FTT not enough; abolish credit default swaps

At Huffpo, Robert Kuttner makes the case for completely abolishing credit default swaps.  Many reformers are focusing on enacting a financial transaction tax, but Kuttner argues that this worthy reform falls far short of what is ultimately needed for meaningful financial reform.  Therefore, in addition to reenacting the Glass-Steagall Act, Kuttner seeks to abolish credit default swaps:

The financial transaction tax has become a useful symbol of the need to rein in the banks. Its enactment would mark an important turning point -- it would show that the power of the banks can be broken. And if the US government keeps opposing it, the EU should enact it unilaterally -- every global bank does business in Europe.

But such a tax would be only a small first step. Banks would still invent exotic instruments and trade them; they'd just have to pay a small tax.

It's time to simply abolish credit default swaps and similar exotic, impenetrable, essentially unregulated securities. They add nothing to economic efficiency, they line bankers' pockets, and they add massively to global financial risks. Swaps were only invented in the 1990s. The world got along beautifully -- much better in fact -- without them.

Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos.

Continue ReadingFTT not enough; abolish credit default swaps

Bill Moyers explains the concerns of Occupy Wall Street

Bill Moyers recently gave the keynote speech at Public Citizen's 40th anniversary Gala. In addition to the video of that speech, I have transcribed various excerpts from his excellent speech. During his speech, he made it quite clear that he fully understands the concerns of the occupy Wall Street protesters. Except for the bracketed material each of the following is a quote by Bill Moyers at the Public Citizen 40th Anniversary Gala: While it's important to cover the news, it's more important to uncover the news. One of my mentors at the University of Texas told our class that "news" is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity. And when a student asked the journalist and historian Richard Reeves for his definition of real news, he answered, "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." - [We now have what historian Lawrence Goodwin has described as] "a mass resignation of people who believe the dogma of democracy at a superficial level, but who no longer believe it privately." - We have a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions of people. - We hold elections knowing that they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by a majority of Americans. - The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly veneration of wealth are now openly enforced, and the common denominator a public office, including for our judges, is a common deference to cash. - Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats and then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 per person. And that's the norm. They get away with it. - Let's name it for what it is: Democratic deviancy, defined downward. - Politics today is little more than money laundering in the trafficking of power and policy. - Why are the occupiers there? They are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied America - Citizens United: Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. - [At the 12 minute mark of the video, Moyers discusses corporate personhood and the laws damaging public welfare resulting therefrom] - The Roberts Court has picked up the mantle: Money first, the public second, if at all. - [At the 14 minute mark: the damage done by Citizens United]

Continue ReadingBill Moyers explains the concerns of Occupy Wall Street

Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges discuss #Occupy with Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose recently discussed the #Occupy movement with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and writer Chris Hedges of Truthdig.com. This was a thought-provoking show in which all of the participants take the #Occupy movement seriously. What follows are some of my notes regarding the interview. Amy Goodman indicates that we are in the midst of a revolution. Chris Hedges describes this revolt as one that strives to regain democracy and is opposed to the current system of "inverted totalitarianism." It's not "classical totalitarianism. It doesn't find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader, but through the anonymity of the corporate state. . . . [In a system of inverted totalitarianism, "corporate forces purport to pay a fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the iconography and language of American patriotism, and yet have so corrupted the levers of power as to render the citizens impotent. We see that in one piece of legislation after another. . . . The formal structures of power are tone deaf. . . [Under the corporate state] there is no way to appeal to the system. It doesn't matter what the citizens want." Amy Goodman points out that while most Americans support the #occupy protests, the protesters are portrayed by many as merely engaging in class warfare. At 14:50, Goodman points out that the #Occupy protesters and the Tea Party have many overlapping concerns. At 21:00 Hedges indicates that there are stark differences with the Tea Party which, he claims, has deep elements he would describe as fascist. Another difference is that the Tea Party targets government because "the corporations want government to become more anemic; it speaks in the language of violence and the gun culture" and they direct their rage toward "vulnerable people such as Muslims, undocumented workers, homosexuals and intellectuals, all sort of the classic rubric that one finds in a fascist movement." Goodman also discusses the importance of citizen journalism. "When police tell people to turn off their video camera, that's exactly when they need to turn their video cameras on. . . . We need media in this country that allows people to speak for themselves. Ultimately, the media can be the biggest force for peace on earth." Goodman believes that this movement will be sustained through the winter and beyond, and that "the organized parties, the Democrat and Republican parties are running scared."

Continue ReadingAmy Goodman and Chris Hedges discuss #Occupy with Charlie Rose

Matt Taibbi offers five concrete solutions to the misconduct of Wall Street

How should the #occupy movements address the problems of Wall Street? Matt Taibbi offers this advice:

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. . . . 2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. . . . 3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him. . . . 4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year. 5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. . . .

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi offers five concrete solutions to the misconduct of Wall Street

What is the financial sector up to?

If the financial sector does not mostly consist of real banks, taking deposits and lending money to businesses, what do they do? Christopher Ketcham explains, in an article titled "The Reign of the One Percenters," in Orion Magazine:

At one time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for the building of things that society needed—projects that also invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. Lord Adair Turner, a financial watchdog and former banker in the city of London—the other world capital of finance—recently denounced his class as practitioners and beneficiaries of a “socially useless activity.” Paul Woolley, who runs a think tank in London called the Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, observed that the “presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable” was a kind of metaphysics. “It wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence,” Woolley told John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges, hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching of mortgages—these were shown to have “little or no long-term value,” according to Cassidy. The purpose was to “merely shift money around” without designing, building, or selling “a single tangible thing.” The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the “value” of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit.

.   .   .

Finance as practiced on Wall Street, says Paul Woolley, is “like a cancer.” There is only maximization of short-term profit in these “financial services”—they are services only in the sense of the vampire at a vein. There is no vision for allocating capital for the building of infrastructure that will serve society in the future; no vision, say, for a post-carbon civilization; no vision for surviving the shocks of coming resource scarcity. The finance nihilist doesn’t look to a viable future; he is interested only in the immediate return.

When reading the above numbers, keep in mind that the annual tax receipts of the United States only amount to about $2 trillion.

Continue ReadingWhat is the financial sector up to?