US Economy a House of Cards/Paul Craig Roberts

Details: Published on Wednesday, 30 April 2014 14:20; Written by editor

US Economy Is A House Of Cards

Paul Craig Roberts

The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics.

American capitalism itself is an illusion. All financial markets are rigged. Massive liquidity poured into financial markets by the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing inflates stock and bond prices and drives interest rates, which are supposed to be a measure of the cost of capital, to zero or negative, with the implication that capital is so abundant that its cost is zero and can be had for free. Large enterprises, such as mega-banks and auto manufacturers, that go bankrupt are not permitted to fail. Instead, public debt and money creation are used to cover private losses and keep corporations “too big to fail” afloat at the expense not of shareholders but of people who do not own the shares of the corporations.

Profits are no longer a measure that social welfare is being served by capitalism’s efficient use of resources when profits are achieved by substituting cheaper foreign labor for domestic labor, with resultant decline in consumer purchasing power and rise in income and wealth inequality. In the 21st century, the era of jobs offshoring, the US has experienced an unprecedented explosion in income and wealth inequality. I have made reference to this hard evidence of the failure of capitalism to provide for the social welfare in the traditional economic sense in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, and Thomas Piketty’s just published book, Capital in the 21st Century, has brought an alarming picture of reality to insouciant economists, such as Paul Krugman. As worrisome as Piketty’s picture is of inequality, I agree with Michael Hudson that the situation is worse than Piketty describes. http://michael-hudson.com/2014/04/pikettys-wealth-gap-wake-up/

Capitalism has been transformed by powerful private interests whose control over governments, courts, and regulatory agencies has turned capitalism into a looting mechanism. Wall Street no longer performs any positive function. Wall Street is a looting mechanism, a deadweight loss to society. Wall Street makes profits by front-running trades with fast computers, by selling fraudulent financial instruments that it is betting against as investment grade securities, by leveraging equity to unprecedented heights, making bets that cannot be covered, and by rigging all commodity markets.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury’s “Plunge Protection Team” aid the looting by supporting the stock market with purchases of stock futures, and protect the dollar from the extraordinary money-printing by selling naked shorts into the Comex gold futures market.

The US economy no longer is based on education, hard work, free market prices and the accountability that real free markets impose. Instead, the US economy is based on manipulation of prices, speculative control of commodities, support of the dollar by Washington’s puppet states, manipulated and falsified official statistics, propaganda from the financial media, and inertia by countries, such as Russia and China, who are directly harmed, both economically and politically, by the dollar payments system.

As the governments in most of the rest of the world are incompetent, Washington’s incompetence doesn’t stand out, and this is Washington’s salvation.

But it is not a salvation for Americans who live under Washington’s rule. As all statistical evidence makes completely clear, the share of income and wealth going to the bulk of the US population is declining. This decline means the end of the consumer market that has been the mainstay of the US economy. Now that the mega-rich have even more disproportionate shares of the income and wealth, what happens to an economy based on selling imports and off-shored production of goods and services to a domestic consumer market? How do the vast majority of Americans purchase more when their incomes have not grown for years and have even declined and they are too impoverished to borrow more from banks that won’t lend?

The America in which I grew up was self-sufficient. Foreign trade was a small part of the economy. When I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the US still had a trade surplus except for oil. Offshoring of America’s jobs had not begun, and US earnings on its foreign investments exceeded foreign earnings on US investments. Therefore, America’s earnings abroad covered its energy deficit in its balance of trade.

The economic stability achieved during the Reagan administration was shattered by Wall Street greed. Wall Street threatened corporations with takeovers if the corporations did not produce higher profits by relocating their production of goods and services for American markets abroad. The lower labor costs boosted earnings and stock prices and satisfied Wall Street’s cravings for ever more earnings, but brought an end to the rise in US living standards except for the mega-rich. Financial deregulation loaded the economy with the risks of asset bubbles.

Americans are an amazingly insouciant people. By now any other people would have burnt Wall Street to the ground.

Washington has unique subjects. Americans will take endless abuse and blame some outside government for their predicament–Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, China, Russia. Such an insouciant and passive people are ideal targets for looting, and their economy, hollowed-out by looting, is a house of cards.

Copyright © 2013 Paul Craig Roberts Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Roberts’ book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, is a must read for those who realize that we must re-think.

"Clearly, this empirically based, theoretically challenging book is one of the most important works of our time." Johannes Maruschzick writes, in the Preface to the German Edition.

"Clearly, this empirically based, theoretically challenging book is one of the most important works of our time." Johannes Maruschzick, from the Preface to the German Edition."Clearly, this empirically based, theoretically challenging book is one of the most important works of our time." Johannes Maruschzick, from the Preface to the German Edition."Clearly, this empirically based, theoretically challenging book is one of the most important works of our time." Johannes Maruschzick, from the Preface to the German Edition."Clearly, this empirically based, theoretically challenging book is one of the most important works of our time." Johannes Maruschzick, from the Preface to the German Edition.

ISBN 978-0-9860362-5-5
$18.95 190 pp. 2013

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PAPERBACK EDITION

This is the book to read for those who want to understand the agenda that is bringing the West to its knees.

THE FAILURE OF LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM and the Economic Dissolution of the West

Towards a New Economics for a Full World

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

available in US/Canada and Overseas

"In his inimitable way, Roberts describes how the rhetorical patter talk about free-markets is a cover story for the horror of an extractive asset-stripping operation by publicly-supported private banks and the governments that they control that impoverishes people and the environment. He shows that unrealistic assumptions made by free-trade ideologues have led to the "New Dispossession" and a political and economic race to the bottom, applauded as a success story by junk economists, who ignore the reductions in living standards and rise in environmental instability." MICHAEL HUDSON

"The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism is fearless. It transcends Roberts’ illustrious career and prior works of intellectual and practical analysis. We are at the crossroads of a crumbling world where both policies and ideologies have failed. Roberts shows the dangers of clinging to the idea that markets are free and to the belief that unrestrained and unregulated capitalism is positive. Jobs offshoring destroyed middle class prospects, and financial deregulation fostered a rapacious banking industry that has removed itself from market discipline and threatens Western economies with collapse. Roberts’ conclusions are sobering, his solutions bold, his book a compelling gift." NOMI PRINS

This book is a major challenge both to economic theory and to media explanations of the ongoing 21st century economic crisis. It outlines how the one percent have pulled off an economic and political revolution. By offshoring manufacturing and professional service jobs, US corporations destroyed the growth of consumer income, the basis of the US economy, leaving the bulk of the population mired in debt. Deregulation was used to concentrate income and wealth in fewer hands and in financial corporations "too big to fail." Bailouts remove financial corporations from market discipline and force taxpayers in the US and EU to cover banksters' gambling losses.

Environmental destruction has accelerated as economists and corporations refuse to count the exhaustion of nature’s resources as a cost, imposing it on the environment and on third parties who do not share in the profits. In much of the Third World the growth model imposes monocultures that deprive people of independence and self-sufficiency

The American people do not benefit. In fact, "Globalism," Roberts writes, "is a conspiracy against First World jobs." In addition to offshoring, business leaders are replacing Americans with foreigners in those jobs that they find convenient to retain in the US. Fraudulently claiming that they cannot find enough Americans with science and engineering degrees to fill the jobs, they successfully lobby Congress for work visas for foreigners, who replace American scientific, engineering, and technical employees at substantially lower costs in order to concentrate income and wealth at the top.

No one seems to understand that research, development, design, and innovation take place in countries where things are made. The loss of manufacturing means ultimately the loss of engineering and science. The newest plants embody the latest technology. If these plants are abroad, that is where the cutting edge resides.

According to a new United Nations Development Program report, the US ranks third among states with the worst income inequality, after Hong Kong and Singapore. Clearly in the US the ladders of upward mobility have been taken down. The US is no longer an opportunity society.

There is no economic recovery.

"Economists who have spent their professional lives rationalizing “globalism” as good for America," Roberts writes, "have no idea of the disaster that they have wrought." As a result, the United States has become a failed democracy. Washington has no concern for the economic welfare of citizens or for their civil liberties or those of its European puppet states. Washington serves the interest groups that control it, and these groups are committed to financial fraud, disinformation and war.

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