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No, you couldn't, because all these billions are not going, directly or indirectly, towards creating jobs.

Those billions go into creating economical activity. Whether or not that means job creation, it doesn't seem implicite at all. And that's no surprise: western society's social advances brought along huge motivation for business to try to cut workforce cost.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)

by ValentinD (walentijn arobase free spot frança) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 06:12:26 AM EST
[ Parent ]
ValentinD:
Those billions go into creating economical activity.
But they aren't, they are going to capitalizing undercapitalised banks.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 06:26:15 AM EST
[ Parent ]
They're going to capitalise some undercapitalised banks.

The smaller banks will - tragically - be allowed to fail.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 08:03:21 AM EST
[ Parent ]
In order to sustain credit activity. They should be supervised about this. I also can't possibly understand how comes that the US government is not in the boards of all those banks yet.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
by ValentinD (walentijn arobase free spot frança) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 08:26:31 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Because the boards of all those banks are in the US government.
by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 09:06:59 AM EST
[ Parent ]
No, in order to bail out their golf buddies.

If this were about sustaining credit activities, they would have separated the banks' activities into the good, the bad and the shoot-on-sight-illegal.

The shoot-on-site-illegal activities would have been rendered null and void by decree. The bad activities would have been dumped on the holding companies, which would then have gone bankrupt. That is not a problem; holding companies are just hedge funds writ big - they are not structurally important. The good activities would have been put into good banks, which would then be solvent.

That's how you do it if you want to solve the problem. It's been done before. It's reasonably cheap. And it always works. Failure on part of the regulators to do so amounts to wilful mendacity, in the same way that failing to break for a red light amounts to wilfully endangering nearby pedestrians.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 09:08:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]
A good exemple of this approach is shown, oddly enough, by AIG, whose insurance subsidiaries, who do a "normal", rather heavily regulated, business, are considered safe (and are now being sold off for real money to plug the holes at the holding level).

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 09:41:39 AM EST
[ Parent ]

What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.)

(From yesterday's OT)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 09:45:27 AM EST
[ Parent ]
They'll tell you that would have risked to plunge the Dow to oil-pocket levels.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
by ValentinD (walentijn arobase free spot frança) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 12:24:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]
So be it. The Dow is not a proper measure of economic health and we should take our collective eyes off it.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 12:53:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I'm not sure how yet, but I assure you I feel quite more revolutionary about all these indexes, given the problems they bring along.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
by ValentinD (walentijn arobase free spot frança) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 03:40:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]
"La politique de la France ne se fait pas à la Corbeille" (de Gaulle)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 01:13:50 PM EST
[ Parent ]
They'll tell you that would have risked to plunge the Dow to oil-pocket levels.

I fail to see any problem with that, which cannot be solved by giving our railways, electrical grid, ports and other infrastructure an overhaul.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 01:26:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Except there is no money. Dow down means no more investor confidence, no more economic funding, and with our happily-spending drown-in-debts countries, paying for such overhaul would pose the obvious problem of where they'll finally take the money from.
This is debatable, but we'll talk about it again when the insistance of the Chinese to put their reserves in FMI withdrawal rights or whatever they're called will push the dollar to where the Turkish pound stands, and the US to default on foreign debt.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
by ValentinD (walentijn arobase free spot frança) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 03:43:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Except there is no money.

Last time I checked, people were not divesting themselves of US Treasuries. The US government has an excellent credit (for reasons that I personally fail to understand, but hey...).

Dow down means no more investor confidence, no more economic funding,

Private investors are irrelevant. The US has a gargantuan backlog of essential public spending that would need to be done anyway. Lack of private spending simply means that it can be started today, rather than slowly over the next ten or twenty years.

and with our happily-spending drown-in-debts countries, paying for such overhaul would pose the obvious problem of where they'll finally take the money from.

Monetise future tax revenues.

And for the case of the US and UK, repatriate wealth from tax frauds who hide money in flag of convenience countries.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 05:19:35 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Sure. Zjust that. Most convenience countries are under US, UK, or China protection :)

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
by ValentinD (walentijn arobase free spot frança) on Wed May 20th, 2009 at 04:56:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Whose protection they are under is irrelevant. You can repatriate the money simply by refusing to clear transactions in your currency for the financial system of said country, until and unless they cooperate with your tax authorities.

All cross-border transactions in your currency are cleared by your central bank, and it is in the nature of a flag-of-convenience country that a substantial part of their assets are in foreign currencies, making them vulnerable to this kind of action.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed May 20th, 2009 at 05:12:38 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Jake, Britain will Never "refuse to clear transactions" with the Guernsey, Man island, Bermuda and so on. You surely can't believe that. London is the biggest one of them, and these procedures have all been invented by anglosaxons. Obama conveniently jabs against the Swiss, because that's one of the few tax haven not under US, UK or China protection. You think he'll do anything against Hong-Kong, or Singapore? Think again.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
by ValentinD (walentijn arobase free spot frança) on Wed May 20th, 2009 at 05:22:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]
You are undoubtedly correct that the British government will never do such a thing.

Which is why the British people should start sharpening their pitchforks and oiling their torches.

In a democracy, the people can and should take the state away from the government when the government misbehaves.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed May 20th, 2009 at 05:33:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]
For neo__s, including the putz, recapitalizing insolvent banks is economic activity. These opinion makers, policy makers, are concerned only with measuring resource and returns attributable to allocation of financial capital, anywhere, globally. I think you did not read the memo carefully: renting money is an efficient alternative real capital production and distribution so long as "the law" backs, or enforces, transaction value.

Treasury and central bank "injections" (secured and unsecured lending and securities repos) contribute to GDP, or GNP, aggregate price level (revenues) --not unit level changes-- and a semblence of productivity gains (profit) which is a virtue unto itself. Thus a putz will argue, "More stimulus!," as if a YoY, QoQ, or MoM difference in GDP measures ("the gap") --irrespective of capital quality purchased-- signified total cost of human employment (wage compensation) across all industrial sectors which ostensibly constitute a national economy. As if stimulus beneficiaries necessarily prefer to spend all or most their newly acquired debt on human labor before any other capital investment (e.g. RE, P&E, software, liquidity, insurance, senators and MPs, securities, etc.)

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

by Cat on Wed May 20th, 2009 at 02:11:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Well, the solution is obvious.  We just set up a computer in the U.K. and a computer in the U.S.  Every even numbered day they transfer a trillion dollars from the U.S. to the U.K., and on odd numbered days from the U.K. to the U.S.  Soon we'll have GDP coming out of our ears.
by tjbuff (timhess@adelphia.net) on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 10:32:31 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Have you been watching Star Trek?

--
$E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
by martingale on Tue May 19th, 2009 at 07:56:21 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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