William K. Tabb on the Criminality of Wall Street

By William K. Tabb

The current stage of capitalism is characterized by the increased power of finance capital. How to understand the economics of this shift and its political implications is now central for both the left and the larger society. There can be little doubt that a signature development of our time is the growth of finance and monopoly power. In 1980 the nominal value of global financial assets almost equaled global GDP. In 2005 they were more than three times global GDP. The nominal value of foreign exchange trading increased from eleven times the value of global trade in 1980 to seventy-three times in 2009. Of course it is not certain what this increase means, since such nominal values can fluctuate widely, as we saw in the Great Financial Crisis. They cannot be compared directly and without all sorts of qualifications to the value added in the real economy. But they do give an impressionistic sense of the enormous magnitude by which finance grew and came to dominate the economy. Between 1980 and 2007, derivative contracts of all kinds expanded from $1 trillion globally to $600 trillion. Hedge funds and private equity groups, special investment vehicles, and mega-bank holding companies changed the face of Western capitalism. They also brought on the collapse from which we still suffer. Ordinary people may not be acquainted with the numbers (and even those best informed are not sure of their significance), but people generally understand in different and often deep ways what has been happening: namely, an ongoing process of financialization that has come to dwarf production.

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Dean Baker on The Promotion of Waste & Inequality By US Finance

By Dean Baker

In the crazy years of the housing boom the financial sector was a gigantic cesspool of excess and corruption. There was big money in pushing and packaging fraudulent mortgages. The country paid a huge price for the financial sector's sleaze. Unfortunately, because of the Obama administration's soft on crime approach to the bankers who became rich in the process; the industry is still a cesspool of excess and greed. Just to be clear, knowingly issuing and packaging a fraudulent mortgage is a crime, the sort of thing for which people go to jail. But thanks to the political power of the Wall Street, none of them went to jail, and in fact they got to keep the money.

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For more on the long-run macroeconomic causes, implications, and effects of US financialization, see recent articles here, here (subscription required) , here, here, here (subscription required), and here (subscription required); for a pertinent sociological analysis, see here

Malcolm Sawyer - Financial Development, Financialization and Economic Growth

 

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New Working Paper By Passarella & Sawyer: Financialisation in the circuit

From The Abstract:

The relationships between financial systems and the macro-economy with emphasis on the saving-investment relationships and the nature of money are set out. A circuitist framework is extended to reflect some major features of the era of financialisation circa 1980.

Read the rest here.

* FESSUD is a multidisciplinary, pluralistic project which aims to forge alliances across the social sciences, so as to understand how finance can better serve economic, social and environmental needs. For more on the project, see here.

Foreign and external debt: not the same

In this whole discussion of the debt-ceiling limit the distinction between foreign debt (that is denominated in foreign currency) and external debt (owned by foreigners) has been often lost.  In the case of the US around 30% of Treasury securities are held by foreigners or around half if you discount the ones held by US governmental institutions (see data here). A country can default on its foreign debt, but not on the external debt denominated in domestic currency.

There is a fear (to some extent manufactured) about the Chinese taking over the country, and not just by pundits and late night comedians, as if the US would be unable to repay debt denominated in a currency that the US can produce.  Even Krugman has been excessively guarded on the issue. While noting correctly that the US is not Greece he said:

"So the US has much less debt than Greece. Also worth noting is the pattern over time. Greece ran up debt relative to GDP at a fairly good clip even during good times, while the United States — despite the Bush administration’s best efforts — did not. So America does not have a comparable record of sustained fiscal irresponsibility; we’ve only developed large deficits in response to the crisis, which happens to be exactly when we should be running large deficits.
And that’s not even to get into the issue of us having our own currency."

The fact that the US has it's own currency was almost an afterthought, and he avoided the crucially important fact that the external debt is in domestic currency.  The point of having your own currency is that you cannot default on debt denominated in it by definition.  This is not about fiscal responsibility or about how large debts and deficits are, but in what currency they are denominated.  The problem is not the ability to print bonds, bills, or dollar bills, which foreigners and the domestic private sector continue to hold without a problem, but the political blackmail by Republicans, and apparently accepted by Obama, to obtain gains for the rich at the expense of the rest.  Franklin Serrano aptly referred to this situation as dysfunctional finance!