"Βάσω Παπανδρέου στο ΕΘΝΟΣ,22/9/2008:
«Θέλουμε στρατιώτες στο ΠΑΣΟΚ, όχι στρατηγούς».
.Στο ΠΑΣΟΚ ψάχνουν για στρατιώτες (δηλ. αγγαριομάχους) … στρατηγούς έχουν-το είπε η Βάσω , έτσι για να εξηγιόμαστε.
.Στη ΝΔ ψάχνουν για εκπρόσωπο τύπου ,που να έχει μουστάκι.
.Στο Συριζα ψάχνουν πως θα αντικρούσουν τις επιθέσεις αγάπης του ΠΑΣΟΚ.
.Στο ΚΚΕ ψάχνουν να βρουν, ποίος μαμεί την κουβέντα.
.Στο ΛΑΟΣ ψάχνουν τρόπο να βοηθήσουν την ΝΔ.
Ο Εφραιμ ψάχνει για χρυσόβουλα….
και όλοι μαζί ψάχνουν για μακάκες..!"
ΚΑΙ Ο ΛΑΟΣ ΨΑΧΝΕΙ ΝΑ ΤΟΥΣ ΣΕΡΒΙΡΕΙ ΤΟ ΜΑΥΡΟ ΜΑΥΡΟ ΤΟΥ.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήafoy eiste zwa kai pshfizete ND-PASOK enw kserete ek twn proterwn to apotelesma kala na pathete
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήafoy eiste zwa kai pshfizete ND-PASOK enw kserete ek twn proterwn to apotelesma kala na pathete
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήΑπο στρατηγούς καλά παει το κίνημα..Φανταρια δεν έχουμε
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήΑρκετα το γλέντησε
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήΑς ΠΑΕΙ ΣΠΙΤΆΚΙ, ΤΗς ..
Ας αφησει και καναν αλλο να σωσει την Ελλαδα..
Ποτε θα παρουν σειρα΄
Η Καιλη η ..Σουλα Ευθυμιου
η ..Μαιρη πρωην χηρα Κασιματη
και τα αλλα ..κοριτσια του κινηματος...
Το επόμενο κείμενο έγραψε ο βραβευμένος με Nobel Οικονομίας και Καθηγητής Πανεπιστημίου, Joseph Stiglitz.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφή( http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=947bf9e5-923b-409a-adac-579658c99ddf )
Falling Down
by Joseph Stiglitz
No manufacturing. No new ideas. What's our economy based on?
Post Date Wednesday, September 10, 2008
More than 75 years ago, confidence in the market economy got a rude shock as the world sank into the Great Depression. Adam Smith had said that the market led the economy, as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency and societal wellbeing. It was hard to believe that Smith was right when one in four Americans was out of a job. Some economists held true to their faith in self-regulating markets; they said, just be patient, in the long run the market's restorative forces will take hold, and we will recover. But Keynes's retort ruled the day: In the long run, we are all dead. We could not wait. Today, even conservatives believe that government should intervene to maintain the economy at or near full employment.
Those who believe in free markets have now received another rude shock: We have not yet sunk into an "official" recession, but it has been more than half a year since any new jobs were created, and, meanwhile, our labor force continues to grow. If the Great Depression undermined our confidence in macroeconomics (the ability to maintain full employment, price stability, and sustained growth), it is our confidence in microeconomics (the ability of markets and firms to allocate labor and capital efficiently) that is now being destroyed. Resources were misallocated and risks were mismanaged so severely that the private sector had to go running to the government for help, lest the entire system melt down. Even with federal intervention, I have estimated the cumulative gap between what our economy could have produced--had we invested in actual businesses, rather than, say, mortgages for people who couldn't afford their homes--and what we will produce over the period of our slowdown to be more than $1.5 trillion.
Blame has rightly fallen on the financial markets because it is their responsibility to allocate capital and manage risk, and their failure has revived several old concerns of the political (and economic) left. Some looking at the U.S. economy's decreasing reliance on manufacturing and increasing dependence on the service sector (including financial services) have long worried that the whole thing was a house of cards. After all, aren't "hard objects"--the food we eat, the houses we live in, the cars and airplanes that we use to transport us from one place to another, the gas and oil that provides heat and energy--the "core" of the economy? And if so, shouldn't they represent a larger fraction of our national output?
The simple answer is no. We live in a knowledge economy, an information economy, an innovation economy. Because of our ideas, we can have all the food we can possibly eat--and more than we should eat--with only 2 percent of the labor force employed in agriculture. Even with only 9 percent of our labor force in manufacturing, we remain the largest producer of manufactured goods. It is better to work smart than to work hard, and our investments in education and technology have enabled us to enjoy higher standards of living--and to live longer--than ever before. America's dominance in so many aspects of high-tech is testimony to the real returns to these soft expenditures. Indeed, I would argue that we would do even better if we had more resources in these sectors.
But the view that our recent success is based on a house of cards has more than a grain of truth to it. In recent years, financial markets created a giant rich man's casino, in which well-off players could take trillion dollar bets against each other. I am among those who believe that consenting adults should be allowed great freedom in what they do--as long as they don't harm others. But there's the rub. These high-rollers weren't just gambling their own money. They were gambling other people's money. They were putting at risk the entire financial system--indeed, our entire economic system. And now we are all paying the price.
Financial markets have been likened to the brain of the economy. They are supposed to allocate capital and manage risk. When they do their job well, economies prosper. When they do their job badly, as we are once again learning, everyone suffers. Financial markets are amply rewarded for their work--in recent years, they have received over 30 percent of corporate profits--and the standard mantra in economics was that these rewards were commensurate with their social return. That is, financial wizards might walk off with a great deal of money, but the rest of society is better off because our capital generates so much more productivity than in societies with less well-developed--and less rewarded--financial markets. Part of the rewards that accrue to financial markets are thus for encouraging innovation--through venture capital firms and the like.
But not all innovations enhance welfare, even when they increase profits. For instance, cigarette profits may have increased when the tobacco industry developed products that were more addictive, but those who died as a result, and their families, were hardly better off; nor were the taxpayers who had to pick up the tab for the increased health care costs. Food companies that, today, taking a page out of the same playbook, develop products that lead to compulsive eating--and the resulting obesity epidemic--may be increasing profits, but not societal well-being. Microsoft was ingenious in its strategies to leverage the monopoly power it had from controlling the PC operating system; it increased its profits, but, in killing rivals like Netscape, it had a chilling effect on innovation.
The task of unraveling all that went wrong in our financial system is a difficult one, but in essence the financial system's latest innovation was to devise fee structures that were often far from transparent and that allowed it to generate enormous profits--private rewards that were not commensurate with social benefits. The imperfections of information (resulting from the non-transparency) led to imperfections in competition, helping to explain why the usual maxim that competition drives profits to zero seemed not to hold. One should have suspected that something was wrong when bank after bank made so much money year after year. One should have suspected that something was wrong with the economic system when millions of Americans owed billions to credit card companies and banks in "late fees," "penalties," and a variety of other charges, transforming a high annual interest rate of 20 percent into a truly usurious effective interest rate of 100 percent or more for those who fell behind in their payments.
Perhaps the worst problems--like those in the subprime mortgage market--occurred when non-transparent fee structures interacted with incentives for excessive risk-taking in which financial managers got to keep high returns made one year, even if those returns were more than offset by losses the next. Behind the subprime crisis were mortgages designed to encourage repeated refinancing of homes--a pyramid scheme that generated billions of dollars in fees for the mortgage company as long as home prices continued to soar. It was inevitable that the bubble would break. But, by then, the profits that had been pocketed would make these financial wizards secure for life--or, at least, that was their hope.
To put it another way, had those in the financial sector allocated capital and risk in a way that fueled the economy, they would have had handsome profits. But they wanted more, and so established incentive structures that encouraged gambling. If they gambled and won, they could walk away with a share of the profits. If they gambled and lost, the investors would bear the consequences. It was almost as if the entire financial system was converted into a giant casino in which the system was rigged to guarantee those running the games huge returns, at the expense of the players. But in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, the games are near zero-sum: The gains of the casino owners approximately equal the losses of the players. The financial-system-as-casino, on the other hand, is a negative-sum game. Those on Wall Street may have walked off with billions, but those billions are dwarfed by the costs to be paid by the rest of us. Some have lost their homes and life savings--to say nothing of their dreams for their own futures and those of their children. Others are innocent bystanders who resisted the false promises of the mortgage brokers and the credit card companies, but now find themselves out of jobs as the economy weakens. And the poor are hurt as state revenues plummet, forcing cutbacks in public services.
The current woes in America's financial system are not an isolated accident--a rare, once-in-a-century event. Indeed, there have been more than one hundred financial crises worldwide in the last 30 years or so. Here in the United States alone, we have had the S&L crisis in 1989, the dot-com/WorldCom/Enron problems of the early years of this decade, and now the subprime-morphing-into-the-beyond-subprime collapse. In addition to these national problems, there were regional troubles--real-estate crises fed by excessive lending in Texas and the Southwest in the mid-'80s, and in California and New England in the early '90s. In each of these instances, financial markets failed to do what they were supposed to do in allocating capital and managing risk. In the late '90s, for instance, so much capital was allocated to fiber optics that, by the time of the crash, it was estimated that 97 percent of fiber optics had seen no light.
In short, the problem with the U.S. economy is not that we have allocated too many resources to the "soft" areas and too few to the "hard." It is not necessarily that we have allocated too many resources to the financial sector and rewarded it too generously--though a strong argument could be put forward to that effect. It is that too little effort was devoted to managing real risks that are important--enabling ordinary Americans to stay in their homes in the face of economic vicissitudes--and that too much effort went into creating financial products that enhanced risk. Too much energy has been spent trying to make an easy buck; too much effort has been devoted to increasing profits and not enough to increasing real wealth, whether that wealth comes from manufacturing or new ideas. We have learned a painful lesson, both in the 1930s and today: The invisible hand often seems invisible because it's not there. At best, it's more than a little palsied. At worst, the pursuit of self-interest--corporate greed--can lead to the kind of predicament confronting the country today.
Joseph Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, and co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War.
Και πάλι, από τον Καθηγητή Πανεπιστημίου και βραβευμένο με Nobel Οικονομίας, Joseph Stiglitz.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφή( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/01/useconomy.congress )
Good day for democracy
Now Congress must draw up a proposal in which costs are borne by those who created the problem
Joseph Stiglitz
The Guardian, Wednesday October 1 2008
What are we to make of the Congressional rejection of the Paulson proposal? The politics is simple: elections are a rare moment of accountability in our political process, and all 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for re-election in a matter of weeks. The Bush administration has lost the confidence of the American people, and so has Wall Street.
Those who created the problem are now the doctors offering the prescriptions. A little while ago we were told everything was fine. Then, less than six months ago, we were told that the economy was on the mend. Now we are told the patient needs a massive transfusion; but everyone can see that the patient is suffering from internal bleeding - in California, the number of foreclosures may already be outpacing voluntary sales. Yet nothing is being done to stem the haemorrhaging.
While the president says the economy faces the risk of economic meltdown, he threatens to veto a stimulus package that would create jobs - and he seems particularly adamant about a stimulus package that includes improved unemployment benefits. Traditionally, this is done when there is a threat of an economic downturn; if the downturn doesn't materialise, it doesn't cost anything. And while the administration and Wall Street promise this is just a temporary loan, not a bail-out, there was strong opposition to making the financial industry pay for any losses. Why would that be, if they are so sure that there won't be losses?
The rescue bill left enormous discretion to an administration on the wane, an administration that has shown unparalleled incompetence, an administration which even tried to politicise the attorney general's office. Americans worry that there will be political favourites among the recipients of the hundreds of billions of dollars. That treasury secretary Hank Paulson seemed tough on Lehman but reversed course when his old firm Goldman Sachs was at risk is hardly reassuring.
If the administration really thought the problems were as severe as claimed, shouldn't they have put forward a bill that was less outrageous? Did they really think that Americans would swallow giving them authority to spend $700bn, without oversight or judicial review, in a bill of a few pages? Normally, if you think there is a crisis, you try to forge a compromise with those who see the world differently - workers who worry about the loss of jobs, and homeowners who worry about the risk of foreclosure.
Americans have lost faith not only in the administration, but in its economic philosophy: a new corporate welfarism masquerading behind free-market ideology; another version of trickle-down economics, where the hundreds of billions to Wall Street that caused the problem were supposed to somehow trickle down to help ordinary Americans. Trickle-down hasn't been working well in America over the past eight years.
The very assumption that the rescue plan has to help is suspect. After all, the IMF and US treasury bail-outs for Wall Street 10 years ago in Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and Argentina didn't work for those countries, although it did enable Wall Street to get back most of its money. The taxpayers in these other poor countries picked up the tab for the financial markets' mistakes. This time, it is American taxpayers who are being asked to pick up the tab. And that's the difference. For all the rhetoric about democracy and good governance, the citizens in those countries didn't really get a chance to vote on the bail-outs. Had they, most would have suffered the same fortune as Paulson's.
There is, in fact, a widespread consensus among economists about what should be done. The economy is weak, and would remain so even with a good rescue plan. That is why there is a need for a strong stimulus. The February stimulus package was badly designed, and its anaemic effects offset by soaring oil and food prices. Given the enormous increase in the deficit during the past seven years (from $5.7bn to over $9 trillion - and that doesn't include the bills yet to be paid for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars) we have to be sure that we get the biggest bang for the buck. We need increased unemployment benefits, and aid to states and localities, which otherwise will be forced to cut back on spending, depressing the economy further. We need more investment in both the public and private sectors.
The fundamental problem with the financial system is that there have been large losses. Loans were made to people who couldn't repay. They were made on the basis of collateral whose value was inflated by a bubble. That bubble has burst, and the collateral is now worth less than the loan. The experts believe real estate prices have still a way to fall. This is not a matter of market confidence. This is a matter of market reality. Paulson would have us believe otherwise, but the American people know better. The fact that he and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke don't seem to grasp these realities undermines confidence that they know what they are doing.
In environmental economics, there is a basic concept called the polluter pays principle. It is a matter of fairness, but also of efficiency. Wall Street has polluted our economy with toxic mortgages. It should now pay for the cleanup.
What is so sad about this whole debacle is that it was predictable. Predicatable and avoidable. Perhaps Paulson and the administration believed that they could bamboozle Americans into doing whatever they asked. But Americans had been bamboozled before - into signing a blank cheque for the Iraq war.
A sad day for Wall Street, but it may be a glorious day for democracy. Hopefully Congress will now devise a plan that is not based on trickle-down economics. A plan that identifies the real sources of the problem and does something about them - a real stimulus to the economy, a real programme to stem the flood of foreclosures, and a transparent programme for filling the holes in bank balance sheets. A plan that assures US taxpayers the costs will be borne by those who created the problem. Accountability means paying for the full consequences for one's actions - and the financial system has much to account for.