That's what the public does well: Manage complex systems that have to work all the time, all over the country, in real time.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Companies going belly-up is a normal and entirely acceptable feature of a capitalist economy. A clearing system that cannot withstand a company going belly-up does not work, any more than a Swedish railway that ceases to run when it starts snowing.
The state is the ultimate solvent, neutral third party (you forgot that the third party in question has to be solvent too... that's the problem with AIG, not that they are not trusted to be neutral).
If the state is not a solvent, neutral third party, then you have bigger problems than the fate of your monetary system.
Let's not lose sight of these distinctions in the process of remote transactions. As with power generation, brokerage, and distribution, many different entities may and do own or operate parts of (i, ii) while a state may hold exclusive right enforce (ii).
Lehman's problem, AIG's problem isn't clearing system failure. It was margin calls by its creditors that neither company was able to resolve -- pay. If Lehman or AIG had sufficient funding, they would have wired the money. No one has reported that Lehman or AIG tried to pay their creditors and beneficiaries but could not because clearing system apparatus or clearing checks failed. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
So trust in the counterparties matters as much as trust in the pipes. So why create a system where you need to worry about both, when you can a system where you only need to worry about the pipes? In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
I offered it, because it seemed to me, reading the convo, that vlad and Jake were at cross purposes about characteristics and structure of this particular "system" of verification.
Some specificity about clearing operations apart from clearing system clients' counterparty expectations, or trust, being disputed would help to illustrate, for me at any rate, under what conditions either vlad or Jake believe verification likely fails.
trust in the counterparties matters as much as trust in the pipes.
Oh, I agree. If a loan officer of one bank mistrusts the willingness or ability of another bank's loan officer to fulfill an obligation, failure to verify a trust is the foregone conclusion to the question, Does the formal clearing system function (as designed or intended)?
A margin call is, among financiers trading on earnest money a/k/a reserve req, the quintessential declaration of mistrust. That's why I mentioned it. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
A margin call is, among financiers trading on earnest money a/k/a reserve req, the quintessential declaration of mistrust. That's why I mentioned it.
The reason mistrust among banks makes the clearing system break down is because if I want to pay you, you have to accept my promise that my bank will pay your bank the amount we agree: my payment to you is cleared by our respective banks. When banks don't trust each other and you know it, you can't take my word for the fact that the transaction will clear.
Which is why both of us are better off having our current accounts at the same institution - QED on the "natural monopoly" nature of clearing.
There were two solutions to the banking panic of ca. 1930: to introduce deposit insurance or to nationalise the deposit-taking and payment clearing part of banking. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Um, a margin call is normally a contractual obligation. Exercising an option to call a loan is a declaration of mistrust.
I don't understand the distinction offered between credit instruments. Pls elaborate.
The reason mistrust among banks makes the clearing system break down is because if I want to pay you, you have to accept my promise that my bank will pay your bank the amount we agree: my payment to you is cleared by our respective banks.
A non sequitur.
"My payment to you is cleared by our respective banks" Yes, the clearing system to which both banks subscribe allows both banks to verify the payment amount is available for transfer. Otherwise your bank will NOT ordinarily transfer funds to the payee. It cannot, for there are insufficient funds to transfer. (A bank may however extend credit to an account holder to honor presentment in the event the account is insufficiently funded.) The clearing operations function as designed and intended --whether or not "my promise" to the payee is true or false.
"My promise" is not the same (contractual) obligation as that of the bank to honor a draft on another bank's (deposit or credit) account. What stands to reason though, with respect to the so-called liquidity freeze of 2008Q4, is the frequency of overdrafts and fails (distrust), verified by testing the "clearing system," proved for bank officers the high probability (mistrust) their counterparties could not pay the full, known and unknown, amounts outstanding. So bankers suspended further demands for payment and demand for credit.
Until such time treasuries started distributing the dough to honor their "promises." Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
There is evidence of mistrust only when discretion is exercised. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Let's examine a generic definition of the credit instrument provided by securities brokers to prospective buyers. Various terms of the agreement proferred --including but not limited to closing share price, buyer's reserve requirement (unobligated capital requirement), minimum margin requirement, and timely payment of service fees-- constitute a contract, an agreement, between them.
Buying on margin involves taking out a partial loan from one's broker in order to cover a larger investment than one's capital could directly cover. A margin call most often occurs when the amount of actual capital the investor has drops below a set percent of the total investment. A margin call may also be triggered if the broker changes their minimum margin requirement --- the absolute minimum percentage of the total investment that one must have in direct equity*.
Note that effective demand for payment (to seller, to broker, to reserve account) rests exclusively at the discretion of the creditor/broker. Uncertainty (mistrust) about valuations, the buyer's liquidity or portfolio exposure informs the creditor's decision to alter terms of margin agreements outstanding. Timing/schedule of such emendments however may or may not be stipulated in a contract. I don't know, but I would imagine such limitation is a marketing feature that differentiates brokerages' range of services as well as individual client risk profiles.
---- *I suppose, sales-speak for dividend bearing securities. <urp. ahh> See investopedia.com Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Now, granted, the US$ isn't what it used to be. But you can still get a hell of a lot of man-years for that kind of money.
And that's just the money that they've paid via their taxes - nevermind the money they paid in interest, fees, 401(k)s that have gone up in a poof of smoke, and so on and so forth and etc.
privately operated clearing systems are more expensive than publicly operated clearing systems.
That's around the same size as the entire GDP of the entire USA for a year. If a crisis of this magnitude occurs in the private clearing system once a century (and on the record it appears to be more often than that), the American government could have a full percent of its population on retainer to service the clearing system, and it would still be cheaper than the bailout alone (nevermind the current operating costs).
Are you saying that the US federal government will need more than 1.5 million people more than the private sector to run the clearing system?
If the petrol distribution network ceases to function for a week, people will still be able to get to where they need to go, because their cars have on-board storage capacity.
If the clearing system entirely ceases to function for a week, people start burning stuff.
> safeguard the capital of corporate and retail banking in order to ensure that they can continue to function even in the event of capital market failure
In which sense is this not the same as safeguarding the clearing system?
clearing systems per se, which are just a byproduct of the banking business
The monetary authority could also offer every citizen an account with the central bank, which could be administered through existing commercial banks, savings banks or post offices.
We're conditioned to see a difference between road building and private lending. But where is that difference?
Or to put it another way - what value does private lending really add, when it reliably creates bubbles and crashes as much as it creates working capital?
You're talking about the actual metal in the coins and paper in the notes, right? Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
While you're thinking like a cult member money is created by the largesse of the central banks, who guarantee - something or other.
What that something is, no one knows. But it's obvious that without state support it would be valueless. Whatever it is.
Quoting Galbraith (my emphasis):
The modern large Western corporation and the modern apparatus of socialist planning are variant accommodations to the same need. It is open to every free-born man to dislike this accommodation. But he must direct his attack to the cause. He must not ask that jet aircraft, nuclear power plants or even the modern automobile in its modern volume be produced by firms that are subject to unfixed prices and unmanaged demand. He must ask, as just noted, that they not be produced.
More to the point, however, there will always be a state, and it will always "butt in," as you put it.
Because "the state" is really just a euphemism for "the dude in the immediate vicinity who has the biggest stick." And there will always be a dude with the biggest stick.
Exchange rates seem to be a measure of belief in the size of the stick.
Which shouldn't entirely be a surprise, I suppose.
Keynes
When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.
after a national gas station strike : see, the cars don't work.
When you have a national gas station strike, the army steps in rather quickly, because it is (even with the grace period, as noted by Jake, of people's fuel tanks) a critical infrastructure. Same with payments systems.
That said, maybe you ARE underlining a critical weakness of the car transportation mode: it's a highly decentralised system depending on a highly centralised infrastructure with a very small number of choke points, a weakness that may be worth remembering. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
The risk of cascading breakdowns is one of the crucial logistical similarities between the clearing system, the power grid and the train service. And risk of cascading breakdowns in a vital infrastructure gives you market failure. Every. Single. Time.
The point of nationalising the clearing system is not to prevent another speculative orgy. That is likely to be impossible. The point is to take away the ability of the criminals on Wall Street to take the entire monetary production economy hostage to their games of three-card monte.
Once the clearing system is nationalised, the rest of the banking sector can and should be allowed to burn to the ground when they fuck up on this kind of scale. That's what happens to every other company or sector in a capitalist economy.
Like I said before, states are by far unable to guarantee, let alone replace the whole banking system. This is why I don't agree with US voices speaking against big state, for instance: state's power and influence is already quite small - except maybe the chinese case.
Unless, that is, you want to nationalize the whole economy. Because this is where your reasoning is heading to, in reality, right :) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Preserving the electrical grid is of little help when the generators break down. Preserving the railroads is pointless when there are no trains in the first place.
Yes. That is why you don't unbundle the grids.
Like I said before, states are by far unable to guarantee, let alone replace the whole banking system.
They do not need to replace the whole banking system. GoldmanSachs does not need to be run by the government - it can be allowed to go into Chapter 7 like every other insolvent company which is not worth keeping as a going concern.
All the government has to guarantee is the clearing system. And that is perfectly well within its capabilities. It may have to confiscate the assets of a few hedge funds to do so, but hedge funds are expendable.
Precisely, so nationalizing the clearing system is not enough: we need to nationalize the banks also, really the whole banking systems. We cannot possibly satisfy to a few ATM, right :) That's why I said earlier that we'll be led to taking over all intermediaries. If G Sachs is allowed to fail, who will finance the economy then? The state, since it's the only big actor standing. If it needs to finance the whole economy, that means it'll have to take it over - or at least that's what it'll all amount to. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
If G Sachs is allowed to fail, who will finance the economy then?
In the short term, the state, via massive construction programmes to green the economy. Programmes that are long overdue and will have to be implemented anyway, eventually.
In the medium term, some of the several thousand local and regional banks will fill out the market for project finance. And some of the big banks will go into Chapter 11 instead of Chapter 7, which means that they will still be around, but under new (and hopefully improved) management.
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but the guaranteeing part is exactly what just happened in the US.
As for the rest - where's your evidence that states can't replace the banking system? States can certainly buy and run banks, and historically they've usually done this with greater success than the bankers have.
Your position seems to be based on nothing more solid than wishful thinking, repetition and ideology.
It's certainly not based on history or fact.
States can buy and run banks, better or worse. The example of Credit Lyonnais comes to mind here.
My position is that the state is not some all-powerful monster. I don't say it's not competent, although even that can be discussed, but that it isn't big enough. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
the state is not some all-powerful monster
You don't need investment banks for that, but you do need deposit accounts and debit cards. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Bubbles and crashes are overhead. They're very, very expensive overhead.
Because even if the banks pay back every last cent they've 'borrowed' - which is about as likely to happen as Jupiter is to crash into the Andromeda galaxy - millions of people will still have lost jobs, homes, marriages and life opportunities, and will be permanently scarred in the aftermath.
Perhaps you think this is unimportant. That's certainly your right, but if so you're not going to find many people on ET who agree with you.
That's the bottom line here. The great free-enterprise rhetoric about freedom and opportunity and its inherent superiority to evil communism is a naked, screaming, childish lie. If you're one of the losers - and as wealth becomes ever more concentrated, more and more people discover that they're losers - you will not be better off. You will not be happier, you will not be more comfortable, you will not have more opportunity.
Banking is at the centre of this, because US-style banking either pushes for a rentier culture which concentrates wealth for the sake of it, or it grudgingly tolerates an investment culture which redistributes wealth for the sake of wider benefit.
And the evidence is clear - rentier culture doesn't work. It doesn't even work for rentiers. Real prosperity has only ever happened under strategic redistributive government investment and management programs. Anything else is a pantomime of horrors.
You're taking a philosophical point of view that Jake didn't, and that's perfectly your right and my pleasure to discuss it. Not only I don't take the absolutely-free markets vs communism as the only two possible alternatives, but I do think they are even somehow related. Unfortunately US style banking became the paragon of banking success, like everything else coming from the US, not the least management and marketing techniques. I'm not for forcing people into stuff though - I wouldn't tax rentiers to death for instance, but create incentive for them to not hoard, but to somehow return the money into the society. Or with things like globalisation, this is hardly possible. I don't even think rentiers are all that rich in the end (I'm still thinking of the poor Noirmoutier fishermen whose houses tripled in value and they dumbfound themselves due "rich" tax) or all that happy to be just rentiers. I mean I wouldn't demonize them quite so easily. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Claiming that price accurately reflects value leads you into the kind of dead end where your economic model fails to accommodate speculative bubbles and the value of goods that cannot be assigned a price by the existing institutions.
In the precise case of the fishermen, the problem lies with the French state's stubborn in taking into account realestate market prices as a criteria for wealth tax. I guess I don't need to tell you that this smells like a law against rentiers, made by -- do I need to tell you who?... Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Including real estate in a wealth tax is a perfectly sensible thing to do. Allowing real estate prices to bubble out of control is a perfectly idiotic thing to do.
Why would yuo have them rent their family house?
Because then they don't have to worry about fluctuations in real estate prices. And they don't get fictitious value increases that can be played up by politicians who are fond of printing money and handing it to rich fucks.
Altogether a better deal for the political economy as a whole. And usually also for the people principally involved.
And needless to say, renting makes you much more mobile, because you can terminate your occupancy without having to go through the hassle of selling the property.
And how do you propose to rein in the realestate bubble?
Progressive wealth taxes, prohibit casino mortgages, limit mortgages to 80 % of the taxed value of the house, provide adequate and affordable public housing. And that's just off the top of my head - I could probably think of a couple of other things if I took a little time to do it.
So, a system of incentives needs to be set up which aligns the interests of both the renter and the owner, so that it is in the interest of both of them to improve the property.
I know many people whose main motivation for wanting to own is "to be able to modify their home". The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Of course, that would also expose the owner to a number of structural risks. But people who can afford to buy to let are better placed to carry those risks than people who are renting from them.
F**k the political economy. Just keep out of My Land will ya! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Or, more bluntly put, if not for the existence of a political economy, you would have to spend most of your time defending "your" land from intruders.
Democratical state guaranteeing the right to private ownership as a fundamental human right does not give it (the State) any prerogative (exceptional situations excepted) to dispose of My Goods.
There you go again with the ideology. The notion of fundamental human rights is an ideological position (one that I happen to share, but also one that the vast, vast majority of human society throughout the history of the species does not).
And I would remind you that for every sob story you can find about poor fishermen being forced to leave their ancestral home because the real estate bubble unjustly inflates their land taxes, there is a multitude of stories to be told about people who quite voluntarily sell their house during a bubble and cash in the inflated price. They have produced no value at all in that transaction - not a single meter of railroad has been built because the price of their house went up, not a single ball bearing has been cast because the price of their house went up, not a single windmill was assembled because the price of their house went up.
Since society in aggregate did not get wealthier, any gain they have made by that transaction comes directly at the expense of someone else in society. How's that fair or just? How's it fair that the price I pay for bread and rent goes up, just because the real estate market is in a manic phase? How is it fair that my job disappears just because the real estate market is in a depressive phase?
Yes, the tools used to pop bubbles have side effects. Innocent people - like your hypothetical fishermen - will be hit by those side effects. But they are less than the predictable and unavoidable effects of not popping the bubble. So if you want to avoid wealth taxes, including taxes on real estate, you have to provide a viable alternative for popping bubbles. Preferably one that causes less collateral damage to innocent people.
If cabins are sold in bubble times, those sales can be taxed. This is a means to fight bubbles, btw, and in the mean time, build some railroads to nicely criss-cross those muddy lands.
Finally, I deeply dislike the idea of collateral damage, no matter how little, that should be tolerated, no matter the reason. This is called injustice and anyone affected should be justly compensated. It is you who was bragging to easily find bubble solutions, btw. I'm just telling you some of them are injust.
(note: the sob story is real, I saw the fisherman's daughter with my own eyes telling it) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Which ideology was that, exactly?
It could be any of several, including but not limited to humanism, constitutionalism and the Enlightenment notion of "natural law." And, of course, a plethora of more or less wingnut versions of lazzes-faire liberalism.
They may temporarily converge with ideas of the modern right, classical liberalism or social democracy, but don't have as a source a particular ideology.
Ah, but you do. And I am actually getting a fairly detailed picture of it by now.
I don't know whether it has a name, but it draws rather heavily upon late Enlightenment notions of natural law, along with a helping of frankly unenlightened Compulsive Centrist Disorder. There's a couple of other things in there as well, but those are the two main points.
Finally, I deeply dislike the idea of collateral damage, no matter how little, that should be tolerated, no matter the reason.
Don't we all. But as it happens, bubbles have very grave collateral damage when they are not popped early.
It is you who was bragging to easily find bubble solutions, btw. I'm just telling you some of them are injust.
Why, yes, they are. If you choose to define justice as a binary attribute, then all policies to deal with bubbles are unjust - including the policy of not dealing with it. Once bubbles form, you have the choice between popping it now and popping it later. When it pops, it will impose some inconvenience, or even hardship, upon everyone it touches. Some of those people will be innocent, in the sense that they were not participating in inflating the bubble. That is beyond the realm of political choice. What you can choose is to pop the bubble sooner rather than later, thus minimising the collateral damage.
Even if, by some miracle which nobody can possibly foresee, the cost of the bailout turns out to be only 1.3 trillion dollars, the point would still stand: That money - averaged over the time until the next crash - would handsomely pay for running an entire public clearing system. With these kinds of numbers, an order of magnitude or two in either direction will not tip the balance.
Because the Fed doesn't know how much it has been lending, what's the betting the real numbers are far more generous?
13 trillion is nearly the entire US GDP. You really have to let that sink in for a while - the Fed has handed out a sum equivalent to the entire US GDP to Wall St investment banks, without proper accounting or oversight.
But no - state-run banking would still be more expensive and less efficient and productive.
Right.
