And his latest book is published by CounterPunch?
Posted on 02/06/2010 8:39:19 AM PST by 1rudeboy
Economic theory has been shattered because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force.
The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan answered that he had placed his trust in a flawed theory when he was called before Congress to explain why he, Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, prevented Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation, a government regulatory agency, from doing her job of regulating over-the-counter derivatives.
The efficient markets theory is that unregulated markets are efficient and rational. According to this theory in which Greenspan placed his trust, unregulated markets produce the best possible result. Any regulatory interference worsens the outcome.
Greenspan blamed his own bad judgment on a theory. The theory, or Greenspan’s understanding of it, nevertheless still holds sway as Congress has proved impotent to re-regulate the gambling casino that is Wall Street. Clearly, the theory serves powerful interests.
But what is the truth?
The truth is that markets are a social institution. Their efficiency depends on the rules that govern the behavior of people in markets. When free market economists talk about markets deciding this or that, they are reifying a social institution and ascribing to it decision-making power. But, of course, markets do not act or make decisions. People act and make decisions, and markets reflect the decisions and actions of people.The entire debate over regulation is misconstrued. It is not the market, an efficient social institution, which is regulated. What is regulated is the behavior of people in markets.
If you want good results from markets, good regulation of human behavior is a requirement.
The market is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.
If people who use markets are not regulated, they issue fraudulent financial instruments. They leverage assets with absurd amounts of debt. They market their instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings. They deal themselves aces.
Did Greenspan not know this? Was he a victim of a theory or an enabler of greed unleashed by the absence of regulation?
The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich. But the U.S. government is guilty of an even greater failure. Washington has not only permitted but also encouraged the unemployment of its citizens by enabling greed-driven corporations to send American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits for CEOs’ bonuses, shareholders, and Wall Street.
As Ralph Gomory has made clear, economic theory has been shattered because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force.
This dispossession of American labor has been heralded by offshoring’s pimps in the major universities as "the New Economy."
The "New Economy" is a hoax like most everything else the bought-and-paid-for-media feeds to Americans. There is no new economy. There is an unemployed economy. The headlined unemployment rate is just over 10 per cent. The real unemployment rate, as measured by the current methodology is 17 per cent. The unemployment rate as measured by the methodology of 1980 is 22 per cent.
If jobs offshoring is a benefit to America, as the hired pimps of the transnational corporations claim, why is more than one-fifth of the U.S. work force unemployed? Why does the U.S. have the largest trade deficits in world history? Why is the U.S. dollar losing value over time to other tradable currencies?
Greed, and elected representatives who are toadies to special interests, are decimating the American economy.
Consider President Obama’s budgets for 2010 and 2011. The combined red ink is $2.9 trillion. No one anywhere in the world has this kind of money to lend to Washington. How will these massive deficits, never before experienced on earth, be financed? They can only be financed by the Federal Reserve destroying its own balance sheet by its purchase of toxic financial instruments from the banks thereby providing the banks with cash with which to buy the Treasury’s bonds, or by the Federal Reserve itself purchasing the Treasury’s bonds by creating new money, or by another collapse in equity values that sends investors fleeing into "safe" Treasury bonds.
American power is on the precipice, about to fall. Perhaps it is a good thing. The world will be rid of bullying, of invasions of innocent countries based on blatant lies, of torture and murder of woman and children, of redistribution of income from the poor to the rich.
The criminal record accumulated by the United States makes it the least indispensable country on earth.
And his latest book is published by CounterPunch?
PCR is off his meds again.
The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the (lazy, over-paid, unionized) American work force.
He drank the leftist koolaid.
He’s a moonbat with a resume.
Another idiot who would like americans to be less productive by keeping disfunctional manufacturing jobs here in the states just so corporations could “employ” people. It’s Americans who have to stop clamoring for labor intensive jobs that we can no longer afford to do here and retrain themselves for more techical employment..
“More technical employment” walks right out the door with the first contract to India.
There is no silver bullet to what has become a national security issue. I would vote for returning government funding to the old tariff-based system as much as possible.
So it appears that another whack-job lib is decrying free markets. I bet he also wonders why no one buys his newspaper any more!
This moonbat wants to erect artificial barriers - determined by armies of bureaucrats - as a defense against other industrious people around the globe. So as to try to re-establish the temporary dominance that Americans briefly enjoyed after WWII. We need more and freer trade, not less of it. Does this jerk actually think that billions of other people were going to be satisfied remaining peasants forever?
That is exactly right. I have this argument with my Uncle. I remind him that we are guaranteed the “pursuit of happiness (wages through employment, profit through investment)”, not guaranteed employment, with ever increasing wages because we learned to put the left rear fender on an Edsel in 1960.
The 20th century found big tyrannical government in all it's forms of “-isms” produced over 260 million deaths all in the name of the allusive ‘perfect Soviet man’ ......
Vigilance, it is the best protection of our freedoms, a silent majority no more.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Thomas Jefferson
The socialist solution fetish: The solution to rich corporations with power, (corporations that have to make consumers happy and answer to their shareholders) , is to make even more powerful a government that grabs the loot and answers to nobody.
Isn't that pretty much a given with any sort of employment? Asking the government to step in causes more problems than it solves. And tariffs simply save some jobs at the cost of others.
If I had to guess, I’d say Mr. Roberts attends a church that heavily preaches The Social Gospel.
Wrong, IT is making a huge comeback here. There are various reasons, but the main one is that Americans have been at it longer and are more competent. Even customer handling is slowly coming back here as corporations have realized that an indian accent at the other end of the phone costs them customers.
I wonder if this idiot has ever heard of the Community Reinvestment Act.
I thought he made excellent points then he spews this buffoonery. Mental issues?
IT has to be done right for overseas development and administration to work well, but General Electric has got that problem licked six ways from Sunday. Ask for an IT job at GE and they will laugh at you.
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