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Homewreckers; How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream, Aaron Glantz, 2019

Steve Mnuchin, Poster Child of the Homewreckers

10 million Americans lost their homes as a result of the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. By 2010 more than 10% of Americans were unemployed. The Financial Crisis left 45 more million Americans below the poverty line. This book focuses on a handful of predators whose actions would not have been possible without the full cooperation and assistance of the Federal government and the Obama administration. Most of those houses became rentals owned by a handful of huge LLC limited partnerships. The new owners of all these houses are holding them waiting for real estate prices to recover sufficiently to satisfy their greedy requirements to profit from a disaster. These houses are not available to individual home buyers which is artificially driving the prices of homes higher. Charts (not shown in this book) illustrate the changes.

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 was the direct result of a Federal government failure of regulation of the banking industry and the confusion of FDIC banking with Wall Street style speculation. Three critical changes were required to assure it didn’t happen again: 1) Reestablish the Glass-Steagall Act to again separate FDIC regulated banking from Wall Street Speculation. This act was passed in 1933 and repealed in 1999 under Clinton. 2) Severely Regulate or outlaw financial derivatives, created by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 signed into law by Clinton. 3) Break up the big banks and separate their FDIC insured portions from their Wall Street operations. Since all banks were insolvent by 2008, the FDIC had full authority to take over all banks, remove all management, and do whatever was necessary to restore sound banking practice. See also Sheila Bair’s book. The Obama administration did none of these things. These three changes were necessary and possible but re regulation would have required even more changes before banking could return to its rightful boring self. The blame for what happened to those 10 million American families who lost their homes couldn’t be clearer. Clinton broke banking and Obama didn’t fix it even though he could have. Now this book;

Through all of this, the administration of Barack Obama, like George W. Bush’s before him, did very little to stem the tide of foreclosures. …Congress passed a massive bank bailout that did little to help individual borrowers. The terms of the deals the federal government brokered afterward, like the sale of IndyMac to Steve Mnuchin’s group of hedge fund managers, encouraged foreclosures.
Then, as foreclosures spiraled out of control and the number of vacant and foreclosed homes mounted, the federal government did almost nothing to prevent communities from collapsing entirely…The Neighborhood Stabilization Program, extended grants to hard-hit communities to provide “emergency assistance to stabilize communities with high rates of abandoned and foreclosed homes.” …A typical NSP grant went to Riverside, California, where fourteen thousand homes were lost to foreclosure… The city…received just $6.5 million–barely enough to buy fifty homes (not even 1 percent of Riverside’s foreclosures).

The Barracks

The Depression era HOLC, by contrast, acquired nearly two hundred thousand properties through foreclosure. 90 percent of those home were sold to families. The Obama Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, simply bundled foreclosed houses into blocks sized between 500 and 10,000 homes at a time to be sold to the Federally subsidized (bailed out) banks and eventually to vulture LLCs. The banks had no intention of finding individual buyers and issuing mortgages so all these homes so they unloaded then in bulk to the vulture LLCs. No attempt was made to determine if the buyers were qualified to manage these properties. There were no promises by buyers to maintain the properties, keep rents affordable, or engage with the community. The home were simply dumped by the government and the banks. And house prices kept dropping through 2012. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Spokane, Riverside and San Bernadino County saw prices drop more than 50 percent. By late 2011 the fire sale was on. The book features Tom Barrack whose source of money to make the home purchases is murky but involves the Cayman Islands and strong suspicions of money laundering and tax evasion. It all ends with Delaware (Biden) LLCs and ultimately to Barrack’s parent company, Colony Capital LLC. Colony eventually amassed an empire of 31,000 houses, rivaling the size of Blackstone’s house empire. Chase lent Colony $1.1 Billion for 7,563 homes. This giant bundle created a derivative that was carved up into tranches and sold on the bond market. But the two LLC predatory vulture groups featured in this book taken together total about 60,000 houses which represent about .6 percent of the 10 million houses lost. Where are the rest of those 10 million houses?

The book outlines the takeover of two failed banks, BankUnited of Florida, and IndyMac of California. Both deals were very costly for the government and resulted in private equity LLC ownership by wealth seeking individuals without a shred of empathy for who was hurt by their actions. The preditors see themselves as simply taking advantage of market opportunities presented by the federal government.

Attention is also given to the unloading of OneWest bank to a who’s who of investors for $1.6 billion. The deal left the government on the hook for any losses incurred in dumping the bank’s mortgages. When the new owners stripped and sold the bank, their return was $5 billion tripling their investment in less than 5 years. The investors included George Soros, John Thain, John Paulson, J.C. Flowers, and others.

Sandy Jolley Reverse Mortgage Whistle blower

Drawing special attention here is the reverse mortgage for the elderly, pioneered during the Reagan years but kept small by government rules. By 2006, the cap was raised to 275,000. Even the government was selling them and packaging its own fully guaranteed reverse mortgages into mortgage backed securities, sold and sliced by the same speculators that brought down the whole system. Most troubling, subprime specialists like IndyMac started selling reverse mortgages using “boiler room” sales tactics and preying on seniors lacking the mental capacity to understand the contracts they signed. Glantz features one deal involving an elderley wife with Alzheimer’s and a dying husband unable to understand the reverse mortgage he was agreeing to. When the husband died, the daughter Sandy Jolley moved back home to care for her mother and fight off foreclosure. In any system with a functioning justice system, the reverse mortgage contracts would have been vacated, the home restored, and damages assessed. None of this happened but Jolley kept fighting, assembling a large group of similarly displaced homeowners and becoming a federal whistle blower. Twelve years after her parent’s reverse mortgage was signed, the case was settled in 2017 with a typical slap on the wrist award and no admission of wrongdoing. Sandy Jolley’s whistle blower’s reward was $978,000.

Too big to fail ($50 billion plus in assets enshrined under Dodd-Frank now raised to $250 billion) Chase bank acquired Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual Bank in 2008. Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia Bank in 2008. Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch in 2008. All banks accelerated their foreclosure and bundled them for sale to vulture capital LLCs as the easiest way to get the houses off their books, and the Obama government was guaranteeing any losses incurred. All banks greatly decreased their mortgage business and offered mortgages only to customers with high income and impeccable credit. From 2014 to 2016 Chase issued six thousand mortgages under the FHA program (usually used by first time buyers). During this same period Chase loaned Tom Barrack’s Colony $3.3 billion as it created six mortgage backed securities covering 23,000 homes. For first time home buyers an entire generation has had no reasonably priced starter homes and no way to buy the few that were out there. Yet the Federal Reserve held interest rates at near zero throughout the period. Practically, this has meant FDIC deposits are practically free for banks and cheap money was available for speculation and vulture purposes.
The Vulture LLCs that acquired all these houses, bundled them into large groups and securitized them using the same vehicles journalists were calling weapons of mass destruction in 2008. The bundles were diced into trenches to receive different ratings by the same agencies like Moodies who contributed to the 2008 collapse. Typically 80 percent of the bundles received AAA ratings. Glantz researched a tiny Los Angeles Home which listed a mysterious LLC as owner and a lien for $500 million (later refinanced for $900 million).

When housing prices reach a suitably high level, no doubt the LLCs will start selling their huge collections of houses but for the time being they can continue to collect ever increasing rents while spending a minimum on maintenance. Expect these houses to be in awful shape when they eventually reenter the housing market as single family homes.

An article in RCLCO real estate advisors in 2016 found that the seven largest LLCs owned and rented out a total of 170,000 single family houses. A chart in this article shows that single family rental units now comprise 35 percent of total rentals. If there are 43 million renters, then 15 million would be renting single family units. The 10 million foreclosed homes must represent a very sizable portion of these rentals. The article puts the increase in occupied single family rentals during the period 2005-2014 at 3.8 million (probably under estimated) while the increase in single family ownership increased by just a tiny 482,000. It appears the government does little to actually track statistically what happened to foreclosed houses or to track what the deals assuring that banks or LLCs wouldn’t lose money from foreclosures actually cost the government. Mother Jones in 2009 put the financial crisis federal bailout cost at a staggering $14.4 trillion. At present, we seem to have no accurate way to determine what happened to the bulk of those 10 million foreclosed houses. The $14 trillion figure also appears in Ron Suskind’s 2011 Book.

Many of the vultures moved to the Trump administration and the administration’s big tax reduction giveaway showered particular largess on corporations and LLCs.

The First Cell; and the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, Azra Raza, 2019

Dr. Azra Raza and Dr. Harvey Priesler

This book is intended as a wake up call for all of us that may have assumed cancer research was making progress. The articulate Dr. Raza has spent her career helplessly watching patient after patient die with only fifty year old therapies available (slash, poison, burn), including her own husband Harvey, himself a specialist in the very cancer that killed him. The book combines introducing us to some of her special and unique patients with a description of the complexity of cancer that is impenetrable reading for us laymen, to a plea for rebooting the entire field of cancer research and treatment. It is best to present the very articulate argument for rebooting our approach in Dr. Raza’s own words.

Over the twelve-year period from 2002 to 2014, seventy-two new anti cancer drugs gained FDA approval; they prolonged survival by 2.1 months. Of eighty-six cancer therapies for solid tumors approved between 2006 and 2017, the median gain in overall survival was 2.45 months…A study published in the British Medical Journal showed that thirty-nine of sixty-eight cancer drugs approved by the European regulators between 2009 and 2013 showed no improvement in survival or quality of life over existing treatment, placebo, or in combination with other agents.

Identifying predictive markers that allow for individualizing therapy by matching drugs to patients remains the treasured yet elusive holy grail of oncology… More than 90 percent of trials ongoing around the county make almost zero attempt to save tumor samples for post hoc examination to identify predictive biomarkers…Who is pushing this short-term agenda driven by the singular goal of getting a drug approved with alacrity as long as it meets the bar of improving survival by mere weeks in a few patients?

A pioneering and revolutionary paper was published in 1976 by Peter Nowell. His clairvoyance about cancer being an evolving entity has been largely ignored. From “The Clonal Evolution of Tumor Cell Populations”:
Peter Nowell

Tumor cell populations are apparently more genetically unstable than normal cells, perhaps from activation of specific gene loci in the neoplasm, continued presence of carcinogen, or even nutritional deficiencies within the tumor. The acquired genetic instability and associated selection process, most readily recognized cytogenetically, results in advanced human malignancies being highly individual karyotypically and biologically. Hence, each patient’s cancer may require individual specific therapy, and even may be thwarted by emergence of a genetically variant subline resistant to the treatment. More research should be direct toward understanding and controlling the evolutionary process in tumors before it reached the late stage usually seen in clinical cancer.

…in 2009, Gina Kolata reported in her New York Times column the jaw-dropping statistics that despite the infusion of more than $100 billion into cancer research, death rates for cancer had dropped by only 5 percent between 1950 and 2005 when adjusted for size and age of the the population. The war on cancer was not going well.

A review of where the research funds go reveals the inherent biases perpetuated by the peer-review process as detailed by Clifton Leaf in his eye-opening book, The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re losing the War on Cancer and How to Win It. Enormous sums of money from the government continue to fund the same institutions and universities over and over…The saddest part is that upon serious examination of what is published, 70 percent of the basic research is not reproducible and 95 percent of clinical trials are unmitigated disasters.

A recent study titled, “Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer,” published in the October 2018 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, tabulated the chilling economic burden borne by patients with newly diagnosed cancer. Using the Health and Retirement Study Data, this longitudinal study identified 9.5 million estimated new cases of cancer between 1998 and 2012 in the United States. Two years from diagnosis, 42.5 percent of individuals had depleted their entire life’s assets, and 38.2 percent incurred longer-term insolvency, cancer costs being highest during treatment and in the final months of life. The most vulnerable groups were those with worsening cancer, older age, females, retired individuals, and those suffering from comorbidities like diabetes, hypertension, lung and heart diseases, belonging of a lower socioeconomic group, or on Medicaid.

The unfortunate reality is that not a single marker for response is examined in the majority of clinical trials being conducted even today. Why? Because this is how the system has evolved. The pharmaceutical industry sponsoring the trials is only interested in reaching a statistical end point to get their agent approved. The companies have usually invested almost a billion dollars already to bring an agent to the point of a phase 3 trial. It would add a staggering amount of money to their stretched budgets to perform such detailed biomarker analysis. I suggest saving all the money being squandered on testing the agents in pretherapy, preclinical models of cell lines, and mouse models and instead investing the resources in biomarker analysis. Some bold changes are needed at every level. To harness rapidly evolving fields like imaging, nanotechnology, proteomics, immunology, artificial intelligence, and bioinformatics, and focus them on serving the cause of cancer patient, we must insist on collaboration between government institutions (NCI, FDA, CDC, DOD), American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Society of Hematology, funding agencies, academia, philanthropy, and industry.

Contrast the putative scientific gold standard of a reproducible animal model with the known fact that every patient’s cancer is a unique disease, and within each patient, cancer cells that settle in different sites are unique. When a malignant cell divides in two, it can produce daughter cells with the same or radically different characteristics because during the process of DNA replication, fresh copying errors constantly occur. Even if two cancer cells have identical genetics, much like identical twins, their behavior can differ depending on genes expressed or silenced according to the demands of a thousand variables, such as the microenvironment where they land, the blood supply available to them, and the local reaction of immune cells. The resulting expansive variety of tumor cells that exist withing tumors are unique within unique sites of the body. Multiply this complexity further by adding the host’s immune response to each new clone and you get a confounding, perplexing, impenetrable situation in perpetual flux.

So what is the solution? The first step is to descend from our high horses and humbly admit that cancer is far too complex a problem to be solved with the simplistic preclinical testing platforms we have devised to develop therapies. Little has happened in the past fifty years, and little will happen in another fifty if we insist on the same old same old. The only way to deal with the cancer problem in the fastest, cheapest, and, above all, most universally applicable and compassionate way is to shift our focus away from exclusively developing treatments for end-stage disease, and concentrate on diagnosing cancer at its inception and developing the science to prevent its further expansion. From chasing after the last cell to identifying the footprints of the first.

The heyday of reductionism, looking for one culprit gene at a time and searching for the one magic bullet, is over. The era of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and wearable sensors has arrived. The study of cancer is evolving into a data-driven, quantitative science. Merging information obtained from liquid biopsies (RNA, DNA, proteomics, exosome studies, CTC), with histopathology, radiologic, and scanning techniques, aided by rapid machine learning, image reconstruction, intelligent software, and microfluidics can–and will–revolutionize the way we diagnose and prevent rather than treat cancer in the future. The ideal strategy will emerge from harnessing cutting-edge technology for a multidisciplinary systems biology approach through a consilience of scientists with expertise in molecular genetics, imaging, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science.

Research is also ongoing in all these areas funded by the National Institute of Health, but the investment remains paltry compared to funding provided for studies conducted on cell lines and animal models. Through redirection of intellectual and financial resources from the same old grant proposals to grant incentives for early detection using actual human samples, and by posing exciting challenges to competitive scientists, progress will be accelerated dramatically. The piece that is missing from the equation is an admission of failure of current strategies and a willingness to take a 180-degree turn to start all over again.

Antonio Fojo of the NCI extrapolating the implications of one trial:

“In the lung cancer trial, overall survival improved by just 1.2 months on average. The cost of an extra 1.2 months of survival? About $80,000. If we allow a survival advantage of 1.2 months to be worth $80,000, and by extrapolation survival of one year to be valued at $800,000, we would need $440 billion annually–an amount nearly 100 times budget of the National Cancer Institute–to extend by one year the life of the 550,000 Americans who die of cancer annually. And no one would be cured.“

This is how complex cancer is. It is pure arrogance to think the problem can be solved by a few molecular biologists if they put their minds to it. Cancer is a perfidious, treacherous, evolving, shifting, moving target, far too impenetrable to be deconstructed systematically, far too dense to lend itself in all its plurality to recapitulation in lab dishes or animals.

Chip War, The Fight For the World’s Most Critical Technology, 2022, Christopher Miller

This reader is a retired software engineer whose 40 year career began with punch card mainframes and ended with microcontrollers with embedded graphic displays, WiFi, and flash memory on a single chip. My introduction to computing was as a graduate research assistant on an ARPA funded project to study the dimensionality of nations. Since that time I followed the development of the ARPANET. I have lived the profound impact of Moore’s Law, needing to constantly anticipate where technology would be when project development required several years before introduction. Moore’s Law has still not been broken after all these years.
To get some sense of what exponental increase in transistors looks like consider the 1980s Cray 2 supercomputer which was export restricted for national security reasons. The CRAY-2 stood nearly 4 feet tall with a 5.5-foot diameter and weighed 5,500 pounds. The iPhone 12 is 5,000 times faster than the Cray-2!
Exponential growth of a technology is unique in human history.

The Long Game; China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Rush Doshi, 2021

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László Ladányi was a Hungarian Jesuit who lived in China from 1936 until his expulsion by the Communists in 1949. He moved to Hong Kong where he published China News Analysis from 1953 til 1982 when he retired to write books. China News Analysis was the only English language coverage of events from a closed China and based on published speeches and other high level official sources. He covered Mao’s paranoid machinations from the Great Leap Forward where Ladányi predicted 50 million Chinese deaths from starvation to the Cultural Revolution.

Rush Doshi adopted much of the research methodology of Ladányi in preparing this book which is a study of Chinese foreign policy (political, economic and military) from Deng Xiaoping to the present. Doshi notes that China inherited its nationalism from Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese century of humiliation at the hands of the west and the desire to return China to its historic role as the Central Kingdom surrounded by tribute bearing smaller states, and its political structure, the Chinese Communist CCP from Lenin.

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In 1973 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited Washington in preparation for Nixon’s visit to China. Zhou asked a young American member of the delegation “Do you think China will ever become an aggressive or expansionist power?” The American answered “No.” and Zhou said “Don’t count on that. It is possible. But if China were to embark on such a path, you must oppose it…And you must tell those Chinese that Zhou Enlai told you to do it.”

The book highlights significant events that caused Chinese leaders to reevaluate their policy focus. The first was a trifecta of events from 1989 to 1991, The Tiananmen Square Massacre, overseen by Deng and widely criticized by the United States and the West; The Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait, which shocked China with the technical superiority of the Americans and the speed with which the war concluded; and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following the collapse and the end of the cold war, China focused much more on the United States and after Tiananmen started to be more sensitive to human rights concerns of the liberal West even though these concerns dated at least as early as the Chinese annexation of Tibet. China also acquired a new respect for the military technical superiority of the US as demonstrated in the Gulf War.

When Deng Xiaoping became Premier, he followed the example of Singapore as a model of a democracy free capitalist economic system open to western investment and engagement under an authoritarian rule pioneered by Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.
The era from China opening to the United States and the West for investment and trade was given a central policy directive from Deng “Tao Guang Yang Hui” or “hide capabilities and bide time”, applying to political, economic, and military policy as directed by the CCP. During the US Kosovo war a Chinese military leader reiterated:

“what the PLA should do” in response to “the rise of military intervention” by the United States was to remember that “our approach is Tao Guang Yang Hui” He elaborated, “As a military, this means…vigorously developing ‘shashoujian’ equipment, [and following the principle of],’whatever the enemy is most afraid of, we develop that’.”

Second, at the political level, the trifecta and China’s strategic adjustment led Beijing to reverse its position on joining regional institutions. Memoirs of Chinese ambassadors are explicit on China’s need to join institutions to blunt American power in three ways: (1)stalling the institutions so they couldn’t become functional; (2) using them to constrain US freedom of maneuver; and (3) using them to reassure neighbors so they wouldn’t join a US-led balancing coalition…Even s, these efforts were taken consistent with Tau Guang Yang Hui’s principle of avoiding claims of leadership, which meant China refrained from launching new institutions; moreover, Deng himself had said that China’s diplomatic voice would grow loader once Tao Guang Yang Hui was retired.

Finally, the trifecta also shaped Chinese international economic policy…China raised new concerns in Beijing about its vulnerability to US leverage, and blunting these became the focus of Chinese efforts. China not only focused breaking economic sanctions, it also sought to secure MFN (most-favored-nation) status on a permanent basis, or permanent normal trading relations (PNTR). The goal was not to limit China’s dependence on the United States but to reduce the discretionary exercise of US economic power…It also pushed for WTO membership, hoping it would further tie Washington’s hands.

China limited its military expansion during this time to the development of mines, missiles, and conventional silent submarines. Their largest fleet in the world of silent submarines could surface right next to a US aircraft carrier without detection. In 1973, 75 year old Zhou Enlie was suffering from bladder cancer which Mao had ordered Zhou’s doctors to not reveal or treat, when he lamented that China had not yet acquired an aircraft carrier.

In 1992, after the Soviet Union collapse, a PLA delegation visited a new Soviet carrier, the Varyag, then under final construction in Ukraine on the Black Sea. China chose not to acquire it. Then five years later China’s top leaders changed their minds and launched a plan to acquire the Varyag that is worthy of a movie.

Xu Zengping joined the PLA in 1971 and left in 1980 to found a trading company that he claimed made him wealthy. Xu’s wife was a basketball player on China’s national team that played alongside Yao Ming’s mother. PLAN Vice Admiral He Pengfei recruited Xu to serve as the military’s intermediary in the Varyag purchase.

Consistent with Tao Guang Yang Hui, Xu knew he needed to deceive the world about his wealth, intentions, and government connections. Xu created the persona of an outlandish tycoon who wanted to use the carrier as a floating casino in Macao. Xu set up a shell company and spent $1 million to acquire licenses to operate the casino in Macao. Xu then bought one of the most expensive villas in Hong Kong for $30 million.

In October 1997, Xu went to Kiev to negotiate with the Ukrainian owners of the Varyag. The private owners acquired the Varyag during the massive neoliberal privatization of Soviet public assets after the collapse in 1991. After months of parties and millions in bribes, the owners finally agreed to sell the Varyag to Xu for $20 million. But Xu also needed the blueprints and the engines which were beyond Chinese capabilities to build at the time. The engines had already been installed but Xu got fake documents showing that the engines had been removed. Xu received 45 tons of blueprints and documents and the engines and then set out on the arduous process of moving the ship to Dalian China.

In all the government of China spend $120 million and in March 2002, the Varyag arrived in Dalian where it was rust protected and left in December 2005. Even the original Soviet name and markings were left on the carrier.

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Then, in response to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, which Chinese leaders took as a clear indication of the weakening of the US and the West, Chinese foreign policy entered a new more aggressive direction. The top level decision to build a carrier fleet was made in 2009. The Varyag was completed, renamed Liaoning , and commissioned on 25 September 2012.

After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, China began to emphasize building regional order. It no longer felt the need to constrain itself fowir fear of rattling Washington or the wider region. The capabilities that carriers were know for were now fully in line with China’s own strategic objectives, which leaned increasingly toward enforcing maritime sovereignty and cultivating the ability to intervene regionally. And so, China entered the ranks of carrier-fielding great powers.

…the 2008 Global Financial Crisis caused a much bigger shift. China’s assessment of the relative power gap with the United States fell significantly and President Hu then officially revised Tao Guang Yang Hu by stressing “Actively Accomplishing Something” in his 2009 address.

In 2012 Wang Jisi, dean of Peking University’s School of International Relations wrote:

“Unlike East Asia, there is no U.S. led regional military alliance among the countries to the west, and there is no possibility that one will arise”…Instead, China had abondant resources and a continental vacuum in that direction, as well as the surplus capacity and dollar reserves to fill it with pipelines, railways, highways, and even overland Internet infrastructure that would reduce China’s dependence on the sea and bind the region tighter to China.

In 2013 Xi would launch the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

Mao’s Cultural Revolution began in 1966 and ended with Mao’s death in 1976. It impacted virtually all Chinese leaders from Deng to the present. Two stories of auto-didactic education are featured in this book:

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On March 16, 2013, Chinese diplomat Wang Yi was formally promoted to minister of foreign affairs. The urbane but fierce defender of Chinese interests was sometimes known as a “silver fox” for both his “looks and his diplomatic wiles.” but he was also brilliant and diligent. After graduating high school during the Cultureal Revolution, Wang Li was sent to labor on a farm in northeast China for eight long years. A former classmate of his recalls that Want Li “did not waste his time” but engrossed himself in literature and history entirely on his own direction. When the Cultural Revolution ended , Wang Li’s diligence paid off, and he earned a spot at Bejing International Studies University, where he dedicated himself to Japanese language studies.

Wang Li married the daughter of Quian Jaidong an underling of Zhou Enlai and member of China’s first overseas delegations to the Geneva conference in the 1950s. Quian Jaidong became China’s UN ambassador in 1980.

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On January 16,2016, The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was declared “open for business” and a grey haired enthusiast for English literature, Jin Liqun was elected its first president…Jin grew up in an educated but poor family with what was then an unusual passion for English literature. When he was sent to labor in the countryside for a decade during the Cultural Revolution, he spend three quarters of his meager annual salary and what little time he had after a day’s work in the fields continuing that pursuit. “I was outfitted with a worn out Remington typewriter and a copy of Webster”, he said later, as well as a radio he kept tuned to the BBC that gave his English a trace of the “standard BBC accent of the 1970s.” When the Cultural Revolution abated, the twenty nine year old autodidact won a seat at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages, excelled in graduate work, and was offered a faculty position…It was not to be. That same year, China joined the World Bank, and English speakers were needed to staff its new office in Washington…He spent a dozen years at the World Bank and then the Asian Development Bank, rising to become its first Chinese vice president, and developed a resume and Rolodex in multilateral finance no other Chinese official could match. When China decided to build its own development bank, Jin was the logical choice.

Another remarkable story about a misfit coming out the Cultural Revolution was previously blogged.

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On October 18. 2017, General Secetary Xi Jinping, in a 3 1/2 hour 30,000 word speech announced the next great change in Chinese foreign policy.

The speech announced a “new era”, put forward timetables for China’s rejuvenation in 2049, promised greater Chinese activism in global governance, called for a “world-class” military, committed China to becoming a “global leader in innovation,” and declared that China would “become a leading country in comprehensive national strength and international influence.”
Like other changes in China’s grand strategy, this shift toward greater global ambition was driven by what Beijing saw as the West’s irreversible decay and decline. In 2016…the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. From China’s perspective–which is highly sensitive to changes in perception of American power–these to events were shocking. The world’s most powerful democracies were withdrawing from the international order they had helped erect, creating what China’s leadership and foreign policy elite has called a “period of historic opportunity” to expand the country’s strategic focus from Asia to the wider globe and its governance systems.

The Lords of Easy Money; How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy Christopher Leonard, 2022

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Life at the zero bound pushes banks way down the yield curve. What does a bank have to lose? A risky bet beats nothing. And this is not just a side effect of keeping rates at zero, “That’s the whole point.” Hoenig (Tom Hoenig was the long time president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City) explained many years later. “The point was to get people willing to take greater risk, to get the economy started. But it also allocated resources. It allocates where that money goes.”…When cash is pushed out onto the yield curve, it leads to the second big problem that Hoenig warned about in 2010: something called an asset bubble. The housing market that collapsed in 2008 was an asset bubble. The dot-com stock market crash of 2000 was the bursting of an asset bubble.

One of his (Ben Bernanke) central ideas was that the Fed hadn’t acted boldly enough back in the 1930’s. The central bank had actually worsened the Depression by tightening the money supply, The solution, Bernanke believed, was to to be as aggressive as possible after a crash. He had spent many years thinking up new ways that the Fed could boost economic growth even after pushing interest rates to zero. He didn’t see the zero bound as an inviolable limit, but just another data point.

To execute quantitative easing, a trader at the New York Fed would call up one of the primary dealers, like JP Morgan Chase, and offer the buy $8 billion worth of Treasury bonds from the bank. JP Morgan would sell the Treasury bonds to the Fed trader. Then the Fed trader would hit a few keys and tell the Morgan banker to look inside their reserve account. Voila, the Fed had instantly created $8 billion out of thin air, in the reserve account, to complete the purchase. Morgan could, in turn, use this money to buy assets in the wider marketplace.

Starting in November (2010), the Fed traders did this transaction over and over again until they had created several hundred billion dollars inside the Wall Street reserve accounts…The primary dealers were not just selling the Treasury bills and mortgage bonds that they happened to have on hand…Instead the Fed set up a conveyor belt of sorts, which used the primary dealers as middlemen. The conveyor belt began outside the Fed, with hedge funds that were not primary dealers. These hedge funds could borrow money from a big bank, buy a Treasury bill, and then have a primary dealer sell that Treasury bill to the Fed for a profit. Once the conveyor belt was up and running, it began magically transforming bonds into cash. The cash didn’t stay safe and sound inside the reserve accounts of primary dealers. It started flowing out into the banking system, looking for a place to live.

He (Hoenig at the FOMC meeting in Sept. 2010) pointed out that the deep malaise in American economic life wasn’t caused by a a lack of lending from banks. The banks already had plenty of money to lend. The real problem lay outside the banking system, in the real economy where the deep problems were festering, problems that the Fed had no power to fix. Keeping interest rates at zero, and then pumping $600 billion of new money into the banking system–money that had nowhere to go but out into risky loans or financial speculation–wasn’t going to help solve the fundamental dysfunction of the American Economy.

During the 1980’s, Hoenig and his colleagues in Kansas City were left to sort out the long-term problems the Fed’s short-term thinking created during the 1970s. The biggest mess they cleaned up was the failure of Penn Square, a bank in Oklahoma that had extended a chain of risky energy loans during the 1970s. When Penn Square failed, it almost took down the entire U.S. banking system with it. It also illuminated a second important pattern that would harden in the coming years. The Fed didn’t just stoke asset bubbles. It found itself on the hook to bail out the very lenders who profited most off a bubble as it rose. Some banks, the Fed was about to discover, had grown too large and too interconnected to fail.

Around 2014 or 2015, (Vicki) Bryan (corporate analyst) noticed that she could bring new revelations (about corporate misbehavior) to the market, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. “It’s been a result of what the Fed stated to do in 2010, and continued to do later,” she said. “You’ve got an artificial bottom, and the higher part of that bottom is set by the Fed. So you can’t lose in this market. And if you can’t lose, it’s not really a market,” Bryan said.

In 2008, the market imploded thanks to an exotic debt product called the collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. The CDO was a package of home loans (or derivatives contracts based on home loans) stacked together and sold to investors. The CDO made the housing crash possible by creating a seamless assembly line that allowed mortgage brokers to create risky subprime home loans that were quickly packaged and sold to investors, which in turn allowed the mortgage brokers to extend yet more new loans. At that time, the lowly CLO (collateralized loan obligation) was the undernoticed stepchild of the debt markets. There were only about $300 billion worth of CLOs during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, while in 2006 alone about $1.1 trillion of new CDOs were issued. But the important thing about CLOs was that they didn’t suffer nearly the losses that CDOs suffered.

The pension funds had been settling on a low return from safe corporate bonds, because those bonds were standardized…The bonds were regulated by the SEC and traded on exchanges…The CLO solved this problem. It would standardize leverage loans in ways that make the pension funds feel safe…This meant that a pension could order CLO chunks,…picking between the AAA, mezzanine, and equity slices of the package.

Financial engineering was key to Rexnord’s strategy. Rexnord, like any corporation, responded to the environment in which it operated. And that environment, starting in 2012, was dominated by the influence of ZIRP (zero-interest-rate-policy)…The management team’s biggest maneuvers had to do with leveraged loans and rising stock prices rather than conveyor belts or ball bearings…He (Rexnord employee John Feltner) believed,…that a job at Rexnord might provide him a narrow pathway to a stable middle-class life. All the financial engineering encourage by ZIRP was supposed to make that belief come true. The company owed $1.9 billion and it paid $88 million on interest costs in 2015, which was more than the $84 million it earned in profits…in 2015 Rexnord’s board of directors authorized Adams and his team to buy back $200 million in stock. In 2016, the company bought back $40 million of its own stock. In 2020, the company …bought back another $81 million…In 2016, he (Adams) was paid $1.5 million but the following year he was paid $12 million, mostly in stock awards, and in 2018 he would earn $6 million.

But Rexnord’s stock buybacks were seen by the Fed, as a means to an end. It was OK if CEOs used debt to help engineer multimillion-dollar paydays, as long as the prosperity was eventually dispersed through the “wealth effect” (Cosmic Lie) to neighborhoods like the Feltners’…Rexnord had decided to close the ball-bearing factory and move its production to Monterrey, Mexico. (Feltner lost his job.)

By the end of 2018, the U.S. market for CLOs was about $600 billion double the level a decade earlier…The value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 77 percent between 2010 and 2016. One hedge-fund trader…described the frothy stock market of 2016 as being like the crowded deck of the the Titanic as it sank…It was getting crowded because people had nowhere better to go.

This money flowed out into the system, and it pushed all the major financial institutions to search for yield. Many wall street traders saw clearly what was happening, and they developed a nickname for it: “the everything bubble.”

By 2016, they (negative interest bonds) accounted for 29 percent of all global debt. About $7 trillion worth of bonds carried negative rates…Bond investors were so desperate to find a safe haven for their cash that they willing to pay a fee to governments like those of German and Denmark to safeguard it.

Hoenig said “You had seven years of basically zero-interest rates. Now what happens in an economic system over seven years. The entire market system develops a new equilibrium–around a zero rate. An entire economic system. Around a zero rate. Not only in the U.S. but globally. It’s massive. Now think of the adjustment process to a new equilibrium at a higher rate. Do you think it’s costless? Do you think no one will suffer? Do you think there won’t be winners and losers?”

Excess bank reserves were about 135,000 percent higher than they had been in 2008. The Fed’s balance sheet was about $4.5 trillion, about five times its level in 2007. Interest rates had been pinned at zero for nearly seven years.

In response to the 2020 Covid epidemic, congress passed the CARES act worth $2 trillion in relief funds:

People who owned businesses were given tax breaks worth $135 billion, meaning that about 43,000 people who earned more than $1 million a year each got a benefit worth $1.6 million. By and large, these billions of dollars were quietly absorbed into corporate treasuries and personal bank accounts around the county. The wildly unequal distribution of money was not made public until months later, after The Washington Post won an open-records lawsuit that made the information public.

The market hit its low point in mid-March, when the Treasury market collapsed. But between that day and middle of June–in just three months–the market’s value surged by 35 percent. By then, stocks were trading at the same value they had when restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, and cruise ships were operating at full capacity. The average monthly returns on leveraged loans were restored as early as April. By August, so many new investment-grade bonds were issued that the previous record, set in 2017, was broken.

The bailout of 2020–the largest expenditure of American public resources since WWII–solidified and entrenched an economic regime that had been quietly and steadily constructed, largely by the Federal Reserve, during the previous decade. The resources from this bailout went largely to the entities that were strengthened by the policies of ZIRP and QE. It went to large corporations that used borrowed money to buy out their competitors. It went to the very richest of Americans who owned the vast majority of assets; it went to the riskiest of financial speculators on Wall Street, who used borrowed money to build fragile positions in global markets; and it went to the very largest U.S. banks, whose bigness and inability to fail was now an article of faith.

And all of this happened at a moment when Americans were more distracted, more beleaguered, and more financially distressed than at any moment in modern history. It was difficult to even comprehend the impact of what had happened. But the impact would make itself visible in the months, years, and likely decades to come.

By the end of 2020, companies issued more than $1.9 trillion in new corporate debt, beating the previous record that was set in 2017…A zombie company was a firm that carried so much debt that its profits weren’t enough to cover its loan costs. The only thing that kept zombie companies out of bankruptcy was the ability to roll their debt perpetually. During 2020, nearly two hundred major publicly traded companies entered the ranks of the zombie army…These weren’t just marginal or risky firms, but included well-known firms like Boeing, ExxonMobil, Macy’s, and Delta Airlines.

In many important ways, the financial crash of 2008 had never ended. It was a long crash that crippled the economy for years. The problems that caused it went almost entirely unsolved. And this financial crash was compounded by a long crash in the strength of America’s democratic institutions. When America relied on the Federal Reserve to address its economic problems, it relied on a deeply flawed tool. All the Fed’s money only widened the distance between America’s winners and losers and laid the foundation for more instability. This fragile financial system was wrecked by the pandemic and in response the Fed created yet more new money, amplifying earlier distortions. The long crash of 2008 had evolved into the long crash of 2020. The bills had yet to be paid.

Christopher Leonard is also the author of Kochland

The New Climate War: The Fight To Take Back Our Planet, Michael E. Mann, 2021

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Mann has devoted much of his professional life and focus in an effort to educate the public about climate change. His role model was Carl Sagan who had a remarkable ability to communicate complex science to ordinary people.
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Mann, Bradley and Hughes 1998 Hockey Stick Chart

How quickly are temperatures rising?

The true warming rate is about 0.2%C per decade. Since current warming stands at about 1.2%C, it would at current rates take a decade and a half to reach 1.5%C warming, and another two and a half decades to reach 2%C warming.

Without CO2 reductions, we would expect a rise of 1.5%C by 2035 and of 2%C by 2060.

Researchers believe renewables can be scaled up to meet 80% of global energy needs in ten years and 100% in thirty years. Clearly that last 20% which would include air travel and other hard to solve problems will take time and research.
Guardian’s Fiona Harvey:

investments amounting to trillions of dollars (estimated 1 to 4 trillion) in fossil fuels–coal mines, oil wells, power stations, conventional vehicles–will lose their value when the world moves decisively to a low-carbon economy. Fossil Fuel reserves and production facilities will become stranded assets, having absorbed capital but unable to be used to make a profit…If the bubble bursts suddenly, as it might, rather than gradually deflating over decades, then it could trigger a financial crisis.

Banks are already reducing their investments and many University endowments are pulling their funds out under pressure from their students.

Why look at non solutions when a solution is in hand. Solar costs about $50, wind $30-$40, and nuclear $100 per megawatt hour. Fossil fuels cost about $50. If fossil fuel subsidies were removed and a carbon tax were added to reflect the real cost of CO2 emissions, the cost of fossil fuels would rise dramatically.

One group of climate experts has in fact published a set of “concrete interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics.” They propose as key ingredients, “removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building carbon neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, strengthening climate education and engagement, and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions information.

Air travel is often sited as a way to reduce CO2 but air travel accounts for about 3% of global carbon emissions. if everything is taken into account, travel by train can have an even higher carbon footprint than air travel.

We know that we can eliminate most CO2 emissions by converting to renewable sources of energy like solar, wind, geothermal, etc. Those who wish to continue to rely on fossil fuels for energy often propose “non-solution solutions” as a deflection tactic.

DEFLECTION DELAYISM
The most common of these is “clean coal” using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Global CCS Institute reports 51 facilities globally are under development. When fully deployed they would collectively capture nearly 100 million tons of C02 annually. We emit about 40 billion tons of CO2 annually so 100 million tons would represent about 0.25% of total emissions. It will take decades (which we don’t have) to determine the actual amount of CO2 that has been captured and stored successfully. Coal generators are rapidly being phased out. CCS is not a solution.

There has been much talk of geoengineering and Bill Gates has hired geoengineers to look into shooting reflective particles, sulfate aerosols into the stable upper part of the atmosphere. This is feasible and a muti-billionaire like Gates might even be able to try it without government assistance or approval. The big problem is “we don’t know what we don’t know.” Would Ozone layer destruction accelerate? Would polar ice melt faster? Would the sulfur falling back to earth result in catastrophic acid rain? If we don’t sustain the layer with continuous injections the earth’s temperature would rise suddenly. The danger here is not only from billionaires but from other countries that might attempt to solve their own problems without regard for the rest of the world. And we already have a known solution – renewable energy – so why even look at such a crazy unproven idea with huge unknown risks to the entire planet?

Reforestation sounds promising but at best, combined with modified agricultural practices, at absolute most 20 billion tons of CO2 could be captured or 50% of our current emissions. It would take decades to reach these levels of CO2 removal and meanwhile we would continue to increase emissions every year. We already have a real and proven solution, renewables, that can be implemented now so why focus on this. Reforestation and agricultural reform are important and should be undertaken but they are not a solution to our immediate CO2 problem.

Then there is the nuclear power option, forgetting the meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Nuclear cost is double that of renewables. Mann suggests we leave existing nuclear plants operational since the investment has already been made until they are decommissioned at the end of their useful lives, hoping they continue to have access to adequate cooling water and avoid other accidents. Building new Nuclear plants would also take far too long to displace existing fossil fuels.

Much of this important book is dedicated to educating the public in the tactics developed by monopolistic companies whose products are harmful in attempts to convince the public otherwise. These tactics no doubt originated in the 19th Century but came to public awareness over the dangers of tobacco, plastic trash, chemicals like DDT, CFC refrigerant destroying the ozone layer, Roundup, etc., Fossil Fuels and CO2 levels, etc. The playbook was even attempted for COVID-19 because the pandemic posed a threat to companies wanting business as usual (Urging us to take one (die) for the sake of the economy). The successes of these campaigns is due to the enormous resources available to these companies, their willingness to sponsor fake research (Koch and Mercer), their control over messaging and media (Fox WSJ, the petrostates led by Russia and Saudi Arabia), and exploiting the ignorance of the public about science and research (disinformation). Who does the powerful global fossil fuel industry most fear? Greta Thunberg and the international climate youth movement. Mainstream media is notorious for failing to report on climate change. Young climate activists have succeed in making the front page of major newspapers around the world, something climate scientists have been unable to do. As Bob Dylan would say “The times they are a changin”.
Stephan Schmidt, former presidential campaign co-advisor to McCain tweeted about the COVID-19 campaign “The injury done to America and the public good by Fox News and the bevy of personalities from Limbaugh to Ingraham will be felt for many years in this country as we deal with the death and economic damage that didn’t have to be.”

The Coronavirus crisis, in fact, underscored the importance of government. The need for an organized and effective response to a crisis, after all, one of the fundamental reasons we have governments in the first place. Crises, whether in the near term like COVID-19 or in the long term like climate change, remind us that government has an obligation to protect the welfare of its citizens by providing aid, organizing an appropriate crisis response, alleviating economic disruption, and maintaining a functioning social safety net.

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The book includes discussions of social media and the role of bots and troll bots, artificially generated internet postings with the ability to automatically analyze real people’s postings and create artificial responses. So then bot sentinel is created that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to classify accounts and their postings as being the creation of bots and trollbots and to automatically generate a trollbot score for the likelihood that the the account is automated. This is not a fictional dystopian world. Users of social media are facing this mad world of bots where it may be impossible to know if you are having a conversation with a machine or a person. Imagine an entire discussion thread generated completely by warring bots with no actual human participation. Forget annoying automated phone calls. This is total out-of-control madness.

Monopolized; Life in the Age of Corporate Power, David Dayen, 2021

This book is one of the most depressing, even apocalyptic in recent memory. It is also well researched, organized, and important.
Each chapter addresses an industry segment that has fallen to monopoly: Airlines, Big Agriculture, Journalism and media, Broadband Internet, Opioid medication, Banks, Offshoring essential products, Amazon and Google, Hospitals Supply chains, Rental Housing after 2008, Prisons and Immigrant detention. The book is focused on monopolies in each of these segments. Warren Buffet is mentioned as a significant investor in monopolies in each chapter. Dayen estimates that twelve mega-billionaires like Warren Buffet effectively control the entire US economy today. What can these handful of men possibly do with the wealth they have accumulated? This is from Jeff Bezos, currently the wealthiest:

The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space Travel

Tesla’s Elon Musk seems to share Bezos’ sentiment. Dayen — “Our overlords literally shoot money into space while millions around them suffer.” Here is Buffet;

We think in terms of that moat and the ability to keep its width and its impossibility of being crossed.

Dayen — “Morningstar offers an economic moat index fund of the twenty companies with the highest walls around their businesses.”

The average age of a farmer in America is fifty-eight. In Iowa, 60 percent of all farm owners are over the age of sixty-five; just 1 percent are thirty-four or younger. More than half of all Iowa farmland is rented out, and the startup costs of land, machinery, and other inputs are a huge barrier to entry. A substantial number of farm owners are elderly widows who inherited the land. As they pass on, Iowa could be transformed.

As Iowa and other agricultural states empty out and businesses close, the states turn into people less deserts. Mono culture (single crop) farming with huge chemical inputs are transforming formerly fertile land into barren deserts. Deserts can take many forms and empty farmland is only the first discussed here.

The news deserts created primarily by the dominance of Facebook and Google and by the crippling of the media business model have grave implications for democracy…it’s undeniable that corruption spreads, conspiracies are fostered, and truth is obscured where journalism is absent.

This is the curse of bigness in San Francisco, a city so teeming with money that nobody can afford to open a store to take it…But the truth is that the San Francisco Bay Area is the nation’s second-most dense…Big money has created a vicious spiral: a winner-take-all city keeps accumulating vacant lots, dead-eyed commuters drive for hours to their barely affordable homes, landords must keep rents astronomically high to cover their own astronomically high loans. The concentration of extreme wealth isn’t just bad for the losers in depressed counties and towns. It’s bad for the winners.

Urban deserts are not limited to Flint and Detroit Michigan, to Oakland California and Philadelphia and Baltimore. Try living in today’s San Francisco. Several of my son’s San Francisco old high school friends are living lives as nomads in the city, complete with vans.

In telecommunications including cellphone and broadband America is a disgrace with the highest prices and lowest quality and service anywhere in the world. At America’s founding, postal service was guaranteed to every American. FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) together with massive western dam projects guaranteed electrical power to every American. At one time every American was guaranteed phone service. Dayen describes Chattanooga, a big beneficiary of the TVA, and its TVA run utility the Electric Power Board (EPB) which decided to upgrade using fiber optics to improve the reliability of its electric grids. In 2007 EPB decided to offer fiber optics to every home in its service area paid for by a $219.8 million bond. Comcast sued to stop the plan alleging illegal cross-subsidy of electric rate payer funds. Comcast lost and residents of EPB’s service area have access to gigabit broadband access supporting phone and internet service. If you are not in EPB’s service area you are in the communications desert.
I live in the heart of Phoenix Arizona and have access to Centurylink’s (baby Bell) DSL “service” of 16MB sometimes at a cost of about $50 per month. I have a grandfathered T-Mobile prepaid phone that gets no signal at my home even after the T-Mobile Sprint merger. I can make phone calls from my home via Android wifi on my T-Mobile phone or via voice over IP (VOIP) through google voice.
I live five miles from Phoenix’s TV Towers but receive no over the air (OTA) signals for any major network on my TV. Using advanced rooftop antennas and signal amplifiers, I used to be able to receive 5 major networks 95 miles line-of-site to the towers on Mount Lemon near Tucson. Continued reduction in transmit power by network operators has reduced reception to 3 major networks today. Even these 3 are sensitive to weather. I tried to raise the issue of reduced OTA transmitter power over the publicly owned airwaves with newly elected Senator Mark Kelly and was blown off by staff members.
If you live in rural America chances are you have no access to broadband. Urban Americans may typically have two “options” for broadband, your baby bell or surviving phone company and one cable operator. Both will have atrocious customer service and questionable reliability and unconscionable low speeds. Somewhere in a streaming chain, maybe the local broadband supplier is able to restrict speeds or break a stream altogether. We could get better service almost anywhere in the world. Most Americans live in a communications desert.

Dayen talks about the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) banking business that came into it’s own in the 1960s. Today it is a huge industry dominated by the six too big to fail banks.

As of 2019, the six biggest banks–JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley–control $10.5 trillion in financial assets. These banks also happen to be serial transnational criminal enterprises, paying $182 billion in (inadequate) penalties for rap sheets of incomparable length. Few of the violations even relate to the financial crisis’s run-up and aftermath, though those were significant. Incidents of debt collection fraud, market rigging, money laundering, misrepresentations to clients, kickback schemes, and unlawful securities sales all occurred after the crisis.

The media has focused on stock buyback after tax reductions and record profits but gives little attention to the bigger story; mergers of corporations into ever larger and more unaccountable monopolies. The six big banks are key players in these mergers pocketing huge fees for their services. Goldman Sachs, in one merger featured in the book involving United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI), continued to change the terms of the merger to favor themselves and even created and sold derivatives for hedge funds wanting to bet against the merger.

Mergers in the health care industry, especially hospitals has created large healthcare deserts in America. Hedge funds often buy hospitals for their real estate value and close them after gutting their operations. Millions of Americans are left with few options and long travel distances and time to seek services.

Monopolies create highly vulnerable supply chains often with sole source and offshore production. Dayen talks about an acute shortage of saline drip bags (cost $1) because production in sole source Puerto Rico was disrupted. This failure disrupted services in hospitals across the country. Covid19 protective equipment like masks, shields, gowns, etc. were simply not available for months. Then there are sole source parts like faulty batteries for the F-35 $100 million fighter jets that made them unable to escape Hurricane Michael in 2018. All current US Weapons systems are dependent on parts from China! Supply deserts are disruptive and dangerous and we are inundated in them.

Ten million American homes were lost to foreclosure as a result the 2008 financial subprime disaster. Dayen has an earlier book Chain of Title focusing on the struggle of American’s being illegal foreclosed on as a result of the massive production of fake documents purporting to support the existence of loans. Aaron Glantz in 2019 published Homewreckers, showing the macro side of how all these illegally foreclosed homes ended up in the hands of hedge funds and other bottom feeders and were removed permanently from the American supply of individually owned homes. Dayen here talks about how these new owners, without experience in real estate rentals and without any regard for the law or people converted these homes into badly or unmaintained rentals and profited from illegal fees, penalties, evictions, and extortion while the huge inventory of once livable single family homes are turned into slums. These few corporations make the Trumps and Kushners of the world look like petty thugs. Meantime, Americans looking to buy homes find limited options and soaring prices. Welcome to the housing desert.

We know how to handle monopolies. You restore the interpretation of the antitrust laws to cover the full spectrum of harms, beyond just consumer welfare. Then you break up dangerous concentrations of economic power, block mergers that would excessively consolidate markets, regulate natural monopolies as public utilities, structurally separate functions where necessary, intervene in the public interest so citizens are protected and empowered, and vigilantly examine markets to prepare for monopolies to emerge again. Maybe that sounds impossible in the abstract. But it is entirely possible under existing law that either hasn’t been enforced in decades or has been misinterpreted for decades. We have over a century of experience with both successfully preventing unnecessary concentrations and failing to do so. The mechanisms are clear; getting the political class to enforce them is the stumbling block.

People, Power, and Profits, Progressive Capitalism For An Age of Discontent, Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2020

Stiglitz is an optimist believing that the enormous concentration of wealth and income (23 people own 50% of the world’s total wealth) can be corrected with a more equal distribution brought about by political action. Thomas Piketty shares Stiglitz’s concern with income and wealth inequality but Piketty’s optimism is based on the study of history and how fast enormously significant and rapid changes have occurred in the past. It’s unclear what the basis for Stiglitz’s optimism is. He talks extensively about how unhappy large majorities of American citizens are, but how this can be translated into meaningful political change is unclear given how broken our current political system is.

Progressive International Elizabeth Goméz Alcorta Yanis Varoufakis Noam Chomsky

Japanese Translation

By 2018, those soaring ideas seem finally to have crashed to Earth. The 2008 financial crisis showed that capitalism wasn’t all that it was supposed to be–it seemed neither efficient nor stable. Then came a rash of statistics showing that the main beneficiaries of the growth of the last quarter century were those at the very top.

The elites had ignored the plight of too many Americans as they pushed for globalization and liberalization, including the financial markets, promising that all would benefit from these “reforms”. But the promised benefits never materialized for most citizens. Globalization hastened de industrialization, leaving behind a majority of citizens, especially the less educated, and of these, especially the men.

Financial market liberalization led to the 2008 financial crisis,the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression that began in 1929. Yet while tens of millions around the world lost their jobs, and millions of Americans lost their homes, none of the major financial executives who brought the global economy to the brink of ruin were held accountable. None served time; rather they were rewarded with mega-bonuses.

No wonder that in the aftermath of the economic failures we have described…there developed a skepticism of the elites and of the knowledge institutions from which they had supposedly derived their wisdom (Chicago School)…good academics had pointed out that globalization could actually lead to lower wages of unskilled workers…unless the government took strong counterveiling measures. They had pointed out that financial liberalization would lead to instability.

Hayek Friedman Reagan Thatcher
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…Swedes knew that a prosperous country required a high level of public expenditures, on infrastructure, education, technology, and social protection, and that the government needed revenues to sustainably finance these expenditures.

The truly greedy and shortsighted in the 1 percent have come to understand that the globalization, financialization, and other elements of the current economic rulebook are not supported by the vast majority of Americans…these super rich have thus formulated a three part strategy: deception, disenfranchisement, and disempowerment.

A misshapen economy creates misshapen individuals and a misshapen society

In economics,it will require both regulating the market and doing what the market can’t do. We will have to get over the shibboleths that markets on their own are self-regulating, efficient, stable, or fair, or that government is inevitably inefficient…we have to save capitalism from itself. We have to construct a new social contract that enable everyone in our rich country to live a decent, middle-class life.

Nor is an economy doing well if GDP goes up, but meanwhile the environment is deteriorating and resources are being depleted. A country living off the past and not investing in the future–or destroying its children’s environmental heritage–is one in which the generation is doing well at the expense of its descendants.

Finance was central to the creation of today’s economic, social, and political malaise: in the economic crisis that America endured for almost a decade as well as in the increase in inequality and the slowing of growth. Resources–including some of the most talented young people–went into finance rather than into strengthening the real economy.

The bank bailout of 2008 itself showed the power of the banks. They had caused the crisis, yet government provided massive largess to the banks and the bankers–without any sense of accountability for the crisis they had created, and with miserly help for the workers and homeowners who seemed but collateral in the financier’s war of greed.

Over the past half century, (some) economists have come to a deeper understanding of the circumstances in which some form of collective action is needed to ensure the attainment of societal objectives–and which markets by themselves fail to produce efficient or fair outcomes…in the absence of regulations, individuals will fail to take into account the cost of their pollution in their economic calculus. Market on their own produce too much pollution, inequality, and unemployment, but too little basic research.

Banks know how to take advantage of others through predatory and deceptive lending. Large banks engage in excessive risk-taking, knowing that they are too big to fail, so that if they run into a problem, they will be rescued.

There can only be trust if there is a belief that the political system is fair, and that our leaders are not just working for themselves. Nothing destroys trust so much as hypocrisy and gaps between what leaders promise and what is delivered…We had created a system where the inequalities in justice seemed as wide as those in income, wealth, and power. No wonder that so many Americans were angry.

Adults in the Room; My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment, Yanis Varoufakis 2017.

This political memoir is best read as a companion to Varoufakis’ 2016 And the Weak Suffer What they Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future. Both were written after Varoufakis’ short term as the Greek Syriza government’s Finance Minister in 2015.

The 2016 book is a macroeconomic primer describing how we got from the 1920 gold standard to Bretton Woods to financialization and the Great Moderation to the worldwide economic and banking collapse of 2006. It explains how the European Union was set up without a political union, with a currency like the 1920’s gold standard and without a central bank like the US Federal Reserve capable of recycling surpluses. What can possibly go wrong? The 2008 global financial meltdown. Yanis estimates a Greek bankrupsy in 2010 would have required a European wide bailout costing each European citizen €10,000. A similar market turn against Wall Street would have cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $258. That is why the 2010 Greek bailout was so important to the EU.

Finance Minister Limousine

The 2017 book is a page turner describing Varoufakis’ attempts to deal with the European troika made up of the European Commission the European Central Bank and the IMF to restructure Greece’s debts and to put the Greek economy on a path to recovery. The troika were only interested in a third bailout with even harsher austerity to punish Greece for having elected a left leaning government and to serve as an example to other weak EU members not to defy the troika.

Yanis describes an early meeting with the formidable Larry Summers who Yanis had previously called “the prince of darkness”. Summers:

There are two kinds of politicians, he said, insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance though not a guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes… So, Yanis, he said, which of the two are you?

In 2009 Germany’s Angela Merkel had requested a €406 Billion bank bailout from her Bundestag. It was barely enough to cover losses from German bank investments in US toxic derivatives. By 2010, losses from German bank loans to the governments of Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece totaled €477 Billion of which €102 Billion had gone to Greece. Merkel knew it would be suicide to return to the Bundestag to request a second bailout. This was the birth of “Bailoutistan”; a complex and deceptive way to get the banks their bailout without the voters knowing how it was done. Corrupt Greek politicians and tax dodging oligarchs were complicit in the deception which pretended to put weak European countries on the road to recovery via extreme austerity measures.

Strauss-Kahn and wife at his NY Trial

The EU charter prohibits financing of government debt. To get around this the EU persuaded the notorious Dominic Strauss-Kahn, who was desperate to save the French banks, to have the IMF make the loans. The beauty for Germany and France was that more than half the loans were guaranteed by the citizens of other poorer countries, many of whom are not in the EU. The other countries all believed they were lending money to the troubled countries. They were unaware the money went directly to the German and French banks. Bailoutistan ultimately became a more than €1 Trillion scam.

James Galbraith

In 2012, James Galbraith arranged for Yanis to teach at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin Texas where he taught courses, including one on the European financial crisis. Yanis was able to organize lectures by Syriza’s leaders that he hoped would reassure Washington, should Syriza became the government of Greece. When Syriza came to power in 2015, Jamie joined Yanis in the finance ministry where he worked tirelessly on plans to restructure the EU debt and economy of Greece. Jamie was nearby during most of Yanis’ meetings with troika leaders, continually revising plans for reform and writing presentations.

Economist William Black who exposed the frauds at the heart of the US Savings and Loan scandal and wrote the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, wrote in support of Yanis after a BBC profile labeled Yanis Greece’s Cassandra:

So why does the BBC treat Varoufakis as a sexy leftist and Dijsselbloem (president of the Eurogroup) as the respected spokeperson for the troika even though Dijsselbloem is a fanatic ideologue who has caused massive human misery because of the intersection of his inflexible ideology and economic incompetence? Varoufakis’ views on the self destructive nature of austerity as a response to the Great Recession are mainstream economic views. He certainly is a leftist, but his policy view arise from different ideological traditions most people would find antagonistic (to left wing thinking). That makes him a non ideologue as the term is defined. The troika, by contrast, is led entirely by ideologues. The primary difference is that they are exceptionally bad economists and exceptionally indifferent to the human misery they inflict on the workers of the periphery that they despise and ridicule. The BBC, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal will never write a profile of the troika’s leadership that makes any of these points. The BBC profile is another of what I and call revealed biases. Journalists and media organs routinely reveal and betray their biases — biases that they hotly deny but rarely escape.

Jeffrey Sachs

Among Yanis’ strongest supporters was American Jeffrey Sachs who was involved in the attempts to restructure the economies of Eastern Europe after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and who came to understand the destruction caused by austerity. Sachs accompanied Yanis at many meetings and worked behind the scenes on developing plans:

Yanis and Christine Laguarde IMF head – “We need adults in the room”

At the end of a busy but arid day punctuated only by Wolfgang Schauble’s (German Finance Minister) statement that Grexit (Greece leaving the EU) was inevitable, Jeff (Sachs) rewarded me with what I took to be a massive compliment. “Having sat in your meetings with Thomasen (European IMF Director), Draghi (ECU president), Schauble, and Regling (head of the ESM), I must tell you that I have never seem anything like this in my decades of experience with meetings between debtor governments and creditors such as the IMF the US government, the World Bank…In every meeting you were positive, bristling with ideas regarding practical solutions. And they kept knocking your ideas down, even though they were good ideas, without proposing a single one of their own. Unbelievable.”

Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Strategist, Whistleblower, and economist) emailed Yanis:

Keep in mind that the ruling class can be self-destructively mad, not just pretending:

Yanis and Alexis Merkel and Alexis

On June 26, after the troika issued an ultimatum, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s Prime Minister, called a cabinet meeting to announce a referendum on the third bailout to take place in one month. During the wait, the troika closed all Greek banks. The Greek oligarchs, the Greek media, previous political leaders and even Syriza leaders all advocated voting yes to a third bailout. Vanis attended a huge rally for “no” where he was cheered for standing up to the troika. It was one of the happiest moments of his time as finance minister. The Greek people voted 61.3% no to the troika. When Yanis went to get his government’s instructions to proceed with plans for a counter offensive he realized that Alexis was capitulating to troika demands. He commented to Danae that evening: “Tonight we had the curious phenomenon of a government overthrowing its people.” Because Yanis would never sign a third bailout he was replaced as finance minister.

Bull By the Horns: Fighting to save main street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself, Sheila Bair, 2012

Hank Ben Sheila Tim Sheila Ben

There were four central regulatory players in the great financial crisis of 2008; Ben Bernanke of the Fed, Hank Paulson of Treasury, Tim Geithner of the New York Fed and Obama’s Treasury secretary, and Sheila Bair of the FDIC. Paulson left Treasury at the end of W’s term and wrote his account of the crisis which this reader has not read. Bair left the FDIC in 2011 and this is her account. Geithner is leaving the Obama administration and will no doubt give us his account. We will have to wait for Bernanke to leave the Fed for his account.

We previously reviewed the Suskind book which featured Geithner ignoring an order from Obama to come up with a plan to break up Citigroup ( Scamming the President ). Bair recalls the meeting in question where the breakup of Citibank is discussed with the President: “Tim seemed to view his job as protecting Citigroup from me, when he should have been worried about protecting the taxpayers from Citi.” Bair says she only learned that Summers was in favor of breaking up Citigroup after reading Suskind’s book. Had she known at the time, she could have insisted that Summers arrange another meeting with the President where she could discuss and advocate using FDIC to resolve Citigroup. She never doubted this breakup could have been done.

This is the first time we learn about the “systemic risk exception” where super majorities of the Fed and FDIC boards declare that putting an institution into an FDIC type resolution would cause “systemic ramifications”. This effectively means that Treasury and the President himself must approve the resolution. Bair says of the NY Fed invoking the exception for Bear Stearns:

In fact, prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the FDIC had never invoked the systemic risk exception. But here we had the NY Fed (Geithner) going out on its own and deciding to bail out a relatively small investment bank, a perimeter player at best…I was concerned about the precedent the NY Fed was setting.

Senator Elect Elizabeth Warren

As Suskind relates, both Geithner and Summers went to great lengths to control access to Obama and the administration had an all boys club atmosphere. Christina Romer, nominal head of the Counsel of Economic Advisers, left the administration early and gets one brief mention in Bair’s account. Bair did have a close working relationship with Elizabeth Warren, newly elected Senator from Massachusetts in Ted Kennedy’s old seat, and Bair still has high hopes for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

She Bear

Bair is a tough, no nonsense, plain speaking advocate of the public interest. Her fierce and protective support of the FDIC against all critics led her staff to call her “She Bear”. When she arrived at the FDIC in 2006, moral was low and the agency hadn’t closed a bank in three years. The black clouds were on the horizon and the FDIC through its own and other regulators examinations had probably the clearest picture of the looming catastrophe. She launched a major offensive to educate the public and woo the media to the role of the FDIC, the mechanisms of the bank resolution process, and reassure the public that insured bank accounts were perfectly safe.

Tim and Sheila Adversaries

Almost immediately the FDIC was overrun with bank failures; Wachovia, Countrywide, Indymac, Washington Mutual and others. She ran into her first major conflict with Geithner who wanted his client Citigroup, despite their dismal financial condition to acquire Wachovia to add their FDIC insured deposits to Citigroups small deposits. Geithner was furious when Bair continued to press Wells Fargo to purchase Wachovia, which they did without any government assistance or guarantees. Geithner doesn’t fare well in Bair’s account in this book.

Rubin’s Acolytes

Bair does a good job explaining the complex structure of financial regulation in this country. The Fed has certain regulatory functions; the FDIC domain covers any institution with insured deposits; Treasury houses two regulatory agencies, the OCC for mega banks; and the OTS for the thrifts including WAMU, Countrywide, and Golden West. While the Fed and FDIC are more independent, the Treasury is highly politicized and has been under the sway of the financial industry for some time. Citigroup’s Bob Rubin (Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary) mentored both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and it was under Clinton that Glass-Steagall was repealed and Derivatives declared free from all regulation. And Hank Paulson was former CEO at Goldman-Sachs. The SEC and CFTC are separate and are dependent on annual budget allocations.

When Senator Dodge advocated creating a single unified regulatory agency, Bair talked him out of it because she feared a single agency would more easily fall under the control of the financial industry and become a super OCC. Besides her wars with the Citigroup dominated Geithner, Bair had continuing problems with the OCC, with John Dugan and John Walsh, comptrollers of the currency, and OTS’s John Reich, who opposed Chase’s purchase of WAMU, Reich’s last bank. The OTS is now abolished. None of these were advocating for main street and the public interest.

Reich opposed Wamu sale

Bair strongly advocated using the government through the resolution process to clean up the toxic mortgage backed securities. The FDIC successfully demonstrated simplified methods to modify mortgages en-mass during the cleanup of the thrifts. Bair was a consistent advocate for loan modification as a way to keep people in their homes and minimize the overall losses to the industry and government. She called TARP, which Paulson sold as a fund to buy toxic assets, then used it to bail out the banks and wall street with capital infusions, a case of bait and switch. She explained some of the reasons for the failure of loan modification programs. Mortgages were lumped into securities which were sold with banks providing loan servicing for low flat fees. This meant the banks were understaffed, under trained, and unsupervised. Breaking the securities into tranches meant that holders of the “safest” tranches would not be hurt financially until perhaps 20% of the mortgages defaulted so were incentivized to prefer foreclosure to restructuring loans. When robo signing was uncovered where single bank workers were fraudulently claiming to have examined the loans being foreclosed the issue moved to the front burner but no effective action resulted. Banks still had separate groups working simultaneously on foreclosure and modification of the same mortgage with customers being approved for modification at the same time they are being evicted. To this date, loan modifications are woefully inadequate and the bulk of toxic assets are still looming.

During the debate on Dodge-Frank, there was considerable discussion of FDIC style regulatory resolution verses bankruptcy. Bair uses the infamous case of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to prove her case that regulatory resolution is far better. Legal and other fees topped $1.5 billion and to date, creditors have recovered 21 cents on the dollar. The Lehman brand is dead and all employees lost their jobs. An FDIC style resolution results in an instant solution, preserving the brand and jobs. Her staff estimated that an FDIC resolution would have recovered 97 cents on the dollar at Lehman.

Bair is generally positive on Dodge-Frank but worries that the industry will continue to attack and modify the measures. Much of the effectiveness of Dodge-Frank will depend on the regulatory implementation and the jury is still out on much of the new complex legislation.

Bair complains that Sorkin in his book Too Big To Fail and in his columns failed to contact the FDIC to get their perspective and thus misrepresented FDIC positions and actions.

Bair spends considerable time on the Basel II accords which greatly reduced capital requirements for banks allowing the European banks to load up on sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Much of the current European financial crisis is attributable directly to Basel II. Bair with a little help from the Fed was able to prevent the US from adopting Basel II. Bair then pushed Basel III to greatly increase capital requirements and to require mega banks to have even higher (9.5%) capital reserves.

Geithner Grilled after Libor Scandal Breaks

Bair notes that the Barclay misconduct in the Libor interest rate fixing scandal from mid 2005 to early 2009 took place at Barclay’s NY trading desk which was subject to Geithner’s NY Fed. The investigation was conducted jointly by the CFTC, UK authorities and the Justice Department. The investigation did not involve the NY Fed. During his appointment hearings for Treasury, Geithner proudly stated “I have never been a regulator, for better or worse.” For once he seems to have been telling the truth. Unfortunately for us, regulating was his Fed job.

Bair is very disappointed in Obama and hopes he will appoint better people in his next administration. The FDIC currently has no head. Would it be too much to hope that Obama might appoint audacious Bair to Treasury?