Where is the Economy Headed?

Headlines such as “World Stocks Fall to Two-Year Low” that appears in today’s (October 30) Wall Street Journal have many wondering if the tepid recovery from the 2007-2008 crash is finished. Since mid-Summer, the Shenzhen Composite, FTSE 100, Stoxx Europe 600, and other benchmark exchanges have steadily declined, with the US Standard and Poor’s joining them over the last few weeks. As author Akane Otani notes: “After a punishing October, major indices in Europe, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Argentina, and Canada are languishing in correction territory-- a drop of at least 10% from a recent high. The US is teetering on the edge of joining its peers…”

The Stock Market Fetish

Like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Unemployment rate, composite equity performance is a limited measuring stick of the economy’s health, though it is favored by popular mainstream pundits and celebrity economists. As such, all three become the grist for the bourgeois political mill. Invariably, they soon obscure more than they enlighten.

So what do the markets tell us?

In some parts of the world, they signal that stimulus programs have failed to revive stagnant economies (e.g. EU, Japan). Additionally, measures of manufacturing growth have declined for nearly every segment of the global market since the beginning of the year (emerging markets, EU, Japan, etc., excepting the US).

Last week’s EU quarterly GDP figures confirm the European Union’s persistent stagnation: the aggregate growth for the European Union’s 19 members was a mere 0.6%, the lowest in 5 years.

For the US stock market, on the other hand, highs and lows are more intertwined with policy decisions, financial manipulation, and speculation. Thus, the market euphoria of the last few years did not reflect real economic fundamentals, and the current volatility does not foretell an imminent collapse. Instead, US stock exchanges have thrived on nearly free money and a Federal Reserve that removed all of the “asset” flotsam and jetsam lingering in the wake of the 2007-2008 collapse. But the usual shakeout of less profitable, damaged firms was incomplete, thanks to the availability of money at interest rates suppressed by the central bank, the Federal Reserve. The low interest-rate environment was especially favorable to high-tech firms (slow to show sufficient revenue growth), emerging markets (hungry for low interest foreign loans), and small capitalization enterprises that should have sunk into oblivion because of investment unworthiness after the meltdown.

For the behemoths of monopoly capital, low interest rates in the wake of the crisis allowed for an orgy of mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks that electrified equity markets without creating any socially useful results. In others words, the era of interest-free money buoyed up a leaking capitalist ship that predictably converted the gift into market “value” and profit.

Wiser heads in the Federal Reserve understood that if it continued to be a wet nurse for mature capitalist enterprises, asset inflation would continue unabated. Investors would wake up and see that there was no ‘there’ there and punch a hole in the market bubble.

Consequently, the Fed began a program of gradual interest-rate increases to slow the promiscuous borrowing that was fueling asset inflation. Industries like Technology, Finance, and Communication were particularly vulnerable to this program since their earnings growth stood well beyond their more modest growth of revenue.

Nothing shows the weakness of the overheated market more than the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs)-- the first stock offerings of newly public companies. So far in 2018, fully 83% of IPOs have been conducted for companies that have lost money in the last 12 months, a figure greater than that leading to the dot-com crisis year of 2000.

It is no wonder that the Federal Reserve, fearing an asset bubble, has put the brakes on. And it is no wonder that capitalists are caught between the responsibility of managing capitalism as a system and the ecstasy of operating with free money, the contradiction between systemic discipline and unrestrained accumulation.

Leading Indicators?

But if the stock market is a not-so-reliable guide to the health of the US economy, what are more reliable markers?

On the surface, the US economy is uniquely healthy in the midst of global stagnation or decline. The television hawkers of economic news herald the GDP growth rate in the second (4.2%) and third (3.5%) quarters of this year, numbers well above the post-crash averages. Similarly, the pundits are in awe of the officially reported low unemployment level. And they point to the less impressive, but welcome growth of wages in recent months as further evidence of a vibrant economy. They are less forthcoming-- embarrassed, perhaps-- about the explosion of already robust earnings (profits) in 2018.

Likely, this photo-shopped picture of the US economy will benefit Trump and his candidates in the elections. The warm and fuzzy picture is conveyed by the so-called leading indicators. But if we open the hood and look more closely at the capitalist economic engine, we get a somewhat different picture.

Behind the 2018 GDP growth are several contingent factors, including the Trump tax cut. But unacknowledged by many is the increase of government spending, largely military. Nearly half of the year-to-year growth-rate increase through April was accounted for by government spending alone, two-thirds of which was directly for the military. The bipartisan endorsement of an obscene military budget pumps up Trump-era growth as it has for many previous Presidents (remember Reagan?).

Fully 1.22 points were added to the 4.2% 2nd-quarter growth solely from global trade, the overseas purchase of US products like soybeans before the onset of the Chinese retaliatory tariffs.

And third-quarter GDP growth was equally a result of consumer spending (highest growth since 2014) and the aforementioned growth in government spending.

Despite the hollow celebration of rising wages, the aggregate numbers mask an important reality: Labor Department figures show that the greatest growth in weekly earnings accrue to the bottom 10% of earners (+5%) and the top 10% (+3+%), while 80% of US workers now see their incomes grow at a level only marginally above their cost of living.

While growth in income for the bottom 10% is welcome, it results only from the tight labor market in low-paying jobs, the largest source of job growth since the crash. The pressure on that segment underscores the hollowness of the employment recovery.

The US capitalist “recovery” has relied on the availability of low-wage labor. The collapse of 2007-8 generated a veritable ‘reserve army of unemployed’ willing to accept low-paying jobs, absent union militancy. Consequently, the capitalists have felt no need to invest in productivity-enhancing equipment-- it is cheaper to hire minimum-wage workers than invest in new machinery. Therefore, the last decade has experienced tepid growth in labor productivity demonstrated by 32 straight quarters (8 years!) of sub-2% productivity growth, but strong profitability, unprecedented in the post-World War II era.

Most of the growth in consumer spending is fueled, not by workers’ pay, but by additional borrowing and more people working more hours. US household debt hit a new high in the 2nd quarter; debt continues to rise faster than income for the average US citizen.

Fundamentals

Contrary to the promises of the Trump Administration, the deep cut in corporate taxes along with the 21% increase in profits in the 3rd quarter have produced little increase in business investment. Growth in business investment was a mere .1% in both August and September.

A key measure of core industrial production—durable-goods orders excluding military orders-- declined 0.6% in September.

Retail spending-- a core element of consumer spending-- rose by only 0.1% in both August and September.

Two other critical components of consumer spending-- auto sales and home sales-- are flashing danger. Auto sales declined steeply by 6% in September, after a mostly sluggish year.

And home sales, a huge element in the US economy has tanked. New-home sales declined in September by 5.5%, the slowest rate in 2 years, and the latest month of a four-month slide.

Existing-home sales, a far bigger part of the housing market, declined by 3.4% in September, the latest month of a seven-month slide!

What to Expect

While it is true that Trump has been somewhat corralled into being a conventional right-wing Republican, but with his own uniquely vulgar and infantile stamp on the Presidency, he retains unconventional elements of populist nationalism-- the tacit confession that the empire is in trouble and the need to “Make America Great Again.” Both stances play into Trump’s economic policy in unusual and contradictory ways.

Like archetypical right-wing President Reagan, tax-cutting and deregulation drives a Corporation Über Alles approach. 

Like Reagan, the current Administration uses defense spending as the central stimulus for the economy. Since such a policy needs powerful enemies, the two parties have collaborated to concoct Russia and China as the countries to play the role of bitter enemies. The threat of war against China and/or Russia justifies far more spending and weapons sales than a war against Islamists in sandals or weak countries with ancient Soviet equipment.

Trump’s nationalism rejects alliances, pacts, and submission to international constraints, regulation, or authority. Instead, it embraces the economics of sanctions and tariffs; it substitutes the blatant behavior of a bully for the formerly fostered notion of global cooperation. If other countries deny US hegemony, the US will demonstrate it forcefully.

To the chagrin of the Democrats, the popular perception of the booming US economy has calmed corporate fears of Trump’s recklessness and emboldened Trump’s advisors and supporters.

But behind the appearance of economic exuberance is an economic engine running out of gas: key fundamental markers for consumption and investment are slackening, profits are threatened, and major political stumbling blocks lie ahead.

Despite record-breaking profits, compensation costs for capitalist enterprises are eating into those profits. The low unemployment rate has spurred an intense competition for workers. With fewer unemployed available, firms are offering higher wages, salaries, and benefits to wrest employees from other firms.

Further, the rising interest-rate environment is tacking on additional borrowing costs to overall costs, cutting into corporate margins.

And the relatively slow corporate-revenue growth, especially in Technology and Communication, is squeezing profits as well.

The explosive growth of Federal debt further challenges the Trump economy, though only for those wedded to conventional economic dogma. Because of the tax cuts, the deficit expanded by 17% in the fiscal year ending in September to the highest level in 6 years. With rising interest rates, deficit growth will only accelerate. The debt scolds in both parties will be screaming in chorus for budget cuts and spending limits (as they did so often during the Obama Administration). Of course they will argue for the cuts to come from programs and institutions that serve the people. The scourge of austerity will descend again over the economy, producing the readily predictable result of dampened growth.

The Trump Administration is battling the Federal Reserve over the issue of interest rates. The Fed is attempting to raise interest rates to take the oxygen out of the economy and evade speculative bubbles. Trump, on the other hand, wants low rates to pump oxygen into the economy to secure the continued growth that he has promised. Neither approach will save the economy from the turmoil ahead.

Next year will bring stagnation, if not economic decline, for the global as well as the US economy. Inevitably, capitalism will attempt to place the burden of the system’s failure onto the backs of working people. It will sell austerity as the palliative for that failure, another sign of the bankruptcy of the system.

Some will fight to fix the capitalist system, to reform it. Others will struggle to replace it. The goals should not be confused. They are different projects. Only one can promise a humane, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Tottering on Another Brink

In June of 2015, I wrote:

Broadly speaking, the three key factors of fixed business investment, productivity and, corporate profits have been trending downward for three to four years. First-quarter 2015 fixed investments fell 3.4%, not surprisingly, output per hour (productivity) fell by 3.1%, and earnings were expected to barely move. These three interdependent and fundamental indicators underscore the critical weaknesses in the US economy. Capitalism has wrung as much sweat as it can from workers, managers are reluctant to invest in new or advanced means of production, and US corporations are experiencing a decline in the rate of profit.

Since then, the “three key factors” gauging the health of the US economy have only worsened: Capital expenditure in the third quarter fell by 3.8%, productivity on an annualized basis was only up .4% for the third quarter, and profits suffered the largest (annualized through the third quarter) decline since the 2008 downturn.

In addition, the US manufacturing activity index (Institute for Supply Management) has fallen to its lowest level since June of 2009 and industrial production has declined for the third straight month through November (the just released December data from ISM affirm the first consecutive monthly contraction of the index of manufacturing activity since 2009).

Capacity utilization has dropped to 77%, the lowest in two years. Before 2007 and the onset of the economic crisis, it stood at 80%.

I wrote in June of the stock market inflation generated by mergers and acquisitions, stock buy-backs, and the obscenely low cost of borrowing. The wealth effect of that inflation—its psychological effect on spending—has receded. Market losses account for most of the $1.2 trillion in erased wealth in the third quarter, as reported by the Federal Reserve.

The rout of junk bonds (high-risk, high-yield bonds) in 2015 only adds to insecurity. While junk bonds only totaled $709 billion at the onset of crisis in 2008, they totalled $1.3 trillion when investors began to abandon them. Consequently the ratio of high-yield debt to corporate earnings is close to a new high. A faltering equity market is dampening investor euphoria.

I warned in June:

Today, there are 65 venture capital investments of over $1 billion each (CB Insights says there are 107), drawing funds from yield-hungry retirement funds, mutual funds, and hedge funds. Whatever the number, all agree that the total capitalization of these investments in firms that are little more than start-ups approaches or exceeds the capitalization of the similar “dot com” firms that blew up in 2000.

But new start-ups hit powerful head winds in 2015, especially in the tech/internet sector. As The Wall Street Journal reports: “Technology and Internet companies that went public in the US raised $9.5 billion in 2015, down from $40.8 billion in 2014… the number of IPOs in the sector dropped by more than half, to 29 from 62.”

Clearly, “yield-hungry” investors have miscalculated, as reflected by the current sharp fall of the NASDAQ equity market.

Of course, the US economy is also decidedly rocked by global developments: the PRC economy is shaky at best, the EU is stagnant, Canada is slowing, and the Russian and Brazilian economies are in sharp decline.

While consumer spending has buoyed the US economy, lifting GDP into positive territory, the well-spring of capitalism—profitability—continues to pose the critical problem. The third quarter of 2015 suffered the largest annualized decline in profits since the 2008 downturn. Third quarter profits were down 1.1% from the second quarter and 4.7% from the same quarter in 2014, demonstrating a persistent downward trend.

Interviewed in Barron’s (December 21, 2015), David Levy of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center perceptively opined: “…But the one thing that has actually caused the economy to weaken a little is sagging profits. We’ve heard people use the expression ‘profit recession’, but there is no profits recession without a real recession. I see signs of things slowing as a result of that profits decline…”

It confounds me that progressive economists, many Marxists, and even Communist Parties continue to locate the source of the ongoing, and now deepening, capitalist crisis in “overproduction” or declining consumption or demand. These notions are remnants of an earlier pre-monopoly era or the influence of Keynesian thinking on Marxism and the broader Left. The “overproduction” that is relevant to capitalist crisis is the overproduction of capital which cannot find a profitable home without gumming up the accumulation process.

The demand-based theories serve as the centerpiece of social democratic crisis theory. Yes, corporate revenue and consumer spending are now stagnant or declining—not as leading indicators, but as consequences of a general economic slowdown brought on by the prospect of fewer profit opportunities. But it is a fall in the growth of profits or a decline in the rate of profit that causes capitalists to apply the brakes. If markets demonstrate greater profitability (by awarding capitalists a greater share, for example), capitalists will continue to invest, fuel the economic engine, even in the face of the stagnant or declining revenues of the moment. Of course falling revenues will eventually further retard the rate of profit. But it is profit that propels capitalism or sinks it in its absence.

For Marxists, it is not simply the numbers that explain the future, but the trends or patterns. Clearly the trends are negative. With central bank tools largely exhausted, it is difficult to imagine an easy escape from deepening crisis; it is difficult to see the coming year as bringing anything other than economic hardship.

Given the rise of the extreme right and the absence of a militant left in most countries, the economic crisis threatens to pose formidable political obstacles. And given the ubiquitous deadly conflicts and increasing inter-imperialist hostilities, the new year demands a heightened commitment to peace and social justice. That commitment must go beyond the tinctures and band aids served up currently by liberals and social democrats.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

The Chronic Crisis, with Worse to Come?

Looking back on the ten years following the 1929 stock market crash, Marxist economist and Science and Society co-editor, Vladimir D. Kazakevich, wrote of the “chronic crisis” that persisted throughout the nineteen thirties in the US (“The War and American Finance,” Science and Society, Spring 1940). Kazakevich drew attention to the stagnation that lasted over the decade, noting that after World War One, the United States became the most dominant economy in the world. Yet “[a]s the most powerful capitalist country, the United States developed particularly glaring financial weaknesses, attributable, for the most part, precisely to its foremost place in a capitalist world torn by economic contradiction and frustration.”

Kazakevich, a good Marxist instead of a born-again Keynesian, reflected on the collapse of growth of the capital goods sector through the New Deal decade: “These figures show how enormously capitalist activity had shrunk in the thirties as compared to the twenties. Most of the Federal expenditures of the New Deal period were directed towards sustaining the demand for consumers' goods rather than for capital or producers' goods... Although widely advocated, 'priming of the pump' from the end of consumers' goods alone, has proved a complete failure as an economic measure for resuscitation of the capitalist organization harassed by a chronic crisis.”

Economic commentators today are increasingly nervous about a similar slump in capital goods accompanying our own “chronic crisis.” Because the growth of capital spending (and capital equipment spending) is running well below its long-term average of 8% (growing just 3% in 2013), the average age of industrial machinery and equipment in the US has surpassed 10 years, the highest average age since 1938 when Kazakevich was painting his dire picture! (The Wall Street Journal, 9-3-14) Thus, the slug-like motion of the US economy during the last seven years mimics in an important way the stagnation following the great crash initiating the Great Depression.

While capital spending may not now play quite the decisive role it played in the US economy during the 1930s, it remains a strong indicator of the hesitancy of managers to expand the productive core of the economy. They fail to see prospects for profit expansion in the extensive growth or retooling of the manufacturing sector. Of course that does not mean that managers are not seeking profits or investors are not seeking a return on investment. Managers have plowed more cash into mergers and acquisitions during the first half of 2014 than any time since 1999. That also is typically a part of capitalist restructuring after a severe crash. This rationalizing of capitalist production serves and has served to restore the growth of profit following a capitalist misadventure.

In the wake of the crash of 2007-2008 the US economy experienced a dramatic jump in labor productivity (in the absence of capital investment, this necessarily came largely from an increase in the rate of exploitation). Massive layoffs, plant closings, and weak union leadership combined wage stagnation with extreme speed up of a shrunken labor force. Profits ensued. And consequently the previously depressed rate of profit resumed its growth.

Unfortunately for the prospects of capitalism, the growth of productivity has petered out: its past 5-year average is only slightly more than half of the 20-year average, with productivity actually falling 1.7% in the first quarter of 2014. So this road to profit recovery and growth is seemingly closed.

Of course if the past productivity gains had been shared with the working class, capitalism likely would have experienced an increase in revenues (folks would have purchased more goods and services) and a rosier earnings outlook. But that did not happen. Adjusted for inflation, the cumulative growth of median household income has dropped precipitously since the crash, settling at the level of 1990. Consequently, corporate revenue growth peaked in the third quarter of 2011 and has shrunk ever since.

Thus, three signal measures promising profit-rate increases-- capital investment, labor productivity, and revenue increases-- are failing the US economy.

Not surprisingly, reported corporate profit growth has suffered. From its peak in the last quarter of 2009 (over 10%), it has receded steadily.

Profits, Profits, Profits!

It is important to emphasize that it is profits that fuel the capitalist system. While it seems an obvious point, it is the starting point of the Marxist theory of crisis. The capitalist system only appears healthy when the capitalist both holds capital and expects a return. He or she dreads two things: idle capital (capital with no prospect of return) and a stagnant or declining rate of return. Consequently, capitalism generates systemic growth if and only if capital is abundant, investment opportunities are rife, and the rate of profit is sufficiently enticing.

But this law of capitalist accumulation contains the seeds of capitalist crisis. As noted above, the growth of the rate of profit has been declining for some time. At the same time, the accumulation of capital is expanding faster than the overall US economy. The relative mass of profits-- measured by US corporate profits as a percentage of GDP-- reached unprecedented levels in the second quarter of 2014 (a level of profit/GDP only approached twice since 1947: immediately before the crash and in 1950). In other words, despite the fall in the rate of profit, the profit-generating capitalist engine is producing potential new capital faster than wealth is being produced. Three conclusions follow: capital is winning the class war, growth is lagging, and the mass of capital is growing relative to the size of the economy while the profit rate is declining.

And new capital must seek a home, a place to go to accumulate more capital.

Combine the profit-generated capital with the unprecedented cash held by corporations and the availability of cheap credit (nearly non-existent interest rates) and the capitalist class is faced with a daunting task of finding investment opportunities for a vast pool of capital.

If this sounds familiar, it is. Before the crash, many economic commentators noted that the investment world was awash in cash searching for opportunities. I wrote in April of 2007 (Tabloid Political Economy: The Coming Depression, Marxism-Leninism Today, April 5, 2007) that “Despite being awash in capital, financial power searches for investment opportunities to no avail. Economic theorists have been puzzled by the low returns available, even for high-risk or long-term investment. Under normal circumstances, risk and patience earn a premium in investment, but not today. Instead, the enormous pool of wealth concentrated in fewer hands can only lure borrowers at modest rates. There is simply too much accumulated wealth pursuing too few investment opportunities.”

It is this paradox of accumulation-- two much capital, too few opportunities-- that collapses the already stressed rate of profit and courts structural crisis (or deepening crisis, in our case). It is this paradox of accumulation that drives capital-gorged investors to pursue riskier and more ephemeral schemes.

Risk

Once again a vast pool of capital chases diminishing investment opportunities. Once again, as in the prelude to the crash, yields have shrunk, leading investors into riskier and more speculative investments. Pension funds and hedge funds are moving toward more arcane and less safe bets, hoping that return will outweigh the danger. As Richard Barley perceptively observes in the Wall Street Journal (August 11, 2014):

...there is a dearth of high quality securities. Yet there is still a global glut of capital seeking a home... All this creates incentives for financial engineering. In credit derivatives markets, there are signs investors are delving into esoteric structures. Citigroup reports a “large increase” in trading of products that slice and dice exposure to defaults in credit-default-swap indexes... Precrisis, low yields and seemingly benign market conditions led to the creation of instruments that ultimately few understood. The longer the reach for yield persists, the greater the chance that investors revisit the unhappy past.

For some time, the elusive “reach for yield” has driven a re-vitalized junk-bond market. In the five years after the crash, four of the ten fastest-growing bond funds held substantial quantities of low rated debt, according to WSJ analysts. They note that this “...development underscores the intense demand for investment returns since the 2008 crisis.”

But the flow of cash to the high yield market depressed yields to levels unseen since late 2007. They are rising again as investors sense that global economic turmoil and low yields signal danger.

The mania for mergers and acquisitions has also swung into dangerous, risky territory. Despite Federal guidelines urging the limitation of leverage to six times gross earnings by banks financing acquisitions, forty percent of private-equity takeovers in 2014 have exceeded the 6X rule. This rate is fast approaching the pre-crisis level of 2007.

The Wealth Effect

A seemingly robust stock market and a relatively stable US debt market join to create the illusion of a healthy, prosperous economy. They have, to great effect, masked the serious cracks in US capitalism.

The long anticipated Federal Reserve retreat from QE (Quantitative Easing: the purchase of US and other debt by the Fed) has not brought the disaster that many in the punditry and on Wall Street feared. Seldom noted, however, is the fact that the Peoples Republic of China has escalated its purchase of US treasuries nearly dollar for dollar against the Federal Reserve's retreat.

The “stellar” performance of equities is another matter. One moderately alarming sign is the steady march of equity price-to-earnings ratios to a territory greater than the long-term average and to a level equal to or above that of 2006-2007. Of course this alone does not explain the market's performance.

A puzzling aspect of equity price expansion is the historically low market activity in the post-crash period. What, then, has jacked up stock prices?

Part of the answer lies in corporate repurchases of shares, a practice that elevates the market price by taking stocks off the table. The Wall Street Journal (9-16-14) reports that $338.2 billion of equities were bought back by corporations in the first half of 2014, the most since 2007. The same report noted that corporations in the second quarter of 2014 spent “31% of their cash flow on buybacks.”

Corporations are hoarding cash and amassing debt at unprecedented levels (thanks to low interest rates, corporate bond issuance may approach $1.5 trillion this year, having grown geometrically over the last twenty years). Thus, corporate activity has shifted away from investing in future growth and toward mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks, activities that bolster share inflation without creating underlying value.

Take Apple, for example. Sitting on vast quantities of cash, Apple nonetheless sold $12 billion worth of corporate bonds this year. At the same time, Apple repurchased $32.9 billion in Apple stocks, effectively driving up the price of those shares remaining in the market place.

Does this really create wealth? Or is it a ruse to keep the party going?

Interestingly, it’s not just the jaundiced Marxist eye that peers through the fog to see rocky shoals ahead. Rob Buckland, a CITIGROUP analyst, perceives the US economy as entering “phase three,” the phase preceding a marked downturn. Business Insider (August 15, 2014) summarizes Buckland's phase three as follows:

Phase 3: This is the tricky part. Stocks are still flying high, but credit spreads are widening as investors become increasingly unwilling to finance further risk. Corporate CEOs have now experienced a lengthy period of gains and become risk-happy. (And we'd note that central banks are already talking about tightening credit by raising interest rates.) Bubbles can form in Phase 3, Buckland says, as the high-flying stock market ignores the early warning signs of the deteriorating credit market.... (http://www.businessinsider.com/citi-economy-phase-3-where-bubbles-form-prior-to-crash-2014-8#ixzz3DcJqF9tH)

It is against this backdrop that worries are surfacing among investors. Some bearish hedge fund managers are investing anxiously in credit-default swaps and retreating from high risk. Discounting the distractions and illusions fostered by the monopoly media, serious students see the intractable crisis in Europe, the slowdown of the emerging market economies, the recent setbacks to Abe-nomics in Japan, and the loss of momentum in the economy of the Peoples Republic of China as adding to the contradictions lurking under the surface of the US economy.

Vladimir Kazakevich expressed fears in his 1940 article cited above that “...powerful interests on both sides of the Atlantic are likely to regard a war economy as an immediate solution for the chronic crisis...” Certainly his fears were well grounded. Militarism did prove able to “solve” the contradictions of global depression, at the enormous, unprecedented human cost of World War Two.

One cannot but wonder today if a similar logic is operating in the minds of US and NATO leaders who seem determined to stir hatred and belligerency. The newly emerged ISIS demons seem almost too perfect of a foe --- almost a caricature of evil that may well bring an unprecedented level of US military might back to the Middle East. The “limited” US air campaign has already cost over a billion dollars, a nasty piece of military “pump priming” for the US economy.

And bear-baiting-- poking Russia with threats, sanctions, and military engagement-- is the new obsession of NATO, even at great economic cost to a prostrate Europe. The actions contemplated by militarists would push the risk level back to some of the worst days of the Cold War.

Is it not more and more apparent that only the “specter” of socialism can offer an answer to the chronic global crisis of capitalism and its attendants, xenophobia and war mongering?

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Storm Clouds?

As the panic over the destiny of the Federal Reserve's “quantitative easing” program reaches hysterical proportions, uncommonly bizarre economic anomalies are surfacing. In the last week of June, the news that first quarter US Gross Domestic Product growth report was reduced dramatically from 2.4% to 1.8% was met by an equally dramatic, but paradoxical positive jump in equity markets. Normally, a rather staggering drop in GDP estimates would trigger stock market losses-- investor confidence would be battered. But the opposite occurred. 

What's going on?

Pundits and investors hailed the bad news because they hope that it will keep the Federal Reserve committed to the $85 billion per month bond purchasing project dubbed “quantitative easing.” They believe that the Fed would not dare to relax the program in the face of poor economic performance. And they recognize that without the Fed’s foot firmly pressing the accelerator, the capitalist economy will stagnate or slow. The Federal Reserve program is truly a life-support system for our economy, and capitalism's apologists recognize that they are in deep trouble without it. Therefore, investors welcomed the fall in GDP growth!

Even Paul Krugman, the popular voice of social democratic theory in the US, has caught the contagion of fear. In a late-June appeal in The New York Times (Et tu, Ben?) to Federal Reserve head, Ben Bernanke, Krugman calls for the Fed to keep its foot aggressively on the gas pedal. A firm advocate of an alternative policy option, fiscal stimulus (spending on infrastructure, public works, etc), Krugman holds his nose and urges the continuation of the Fed's monetary stimulus program of printing money for bond purchases.

So why can't we just all agree to get along and urge the Federal Reserve to keep printing dollars?

In the first place, the Fed's policy of dollar-printing promiscuity is losing its healing powers. The effect of the purchase of government debt-- Treasury notes-- in order to restrain bond yields and interest rates has diminished since mid-2012. Moreover, the Fed remedy has lost its magic entirely in May and June of this year, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rising by two-thirds, mortgage rates jumping about 27% from March to the end of June, and the US and European (except Germany) bond market experiencing a sell-off. All of these indicators demonstrate that quantitative easing, as a stimulus policy, is simply losing its punch.

The Federal Reserve sees its injection of $85 billion into the economy every month as a hedge against the dreaded deflation, a sure companion to stagnation or negative growth. They watch to see when inflation crosses their target of 2% in order to slap on the brakes to avoid an overheated economy. But there is no reason for the Fed to fret: inflation is well below their target, a clear sign that without monetary stimulus we would be in a deflationary period. Corporations are hoarding cash rather than investing: they are holding 5.6% of their total assets in cash, against a forty year average of 4.4%. It was weak business investment, in part, that caused the first quarter GDP growth revision downward by 25%.

The Chicago Federal Reserve's three-month moving average National Activity index remained in negative territory, underlining the diminishing effects of quantitative easing.

Aside from its ineffectiveness, quantitative easing poses more serious, more fundamental problems: Fed monetary promiscuity distorts markets and masks underlying economic processes. Given that a capitalist economy is an enormously complex organism made up of mutually interactive actors, commodities and processes, manipulating some of the central elements such as interest rates, the money supply, debt growth, etc. can have unforeseen and damaging repercussions in other sectors of the economy. Mechanisms fail and balances are disrupted. A therapy becomes an injury. This is a lesson that the leadership of the Peoples' Republic of China is learning from the volatility created by its shadow banking sector. Even with majority public ownership of the biggest banks, the informal private sector distorts the impact of policy decisions.

In Marxist terms, the massive Federal Reserve intervention in financial markets violates the law of value. That is, it replaces the exchange of equivalent-for-equivalent in financial markets, with exchanges determined independently of market forces by the officers of the Fed. Those exchanges must, at some point, be reconciled; but in the meantime, they distort exchange relationships in other sectors of the economy. They create a disconnect between the financial sector and the signals sent to the productive economy. They distort the rate of profit in the financial sector, channeling capital into speculation and over-reliance on cheap credit. It’s no wonder that corporations hoard cash and seek higher returns on retained capital and easily available capital.

In reality, quantitative easing invites the very conditions that led to the 2007-8 collapse.

And we are now seeing omens in the economic data.

The exuberant 2013 stock market is suffering a retreat, but even more ominously, demonstrating growing volatility. Last year, the small investor jumped back in the market, a sure sign that a bear market was in sight. Much of the volatility comes from market manipulators exploiting the amateur day-traders. Like the swaggering Vegas weekend gambler, they are ripe for the picking. One can watch the picking by following the end-of-day trading; they don't know when to get in or when to get out.

US exports are pulling back.

The post-World War II record profits reported in 2012 are threatened. Of 108 companies scheduled to report profits in the second quarter of 2013, 87 offered negative guidance to their shareholders. Falling profits, contrary to underconsumption theorists, are a better predictor of a downturn than falling consumption. Consumption generally falls as a result and as an amplifier of economic decline.

Today, US consumption hangs precariously in the balance. While savings are declining, wages are in free fall. The year ending in September 2012 experienced a wage decline of 1.1%. First quarter estimates augur a shocking decline. The consumer is simply running out of money, savings, and available credit.

And the just announced June unemployment figures actually show an increase in the more telling U6 calculation to 14.3%. That rate includes those who have dropped out of the job market and those working part-time but desiring a full-time job.

Not a promising picture.

In most of the world's capitalist countries, the labor movements and left political parties have yet to decouple their fate from that of the monopoly capital, profit-driven, market-governed system. They are like ships on turbulent waters unwilling to bring their vessels and crew to port. They are simply counting on the storm to subside. They are neither prepared for nor expecting a hurricane or a shipwreck. After five disastrous years, one would hope that left and labor leaders would began to look for alternatives to capitalism, a safe haven for their fellow passengers.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com