Charlie Rose

JohnGelles  09/06/2011 03:46 PM Report

http://www.amazon.com/forum/politics/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1S3QSZRUL93V8&cdMsgN o=37&cdPage=2&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=TxSQQM85XAAEWU&cdMsgID=Mx2UH8Y9VENXUP2#Mx2UH8Y9VENXUP2

These issues suggest a Full Employment Budget. The link above discusses this.

winter  08/23/2011 10:02 PM Report

I agree and I'll do him one better. Nationalize their asses. Hire all the same people except the administration

and board and keep the profits for lowering the price at the pump. We can do research ourselves its just a matter of who you hire. It began with oil coming out of the ground ...who's ground is it anyway? Some cabal who gets together and buys politicians and subsidizes themselves? When you strip it down to what it is socialism would do average taxpayers alot better. I don't play silly name calling games.

doodah  08/23/2011 09:45 AM Report

... but nothing or Nobody can stop, REMant from continuing to Boggle the Mind.

doodah  08/23/2011 06:38 AM Report

The Genesis to All these problems can be traced to the Banking Lobby and Political Action Committees 'interaction' ($$$wink wink$$$) with Everybody else's elected officials (politicians). This is why 'conservatives' are Not Really conservative; it's a kind of 'selective conservatism'. And they use their rhetoric to kind of 'blend in', so to Not Cooperate is the Trojan Horse to get back in again later for some more of that Lobby and PAC Honey and Life$tyle.

There's plenty of money out there but the Tea Party (and Their Wealthy SugarDaddys) wants to keep it for themselves and wage a war of Attrition on Everybody who hasn't made it yet. Down Fido! Down Joe the Plumber! Down!!

JohnGelles  08/23/2011 05:02 AM Report

Sharks demands --

"Bottom line--price at the pump. LOWER IT! That will get America to first base."

Who here agrees with him?

How would he proceed to LOWER IT with capital letter emphasis?

I do not think he's wrong.

I would LOWER IT faster than a speeding bullet. Faster than Michelle Bachmann.

I know how. Do you?

To all RSVP. I am displeased with our passive acceptance of a slow recovery to a new normalcy that will move America down some notches -- and move none but the very richest everywhere up. It's as though we can't add 2 and 2 and accept that they add to 4.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  08/23/2011 01:51 AM Report

The quiver is NOT bare and please do not hold my hand and tell me it will be all right.

There is NO cash fetish.

There IS a scum problem that needs some bleach--the lost decade on the S&P 500, the crooks who never paid for anything yet walked away with tens of millions of dollars, the oil prices that are reflected on every corner and experienced weekly by most Americans who fill a tank, the negative worth from a house that sucks up to 33% of your income.

Bottom line--price at the pump. LOWER IT! That will get America to first base.

Iraq's budget, approved in February, factors in oil prices of $76.50 per barrel and average exports of 2.2 million bpd.

DOUBLE THE OIL OUTPUT FROM IRAQ and let's get way below the $76 a barrel.

http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/2011/08/22/iraq-july-oil-exports-quantity-dips-but-revenues-rise/

winter  08/22/2011 07:08 PM Report

The Stock Market? Is there a way money is made in the market w/o taking it from the bagholders, last ones out or weak hands and tranferring it to winners and administrations' Golden ...Everythings? I know -- they're "talented"!!

Is it "investment" or a video game casino ( ...has Anything ever been invented thats more fickle than Black Boxes? Hell,not even NY Housewives. Fickleness as measured inversely by a time of position held asymptotic curve.)

So as it turns out its the losers who fund the market and get nothing in return for their shot at getting rich.

robdverity  08/22/2011 05:36 PM Report

Gelles opines: "My reaction to story, which I could not put down after reading the first sentence, was HOW ON EARTH CAN AMERICA BE DEFEATED BY SIMPLE FINANCIAL ARITHMETIC when it produce for use by bold leadership a competitive fighting machine a million times more complex and difficult to build than a lousy bank with one accountant worth his salt."

The "fighting machine" is the very thing that has taxed our ec. Like digging a hole and refilling it - with nothing used or useful, let alone productive. Our penchant for warfare led mightily to our financial collapse.

Building (war) widgets for their own sake to be ultimately discarded is insanity - of which we repeatedly imbibe.

JohnGelles  08/22/2011 05:31 PM Report

[edited first par. was tied up for an hour and did not correct before sending. my usual crime -- and lame excuse. probably lots more errors -- but will have to leave them there.]

Now we hear from REMant, not at the beginning of these comments (the usual place he occupies with his nonsense from his misinterpretation of Austrian economics, itself a misinterpretation of the world of work, supply, demand , peace, war and money.)

The Road to Serfdom in 1946, when welfare states were seen as preludes to police states by an economist named Hayek who wanted to predict a victory of Stalin in Europe (even the world,) over Roosevelt and later Truman.

Hayek and his followers were wrong on who would win. They were wrong on money and demand.

..... ..... They were right about the difficulty of complexity but dead wrong about a free market price being endowed with the much of the power of data points in the hard sciences.

JohnGelles  08/22/2011 05:24 PM Report

[part 2, building a better bank to put our money where we need it.]

Now we hear from REMant, not at the beginning of these comments (the usual place he occupies with his nonsense from his misinterpretation of Austrian economics, itself a misinterpretation of the world of work, supply, demand , peace, war and money. The Road to Serfdom in 1946, when welfare states were seen as preludes to police states by an economist named Hayek who wanted to predict a victory of Stalin over Roosevelt and later Truman. Hayek and his followers were wrong on who would win. They were wrong on money and demand. They were right about the difficulty of complexity but dead wrong about a free market price being endowed with the much of the power of data points in the hard sciences.

Of course Hayek and Von Mises can be read alongside Keynes ans Marx to study how we organize work for overcoming scarcity and moving from war (where Keynes reigns alone) to peace (where only Franklin, Lincoln and FDR have much to offer us today).

REMant is so confused he is worse than reading Austrian nonsense. His texts are nonsense, (as is said in the cliche) on steroids.

Money is money, be it beads to buy Manhattan from its owners way back when, or dollars, yen, euros or gold, today.

When you have the money and the real wealth (including ultra-high-tech know-how, resources and fully staffed activities,) and the staff expects to earn a living provided by a nation of organized suppliers who want the same money that bought Manhattan, you are positioned to end poverty, pollution and war -- and that is your duty.

Hayek know it but without today's computers may have been right it was not possible.

REMant does not want to know it. And he has had his desire metIN spades.

JohnGelles  08/22/2011 04:02 PM Report

In the August 8 edition of The New Yorker, Nicholas Schmidle, fellow at the New America Foundation, as a Reporter at Large, wrote GETTING BIN LADEN.

I heard him on Charlie Rose (if memory serves) and was impressed with his directness. But I did not read his story (report) until moments ago.

He gives us a picture of the enormous capabilities of the United States defense and national security forces, including its intellectual and industrial base, its financial strength (now in jeopardy--but not seriously neglected for more than half a century,) and its complexity mixed with competency.

My reaction to story, which I could not put down after reading the first sentence, was HOW ON EARTH CAN AMERICA BE DEFEATED BY SIMPLE FINANCIAL ARITHMETIC when it produce for use by bold leadership a competitive fighting machine a million times more complex and difficult to build than a lousy bank with one accountant worth his salt.

[to be continued]

REMant  08/22/2011 01:38 AM Report

The Dow is no doubt reacting to Europe, not the US except as the banks are involved. And Mr Ip is still a Keynesian. Demand, confidence or fear - liquidity preference - has little to do with it. While there might be a case to be made for a very large spending measure considering the paucity of public investment over the past generation or two, assuming it could in some way be mustered, which is unlikely, there surely is no case for the idea of doing something or this kind now, and balancing the budget later, because there is no way to make ppl whole through printing money. All that could possibly come of it is to stabilize the economy at a lower level. Keynesians simply do not want to realize that debt exists. And they certainly don't think of money as debt. But debt matters, and paying it back matters. If it didn't we wouldn't have the conundrum facing us now. That is why ppl are doing it now rather than buying more goods. They can't just sit with the debt on their balance sheets, and in the long-run neither can the govt or the Fed.

The markets on the other hand want inflation, because they are likely to lose their shirts without it. But the markets are no more the economy than the banks were and that Keynesians like Ip think so, is every bit as ridiculous as their attitude towards debt. Even Keynes pointed out that stock mkts were largely superfluous. On the one hand we can't honor our obligations, they are saying, and on the other, possessing barren assets is the remedy. It is not as Keynes had it, that money if barren, rather assets are barren. In other words what it comes down to is that Ip and others of his primitivist ilk are saying all this was the fault of some nasty ppl, give us our share and everything will be hunky-dory. But it wasn't all someone else's fault, and regardless of who ends up with the money it has to be put into capitalization of one kind or another, not towards buying more goods, and certainly not overseas. We are in competition with countries that not only have lower costs, because they haven't been printing the money we have, but whose workers are better trained. As I said the other day, the Keynesians have no idea of production; with them it's all about distribution. That's important, but it isn't everything, and you can't sustain an economy merely through transfer. Ask the Russians. And the maldistribution is clearly the result of privileging assets over labor.

Again, China can no more come out of this whole through such Keynesian measures than the public at large. And it is not its fault that we printed money to buy their goods. Indeed they wanted to sell them to advance their industry and perhaps, in retrospect they shouldn't have, but if you want to say that, then you can't at the same time argue free trade. However, the solution is not for them to depreciate their currency in comparison with ours, but for us to appreciate ours in relation to theirs. And we've left them no choice but to buy Treasury bills, which we shouldn't have floated to fund the govt either. It all starts and stops with the Fed, because without printing money, none of this could have happened, and I'll repeat it, printing money is the basis of Keynes's, as well as, all mercantilism.

Curiously similar to Mr Buffett last week, an op-ed by Mr Ip, tho no doubt paid for, appeared under the full page headline "The new voodoo economics?" in the Wash Post Sunday. It was fine until the end of the second sentence, where he said Republicans wanted to strip the Fed of its ability to boost the economy. They have, like Rep Ryan, said they want to review the Fed's mandate to maintain prices. That is in a manner boosting the economy, but the proof that it does so is lacking, and has been for more than a century. Ip, however, then goes on in the fourth sentence to identify boosting the economy with promoting employment, so that his meaning will be crystal clear. Even if printing money would boost the economy temporarily, there is certainly little evidence, esp since the Phillips curve was exploded about the time Ip was born, that it increased employment. But it is certainly at odds with neocon views which are Keynesian, or the monetarist version thereof.

Ip alleges Hoover's balanced budgets worsened the Depression, but there is no evidence of that, nor that spending was lacking. Hoover, who was idolized by FDR, started all the relief programs the latter continued, and convinced business to maintain employment, which they did for two years. It has been convincingly argued that the Depression worsened only after FDR's election when he failed to cooperate on maintaining the value of the dollar and thus started a run on the banks. But like FDR then, Ip alleges the Republicans only wish to defeat the president, not help the country. We have already begun to hear this from the Democracy, and will no doubt hear more.

To be honest Mr Ip doesn't like the supply-side either, that tax-cuts alone will suffice, but he is not clear how that may differ from the Keynesian measures he says have long been orthodoxy, missing entirely the defeat of Keynesian economics in academia taking place while he was in college in Canada. He argues that the Depression "shattered" the equilibrium economics of the Physiocrats, Smith, Say and the classicals, because there was persistent unemployment, but that misses the fact that correction was never given a chance by the inflationist forces that had been building since the post-WWI depression, whose credit creation on top of hot money from Europe caused the 1929 crash and collapse to begin with, and then, just as now, prolonged the required liquidation. The '20s saw the emergence of the power of positive thinking and the so-called new economics of abundance, which was by then a surprise to no one, least of all Keynes. So it was not that the markets were thought to self-correcting anymore than they were by Greenspan, Clinton and Bush, but rather that they were had not been allowed to be. That was most evident by Coolidge's refusal to deal with the problem of postwar Europe, which Hoover repeatedly pressed on him. Cal said he had had lots of advice from Hoover, all of it bad.

Keynes's particular argument that fear or a lack of confidence was to blame and could be overcome by massive spending regardless of how invested or its source, was as old as John Law's program to develop 18th c Scotland, and despite repeated failure to do anything but create inflation, took hold by radicals as an alternative view to balanced budgets and sound money, being later advanced in every financial panic, all of them however caused by fractional reserve banking or in other words the very policy for which the Fed was created, and from which any govt spending in a debt crisis would have to come.

And Mr Ip goes on to misstate the Austrian school position, which is, as I said above, that too much credit creates misallocation of resources and is hardly the "natural feature of capitalist economies," unless you consider fractional reserve banking such a feature. Ip attempts to make the Austrian view idiosyncratic, but publicly persuasive, when in fact it is the other way 'round, the heretics being clearly the Keynesians, who are always big with the public, and esp the bankers and stockjobbers who feed off inflation.

Halfway through his piece Ip admits that Keynesians went too far, but claims that nevertheless the Fed in the '80s produced decades of unparalleled economic improvement. If they did, they also produced inflation at the rate of 10% per year as measured by anything not manufactured overseas. Americans then, he writes, became victims of their success, taking too many risks, but it is hard to take risks when you have nothing to take risks with, and so we must return to the root cause, which is inflationary banking.

Like many Keynesians he wants to call reason and responsibility, austerity, which, IMHO can only point to psyches accustomed to bulimic binge and purge cycles.

Mr Ip gives as further proof of the fallacy of classical or equilibrium economics the Volcker recesssion of 1982, but this was caused not by Volcker, but by the Keynesian program of the '60s and '70s and consequent stagflation, the same as in Japan and the present, and the recovery precisely by that Fed chief's actions to wring it out, that is until Reagan, a converted Democrat, began spending too much once again, which once again produced a bubble, the S & L crisis and the 1987 mkt crash.

Mr Ip goes on to repeat Keynesian cant about 1937, which had nothing to do with fiscal tightening, but the elimination of investment by ill-considered attempts to increase spending resulting in another bubble and mkt crash, and the myth about Japan, which as the result of hot money and the impact of developing economies like China, experienced a situation much the same as ours and every other financial crisis to date, save those we've been easily able to inflate our way out of by exporting the problem overseas.

Like other Keynesians, Mr Ip believes there is no paradox between spending more now to "entrench recovery" and balancing the budget later, but as I have argued for the past almost three years now, that is nonsense, because it this entire rob Peter to pay Paul pyramid scheme that is at fault. There is only one cure for a "liquidity trap": paying off the debt one way or another and raising the value of money, and that will not be done by magic.

As Gracie Allen cracked in 1940: "This used to be a government of checks and balances. Now it's all checks and no balances. But I have a cure for that. I'll sign all checks with invisible ink,..."

Mr Ip, who has only an undergraduate major in economics, and was a WSJ cheerleader before joining The Economist, might do well to read several books I've recommended before: Lionel Robbins' The Great Depression written in 1934; Benjamin Anderson's Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946 (it should be noted that Anderson was an adherent of the banking school despite his classicism); and John Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth, concerning the '20s and '30s, all archived at Mises.org; Thomas Humphrey's 1999 article Mercantilists and Classicals, concerning the doctrinal history and available from the Richmond Fed; and, for earlier crises, Charles Sumner's A History of Banking: The United States, to be found at the Online Library of Liberty and the Internet Archive.

JohnGelles  08/21/2011 11:41 AM Report

Errata and addendums:

Kiss him because he alone has so far -- tried to hand us the money.

Ben Bradley's subsidies for net new employees are both clever and important. Subsidies get the job done. Taxes are exactly the wrong answer. Money is not a problem if you know what you're doing. Read how Mariner Eccles and Henry Morgenthau put money on the side of the godd guys. Of course they knew FDR. And FDR knew which way was up.

Long term paths, to the low inflation real full employment democratic capitalism we want, will be the natural outcome of tax and law-making reform. The pull of graft for lobbying and law-making may have to put some people in jail. For you tough guys -- looking for raw meat -- go after Congress. Of all the bodies of citizens in America the ones most at fault for failures sit in the halls of congress.

JohnGelles  08/21/2011 11:25 AM Report

It's 8 am in California. This commentary page is on EDST, I think. When it posts I'll find out the fact.

I last posted at 5:43 am Charlie Rose Time. My hope at that time was for doodah, Ted Palmer, Shalom, Charlie Rose and myself (JG), to make CR make the President come back from Cape Cod swinging his punches from the ground -- right up to the nose of our enemy -- (who happen to be in the mirror -- all of us).

He would slap us silly until we kissed Ben Bernanke, the only American with money enough to seed the GROWTH on which all bets are riding.

Kiss him because he has so far he has tried to hand us the money.

His bosses, Obama and Congress, seem afraid to embrace him. They want him to remain indpendent. BUT NOT YOU SONS OF GUNS, INDEPENDENT OF ME, AND THE REST OF US.

The jobs program Barack Obama is finalizing is going to be OK. It will have immediate effect stuff like longer unemployment insurance. It will prolong, too, the moratorium on payroll taxes for employees and employers.

It will have enormous investment in industry, infrastructure, education, re-training and advanced technological research (nano-tech for materials; bio-tech for the 21st century's prime targets; and info-tech to redefine money among other things -- especially reform of language, law, constitutions and communication between the haves and have-nots.)

It will be the light at the end of the tunnel. If we really want it.

Of course we do have a problem. People like Nial Ferguson have already written us off. The West is doomed. The East has risen.

BALONEY!!!

The light at the end of the tunnel must include a new look at global supply, demand, production and peace. We still need the US Navy, Air Force and Dollar.

But we must invite every decent and well armed power to sit at the table -- and contribute their best and brightest to shared responsibilities and solutions.

Lets hope HE DOES HIS JOB. We are doing ours.

doodah  08/21/2011 08:17 AM Report

... Far Propaganda, Far Corrupt, Far Plutocracy

doodah  08/21/2011 08:13 AM Report

... just saw on the News, the Libyans are closing in on Gdaffi. And are close to killing him.

This Must be dreadful news for the Tea Party; possibly just as bad as killing Osama. My goodness, how REALITY pokes holes in the Tea Party's arguments in just not right! (Far Right).

doodah  08/21/2011 08:07 AM Report

Yes, I can, 'Don't worry about it." :)

TedPalmer  08/21/2011 06:37 AM Report

As I was updating my Excel Spread Sheet catalog of DVDs that I am making of Charlie Rose, Tavis Smiley, and others; I noticed the title of this conversation is "A look at Uncertainty in the Markets". I just object to the criticism of the guests commentary as faulting someone for not doing what they never intended to do in the first place. I thought they did a very good job of explaining the topic which was their goal defined by Charlie Rose in the first place.

I started out to add a star to the rating of this conversation. I thought 2 stars was not near accurate. But I can not find on this web page how to do that. Can somebody give me a clue please?

doodah  08/21/2011 06:12 AM Report

For Tea Party folks, the light at the end of the tunnel (according to all the Drama of their prophetical Empty rhetoric), the simple removal of Obama from office will suffice. . The Beginning of a New Dawn on the horizon. ..it's hard not to be inspired by such competent intelligence.

JohnGelles  08/21/2011 05:43 AM Report

http://ustaxreform.us/a-crs.htm

Link above ties recent related interviews together.

JohnGelles  08/21/2011 05:34 AM Report

I guess I was too slow. doodah and TP got in between SF and me. They did not find the light and tunnel is growing longer. But we know there will be light. And it won't be made in China. It will be made somewhere. Maybe Chimerica --where everything else is made.

JohnGelles  08/21/2011 05:28 AM Report

SupportPeaceAndFreedom, commenting immediately below, hits the nail squarely on the head. The possibly 70 percent whose wealth has not recovered the effects of the Great Contraction (Rogoff's words) will send a lot of voters to the polls in 2012. They may have little choice or a great choice -- only time will tell. Meanwhile I'm trying to find some solutions from the supporters of quantitative easing as the way to seed the growth we need.

All of us assembled here for commentary are respectfully reqested by me to post whatever you find that looks to you like light at the end of tunnel. Tunnels with no end are the stuff of nightmares. And it's time to go back to bed looking for sweet dreams.

doodah  08/21/2011 05:28 AM Report

'Greg Ip' of The Economist Isn't much of an economist. 'Farzad' seems to recognize Reality more Accurately.

TedPalmer  08/21/2011 05:18 AM Report

I value what they both had to say. Looking at the world through rose colored glasses doesn't give an accurate image to base economic decisions on. They weren't trying to give a formula to correct the situation as much as they were trying to explain the degree of the challenge. Knowing that is necessary to be aware of how much effort and resource is going to be required to implement a "fix".

ShalomFreedman  08/21/2011 03:03 AM Report

This was a no light at the end of the tunnel, discussion. It was piling more economic detail on the basic reality that almost every person is facing i.e. a worsening personal economic situation. Add to the nine percent or perhaps more realistically fifteen to twenty percent unemployed the sixty or seven percent whose household balance sheet is shrinking, and one comes to a kind of dead- end hopeless situation. Growth of one and one- half percent considering the growth in population is virtually no growth at all.

JohnGelles  08/20/2011 03:09 PM Report

At 16 minutes into the video above, Roben Farzad discusses the coming election -- and the fact that no Obama rival is likely to promise a first hundred days attack on jobs and underwater mortgages. Listen to it and we will talk later. I would promise the attack. And the attack would succeed. I hope the Univ. of Missouri Kansas City blogs agree.

JohnGelles  08/20/2011 01:20 PM Report

line 5 below -- change "are" to "our"

"Keynes Without Debt" can be googled and is also at

http://ustaxreform.us/kwod

JohnGelles  08/20/2011 01:16 PM Report

Greg Ip of The Economist and Roben Farzad of Bloomberg Businessweek are a couple of unusual names to add to Paul Krugman and Ken Rogoff as explainers of why we do not mobilize our own and the world economy to force (1)supply to maximize in our effort to meet need, (2) demand to meet supply, and (3) the money supply to be sufficient to pay off some critical debt (perhaps after some haircuts).

They explained reasons not to do the above but rather to do less. They explained that are habit is to squeeze the people in need until we put them in the nuthouse or in the army for world war.

The idea that "banks can make loans to people who want to sell to others without enough income or job security to want to buy NOW", is treated casually but the idea that "a market economy must be balanced by an intentional economy willing to create Keynesian demand aimed at recovery from recessions or similar contractions" is not treated at all.

Charlie Rose continues to avoid Mathew Forstater and Randall Wray, two world class experts on how to move enough of our need now for aggregate demand into a world that understands "KEYNES WITHOUT DEBT", Ron Morrison's prescription for a common sense solution to the current contraction.

Shame on Charlie Rose and the staff he pays good money.