Posts tagged with 'John Nichols'
Weekly Audit: House Bank Bill Fatally Flawed
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By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Last week, the House of Representatives finally approved a financial regulatory overhaul and President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to address the unemployment crisis. Both are a step in the right direction, but neither offer effective solutions to problems that still plague the U.S. economy.
The House bill doesn’t do away with too-big-to-fail banks and that’s a big problem. As John Nichols explains for The Nation, “the big banks aren’t going to get sidelined—let alone broken up—anytime soon.” Instead of splitting large, risky banks into smaller firms that could fail without wreaking economic havoc, the House bill gives regulators more power, including the ability to bail out a faltering bank with billions of taxpayer dollars. When push comes to shove, regulators are not going to risk letting a major bank fail. They’ll just bail the company out. We all saw what happened when Lehman Brothers collapsed last year.
By imposing a tougher set of rules on banks, it’s conceivable that regulators could prevent some future failures. But as Mary Kane notes for The Washington Independent, Congress carved so many loopholes in the new laws that banks will have little trouble skirting them.
Obama had hoped to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) to crack down on predatory lending, but a coalition of bank-friendly Democrats pushed through amendments that significantly weaken it. Obama wanted states to have the power to enforce stronger rules on predatory lending. Under a loophole that Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) pressed into the House bill, states are prevented from writing or enforcing rules that limit interest rates charged by credit card companies and payday lenders. That’s a really destructive move, Kane notes, since it was state regulators, not federal regulators, who cracked down on abusive lending over the past decade.
Obama also hoped to require that risky derivatives transactions would be conducted via exchange like ordinary stock trades. Derivatives are the type of trades that brought down AIG. But the House bill exempts a huge portion of transactions from this requirement and changes the definition of “exchange” to include private, unregulated derivatives trades, as Nick Baumann explains for Mother Jones. This is a fatal flaw in the regulatory overhaul. Derivatives are the primary technique that banks use to make themselves too-big-to-fail. Over 95% of the $290 trillion derivatives market is housed at just five banks. These derivatives tie the bank to other financial firms in a complicated web of risk that is impossible for regulators to navigate. If one of those five banks goes down, there’s no way a regulator can predict the consequences.
The only hope for meaningful reform right now rests in the Senate, which is considering a much tougher bill than what the House approved. But the Senate has yet to even conduct mark-up hearings on its legislation and the pressure from the banking lobby is going to be enormous. Progressives have to keep pushing for a better bill if we want to protect our economy from the abuses that brought on the current recession.
And while huge federal bailouts for banking giants like Citigroup and Bank of America have helped the financial sector recover, the broader economy is battling the highest unemployment levels since the early Reagan era. Things are poised to get a lot worse. As Daniela Perdomo emphasizes for AlterNet, a full 3.2 million workers will lose their unemployment benefits by the end of March 2010. Even if the unemployment rate stays where it is—and Perdomo notes that a vast majority of experts think its going to go higher—the impact on ordinary people is going to be even more severe than today’s nightmare.
In a blog post for Working In These Times, Roger Bybee highlights a piece by Harvard University Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, who emphasizes the hardships faced by ordinary families. The statistics are grim—one-eighth of Americans are on food stamps, one-eighth cannot pay their mortgages and 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month.
We need to take serious steps to get people back to work. Mass unemployment means that consumers don’t spend money, which means that companies don’t sell as much, which makes companies lay off more workers to cut costs. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. The market can’t fix unemployment without help.
So Obama’s Dec. 8 speech announcing a new job-creation plan was a welcome event. But the concrete aspects of Obama’s plan are not effective. All the tax cuts in the world won’t necessarily put people back to work. Obama did endorse a public jobs plan which involved the government hiring people to improve the nation’s infrastructure and clean up communities ravaged by the economic crisis, but he shied away from any specific numbers.
As David Roberts explains for Grist, Obama’s willingness to sign off on a $23 billion program for environmentally friendly home renovations is a step in the right direction. The plan is being referred to as “cash-for-caulkers” and is modeled on the very successful cash-for-clunkers program. The government will pay people to increase the energy efficiency of their homes, helping people cut down on utility bills and increasing the demand for construction labor and products like new windows and doors. It’s a good idea. But if all we get are tax cuts and $23 billion for greener homes, the jobs bill is not going to assuage the unemployment crisis.
There is no reason to be concerned about the cost of a thorough jobs program. Taxpayers committed trillions of dollars to help the financial sector weather the economic storm. Anybody who is worked up about the prospect of spending money on jobs should read Amitabh Pal’s piece for The Progressive. A modest tax on speculative trades of stock and derivatives could easily raise $150 billion a year to finance a robust jobs program.
At this point in the economic downturn, the government needs to take much stronger steps to rein in Wall Street and create jobs. We know what needs to be done to protect the economy from risky banking and we can afford to fix the unemployment crisis. All we need is the political will.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Audit: Time to Audit the Fed
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Two key lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Ron Paul (R-TX), are pushing to authorize a full, comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. The plan has sparked fury from both the Fed and the corporate banking industry, but the proposal is so appealing that the controversy is almost laughable.
The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful economic institutions in the world, but most of its operations are conducted in total secrecy. The Fed’s rescue activities have dwarfed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, but without any public accounting. Some of these efforts may have been entirely appropriate, but we don’t even know who the Fed is helping. That fact is a major barrier to establishing effective and fair economic policy. (more…)
Weekly Audit: Unemployment Fueling Political Storm
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Unemployment figures in the U.S. are staggering: The official rate stands at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years. A broader measure that includes people who are involuntarily working part-time or who have given up looking for work is at 17.5%. That’s a full-blown economic emergency.
But, as Joshua Holland explains for AlterNet, President Barack Obama’s response to the unemployment crisis has not matched the urgency of his response to the crisis on Wall Street. This isn’t just unfair, it’s bad economics. (more…)
Weekly Audit: Why Accountability Matters
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
With workers all over the globe trudging through a catastrophic recession, it’s almost a given that governments will be battling the economic slide for a long time. Part of the effort to rebuild must involve new rules and regulations, but meaningful systems for economic accountability will be just as essential. If we do not hold the reckless executives who caused this crisis accountable for their actions, we risk regressing into similar turmoil in the near future.
We all know that times are tough, and almost all of us agree on the cause: A massive Wall Street risk-binge combined with an almost total failure of regulatory oversight. It’s surprising that few meaningful criminal charges have been filed amid what may very well be the worst financial crisis in history. Bernie Madoff will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, but the subprime mortgage brokers who specialized in predatory loans–and the Wall Street banks that bought them–have yet to face consequences in court.
In The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz details the efforts of some state-level officials to investigate and punish white-collar crime at the nation’s largest financial firms. Much of the problem, Fernholz explains, results from an insane legal landscape at the federal level. Active deregulation of the financial sector, which began in the 1980s, is shielding the irresponsible risk-taking that caused the current crisis from legal penalties.
Despite these obstacles, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and other key officials are going after some of the worst offenders, and have successfully taken action against some of the predatory profiteers, including subprime mortgage lender Fremont Investment & Loan and Wall Street icon Goldman Sachs. Coakley secured an injunction against Fremont to prevent the company from foreclosing on its borrowers, and Goldman agreed to modify $50 million in predatory mortgages.
But while Coakley’s investigations may bring some much-needed relief to troubled homeowners, they’re only part of the solution. If executives that approved their companies’ subprime policies go through this crisis unscathed, it will be difficult to deter similar behavior in the future.
Fremont had to be sold off last year at fire-sale prices to avoid bankruptcy, but Goldman has weathered the economic downturn better than many of its Wall Street brethren. Much of the company’s resiliency, however, stems from its ability to secure billions upon billions of dollars of bailout financing from the U.S. government. Over at AlterNet, Jim Hightower blasts Goldman for its multiple avenues of taxpayer support and emphasizes that only the notorious Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) comes with any strings attached whatsoever. While Congress attached some very modest restrictions on executive compensation to the TARP bailout, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve have provided big banks with trillions in loans and guarantees completely free of restrictions on how these perks are deployed.
Goldman received $10 billion under TARP, which the company hopes to repay soon to shrug off those CEO pay limits. When the government bailed out AIG, $12 billion of the funds were directed Goldman’s way. But perhaps the greatest and lowest-profile outrage comes in the form of the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. Hightower notes that the FDIC has guaranteed $28 billion of Goldman’s recently issued corporate debt without imposing any restrictions on the Wall Street giant. In short, if Goldman were to default, the government would pay off its investors. This taxpayer guarantee has allowed Goldman and many of its banking peers to secure capital at exceptionally low rates, helping the firms survive during a time when any financing is hard to come by.
Even if Goldman is able to repay its TARP money, the company remains thoroughly dependent on taxpayer assistance. Once the TARP funds are paid off, Goldman will be free to pay its executives whatever it wants—even when that salary is subsidized by American tax dollars. That’s a pretty perverse definition of accountability.
Of course, botched bailouts are not unique to the financial sector. As John Nichols explains in The Nation, the terms of automaker Chrysler’s bankruptcy proceeding include plans to close down manufacturing plants across the Midwest, a strategy that undermines the entire economic justification for bailout: Sparing investors pain in order to save jobs.
“Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are being poured into Chrysler and General Motors, ostensibly to ’save’ the U.S. auto industry,” Nichols writes. “Yet, the companies have acknowledged that they plan to use the money to shutter factories, lay-off tens of thousands of factory workers and dramatically downsize dealership networks–at the cost of as many as 100,000 additional jobs.”
Still worse, it appears that both Chrysler executives and officials from the Obama administration mislead Congress on the implications of the bankruptcy. Nichols cites a letter from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, in which the lawmaker says Congress was told there would be no permanent job losses a result of the Chrysler bankruptcy filing. The very next day, plant closings were announced in Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Ohio.
Even the economic stimulus package rewarded companies with a history of recklessness. In a piece for Salon, ProPublica journalists Michael Grabell and David Epstein reveal how contractors that have paid substantial fines for violating environmental regulations, federal safety rules and laws against racism have been able to score new business with the federal government. The worst offender? A contractor known as CACI International, which has been awarded three contracts worth $1.5 million under the stimulus package, despite ties to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
CACI helped hire interrogators at Abu Ghraib, but an Army investigation found that the contractor ended up employing people with “little or no interrogator experience.” Abuses committed by CACI employees included dragging a handcuffed prisoner on the ground, placing a prisoner in an “unauthorized stress position,” dressing a prisoner in women’s underwear and lying to investigators about using dogs in interrogations, according to Grabell and Epstein.
If the government relies on criminals to build the recovery, the public is not going to get the results it needs. But the recovery is only part of the solution to the current economic crisis. If we fail to prosecute executives whose active scheming and criminal negligence brought down the global economy, we are inviting more of the same behavior in the future.
Weekly Audit: Why the Current Stimulus Plan Isn’t Enough
by Zach Carter, TMC MediaWire Blogger
The U.S. economy just keeps getting worse. Given the absolute pummeling the job market has taken over the past five months, we’re going to need some much stronger medicine than policymakers are currently proposing. It’s increasingly clear that President Obama’s stimulus plan was devised for a far milder downturn, and this week we received further evidence of the recession’s high human cost.
The U.S. lost another 663,000 jobs in March, according to a report released by the the Labor Department last Friday. Most of us are getting used to seeing big numbers associated with this recession, but those massive layoffs are perhaps the most distressing statistics of all. Jobs matter most to ordinary people right now, as John Nichols notes for The Nation, and the primary measure of success for any economic policy is whether it will get people back to work. Nichol’s argument stands in sharp contrast to what much of the news media is using as its metric of success: the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Speculators on Wall Street have pointed to the Dow’s recent upward trend as evidence that things are getting better. We’ll see if that uptick continues after the next round of quarterly banking losses comes in, but even if they do, Nichols emphasizes, happy speculators are not the same thing as a happy economy.
The national unemployment rate currently stands at 8.5% and, without a dramatic increase in government support, will likely be mired in double digits for years to come. Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it succinctly in an interview at Salon: “This model no longer works. The Americans are completely over-indebted. They can’t increase their consumption, instead they have to save.”
The recession’s growing severity underscores a host of long-brewing economic problems, not the least of which is access to a college education. The cost of tuition has been steadily soaring for decades, but with the life savings of many families decimated by the housing bust, even relatively inexpensive state schools are out of financial reach, as Andy Kroll illustrates for Mother Jones.
“Simply to ensure that a child attends a four-year public university, a family in the country’s lowest-income bracket now has to pay, on average, 55% of [their] total income,” Kroll writes. That’s not 55% of disposable income, that’s 55% of what the family is taking in, period. President Obama has proposed some solid remedies for this issue—increasing federal grants for low-income students and replacing overpriced private-sector student loans with cheaper government loans, to name a few. But Kroll notes that it’s also important to divert more federal stimulus funds to states to increase the flow of need-based financial aid at public universities.
For many younger students, attending college takes a backseat to making sure they have a roof over their heads. One out of every 50 children in the United States is homeless. This problem will not go away on its own, Randy Jurado Ertll writes for The Progressive. Ending homelessness for children would cost just a fraction of what we’re paying to bailout the nation’s largest banks—there is no excuse for ignoring the issue in the next round of recovery funding.
The housing collapse continues to deepen, but some policies designed to help families keep their homes are quietly expiring. In a story for The Colorado Independent, Mary Kane points out that the moratorium on foreclosures imposed by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expired at the end of March. Foreclosure-related evictions are set to resume. Just as depressing: none of the mainstream media seems to have noticed.
As foreclosures escalate, one policy option that would keep families with a roof over their heads is being generally ignored by both the government and the banking world: renting. If, Kane notes, banks rented foreclosed properties to the borrowers who can no longer afford them, the most devastating impact of the foreclosure crisis could be averted.
But instead of dealing with actual problems, some Senators remain more focused on throwing money at rich people. The estate tax has actually surfaced in the recent haggling over the federal budget, Steven Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, a tax that only applies to the richest 0.2% of American families.
We’ve seen enough giveaways to wealthy people in the recent bank bailouts, and we know that they have extremely limited economic benefits. Steering the economy toward recovery will require a much more aggressive investment in the livelihood of ordinary Americans.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Bankruptcy Law is Key to Obama’s Foreclosure Fight
President Barack Obama unveiled his administration’s plan to fight foreclosures on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the most important element of the program will require Congressional action—and the banking and business lobbies are already on the attack.
The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan has three chief components:
- Offer financial incentives to persuade loan servicers to modify mortgages
- Allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance more mortgages
- Change bankruptcy laws and give judges the power to reduce the amount borrowers owe on their mortgages.
The financial incentives probably won’t help much, as Kevin Drum writes for Mother Jones. When a bank makes a mortgage, it doesn’t usually hold onto the loan. Instead, the loan is packaged into a security with a other loans and sold to several investors. Another bank collects payments on the mortgage for the security’s investors and acts as a point of contact, or loan servicer, for the borrower. To date, servicers haven’t shown much interest in keeping people in their homes, even though foreclosure is the worst option for all parties involved.
“Loan servicers already have an incentive to rework loans that would otherwise go into default, and for the most part they aren’t doing it,” Drum writes. “Will a couple thousand dollars [of incentives] change their internal calculus?”
The provision aimed at Fannie and Freddie will help some. It’s also a good use of the government’s authority over the companies, which were nationalized last summer. But the key to Obama’s plan is the bankruptcy provision. Until now, every government-enacted plan to reduce foreclosures has relied on incentives to encourage the banking industry to keep people in their homes. As Drum notes, bankruptcy is the stick behind those carrots. Obama is supporting a bill in Congress that would enable bankruptcy judges to reduce the amount a borrower owes to the present value of the home. The beauty here is that investors who own the mortgage securities, not taxpayers, will have to eat the losses. In short, investors will be held responsible for making a poor investment.
“The government is essentially presenting a choice for mortgage lenders: take our deal, which is standardized across the entire industry, or let a bankruptcy judge modify the loan however he or she sees fit,” Tim Fernholz writes for The American Prospect.
The bank lobby has been fighting the bankruptcy law change since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, and they wasted no time lashing out at Obama’s proposal today. Elana Schor of Talking Points Memo highlights a nasty statement released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of “Washington’s biggest lobbying groups.” The release not only attacks the Homeowner Affordability and Stability plan, but takes a shot at Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as well, saying the policy “should have undergone a stress test to determine if it’s ready to stabilize a major portion of our economy.” Stress tests for the financial viability of banks were a big part of the murky bank bailout plan Geithner rolled out last week.
If Congress fails to pass a bankruptcy law overhaul, the entire plan will fall apart. And the record so far is not very promising—last year’s bill garnered only about half of the votes necessary to override a filibuster in the Senate.
Team Obama deserves credit for taking action on foreclosures, as John Nichols writes for The Nation. The Bush administration spent years vilifying troubled borrowers and then dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out banks. If Congress can’t pass bankruptcy law reform, the government should simply force banks to modify loans. The strategy would be simple—either keep borrowers in their homes, or return your check from the federal government.
“Ohio Congressman Marcy Kaptur and economist Dean Baker have some smart ideas,” Nichols writes. “They argue that the proper role for the federal government is not to fund mortgage negotiations but to insist that banks—many of which have already collected billions in taxpayer dollars—carry them out.”
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Chicago workers strike back, jobs strike out, Obama strikes new New Deal
President-elect Barack Obama rolled out his highly anticipated priorities for an economic recovery package this weekend, but the current Congress remains focused on bailouts, with the fate of U.S. automobile manufacturers still hanging in the balance.
Mike Madden details the Detroit drama for Salon.com, reporting on how lawmakers who would ordinarily be receptive to a salvage plan have become skeptical in the wake of the Bush administration’s handling of the Wall Street bailout. After being promised that their votes would be used to help fend off foreclosures, members of Congress have responded with outrage as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has devoted all of his legislatively allocated funds to the purchase of preferred stock in financial companies.
Josh Marshall offers a compelling analysis of the public reaction to the Big Three’s predicament over at Talking Points Memo, noting that the widespread reluctance to reward bad behavior at the automakers could be tied to the fact that most people actually grasp how car companies work, whereas the average American has no idea what role Citigroup really plays in the economy.
“I do think a big, not very good, and really underappreciated reason for the disjuncture is that the auto makers are structured in a way, are economic entities in a way, that most of us can have some basic understanding on how they operate, what they do,” Marshall writes.
While the Big Three have undeniably been horribly mismanaged for decades, losing even one of them would have major economic aftershocks. General Motors alone employs well over one million workers.
The role of unions in the collapse of the Big Three has also been blown completely out of proportion. Not only have major newspapers grossly overstated union wages for Detroit by factoring in decades of built-up pension costs as labor expenses for current employees, they have recently featured editorials claiming that unions exercise too much power in the current economy. Ezra Klein of The American Prospect takes the Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby to task for simultaneously bashing unions and praising economic growth in countries like Sweden and Denmark, which both have union densities of about 80%, compared to 12% in the U.S.
Which is why it is nice to hear that union workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago– who received just three days’ notice that the plant would be shut down– have refused to leave the facility until they are granted severance pay. Check out Ron Ruby’s interview with factory worker Raul Flores live from the sit-in for Air America Radio.
Obama’s new New Deal also gives progressives something to celebrate after several recent centrist selections for cabinet positions. We finally have an economic policy that does not begin and end with the financial sector.
The next president’s proposals include a massive push to boost the energy efficiency of government buildings, repair public schools and provide them with new teaching technologies, and invest in new health care technologies. The plan also includes some of the most basic infrastructure layouts, with a 21st century twist: Obama pledged to rebuild roads and bridges across the country and expand the availability of broadband interenet access.
John Nichols writes for The Nation that Obama’s focus on infrastructure will be particularly helpful for construction workers, who have been hit hard by the recent housing market downturn.
But while the recovery package would be a step in the right direction (the term “recovery” appears to be roughly synonymous with the word “stimulus,” with added hints of AIG, Lehman Brothers and skyrocketing unemployment numbers), it is far from the final word on the nation’s economic troubles. For Obama to carry out his campaign promise to make health insurance available to everyone in the U.S. would not only be good for the nation’s physical well-being, it would also cushion the shock stemming from mounting job losses, as Sarah van Gelder notes for YES! Magazine. An extension of unemployment benefits would also help laid-off workers pay the bills while they search for new work.
Speaking of job cuts, the Labor Department delivered another devastating set of unemployment data last Friday, revealing that the U.S. economy lost 533,000 jobs in the month of November, the largest monthly decline in 34 years.
Carlo Basilone produced nice video spot for The Real News detailing the scope of current U.S. economic difficulties. Although 10.3 million people are now unemployed nationwide, a staggering 10% are living on food stamps, revealing that many of those who still have jobs are not being paid enough to make ends meet.
As Farron Cousins notes in a piece for GoLeft TV, monthly job losses could reach over one million next year and remain at that level for several months.
On the Wall Street front, David Moberg provides an excellent history of recent financial innovation and subsequent financial collapse in a piece for In These Times. Chelsea Green features Woody Tasch’s inquiries into alternative financial structures that are actually tied to communities and the environment rather than unsustainable risk and short-term executive compensation models.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.