Well, it's great to have as our Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecturer this year, Mr. David Stockman.
David's a graduate of Michigan State University. He did graduate work at Harvard University.
He was elected to Congress three times from the state of Michigan.
And back when I first went to work for Ron Paul in the reign of Jimmy the First,
Outside of admiring our own boss, the Ron Paul staff always admired David Stockman.
We got a chance to work with him on things like the draft, draft registration, and other
issues.
And in fact, among the Republican staffers, he was generally considered one of the most
brilliant people ever to be elected to Congress.
That might seem like faint praise, but it's actually not, actually not.
So obviously the talent spotters for the Reagan administration had the same view.
They brought him on board as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
He was the youngest cabinet secretary in the 20th century when he took that job.
Now, he was very unusual in that job.
I would say unique in the Reagan administration and maybe unique in Republican politics at
the presidential level.
He actually tried to cut spending.
And his opponents were people like Ed Mises, you know, the conservatives who always talked
When he left that job, he wrote one of the most wonderful books ever written on American politics, I think The Triumph of Politics was a best seller, as I say a very significant book too, and in fact I hope he'll talk to us today about the book that he's writing right now about crony capitalism and the very unfortunate current American political and economic system.
When David left the Reagan administration and finished his book, he went to work for Salomon Brothers and then he became a founding partner of the Blackstone Group, thereby proving the Republican staffer's view of him as smart some years before.
He now runs his own investment bank, the Heartland Industrial Partners.
David, we're so glad to have you here. It's an honor that you've flown down here and he's donating. There's no travel expenses or honorarium. He's doing this all on his own as a gift to the Mises Institute and a gift to us and everybody who will watch this on the internet and in the future on Mises.org. So please help me welcome Mr. David Stockman.
Well, thank you, Lew, and let me start by saying like everyone miseducated in the 1960s,
I've benefited enormously from economics in one lesson, the failure of the new economics
and all the other work of Henry Hazlitt, but I have to confess that my miseducation was
at Harvard Divinity School and the subject was not economics.
But I did try to get economically miseducated anyway by auditing John Kenneth Galbraith's
course on economics, not knowing at the time that I was going right to the heartland of
error.
Anyway, it seems that his lectures were exceedingly popular, something like a thousand students
would fight outside the hall to get in, but I soon learned that it was for the entertainment
value.
The first 30 minutes or so were non-stop canned jokes about the stupidity of Republicans,
of businessmen, of Wall Street, of most economists, and generally anyone who wasn't John Kenneth
Galbraith.
But of course, I came to these lectures for the substance which followed, and that was
as can too, but only later did I learn that this part of the lecture was the real joke
of the thing when all was said and done.
Anyway, I escaped Harvard not being miseducated in economics. I went to work on Capitol Hill.
I worked for a moderate Republican. We were allowed to read Newsweek in that office and
So as a result, I became educated directly for the first time by Henry Hazlitt's columns
week after week.
And so it really is a great honor to try to give a lecture today that may update and incorporate
and apply to the circumstances of the moment some of the enormous wisdom and fundamentally
correct economics that he wrote about and stood for for so long.
So I would start today by saying the triumph of crony capitalism occurred on October 3,
208. The event was the enactment of TARP, the single greatest economic policy abomination
since the 1930s, or perhaps ever. Like most other quantum leaps in status intervention,
the Wall Street bailout was justified as a last resort exercise in breaking the rules
to Save the System.
In the immortal words of George W. Bush, our most economically befuddled president since
FDR, I've abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system.
Now I've checked that out several times and he did say that, just in case anyone thinks
I'm exaggerating.
Based on the panicked advice of Paulson and Bernanke, of course, the president had the
misapprehension that without a bailout, quote, this sucker is going down, unquote.
Yet 30 months after the fact, evidence that the American economy had been on the edge
of a nuclear-style meltdown is nowhere to be found.
In fact, the only real difference with Iraq is that in the campaign against Saddam, we
found no weapons of mass destruction.
By contrast, in the campaign to save the economy, we actually used them, or at least their economic
equivalent.
Still the urban legend persists that in September 2008, this payment system was on the cusp
of Crashing, and that absence of bailouts, companies would have missed payrolls, ATMs
would have gone dark, and general financial disintegration would have ensued.
But the only thing that even faintly hints at this fiction is the commercial paper market
dislocation that occurred at the time.
Upon examination, however, it is evident that what actually evaporated in this sector was
is not the cash needed for payrolls, but billions in phony book profits which banks had previously
obtained through yield curve arbitrages, which were now violently unwinding.
At the time, the commercial paper market was about $2 trillion and was heavily owned by
institutional money market funds, including First Reserve, which was the granddaddy, with
about $60 billion in footings.
Most of this was rock-solid, but its portfolio also included a moderate batch of Lehman commercial paper, a performance enhancer, I guess you might call it, designed to garner a few extra bips of yield.
As it happened, this foolish exposure to a de facto hedge fund, which was leveraged 30 to 1, resulted in the humiliating disclosure that First Reserve broke the buck,
and that the somnolent institutional fund managers who were its clients would suffer
a loss, all of 3%. Well, that should have been a so-what moment, except then all the
other lemming institutions who were actually paying fees to money market funds for the
privilege of getting return-free risk decided to panic and demand redemption of their deposits.
This further step in the chain reaction basically meant that some maturing commercial paper
would not be rolled over due to money market redemptions.
But this outcome, too, was a so-what.
Nowhere was it written that GE Capital or Bank One's credit card conduit, to pick two
heavy users of this space, had a federal entitlement to cheap commercial paper so that they could
earned fat spreads on their loan books.
Regardless, the nation's number one crony capitalist, Jeff Imelt of GE, jumped on the
phone to Secretary Paulson and yelled fire.
Soon, the Fed and the FIDIC stopped the commercial paper on wine dead in its tracks by essentially
nationalizing the entire market.
Even a cursory look at the data, however, shows that Imelt's SOS call was a self-serving
Croc. First, about one trillion of the two trillion in outstanding commercial paper was
of the so-called ABCP type, asset-backed commercial paper, paper backed by packages of consumer
loans such as credit cards, auto loans and student loans. The ABCP issuers were off-balance
sheet conduits of commercial banks and finance companies. The latter originated the primary
Loans, and then scalp profits up front by selling these loan packages to their own conduits.
In short, had every single ABCP conduit, and there was a trillion, been liquidated for
want of commercial paper funding in the fall of 2008, and over the past three years most
have been, not a single consumer would have been denied a credit card authorization or
a car loan.
His or her bank would have merely booked the loan as an on-balance sheet asset rather than
an off-balance sheet asset.
The only noticeable difference on the entire financial planet would have been that a few
banks wouldn't have been able to scalp profits from on-season loans.
In this instance, it appears that President George W. Bush did, in fact, bomb the village
to save it.
Another $400 billion of this sector was industrial company CP, the kind of facility that some
blue-chip companies did use to fund their payroll. But there was not a single industrial
company in America then issuing commercial paper, which did not also have a standby bank
line behind its CP program. Moreover, since these companies had been paying a 15 or 20
Basis Point Standby Fee for years, their banks had a contractual obligation to fund these
backup lines and none refused. In short, there never was a chance that payrolls wouldn't
be met. The last $600 billion of CP is where the real crony capitalist stench lies. There
were two huge users of the finance company CP sector this last $600 billion, GMAC and
and GE Capital. At the time of the crisis, GE Capital had asset footings of $600 billion,
most of which were long-term, highly illiquid and sometimes sketchy corporate and commercial
real estate loans. In violation of every rule of sound banking, more than $80 billion of
these positions were funded in the super cheap commercial paper market. This maneuver, of
of course produced fat spreads on GE's loan book and big management bonuses too, but it also raised to a whole new level the ancient banking folly of mismatching short and hot liabilities with long and slow assets.
Under free market rules, an inability to roll $80 billion in CP would have forced GE Capital into a fire sale of illiquid loan assets at deep discounts, thereby incurring heavy losses and a reversal of its prior phony profits.
Funds, or in the alternative, it could have held the loan book and issued massively dilutive
amounts of common stock or subordinated debt to close its sudden funding gap.
Either way, GE shareholders would have taken the beating they deserved for overvaluing
the company's true earnings and for putting reckless managers in charge of the store.
So my point is that the financial meltdown during those eventful weeks was not triggered
by the financial equivalent of a comet from deep space, but resulted from leveraged speculation
that should have been punishable by ordinary market rules.
Viewed very broadly or more broadly, the carnage on Wall Street in September 2008 was the inevitable
financial crash from a 40-year financial bubble spawned by the Fed after Nixon closed the
gold window in August 1971. As time passed, the Fed's market rigging and money printing
actions had become increasingly destructive, leaving the banking system ever more unstable
and populated with a growing bevy of too-big-to-fail institutions. The 1984 rescue of Continental
of Illinois, the 1994 Mexican peso crisis bailouts, the Fed's 1998 life support operation
for long-term capital were all just steps along the way to September 2008.
Then, at that point, faced with the collapse of its own handiwork, Washington panicked
and joined the Fed in unleashing an indiscriminate bailout capitalism that has now thoroughly
really corrupted the halls of government even as it has become a debilitating blight on
the free market.
So in this context, the linkage between printing press money and fiscal profligacy merits special
attention.
Now there are no fiscal rules at all.
And already we have had cash for clunkers, cash for caulkers, and under the homeowners
Cash for Convicts. In any event, my belief is that the subprime meltdown was only a warm-up.
The real financial widow-maker of the present era is likely to be U.S. government debt itself.
The sheer budgetary facts are bracing enough. It needs to be recalled that fiscal year 211, now underway,
will encompass not a recession bottom, but the sixth through the ninth quarter of recovery.
During this interval of purported rebound, however, the White House now projects red
ink of 1.645 trillion.
This means that 43 cents on every dollar will be borrowed, every dollar spent will be borrowed,
thereby generating a financing requirement just shy of 11% of national income.
These elephantine figures mark a big lurch southward since the deficits only half this
size were expected for the current year as recently as last spring.
Notwithstanding, a full year of green shoots and booming stocks, however, Washington embraced
a monumental round of new fiscal stimulus in December, as you all recall.
The result was a trillion-dollar Christmas tree festooned with fiscal largesse for every
Citizen, inclusive of the quick as well as the dead. Moreover, this bounty was extended
without prejudice to each and every social class, with workers, the unemployed, the middle
class, the merely rich, and billionaires, too, getting a share. It would be foolish in
the extreme to dismiss this budgetary eruption as a fit of transient exuberance, even if
If by the President's own admission, the White House was in a shellacked state of mind and
in no position to restrain December's bipartisan stampede.
In fact, the United States is clocking a 10% of GDP deficit for the third year running
because this latest fling of budgetary excess is just another episode in the epochal collapse
of U.S. Financial Discipline that began 40 years ago at Camp David.
That the demise of the gold standard should have been as destructive of fiscal discipline
as it was of monetary probity can hardly be gainset.
Under the ancient regime of fixed exchange rates and currency convertibility, fiscal
deficits without tiers simply were not sustainable no matter what errant economic doctrines lawmakers
got into their heads. Back then, the machinery of honest money could be relied upon to trump
bad policy. Thus, if budget deficits were monetized by the central bank, this weakened the currency
and caused a damaging external drain of monetary reserves. And if the deficits were financed
out of savings, interest rates were pushed up, thereby crowding out private domestic
Investment.
Politicians did not have to be deeply schooled in Bastiat's parable of the seen and the
unseen.
The bitter fruits of chronic deficit finance were all too visible and immediate.
But during the four decades since the gold window was closed, the rules of the fiscal
game had been profoundly altered.
Specifically, under Professor Friedman's contraption of floating paper money, foreigners
Members may accumulate dollar claims or exchange them for other paper money, but there can
never be a drain on U.S. monetary reserves because dollar claims are not convertible.
The infernal engine of the fiat dollar, therefore, has had numerous lamentable consequences,
but among the worst is that it facilitated open-ended monetization of the U.S. government's
debt.
Now, monetization, as I'm sure you all know, can be done in two ways. First, there is outright
monetization, as is now being conducted by the Fed through its POMO program, that is,
its daily purchase of 4 to 8 billion of Treasury debt. Indeed, the Fed's QE2 bond purchases
of late have been so massive that it is literally buying Treasury paper in the secondary market
Market, almost as fast as new bonds are being issued. During January, for example, fully
40% of the Fed's $100 billion bond buy was from QCIP numbers, or that series of bonds,
that were less than 90 days old. Needless to say, putting brand new Treasury bonds in the
Fed's vault before they have paid even a single coupon is functionally equivalent to
and printing greenbacks. After all, under this type of high-speed round trip, virtually all the coupons from newly issued bonds will end up as incremental profit at the Fed and be remitted back to the Treasury at year-end, hence the money never leaves.
Stated differently, in the present era of massive quantitative easing, newly issued treasury
securities amount to non-interest bearing currency without the circulation privilege.
But over the last several decades, the preferred course has been indirect monetization.
That is, the world's legion of willing mercantilist exporters from China to the Persian Gulf have
have printed their own money in vast quantities ostensibly to peg their exchange rates but
with the effect of absorbing trillions of U.S. Treasury paper.
To be sure, the People's Money Warehouse in China and those in other mercantilist lands
are pleased to label these accumulations as sovereign wealth portfolios.
But the fact is these hordes of sequestered dollars are not classic monetary reserves derived
from a true sustainable surplus on current account.
Instead they are simply the book entry offset to the inflated local money supplies that have
been emitted by this global convoy of peggers, that is the mercantilist nation central banks
tethered to the Fed.
That this convoy is a potent mechanism for monetizing the U.S. debt is readily evident
by way of contrast with classic monetary systems anchored on a true reserve asset.
At the peak of its glory, before the guns of August 1914 laid at low, the sterling-based
gold standard operated smoothly with a London gold reserve amounting to 1 to 2% of British
GDP.
Likewise, in 1959, at the peak of Bretton Woods, the U.S. held 20 billion of gold reserves
against GDP of 500 billion. Again, at about 4% of GDP, the hard monetary reserves needed
to operate the system were extremely modest. The reason for parsimonious reserve quantities
under the gold standard was the fact of continuous settlement of trade accounts via the flow
and the outflow of monetary assets. In the case of a balance of payments deficit, for example, the outflow of reserve assets directly and immediately contracted domestic money markets and banking systems, setting in motion an automatic downward adjustment of domestic wages, prices and demand, and encouraging an upward move in exports and domestic production.
In the case of surplus countries, the adjustments were in the opposite direction.
Most importantly, with real economies constantly in adjustment,
central bank balance sheets stayed lean and mean.
By contrast, under the contraption that Professor Friedman inspired,
trade account balances are never settled.
They just grow and grow and grow
until one day they become the object of fruitless jabbering at a photo op society called G20.
In all fairness, Professor Friedman did not envision a world of rampant dirty floating.
Indeed, it would have taken a powerful imagination to foresee four decades ago that China would
would accumulate $3 trillion of foreign currency claims or more than 50% of its GDP and then
insist over a period of years and decades that it did not manipulate its exchange rate.
Still today there can be little doubt that China and other mercantilist exporters operate
massive monetary warehouses where they deposit treasury bonds acquired during their endless
and Business, Dollar Buying Campaigns. Moreover, the U.S. Treasury Department can now stop
splitting hairs about whether China is a reserve, is a currency manipulator because China just
admitted it. Recently, the Vice Chairman of the People's Bank of China, Yi Gang, asked
a good question, why do we have so much base money? He wondered. Said Mr. Yi, answering
in his own question, quote, the central bank buys up foreign exchange inflows.
If it didn't, the yuan wouldn't be so stable.
Nowhere now I would say there's one for the Guinness Book of Understatements if I ever
saw one.
So at the end of the day, American lawmakers have been free to the classic monetary constraints.
There is no monetary squeeze and there is no reserve asset drain.
The Fed always supplies reserves to the banking system to fund any and all private credit
demand at policy rates that are invariably low.
The notion of fiscal quote crowding out thus belongs to the museum of monetary history.
At the same time, the seemingly limitless emission of dollar claims by the U.S. Central
of Central Bank, results not in a contractionary drain of monetary reserves from the domestic
banking system, but in an expansionary accumulation of these claims in the vaults of central banks.
In less polite language, a growing portion of the federal debt has ended up in what amounts
belongs to a global chain of monetary roach motels, places where treasury bonds go in,
but they never come out.
In fact, foreign central banks hold 2.6 trillion of U.S. Treasuries at the New York Fed, while
the Fed itself owns 1.2 trillion of Treasury debt.
Add in at least a half trillion more Treasury paper that is officially held elsewhere, and
You have the startling fact that about $4.5 trillion or 50% of all the publicly held federal
debt ever issued has now been sequestered by central bankers.
With such a mighty bid from the world's central bankers, we have thus experienced what our
classically trained forebearers held to be impossible, a prolonged era of fiscal deficits
without tears.
To be sure, it took American politicians a decade or so to realize that the old rules
were no longer operative.
Helped immeasurably by the collapse of the Soviet war machine, Orthodox Senate Republicans
and Bourbon Democrats achieved for a fleeting moment the appearance of fiscal balance at
the turn of the century.
But it was not long before the cat was out of the bag.
In making the case for the Bush tax cuts of 2001, then Vice President Cheney summed up
But the new reality postulating that, quote, Reagan proved deficits don't matter.
He proved nothing, he proved no such thing, of course, but Republican politicians of the
George W. Bush era had most assuredly discovered that they could borrow with relative impunity.
Soon the GOP transformed the policy-based idea of lower marginal income tax rates from
from the Reagan era into a faith-based religion of tax cutting anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
So intense was the reawakening that the floor of the U.S. House became thronged with fiscal holy rollers,
throbbing and shaking and jerking and gesticulating as they exercised section after section of the revenue code.
By the time Bush and the Congressional Republicans were through in fiscal 2009, the revenue had been reduced to 14.9% of GDP, the lowest level since 1950 and far below the 18.4% level extant when Ronald Reagan left office.
To be sure, lowering the burden of taxation on the American economy is a compelling idea from both a philosophical and an economic policy viewpoint.
But deficit-financed tax cuts are a politician's snare and delusion.
Such fiscal actions do not actually reduce tax payments, they just defer the timing.
Moreover, the evidence of the last 30 years shows that preemptive tax cuts don't actually, quote, starve the beast,
notwithstanding the popularity of this nostrum among certain K Street philosophers
whose day job involves panhandling outside the Ways and Means Committee hearing room.
Indeed, even as the tax-cutting branch of the GOP busied itself giving every organized constituency in America some kind of special break,
including incentives to Iowa pig farmers to distill motor moonshine that they were pleased to call ethanol,
The dual fiscal burden of the American welfare state and warfare state were getting heavier,
not lighter.
Here, the GOP's neocon war department and its domestic porker division were busy too
pushing the federal spending to GDP ratio to record levels.
In this respect, the neocons deserve a special chapter in the annals of fiscal infamy.
Having pushed the American empire to take its stand on real estate of dubious merit
historically, that is, the bloody plains of the Tigris Euphrates and the desolate expanse
of the Hindu Kush, they persisted for the better part of the decade in refusing to finance
with Honest Taxation Wars which they could not win and would not end.
The cumulative tab for Iraq and Afghanistan now stands at $1.26 trillion.
And therein lies a stark tribute to the efficacy with which Professor Friedman's contraption
absorbs the federal debt.
The fact is, America's conservative party, so-called, did not even break a sweat as
it debt-financed what were, surely, two of the most elective foreign policy misadventures
ever undertaken.
Again, the contrast with canons of classical finance helps crystallize the picture.
Writing in 1924, Hartley Withers, eminent editor of The Economist and keeper of Badgett's
and its wisdom on matters of money and central banking lamented that British finances were
in shambles because the government had broken all the rules of proper war finance during
its battle with the Hun.
Rather than obtaining at least 50% of its revenue from current taxation and the balance
from the people's savings at an honest wage for capital, it had resorted to massive inflation
of Bank Credit and issuance of paper money, shin plasters, as they were known then, to
pay his majesty's bills.
Withers took special aim at England's first war chancellor, Lloyd George, thundering as
follows, quote, it is difficult to exaggerate the evil effects of the economic crime that
that he committed when in the spring of 1915 he imposed no taxation whatever to meet the
massive deficit which faced him.
So at the zenith of the monetary golden age, sound opinion held that it was an economic
crime to run the printing presses even when a million enemy soldiers were bivouacked across
Now, a hundred years later, monetizing the expense of pursuing a tall man and a hundred followers lost in the high Himalayas apparently doesn't even rank as a misdemeanor.
That's how far we've come.
It was in the domestic spending arena, however, where the newly liberated Bush Republicans put the pedal to the metal.
During the Reagan era there had been a modicum of progress in throttling the domestic welfare state with domestic spending dropping to 13.4% of GDP after having averaged 15.2% of GDP during the Carter years.
Moreover, after the next decade of divided government in the 90s, the size of the domestic welfare state had drifted upward but only a touch, clocking in at 13.5% of GDP by fiscal year 2000.
2000. The frightening thing about the American fiscal future lays in what happened next with
Republican control of both houses of Congress and the White House for six full years. Now
apologists such as Newt Gingrich had excused Reagan's mega-deficits on the grounds that
conservatives were not obligated to serve as tax collectors for the welfare state. And
fair enough. With divided government during Reagan's entire eight years, the political
Fiscal horsepower simply didn't exist to take on the three core entitlement programs,
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
By fiscal 2000, however, the big three entitlements alone cost $740 billion, or 7.5% of GDP.
The time for fundamental reform was long overdue, but a Republican policy offensive against
the fiscal heartland of the American welfare state never came.
Instead, Medicaid was actually expanded moderately at the behest of Republican governors, Medicare
spending was swollen by a huge new entitlement benefit for prescription drugs courtesy of
Big Pharma, and Social Security rolled along without even a sideways glance from the anti-spenders.
Consequently, outlays for the big three entitlements doubled to $1.425 trillion, or 10.1% of GDP
in Bush's final budget, thus upping the fiscal burden by one-third in only eight years.
But wait, as the late-night commercial admonishes, there's more.
In that most, in that modest 15% corner of the federal budget, known as domestic discretionary spending,
Bush-era Republicans went on a veritable rampage.
Homeland Security spending, for example, soared five-fold from $13 billion in 2000 to $59 billion in 2009.
Likewise, outlays for veterans programs rose from $47 billion in 2000 to nearly $100 billion by 2009.
Next there is the one President Reagan tried to abolish, the Department of Education.
Steaming in the opposite direction, the Bush Republicans doubled it from $33 billion to $66 billion.
While they touted this education spending explosion as evidence of, quote, compassionate conservatism,
the more apt characterization is that once Republicans embraced yet another function for the American welfare state,
they saw to it that no education lobby group would ever be left behind.
That's evident in the numbers.
During the same eight years, housing and community development spending also doubled to $60 billion along with a 75% rise in transportation, a swelling of farm support programs, an enactment of a $60 billion energy bill, providing subsidies for solar, wind, fuel cells, clean coal, fusion, ethanol. The exact menu Republicans once held could best be sorted out by the free market. In all, domestic spending during fiscal 2008 came in at a record
2.3 trillion. After 30 years of a rolling referendum on the welfare state, then the verdict
was clear. Eight years of Republican government had brought the burden of domestic spending
to 15.8% of national income, a figure materially higher than the average during the last period
of unified democratic government under Carter. Thus, while the impact of the Reagan Revolution
on the size of the U.S. government has always been immeasurably modest, it was now totally
erased.
The sorry Republican record on fiscal matters is not merely a morality tale.
When the conservative party and democracy embraces starve the beast on taxing and feed
the beast on spending, then fiscal governance breaks down badly.
You end up with two free lunch parties competing for the affections of the electorate, alternately
depleting the revenue base and then pumping up the spending.
Needless to say, this outcome bespeaks irony.
Milton Friedman was an unrelenting foe of big government and the American welfare state,
yet the global monetary contraption he inspired ensured its perpetuation.
Consider for example how the two-party free lunch competition has perverted the basic
Basic Budgeting Process. Here, the basic tool of long-term fiscal policy, the so-called
10-year budget projection, has been utterly corrupted by the need of both parties to disguise
the full measure of their profligacy. The most recent CBO baseline, for example, shows
the federal deficit declining from 11% of GDP this year to 3% by 2015, a trend which
Looks Like Progress. Unfortunately, this baseline outlook is now useless as it is riddled
with fiscal booby traps, as I call them, in the form of major costly entitlement and tax
law provisions that expire in an arbitrary, cliff-wise fashion one, two or three years
down the road. It is widely known, of course, that the Bush income tax rate cuts expire
expire promptly at midnight on December 31, 2012, causing a $200 billion per year pickup
in the revenue baseline thereafter, at least in the projections.
But what also happens on January 1, 2012, is that the $100 billion abatement of payroll
taxes abruptly expires, and so does the so-called AMT patch.
The latter means that the number of taxpayers facing the alternate minimum tax jumps from
from $4 million to $33 million, causing the projected annual revenue take to rise from
$34 billion under the patch, temporary, to $129 billion permanent.
Likewise, the 15% tax rate in corporate dividends will jump to 40% in 2013, the estate tax goes
back up, all the tax credits that are now in place expire and so forth.
Adding together, the December Christmas tree contained temporary tax provisions worth 3.8%
of GDP, the equivalent of $650 billion annually, that will have completely expired by 2014.
The resulting big uptick in revenue seems antiseptic enough when viewed on the computer
screen.
However, were these provisions to expire in real life, upwards of 100 million different
Taxpayers would take a hit. Consequently, most of these tax breaks won't expire. Their
due date will just be kicked down the road a couple of years as part of the annual quote
rinse and repeat exercise which now passes for budget making. The picture is not much
different on the spending side. Something called the dock fix has been enacted repeatedly,
a measure which temporarily waives the twenty percent drop in Medicare fees billed into
current law. Now upon passage the politicians collect their election year medications from
the grateful physician's lobby while taking credit for a thirty billion future annual
spending reduction when the waiver expires, but of course it won't. Likewise under extended
unemployment benefits ten million workers get various quote extended tiers of the unemployment
Insurance Program at an annual cost of $150 billion, but under current law, nearly two-thirds
of this cost is deemed temporary, meaning that out-year budget projections only show
$50 billion of annual expense.
The reality, however, is that to avoid a cold turkey shock, Congress has repeatedly voted
extensions at the eleventh hour and will again in 2012.
Going forward, there can be little doubt that the GOP is determined to forestall nearly
all of the tax law expirations currently scheduled, including the rate cuts, capital gains, estate
tax, dividends, business credits, and so forth.
This means that baseline revenue is only about 16 to 17 percent of GDP according to current
Republican policy doctrine.
At the same time, when you remove the spending expiration booby traps, it appears that current
The current policy for outlays is advocated by the Democrats, and most of the Republicans too, is about 24% of GDP.
So if you go by the math of it, the current bipartisan policy path results in a permanent fiscal deficit of 7 to 8% of GDP.
That would amount to about $7 trillion in new bond issuance over the next five years
alone and take the total public debt in the United States to over 100% of GDP.
There is no telling, of course, as to how much more of Uncle Sam's debt the monetary
roach motels of the world can ultimately absorb.
But since American politicians no longer fear deficits because they have been successfully
There is one powerful factor, however, suggesting that the man with his the end is near sign
may show up any day now.
Specifically, the aforementioned 1.5 trillion per year of current policy deficits, as far
as the eye can see, assumes that we are having a Keynesian moment, not an Austrian one.
The new White House budget, for example, postulates that the Keynesian medication has worked like
a charm.
Thus, there will be no recession for the next 10 years, although we have averaged one every
4.3 years since 1947.
It also assumes that real GDP growth will average 3.2% over the next decade or double
the 1.7% average during the past decade.
Finally, it projects the U.S. economy will generate 20 million new jobs during the coming
Decade compared to only 1.7 million during the last 10 years.
As the man with the sign also said, good luck with that.
In any event, the already baleful deficit projections would grow by trillions more under
plausible economic assumptions.
But the more crucial point is that the dead hand of Richard Nixon keeps showing up on
on the Fiscal Playing Field. Echoing Tricky Dick, today's GOP has once again embraced
the Keynesian faith, even if it has been robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous
classes, that is, in a preference to ameliorate cyclical weakness with tax cut stimulants
rather than spending sprees. But notwithstanding choice of stimulants, Republicans too believe
believe that the U.S. economy is in a conventional business cycle, and that the rebound remains
much too fragile to tolerate any jarring fiscal actions. Thus, the renaissance Keynesian consensus
will result in kicking the fiscal can down the road again, again, and again. It is here
that the true fiscal nightmare arises, owing to the possibility that this mainstream outlook
is completely erroneous, and that the nation's deep economic ills are rooted in the massive
excess debt burden accumulated on the U.S. balance sheet after 1971. In that event, we
would be in the midst of an Austrian debt deflation, not a Keynesian cyclical rebound.
From a fiscal perspective, a prolonged debt deflation would be the coup de grace. That's
That's because debt deflation crush nominal GDP growth owing to the evaporation of credit-fueled
additions to spending.
In turn, lower nominal GDP growth is bad news for revenues because what we tax, obviously,
is money incomes.
Moreover, the actual GDP data suggests that debt deflation is already resident in the
numbers.
Total U.S. credit market debt essentially stopped growing in late 2007 at a level slightly
above $50 trillion compared to $14.3 trillion of GDP.
During the three years since late 2007, total debt growth has been a tepid 1.5 percent annual
rate with public debt growing much faster than this and financial and household sector
liabilities actually shrinking.
Not surprisingly, nominal or money GDP growth has gained only $530 billion during the 36
months since the peak, meaning that the annualized growth rate has only been 1.2%. There is no
three year streak that anemic anywhere in the data since the 1930s. Moreover, even if
If you allow for the alleged rebound since June 2009, the rate of money GDP growth has
been only 3.8% and was actually just 3.2% in the most recent quarter.
By contrast, the new White House budget projects money GDP growth of 5.6% per annum over the
next five years, meaning that nominal GDP would reach 20 trillion by that latter date.
At a 3.5% lower rate, however, which has tripled the growth rate of the last three years and
in line with the post-June 2009 rate of advance, money GDP would come in at only $18 trillion
by 2016.
Now this $2 trillion variance might be written off to wild blue speculation.
Then again, at the current marginal federal tax yield, the implied revenue shortfall of
The Infernal Engine of the Dollar may thus have been doubly diabolical on the fiscal
front.
First, it hooked the American political system on the Deficits Don't Matter Theorem by eliminating
between the economically painful squeezes and drains on the monetary system that traditionally
accompanied fiscal deficits. Secondly, to the extent that it fueled a debt super cycle that
swelled from 1980 until 2008, it generated a false prosperity and a bubble-derived fiscal
windfalls that have now evaporated. Shortly after Nixon closed the gold window in August
In 1971, Secretary Connolly, many of you recall him, famously told an assemblage of foreign
central bankers that, quote, the dollar is our currency, but it's your problem.
Of course, the esteemed secretary had studied at the Wright-Patman School of Texas Finance,
of course, and not the University of Chicago.
But he nevertheless shared Professor Friedman's assurance that floating the dollar would eliminate
the nettlesome problem of the U.S. current account deficit, that is, such trade adjustments
as might be needed would be done by non-dollar speakers in the global economy.
Spree now says otherwise and resoundingly so. Indeed, once relieved of the immediate pain
of self-correcting contractionary drains on our domestic money markets and banking systems,
the U.S. was free to go on a monumental borrowing spree denominated in the world's reserve currency.
At the same time, there emerged up and down the East Asian main rulers enamored with a
a development model amounting to export mercantilism. This scheme produced a plenitude of factory
jobs and social quietude internally while generating massive external surpluses that
could be recycled into vendor financing for ever-expanding export volumes. The resulting
mutant symbiosis between the American economy and the East Asian mercantilist exporters
spawned a long-term outcome that Milton Friedman held to be impossible
under floating exchange rates. Namely, 33 consecutive years
of deep current account deficits at three to five percent of GDP,
external deficits which now have cumulated
to more than seven trillion dollars since the late 1970s.
Now the fly in the theoretical ointment, of course, is that by pegging their
currencies
The East Asian exporters and Persian Gulf oilies have permanently forestalled balancing their
external accounts by accepting cheaper and cheaper dollars as prescribed by Texas-style
monetarism.
Thereby retaining their export surpluses, the mercantilist exporters have accumulated
treasury bonds from the backhaul.
Accordingly, the nine trillion of current global forex reserves, mostly held by the
and the aforementioned peggers are not monetary reserves in any meaningful sense.
They are effectively vendor-financed export loans, and they are what make the present
economic world go round.
They are also what made the U.S. balance sheet go parabolic.
For a century after the resumption of convertibility in 1879, the ratio of total U.S. debt, both
private and public to national income was remarkably stable despite cycles of
war and peace and boom and bust this national leverage ratio oscillated
closely about around 1.6 times call this remarkably stable ratio of total debt to
national income the golden constant note further that after the events of August
Since 1971, this heretofore stable national leverage ratio broke out to the upside and
never looked back.
By the middle 1990s, it had reached 2.6 times and then soared to 3.6 times national income
by 2007, where it remains.
Stated differently, we have added two full terms of debt on the national income since
1980, an outcome which amounts to a nationwide LBO.
Now the volume of incremental debt now being lugged about by the national economy owing
to this debt spree is startling.
In round dollar terms, total credit market debt would currently be 22 billion under the
golden constant, i.e. 1.6 times 14.5 trillion of GDP.
But today it is actually 52 trillion, or 3.6 times.
Now Wall Street bulls and Keynesian economists, to indulge in a redundancy, insist that this
extra 30 billion of debt is no sweat.
Presumably they would otherwise not be forecasting 10 years of standard growth with no recession
and would not be capitalizing corporate earnings at the conventional 15 times EPS.
Put another way, by the lights of mainstream opinion, our parabolic departure from the golden
constant of leverage apparently represents nothing more than a late blooming enlightenment,
the shedding of ancient superstitions about the perils of too much debt in households,
businesses and government.
If this were true, it would be a pity.
Had our benighted financial forbearers only known better, they would have levered up the
U.S. economy long ago, producing unimagined surges of growth and wealth.
Indeed, economic miracles like the Internet might have been generated at a far earlier
time, say in 1950, not 1990.
And it might have been invented by Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, rather than
The alternative possibility, however, is that our financial forebears actually knew a thing
or two about finance. Perhaps they understood that in not settling our accounts with the
world, we were merely borrowing GDP, not growing it. The numbers, in fact, suggest exactly
During the era of the Golden Constant, about $1.50 a debt growth accompanied each dollar of GDP growth.
By 1989, each dollar of GDP growth took $2.50 of debt increase, and by 1999, the ratio rose to $3.30.
After this, it was off to the races. When the debt super-cycle Apogee came in 2007,
In 2007, it took $4 trillion of debt growth that year alone to produce just $700 billion
of incremental GDP.
At that point, the debt-to-income growth ratio had climbed to six times.
And shortly thereafter, the man from Citigroup finally stopped dancing, as you all remember.
The evaporation of artificially inflated income growth and the bursting of the asset bubbles
which inexorably followed this kind of debt super cycle have arrived at their appointed
time.
And the financial condition of the household sector suggests that the postulated Austrian
moment may have a hang time measured in years or even a decade, not months or a quarter.
First, the adjustment in household balance sheets to date has been in the marking down
of housing assets, not any material shrinkage of debt outstanding.
Specifically, household net worth has dropped by $9 trillion, or about 14% since the final
quarter of 2007.
However, only $380 billion, or 4% of this decline, is attributable to reduced debt.
The rest is owing to shrinking asset values.
So by the lights of the golden constant, we still have a long way to go.
Indeed, back in 1975, when America's baby boomers were still young, total household
debt, including mortgages, car loans, credit cards, and bingo wagers, were $730 billion,
or about 45% of GDP.
But today, the far older baby boom-led household sector now has shed almost no pounds since
Since the crisis of 2008, total household sector debt outstanding is still $13.4 trillion,
or 91% of GDP, double where we started.
It is always possible, of course, that the 78 million baby boomers now marching straight
away into retirement will hit the credit juice one more time.
But the only household debt still growing is on the other end of the demographic curve.
All student loans outstanding, subprime credits by definition, now total one trillion and
exceed all of the nation's outstanding credit card debt.
We've seen this movie before and it doesn't end happily.
If in the future households have to earn, not borrow, what they spend, that 3.5% assumption
about money GDP growth might look a lot more plausible.
The fact is, organic income is not growing at even 3%.
A shocking point buried in the statistics of our government-medicated recovery is that
since the Q3-208 meltdown, personal consumption spending is up by $400 billion or nearly 4%.
But private wages and salaries are still $100 billion or 2% below where they were before
The Plunge. Again, these figures are nominal, not deflated dollars. Looking at the data
since 1950, you can't find a period in which private money wages were down for even three
months, let alone nearly two and a half years. Consequently, we have been able to keep up
the appearance of consumption spending growth, even if tepid, only by resort to Uncle Sam's
Times credit card. Specifically, the gap between wages, which are still down and spending,
which is up, has been filled by government transfer payments, all of which were funded
on the margin with new borrowings. Transfer payments have risen by nearly $500 billion
from the Q3-208 rate. Thus, the Fed and its global convoy of monetary roach motels have
have been the source of the entire intervening gain in U.S. personal consumption expenditures
and then some.
When all else fails, of course, the possibility remains that a rebound of job growth could
revive wage and salary incomes and get the GDP juices flowing again at more normal rates,
rates compatible with a Keynesian recovery rather than an Austrian deflation.
Well, as the man also said, good luck with that one too.
The January non-farm payroll number was 130.5 million, a figure first reached in November
1999, 12 years ago.
And that is the encouraging part of the story.
Way back then there were 72 million, quote, I call them breadwinner jobs in the U.S. economy,
That is jobs in manufacturing, construction, distribution, finance insurance, real estate,
information technology, the professions and white collar services.
Average pay levels were $50,000 per year in today's dollars.
A decade later, in February 2011, there were only 65 million of these same breadwinner
jobs left in the economy, 10% less.
To be sure, this large drain was offset by a 6 million job gain over the decade in what
I call the HES complex, Health Education and Social Services.
But the 30 million total jobs in the HES complex have much lower average pay at about $35,000
per year, so we were trading down, and their funding is almost entirely derived from the
public purse, which is broke.
Consequently, the era of robust job growth in the HES complex is nearly over.
After experiencing job gains averaging $50,000 per month in health, education, social services
during all of 2000-2007, the rate has now dropped to less than $20,000 per month as
the fiscal noose has tightened.
That leaves what might be termed the part-time economy.
35 million jobs in retail, bars, restaurants, hotels, personal services and temp agencies.
The average wage in this segment is just $19,000 per year.
Thus, from the point of view of economic throw weight, not so much.
Other than providing intermittent spells of gainful employment for bellboys and barhops,
This segment supports no families and funds no savings, even if it does give Wall Street
economists something to count.
None of this bodes well for a spirited Keynesian recovery or even a toothless one.
Accordingly, the U.S. economy is likely stuck in an extended Austrian moment, and the U.S.
deficit is likely beached in the 1.5 to 2 trillion annual range as far as the eye can see.
When it soon becomes evident that most of the 60 billion of appropriations so noisily
cut by the House Republicans is mainly smoke and mirrors and a fiscal rounding error to boot,
the test of Professor Friedman's floating rate fiat money contraption may finally come.
Maybe there is room for trillions more of government bonds to be absorbed by the mighty bid of the Fed
and its chain of monetary roach motels.
But looking back to 1971, it seems possible that even the ever-visionary Richard Nixon
did not then realize the ultimate consequence of closing the gold window
and opening the door to China in such close couple.
At that moment, the China rural economy, the only one it ever had, was prostrate under the weight of 45 million dead from starvation and far more debilitated and destitute owing to the great helmsman's economic follies.
By underwriting a 40-year debt super-cycle, however, the newly unshackled Fed fueled unstinting
American demand for the output of East China's rapidly expanding export factories.
In so doing, it also drained China's stricken rice paddies of their nimble young fingers
In this context, a clue to the next phase of this saga may lie in the contrafactual.
Had Nixon kept the gold window open, China would have accumulated bullion, not bonds.
America would have experienced deflationary austerity, not inflationary bubbles.
And federal deficits, fiscal deficits, would have mattered a lot.
Thus, today's terminally imbalanced world has evolved at complete variance with the
The outcome that could have been expected under a regime of sound money.
The risk is that the doomsday system for global money and trade, which has metastasized since
1971, may be approaching its end game.
By all appearances, Mao's great rural swamp has now pretty much been drained.
Global wages will therefore start rising because even Walmart has not been able to discover
another country inhabited by millions of $1 per day workers.
In that environment, the people's printing press in China will have to drastically slow
its creation of RMB and therefore its capacity to absorb Treasury bonds.
This fellow traveling central banks throughout its feeder system of mercantilist exporters
will likely follow its lead.
At that point, the Fed will be the last bid standing.
But if it keeps buying bonds, Mr. Market may be inclined to sell dollars with prejudice,
if not violence.
If it stops buying the bond, at what price can trillions more of federal debt find a
place in real risk-based private portfolios? Either way, it will be a grand experiment.
But as they say on television, it's definitely not something that should be tried at home.
Thank you very much.