Prosper Australia

photo credit: elodole

MICHAEL HUDSON

Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times yesterday, February 16 outlining how to put the U.S. economy on rations. Not in those words, of course. Just the opposite: If the government hadn’t bailed out Wall Street’s bad loans, he claims, “unemployment could have exceeded the 25 per cent level of the Great Depression.” Without wealth at the top, there would be nothing to trickle down.

The reality, of course, is that bailing out casino capitalist speculators on the winning side of A.I.G.’s debt swaps and CDO derivatives didn’t save a single job. It certainly hasn’t lowered the economy’s debt overhead. But matters will soon improve, if Congress will dispel the present cloud of “uncertainty” as to whether any agency less friendly than the Federal Reserve might regulate the banks.

Paulson spelled out in step-by-step detail the strategy of “doing God’s work,” as his Goldman Sachs colleague Larry Blankfein sanctimoniously explained Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Now that pro-financial free-market doctrine is achieving the status of religion, I wonder whether this proposal violates the separation of church and state. Neoliberal economics may be a travesty of religion, but it is the closest thing to a Church that Americans have these days, replete with its Inquisition operating out of the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Columbia.

If the salvation is to give Wall Street a free hand, anathema is the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency intended to deter predatory behavior by mortgage lenders and credit-card issuers. The same day that Paulson’s op-ed appeared, the Financial Times published a report explaining that “Republicans say they are unconvinced that any regulator can even define systemic risk. … the whole concept is too vague for an immediate introduction of sweeping powers. …” Republican Senator Bob Corker from Tennessee was willing to join with the Democrats “to ensure ‘there is not some new roaming regulator out there … putting companies unbeknownst to them under its regime.”

Paulson uses the same argument: Because the instability extends not just to the banks but also to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, A.I.G. and Wall Street underwriters, it would be folly to try to regulate the banks alone! And because the financial sector is so far-flung and complex, it is best to leave everything deregulated. Indeed, there simply is no time to discuss what kind of regulation is appropriate, except for the Fed’s familiar protective hand: “delays are creating uncertainty, undermining the ability of financial institutions to increase lending to businesses of all sizes that want to invest and fuel our recovery.” So Paulson’s crocodile tears are all for the people. (Except that the banks are not lending at home, but are shoveling money out of the U.S. economy as fast as they can.)

As Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it, a crisis is too good a thing to waste. Having created the crisis, Wall Street wants to use its momentum to knock out any potential checks to its power. “No systemic risk regulator, no matter how powerful, can be relied on to see everything and prevent future problems,” Paulson explained. “That’s why our regulatory system must reinforce the responsibility of lenders, investors, borrowers and all market participants to analyze risk and make informed decisions,” In other words, blame the victims! The way to protect victims of predatory bank lending (and crooked sales of junk securities) is not new regulations but just the opposite: “to simplify the patchwork quilt of regulatory agencies and improve transparency so that consumers and investors can punish excesses through their own informed investing decisions.” Simplification means the Fed, not a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Moving in for the kill, Paulson explains that the Treasury is bare, having used $13 trillion to bail out high finance in 2008-09. So he warns the government not to run a Keynesian-type budget deficit. The federal budget should move into balance or even surplus, even if this accelerates the rise in unemployment and decline in wage levels as the economy moves deeper into recession and debt deflation. “We must also tackle what is by far our greatest economic challenge — the reduction of budget deficits — a big part of which will involve reforming our major entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.” The economy thus is to be sacrificed to Wall Street rather than reforming finance so that it serves the economy more productively. It is simple mathematics to see that if the government cannot raise taxes, it must scale back Social Security, other social welfare spending and infrastructure spending.

What is remarkably left out of account is that today’s financial crisis, centered on public debts, is largely a fiscal crisis in character. It is caused by replacing progressive taxation with regressive taxes, and above all by untaxing finance and real estate. Take the case of California, where tears are being shed over the dismantling of the once elite University of California system. Since American independence, education has been financed by the property tax. But Proposition 13 has “freed” property from taxation – so that its rental value can be borrowed against and turned into interest payments to banks. California’s real estate costs are just as high with its property taxes frozen, but the rising rental value of land has been paid to the banks – forcing the state to slash its fiscal budget or else raise taxes on labor and consumers.

The link between financial and fiscal crisis – and hence the need for a symbiotic fiscal-financial reform – is just as clear in Europe. The Greek government has pre-sold its tax revenues from roads and other infrastructure to Wall Street, leaving less future revenue to pay its public debt. To cap matters, paying income tax is almost voluntary for wealthy Greeks. Tax evasion is hardly necessary in the post-Soviet states, where property is hardly taxed at all. (The flat tax falls almost entirely on labor.)

Throughout the world, scaling back the 20th century’s legacy of progressive taxation and untaxing real estate and finance has led to a public debt crisis. Property income hitherto paid to governments is now paid to the banks. And although Wall Street has extracted $13 trillion in bailouts just since October 2008, the thought of raising taxes on wealth to pay just $1 trillion over an entire decade for Social Security or health insurance is deemed a crisis that would lead Wall Street to shut down the economy. It is telling governments to shift to a regressive tax system to make up the fiscal shortfall by raising taxes on labor and cutting back public spending on the economy at large. This is what is plunging economies from California to Greece and the Baltics into fiscal and financial crisis. Wall Street’s solution – to balance the budget by cutting back the government’s social contract and deregulating finance all the more – will shrink the economy and make the budget deficits even more severe.

Financial speculators no doubt will clean up on the turmoil.

Read more by our favourite contemporary author at www.michael-hudson.com

The Brumby government’s ill-fated Growth Areas Infrastructure Tax was defeated in the Victorian Senate last evening.

This spells the danger of poor land policy. Why did they attempt to charge $95,000 per hectare as a flat fee? Why wasn’t this infrastructure cost spread over a 20 year period as per traditional council bond funded infrastructure (repaid over time by the rating system – until neo-liberalism took over to undermine public finance)?

With developer’s squeezing at least 16 titles into each hectare, the per hectare land value would be worth approximately $4.5m (16 x $280,000). Even a more pessimistic price of $200,000 per possible title would deliver bucket loads to farmers.

Could farmers really look the people in the eye to say that they deserved to earn more in one foul swoop than they have over their entire life time?

The $95,000 per hectare flat tax was destined to cause controversy as it ignored those sites with access to nearby roads or services. This disadvantaged those farmers in poor locations, for which the media was made well aware of. Obviously, some sites would be more advantageous than others and so their land values would be higher.

Why didn’t the Brumby government communicate to MP’s and the public alike that firstly, huge millionaire windfalls would result from the re-zoning. With numbers please. Secondly, the naturally appreciating value of land.

Many criticisms would have been avoided if the government bond system of finance was repaid over the average 20 year lifetime of infrastructure by the landholders who benefited most from the new train stations etc.

As we show above, the $95K is minuscule compared to the land value per hectare post re-zoning. That’s barely 2% of the upkick. Worse yet, all this controversy for a GAIC that has been shown to only capture 15% of the projected infrastructure costs.

If the government was serious about financing such sprawl, it should implement a 10% land value capture policy on any re-zoned land. This will force the land to be used for it’s best and highest use (in this case housing). The farmer will still take home 90% of the windfall, but the public would receive some compensation for the privilege bestowed upon these landowners.

Readers of this site would understand that we would prefer to keep the 10% LVC charge in place and start removing stamp duty, payroll and the loophole ridden income tax. This would ensure that developers release all land to market asap, rather than drip feeding sites to the market over 18 years like Stockland have admitted at their Highlands sight in in Craigieburn. More positive spin offs can be seen here.

Who do rising property prices really benefit?

photo credit: Robbert van der Steeg

Surprise! A new Age survey found that investors were concerned about the Henry Review’s proposed Resource Rent Tax:

… a staggering 92 per cent believed that the higher taxes would hurt the share prices of resource stocks. Long-term effects were also considered, with 25 per cent believing that a resource rental tax was ’short-sighted’ and likely to ‘damage mining’ as an industry. More frightening was that 45 per cent of investors said the implications of the tax would make them rethink their investments in the sector.

These figures suggest significant support for a mining campaign against the tax, at least among those actively in the stock market. However, the miners have a big job ahead of them balancing this campaign against an already-widespread perception among investors that the tax is damaging to earnings. Too vigorous a response could increase risk-aversion significantly.

The miners have some room to move. When asked about how the government should deal with any resistance to the tax, 42 per cent of investors reckon authorities should ‘give in’ to miner demands. If the miners threatened to move offshore, 23 per cent said ‘let them go’. The results sounded one note of caution in that 36% of investors agreed the government should counter-threaten with nationalisation of assets. This figure is likely to be higher among the general population.
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It seems investors are keen to fashion Australia’s economy into a resources powerhouse – with all of the population increases that entails – but they don’t want to pay for it.

With this BRIC-led resource boom in full steam, a number of countries are charging over 70% in Resource Rents (Norway, Bolivia, Bahrain). Let’s hope the Rudd government can keep the public’s interest front and centre when the lobbyists knock on their door. Extraction should never be confused with production.

Please read our Dec – Jan edition of Progress (8MB), a special on Resource Rents.

photo credit: ToOliver2

Dr Gavin Putland

Taken from the Dec – Jan edition of Progress.
Download Progress (8MB)

If a “site” is a piece of ground or airspace, then the “rent” of the site is simple enough: it is the price per unit time that the highest rational bidder will pay for the use of that ground or airspace, subject to any legal constraints on the uses to which that ground or airspace may be put.

But what if the “site” confers — or simply is — the right to exploit a mineral deposit? At any given time, that right will command a rent of so much per year. But because the deposit is depletable, the time over which the rent can be collected is limited. Moreover, as other deposits are depleted, the value of this deposit will presumably increase over time.

“Hotelling’s rule” says that because the conservation of this resource must be competitive with other uses of capital, the capitalized rent per unit of the remaining portion of this deposit must increase at the going rate of interest, in which case the present value of the right to exploit the deposit is independent of the timing. But this rule assumes unrestricted competition between uses of “capital”.

If in fact the “capital” available to exploit this deposit comes from a limited pool of which the owners expect some element of economic rent, then the remaining portion of the deposit must appreciate faster than the going rate of interest in order to justify its conservation. If, in addition, this deposit is a small part of the global reserve, exploiting it faster will not significantly accelerate the appreciation of the remaining portion, in which case the company with access to the resource will simply deplete the resource as fast as its capital allows. That (as Michael Hudson told me in October) is what typically happens.
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Our colleague Gavin Putland is quoted in this article by Leon Gettler:

Predicting when the property bubble will pop is bad for your mental health

PROPERTY bubbles suspend laws of supply and demand. In markets for widgets, demand goes down when the price goes up. With real estate, it’s the other way around. Higher prices lead to more demand as people seek to profit from the boom; property prices go up and potential buyers expect further increases, so they are willing to pay more. Maybe these laws are also inverted for other asset bubbles but the combination of leverage and low-priced finance leaves housing markets chronically vulnerable.

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Bubbles tipped to burst this year include China, gold, US Treasury bonds and, according to the Melbourne-based Land Values Research Group, Australian property.

LVRG director Gavin Putland puts it bluntly: “It’s months rather than a year, but how many months is hard to say because it’s so irrational and being irrational by definition makes it hard to predict. But reality must assert itself.”

If he is right, it will be a shock to many. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea that homes and flats were fabulous investments took hold of the public imagination. Hence the frenzy. Newspapers in recent weeks have been fuelling the excitement, running pieces about half of Sydney’s home owners becoming millionaires by 2020 and sitting on a daily $766 average increase in the value of their properties.

The article ends with a shocker quoting Yale economist Robert Shiller:

Shiller says society needs mechanisms to let air out of property bubbles, something more than interest rates. These include home-equity insurance and new markets selling real estate futures with the potential to tame speculative bubbles.

So derivatives will save the day?!!! Short selling on an 18 year land cycle will do little to curb the boom busts. A tragedy that the history of economic thought has been watered down to such Junk Economics.

It’s hard to keep up with Professor Hudson’s rapid fire work rate. Wash the dishes to these 2 key interviews.

photo credit: moominsean

Tuesday 2nd March
Phillip J Anderson

Phil Anderson, (Economic Indicator Services) author of The Secret life of Real Estate, will discuss the economic policies of the day in light of his arresting array of charts.

Will the commodities boom push us upwards and onwards or are other issues likely to influence 2010?

Phillip has spent much of the last year traveling the world presenting to packed audiences. We are looking forward to an exciting talk, his last in Melbourne for the next few years.

$5 entry, 6.30 – 8 pm | JASPER HOTEL (former YMCA)
489 Elizabeth Street | Melbourne (right next to the Vic Market)
RSVP

photo credit: Hyaground

Peter Martin, the journalist with the biggest sieve (catching all those Henry Tax report leaks), wrote recently on the LP’s highly secretive Ergas report:

The report proposes an annual land tax that would extend to the family home and would be used to fund the abolition of real estate stamp duty. ”It would be obvious nonsense to exclude the family home. It would create an unbearably low base.”

Company tax would be modeled on the resource rent tax that is presently in place for offshore petroleum and which the government’s Henry review recommends extending onshore.

Bryan Kavanagh stated:

So, we have a coalition report (the Ergas report) recommending a 20% flat income tax, plus a land tax which must include the family home, and the Henry Report that Glenn Milne initially inferred an across-the-board federal land tax, but which we’re assured by Peter Martin now excludes the family home.

With the GFC still raising it’s ugly head with recent sharemarket tremors, the need for other nations to review their tax system will no doubt continue. With the recent NZ tax review also recommending a greater role for land taxes in a highly mobile marketplace, our beliefs have never been more important.

If governments are serious about avoiding boom-busts, then the harnessing of the community created locational value of land (and other licensed monopolies) cannot be ignored. Billowing credit levels (as per helicopter Ben) will do little for the productive economy or sustainable growth. Resource Rents must be the prime revenue base for an economy concerned with reward for effort.

Michael Hudson

If the economy deteriorates in the L-shaped “hockey-stick” rut that many economists forecast, what political price will President Obama and the Democrats pay for having returned the financial keys to the Bush Republican appointees who gave away the store in the first place? Reappointing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may end up injuring not only the economy but also the Democratic Party for years to come. Recognizing this, Republicans made populist points by opposing his reappointment during the Senate confirmation hearings last Thursday, January 27 – the day after Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address.

The hearings focused on the Fed’s role as Wall Street’s major lobbyist and deregulator. Despite the fact that its Charter starts off by directing it to promote full employment and stabilize prices, the Fed is anti-labor in practice. Alan Greenspan famously bragged that what has caused quiescence among labor union members when it comes to striking for higher wages – or even for better working conditions – is the fear of being fired and being unable to meet their mortgage and credit card payments. “One paycheck away from homelessness,” or a downgraded credit rating leading to soaring interest charges, has become a formula for labor management.

As for its designated task in promoting price stability, the Fed’s easy-credit bubble has made asset-price inflation the path to wealth, not tangible capital investment. This has brought joy to bank marketing departments as homeowners, consumers, corporate raiders, states and localities run further and further into debt in an attempt to improve their position by debt leveraging. But the economy has all but neglected its industrial base and the employment goes with manufacturing. The Fed’s motto from Bubblemeister Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke has been “Asset-price inflation, good; wage and commodity price inflation, bad.”

Here’s the problem with that policy. Rising prices for housing have increased the cost of living and doing business, widening the excess of market price over socially necessary costs. In times past the government would have collected the rising location rent created by increasing prosperity, public investment in transportation and other infrastructure making specific sites more valuable. But in recent years taxes have been rolled back. Land sites still cost as much as ever, because their price is set by the market. Land itself has no cost of production. Locational value is created by society, and should be the natural tax base because a land tax does not increase the price of real estate; it lowers it by leaving less “free” rent to be paid to the banks.

The problem is that what the tax collector relinquishes is now available to be paid to banks as interest. And prospective buyers bid against each other until the winner is whoever is first to pay the land’s location rent to the banks as interest.

This tax shift – to the benefit of the bankers, not homeowners – has made Mr. Obama’s hope of doubling U.S. exports during the next five years ring hollow. This is the upshot of “creating wealth” in the form of a debt-leveraged real estate and stock market bubble. Labor must pay more for debt-financed housing and education, not to mention payments to health insurance oligopoly and higher sales and income taxes shifted off the shoulders of finance and real estate.
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Read Hudson’s latest interpretation of Obama’s economic policies:

At stake now is President Obama’s credibility as an agent for change. Voters see his main “change” thus far to have been favoritism to Wall Street. Jay Leno jokes that Obama has done the impossible: resurrected the seemingly dying Republican Party and given it the coveted label of the “Party of Change,” running against Wall Street.

This is the political setting for what must certainly be a hastily rewritten State of the Union message. Instead of celebrating a Republican- and Lieberman-approved health care bill, Obama finds himself obliged to respond to voters who celebrated his first anniversary in office by choosing a Republican as their designated voice for change.

Those voters in Massachusetts last week who felt duped by Obama’s promise as a reform candidate did not really turn Republican, but obviously felt that at least they could throw out the Democrats for failing to make a credible start fixing the debt-strapped economy. The President has begged the banks to start lending again. But this means loading the economy down with yet more debt. The $13 trillion bailout was supposed to help them do this, but the banks have simply taken the money and run, paying it out in bonuses and salaries, stepping up their lobbying efforts to buy Congress, and buying out other banks to grow larger and increase their monopoly power.

Read More at Counterpunch