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Title: THE CRASH IS COMING: Bush Convenes Plunge Protection Team
Source:
Telegraph
URL Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/ma ... money/2008/01/07/ccview107.xml
Published: Jan 8, 2008
Author: By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Post Date: 2008-01-09 06:49:27 by Uncle Bill
Keywords: Going, Going, Gone
Views: 866
Comments: 60
Telegraph Bears beware. The New Deal of 2008 is in the works. The US Treasury is about to shower households with rebate cheques to head off a full-blown slump, and save the Bush presidency. On Friday, Mr Bush convened the so-called Plunge Protection Team for its first known meeting in the Oval Office. The black arts unit - officially the President's Working Group on Financial Markets - was created after the 1987 crash. It appears to have powers to support the markets in a crisis with a host of instruments, mostly by through buying futures contracts on the stock indexes (DOW, S&P 500, NASDAQ and Russell) and key credit levers. And it has the means to fry "short" traders in the hottest of oils. The team is led by Treasury chief Hank Paulson, ex-Goldman Sachs, a man with a nose for market psychology, and includes Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and the key exchange regulators. Judging by a well-briefed report in the Washington Post, a mood of deep alarm has taken hold in the upper echelons of the administration. "What everyone's looking at is what is the fastest way to get money out there," said a Bush aide. Emergency measures are now clearly on the agenda, apparently consisting of a mix of tax cuts for businesses and bungs for consumers. Fiscal action all too appropriate, regrettably. We face a version of Keynes's "extreme liquidity preference" in the 1930s - banks are hoarding money, and the main credit arteries of the financial system remain blocked after five months. "In terms of any stimulus package, we're considering all options," said Mr Bush. This should be interesting to watch. The president is not one for half measures. He has already shown in Iraq and on biofuels that he will pursue policies a l'outrance once he gets the bit between his teeth. The only question is what the president can manage to push through a Democrat Congress. The Plunge Protection Team - long kept secret - was last mobilised to calm the markets after 9/11. It then went into hibernation during the long boom. Mr Paulson reactivated it last year, asking the staff to examine "systemic risk posed by hedge funds and derivatives, and the government's ability to respond to a financial crisis", he said. It seems he failed to spot the immediate threat from mortgage securities and the implosion of the commercial paper market. But never mind. The White House certainly has grounds for alarm. The global picture is darkening by the day. The Baltic Dry Index has been falling hard for seven weeks, signalling a downturn in bulk shipments. Singapore's economy contracted 3.2pc in the final quarter of last year, led by a slump in electronics and semiconductors. The Tokyo bourse kicked off with the worst New Year slide in more than half a century as the Seven Samurai exporters buckled. The Topix is down 24pc from its peak. If Japan and Singapore are stalling, it is a fair bet that China's efforts to tighten credit are starting to bite. Asia is not going to rescue us. On the contrary. Keep an eye on Japan, still the world's top creditor by far, with $3 trillion in net foreign assets. The Bank of Japan has been the biggest single source of liquidity for the global asset boom over the last five years. An army of investors - Japanese insurers and pension funds, housewives and hedge funds borrowing at near zero rates in Tokyo - have sprayed money across the Antipodes, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey, Iceland, Latvia, the US commercial paper market and the City of London. The Japanese are now bringing the money home, as they always do when the cycle turns. The yen has risen 13pc against the dollar and 12pc against sterling since the summer. We are witnessing the long-feared unwind of the "carry trade", valued by BNP Paribas in all its forms at $1.4 trillion. The US data is now relentlessly grim. Unemployment jumped from 4.7pc to 5pc - or 7.7m - in December, the biggest one-month rise since the dotcom bust and clear evidence that the housing crunch has spread to the real economy. "At this point the debate is not about a soft land or hard landing; it is about how hard the hard landing will be," said Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University. "Financial losses and defaults are spreading from sub-prime to near-prime and prime mortgages, to commercial real estate loans, to auto loans, credit cards and student loans, and sharply rising default rates on corporate bonds. A severe systemic financial crisis cannot be ruled out. This will be a much worse recession than the mild ones in 1990-91 and 2001," he said. Sovereign wealth funds stand ready to rescue banks, as they have already rescued Citigroup and UBS. But as Moody's pointed out this week, the estimated $2,500bn in lost wealth from the US house price crash is more than the entire net worth of all the sovereign wealth funds in the world. Add fresh losses as the property bubbles pop in Britain, Ireland, Australia, Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, as they surely must unless central banks opt for inflation (which would annihilate bonds instead, with equal damage), and you can discount $1,500bn in further attrition. Not even a Bush New Deal can hold back the post-bubble tide that is drawing in across the globe. What it can do is buy time. Fortunately for America - and the world - the US budget deficit is a healthy 1.2pc of GDP ($163bn). Washington has the wherewithal to fund a fiscal blitz. Britain has no such luxury. Our deficit is 3pc of GDP at the top of the cycle. Gordon Brown has shut the Keynesian door. CONGRESS IGNORING LOOMING FINANCIAL CATASTROPHE The Left: The Right: Heritage Foundation President Edwin J. Feulner - National Debt Now $72 trillion "Social Security, Medicare and other retirement benefits promised to baby boomers will drive the government into insolvency" Brother, can you spare $65 trillion? Walter E. Williams: "The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest." SECRETS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE "How did you get the money to buy those two billion dollars worth of Government securities in 1933? ECCLES: We created it. MR. PATMAN: Out of what? ECCLES: Out of the right to issue credit money. MR. PATMAN: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government’s credit? ECCLES: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money." On June 17, 1942, Governor Eccles was interrogated by Mr. Dewey. ECCLES: "I mean the Federal Reserve, when it carries out an open market operation, that is, if it purchases Government securities in the 167 open market, it puts new money into the hands of the banks which creates idle deposits. DEWEY: There are no excess reserves to use for this purpose? ECCLES: Whenever the Federal Reserve System buys Government securities in the open market, or buys them direct from the Treasury, either one, that is what it does. DEWEY: What are you going to use to buy them with? You are going to create credit? ECCLES: That is all we have ever done. That is the way the Federal Reserve System operates. The Federal Reserve System creates money. It is a bank of issue." At the House Hearing of 1947, Mr. Kolburn asked Mr. Eccles: "What do you mean by monetization of the public debt? ECCLES: I mean the bank creating money by the purchase of Government securities. All is created by debt--either private or public debt. FLETCHER: Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of returning to a free and open market, instead of this pegged and artificially controlled financial market we now have? ECCLES: Never. Not in your lifetime or mine." The Bankruptcy of The United States If anybody ever tells you that government can't go bankrupt, especially in America, just hand them this: http://www.ppic.org/c on tent/pubs/rb/RB_498MBRB.pdf In Case Of Bankruptcy The Washington Times If you knew the U.S. government was going bankrupt primarily because of spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the only solutions were the following, which one would you pick? (1) Doubling individual and corporate income tax rates. Many leading economists of the political right and left have concluded the U.S. government will not be able to pay its creditors, including its current and future retirees, the full value of promised benefits, unless current policies are radically changed. (Most recently, Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff in a paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Lawrence A. Hunter, former chief of staff for the Joint Economic Committee in a paper for the Institute of Policy Innovation, using different models, each concluded the U.S. is on its way to bankruptcy. The above alternative solutions were taken from these papers.) Simply, government spending, in particular Social Security and Medicare, is growing faster than real economic growth. Obviously, it is a mathematical truism that this trend cannot continue indefinitely -- and when something cannot continue forever, it will not. When governments go bankrupt, they pay off their debts by running the printing presses, which results in high inflation and perhaps hyperinflation. Under the condition of bankruptcy/hyperinflation, everyone gets poorer, including both workers and retirees. Argentina is a good example of a country that has been going through bouts of bankruptcy. A century ago, it had the world's third- highest per capita income and was on par with the U.S. But Argentina now ranks about No. 70 in the world with a per capita income of only around $13,000 per year as contrasted with the U.S. and Ireland with per capita incomes of about $41,000 yearly. Increasing the tax rates by the magnitude necessary would make U.S. tax rates even higher than most European nations, and lead to economic stagnation, or worse. The French, Germans and Italians are trying the high tax rate route, and it is not working. Cutting current Social Security and Medicare benefits would not be fair to those who are retired, or near retirement, and cutting other government spending by the necessary amount would not be politically acceptable. When the AARP folks, or most Democrats and many Republicans in Congress, tell you the Social Security and Medicare problems can be solved by minor tweaks, they are either ignorant or lying. Most AARP members are at retirement age. If you look at the AARP position on Social Security and Medicare reform, you can only conclude these people don't really care about their grandchildren. Fortunately, if Congress acts quickly, there is a relatively painless way out, which will avoid the U.S. going the way of Argentina (and France). It involves both tax and entitlement reforms. Tax reform means either moving to a sales tax or flat tax system in which taxes on capital are removed. Such reform will increase both capital and labor, thus increasing productivity growth. Entitlement reform means moving from the current pay-as-you-go defined benefit systems for Social Security and Medicare to defined contribution systems with individual retirement and medical accounts, as most private companies have been forced to do. The transition to individual accounts will entail some transition costs that can be covered through some temporary increase in government borrowing and/or sales of government assets such as federal land (the federal government owns more than 40 percent of the land in the U.S.). Serious and responsible people both right and left understand the national debate over the defined contribution plans should be about the size and the extent of government versus individual control. This debate is not happening -- to the necessary degree to get reform -- because most Americans still do not understand the magnitude of the problem (as shown by the polls). There is also no need to reduce the real promised benefits to current and near-retirees -- but only if Congress acts soon. The Bush administration made a strategic mistake by failing to educate the American people to the nature and extent of the problem before launching its partial solution. Given the irresponsibility and the inability of much of the political class and media to explain the real problem and lead the country to the solution, private parties will have to do it. The only salvation is for well motivated individuals to invest the time and resources to do the necessary educational effort -- or in a few decades the U.S. will look like Argentina. Richard W. Rahn is director general of the Center for Global Economic Growth, a project of the FreedomWorks Foundation. "With the decline of society begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia war of all against all, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
Bush convenes Plunge Protection Team
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
08/01/2008 
David M. Walker, General Accounting Office Chief - April 16, 2004, Washington Times, GAO Chief Sounds Alarm Bells On Debt.
Benjamin Franklin
On September 30, 1941, before the same Committee, Governor Eccles was asked by Representative Patman:
Note: Congressional Record
By Richard W. Rahn
Published July 27, 2006
(2) Immediately cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits by two- thirds.
(3) Immediately cutting all federal discretionary spending (including defense) by 143 percent.
(4) Reforming Social Security and Medicare by moving from the current defined benefit plans to a program of individual investment accounts, like the current 401(k) and Medical Savings Account (MSA) plans.
Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 48.
#2. To: Uncle Bill (#0)
No, bogus wars are what has driven the government into insolvency.
"Social Security, Medicare and other retirement benefits promised to baby boomers will drive the government into insolvency" David M. Walker, General Accounting Office Chief - April 16, 2004, Washington Times, GAO Chief Sounds Alarm Bells On Debt. No, bogus wars are what has driven the government into insolvency. That bogus wars have contributed significantly to America's debt crisis cannot be debated. However, the abject inability of the federal government to fulfill fiscally insane promises/programs as well cannot be discounted as a major factor. The bottom line is that the federal government has spent this country into financial oblivion--in several ways.
The bottom line is that the federal government has spent this country into financial oblivion--in several ways. You are correct, however IF the social security paid into the federal government by workers had been held in a separate fund, as was promised, that alone would not have bankrupted this country. Matter of fact, the government was bankrupt long before SS and welfare programs were twinkles in uncle sam's eye.
These guys will be used tomorrow.
We need Ron Paul's wisdom and like minded intellectuals right now.
"We need Ron Paul's wisdom and like minded intellectuals right now." Absolutely, I agree.
What would Ron Paul do as President? What should Congress do?
I believe we both have a good idea on what he would like to do. And Congress would not approve of any of it. Thus, I concluded some time ago, I would accept Ron Paul vetoing every thing those bastards did for at least one term, unless they try to impeach him, or worse, kill him. I still remember one black congressman in 1994 in the House of Representaives, during the government shutdown, screaming on the House floor: They're coming for the children, they're coming for the children, we will be in poverty everlasting if they get their way, you, I will not have a life, My God, they are coming for the children. The individual socialist trough slurpers and corporate parasites would scream like a scalded pig, but maybe Americans would begin the long process of actually becoming serious about the state of the government. But in reality, this federal government is going to collapse, and as I see it, under the current circumstances, the current culture, and the apathy and ignorance of the American people, not to mention just the scientific and mathmatical calculations of the staggering debt numbers with interest, our country, or, well, our federal government is going to collapse.
Declare the federal reserve null and void. I don't know what Ron Paul would do about the home owner foreclosure crisis. Most of the solutions that others are proposing are collectivist.
I agree with your post #41. What do you think of this? How to Abolish the Federal Reserve I'm a hard asset guy though. NO FIAT MONEY OF ANY KIND FOR ME. Read the comments after the video.
There are no replies to Comment # 48. End Trace Mode for Comment # 48.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest"Social Security, Medicare and other retirement benefits promised to baby boomers will drive the government into insolvency" David M. Walker, General Accounting Office Chief - April 16, 2004, Washington Times, GAO Chief Sounds Alarm Bells On Debt.
#3. To: RidinShotgun, Uncle Bill (#2)
#4. To: wbales (#3)
That bogus wars have contributed significantly to America's debt crisis cannot be debated. However, the abject inability of the federal government to fulfill fiscally insane promises/programs as well cannot be discounted as a major factor.
#26. To: RidinShotgun (#4)
#27. To: Uncle Bill, Cynicom, iconoclast, FOH (#26)
#30. To: buckeye (#27)
#33. To: Uncle Bill (#30)
#39. To: buckeye (#33)
#41. To: Uncle Bill (#39)
Link present dollars to their exact gold price.
Immediately inventory and safeguard the gold we should have, if we still have it.
Give the order to ship every troop home from every corner of the planet.
Tell OPEC and the Asians "we'll get back to you, but we will pay."
Dismantle 95% of the federal government by order.
One more thing: offer homesteading to Americans who can leave their foreclosures and hold a claim in several major regions of our national parks.
#45. To: buckeye (#41)
#48. To: Uncle Bill, Sparker, angle (#45)
I agree with your post #41. What do you think of this?
How to Abolish the Federal Reserve (in 4 easy steps)
Declare a national holiday "when Americans got their freedom back could be added to your list.
Replies to Comment # 48.