Marx, Robotics, And The Collapse Of Profits

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via oftwominds.com

Whatever commoditized robots can produce is no longer profitable; rather, the production destroys capital.

Yesterday I discussed how robots only do work that"s profitable, as any enterprise buying, programming and maintaining robots to do unprofitable work will soon be out of business.

What few observers seem to grasp is that automation goes through two distinct stages of profitability: when robots/automation first replace high-cost human workers, profits soar. Observers then draw projections based on the belief that these initial profits will continue essentially forever.

But this initial boost phase of profits gushing from automation is short-lived; as the tools of automation are themselves commoditized and become available to anyone on the planet with some capital and ambition, lower cost automated competitors come to market, destroying the pricing power of the first adopter.

Once an enterprise is competing only with other automated enterprises, profits fall to near-zero as lower cost competitors emerge. Competitive advantages are small once a field has been commoditized/globalized, and there is little pricing power left except for brands that establish some cache people will pay extra to have and hold.

But everything that"s been commoditized will no longer be profitable, as the competitive advantage of replacing human workers with robots vanishes once competitors have also replaced their human workers with robots.

Karl Marx described this dynamic of profits cratering and then vanishing in the 19th century. Marx described the consequences of over-investment in commoditized production and the resulting over-capacity: when anyone with access to investors or credit can buy the same machinery—that is, the machines are interchangeable commodities such as sewing machines, power looms, etc.--the capacity to produce rises as every competitor attempts to lower the unit cost of each product by producing more.

In other words, the only competitive advantage in an economy of commoditized machines and products is to increase production by over-investing in productive capacity. If competition has lowered the price of products, those who can double their production will achieve profitable economies of scale.

Over-investment and overcapacity are intrinsic dynamics of production; those who fail to invest heavily in increasing capacity will become unprofitable. Once their capital is destroyed, they vanish in insolvency.

As Marx explained, every enterprise is driven to pursue the same strategy, and the end result is massive over-investment and overcapacity. The flood of products overwhelms demand, and prices fall below the production costs.

Over-investment leads to overcapacity that devalues whatever is being produced.

This leads to a counter-intuitive result: over-investment destroys capital.

The naïve faith that robots will generate so much wealth that humans will have no work has it backward: over-investment in commoditized robots and their commoditized production will destroy capital, not create it.

Recall that enterprises don’t have profits, enterprises only have expenses. Robots will never be free, due to their intrinsic complexity and use of resources and energy. As robots and other tools of automation become commodities that anyone can buy, whatever robots can produce is devalued accordingly.

In other words, whatever commoditized robots can produce is no longer profitable; rather, the production destroys capital.

This leads to a startling conclusion: this destruction of capital must be subsidized by taxing whatever is still profitable, i.e. whatever cannot be commoditized or automated.

In other words, enterprises profiting from human labor that can’t be replaced by commoditized (interchangeable) robots will be subsidizing intrinsically unprofitable robotic production that destroys capital.

Exactly how will all these robots create unimaginable wealth when every moment they’re in production they’re destroying capital? It will fall to the remaining profitable enterprises and their human employees to subsidize the capital-destroying robots.

Robots can only perform profitable work, and in a fully commoditized production chain, very little production will be profitable. This raises a question: who will subsidize all the unprofitable robots? Who will buy them, program them, repair them and energize them? Who will subsidize all this capital-destroying work performed by robots?

The overcapacity intrinsic to automation destroys financial capital, globalized commoditization destroys social capital, and overconsumption destroys the planet’s natural capital.

The fantasy that robots will do all the work of stripmining the Earth to provide for our endless overconsumption, and generate vast profits doing so, is just another manifestation of an intrinsically destructive and unsustainable Mode of Production.

We"re Living In The Age Of Capital Consumption

Authored by Ronald-Peter Stöferle via The Mises Institute,

When capital is mentioned in the present-day political debate, the term is usually subject to a rather one-dimensional interpretation: Whether capital saved by citizens, the question of capital reserves held by pension funds, the start-up capital of young entrepreneurs or capital gains taxes on investments are discussed – in all these cases capital is equivalent to “money.” Yet capital is distinct from money, it is a largely irreversible, definite structure, composed of heterogeneous elements which can be (loosely) described as goods, knowledge, context, human beings, talents and experience. Money is “only” the simplifying aid that enables us to record the incredibly complex heterogeneous capital structure in a uniform manner. It serves as a basis for assessing the value of these diverse forms of capital.

Modern economics textbooks usually refer to capital with the letter “C”. This conceptual approach blurs the important fact that capital is not merely a single magnitude, an economic variable representing a magically self-replicating homogenous blob but a heterogeneous structure. Among the various economic schools of thought it is first and foremost the Austrian School of Economics, which stresses the heterogeneity of capital. Furthermore, Austrians have correctly recognized, that capital does not automatically grow or perpetuate itself. Capital must be actively created and maintained, through production, saving, and sensible investment.

Moreover, Austrians emphasize that one has to differentiate between two types of goods in the production process: consumer goods and capital goods. Consumer goods are used in immediate consumption – such as food. Consumer goods are a means to achieve an end directly. Thus, food helps to directly achieve the end of satisfying the basic need for nutrition. Capital goods differ from consumer goods in that they are way-stations toward the production of consumer goods which can be used to achieve ultimate ends. Capital goods therefore are means to achieve ends indirectly. A commercial oven (used for commercial purposes) is a capital good, which enables the baker to produce bread for consumers. 

Through capital formation, one creates the potential means to boost productivity. The logical precondition for this is that the production of consumer goods must be temporarily decreased or even stopped, as scarce resources are redeployed toward the production of capital goods. If current production processes generate only fewer or no consumer goods, it follows that consumption will have to be reduced by the quantity of consumer goods no longer produced. Every deepening of the production structure therefore involves taking detours.

Capital formation is therefore always an attempt to generate larger returns in the long term by adopting more roundabout methods of production. Such higher returns are by no means guaranteed though, as the roundabout methods chosen may turn out to be misguided. In the best case only those roundabout methods will ultimately be continued, which do result in greater productivity. It is therefore fair to assume that a more capital-intensive production structure will generate more output than a less capital-intensive one. The more prosperous an economic region, the more capital-intensive its production structure is. The fact that the generations currently living in our society are able to enjoy such a high standard of living is the result of decades or even centuries of both cultural and economic capital accumulation by our forebears.

Once a stock of capital has been accumulated, it is not destined to be eternal. Capital is thoroughly transitory, it wears out, it is used up in the production process, or becomes entirely obsolete. Existing capital requires regularly recurring reinvestment, which can usually be funded directly out of the return capital generates. If reinvestment is neglected because the entire output or more is consumed, the result is capital consumption.

It is not only the dwindling understanding of the nature of capital that leads us to consume it without being aware of it. It is also the framework of the real economy which unwittingly drives us to do so. In 1971 money was finally cut loose entirely from the gold anchor and we entered the “paper money era.” In retrospect, it has to be stated that cutting the last tie to gold was a fatal mistake. Among other things, it has triggered unprecedented instability in interest rates. While interest rates displayed relatively little volatility as long as money was still tied to gold, they surged dramatically after 1971, reaching a peak of approximately 16 percent in 1981 (10-year treasury yield), before beginning a nosedive that continues until today. This massive decline in interest rates over the past 35 years has gradually eroded the capital stock.

An immediately obvious effect is the decline in so-called “yield purchasing power”. The concept describes what the income from savings, or more precisely the interest return on savings, will purchase in terms of goods. The opportunity to generate interest income from savings has of course decreased quite drastically. Once zero or even negative interest rate territory is reached, the return on saved capital is obviously no longer large enough to enable one to live from it, let alone finance a reasonable standard of living. Consequently, saved capital has to be consumed in order to secure one"s survival. Capital consumption is glaringly obvious in this case.

It is beyond question that massive capital consumption is taking place nowadays, yet not all people are affected by it to the same extent. On the one hand, the policy of artificially reducing the interest as orchestrated by the central banks does negatively influence the entrepreneurs’ tasks. Investments, especially capital-intensive investments seem to be more profitable as compared to a realistic, i. e. non-interventionist level, profits are thus higher and reserves lower. These and other inflation-induced errors promote capital consumption.

On the other hand, counteracting capital consumption are technological progress and the rapid expansion of our areas of economic activity into Eastern Europe and Asia in recent decades, due to the collapse of communism and the fact that many countries belatedly caught up with the monetary and industrial revolution in its wake. Without this catching-up process it would have been necessary to restrict consumption in Western countries a long time ago already.

At the same time, the all-encompassing redistributive welfare state, which either directly through taxes or indirectly through the monetary system continually shifts and reallocates large amounts of capital, manages to paper over the effects of capital consumption to some extent. It remains to be seen how much longer this can continue. Once the stock of capital is depleted, the awakening will be rude. We are certain, that gold is an essential part of any portfolio in this stage of the economic cycle.

 

The Endgame Of Financialization: Stealth Nationalization

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This is the new model of nationalization: central banks control the valuation of private-sector assets without actually having to own them lock, stock and barrel.

As you no doubt know, central banks don"t actually print money and toss it out of helicopters; they create a digital liability and use this new currency to buy assets such as bonds and stocks. Central banks have found that they can take control of the stock and bond markets by buying up as much as these markets as is necessary to force price and yield to do the central banks" bidding.

Central Banks Have Purchased $2 Trillion In Assets In 2017. This increases their combined asset purchases above $15 trillion. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you"re talking real money--especially if you add in assets purchased by sovereign wealth funds, dark pools acting on behalf of monetary authorities, etc.

Gordon Long and I discuss this stealth nationalization in our latest video program, The Results of Financialization: "Nationalization" (35 min):

In the old model of nationalization, governments expropriated/seized privately owned assets lock, stock and barrel. When a central state nationalized an enterprise, it took total ownership of the asset.

In today"s globalized financial world, such crude expropriation is avoided for two reasons:

1. The entire point of the dominant neoliberal / neofeudal /neocolonial model is to maintain private ownership as a means of transferring the wealth to the New Aristocracy, i.e. the financier class. Government ownership certainly conveys benefits to the some are more equal than others functionaries atop the state"s wealth-power pyramid, but it doesn"t transfer the assets" income streams to private hands.

2. It sends the wrong message: central banks want private investors to do their bidding, i.e. to go along with the transfer of wealth and income from the many to the few (the New Aristocracy). Maintaining the system of private ownership enables the central banks to control the markets for these assets at the modest cost of a few handfuls of the loot being distributed to the small-fry owners of IRAs, 401K retirement accounts, etc.

In other words, what central banks want is not outright ownership, which is costly and troublesome; what central banks want is to control the markets on the cheap, with leveraged buying. In effect, central banks have been able to manage assets worth $150 trillion with a mere $15 trillion in well-timed (and loudly announced) asset purchases.

This is the new model of nationalization: central banks control the valuation of private-sector assets without actually having to own them lock, stock and barrel. Being the buyer of last resort--the Plunge Protection Team that buys every dip in whatever size is needed to stabilize valuations and then reverse the downturn into yet another rally to new highs--has worked for nine long years.

This success has bred a complacent faith in the central bank cargo-cult that there is no limit to central bank control of yields, valuations and market sentiment.

But as I"ve described here many times, financialization is a box canyon. Once you start down the path to the Dark Side of phantom wealth created by commoditized debt and leverage (i.e. financialization), there"s no turning back to the real world.

The central bank aircraft is flying into a canyon with walls 2,000 feet high at an altitude of 300 feet. Everything seems to be going splendidly until the central bank aircraft rounds a bend in the canyon and discovers the canyon ends in a rock face 2,000 high.

In a desperate attempt to escape the box canyon, central banks will ramp up their assets purchases of bonds to keep yields near zero, and of stocks to keep the bubble valuations high enough to support all the debt and leverage that"s been piled on the underlying collateral of the stock market: non-phantom net earnings.

Needless to say, attempting to control global markets via the issuance of trillions in new currency and using that currency to buy huge chunks of the stock and bond markets is an unprecedented experiment.

To continue the box canyon analogy: central bankers and their cargo-cult faithful are confident central banks are flying an F-18 with afterburners on max; climbing 1,700 feet in a near-vertical ascent should be no problem.

Those of us outside the cargo cult see the central bankers flying a Wright Flyer: innovative in its time, but inadequate to the task of controlling private-sector markets via stealth nationalization.

*  *  *

If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

Financialization & The Destruction Of The Real Economy

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Strip an economy of capital, productive incentives, talent and yes, ethics, and what are we left with? An economy spiraling toward an inevitable collapse.

Financialization is destroying the real economy, but few in power seem to notice or care. The reason why is painfully obvious: those in power are reaping vast fortunes from the engines of financialization--for example, former President Obama: Obama Goes From White House to Wall Street in Less Than One Year.

This is not to single out President Obama as a special case; politicos across the spectrum depend on the engines of financialization to fund their campaigns and make them multi-millionaires, and corporate managers and financiers have skimmed billions of dollars in gains not from producing new, better and more affordable goods and services but by playing financialization games such as borrowing billions to buy back stocks, leveraged buyouts, and so on--all of which have reaped the insiders gargantuan fortunes while hollowing out the real economy.

Financialization necessarily hollows out the real economy, as Gordon Long and I detail in this new video program: The Results of Financialization - Part I (34 minutes)

The key dynamic is that financialization creates irresistible incentives to ramp up debt and leverage at the expense of the real economy. Those who fail to exploit financialization will underperform the market and be fired.

As Gordon explains, if a CEO refuses to load a company up with debt, a private-equity financier with access to cheap Federal Reserve credit will scoop up the company in a private buyout, fire the management, extract immense profits by loading the company with debt, then take the hollowed-out shell public again, reaping another windfall of financialized gains.

Note that the private-equity financiers have every incentive to lay off employees, especially experienced workers who earn higher salaries, to reduce costs before they take the hollowed-out shell public.

How can corporations pay out more to shareholders than they actually earned? Easy--financialization.

Another key dynamic in financialization is limitless liquidity and super low interest rates set by central banks--rates that are so low and liquidity so abundant that corporations can roll over their debt and actually add more debt and keep their interest payments unchanged.

This dynamic inevitably leads to zombie corporations--corporations with low rates of growth and profitability and high debt loads that in an unfinancialized economy would be recognized as insolvent and liquidated.

As we explain, financialization skews the risk-reward in favor of financial games, so real-world investments no longer make sense. Why risk building a factory in the U.S. or training workers when the pay-off is uncertain, when there are so many ways to reap immense fortunes via financial games that are ultimately backstopped by the Federal Reserve or federal agencies (i.e. the taxpayers)?

As many observers have noted, these perverse incentives have siphoned human talent away from productive employment and into enormously well-compensated but parasitic, exploitive financialization-related jobs.

Strip an economy of capital, productive incentives, talent and yes, ethics, and what are we left with? An economy spiraling toward an inevitable collapse. The metaphor I"ve used to explain this in the past is the Yellowstone forest fire. The deadwood of bad debt, extreme leverage, zombie companies and all the other fallen branches of financialization pile up, but the central banks no longer allow any creative destruction of unpayable debt and mis-allocated capital; every brush fire is instantly suppressed with more stimulus, more liquidity and lower interest rates.

As a result, the deadwood sapping the real economy of productivity and innovation is allowed to pile higher.

The only possible output of this suppression is an economy piled high with explosive risk. Eventually Nature supplies a lightning strike, and the resulting conflagration consumes the entire economy.

The Yellowstone Analogy and The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism (May 18, 2009)

The Financial Markets Now Control Everything (April 29, 2015)

I explain all this in greater detail in my short book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform.

*  *  *

If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

The Real Reason Wages Have Stagnated: Our Economy Is Optimized For Financialization

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Labor"s share of the national income is in freefall as a direct result of the optimization of financialization.

The Achilles Heel of our socio-economic system is the secular stagnation of earned income, i.e. wages and salaries. Stagnating wages undermine every aspect of our economy: consumption, credit, taxation and perhaps most importantly, the unspoken social contract that the benefits of productivity and increasing wealth will be distributed widely, if not fairly.

This chart shows that labor"s declining share of the national income is not a recent problem, but a 45-year trend: despite occasional counter-trend blips, labor (that is, earnings from labor/ employment) has seen its share of the economy plummet regardless of the political or economic environment.

Given the gravity of the consequences of this trend, mainstream economists have been struggling to explain it, as a means of eventually reversing it. The explanations include automation, globalization/ offshoring, the high cost of housing, a decline of corporate competition (i.e. the dominance of cartels and quasi-monopolies), a failure of our educational complex to keep pace, stagnating gains in productivity, and so on.

Each of these dynamics may well exacerbate the trend, but they all dodge the dominant driver of wage stagnation and rise income-wealth inequality: our economy is optimized for financialization, not labor/earned income.

What does our economy is optimized for financialization mean? It means that capital and profits flow to the scarcities created by asymmetric access to information, leverage and cheap credit--the engines of financialization.

Optimization is a complex overlay of dynamically linked systems: the central bank optimizes the flow of cheap credit to the banking/financial sector, the central state tacitly approves the consolidation of cartels and quasi-monopolies, and gives monstrous tax breaks to corporations even as it jacks up taxes and fees on wage earners and small business.

Financialization funnels the economy"s rewards to those with access to opaque financial processes and information flows, cheap central bank credit and private banking leverage. Together, these enable financiers and corporations to get the borrowed capital needed to acquire and consolidate the productive assets of the economy, and commoditize those productive assets, i.e. turn them into financial instruments that can be bought and sold on the global marketplace.

These commoditized assets include home mortgages, student loans, and specialized labor forces which are "sold" with their employers or arbitraged globally. Once an asset is commoditized, the profits flow to those who process the transactions of packaging and marketing these assets globally.

Take auto loans as an example: the big money isn"t made from collecting the interest on the auto loans; the big money is made by processing and assembling the loans into tranches that can be sold to investors globally.

One way of understanding financialization is to ask: what"s the quickest, easiest way to make $10 million in our economy? Is it building a business based on the labor of employees over a decade or two?

You"re joking, right? The easiest way to make $10 million is to be part of the investment banking team overseeing a $10 billion corporate buyout or merger deal, or investing seed money in a tech company that subsequently goes public.

How about the easiest and quickest way to make $100 million? The answer is the same: working a vein of financial wealth based on commoditized instruments, leverage and credit.

Labor"s share of the national income is in freefall as a direct result of the optimization of financialization. The money flows to those with the capital, credit and expertise to optimize financialized skims. As for selling one"s labor in an economy optimized for capital and the asymmetries of finance--there"s no premium for labor in such an economy, other than technical/managerial skills required by finance to exploit markets.

This is the driver of the rising income-wealth inequality this chart reveals:

*  *  *

If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

The Toxic Fruit Of Financialization: Risk Is For Those At The Bottom

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Those who have pushed the risk down the wealth-power pyramid are confident the Federal Reserve will continue to limit the risks of speculative financialization.

One of the most pernicious consequences of financialization is the shifting of risk from the top of the wealth-power pyramid to the bottom: those who benefit the most from financialization"s leveraged, speculative credit bubbles protect themselves from losses while those at the bottom of the pyramid (the bottom 99.5%) face the full fury of financialization"s formidable risk.

Longtime correspondent Chad D. and I recently exchanged emails exploring how the higher debt loads and higher interest payments of financialization inhibits people at the bottom of the wealth-power pyramid (i.e. debt-serfs) from taking risks such as starting a small business.

But this is only one serving of financialization"s toxic banquet of risk-related consequences. Chad summarized how those at the apex of the wealth-power pyramid protect themselves from risk and losses.

At the top levels of the pyramid, members in those groups collect way more interest than they pay out and at the very top, they get a ton of interest and pay little to none. The people at the top can take all sorts of risk, because of this dynamic and further, they also usually have a heavy influence on the financial/political machinery, so they get bailed out by taxpayers when their investments go bad. In addition, because their influence extends to the criminal justice system, they are able to commit fraud and at the same time neutralize regulators and prosecutors, thereby escaping any ramifications from their excessive risk taking and in many cases massive fraud.

As Chad observed, the wealthy own the income streams from debt (bonds, etc.), while everyone else owes the interest and principal due on debt. As this chart shows, the wealthy own business equity and financial securities and have a modest slice of debt. The bottom 90% owe most of the debt, and their primary asset is the family home-- an asset that doesn"t generate income while it generates interest income for those who own the mortgage. In other words, it"s less an investment than a form of consumption-- especially when the current housing bubble deflates.

The asymmetry of risk and exposure to loss resulting from financialization is about to become consequential. Financialization has reached the top of the S-curve and is now in the decline phase. As noted on this graph, what worked so effortlessly in the boost phase of financialization not only no longer works, it actively boosts the risks of sudden, catastrophic losses.

Those who have pushed the risk down the wealth-power pyramid are confident the Federal Reserve will continue to limit the risks of speculative financialization. The S-curve is a pattern of Nature. If you"re confident the Fed is now the ultimate power in the Universe, then you"re betting that the Fed and Treasury will always absorb all the risk and all the losses, with zero consequences.

The S-Curve suggests that bet isn"t as low-risk as those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid currently believe.

The Death Spiral Of Financialization

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Each new policy destroys another level of prudent fiscal/financial discipline.

The primary driver of our economy--financialization--is in a death spiral. Financialization substitutes expansion of interest, leverage and speculation for real-world expansion of goods, services and wages.

Financial "wealth" created by leveraging more debt on a base of real-world collateral that doesn"t actually produce more goods and services flows to the top of the wealth-power pyramid, driving the soaring wealth-income inequality we see everywhere in the global economy.

As this phantom wealth pours into assets such as stocks, bonds and real estate, it has pushed the value of these assets into the stratosphere, out of reach of the bottom 95% whose incomes have stagnated for the past 16 years.

The core problem with financialization is that it requires ever more extreme policies to keep it going. These policies are mutually reinforcing, meaning that the total impact becomes geometric rather than linear. Put another way, the fragility and instability generated by each new policy extreme reinforces the negative consequences of previous policies.

These extremes don"t just pile up like bricks--they fuel a parabolic rise in systemic leverage, debt, speculation, fragility, distortion and instability.

This accretive, mutually reinforcing, geometric rise in systemic fragility that is the unavoidable output of financialization is poorly understood, not just by laypeople but by the financial punditry and professional economists.

Gordon Long and I cover the policy extremes which have locked our financial system into a death spiral in a new 50-minute presentation, The Road to Financialization. Each "fix" that boosts leverage and debt fuels a speculative boom that then fizzles when the distortions introduced by financialization destabilize the real economy"s credit-business cycle.

Each new policy destroys another level of prudent fiscal/financial discipline.

The discipline of sound money? Gone.

The discipline of limited leverage? Gone.

The discipline of prudent lending? Gone.

The discipline of mark-to-market discovery of the price of collateral? Gone.

The discipline of separating investment and commercial banking, i.e. Glass-Steagall? Gone.

The discipline of open-market interest rates? Gone.

The discipline of losses being absorbed by those who generated the loans? Gone.

And so on: every structural source of discipline has been eradicated, weakened or hollowed out. Financialization has consumed the nation"s seed corn, and the harvest of instability is ripening in the fields of finance and the real economy alike.

"Nobody In Power Is Paying Attention To How Close We Are To The Edge"

Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

As our politicos creep deeper into a legalistic wilderness hunting for phantoms of Russian collusion, nobody pays attention to the most dangerous force in American life: the unraveling financialization of the economy.

Financialization is what happens when the people-in-charge “create” colossal sums of “money” out of nothing — by issuing loans, a.k.a. debt — and then cream off stupendous profits from the asset bubbles, interest rate arbitrages, and other opportunities for swindling that the artificial wealth presents. It was a kind of magic trick that produced monuments of concentrated personal wealth for a few and left the rest of the population drowning in obligations from a stolen future. The future is now upon us.

Financialization expressed itself in other interesting ways, for instance the amazing renovation of New York City (Brooklyn especially). It didn’t happen just because Generation X was repulsed by the boring suburbs it grew up in and longed for a life of artisanal cocktails. It happened because financialization concentrated immense wealth geographically in the very few places where its activities took place — not just New York but San Francisco, Washington, and Boston — and could support luxuries like craft food and brews.

Quite a bit of that wealth was extracted from asset-stripping the rest of America where financialization was absent, kind of a national distress sale of the fly-over places and the people in them. That dynamic, of course, produced the phenomenon of President Donald Trump, the distilled essence of all the economic distress “out there” and the rage it entailed. The people of Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin were left holding a big bag of nothing and they certainly noticed what had been done to them, though they had no idea what to do about it, except maybe try to escape the moment-by-moment pain of their ruined lives with powerful drugs.

And then, a champion presented himself, and promised to bring back the dimly remembered wonder years of post-war well-being — even though the world had changed utterly — and the poor suckers fell for it. Not to mention the fact that his opponent — the avaricious Hillary, with her hundreds of millions in ill-gotten wealth — was a very avatar of the financialization that had turned their lives to shit. And then the woman called them “a basket of deplorables” for noticing what had happened to them.

And now the rather pathetic false promises of President Trump, the whole MAGA thing, is unraveling at exactly the same time that the financialized economy is entering its moment of final catastrophic phase-change. The monuments to wealth — especially the stock and bond portfolios and the presumed value of real estate investments — will surrender to a process you might call price-discovery-from-Hell, revealing their worth to be somewhere between little and nothing. The accumulated monstrous debts of persons, corporations, and sovereign societies, will be suddenly, shockingly, absolutely, and self-evidently unpayable, and the securities represented by them will be sucked into the kind of vortices of time/space depicted in movies about mummies and astronauts. And all of a sudden the avatars of that wealth will see their lives turn to shit just like moiling, Budweiser-gulping, oxycontin-addled deplorables in the flat, boring, parking lot wastelands of our ruined drive-in Utopia saw their lives rendered into a brown-and-yellow slurry draining clockwise down the toilet of history.

Nobody in power in this country is paying attention to how close we are to that epic moment — at least, they’re not talking about it. If the possibility of all that even occupies some remote corner of their brains, they surely don’t know how to prepare the citizenry for it, or what to do about it. The truth is that societies respond emergently to major crises like the imminent unraveling of our financialized economy, often in disorderly and surprising ways. I suppose we’ll just have to watch the nauseating spectacle play out, and in the meantime enjoy the Russian collusion melodrama for whatever it’s worth — probably more than a ticket to Wonder Woman or the new Tom Cruise Mummy movie.

Financialization & The Erosion Of Growth

Authored by Ben Masters via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

One of the common side effects of debt-fueled speculation/spending is financialization, and one should immediately look to the growth and prominence of the financial industry (since the 1980s) with alarm, hesitation and concern; how and why is it that an industry that produces no physical product has grown to its current size?  After all, the financial industry exists as a non-production-utility — its very purpose is to properly allocate capital and resources to desirable (in-demand) industries; it’s an industry whose very existence relies on the success of other industries. If the financial industry is able to properly allocate capital/resources to desirable industries, it’s rewarded and is able to grow along with those other fundamental industries; and if a misallocation occurs, capital/resources are allocated to (and used up by) unsuccessful industries — those industries then shrink, along with the finance industry and economic growth.

The concern then is that if a general “hollowing out” of production occurs in a country — something that is rarely disputed these days when addressing U.S. industry — this would typically result in a smaller financial industry, not a larger one; yet the explosion of growth in the finance industry since the 1980s has been in stark contrast.  Why is this?  Put simply, debt-fueled investment speculation and debt-based spending has exploded since the 1980s.

Debt-fueled investment speculation can be seen in this visual of the three instances of the 21st century where long-term returns for stocks have been reduced — each peak fueled by different forms of speculation that ensure low future returns:

Tradable securities far outpacing economic growth…

The three speculative episodes of the 21st century, and dangerous transition periods…

Each of these speculative episodes have been addressed in The Orchestration of Debt-Based Expansions; and the topic of debt-based spending (pursued since the 1980s) has been written about as well, and includes government debt and consumer debt (mortgages, credit cards, student loans, car loans, borrowing to supplement falling incomes, etc.): see Debt Levels, Why does college cost so much?, Why doesn’t anyone earn anything in a bank account anymore?, and Income Stagnation.

The dilemma is that debt temporarily inflates the price of desirable assets (until the point in time where that debt needs to be paid back), and if a majority of the economy has debt that needs to be paid back economic growth is constrained — at some point in time those individuals are paying back loans instead of boosting economic growth through spending.  And if the majority of the economy has unproductive debt (debt that has not created an income stream to repay the principal amount borrowed and interest on the debt) then defaults, write-downs, etc. have a punishing affect on the economy and financial system.

For many, that punishing affect is a destruction of investments (which are not the same as wealth… see Fundamental Wealth).  Their “assets” evaporate, prices plunge, and they don’t know why…  The reason that assets vanish in a market crisis is because debt is always considered an asset by the issuer, yet in reality debt isn’t always an asset for the issuer; there are improper claims of assets — assets that don’t exist (loans that won’t be able to be paid back).  In effect, there are claims of assets (and securities issued on those “assets”) that outnumber the actual underlying assets.

It’s the financialization due to debt/leverage/speculation — the adding of layers and complexities — that can lead to a weakening of the market structure; one need only look to Charles Kindleberger’s work Manias, Panics, and Crashes to see how this process has unfolded over and over throughout history.

“Speculative manias gather speed through expansion of money and credit. . .there are many more economic expansions than there are manias.  But every mania has been associated with the expansion of credit.  In the last hundred or so years the expansion of credit has been almost exclusively through the banks and the financial system.

In boom, entropy in regulation and supervision builds up danger spots that burst into view when the boom levels off.” – Charles Kindleberger

And so financialization — the prominence of the finance industry and the growing dominance of obscure types of investments (many of which are simply more expensive packages of existing investments) — is made plain and clear: since the 1980s, it has grown due to temporary debt-based investment speculation and debt-based spending.  And although financialization is temporary (debt constraints eventually cause a readjustment), the real danger is that the temporary misallocation-of-wealth that occurs rewards the financial industry in a boom/bust cycle; wealth and capital that would have been used in other in-demand industries (had productive debt been pursued) is instead concentrated and used up in the financial industry, and when coupled with the ability to influence politics this temporary reward/misallocation can cause a further entrenchment of the undeservedly rewarded industry — a further misallocation of wealth.

Said in 2009 by Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of Grantham, Mayo, & Van Otterloo — one of the largest investment companies in the world…

“I’d like to challenge the usefulness — not just of new instruments — but of large tracts of the whole financial industry, much of which is a net drag.  Let’s start with the investment management business, because I think intuitively, obviously, you can see that we collectively add nothing.  We produce no “widgets”, we shuffle the existing value of all corporations and bonds around, in a cosmic poker game.  At the end of each year, the investment community is down by one percent (cough)…the individual is down by two, and aggregate fees have steadily grown.  As we grew by ten times from ’89 to ’99 huge economies of scale were existing, but the fees-per-dollar-managed grows — no fee competition at all, contrary to theory.  Why?  Agency problems, asymmetry of information, the client can’t tell talent from luck or risk taking, and as we add new products (options, futures, CDOs, hedge funds, private equity) aggregate fees rise as a percentage of assets; there becomes a layer of fees and another layer of agents and fees — the more complicated and opaque, the more the client need us. . .

As fees go up by half-a-percent, we reach into the client’s balance sheet, snatch the half-a-percent, and turn it into income; it’s almost magic — capital into income… but we lower the savings rate of our clients (savings and investment rate) by half-a-percent as our fees go up, so we get short term GDP kick from our income, at the expense of lower long-term growth on the part of the system.  Similarly with the whole financial system… let us say by 1965 (the best decade we ever had, the ’60s) there was a very financial financial-service arrangement — enough banking, enough letters of credit, to get the job done. 

Adequate tools are vital — that’s not the issue.  We’re talking the razzmatazz of the last ten or fifteen years…  The financial system was 3% of GDP in 1965 — it’s now 7 1/2; this is an extra 4% load that the real economy carries.  The financial system overfeeds and slows down the real economy.  The first hundred years, up to 1965, the economy was like a battleship, growing at 3.5% a year.  Even the great depression bounced off it.  After 1965 the GDP (ex-financials) grew at 3.2; after 1982, at 3.1; after 2000, at 2.3; all of these to the end of ’07 (not including the current problems).  From society’s point of view this 4% works like looting, or an earthquake — both increase GDP short term, but chew up capital.  They might as well be retirees or children — all these extra people in the financial business— but they are much, much more, expensive. 

Economists have not studied the optimal size for finance — indeed, a learned journal recently rejected a paper on the grounds that finance does not comment on social utility; that is perhaps why the risks are little. 

The underlying problem recently has been touching faith in capitalism, this faith was based on 50 years of a dominant economic theory that was shockingly not based on facts but on unestablished, unprovable, assumptions: “rational expectations” — this has given us efficient markets. So why regulate new instruments, if capitalism and markets are efficient?  Or why regulate anything?  So Greenspan, Rubens, Summers, and the SEC, happily beat back Brooksley Borne trying to regulate new instruments. But as Keynes knew in 1934, markets are behavioral jungles, racked by changing animal spirits, and by agency problems.  Efficient markets assume symmetry of data on all sides.  In real life, agents have all the data and the principal clients know little. It’s like taking candy from babies, the more opaque and complicated the new instruments, the easier the ripoff.  There is now — at LSE [London School of Economics] — a Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, started by my former colleague, Paul Woolley, that is even now, attempting an academese, to establish that in the real world condition, agents in finance tend towards getting everything.”

- Jeremy Grantham, 5:33 mark of 2009 Buttonwood Gathering

Do The Roots Of Rising Inequality Go All The Way Back To The 1980s?

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Unless we change the fundamental structure of the economy so that actually producing goods and services and hiring people is more profitable than playing financial games with phantom assets, the end-game of financialization is financial collapse.

I presented this chart of rising wealth inequality a number of times over the past year. Do you notice something peculiar about the inflection points in the 1980s?

Correspondent W.S. noted that the inflection point for the top .1% (late 1970s) preceded the inflection point of the bottom 90% (around 1986): both increased their share of household wealth from 1978 to 1986, and then the share of the top .1% took off, essentially tripling from 8% to over 22%, while the share of the bottom fell precipitously from 36% to 23%.

(Note that the data stops at 2012; if we extend the trends to the present, the lines have certainly crossed and the share of the .1% now exceeds that of the bottom 90%.)

So what happened between 1978 and 1986? The first phase of the financialization of the U.S. economy. What is financialization? In a financialized economy, speculating with highly leveraged debt and exotic financial instruments is far more profitable than producing goods and services.

Financialization hollows out the productive assets of an economy by incentivizing leverage, debt, opacity, speculation, financial fraud, collusion and the perfection of crony capitalism, i.e. financial Elites" ownership of the government"s regulatory and legislative bodies.

Here is another less pungent description via Wikipedia: "Financial leverage overrides capital (equity) and financial markets dominate traditional industrial economy and agricultural economics."

Here is my more formal definition:

Financialization is the mass commodification of debt and debt-based financial instruments collaterized by previously low-risk assets, a pyramiding of risk and speculative gains that is only possible in a massive expansion of low-cost credit and leverage.

Another way to describe the same dynamics is: financialization results when leverage and information asymmetry replace innovation and productive investment as the source of wealth creation.

I describe the dynamics in What"s the Primary Cause of Wealth Inequality? Financialization (March 24, 2014)

Correspondent W.S. submitted commentary and references this 2005 book Financialization and the World Economy:

In the US "total credit market debt divided by GDP was about 1.5 from 1961 to 1981. It accelerated rapidly in the decade of the 1980s - from 1.6 in 1981 to 2.3 in 1989 - as the federal budget deficit soared, hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts loaded corporations with debt, and household borrowing increased. Corporate and household borrowing raised indebtedness further in the 1990s; by 2001 the debt to GDP ratio was 2.8, almost double the ratio in the Golden Age. Moreover, average real interest rates have been much higher in the neoliberal era than they were in the three decades that preceeded it.

W.S. Also referenced FINANCIALIZATION OF THE ECONOMY and added this commentary:

While “bloated” conglomerates were linked by some to the sluggish performance of the American economy in the 1970s, for corporate raiders they presented a get rich quick opportunity via the “market for corporate control” (Manne 1965). Outsiders could buy the firm from its existing shareholders, fire its managers, and sell off the parts for a quick profit.

After the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, this became possible on a grand scale due to relaxed antitrust guidelines, changes in state antitakeover laws, and financial innovations that enabled raiders to get relatively short-term financing on a large scale (Davis & Stout 1992). Within a decade, nearly one-third of the Fortune 500 largest industrial firms had been acquired or merged, often resulting in spinoffs of unrelated parts, and by 1990 American corporations were far less diversified than they had been a decade before (Davis et al 1994).

The other thing that happened in the mid-1980s was computer technology became cheap enough and powerful enough to start replacing human labor on a wider scale. Spreadsheets such as Excel became accessible to small business, and the desktop publishing combo of the Apple Macintosh and laserprinters revolutionized the cost structure of marketing.

The rise of the Internet (coupled with cheap memory and processing power) further fueled the productive expansion of digital technologies. As I describe in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, these tools-- which are now ubiquitous and inexpensive--enable one person today to equal the output of what once took four people to produce in the late 1980s.

In effect, labor entered an era of dynamic over-supply just as healthcare costs began to rise, making it more costly to hire workers. Some skills and trades remain scarce and thus well-paid, but as a generalization it became cheaper and more efficient to replace increasingly expensive human labor with increasingly inexpensive and powerful software and digital tools.

Unless we change the fundamental structure of the economy so that actually producing goods and services and maximizing opportunities for people is more profitable than playing financial games with phantom assets, the end-game of financialization is financial collapse.

Recent podcasts/video programs:

Deep State Fractures Under Populist Revolution (TruNews, 37:27)

Debt Bomb Ready to Explode: “Nitroglycerin On A Bumpy Road”

In the tense foreign film ‘Wages of Fear,’ the men must gamble with their lives to pay their bills amidst an economic depression, compelled to take a high risk, and high paying job driving nitroglycerin down a long, bumpy road to deliver it to the oil fields to put out larger fires. In the current economy, we must also keep putting the gun to our head in order to keep society functioning… good luck on the draw.

This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge.

Editor’s Comment: The debt problem will always be the worst, because it compounds interest indefinitely, and in a very harsh way, and because it so thoroughly swamps the people who can least afford to deal with it. All the incompetence, corruption and mismanagement of the federal government, and those of the state and local governments, will ultimately enslave the taxpayers and U.S. citizens to generations of debt servitude, where we could ultimately be prodded into promising our children, and their children, as collateral on the debts we owe.

Underneath it all, the Federal Reserve and central bank systems, controlled behind a thin veil of the world’s ranking financial elites, cast booms and busts just as God Almighty casts thunder and lightning, preferring to bring down huge swaths of the population in trials and tribulations that will soon prove hard to endure.

For eight years, it has been easy money to the top of the heap, and flowing credit in the system; but those payments will now come due, and the larger crisis on the horizon… get your affairs in order while you still can.

Bill Gross: “Our Financial System Is A Truckload Of Nitroglycerin On A Bumpy Road”

by Tyler Durden

Courtesy of Bill Gross’ latest monthly letter “Show Me The Money“, here are some perspectives on the only thing that has kept the global economy going since the financial crisis: debt, and lost of it.

in 2017, the global economy has created more credit relative to GDP than that at the beginning of 2008’s disaster. In the U.S., credit of $65 trillion is roughly 350% of annual GDP and the ratio is rising. In China, the ratio has more than doubled in the past decade to nearly 300%. Since 2007, China has added $24 trillion worth of debt to its collective balance sheet. Over the same period, the U.S. and Europe only added $12 trillion each. Capitalism, with its adopted fractional reserve banking system, depends on credit expansion and the printing of additional reserves by central banks, which in turn are re-lent by private banks to create pizza stores, cell phones and a myriad of other products and business enterprises. But the credit creation has limits and the cost of credit (interest rates) must be carefully monitored so that borrowers (think subprime) can pay back the monthly servicing costs. If rates are too high (and credit as a % of GDP too high as well), then potential Lehman black swans can occur. On the other hand, if rates are too low (and credit as a % of GDP declines), then the system breaks down, as savers, pension funds and insurance companies become unable to earn a rate of return high enough to match and service their liabilities.

U.S. Total Credit Market Debt as a Percent of GDP

Central banks attempt to walk this fine line – generating mild credit growth that matches nominal GDP growth – and keeping the cost of the credit at a yield that is not too high, nor too low, but just right. Janet Yellen is a modern day Goldilocks.

How is she doing? So far, so good, I suppose. While the recovery has been weak by historical standards, banks and corporations have recapitalized, job growth has been steady and importantly – at least to the Fed – markets are in record territory, suggesting happier days ahead. But our highly levered financial system is like a truckload of nitro glycerin on a bumpy road. One mistake can set off a credit implosion where holders of stocks, high yield bonds, and yes, subprime mortgages all rush to the bank to claim its one and only dollar in the vault. It happened in 2008, and central banks were in a position to drastically lower yields and buy trillions of dollars via Quantitative Easing (QE) to prevent a run on the system. Today, central bank flexibility is not what it was back then. Yields globally are near zero and in many cases, negative. Continuing QE programs by central banks are approaching limits as they buy up more and more existing debt, threatening repo markets and the day to day functioning of financial commerce.

I’m with Will Rogers. Don’t be allured by the Trump mirage of 3-4% growth and the magical benefits of tax cuts and deregulation. The U.S. and indeed the global economy is walking a fine line due to increasing leverage and the potential for too high (or too low) interest rates to wreak havoc on an increasingly stressed financial system. Be more concerned about the return of your money than the return on your money in 2017 and beyond.

* * *

And as a follow up, a primer by Gross on fractional reserve lending:

“Pretend,” I told the “fam” huddled around the kitchen table, that there is only one dollar and that you own it and have it on deposit with the Bank of USA – the only bank in the country. The bank owes you a buck any time you want to withdraw it. But the bank says to itself, “she probably won’t need this buck for a while, so I’ll lend it to Joe who wants to start a pizza store.” Joe borrows the buck and pays for flour, pepperoni and a pizza oven from Sally’s Pizza Supplies, who then deposits it back in the same bank in their checking account. Your one and only buck has now turned into two. You have a bank account with one buck and Sally’s Pizza has a checking account with one buck. Both parties have confidence that their buck is actually theirs, even though there’s really only one buck in the bank’s vault.
The bank itself has doubled its assets and liabilities. Its assets are the one buck in its vault and the loan to Joe; its liabilities are the buck it owes to you – the original depositor – and the buck it owes to Sally’s Pizza. The cycle goes on of course, lending and relending the simple solitary dollar bill (with regulatory reserve requirements) until like a magician with a wand and a black hat, the fractional reserve system pulls five or six rabbits out of a single top hat. There still is only one dollar bill but fractional reserve banking has turned it into five or six dollars of credit and engineered a capitalistic miracle of growth and job creation. And importantly, all lenders of credit believe that they can sell or liquidate their assets and receive the single solitary buck that rests in the bank’s vault. Well . . . not really.

“And so,” my oldest son, Jeff, said as he stroked his beardless chin like a scientist just discovering the mystery of black holes. “That sounds like a good thing. The problem I’ll bet comes when there are too many pizza stores (think subprime mortgages) and the interest on all of the loans couldn’t be paid and everyone wants the dollar back that they think is theirs. Sounds like 2008 to me – something like Lehman Brothers.”

“Yep,” I said, as I got up to get a Coke from the refrigerator. “Something like Lehman Brothers.”

Full letter here.

This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge.