Alas, he did not fly. Nor even float. He fell “like a stone,” the paper reported.

Immortality was achieved, but not the way he had hoped. His stunt was captured by the new motion picture technology of the time. That silent film inspired the very popular Jackass videos, which show people engaged in reckless acts of mischief and mortality.

But we do not have to go to Youtube to enjoy the Jackass genre. We have only to read the news. All over the world the authorities are strapping on their absurd parachutes…and climbing to very high places. In Europe, banks borrowed 442 billion euros last month from the European Central Bank. Much of it is lent back to European governments. In America, stimulus funds are used to fix public toilets, as well as to repair Wall Street’s balance sheets. Trillions of dollars have been put at risk in these adventures – $23 trillion in the United States alone. And yet, despite the most daring experiment in stimulus ever, by the end of June, the British economy was 5.6% smaller than it had been a year before, paralleling the decline that followed the crash of ‘29. As for the United States…we await the figures…

On the evidence, stimulus programs aren’t working. In fact, where they are tried the most they work the least. For proof, we go to Stimulation Nation itself. From America last week came news that new house sales had finally turned up. They were up 11% in June, according to the papers. That was the monthly figure. According to the annual numbers, they were down 21% from the year before – at the second lowest since they began counting in 1963. And since the population is much bigger than it was 52 years ago, this was relatively the worst June in history for new house sales. And now that the economy is in a slump, the rate of new household formation has been cut in half. Faced with lower incomes and worsening jobs prospects, people are less eager to set up new households – reducing the demand for new houses.

Unemployment shows no sign of improving, either. The stimulus program was supposed to cap joblessness at 8%. Officially, the rate is now 9.5%. Economist David Rosenberg puts the real unemployment rate almost twice that high. And businesses are cutting jobs even faster than expected. Economist Arthur Okun suggested a rule of thumb for predicting unemployment levels in a downturn. But firms are not only laying off redundant workers; they are laying off workers who would normally be spared. What’s more, those who are left are working the shortest weeks ever recorded.

In the past, workers were quick to move to where the jobs were. The Sun Belt traditionally bounced back first. But Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada have been flattened even more than the rest of the nation – by record foreclosures, government cutbacks and bankruptcies. Now, the jobless stay put…and stay unemployed.

Currently, the excess capacity in the United States is staggering – both in labor and capital. Capacity utilization is only 65%; in theory, output can increase 35% before any new capital investments are made.

Recovery? “Forget it,” says Rosenberg.

Now that the facts are out of the way, we end our critique of stimulus…and turn to laugh at the stimulators. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back,” wrote John Maynard Keynes. And now it is Keynes’ voice they hear.

“We are all Keynesians now,” said Richard Nixon as he strapped on a crash helmet.

Keynes probably got the idea of a counter-cyclical stimulus in Bible class. And a good idea it was. Simple…intuitively correct…practically demonstrated…and theoretically sound. But he and his followers still managed to screw it up.

First, Keynes’ General Theory is no theory at all…at least not in the scientific sense. It can’t be tested. The results aren’t reproducible. Instead, it’s merely an idea about how things should work, based on an Old Testament story.

Pharaoh had a dream. He dreamt he saw seven fat cows devoured by seven scrawny, misbegotten cows. He didn’t know what the dream meant, so he called for a young Hebrew man who had interpreted dreams for his master. Joseph told Pharaoh that Egypt was to enjoy seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. He told him what he should do about it too. He should store all the grain he could from the fat years…so he could pass it out when the going got tough.

This is a story we all know. It is easy to tell and easy to understand. But modern economists twisted it as though it were an inflation statistic. They maintain that when the business cycle turns down, it’s just like a drought. And they can counteract the effect of the drought by giving the economy stimulus – liquidity – from the public sector.

Trouble is, they missed the point completely. Do you recall any public official urging the public to stop spending so much in the bubble years? Do you remember any Treasury Secretary or Fed Chairman suggesting that the U.S. government run real budget surpluses in the fat years? Does any headline from any paper in the nation mention a storeroom in which grain or treasure was stored for the lean years? Not at all! Instead, the feds encouraged people to eat their grain! Governments ran deficits even during the bubble years, with the biggest deficit in history in 2008, just as the lean years began. Now they have no real grain to offer. So they turn to a reckless, disaster-defying stunt – passing out phony money, like sawdust muffins…

Future generations will watch the video and laugh until their stomachs hurt.

Enjoy your weekend,

Bill Bonner

Source: We Are All Jackasses Now

The decline of the global financial services industry from its unsustainable 2006 peak may produce a similar effect in a once economically thriving country – Britain.

Thirty years ago, Britain had its own rust-belt problems. The British automobile industry, a shining star until the Morris Motor Co.’s Lord Nuffield died in 1963 (remember 1959’s hot new model, the Mini?), was subjected to a series of government-directed merger deals in the 1960s, and the resulting mess, British Leyland, was nationalized in 1975, amid appalling losses.

The steel industry was nationalized in 1950, denationalized in 1954, and nationalized again in 1965; not surprisingly, the political football became a byword for high costs, strikes and inefficiency. Even Rolls-Royce Ltd., Brian’s premier high-tech company and maker of both luxury automobiles and aircraft engines, was effectively bankrupted and forced into public ownership in 1971.

In 1979, however, Margaret H. Thatcher became prime minister. Whereas her American contemporary, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, had little direct effect on U.S. industry, Thatcher had a huge direct effect on the shape of the British economy – she had little option, since the government owned so much of it. She forced British Leyland to shrink drastically, privatized British Steel, British Telecom and Rolls-Royce, and dramatically downsized British Coal after a yearlong face-off with the miners union.

At the same time, she deregulated the City of London’s financial-services business on a supposed “level-playing-field” basis, allowing foreign banks to dominate it and effectively putting the 200-year-old London merchant banks out of business.

Thatcher’s restructuring of British manufacturing, together with her tax cuts and government spending restraint, put Britain on a growth path that lasted a generation. Even after her Labour Party political opponents under Tony Blair gained power in 1997, growth continued, although government spending began creeping back upwards, and is now slightly above its 1970’s peak as a percentage of the economy.

Her restructuring of the City of London brought immense wealth to London itself, as huge global banks deployed increasing amounts of resources to growing their London-based international finance businesses. By 2006, London was rivaling New York as a financial center, even though the base of British domestic business was a fraction of that available from the giant U.S economy.

Traders, hedge fund managers, private-equity managers and dealmakers in general were paid fabulous sums. Since London residents were not liable to British tax on their non-U.K. income, the city also attracted footloose glitterati of all kinds, from the Indian steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal to the seedier but immensely rich top members of the Russian mafia.

In the United States, financial services doubled its share of gross domestic product (GDP) and trebled its share of Standard and Poor’s 500 Index profits between 1980 and 2006; in London, the growth was even greater and its dominance of the economy more extreme. House prices, too, became far more overblown in Britain than in any but the most speculative areas of the United States.

The 2006 celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the Financial Services Act of 1986, Thatcher’s deregulatory bombshell, rejoiced in London’s newfound wealth, sneered at the relative impoverishment of Britain’s provinces and missed one key weakness of the economy: Almost none of the major institutions generating such fabulous wealth were owned or headquartered in Britain.  When London-based “masters of the universe” wanted to speak to those controlling the huge amounts of capital they deployed, they had to pick up the phone to New York, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo or Dubai.

Now, the financial services business is in trouble. What’s more, the parts of the business in which London specialized are in most trouble. Securitization and derivatives were the two immediate causes of the credit crisis, while the 50% declines in the emerging-market stock markets have made the exorbitant fees of the private-equity and hedge-fund managers seem extortionate.

It is now abundantly clear that the financial services sector has incurred gigantic losses and that even when those losses have been subsidized by some unfortunate group of taxpayers, the sector is likely to end up being far smaller than it was. In fact, as a share of the economy the sector will probably end up being only a little larger than it was back in the 1970s.

For Britain, this has three appalling costs.

First, the assets of its financial services sector are around 400% of its GDP, below only the much smaller Iceland, Switzerland and Ireland and twice the U.S. ratio (and most Swiss banks were notably cautious in the bubble). Because of the importance of Britain’s financial sector, its bank bailouts need to be nearly as large as those in the United States, yet its tax base is only one quarter the size.

Second, the downsizing of financial services will produce an immensely damaging decline in British asset prices, particularly those of London and southeast England housing, in which so many middle-class Britons have invested their entire life savings (investing in the stock market is much less embedded there than it is here in the United States). That will have a further unpleasant effect on bank loan portfolios, pension and insurance assets and the British tax base, which will deepen the economic downturn.

Third, and most serious, since the British financial services sector is almost entirely controlled from overseas, there is very little long-term reason why it should remain in Britain. After all, it’s not as if London’s climate is particularly attractive except to aficionados, while its infrastructure is appalling.  The product areas in which London-based houses appeared to have a particular expertise have mostly been shown to be over-elaborate Ponzi schemes.

Even if the top management of a German, American or Japanese bank wishes to keep its stable of overpaid London financial whiz kids, it will have to deal with enormous shareholder and political opposition to do so. The Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ) bankruptcy, in which money was remitted at the last moment to the United States, so that London-based employees and creditors fared far worse than those in New York, is symptomatic of the “hollowing-out” process that is likely to continue for several years. Even the Russian mafia may find it prefers somewhere warmer.

Eventually, probably after a steep decline in the value of the British pound sterling and a major reorganization of the British economy, and at the cost of an enormous increase in British government debt, the inventive and entrepreneurial British will no doubt find new ways to make a living. In the meantime, I wouldn’t put my money there.

Source: Great Britain – The “Rust Belt” of Global Finance

The ECB has established itself as a credible central bank, with the euro flying high against its major rivals; eurozone inflation is lower than in the previous decade and the euro accounts for 27% of global forex reserves.

Meanwhile, sterling has slumped as the British economy has hit the skids, and, as Lex points out in the FT, sterling is now worth the equivalent of 2.44 deutschmarks, 16% below the ERM entry level – “a competitive rate to lock in for exporters”. Consumer prices over the past year and growth rates since 2004 have been similar to the eurozone’s, suggesting Britain has been converging with the eurozone. Given all this, the question of Britain joining the euro has re-emerged.

We’re better off out, says the FT’s Martin Wolf. Granted, entry seems plausible at current exchange rates and real interest rates have been higher here since 1999. But setting our own rates allowed us to restrain the credit bubble a bit; the eurozone’s lower rates would have led to an even bigger boom and inflation and credit “overshoot”. With the spending boom over, at least the falling pound can cushion the blow. Eurozone states in the same trouble don’t have this option.

Moreover, consumer prices between 1998 and 2008 rose by 18% here, the same as in Germany and less than France’s 20%, while GDP in 1999-2008 has grown by 28%, against 21% in the eurozone. “Remaining outside… preserves the safety valve of currency flexibility, while losing nothing in economic performance.”

In any case, the eurozone is heading for turbulence. Growth is on the slide, credit conditions are beginning to tighten and economic sentiment hit a near three-year low in April. And unemployment has now ticked up in Germany, boding ill for already fragile consumer confidence – which in France has hit a 20-year low.

The main problem, however, is the divergence between the periphery and the core. Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy have become increasingly uncompetitive over the past few years due to the strengthening euro, racking up large current account deficits (around 9%-10% last year in the former three countries) that have dragged down the zone’s trade performance. The eurozone had a seasonally adjusted record current-account deficit of e15.3bn in March. In Spain, Ireland and Greece shrinking competitiveness has been masked by spending sprees induced by housing bubbles: prices rose threefold in Spain between 1997 and 2007.

But now these have burst, with Spanish prices down 15% since September, and both countries look set for a nasty slowdown. With no control of interest rates and the hawkish ECB unlikely to cut rates soon, and without the option of devaluing their currencies, only cutting wage costs to improve competitiveness can help the periphery in the medium term. That means following in Germany’s footsteps by clamping down on labour costs – real German unit wage costs have stayed steady for a decade. But that also implies a severe slowdown: Germany only grew by an average of 0.6% in 2001-20005, says Wolf.

“As the boom-bust cycle turns ugly” the likely upshot is “a lot more irascible finance ministers” in the eurozone, as Wolfgang Munchau puts it in the FT. Political pressure on the ECB to water down its inflation targets and dash for growth may mount, denting its credibility and the currency. The pressure of adjusting to internal divergences may prove too much for some. “It is no coincidence,” as BNP Paribas pointed out earlier this year, “that all failed currency unions were abandoned during times of economic stress.”

Source: Should Britain Now Join the Euro?