And you thought the Obama administration’s screwing the middle-class would be over now that he is gone. Well, Naked Capitalism has the article The Obama Administration Bails Out Private Equity Landlords at the Expense of the Middle Class: Government Guarantees for Rental Securitization.

Here is an excerpt from the Naked Capitalism introduction.

Even though this guarantee clearly had to have been worked out during the Obama Administration, Blackstone did not make it public until it updated its filing with the SEC this week. It looks an awful lot like the timing was designed to make sure that the disclosure came after the new Trump team was in charge, meaning Obama would be unlikely to face the criticism he deserves, and the Trump Administration would be certain to let the deal stand.

Here is the closing paragraph from the article itself.

There is a darker side to corporate ownership of single-family rental homes and the financialization of rents: soaring evictions, according to the Atlanta Fed, which explicitly blames the Fed and Bernanke. Read…  Evictions by Wall-Street Mega-Landlords Soar, Financialization of Rents Cause “Housing Instability”: Atlanta Fed

I don’t think the Obama’s have to worry about their financial security after leaving office.

The Whitehouse web site has posted Presidential Memorandum Regarding Withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations and Agreement.

It is the policy of my Administration to represent the American people and their financial well-being in all negotations, particularly the American worker, and to create fair and economically beneficial trade deals that serve their interests. Additionally, in order to ensure these outcomes, it is the intention of my Administration to deal directly with individual countries on a one-on-one (or bilateral) basis in negotiating future trade deals. Trade with other nations is, and always will be, of paramount importance to my Administration and to me, as President of the United States.

While listening to various pundits from left and right tell you what President Trump thinks about trade, you might want to read his own words. I am not saying you have to believe his words, but you might find it amusing that what the pundits say he means is not very close to what he has said.

The dog whistle politics that many of the pundits accuse Trump of may be figments of their defective hearing. Only time will tell if some of the crap is coming from Trump’s mouth or some of it is in between the ears of some of the listeners.

The New York Times (that purveyor of truly fake news) has the article Trump Abandons Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s Signature Trade Deal.

President Trump formally abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Monday, pulling away from Asia and scrapping his predecessor’s most significant trade deal on his first full weekday in office, administration officials said.

In a discussion about whether or not the Republicans were going to kill TPP anyway, I gave my opinion.

The trouble with the Republicans was that they opposed all the good things Obama proposed. It was very risky to have to depend on them to oppose the bad things, too. Luckily the Republicans were so spiteful that they did save us from Obama’s grand bargain on entitlements and austerity. The TPP was just too good for business to have to depend on the Republicans’ killing it outside of an election season.

Don’t think business won’t keep trying. We have to depend on Trump to keep us safe. Can you imagine anyone saying that, least of all me?

People used to argue against my attitude of wanting to kill TPP that was meant to be Obama’s legacy trade deal. I always said that this was the worst legacy he could leave, and we would be doing him a favor by preventing this from being his legacy. So I guess you could say that Trump saved Obama’s legacy.

YouTube has the video L. Randall Wray – Modern Money Theory: Intellectual Origins and Policy Implications.

I am fascinated by this introduction to a topic that I have been learning for the last few years.

Despite my having read his book and having read many articles about MMT (Modern Money Theory), the first 15 minutes or so of this talk has clarified a number of issues for me. Until recently, I have rebelled against the MMT notion that taxes that must be paid in the currency of the country is what gives that currency its value. I always use China’s huge reserves of US dollars as an example of an entity that does not have to pay U.S. taxes anywhere near the extent of the dollars they have accumulated.

This is the first time I have heard the nuance that the payment of taxes is a sufficient reason for currency having a value, but it may not be necessary. He had already explained why a country like China would want to accumulate a huge stock of a currency beyond what it needs to pay taxes. (I suppose his explanation can be taken as an indication that George Soros’ bond investment strategy may also be a great driver of the dollar’s value.)

I don’t have time right now to listen to the 90 minutes left in this talk, but I anxiously look forward to when I will have time. This is one of my motivations for putting this on my blog. I won’t lose track of where to find the video to listen to the rest.

January 24, 2017

I have listened to the rest of the talk, and I was not disappointed. Wray answered so many of the questions about MMT that I still had. His discussions of the implications for policy were also very enlightening. Of course, you have to be able to take in what he is explaining and digest it. If you just cannot get the information to pass by the filters you have erroneously built up, then the talk will be useless to you. Come back at a later time when you are willing to listen.

I have seen evidence that I am going to need the article Rothschild Family Wealth a lot in the coming days, months, and perhaps years. That’s is why I am finally posting it on my blog for easy finding.

While the Rothschild family has amassed great wealth since the 1700s, claims that they have a net worth of $500 trillion or that they own 80% of the world’s wealth are problematic.

For one, the world’s total wealth was estimated as of 2015 to be only $250 trillion, half of what the Rothschild’s alone are claimed to possess.

There are many interesting facts in this article which don’t depend on having faith in the messenger.

The closest thing to a “Rothschild Family” business in 2016 is the Rothschild Group, a multinational investment banking company, but that firm does not in itself generate nearly enough income to back up claims about the family’s wealth. In 2015, the Rothschild Group’s annual revenue was approximately $500 million. In comparison, the world’s largest company, Walmart, has an annual revenue of nearly $500 billion.

Райчо Марков posted the article HOW ARE YOU GOING TO PAY FOR IT?. This is a speech written by Warren Mosler.

Warren Mosler: “So how do you like this unsolicited speech I drafted for him (PRESIDENT BERNIE SANDERS – well apparently not anymore)”:

Early on, he wrote these words for Sanders to speak.

And before I begin, I’d like to thank my chief economist, Professor Stephanie Kelton, a specialist in economic policy as well as Federal Reserve Bank monetary operations, for educating me on this critical question.

Stephanie Kelton is a name you will see in several places in my blogs and posting, so I wanted you to know who she is.

Now, for a little tantalizing bit of meat from the “speech”.

The public debt is nothing more than all the dollars spent by the government
that haven’t yet been used to pay taxes.

And those dollars stay in the economy as someone’s savings until they get used to pay taxes.

Think of it this way – when the government spends a dollar, someone has to have it.

And if it also taxes away that dollar, that dollar is gone from the economy.

But if the government spends a dollar and doesn’t tax it away, it stays in the economy as someone’s savings.

And most all of that savings is right there at the Federal Reserve Bank in bank accounts that they call Treasury bonds, notes, and bills. Yes, all those Treasury’s are just dollars in savings accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank with fancy names.

I don’t care what you do and do not understand about economics, this explanation is so simple and obvious that I doubt many will fail to understand it.

Ellis Winningham has posted his article Don’t Listen to Milton Friedman. There is a Free Lunch If There is a Lunch to be Found on his web site.

Is lunch what you used as payment to buy lunch, or is lunch what you eat? I’ll ask again – do you eat US Dollars or do you eat the food purchased with US Dollars? You can be hungry at noon and have $60,000 burning a hole in your pocket, but if there is no food anywhere to be found, what good does that $60,000 do you as far as lunch goes? Lunch is the thing you consume, not the thing used to purchase the thing you consume. Food is a commodity, US Dollars, British Pounds are not. US Dollars are just a voucher used to obtain lunch.

The article goes on to explain what MMT is saying and what it is not saying in terms so simple that most people should be able to understand it easily. Understanding may be different from accepting. I am sure that some people will continue to think that they must have been tricked into something by this article. In the long run, I don’t believe these doubters will be able to find any tricks in the article, and more and more people will get to acceptance.

Once we get to acceptance by a large enough population, the oligarchs will have lost their grip on our minds. From that point forward, anything becomes possible.

Isn’t it obvious that if there is a supply side economics, there must be a demand side economics?

I take supply side economics to mean that when supply is not adequate to meet demand, you want to work on increasing supply harder than working on decreasing demand. I think that makes an awful lot of sense.

The proponents of a single prescription that works for all diseases fail to ask if there might be a different prescription for a different disease. If there is supply side economics to cure one disease, isn’t it natural to ask if there is demand side economics to act on a different disease?

I take demand side economics to mean that when demand is not adequate to meet supply, you want to work on increasing demand harder than working on decreasing supply. I think that makes an awful lot of sense.

It didn’t take much to come up with demand side economics. All I had to do was to swap the words demand and supply.

The problem with adherents of supply side economics is not that their is a flaw in the theory. The problem is not knowing when that theory applies, and not knowing the obvious theory to apply when the situation changes.

There is no contradiction in being a proponent of supply side emphasis when it is needed and demand side emphasis when it is needed.

To me, it seems so obvious that I don’t know why more people aren’t saying this, and why it has taken me so long to write this.

Back to the original purpose of this blog – education about money and economics – Critical Finance has the article Full Reserve Banking: The Wrong Cure for the Wrong Disease.

As J. K. Galbraith famously observed: ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.’

I’ll use this article as an excuse to put forward a related idea that I have had recently.

One of the limitations on Quantitative Easing (QE) is that the Fed only buys paper assets. This is the closest the Fed thinks it can get legally to fiscal policy maneuvers. However, this is like pushing on the proverbial string. They can put money back into the hands of the banks, but if there is nothing to invest in, then it just creates asset bubbles, and puts very few people back to work. If instead the Fed could buy infrastructure, they could put people to work, and this would be real fiscal policy.

Imagine if the new QE had the Fed buying state and local infrastructure bonds. The money would have to be used to build the infrastructure for which the states and localities issued the bonds. This would put people to work, replace the lost consumer demand in the economy, and get the economy moving again with a fairer distribution of wealth and income. It would eliminate the legislative and executive branches of the federal government from interfering with the growth of the economy.

What if states and localities were able to have reserve accounts at the Fed, so that they could borrow directly at the same interest rates as the banks do? My idea of the Fed buying state and local bonds is one step removed from the direct access. What would happen if we did away with the one step removal? The states would not have to issue bonds and the banks and other private financial institutions would not be raking off profits from running this bond trading system.

Yes, I am only talking about the good aspects of this change in policy. Of course there are some bad aspects that would have to be controlled. I am just not featuring that aspect in what I have written here. I fully admit that. You can nitpick away with all these other issues, but first, I would like you to examine the idea for its positive possibilities.

If you don’t like the idea of the Fed having control of part of the fiscal policy, there is the idea of creating an infrastructure bank to handle it. The trouble with that is that we would have two federal entities creating high-power money, and that would not be good. If the Infrastructure Bank could borrow from the Fed to fund its operations, then that might be a good way to handle it.

I have read many of Joe Firestone’s posts on New Economic Perspectives. This is the first time I have seen a live interview with him. It is especially good interview because the interviewer, Steven D. Grumbine, is very well versed in the topic at hand.

This is a heavy duty session on US money, US debt and deficits, US taxes, and economic policy help for the bottom 90%.

If there is one thing to learn it is that in the United States of America

Taxes Are Not Needed To and Do Not Fund Federal Government Spending..

This is a hard concept to believe, but you need to learn enough about it to understand why this is true, Any Progressive that gets into a debate with a Republican, a Conservative, a Neo-Liberal, or a Libertarian will surely lose the argument if you are arguing from their erroneous frame of reference. You have to be like Steven D, Grumbine and me who start screaming when any Progressive who doesn’t know the above concept and gets into an argument about how any government program will be paid for. It will be paid by the Federal Government creating the money to pay for it. That is how all Federal government spending is paid for. This only applies to Federal government spending.

In the video, there is an important discussion of sector balances. It might help to have the following picture in mind:

This comes from my previous post When Will the White House and OMB Ever Learn About Sector Financial Balances?