The financial industry is a lot bigger than a giant vampire squid

The size of the financial industry bears no relation to the economy. Self-mythological panegyrics aside, the finance industry confiscates money; it doesn’t create it. How much? Get out your calculators, and maybe you’ll have to find a way to add a couple of digits to what your screen can hold.

Perhaps the total amount of money extracted by financiers (or, more to the point, speculators) is not quite as large as Douglas Adams’ description of space in the, yes, increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers’ Trilogy, as “Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” But it’s close. 

OK, let’s put down a couple of numbers here. The numbers on their own are so absurd as to defy easy comprehension, so let’s try to find a way to situate them.

• Total amount of debt outstanding: US$305 trillion (€304 trillion).
• Total amount of financial instruments traded, on average, per day: US$9.68 trillion (€9.65 trillion).

Yep, that’s a whole lot of money. So big that the imagination struggles to grasp such numbers. One way to put those numbers in perspective is that the size of the world economy (global gross domestic product for all the world’s countries) was US$96.1 trillion (€95.8 trillion) in 2021.

^{Commodities futures trading (photo by Lars Plougmann)}

In other words, the volume of currency trading (foreign exchange), stocks, bonds and their derivatives exceeds the size of the global economy in 10 business days. (The period is almost certainly a little less, as that US$9.68 trillion in average daily trading doesn’t include most government bonds, trading figures for which are difficult to come by.) To create another comparison, the amount of debt owed by the world’s governments, businesses and households (the $305 trillion total above) is more than three and a half times of the value of all economic activity produced in a year.

Still another way to look at this activity is that foreign exchange trading (including swaps, options, spot transactions and outright forwards) in one day is bigger than the economies of all countries other than the United States and China. Given that the U.S. dollar, the world’s reserve currency, is involved in 88 percent of foreign exchange trades, trading in the dollar by itself totals more than a year’s production of all countries other than itself and China.

A multi-headed monster that is never satiated

Rolling Stone magazine once memorably described Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” That makes finance capital as a whole a multi-headed monster with the attributes of a tyrannosaurus rex, killer whale, giant squid and elephant that can swallow ships at sea whole, fly through the air at supersonic speed and never stops eating. Or something like that. Perhaps some planet-eating monster in a science fiction potboiler? Maybe we can fall back on Douglas Adams after all, and just consider the financial industry vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big. 

And getting bigger. When I last did this exercise 10 years ago, it took about 11 business days for speculators to trade financial instruments and contracts valued at all the products and services produced by the entire world in one year. Now it’s 10 days. There’s progress for you.

There is no rational economic reason for a financial industry — and “bloated” would be woefully inadequate to describe it — even a fraction of this size. Most of the action on stock exchanges is simply speculation. Greed is certainly a part of the picture, but by no means the entire picture. Because there are insufficient opportunities for investment, more money is diverted into speculation. As ever bigger piles of money are diverted into speculation, the size of the financial industry and the percentage of corporate profits claimed by the financial industry steadily grows. 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.

^{“Greed” (Nicholas Kwok)}

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. Not altogether different from those Warner Brothers cartoons in which the character walks off a cliff, takes several steps suspended in air before looking down, sees there is nothing but air below and then falls, at some point speculators look down and notice they have no support, mass panic commences and prices collapse, bringing on another economic downturn. One that working people, not speculators, will pay for. 

The very size of financial markets is a major contributing cause of economic instability. Financial companies, having extracted immense sums of bailout money after the 2008 collapse, have leveraged their power to become even bigger through consolidation, thereby enabling them to divert more capital from productive use. But even during the “boom” portion of business cycles financiers are destructive to an economy by rewarding manufacturers for mass layoffs, moving production to low-wage developing countries with few or no effective labor or environmental laws, and setting up subsidiaries overseas and using creative accounting to shift profits offshore to avoid paying taxes. Financiers provide rewards for such behavior in the form of rising stock prices, and those stock prices in turn provide top executives a rationale to give themselves stratospheric pay packages because they “enhanced shareholder value.”  

In turn, there is continual downward pressure on wages — an increasing share of corporate revenues go toward executive pay and profits as the share going toward wages declines. And much of those corporate profits are quickly funneled into dividends and stock buybacks, yet more ways for money to move upward into the ever grasping hands of super-wealthy speculators.

As I wrote back in June, the corporations of North America, Europe and Japan handed out an astounding US$2.75 trillion (€2.63 trillion at then exchange rates) to shareholders in 2021 through dividend payments and stock buybacks. By February 2022, the amount of money created by the central banks of five of the world’s biggest economies for the purpose of artificially propping up financial markets since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic totaled US$9.94 trillion (€8.76 trillion). That is on top of the US$9.36 trillion (€8.3 trillion at the early 2020 exchange rate) that was spent on propping up financial markets in the years following the 2008 global economic collapse. That’s US$19.3 trillion (€17.1 trillion) in the span of 14 years, and this astounding sum of subsidies and handouts represents only one program of the many used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada.

Crash to crash, but it’s you who is supposed to fall down

How could a parasitic industry grow to such gargantuan proportions? 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. And thus the steady increase in buybacks, which combined with dividends, in some years exceeds the total of profits! 

And what of distributing investment capital to where it is needed? That is saying, in so many words, that stock markets make finance more efficient — that capital will be put to use in the industries or companies in which a high profit is seen as a good bet because a company is filling a need with a product but lacks sufficient capital to take full advantage, or that the company already has a history of delivering profits. At bottom, buying stock is a gamble on the future profits of the company in which stock is bought. An investor is betting that profits will not only rise, but rise at a faster rate than in the past. I at one time worked on a financial news wire service, and one day was surprised when the stock price of a well-known technology company fell despite announcing it had earned a profit of $800 million for the previous three months, a higher profit than the same quarter in the previous year. On closer examination, the company was punished by speculators because the rate of the increase of the profit did not increase — this gigantic profit was lower than what stock market “analysts” had predicted. 

^{What happens to rain forests when the market is allowed to decide. (Photo of Montane Rainforest in Ecuador by Gunnar Brehm)}

This illustrates that trading is primarily done for speculation, not for any rational economic reason. The beginnings of the financial industry lie in the very slow rate of business in the early days of capitalism; it could take years for an investment made on the other side of the globe to pay off. Thus financiers stepped in to provide cash liquidity. But because financial speculation doesn’t have the physical limitations of the production of tangible goods, speculation would become prominent. Indeed, financial crashes long predate the crashes of 1929 and 2008. “Tulip mania” consumed the Dutch in the 1630s, speculation fueled by the first futures contracts; uncontrolled speculation in the 1710s in the English South Sea Company and the French Company of the Indies led to the collapse of stock in both, a bubble in which short selling was born; an 1830s bubble in U.S. real estate burst when banks stopped making payments; and an 1870s bubble inflated by speculation in railroads and construction in North America and Europe burst when the Vienna stock market crashed, followed by waves of bank failures, to note some of the more well-known examples.

The world’s billionaires and multi-national corporations profited enormously from the Covid-19 pandemic, enormously inflating their wealth. Not surprisingly, debt increased dramatically as well. The 2020 increase in debt was the biggest for any year since World War II, according to the International Monetary Fund. 

Half of the 2020 increase in debt was governmental, again no surprise given the trillions handed out to financial institutions that year. According to the IMF, “Debt increases are particularly striking in advanced economies, where public debt rose from around 70 percent of GDP, in 2007, to 124 percent of GDP, in 2020. Private debt, on the other hand, rose at a more moderate pace from 164 to 178 percent of GDP, in the same period. … Public debt now accounts for almost 40 percent of total global debt, the highest share since the mid-1960s.” 

Extracting money from those who work

It should always be remembered that profit comes from a capitalist paying to employees much less than the value of what they produce. In turn, the financial industry extracts money from the producers of tangible goods and services, and often from governments as well. Finance capital seeks to profit off any and all economic activity anywhere, regardless of cost to everybody else. It’s incredibly profitable — not only are investment banks among the most profitable corporations, but speculators can rake in hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars annually — and they pay less in taxes that you do! 

Not even the biggest corporations are immune from financial industry pressure. Several years ago, DuPont, the chemical multi-national that produces many products that dominate their market, had racked up about US$17.8 billion in profits over five years, handed out $4 billion to shareholders from the proceeds of selling its performance chemicals business and boasted a one-year increase in its stock price of 20 percent. Yet a powerful hedge-fund manager declared war on DuPont management, demanding DuPont be broken up into two companies, under the theory that more profit could be extracted. The speculator did not get what he wanted, but DuPont did lay off workers to appease speculators despite its massive profitability. Ultimately, DuPont merged with Dow Chemical and then the combined conglomerate split into three companies, maneuvering done mainly to throw more cash at speculators.

Even Wal-Mart is not ruthless enough for Wall Street. After five years of massive profits (US$80 billion), speculators began driving down the price of Wal-Mart stock in part because the company had raised its minimum wage to $9 an hour. Wal-Mart did attempt to offset that news by also announcing a new $20 billion buyback of shares, but not even blowing that kiss to financiers served to lift speculator moods. Thus the company that is the most ruthless in accelerating the trend of moving manufacturing to the locations with the lowest wages, legendary for its relentless pressure on its suppliers to manufacture at such low cost that they have no choice but to move their production to China, or Bangladesh, or Vietnam, because the suppliers can’t pay more than starvation wages and remain in business, was deemed by financiers to be insufficiently brutal.

As always, it’s heads, Wall Street wins and tails, Wall Street wins. Those fantastic values of financial instruments traded don’t fall from the sky and aren’t because of some rare acumen of speculators. Those sums of money, which would put orbiting satellites at risk if they were stacked up, are the direct result of exploitation of those who work.

Imagine having so much money you can spend it on Instagram “influencers”

That so much money concentrates at the top that capitalists can’t find useful outlets for it, and that capitalism produces huge amounts of junk we don’t need or want, was reinforced for me upon reading a New York Times article on what apparently has become a war against Instagram bots.

You can’t make this up, can you? So much capital is thrown into marketing that huge sums of money are thrown at Internet “influencers” who apparently are “influencers” because they have large numbers of followers on Instagram. The problem here, from the marketers’ perspective, is that large numbers of those followers are fake. They’re bots created to inflate the size of followings.

Although I couldn’t read this business-section article without laughing at the absurdity of this, it did also nicely illustrate the tremendous amount of waste in capitalist production. You’ve got to have a lot of capital lying around to afford spending on buying posts on Instagram. There is good money in this, it seems, for those who succeed at positioning themselves as “brands” as opposed to, say, human beings.

Because every space is a canvas for advertising

In one example, the Times article quoted an “influencer” who “said that she charged about $1,200 for a branded post. She added that she knew people with two million followers who charge $40,000 per post.”

With a straight face, the Times article casually referred to companies that exist to “connect brands with influencers” and discussed other companies that exist to ferret out Instagram accounts with high numbers of bots among their followers. The article said: “The interest in such firms reflects how easy it is to fake popularity on platforms like Instagram, where bots seem to run unchecked even on accounts where people have not paid for them.”

Apparently, Instagram’s response to this “problem” is to reduce access to its data. That prompted this reaction from another “influencer” in the article: “It will be unfair until Instagram really just cleans out the bots and the lurkers.”

Altogether now: Awwwwww.

Your intrepid blogger does his best to maintain his revolutionary optimism, but reading articles like this does sometimes make me despair for the future. I know such people are a small slice of overall humanity, but, still, there are large numbers of such people who hopelessly swallow capitalist ideology. What if the vast sums of money thrown around in marketing campaigns instead went to more useful functions, such as affordable housing, clean water, environmental cleanups and repairs to our crumbling infrastructure, to point out only a few needs. The investment needed to modernize and maintain school facilities is estimated to be at least $270 billion, a fraction of what is spent on marketing.

We are talking about huge sums of money here: Estimates of the money spent on marketing in the United States per year range from $460 billion to $1.07 trillion. (The former estimate is from the book Marketing by Charles W. Lamb, Joseph F. Hair Jr., and Carl McDaniel and the latter estimate is from the Metrics 2.0: Business & Market Intelligence web site.)

Such numbers provide an expensive hint that too much stuff that don’t fill a need is produced. The size of the marketing and advertising industries wouldn’t be so gigantic otherwise. Production under capitalism is for private profit, not to meet human needs. To achieve those profits, vast efforts must be made to induce spending.

The latest Internet scandal, the harvesting of data from 50 million Facebook users by the secretive company Cambridge Analytica, can be seen in this light. The immediate scandal is that Cambridge Analytica, a company created by extreme Right hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and former Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, sought to manipulate elections in furtherance of their fascistic ideology. But there are plenty of multi-national corporations who would dearly love to get their hands on such troves of data. Whose to say some haven’t already? We don’t know.

Perhaps enough of these episodes will induce some naïve technology fetishists to re-examine their thinking. Why should corporate spying be more tolerated than government spying? An ex-son-in-law of a friend, prompted by being asked what he does for a living, actually saw himself as providing a necessary service when he explained how he works for a technology company to tailor advertising to the profile of a user, complaining that non-tailored advertising “would be a waste” — for the recipient of the advertising!

Those who work to create a better world sure have a lot of work to do.

When housing is a commodity instead of a human right

A basic problem of housing it this: Housing is a commodity instead of a human right. We’re not accustomed to seeing housing as a basic right for everybody, but why isn’t it? Other than food and water, what is more basic a need than shelter?

It is here that questions about why the cost of housing is so out of control should begin. Because real estate is a massively profitable commodity — a locus of speculation — your rent is too damn high. So is your mortgage. And not disconnected from that is the scourge of gentrification, which continues to decimate urban communities around the world.

The specifics can change from one city to another, but ultimately massive accumulations of capital are at work. In New York City, where the form of government is a de facto dictatorship of the real estate and financial industries, the hands behind sharply rising rents are in the open. In San Francisco, where gentrification is fueled by cascades of money flowing into the technology industry, or Vancouver, where foreign speculators are seeking profitable outlets for the massive amounts of capital at their disposal, the proximate causes are somewhat different. But the underlying causes in these and other cities are ultimately “market forces.”

“Example of Bruxellisation” (photo by “Uppploader”)

Market forces are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the largest industrialists and financiers. Markets do not sit high in the clouds, dispassionately sorting out worthy winners and losers in some benign process of divine justice, as ideologues would have us believe. There is no magic at work here.

Neither housing, nor education, nor a clean environment are considered rights in capitalist formal democracies, and if you live in the United States, health care is not a right, either. Democracy is defined as the right to freely vote in political elections that determine little (although even this right is increasingly abrogated in the U.S.) and to choose whatever consumer product you wish to buy. A quite crabbed view of democracy or “freedom” if we stop to think about it.

That is because “freedom” is equated with individualism, a specific form of individualism that is shorn of responsibility. Those who have the most — obtained at the expense of those with far less — have no responsibility to the society that enabled them to amass such wealth. Imposing harsher working conditions is another aspect of this individualistic “freedom,” but freedom for who? “Freedom” for industrialists and financiers is freedom to rule over, control and exploit others; “justice” is the unfettered ability to enjoy this freedom, a justice reflected in legal structures. Working people are “free” to compete in a race to the bottom set up by capitalists.

Housing costs in U.S., Canada far outstrip inflation

Let’s run some numbers and examine just how this “freedom” works for working people. By no means are the massive increases in the cost of housing limited to a handful of popular cities. Nor is this merely a new or recent phenomenon.

Since 1975, the average prices of houses in the United States have risen by more than 60 percent faster than inflation. In Canada, real estate prices have increased 46 percent faster than inflation since 2000. Those are countrywide numbers, not specific to particular cities.

That inflation-adjusted cost of U.S. housing was calculated by comparing the statistics for the period January 1975 to February 2017, as reported by the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, with the rate of inflation for that period as calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator. The increase in Canadian national housing prices from January 2000 to February 2017 was then compared with the rate of inflation as determined by the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator.

San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district (photo by “Urban”)

If the prices of buildings are increasingly inflated above inflation, then as sure as the Sun rises in the east rents will rise, too. Often faster, as holders of real estate try to squeeze every possible dollar out of beleaguered renters. The U.S. government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, in a report that the Trump administration has not yet gotten around to removing, says:

“Shelter costs have been increasing faster than the costs of other items. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI), the costs of equivalent levels of shelter increased by 104 percent from 1985 to 2005 compared to a 74-percent increase in the cost of all other items.”

The department reports that for home owners, the cost of principal and interest on mortgages increased nearly 18 percent, adjusted for inflation, from 1985 to 2005. The cost of rent, over the same period also increased nearly 18 percent over the same period, again adjusted for inflation. As a result, the percentage of income paid toward either a mortgage or rent increased over these two decades. These trends have only accelerated since.

Incomes fall but rents keep rising

Those are national averages. In many cities, of course, rent increases have been much faster. Examining the trends in rents going back to 1960, Andrew Woo of Apartment List wrote:

“[I]nflation-adjusted rents have risen by 64%, but real household incomes only increased by 18%. The situation was particularly challenging from 2000 – 2010: household incomes actually fell by 7%, while rents rose by 12%. As a result, the share of cost-burdened renters nationwide more than doubled, from 24% in 1960 to 49% in 2014. … Rents have risen rapidly in many cities across the US, but looking at things over more than fifty years helps us understand the impact of these trends. If rents had only risen at the rate of inflation, the average renter would be paying $366 less in rent each month.”

Mr. Woo reported that although incomes in expensive areas like Washington, Boston and San Francisco have risen rapidly, rents have increased roughly twice as fast. In Houston, Detroit and Indianapolis, incomes have actually fallen in real terms, while rents have risen 15 to 25 percent. He found that the only U.S. urban areas where incomes kept pace with rising rents were Austin, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

For those workers struggling to survive on the lowest wages, the cost of living is a nearly impossible burden to bear. There is not one state in the U.S. in which a minimum-wage worker can afford the cost of the average one-bedroom apartment by working a full-time 40 hours. It would take 49 hours per week to afford the average one-bedroom apartment in West Virginia (the lowest figure) and 124 hours in Hawaii. In 14 states and the District of Columbia, you’d have to work at least 80 hours per week at minimum wage to afford the average one-bedroom apartment.

As this is a product of capitalism, not national peculiarities, we can see the same trends around the world. Average real estate prices in Toronto, adjusted for inflation, are seven times higher in 2016 than they were in 1953! Thus it comes as no surprise to learn the average rent of a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto is nearly double that of someone earning Ontario’s minimum wage. And not only does the supply of affordable housing not keep up, it is actually shrinking: In Calgary, for example, 3,000 rental units were converted into condominiums from 2006 to 2008 alone at the same time that the number of people in unaffordable housing steadily increases, while in Edmonton the wait-list for social housing in 2015 tripled.

A BBC report found that the average rent on a one-bedroom flat in London is £920, which would consume more than 90 percent of the after-tax income of someone working 39 hours per week at the minimum wage. Although not as expensive elsewhere, the rent for a one-bedroom would consume more than half of that minimum wage in Wales, West Midlands, and the southeast and east of England. A separate report by the Resolution Foundation found the household income of British renters increased two percent from 2002 to 2015, while their housing costs increased 16 percent.

And on it goes, from Paris to Berlin to Istanbul to Sydney to Melbourne.

Limited local efforts to counteract global forces

Some local governments in the cities subjected to the most extreme rent crises are taking measures to ameliorate market conditions, including those with a measure of effectiveness, such as Vancouver, which has instituted targeted taxes, and those with no effectiveness, such as New York, where the mayor continues his predecessors’ policies that accelerate gentrification.

Homelessness in Vancouver has reached record heights at the same time as the city has become one of the world’s least affordable, along with Hong Kong, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and the California city of San Jose.

The city council of Vancouver in November 2016 instituted a tax on unoccupied homes that are not principal residences and are unoccupied for at least six months of the year. The city government estimates that more than 20,000 homes are empty or left vacant for most of the year. Earlier in the year, the British Columbia provincial government imposed a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers, who have been rapidly buying up real estate. “We need to find a balance between welcoming investment and ensuring it doesn’t skew the housing options for people who live here,” Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson told The Guardian, while lamenting the actions already taken as “too late.”

Vancouver as seen from Lookout Tower

Home prices were reported to have declined since the 15 percent tax on foreign buyers was imposed, but whether that decline will be sustained, or translate into reduced rents, remains to be seen.

Doomed to certain ineffectiveness, by contrast, is the housing plan of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Rents there have escalated well beyond inflation for many years, with landlord profits increasing yearly. Gentrification was encouraged by the city’s mayor during the late 1970s and 1980s, Ed Koch, who infamously declared, “If you can’t afford New York, move!” The pace quickened under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, with the latter forcing through massive re-zonings of neighborhoods against the wills of residents.

The Bloomberg plan was to allow developers to run wild, and give gigantic subsidies to them in exchange for a few units to be set aside for affordable housing. Although he won election as a supposed progressive reformer, Mayor de Blasio has kept the Bloomberg plan firmly in place, and thus continues to drive gentrification, rising rents and the ongoing removal of residents forced out by unaffordable rents.

Gentrification is a deliberate process

Gentrification is not some natural phenomenon like the tides of the ocean, as ideologues are fond of asserting, but rather is a deliberate process. Gentrification frequently means the replacement of a people, particularly the poor members of a people, with others of a lighter skin complexion. A corporatized, sanitized and usurped version of the culture of the replaced people is left behind as a draw for the “adventurous” who move in and as a product to be exploited by chain-store mangers who wish to cater to the newcomers.

Gentrification is part of the process whereby people are expected, and socialized, to become passive consumers. Instead of community spaces, indoors and outdoors, where we can explore our own creativity, breath new life into traditional cultural forms, create new cultural traditions and build social scenes unmediated by money and commercial interests, a mass culture is substituted, a corporate-created and -controlled commercial product spoon-fed to consumers carefully designed to avoid challenging the dominant ideas imposed by corporate elites.

Bill de Blasio tries to assert that gentrification is some natural, uncontrollable process beyond human control as fervently as his billionaire predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. In sum, Mayor de Blasio believes that the only way to get affordable housing built is to allow billionaire developers to do whatever they want, grant exceptions to already pro-developer zoning regulations, and accept a few crumbs in return. As a result, rents have increased more than twice as fast as wages since 2012, and a minimum-wage worker would have to work 139 hours per week to afford the average New York apartment.

The new look of Williamsburg (Photo by Alex Proimos)

Rezoning is the linchpin of Mayor de Blasio’s housing plan — specifically, what is called “inclusionary zoning,” whereby developers are allowed to exceed height limits and are given huge tax credits in return for a few extra apartments below market rates and targeted for specific income levels. This simply does not work, instead funneling still more money into developers’ bulging pockets and further fueling higher profits for existing landlords because the new high-rent housing puts upward pressure on the rents of older apartments. The affordable units created by Bloomberg’s inclusionary zoning account for just 1.7 percent of housing growth between 2005 and 2013, according to Samuel Stein, writing in Jacobin.

That is below the level of the city’s population increase for the period. Coupled with de-regulation laws with large loopholes, an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 rent-regulated apartments have been lost since the 1990s, a city housing activist and reporter, Steve Wishnia, reported in Truthout. At the same time, other subsidies are thrown at developers to build luxury housing unaffordable by almost all city residents — a Midtown Manhattan tower in which apartments cost tens of millions of dollars and which is largely empty because the units are mostly bought by capitalists from outside the country as pied-à-terre received $35 million in tax breaks!

Jamming more money into developer pockets

Inclusionary zoning is a “fatally flawed program,” concludes Mr. Stein:

“It’s not just that it doesn’t produce enough units, or that the apartments it creates aren’t affordable, though both observations are undeniably true. The real problem with inclusionary zoning is that it marshals a multitude of rich people into places that are already experiencing gentrification. The result is a few new cheap apartments in neighborhoods that are suddenly and completely transformed.

De Blasio wants to use inclusionary zoning to create sixteen thousand apartments for families making $42,000. That’s just 3 percent of the need for such apartments in the city today, according to the plan’s own figures. At the same time, the mayor’s policies would build one hundred thousand more market-rate apartments in the same neighborhoods. What will happen when these rich people arrive? Rents in the surrounding area will rise; neighborhood stores will close; more working-class people will be displaced by gentrification than will be housed in the new inclusionary complexes. …

Rather than curbing speculation or aggressively taxing landlords, inclusionary zoning keeps the urban growth machine primed and ready to build. … What this and other public-private partnerships will not do is fix the city’s perpetual housing crisis.”

The only alternative is to fight back. Fran Luck, a housing activist who has fought the gentrification of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, notes:

“Progressive movements from the 1920s through the 1960s fought for and won some housing relief for low-income people — including rent controls, public housing and Section 8 subsidies. But during the ‘Reagan [counter-]revolution’ of the 1980s, federal housing monies were slashed and by the late ’80s, mass homelessness, such as had not been seen since the Great Depression, had made a comeback, accompanied by accelerating gentrification.

“Today, with little housing money from the Feds, mayors such as New York’s Bill de Blasio, even with the best of intentions, simply have no source for ‘affordable housing’ funds other than the crumbs thrown out by large developers. While the housing movement in New York City is not dead — as shown by the annual struggle between tenants and landlords over rent regulation — it has been on the defensive for some time due to a real estate climate heavily skewed toward developer profits, not people’s housing needs.”

Such a climate enables judges judges to overturn even tepid attempts at stabilizing rents, such as in San Francisco, where a federal judge in 2014 declared that rents rise without human invention and thus a ruled against a city law that would have forced landlords who kick tenants out of rent-controlled apartments to pay them the difference between the rent they had been paying and the fair market rate for a similar unit for a period of two years.

Landlords are innocent victims of rising rents, the judge declared, and have no responsibility for San Francisco’s housing crisis. Bizarre, yes, but the logical conclusion of rampant ideology that declares the workings of capitalism operate on their own, as a natural process outside of human control. Public-private partnerships, whether designed to create housing or public infrastructure, are thinly disguised schemes to turn over public property to private capital, so the latter can cash in at the public’s expense.

As long as housing is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold by the highest bidder, housing costs will increase and we’ll remain at the mercy of landlords, who, under gentrification, decide who is allowed to stay and who will be pushed out of their homes. Housing should be a human right!

Wall Street bigger and badder than ever

Being a banker means never having to say sorry. Or worry where that next million is going to come from.

Financial results are in for 2016 for the biggest U.S. banks and — surprise! — profits continue to reach the stratosphere. And with Goldman Sachs in firmer control of the U.S. Treasury Department than ever before, the good times will continue to roll for Wall Street. For the rest of us, that’s another story.

No less than six “Government Sachs” executives have been nominated to high-level posts in the new Trump administration. As a candidate, Donald Trump attacked opponents for their ties to Goldman Sachs during the campaign, but the joke is on those who naïvely believed the real estate mogul was going to “drain the swamp.” Heading the list is the treasury secretary nominee, Steve Mnuchin, who spent years at Goldman Sachs before earning the title “foreclosure king” as chairman and chief executive officer of OneWest Bank.

Occupy Wall Street (photo by David Shankbone)

Mr. Mnuchin, who bought distressed mortgages and evicted thousands of homeowners during the financial crisis, further demonstrated his humanitarian streak when he announced that, as treasury secretary, he would oversee “the largest tax change since Reagan” and said his “No 1 priority is tax reform.” More tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Hurray! How many more people would pay for this by losing their ability to keep their homes was not indicated.

The Guardian, however, did report that “Mnuchin went on to sell OneWest last year for more than double what he paid the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for the assets in the teeth of the financial crisis.” The California Reinvestment Coalition has calculated that Mr. Mnuchin’s bank was responsible for more than 36,000 foreclosures in in that state alone, and reported he disproportionally foreclosed on seniors. It did so frequently using harassment and other aggressive tactics, even to the point of changing the locks on a senior’s home in a blizzard.

“Vampire squid” indeed. Those are the sort of tactics that surely endeared Mr. Mnuchin to President Trump.

Citigroup hopes to replicate destruction of Detroit

No roundup of the year in banking, however, would be complete without the wit and wisdom of JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon. When we last checked in a year ago, Mr. Dimon insisted that declining incomes for working people was no big deal, because they are better off by virtue of possessing iPhones, while in 2014 he complained that — oh the humanity! — “banks are under assault.” As we look back at 2016, he has again provided us with comic relief.

Somehow keeping himself composed as he told Bloomberg News that “business [has] been beaten down as if we’re terrible people,” he upheld the work of banks in saving Detroit. You can’t make this up: He said, “Detroit is a perfect example where civil society, not-for-profits, government, business all work together to improve the lives of American citizens. If you can duplicate what they’ve done in Detroit around the country, you’re going to have a huge renaissance.” He finished by declaring “JPMorgan didn’t jeopardize the system. We did not cause the crisis. We have three times more capital than we had back then. We saved 30,000 jobs.”

Goldman Sachs headquarters (photo by Quantumquark)

We’ll pause here so you can enjoy a hearty laugh. There is no need to point out the tremendous damage major banks did to economies around the world, and the trillions of dollars of handouts given to them as a reward for their destructive behavior. There is little need to point out the damage done to Detroit, but as a reminder, complex and poorly understood derivatives were decisive in Detroit’s fiscal downfall.

These derivatives were sold to the city as a form of “insurance” against possible increases in interest rates, but when interest rates fell and Detroit’s credit rating was cut, hundreds of millions were siphoned from city coffers into Wall Street pockets, and the banks that sold the derivatives jumped to the head of the line of creditors. No money for pensions or government services, but plenty for financiers.

Mr. Dimon does seem to be rather well compensated for his difficulties, “earning” $27.6 million for 2015, tops among banking chief executive officers. Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein didn’t do too badly himself, hauling in $23.4 million in compensation. Another nine topped $10 million.

Bigger and badder than ever

These bloated salaries did not, so to speak, break the banks. Once again, profits for the six biggest U.S. banks were massive — nearly $93 billion for 2016.

Here’s a breakdown of the six banks for 2016, three of which reported record profits.

• JPMorgan Chase & Company reported net income of $24.7 billion on revenue of $99.1 billion, the bank’s highest-ever profit, beating out the record set just the year before. These massive profits led to a massive bonanza for speculators — JPMorgan handed out $15 billion in dividends and stock buybacks.
• Bank of America Corporation racked up $17.9 billion in net income on revenue of $83.7 billion, both increases from a year ago, which, in turn had tripled 2014 earnings. Speculators did well here, too, as Bank of America ladled out $7.7 billion in dividends and stock buybacks, and plans on buying back another $4.3 billion of its stock in the first six months of 2017.
• Citigroup Incorporated reported net income of $14.9 billion on revenues of $69.9 billion, both a little bit lower than a year earlier. But shed no tear for downtrodden speculators as Citigroup handed out $10.7 billion in dividends and stock buybacks. Five separate violations cost a total of $485 million in government penalties, but that seems to be no more than a minor speed bump.
• Wells Fargo & Company had net income of $21.8 billion on revenue of $88.3 billion, a dip in profits from 2015 due to having to pay a penalty of $1.2 billion for shady mortgage lending practices and another $185 million in fines because of its illegal practices of opening fake accounts in the name of its depositors. Who says crime doesn’t pay? Speculators certainly won’t say that: Siphoning money from its account holders helped Wells Fargo be in a position to shovel $12.5 billion into financiers’ pockets through dividends and stock buybacks, almost equal to what it handed out a year earlier.
• The Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated reported net income of $7.4 billion on revenue of $30.6 billion, a bigger profit and profit margin that a year earlier. The company did not break out its expenses for its purchases of the U.S. government in its latest financial report. Goldman Sachs spent $7 billion on buying back its stock and proudly declared itself first in the world in mergers and acquisitions, work that added billions to the investment bank’s bottom line while costing untold numbers of people their jobs. Profits would have been even bigger had it not been for a $5.1 billion fine for selling toxic mortgage securities to unsuspecting investors.
• Morgan Stanley reported net income of $6.0 billion on revenue of $34.6 billion, a profit about two percent lower than that of 2015. Despite that slight dip in income, the bank somehow found the means to buy back $3.5 billion worth of its stock — a 67 percent increase from what it bought back a year ago. Morgan Stanley would have seen its profits increase for 2016 had it not had to pay $3.2 billion in penalties related to its role in the subprime-mortgage housing debacle.

Beyond the whip of Wall Street

The biggest banks not only extract more money from the rest of the economy than ever, but are bigger than ever — banks with more than $100 billion assets increased their market share from 17 percent in 1995 to 59 percent in 2014. This is the mad logic of capitalism — grow or die. Finance capital, despite being the whip enforcing trends that worsen inequality, is not immune from what it enforces on everyone else. One measure of the cancerous growth of financial products bearing little relationship with actual needs is this: 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.

Reducing banking and finance to a public utility would be the only way to break the grip of giant banks and financial institutions. One intermediate step that could be taken would be government banks that would fund public infrastructure projects and provide low-cost loans, and which would be the recipient of government revenue rather than commercial banks.

The Bank of North Dakota is an example of such an institution that already exists, with proposals for state banks being floated for Vermont, Washington state, Oregon and California. A New Jersey gubernatorial candidate, Phil Murphy, has made a public state bank the centerpiece of his campaign, arguing that students would benefit from low interest rates for college tuition, more loan capital would be made available and municipal governments would no longer have to pay high interest to Wall Street.

The Left Party of Germany has a detailed plan to bring banks under democratic control. Although the party’s proposal is specific to Germany, its basic ideas are transferable to any country. Any form of democratic control of an economy would be impossible without banking and finance being reduced to a public utility, and thus serving to benefit communities rather than existing as a parasite that exists to profit over every aspect of human activity, no matter the social cost.

They throw us out of our homes but we get ice cream

If there were any doubt that gentrification has come to my corner of Brooklyn, that was put to rest last weekend with the appearance of an ice cream truck. An ice cream truck painted with the logo and red color of The Economist. Yes, it was just as this reads. Free scoops of ice cream were being given out as a young woman with a clipboard was attempting to get people to sign up for subscriptions to The Economist.

Not that there had been any reason to harbor illusions about gentrification — the glass-walled, high-priced high rises sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm are merely the most obvious of multiple signs. The neighborhood where I live, Greenpoint, is notable as a Polish enclave, although a sliver along the East River was mainly populated by Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and artists two decades ago. In short, a place for people needing a (relatively) cheap (by New York City standards) place to live and which still possessed a working waterfront.

A march for Alex Nieto in San Francisco (photo via Justice for Alex Nieto website)

Not really the sort of folks who might be expected to read one of the two main flagships of the British finance industry. To watch, or participate in, an art parade, sure. That is the sort of procession one used to see. Or Mr. Softee, a local franchise with ice cream trucks (of the traditional sort) that played a jingle, over and over again, that had a way of getting inside your head, although not necessarily in a good way. One summer a Mr. Softee truck seemed permanently stationed on my block, leading me to write a poem on the uses of Mr. Softee’s ice cream other than eating and even as a talisman against an invasion of space aliens. As I said, the jingle has a way of getting inside your head.

But no matter how bizarre the sight of an Economist ice cream truck, there is nothing actually funny about gentrification. Not even a Financial Times ice cream truck in pink (although perhaps a little too close to the color of Pepto-Bismol for comfort there) would be funny. Systematic evictions, the wholescale removal of peoples, the wiping out of alternative cultures and the imposition of the soul-deadening dullness of consumerist corporate monoculture has become a global phenomenon.

Rent laws don’t help if your home can be torn down

This has accelerated to where not simply buildings are being emptied out, but entire complexes. In Silicon Valley, a San Jose apartment complex with 216 units is being demolished to make way for a luxury high-rise. The hundreds of residents there are protected from higher rents by local rent-control laws. But that law has a rather big loophole — the rent-controlled buildings can be torn down, and the residents kicked into the street with no recourse and no right to a replacement apartment. The San Francisco Bay Area as a whole lost more than 50 percent of its affordable housing between 2000 and 2013.

Gentrification literally kills — symbolized by the tragic death of Alex Nieto in San Francisco’s Mission District. A story brought to a wider audience in an essay by Rebecca Solnit, Mr. Nieto was a long-time resident of the Mission who was shot by police for being Latino in a local park — targeted because gentrifying techies, new to the neighborhood, decided Mr. Nieto was a threat and called the police, a tragic ending that was set in motion when a techie thought it amusing that his dog was menacing Mr. Nieto as he ate on a bench.

The Mission, as is well known, has long been a Latin American enclave. What is happening there, and in so many other neighborhoods in so many other cities, is no accident. Gentrification is a deliberate process. Gentrification frequently means the replacement of a people, particularly the poor members of a people, with others of a lighter skin complexion. A corporatized, sanitized and usurped version of the culture of the replaced people is left behind as a draw for the “adventurous” who move in and as a product to be exploited by chain-store mangers who wish to cater to the newcomers.

Gentrification is part of the process whereby people are expected, and socialized, to become passive consumers. Instead of community spaces, indoors and outdoors, where we can explore our own creativity, breath new life into traditional cultural forms, create new cultural traditions and build social scenes unmediated by money and commercial interests, a mass culture is substituted, a corporate-created and -controlled commercial product spoon-fed to consumers carefully designed to avoid challenging the dominant ideas imposed by corporate elites.

Dictatorships of favored industries

There are interests at work here. The technology industry has a stranglehold on San Francisco, for example, its techies with their frat-boy culture rapidly bidding up housing prices and making the city unaffordable for those who made it the culturally distinct place it has long been. New York City is a dictatorship of the real estate and financial industries; the process of gentrification there has progressed through a mayor who snarls and can’t be bothered to hide his hatred for most of the people who live there (Rudy Giuliani), a mayor who covered himself with a technocratic veneer (Michael Bloomberg) and a mayor fond of empty talk but who is the Barack Obama of New York (Bill de Blasio). They follow in the footsteps of Ed Koch, who showed his humanitarian streak when he declared, “If you can’t afford New York, move!”

Despite the reasoning of a federal judge who two years ago overturned a San Francisco ordinance designed to slow down speculation in housing that accelerates exorbitant rises in rents, those rents do not rise without human intervention. Not a single county in the U.S. has enough affordable housing for all its low-income residents, according to a report issued by the Urban Institute, which also reports that only 28 adequate and affordable units are available for every 100 renter households in the U.S. with incomes at or below 30 percent of their local median income.

The trend of rents taking up a bigger portion of income, although accelerating in recent years, is a long-term trend — one study found that rents have risen close to double the rate of inflation since 1938, and the prices of new houses at an even higher rate. Gentrification and the rising rents that accompany it are found around the world, from Vancouver to London to Berlin to Istanbul to Melbourne.

Just as markets are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the biggest industrialists and financiers, allowing the “market” to determine housing policies means that the richest developers will decide who gets to live where. The vision of former New York City Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg (enforced through policies kept in place by Mayor de Blasio) is of Manhattan and adjoining areas of Brooklyn becoming a gated city for the wealthy, with the rest of us allowed in to work and then leave. The most profitable projects for developers are luxury housing for millionaires and billionaires — interests coincide. Even when a local government makes a tepid attempt, under public pressure, to ameliorate the harshness of housing conditions, such as with San Francisco, it is swamped by the tidal pull of market forces.

This global phenomenon derives from a top-down global system, capitalism, under which housing is a commodity for private profit instead of a basic human right. A free scoop of ice cream really doesn’t compensate losing the ability to keep a roof over your head.

Let them eat iPhones

You say you are struggling to cover your rising expenses while your pay is stagnant? You should have become an executive at a bank. Break the economy and earn big rewards!

But don’t sweat it — you have a phone and that more than makes up for your lack of adequate wages, declining ability to access health care and lack of a pension. Just ask JPMorgan chief executive officer Jamie Dimon.

Mr. Dimon’s pay is more than 220 times that of the average employee at JPMorgan, reports Business Insider, but he says you underpaid employees shouldn’t complain — because you have iPhones! At least Marie Antoinette’s alleged belief in cake allowed France’s plebeians to eat, more than can be done with a phone. Here is what Mr. Dimon said in his latest attempt to show compassion, according to BloombergBusiness:

“ ‘It’s not right to say we’re worse off,’ Dimon said [last September 17] at an event in Detroit in response to a question about declining median income. ‘If you go back 20 years ago, cars were worse, health was worse, you didn’t live as long, the air was worse. People didn’t have iPhones.’ ”

Cutting the pay of chief executive officers would do nothing to solve inequality, Mr. Dimon proclaimed. Instead, “investing in ‘intelligent infrastructure’ ” is what is needed. If possessing a “smart phone” is the key to happiness, apparently “smart buildings” would make us still happier. There’s progress for you — Marie Antoinette never offered anyone a bakery. But as you apply ketchup to your iPhone, you will surely digest smoothly with the knowledge that the chief executive officers of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan officially became billionaires during 2015.

U.S. Treasury Department under new management (photo by takomabibelot)

Goldman Sachs’ chief, Lloyd Blankfein — or Lord Blankcheck, as Occupy Wall Street activists memorably dubbed him — took home US$23 million last year, while Mr. Dimon “earned” $27 million, a healthy 35 percent raise. And shed no tears for those who have yet to reach the corporate pinnacle — three Goldman Sachs executives each took home $21 million and three JPMorgan execs each were awarded more than $10 million in stock alone.

Profits of biggest banks increase again

When we last heard from Mr. Dimon, about this time last year, he complained that “Banks are under assault,” adding that “We have five or six regulators coming at us on every issue.” As the six biggest banks in the U.S., which includes JPMorgan, racked up profits totaling $75 billion for 2014, you will be excused for having doubts about just how tough regulators are.

Profits for those banks were no more endangered in 2015, totaling almost $93 billion. Here is how they fared in the just concluded year:

• JPMorgan Chase & Company: net income of $24.4 billion on revenue of $96.6 billion. JPMorgan reported its highest-ever net income in 2015, and paid out $11 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends.
• Bank of America Corporation: net income of $15.9 billion on revenue of $82.5 billion. Net income more than tripled from 2014, and it nearly doubled the dividend it paid shareholders — the bank said it handed out $4.5 billion through common stock buybacks and dividends.
• Citigroup Incorporated: net income of $17.2 billion on revenue of $76.4 billion. Although revenue was down slightly, net income more than doubled because Citigroup wasn’t troubled with having to pay out billions in fines over its toxic derivatives as it was in 2014.
• Wells Fargo & Company: net income of $23 billion on revenue of $86.1 billion. The bank reported it handed out $12.6 billion through stock buybacks and dividends, yet it relentlessly demands its tellers pressure customers to open multiple accounts and pays those tellers too little to live on.
• The Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated: net income of $6.1 billion on revenue of $33.8 billion. Goldman Sachs’ net income was below that of 2014 due to a $3.4 billion deduction (or “charge”) from its earnings due to its reaching a settlement with government regulators over its toxic mortgage-backed securities; profits would have risen without the fine. But please don’t shed any tears for the investment bank — it proudly reported that it “advised” on corporate mergers and acquisitions worth more than $1 trillion, work that by itself netted it billions of dollars while jobs disappeared.
• Morgan Stanley: net income of $6.1 billion on revenues of $35.2 billion. Similar to its peer banks, Morgan Stanley shelled out $2.1 billion to buy back its stock in an effort to have its profits shared among fewer stockholders. Despite that profit, the bank has said it will lay off staff as part of an effort to “cut costs” under Wall Street pressure.

The biggest get bigger

Yes, the biggest banks keep getting bigger. The four banks with the largest holdings accounted for a composite 42 percent of all U.S. banking assets in 2014, a total that has steadily increased, both before and after the 2008 crash.

And not even the fines levied by regulators slow them down. Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs announced that it had agreed to $5 billion in penalties to settle claims arising from the marketing and selling of dodgy mortgage securities, although nearly $2 billion of that is “consumer relief” in the form of loan forgiveness, the bank said.

Banks have paid a total of $40 billion to settle claims by financial regulators and prosecutors, yet these penalties are bumps in the road for them, no more than a business expense. In part, perhaps that is because much of these penalties come in the form of mortgage modifications, rather than cash, and often these modifications are to loans that the banks service but don’t actually own — allowing them to get credit for modifying loans belonging to another company.

Banking of course is not the only industry undergoing consolidation. Mergers in 2015 were bigger than ever, with corporate deals worth $4.7 trillion. Investment banks earn huge fees for arranging mergers and acquisitions, none more so than the biggest U.S. banks. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup ranked as numbers one through five in the world in terms of the value of the deals banks “advised” on.

Competitive pressure accounts for some corporate mergers — the capitalist imperative to grow or die does not abate even for the biggest corporations — but pressure to “enhance shareholder value” plays a significant role. “Enhancing shareholder value” is finance-speak for acceding to speculators’ demands for more short-term boosts to profits and higher stock prices, no matter the cost to others or the long-term damage to the company itself. Hedge-fund billionaires are among the fiercest in pressing these demands, continually demanding cuts to jobs that serve only to fatten their swollen wallets. The big banks, as major Wall Street players themselves, both apply this “market” pressure for the same reasons and further profit from acting as “advisers.”

Reforming such insanity is a hopelessly sisyphean task. What if instead banks became a public utility with an end to speculation? Proposals are being floated in the U.S. to create state banks, perhaps on the model of the successful Bank of North Dakota, and the Left Party of Germany has a detailed plan to bring banks under democratic control. Capitalist propaganda aside, there is no need for banking to exist as an uncontrollable behemoth extracting wealth from all other human activities. Why shouldn’t it be a utility under public control that exists to serve the productive economy? We can’t survive on iPhones alone.

Keynesianism will not save the world

Nostalgia for the supposed “golden age” of mid-20th century capitalism carries with it an assumption that we can simply go back to a Keynesian world. Yet this is not a matter of simply of switching horses for nobody decreed that we shall now have neoliberalism and nobody can decree we shall now have Keynesianism.

There are structural reasons for the neoliberal assault. It is the logical development of capitalism; “logical” in the sense that the relentless scramble to survive competition eventually closed the brief window when rising wages were tolerated and government investment encouraged. The Keynesian policies of that time was a product of a specific set of circumstances that no longer exist and can’t be replicated.

Mid-20th century Keynesianism depended on an industrial base and market expansion. A repeat of history isn’t possible because the industrial base of the advanced capitalist countries has been hollowed out, transferred to low-wage developing countries, and there is almost no place remaining to which to expand. Moreover, capitalists who are saved by Keynesian spending programs amass enough power to later impose their preferred neoliberal policies. A vicious circle arises: Persistent unemployment and depressed wages in developed countries and inadequate ability to consume on the part of underpaid workers in developing countries leads to continuing under-consumption, creating pressure for still lower wages by capitalists who can’t sell what they produce and seek to cut costs further because there is no incentive for them to invest in new production.

Counter-intuitively, the turn toward neoliberalism is a also a response to declines in profitability. The rising wages of the post-World War II era were tolerated by capitalists because profits and the potential for further expansion were both high. Pent-up demand across the global North and the massive destruction of capacity in Europe enabled U.S. manufacturers to gain an unprecedented, and unrepeatable, opportunity. Capitalists in Europe and East Asia used state investment to rebuild their economies and regain their competitiveness.

Workforce of the future?

The Keynesian compromise was not necessarily what capitalists would have wanted; it was a pragmatic decision — profits could be maintained through expansion of markets and social peace bought. When markets could no longer be expanded at a rate sufficiently robust to maintain or increase profit margins, however, capitalists ceased tolerating paying increased wages.

Competition is now carried out on a global scale, and where in the past local monopolies tended to cohere within national or regional borders, corporate globalization has put the world well down the road of international monopolization. The same tendency toward a handful of corporations dominating a market is now being reproduced on a larger scale, a single global world system, replicating the processes that previously led to monopolizations within individual countries or regions.

This is part of the “grow or die” dynamic of capitalism. It’s not only grabbing market share, it’s a mad scramble to “innovate” to increase profitability. That can be new production techniques but it is especially cutting costs — in the first place, wage costs. Thus robotics and automation to reduce the number of workers needed, which also “deskill” work to make workers more expendable, putting downward pressure on wages. Work speedups are part of the extraction of more profits, or an attempt to stave off declines in profit rates. And when these are finally insufficient, the work begins to be moved to new locations with lower wage levels and weaker regulation. “Free trade” agreements negotiated in secret that bring corporate wish lists to life both accelerate this tendency and are a product of it.

The capitalist that cuts costs first gains an advantage, but competitors follow, eroding the advantage. So the next step, and the next step, is carried out, intensifying these processes. The personality of the capitalist does not matter; he or she is acting under the rigors of competition. There is no way to put a human face on this or to permanently reverse the logic of capitalist competition. The present era of austerity and neoliberalism is the product of capitalist development. Even if a massive movement becomes sufficiently strong to effect significant reforms, eventually they would be taken back just as the reforms of the mid-20th century have been taken back.

(Mural by Ben Shahn)

Not only does the scope for expansion that existed during the Keynesian era no longer exist, the environmental limits and global warming that the world did not then face can no longer be avoided. Humanity is consuming far beyond the world’s replenishment capacity and changing the climate at a faster rate than ever before known. We can’t turn back the clock (and the “golden age” of capitalism wasn’t so golden if you were a woman, a Person of Color or a working person in a developing country) nor is it environmentally sound to ramp up production and consumption on the scale that a global Keynesian initiative would require.

Alas, this is a variation on the theme of “green capitalism” — the idea that the same system that has brought the world to its present state of crisis, a system that requires infinite expansion on a finite planet, that has turned to financialization because speculation is more profitable than production, that treats pollution and waste as external costs to be ignored will somehow now save us. Tinkering with the machinery of capitalism — which is what Keynesian nostalgia amounts to — would ameliorate conditions somewhat for a while, but offer no solution.

The days when it was still possible to believe capitalism can be a progressive force are behind us; the neoliberal assault is the “new normal.” When capitalism has penetrated into every corner of the world, there is nowhere else to expand: The only route for capitalists is to reduce wages and benefits. The only route for the 99 percent is an entirely different world.