustified social consequences. … We should, therefore, find a means to reduce the private debt burden now, and reduce the length of time we spend in this damaging process of deleveraging.”

A radical idea, then, to save the system. A radical idea that is not at all revolutionary in the hands of Professor Keen. Considering the mass political movement required to force what would be an extraordinary change in the policies of the world’s central banks and finance ministries — institutions staffed by and run on behalf of financiers — would we be simply content to say, “Well, that’s it, then, we can all go home now”?

Revolutions as ‘transformations of common sense’

The U.S. activist and economist David Graeber also calls for a debt jubilee but, in contrast, conceives this as a revolutionary demand. Writing in the latest edition of The Baffler, Professor Graeber argues that world revolutions consist “above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.”

Drawing upon the works of “world systems” theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, he argues that the revolutions of 1848 were successful even though none took power because the ideas behind it and the French Revolution widely took root. He similarly sees Russia’s October Revolution as responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states and, on less firm ground, that 1968 “changed everything” because of the personal liberations that grew out of it, including feminism.

Fear of communist revolutions, and large mass movements, did lead to the many advances of the mid-20th century. But as most of those advances have been reversed, it is more realistic to see them as simply reforms — and reforms can, and will, be taken back when movements subside. People can’t stay in the streets forever. The changes of personal liberation spawned by 1968 and beyond are not as susceptible to reversal, and, as with LGBT movements, continue to advance in some ways but, nonetheless, feminist gains in particular are under sustained assaults.

We should be careful to differentiate advances that threaten the system — such as major structural changes in the economic sphere — and those that don’t, such as same-sex marriage or women shattering glass ceilings, however much individual religious fundamentals or tradition-minded men believe themselves to be “threatened.” In no way do I wish to minimize the social gains made by women, LGBT communities, and racial and national minorities, nor ignore that social divisions are integral to the functioning of any system based on inequality and hierarchy. Such freedoms — still only partially attained and still requiring organized defense — are prerequisites for any concept of a better world to have meaning.

Economic inequality has steadily widened as class repression intensifies; objectification of women in mass media is ubiquitous, as exemplified by the pornification and coarseness of corporate-controlled mass culture; and nationalist and other xenophobias are gaining new traction under the impact of economic disintegration and the accompanying social disruptions. It seems premature to declare everything has changed, even keeping in mind that leaps in social zeitgeists are a process rather than a sudden jump.

A jubilee linked to other demands

Given the interconnectedness of struggles, is the idea of a debt jubilee in itself a “revolutionary demand,” as Professor Graeber declares it? In other words, would it actually overturn the current world system, or would it be simply a reform, albeit a welcome and thorough-going one on the scale of the New Deal? He does link the idea of a jubilee with the necessity of slowing down growth:

“We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt — sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal — is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? … [Producing more is] precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.”

Thus, Professor Graeber argues:

“Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also … begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be. … The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.”

Such an outcome would require an extraordinarily strong global movement; in this conception a debt jubilee would be a means to an end and linked to broader structural change. For a debt jubilee to be “revolutionary” it would have to be one piece of a more comprehensive struggle. A debt jubilee by itself, in isolation, would be, as Professor Keen intends, a method of stabilizing capitalism. Indeed, he has shown that a jubilee could be brought about using standard capitalist-management tools in a different way.

Saving the current world system would be a temporary salve and nothing more; all the contradictions within it would resurface. But that system is of human creation. When new ideas gain secure social foundations, revolutions can happen — whether it is sovereignty residing in the people rather than a royal family designated by a god, or that democracy is possible only with everyone able to participate on an equal footing rather than only men of a society’s dominant ethnic or racial group, or that political democracy is an empty shell without economic democracy.

A better world can only arise from unleashed human imagination and creating unbreakable links among struggles.

Social security cuts: Work until you drop

A social movement to preserve Social Security has never been as urgent as it is today. Tempting as it might be to send a dictionary to the White House explaining the difference between “compromise” and “capitulation,” we should not be overly generous — Barack Obama’s intention to gut Social Security is not so much a pre-emptive capitulation as it is yet another demonstration of his adherence to neoliberal ideology.

By now, such a demonstration should not be necessary. Remember that one of the president’s first appointments was Lawrence Summers, who once wrote a memo while chief economist at the World Bank advocating industries creating toxic waste be transferred to Africa because the continent is “vastly UNDER-polluted” (emphasis in original). Professor Summers’ appointment in 2008 as President Obama’s leading economic adviser after his career of promoting Reaganite, neoliberal policies, including leading the Clinton administration’s deregulation of banking and scrapping of regulations for derivative contracts, set the tone for what was to come.

Let us not fall out of our chairs — neoliberal austerity is a bipartisan policy. Voters alternate between their dominant parties in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, yet the train stays in motion. Fans of the movie Avatar likely remember an early scene in which Sigourney Weaver’s character mocks the macho, militaristic approach of the Marines who intend to unilaterally take the mineral “unobtainium” from the Pandora natives by bulldozing their homes and forest. Her intention was to negotiate with the natives and have them agree to give up their homes and forest.

Note that there was no difference in the goal of the Marines, exemplar of the conservative approach, and that of the would-be negotiator, representative of the supposedly more enlightened approach. I remember thinking to myself while watching Avatar that Ms. Weaver’s character represented the Democratic Party wing of neoliberalism. Indeed, Democrats and their “left-of-center” counterparts among the world’s advanced capitalist countries — even parties in Europe that call themselves “socialist” — routinely implement ever more harsh policies that punish working people to further enrich the wealthy.

So we have something here bigger than Barack Obama and whatever character flaws he might be perceived as possessing. Republicans want to privatize Social Security — the ultimate dream of Wall Street and good for industrialists, too, as retirements become a quaint relic of the past. More people are forced to remain in the job market longer; more competition for jobs means lower wages and more profits. President Obama simply wants to phase this in more slowly.

Photo by A. Blackman, England

Specifically, President Obama is unilaterally offering Republicans the first step in the gutting of Social Security — reducing benefits. His method to do this is to change the formula for calculating cost-of-living increases from the standard Consumer Price Index to a different methodology known as the “Chained Consumer Price Index,” under which the rate of inflation is lower.

In the standard CPI, the basket of goods used to calculate inflation does not change. In the “Chained CPI,” items that rise in price are substituted with a cheaper product under the theory that consumers will switch to lower-priced alternatives. That may sometimes be so, but such actions do not alter the fact that the desired product is more expensive and thus represents the true extent of inflation. Nor does it account for the fact that many high-cost expenses, such as rent and electricity, don’t have readily available alternatives.

If they want inflation to be less, they shall make it so

This substitution of the standard CPI for the “Chained CPI” is a long-standing demand of Right-wing ideologues, and President Obama has offered it to them on a silver platter. The New York Times, the first to report of the proposed Social Security cuts (and which, uncharacteristically, called the cuts cuts instead of using a euphemism), anonymously quoted Obama administration officials who intimated that this was part of an elaborate plan to force Republicans in Congress to agree to modest tax increases. The Times quoted an official as claiming:

“That means … that the things like [Chained] C.P.I. that Republican leaders have pushed hard for will only be accepted if Congressional Republicans are willing to do more on revenues.”

But the president’s offer contains far more cuts for working people and retirees than attempts to make corporations and the wealth pay taxes at a slightly more reasonable level. The Times reported:

“He will propose more than $600 billion in new revenues — his last offer had called for $1.2 trillion in taxes — mostly by limiting to 28 percent the deductions that individuals in higher tax brackets can claim. Congress has ignored that idea in past years. Deficits would be reduced another $930 billion through 2023 as a result of spending cuts and other cost-saving changes to domestic programs. … Mr. Obama’s proposed spending reductions include about $400 billion from health programs and $200 billion from other areas, including farm subsidies, federal employee retirement programs, the Postal Service and the unemployment compensation system.”

That sounds like a whole lot of new austerity. Austerity hasn’t been working out so well in Europe, where, for instance, eurozone unemployment is at 12 percent and rising. That, sadly, is not the point. The ongoing economic crisis is an opportunity for corporate executives and financiers to push through what they’ve always wanted anyway. An oft-quoted summation of this thinking was offered several years ago by Stephen Moore of the far right Club for Growth and the Cato Institute: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”

Both groups are dedicated to cutting taxes for corporations and putting an end to any social safety net. The Club for Growth founder is connected to groups like the Heritage Foundation and to Tea Party impresario Dick Armey, while the Cato Institute recently experienced a power struggle in which the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, ousted the leadership for being insufficiently severe. Cato sent six alumni to the Bush II/Cheney administration, four of whom served on the latter’s Orwellian named “Commission to Strengthen Social Security.”

A better slogan than ‘work until you drop’

Because “work until you drop” is not an effective slogan to rally people to your side, Wall Street financiers and those opposed to social safety nets float scare stories that Social Security will soon run out of money, and you’d do better putting all your money in the stock market. Neither is true. Let’s start with the second of these two mythologies. In 2005, I researched the historical performance of the U.S. stock market for an article published in Z Magazine and found that the gains are small, when adjusted for inflation, and the gains only materialize when bubbles are near their peak.

As bubbles peak about once every 35 years, it is difficult to time these just right. When adjusted for inflation, the Dow Jones Industrial Average — the ultimate index of stock-market health and which has its components continually adjusted so as to replace low-performing stocks with high-performing ones — was below its 1929 peak as late as 1991. Here are some long-term results:

• The Dow peaked at 995 in February 1965. Adjusted for inflation, that was 42 percent more than it was worth at its previous bubble peak in 1929, not so impressive when it took 36 years to get there.
• The ensuring crash bottomed out in December 1974. At this point, the Dow, adjusted for inflation, was worth only half of what it was worth in 1929 and little more than one-third of its 1965 peak.
• The most recent crash bottomed out in March 2009, at which point the Dow was three percent below its 1965 peak, adjusted for inflation.
• Yesterday’s Dow closing of 14,673, when adjusted for inflation, is almost precisely double that of its 1965 peak, but a 100 percent gain over 48 years isn’t terribly dazzling.

And with the price/earnings, or P/E, ratio, of the S&P 500 Index now at 18.35, stocks are again over-valued when measured historically. The ratio’s average, calculated back to 1872, is 14. Five times in history this ratio, which is a company’s yearly profit divided by one share, has surpassed 20; each time was followed by a crash.

The biggest canard, however, is how financial chicken littles frame their case. The claim that Social Security will run out of money in perhaps three decades is based on predicting a low rate of future stock-market gains while the claim that privatizing Social Security will produce more money is based on predicting a rate of future stock-market gains double that of the former rate.

There are examples of privatizing social security systems, and the results have been a bonanza for financiers and disastrous for retirees. In Chile, where the privatization was done at the end of a gun barrel during the Pinochet dictatorship, a worker who retired in 2005 received less than half of what he or she would have received had he or she been able to stay in the old system. The six companies that administer the private plans, not coincidentally, constitute one of Chile’s most profitable industries.

It took tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of arrests, torture sessions, “disappearances” and exiles to implement Milton Friedman’s Chicago School shock therapy in Chile. Nowadays, such levels of violence are not necessary as elected governments implement neoliberalism in a series of measured doses, and four decades of incessant propaganda has acculturated the peoples of the world to the ahistorical idea that “there is no alternative.” Violence nonetheless remains the system’s handmaiden, as the coordinated crushing of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the tolerated rise of fascist groups like Golden Dawn in Greece demonstrate.

There is an alternative — ceasing to placing your hopes in parties that disagree only over the best method to implement neoliberalism, whether the one’s candidate sneers at “government-dependent” voters or the other’s candidate makes speeches vowing to tackle inequality while acting to make it worse. Change comes social movements, not from elections.

Cyprus pensioners told to pay for crisis. Who will pay tomorrow?

Either bankers are so confident of their power that they increasingly can’t be bothered to disguise it, or we have to stretch the definition of “democracy” so far that the word loses any sense of meaning. This week’s news that the newly elected government of Cyprus was ordered to make its savings depositors pay for a bailout of Russian oligarchs and real estate speculators is stunning even by the standards of the global economic slump.

None of the previous eurozone bailouts had gone so far as to directly confiscate the savings of ordinary depositors. Not even in Ireland, where former Prime Minister Brian Cowen had huffed and puffed that Ireland would not surrender its sovereignty — which he demonstrated by insisting that Ireland’s ultra-low corporate tax rate not be touched. It wasn’t. European bankers had no issue with that, granting him that one concession while imposing cuts to wages, lowering the minimum wage, drastically raising water rates, raising university tuition and reducing health care services.

The intensity of Ireland’s austerity derives from the decision by the former prime minister to cover all potential losses by Ireland’s major banks, no matter how reckless their speculative lending had become. In other words, the Irish government paid off the bad loans made by its bankers and guaranteed speculators in the banks’ bonds would suffer no losses, and passed the bill onto its citizens. This represented an extraordinary warping of the idea that bank deposits, up to a certain level, are guaranteed. Other countries have had various versions of this austerity imposed on them. But now the European Union and its bankers are attempting austerity from a different angle: Partial confiscation of all savings, even if “guaranteed.”

No, that doesn’t mean that the normal austerity terms aren’t being imposed by the European Central Bank, the eurozone’s finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund. For weeks, rumors had circulated that, this time, that there would be a sharing of the cost of a bailout as Cyprus inched closer to a bailout. In the ordinary sense of this concept, that would mean that bondholders and the banks themselves would shoulder some of the burden. Not surprisingly, there had been pushback against this idea with financiers complaining that making them take responsibility for their own speculation would be disruptive to financial markets.

Finance ministers want pensioners to pay for crisis

Plan B was is to make working people and pensioners who have their life savings in banks and had nothing whatsoever to do with the latest eurozone crisis instead shoulder the burden. The Cypriot government was told point-blank to confiscate a portion of depositors’ savings or all money would be cut off, which would cause an immediate collapse of its two primary banks. No matter that deposits up to €100,000 are guaranteed. To avoid a bank run, Cypriot banks are closed for at least three days so that Cypriot parliamentarians can be hectored by eurozone finance ministers to do their duty.

The Cypriot parliament said no in its March 19 vote, but “no” votes in other countries have been reversed under pressure, so this drama has not yet run its course.

Cyprus needs €17 billion to bail out its banks, but European Union and International Monetary Fund officials are loaning only €10 billion, insisting that the remainder come from a deposit tax and other internal measures, including privatizing utilities. And why do Cypriot banks need all this money? Because they over-extended themselves on loans to real estate developers and others, the same story as in so many other countries. They also absorbed losses when Greek government bonds they owned were devalued in the wake of Greece’s ongoing crisis. An added complication is that about 40 percent of Cyprus’ total deposits are by foreigners, mostly Russians, causing extra challenges.

Cypriot banks are widely seen as money-laundering havens for Russian oligarchs, and a straight bailout of the banks would appear to many eyes as a bailout of money launderers. That in itself would not look good. In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces re-election later this year and, given repeated assertions by German right-wingers that Germany is bailing out slothful Mediterraneans, is loath to leave herself exposed to more such charges.

Imposing a “deposit tax” only on deposits greater than the government guarantee would be one way out of this political dilemma, but that would leave Russia angry. Not only does Russian President Vladimir Putin seek to protect his country’s oligarchs, but Russia has previously granted Cyprus a loan on which the Cypriot government hopes to re-negotiate easier terms. As it is, Russia strongly protested the proposed confiscation that would have affected everyone.

The Cypriot government is caught between multiple rocks and hard places — subordinate to Germany, the northern European Union countries that ally with Germany on financial issues, Russia, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It is also subordinate to financial markets, a nice term that really means international financiers and speculators. Countries far bigger than Cyprus are subordinate to financial markets, and even large countries like Germany are not independent of market forces.

Cypriot banks hold assets estimated at eight times the country’s gross domestic product — Cyprus, like Ireland and Iceland, which had similarly bloated banks, can’t sustain a financial sector swollen to such a dangerous size. Cypriot banks offered interest rates far above rates found elsewhere, which attracted foreign depositors but also signaled significant risk. Banks that do not ask questions of people who deposit huge sums of money are not closely regulated. The downside of that risk has materialized, but rather than impose the cost, financiers and the government ministers who represent them prefer to say “never mind” to the deposit insurance counted on by working people and pensioners banking their life savings.

A crisis of financial domination, not national characteristics

The social risk here, in a broader sense, is that the Cypriot crisis will be seen through nationalist lenses. To accuse “slothful Mediterraneans” or “arrogant Germans” is to be blind to the larger structural forces at work, which pay no attention to national borders. Financiers last year imposed new unelected governments on Greece and Italy so that their preferred policies be carried out. If they can topple one government, they can topple other governments; the pious declarations that Cyprus’ confiscation of savers would be a unique event that won’t be repeated rings hollow given those precedents.

Austerity comes in many forms and no country’s workers are exempt — the German manufacturing “miracle” in fact has a down-to-earth cause — a decade of wage cuts for German workers. Germany is ever more dependent on exports as its domestic ability to consume slowly declines due to the steady drop of wage cuts. When those export markets begin to dry up, German workers will not be able to pick up the slack and German manufacturers and financiers will impose stronger austerity on German workers to buoy profits.

For now, German workers are relatively privileged, a difference exploited to foster divisions. Austerity has been much harsher in the eurozone’s Mediterranean countries and Ireland. Thus far, we have seen only the beginnings of any political fightback, in the form of strong electoral showings by Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece and the 5 Star Movement in Italy. For the most part, Europeans have continued to alternate among their local dominant parties.

Frequent massive demonstrations demonstrate widespread anger — that is important, as the route to reversing austerity and the system that imposes it lies in mass action. It is a healthy sign of cross-border solidarity that demonstrators in front of the Cypriot parliament carried signs saying (in Italian and Spanish) “today me, tomorrow you.”

But anger without organization ultimately dissipates like steam released from an engine. Such organization has to translate, in part, to challenging political power, which in turn is intimately linked (and subordinate) to economic power. Austerity does not fall out of the sky; it is an expression of power to benefit those in power. Capitalists, including financiers, can remove governments and confiscate savings. What’s next? The return of debtors’ prisons? Mandatory unpaid labor to boost profits? Those might sound far-fetched, but unchecked power has a way of moving toward limitless power. Organizing to reverse this is simply self-defense.

Never mind! IMF now says austerity mistakes don’t matter

It did seem too good to be true. The International Monetary Fund last week issued its second paper in three months acknowledging that the damaging effects of austerity measures on economies is much stronger than previously assumed. Unlike October’s quiet admission of error, however, this time IMF researchers say colossal miscalculations don’t matter.

Perhaps the IMF is taking back the bureaucratically couched, quiet mea culpa it genteelly issued last October? Being an orthodox economist evidently means never having to say you are sorry. It does mean that if reality doesn’t match the theory, then it is reality that must be changed.

Readers may recall that in October 2012 the IMF slipped into its World Economic Outlook, in which it forecast that the global economic growth rate would continue to decline, this interesting line:

“Public spending cutbacks and the still-weak financial system [are] weighing on prospects.”

That is as close to an admission as we are likely to receive from the IMF, the World Bank or other financial institutions that the austerity that they relentlessly impose weakens economies. Perhaps some at the IMF are getting cold feet at such an admission, or, more likely, such ideologically inconvenient pronouncements received more attention than expected given the tepid language buried in an otherwise routine paper.

Thus we have last week’s interesting development, in which two IMF researchers published a further study on the IMF web site that confirmed the catastrophic mis-calculations in applying austerity, but concluded that the mistakes don’t matter and austerity must be imposed anyway. As a hedge, the paper’s front page declares it is not an official IMF document and does not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the IMF.

The IMF did see fit to publish the paper and one of the authors is its director of research, so let’s nonetheless take it seriously. As seriously as an ideological paper can be taken, even if its pre-selected conclusion is masked by jargon and mathematical formulae, and clearly intended for an audience of professional economists. There is no reason for us not to peer over their shoulders, especially as austerity has very real implications for us.

Swing an axe, get bloodletting

This debate over austerity revolves around assumptions as to the effect of spending cuts. As I wrote in my October 10 post on the IMF’s quiet confession:

“[I]t seems that governments applying austerity programs over-estimated the savings to be accrued from them. The IMF said a common figure used by governments was to assume that for each dollar lost in government spending, 50 cents is erased from gross domestic product, an assumption used when creating austerity budgets. But, the fund said, its study of the issue has found that, since the economic collapse that began in 2008, for each dollar cut from government spending, GDP is reduced from 90 cents to $1.70. In other words, the result of austerity is that it has accelerated economic contraction.”

A simple look around us confirms that finding. Stagnation or renewed economic contraction is the continuing result in the world’s advanced capitalist countries. Eurozone unemployment, for example, has risen to 11.8 percent.

Sidestepping any examination of ideological bias — not surprisingly, since that would implicate the IMF itself not to mention the entire universe of orthodox economists — authors Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh refer only to “growth forecast errors” and offer a series of ideas as to the source of these innocent errors. The authors’ calculations found nearly identical errors as those mentioned two paragraphs above in calculating the effects of imposed austerity since the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008. From that, they write:

“In other words … growth disappointments should be larger in economies that planned greater fiscal cutbacks. This is what we found.” [page 3]

These “disappointments” were significant — the authors said the extra loss, beyond economists’ calculations, was nearly one percent of economic output for each one percent cut in spending, a result they found consistently in the more than two dozen countries they analyzed. Similarly bad forecasts were made by the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the IMF. Nonetheless, the authors conclude:

“[O]ur findings that short-term fiscal multipliers have been larger than expected do not have mechanical implications for the conduct of fiscal policy. Some commentators interpreted our earlier box as implying that fiscal consolidation should be avoided altogether. This does not follow from our analysis.” [page 6]

Finding a tree instead of a forest

Among the reasons offered for the “errors” in calculating the net effects of austerity programs are that zero interest rates can’t be cut further; that consumption is more dependent on current income than future income due to the tightening of credit; and the effect of cuts become amplified when “there is a great deal of slack in the economy.” The last of those three lead the IMF researchers to conclude that the “errors” in calculating economic effects only apply from the onset of the 2008 collapse; before that everything was fine.

Unless you lived in a developing country in which IMF-imposed austerity was applied. The authors likely do not. But, for now, they acknowledge that the “errors” in the effect of spending cuts for 2008 and beyond resulted in forecasters consistently under-estimating the rise in unemployment and the decline in demand. In the fifth year of economic crisis, the IMF researchers wrote:

“[W]e find that planned fiscal consolidation is associated with significantly lower-than-expected consumption and investment growth. … [I]nvestment varies relatively strongly in response to overall economic conditions.” [page 18]

Um, well, yes. When wages decline and unemployment rises, demand is reduced and corporations would rather sit on their cash, buy back their stock or speculate. Why should they invest when they have trouble selling what they already produce? In advanced capitalist countries, consumer spending accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the economy and if working people don’t have the money, they aren’t going to spend it if they are also trying to reduce their debt. Debt accumulated because that was the only way they could maintain living standards when wages have stagnated or declined since the 1970s.

The competitive pressures on corporations to increase their profits leads them to move production to the places with the lowest wages; that buoys profits for a time but the resulting fall in wages and rise in unemployment in the places where production is shuttered means weaker demand. Weaker demand results in increased pressure on profits, and round and round we go. Austerity, at bottom, is governments enforcing the demands of the most powerful industrialists and financiers for ever more profits.

Competitive pressures force corporations to act in such a manner, and the immense capital accumulated by the biggest capitalists grants them decisive power, ensuring that their interests become paramount when governments implement policy. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are multi-national instruments of the most powerful capitalist governments, which in turn reflect the aggregate interests of their most powerful industrialists and financiers. If we keep that in mind, we need not fall off our chairs when an IMF paper, having laid out the damage done by austerity programs, nonetheless concludes:

“[O]our results should not be construed as arguing for any specific fiscal policy stance in any specific country. In particular, the results do not imply that fiscal consolidation is undesirable. Virtually all advanced economies face the challenge of fiscal adjustment in response to elevated government debt levels and future pressures on public finances from demographic change.” [page 20]

Thus the dramatic conclusion: The economic decline resulting from austerity has been badly under-estimated; therefore we must have more austerity. Ideology this may be, but it’s an ideology concocted to continue capitalist business as usual — it’s not an ideology that inexplicably drops from the sky. The dismal “science” indeed.

Speculators trade in two weeks what the world makes in a year

Speculation rests on phenomenal amounts of money sloshing around the globe. We could call this endless wave a permanent tsunami, except that would grossly understate the size of the financial wave.

If we could pile up all the money that is exchanged in financial markets and make a literal wave out of it, it would make for an astounding sight were we on the International Space Station, towering above the clouds. The wave would rise so high it might swamp the space station itself.

All right, I am getting fanciful here. And we wouldn’t want to contemplate having to bail out the space station in zero-G conditions. But we are talking about an international financial industry that has truly grown to monstrous proportions, beyond any reasonable necessity.

How big? The combined daily trading average on the world’s foreign-exchange, bond and stock markets is very roughly about US$6 trillion. If that total seems amazing, it is for good reason: By way of comparison, the gross domestic product of the world is about $65 trillion. To put it another way, in 11 business days financial speculators trade instruments and contracts valued at more than all the products and services produced by the entire world in one year.

Most of us are familiar with stock exchanges, and that is the financial market that draws the lions’ share of corporate mass media attention. But that is actually only a tiny portion; an average day’s turnover on the world’s stock markets amounts to $270 billion. Bond markets (government debt, corporate debt and the myriad of “asset-backed” securities continually cooked up) are several times larger, and foreign exchange is vastly larger than bond markets.

Much of this daily $6 trillion turnover is in derivatives, swaps, futures contracts and assorted legerdemain. Almost all of this is nothing more than self-interested speculation; trading for the sake of the largest possible short-term profits regardless of the cost to the rest of the economy or the destabilizing social costs of these giant pools of capital sloshing around the world, pouring in capital here and pulling capital there as opportunities for short-term profits wax and wane.

Why do stock markets exist?

In theory, stock markets exist to distribute investment capital to where it is needed and to enable corporations to raise money for investment or other purposes. In real life, neither is really true. A corporation with stock traded on an exchange can use that status to issue new shares, raising money without the burden of dealing with lenders and paying them interest. But large corporations can raise money in a variety of ways, for example by issuing bonds or other interest-bearing debt, or by selling shares directly to private investors.

Nor do corporations necessarily wish to float new stock — doing so is disliked by investors because profits are diluted when spread among more shares. Instead, it is more common for large companies to buy back shares of their stock (at a premium to the trading price), which means less sharing of distributed profits.

From 1981 to 1997, for example, non-financial corporations in the United States bought back $813 billion more in stock through buyback programs and corporate takeovers than they issued.* That is money that was diverted from investment, employee compensation or community development, and constitutes still more money stuffed into financiers’ pockets.

Most of the action on stock exchanges is simply speculation, and as computers become more sophisticated, the speculation drives higher trading volumes and becomes more remote from the actual business of the company in which stock is bought. “Day trading,” where speculators buy and sell stock within minutes to earn profits on price fluctuations became common in the 1990s, but in the following decade the big Wall Street firms showed their muscle while bringing speculation to an unprecedented level.

These firms created sophisticated computer programs that buy and sell stocks in literally milliseconds. The programs issue thousands of buy orders that are canceled in minuscule fractions of a second in order to manipulate prices to the benefit of the computer owner. These price differences are only pennies, but are done on such enormous scale that the profits skimmed in this fashion are estimated to be as high as $21 billion per year — only a “handful” of these high-speed computer traders account for a majority of all stock-exchange trades.**

Speculation for its own sake

Speculation tends to reinforce itself. During the two years I spent working on a financial news service during the 1990s stock-market bubble, I repeatedly heard traders say the dramatic price rises could not last but they would continue to ride the bubble as long as the consensus view that the long bull market would continue remained in place. The primary reason for why market players believe stock prices will rise at a given time is because they believe other market players believe stock prices will rise. Not nearly as “scientific” as financiers would have you believe.

Bond and foreign-exchanges markets are no less fueled by speculation, and it is the gargantuan size of these markets that give the larger players in them the power to dictate to the world’s governments, extracting budget-busting bailouts, imposing austerity and raising their needs above all social considerations.

Their size is truly monstrous: the world’s 1,000 largest banks held an estimated US$102 trillion of assets in 2011. Separately, the “shadow banking” system (hedge funds, private-equity firms and other investment companies) is worth an additional $67 trillion.*** Financiers hold an amount of capital that is more than two and a half times larger than the world’s gross domestic product.

As more money is diverted into speculation because there are insufficient opportunities for investment, the size of the financial industry and the percentage of corporate profits claimed by the financial industry steadily grows — the size of both banks and unregulated “shadow banks” have increased since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008. This capital is a function of the amount of money flowing upward to the rich becoming larger than they can use for personal luxury consumption or investment; these torrents of money are diverted into increasingly risky pure speculation.

Too much money comes to chase too few assets, rapidly bidding up prices until there is no possible revenue stream that can sustain the price of assets bought at inflated levels, triggering a crash. The very size of financial markets is a major contributing cause of economic instability. That size is in turn a product of the continual downward pressure on wages — an increasing share of corporate revenues go toward executive pay and profits as the share going toward wages declines.

A financial industry swollen to such gargantuan sizes have no relation to the actual needs of the economy. It is money that could be used for wages (which would strengthen the economy) or for productive investment were it not so concentrated and under-taxed. Austerity, after all, is only for working people.

* Doug Henwood, Wall Street [Verso, 1998], page 3
** Charles Duhigg, “Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds,” The New York Times, July 24, 2009
*** TheCityUK; the Financial Stability Board

Stagnation, not growth, is the norm for mature capitalism

Economic growth is supposedly the norm, necessitating that an explanation be found for slumps and stagnation. But are these reversed? Is stagnation is the norm with the periods of strong growth requiring explanation?

A two-decade “long depression” occurred after an 1870s bubble inflated by speculation in railroads and construction in North America and Europe burst; the Great Depression lasted more than a decade and ended only because of World War II; and stagnation had been the recent fate of the world’s advanced capitalist countries even before the economic crisis that broke out in 2007 and 2008.

There are no signs of any recovery; on the contrary unemployment remains high across North America and Europe, with consumer and governmental debt rising to unsustainable levels. This state of affairs is the new norm of capitalism, argue John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney in their newly released book, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China.*

The authors, frequent collaborators in Monthly Review (of which Professor Foster is the editor), marshal an impressive collection of material to present an understanding of the capitalist dynamics that have brought the world to its present state of crisis and why that is the natural outcome of these dynamic forces, examining the crisis from a global perspective.

A structural crisis of capitalism is not the same as a standard “business cycle.” During the Great Depression, the U.S. economy moved through an entire cycle, but the “boom” period of the cycle merely gained back some of the dramatic losses of the early 1930s before the economy began sinking again in 1937. Periods of “epoch-making innovation,” such as that resulting from the steam engine or the automobile, have fueled growth for a time, but no such inventions are on the horizon today.

The reassertion of stagnation as normal state

Professors Foster and McChesney argue that, in the absence of such dramatic innovation, which have not occurred for several decades, stagnation is the expected norm, particularly in “mature” capitalist economies:

“The result was that the economy, despite its ordinary ups and downs, tended to sink into a normal state of long-run slow growth, rather than the robust growth assumed by orthodox economics. In essence, an economy in which decisions on [business] savings and investment are made privately tends to fall into a stagnation trap; existing demand is insufficient to absorb all of the actual and potential savings (or surplus) available, output falls, and there is no automatic mechanism that generates full recovery.” [page 12]

One way of conceptualizing that is to note that U.S. corporations are sitting on at least $2 trillion of cash — there are not enough investment opportunities to put that money, accumulated by a small number of hands, to good use. Investment decreases because demand decreases under the impact of stagnant or declining wages, and financial speculation increases.

The rise in the accumulated surplus leads to general deprivation. The “competitive capitalism” of the 19th century kept over-accumulation at bay through dramatic expansion but also through frequent bankruptcies, the authors write. In the modern era, they argue, there is a chronic buildup of excess capacity and thus stagnation, although regular business cycles continue. A lack of price competition caused by the consolidation of many industries into a small number of major competitors pushes prices higher, aggravating the erosion of living standards.

Price competition is ruinous to oligopolistic corporations, the authors argue, so they indirectly collude to prop up prices. (This requires no formal agreement when serious competitors can counted on one’s fingers.) Specific cases of price competition come in destructive forms, such as outsourcing huge amounts of production to countries with extremely low wages and sweatshop conditions. Firms compete through cutting production costs and by increasing market share through advertising and marketing techniques, rather on on retail pricing.

Thus, competition in a modern capitalist economy assumes a form drastically different than the mythological image of small firms competing on an even playing field commonly taught:

“Competition over productivity or for low-cost position remains intense, but the drastically diminished role of price competition means that the benefits of economic progress tend to be concentrated in the growing surplus of the big firms rather than disseminated more broadly by falling prices throughout the entire economy. This aggravates problems of overaccumulation. Faced with a tendency to market saturation, and hence the threat of overproduction, monopolistic corporations attempt to defend their prices and profit margins by further reducing capacity utilization. This, however, prevents the economy from clearing out its excess capacity, reinforcing stagnation tendencies. … Major corporations have considerable latitude to govern their output and investment levels, as well as their price levels, which are not externally determined by the market, but rather with an eye to their nearest oligopolistic rivals.” [page 37]

(The reference to “monopolistic corporations” in the quote above does not refer to a “pure” monopoly, but rather a handful of corporations that, as a group, act in a monopolistic manner — “monopolistic” and “oligopolistic” are used interchangeably throughout The Endless Crisis.)

“The stagnation tendency endemic to the mature, monopolistic economy, it is crucial to understand, is not due to technological stagnation, i.e., any failure at technology innovation and productivity expansion. Productivity continues to advance and technological innovations are introduced (if in a more rationalized way) as firms continue to compete for low-cost position. Yet this, in itself, turns into a major problem of the capital-rich societies at the center of the system, since the main constraint on accumulation is not that the economy is not productive enough, but rather that it is too productive.” [page 38]

Crisis is not a bolt from the blue

The current slump — ongoing stagnation following a steep downturn — is decades in the making. The Great Depression was ended by the massive spending needed to fight World War II, but the boom period of the 1950s and 1960s wound down as pent-up consumer demand was satiated, the final boosts from the automobile ran their course, the stimulus of the Vietnam War ended, and new productive capacity in Europe and Japan contributed to a global surplus. Professors Foster and McChesney demonstrate that financialization was the response to the stagnation that began to grip capitalist economies in the 1970s.

“[U]nable to find an outlet for its growing surplus in the real economy, capital (via corporations and individual investors) poured its excess surplus/savings into finance, speculating in the increase in asset prices. Financial institutions, meanwhile, on their part, found new, innovative ways to accommodate this vast inflow of money capital and to leverage the financial superstructure of the economy up to ever greater heights with added borrowing — facilitated by all sorts of exotic instruments, such as derivatives, options, securitization, etc. Some growth of finance was, of course, required as capital became more mobile globally. This, too, acted as a catalyst, promoting the runaway growth of finance on a global scale.” [page 42]

As a result, debt and financial profits increased much faster than the overall economy. Financialization rests on increasing asset prices; thus, a series of financial bubbles was necessary to keep the whole thing going. As instability increased, repeated central-bank interventions were necessary to deal with a steady outbreak of market and currency crises. The increasing power of financial institutions enabled them to induce governments to deregulate markets, encouraging ever more risky behavior.

The effect of these developments, the authors write, is a “stagnation-financialization trap,” whereby financial expansion has become the main fix for the system, which merely enables the cycle of crises to continue without dealing with the underlying structural weaknesses.

“Today’s neoliberal regime itself is best viewed as the political-policy counterpart of monopoly-finance capital. It is aimed at promoting more extreme forms of exploitation. … Neoliberal accumulation strategies, which function with the aid of a ‘predator state,’ are thus directed first and foremost at enhancing corporate profits in the face of stagnation, while providing further needed cash infusions into the financial sector. … Neoliberalism has also increased international inequalities, taking advantage of the very debt burden that peripheral economies were encouraged to take on, in order to force stringent restructuring on poorer economies.” [pages 44-45]

Thus, the system’s only answer has been attempts to re-inflate new asset bubbles. Globalization has only made this problem a global one:

“At the world level, what can be called a ‘new phase of financial imperialism,’ in the context of sluggish growth at the center of the system, constitutes the dominant reality of today’s globalization. Extremely high rates of exploitation, rooted in low wages in the export-oriented periphery, including ‘emerging economies,’ have given rise to global surpluses that can nowhere be profitably absorbed within production. The exports of such economies are dependent on the consumption of the wealthy economies, particularly the United States, with its massive current account deficit. At the same time, the vast export surpluses generated in these ‘emerging’ export economies are attracted to the highly leveraged capital markets of the global North, where such global surpluses serve to reinforce the financialization of the accumulation process centered in the rich economies.” [page 63]

International oligopoly supplants national oligopoly

The concomitant need for growth under the rigors of capitalist competition fuels corporate mergers; such combinations are necessary to buoy profits via increasing market shares when markets are mature. Because of globalization, the tendency toward oligopoly now takes place on an international scale.

This internationalization of oligopoly gives a false impression of renewed national competition, professors Foster and McChesney argue, because national firms are subsumed by international firms as part of the process of globalization. As under earlier, national scales, few corporations can survive this competition. The 500 largest corporations in the world collectively earn revenues of about 40 percent of world gross domestic product! [pages 76-77]

As ever more power accrues to the capitalists who reap the profits from these corporations, they can move production, or, as is standard in the apparel and computer industries, subcontract production to the places with the lowest wages and longest hours, thereby accumulating fantastic profits and reversing, for now, earlier downward pressures on profits.

“Corporations seek, by means of divide-and-rule strategies, to gain advantages over different local, regional, and national labor markets, benefiting from the reality that, while capital is globally mobile, labor — due to a combination of cultural, political, economic, and geographical reasons — for the most part, is not. Consequently, workers increasingly feel the crunch of worldwide job and wage competition, and giant capital enjoys widening profit margins as the world races to the bottom in wages and working conditions. …

The conflict between workers is engendered by capital through the creating of an industrial reserve army of the unemployed. This divide-and-rule strategy integrates disparate labor surpluses, ensuring a constant and growing supply of recruits to the global reserve army, which is made less recalcitrant by insecure employment and the continued threat of unemployment.” [pages 114-115]

Chinese wages, for instance, have remained at about five percent of the U.S. level since the Deng Xiaoping-led imposition of capitalism in the late 1980s because of hundreds of millions of displaced rural farm workers streaming into cities; rural incomes are still lower than average city wages.

Nonetheless, sweatshop pay and conditions are so poor in China that the pattern is workers staying for at most a few years then returning to their villages because physical survival under such conditions for much longer is impossible. That they can return is because the Chinese government has not yet succeeded in eliminating rights to the land held by villagers, a remaining vestige of the Mao era that, ironically, props up the sweatshop system. Those land rights are a social benefit that enables migrants to survive their stints working in sweatshops.

On such horrific conditions rests modern capitalism. Nor are workers, primarily in advanced capitalist countries, who have steady employment the norm, when viewed on a global scale. Using International Labour Organisation figures as a starting point, professors Foster and McChesney calculate that the “global reserve army” — workers who are underemployed, unemployed or “vulnerably employed” (including informal workers) totals 2.4 billion. In contrast, the world’s wage workers total 1.4 billion — far less! [pages 144-146]

Failure of orthodox economic ‘theory’

The authors note that orthodox economics assumes that new industrial development will eventually employ all these people, a hope based on ideology and not on reality. The countries that industrialized in the 19th century, particularly Britain and other European countries, were far from able to absorb all their displaced farmers — each experienced massive emigration. But today’s developing countries can’t export their population; as a result, the economy can’t possibly grow fast enough to absorb all their reserve labor armies even if the global economy weren’t in a years-long slump.

China and India contain too large a reserve army of labor for wages to substantially increase there; therefore Chinese and Indian consumption will not be a path out of world economic crisis as many orthodox economists and political leaders have hoped, according to The Endless Crisis. Orthodox economics, dominated by rigid Chicago School thinking, completely failed to predict the financial meltdown and subsequent stagnation. The reason for that lies in orthodox economics existing as an ideological campaign that long ago severed itself from analyzing the real world.

“Their abstract models, geared more toward legitimizing the system than to understanding its laws of motion, have become increasingly otherworldly — constructed around such unreal assumptions such as perfect and pure competition, perfect information, perfect rationality … and the market efficiency hypothesis. … This is an economics that has gone the way of stark idealism — removed altogether from material conditions.” [page 5]

The Endless Crisis is a welcome, and very needed, departure from the usual apologetics for capitalist outcomes. Professors Foster and McChesney provide a single source for understanding the present economic impasse, laying out with devastating precision the reasons for the economic crisis, the inevitability of crisis, the inequality and instability inherent in the capitalist system, and the need to move to a more humane system. Transcending capitalism and creating a better world can only be accomplished internationally, with working people around the world linking together. The authors write:

“Never before has the conflict between private appropriation and the social needs (even survival) of humanity been so stark.” [page 63]

Past structural crises of capitalism could be overcome because there was still room to grow. But when there are no more new markets to conquer, deprivation for the many is the only way for the few to continue to accumulate in a system dedicated to that ever narrower accumulation.

* John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China [Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012]

In show of power, financiers impose will on Argentina’s Navy

We know that finance capital is powerful, but that a hedge fund can impound the navy of the world’s eighth largest country is nonetheless startling.

Financiers the world over have fumed over Argentina escaping their clutches a decade ago — the example of a country refusing to acknowledge the maximization of bank profits as the central organizing principle of civilization is too scary to contemplate — but most have made their peace. Accepting that something is better than nothing, at least for now, almost all of Argentina’s creditors accepted 30 percent of the face value of the country’s sovereign debt.

Much of that debt is odious, accumulated by Argentina’s military dictatorship as it killed, tortured, “disappeared” or forced into exile Argentines by the hundreds of thousands as it imposed the Pinochet/Chicago School economic model. The rest of the debt came courtesy of the the country’s neoliberal rulers following the end of military rule, as it followed International Monetary Fund instructions into a crisis that culminated with economic crisis at the end of 2001. When Néstor Kirchner became Argentina’s fifth president in two weeks, he put an end to austerity and defaulted on the debt, ultimately agreeing to pay 30 percent to those willing to negotiate a settlement but refusing to pay anything to holdouts.

Many of Argentina’s creditors are not the financial institutions that originally made the loans; much of the debt was sold to speculators. Two of those speculators, the hedge funds Elliott Capital Management and Aurelius Capital Management, are among the seven percent of creditors who refused to agree, instead demanding full payment of the face value of the debt that they bought for pennies on the dollar. The key speculator here is Paul Singer, the type of character for which the term “vulture capitalist” was coined. Mr. Singer’s hedge fund is Elliott Capital and one of the fund’s subsidiaries is NML Capital.

The eyes of a billionaire

To all appearances, the billionaire Mr. Singer is determined to squeeze every dollar out of every “investment,” and he has the means at his disposal to bring this about. Using the Internet, his NML Capital tracked a ship used as a training vessel for the Argentine Navy. Calculating its chances, NML Capital waited for the ship to dock in Ghana, then quickly went to a local court, where it successfully obtained an order impounding the ship. The ship remains stranded in Ghana’s main port, and the Argentine government had to resort to chartering a flight to bring most of the crew home; it couldn’t use an Argentine airplane under fear that the plane, too, would be impounded.

Mr. Singer has long used such tactics, according to a report in Forbes magazine, and he purposely waited for the ship to dock in Ghana because he believed it was the country among the ship’s ports of call that would most likely grant his wishes. Forbes reports that Elliott Capital had sought in 2007 to seize the Argentine presidential plane when it was scheduled for maintenance in the United States (the plan was foiled when Argentina was tipped off) and two years later plotted to seize Argentine assets at the Frankfurt Book Fair, forcing the government to withhold showing works of art.

That having the ship stranded in port might have negative effects on Ghana, a poor country, does not seem to have been of concern. The ship’s presence has greatly slowed down the ability of cargo ships to use the port, causing dozens of vessels to wait offshore in a lengthening queue, according to The Financial Times. Such delays are also costing the shipping companies and others considerable money.

But what could be more important than a speculator trading on other people’s misfortune scooping up windfall profits?

Buying (very) low, demanding (very) high

There is nothing out of character for Mr. Singer to be using such hardball tactics. In fact, his hedge fund’s strategy is to buy outstanding debt at a tiny fraction of its value and then demand to be paid in full. A report on him and the other billionaires with whom he plays, including David and Charles Koch, on the ThinkProgress blog reports:

“Singer, manager of a $17 billion hedge fund, earned the moniker “vulture capitalist” for buying the debt of Third World countries for pennies on the dollar, then using his political and legal connections to extract massive judgements to force collection — even from nations suffering from starvation and violent conflicts. Singer and his partners have used such tactics in Panama, Ecuador, Poland, Cote d’Ivoire, Turkmenistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to squeezing impoverished countries with sovereign debt schemes, Singer speculates in the oil markets, a practice which can lead to gasoline price hikes.”

Among his other exploits, Mr. Singer is the chairman of the Manhattan Institute, an extreme Right “think tank” that specializes in promoting neoliberal ideology.

That affiliation is evidentially not a coincidence. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, writing for Truthout, provides some of the details of the speculator’s previous efforts to “collect” his debts:

“Singer’s modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo were on his menu). He waits for the United States and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations’ debts, then waits a bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces, legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage.

Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. … Singer demanded $400 million from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. If he doesn’t get his 4,000 percent profit, he can effectively starve the nation. I don’t mean that figuratively — I mean starve as in no food. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition.”

The financier war on Argentina

The billionaire speculator has also been attempting to get many pounds of flesh out of Argentina courtesy of the U.S. federal court system. The latest in a series of thundering rulings by a senior U.S. district judge, Thomas Griesa, earlier this month ordered Argentina to pay US$1.3 billion to Elliott Capital Management and Aurelius Capital Management, the two main holdouts who refused to agree to the 30 percent deal with Argentina.

The Argentine government appealed to a higher court on November 25. That is a routine the government is already familiar with, after the same judge last year issued a ruling that the two hedge funds could seize Argentina’s deposits with the Federal Reserve. Yes, it has come to the point where even the world’s most powerful central bank can be seen as a mere piggy bank to be raided at will by financiers. Well, almost, because that ruling was too much even for the U.S. government — it joined an appeal to a higher court, which threw out the ruling on the basis of sovereign immunity.

The Federal Reserve holds money and gold owned by many of the world’s governments, and has an interest in maintaining a shield that protects those holdings from private seizure.

This was a matter of the principal of sovereignty — the U.S. doesn’t want its overseas assets seized, either — so let us hold off from celebrating the appeals court reversal too joyously. The various bilateral and multilateral “free trade” agreements that elevate corporate profit above all other human considerations, and the arbitration bodies such as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes that improvise ever harsher rulings that become precedents for future cases, quietly lurk in the background. Not that ago that the idea that a regulation against pollution that threatens human health would be illegal because it hurts profits would have been bizarre. Yet it is now routine international trade law.

A billionaire speculator seizing a military vessel is bizarre; the billionaire’s tactics are sufficiently outlandish that, in this case, other financiers oppose his insistence on being paid in full if only because they are afraid they would not receive their own payments if Argentina has to pay him. President Cristina Fernández has repeatedly said there will be insufficient money available to continue to pay back the creditors who accepted the 30 percent deal nor for domestic social programs if full payments are made to the holdouts Elliott Capital and Aurelius Capital.

But if the holdout hedge funds’ tactics ultimately work, what is outlandish will become accepted. What will be seized next? A country’s food supply?

Financiers love to portray themselves as the lubricants of the modern economy, enabling capital to be distributed to where investment is needed. They can believe that if they wish, but there is no reason for the rest of us not to see financiers as what they are: parasites.