A Honduras Solution.

There are 2 standoffs in Honduras. The first standoff is between one section of Honduran elites and their now deposed elected president Manuel Zelaya. The second is the political line being walked between the rest of Latin American leaders and the United States. The U.S. is heavily tied down in the middle east and central Asia, after a massive bet was placed by the neoconservative faction of the American political right on using military control to lock down the energy reserves in the Persian Gulf as one of the last great sources of American power (that is to say, control of energy for the rest of the world). As of now, the U.S is suffering from what used to be called imperial overstretch. From a historical standpoint, our power over others is in a state of decline as other powers rise (by definition, "super-power" or power is a relationship between peoples, and by extension, any region that extricates itself in varying degrees from U.S. control is reducing our overall power over them).



The Persian Gulf: Unstable as the region is, the U.S. heavily protects "our resources" under various middle eastern desert states through a proxy system. Clients manage our resources for us, leaders, kings, 99% of the vote dictators, have come and gone while serving U.S. national and corporate power. Oil is the prime resource, which the U.S. uses as leverage against its strategic competitors by using force in "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Part of this past weeks news that world powers seek to unpeg oil from the U.S. dollar is sign of the trajectory of our declining ability to control the energy supplies needed for other nations. While I don't see the peg shifting in the short term, the writing is on the wall.



Central Asia: Part of the Condoleezzaliza rice containment strategy to curb Chinese inroads into energy producing regions in Central Asia is to finance clients in places like Uzbekistan...as the 2 links here describe from an east Asian perspective, the moves taking place in this region.



Japan and South Korea: Outside of the North Korean diplomacy game, Japan and SK have remained loyal clients, staking their economic fate on exporting to the United States. Clearly though, they took a much more independent path of development, maintaining much more state control over their economies, developing much more quickly than their disorganized counterparts in the global south.



European Union: Preventing a rival superpower has been an objective of U.S. power since the early 1990s. As the cold war deterance faded, the U.S. accelerated violent attacks on defenseless targets, as the Soviets could be ignored, and the U.S. could flex its muscles. (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kosovo, etc..), the central lesson was that attacks can occur on targets that were unable to adequately defend themselves. The EU quickly accelerated internal integration with the creation of the common currency. This trajectory of EU integration remains firmly in place in my view, though clearly, there will be ups and downs in the future.

Latin America: The U.S. regards Latin America as our backyard. In NSC-68, George Kennan, in a highly influential policy document notes that the U.S. would use "harsh measures of repression" to maintain control of those resources. The cold war pretexts would be used to justify the countless dictators which kept each country from voting in ANY popular government (no matter what ideology) which won on a platform of diverting resources away from the U.S. for the benefit of the domestic population. The 20th century in Latin America was a sad one filled with torture, and mass murder traced to Washington's doorstep, and rationalized away with fear mongering corporate propaganda used to justify our anti-democratic interventions such as this:



By the turn of the 21st century, A series of elected governments has been swept into power in Latin America encouraging integration within the region on a scale never before seen. With integration occurring, the old guard of Latin American elites in Honduras (this applies to Latin American elites in general) wants to ensure its own power with the backing of the United States. But the U.S. is tied down elsewhere, and cannot afford a concerted protest of this type of behavior by the rest of the governments Latin America (especially Brazil and Argentina). To resolve the Honduran Crisis, Brazil should attempt to threaten to put a coalition together for a "humanitarian intervention" in Honduras. Picking up an alliance of Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and at the last minute Venezuela would be the wisest course of action. By threatening multi-lateral invasion, the U.S. hand will be forced by virtue of the fact that if it wishes to slow the decline of its influence, it will have to force the Honduran elite's hand. Otherwise, the situation will at best become like Haiti following the 91 coup--when Clinton condemned the coup, but walked the line long enough to allow the back channel support of the right wing to arm the Haitian thugs and allow them to massacre, rape, and torture the Lavalas supporters for years. By the time Aristide was returned to power, the base of his support was destroyed. In Honduras, the base for Zelaya is not even close to the base of support Aristide had from Lavalas (the popular coalition/party that backed the early aristide period) in the early 90s. However the play, if Brazil and Argentina choose to act on it, will certainly have the intended effect. The U.S. will either act to maintain its status as the alpha dog, or it will allow a broad Latin American coalition to invade and place peacekeepers on the ground. It is likely that tepid EU support may be offered if Bolivia and Venezuela are not on board at least at first.

Ultimately, a considered goal should be to get on the road to an EU Style of integration which will once again, force the U.S. to take a much more responsible lead or else be left in the unilateral cold.

The Commodities Bubble, Stocks, Gold, and Money.

The debate now is when to raise rates to prevent inflation. The debate later will be why monetary policy is failing society.

To support this blog, click all the random ads that pop up on this page. They don't know who I am, and I don't know who they are, but I get like 80 cents (until the bottom falls out of that market too.. hah) * update: adsense took their ads away. So much for my little plan.

In my view at this time, gold is a bubble financed by low interest rates. The narrative in the financial press is that gold is a hedge against future inflation. But I am pretty sure that gold is being pumped up by the same forces pumping up equity markets. Super high leverage from low rates has pumped more money into the system--but it does not "print money" as the common metaphor (again, see the Schiff/Ron Paul post) has said. The Federal Reserve and all other monetary incentive to invest policies only create the option to create money out of thin air. It is NOT a guaranteed event. Let's run through a scenario.

Let's just say we have 1 billion dollars in a a hedge fund. The hedge fund borrows 9 billion more at a 1% rate. It now takes 10 billion and attempts to invest its money at a profit. To clear things up, why does it want to borrow money if it has 1 billion already? The short answer is so that it can magnify profits. A 1 billion dollar investment with an 8% annual return nets 80 million, a 10 billion investment at the same rate of return is 800 million. The gains are magnified--but so too are potential losses. But the interest rate in question plays a huge role in monetary policy, because if the initial borrowing rate is 7% then the return on our hedge fund investment is the difference between 8% and 7%. A 1% rate of return.

So given the nature of our current monetarist regime, the one that has ruled the economy since the late 1970s, the missing link in the money printing and inflation discussion is that money only gets printed when it gets borrowed and invested. And right now, money is being borrowed and invested. The S&P is up 50% or so since March 2009. However, this money is being made on money in the same way that houses were mysteriously worth twice as much in 3 years during the housing bubble. Given the extra push and incentives on profitability (low rates, combined with the government buying up assets that the private sector couldn't sell except for at a major loss), it's understandable that a herd of investment is being plowed into anything that can be bought and sold for a profit. And that's where you get the money printing business coming into the discussion. The money gets printed when it gets borrowed and magnified into circulation. Monetarists use the following metrics to break down the money supply: M0, M1, M2, and M3. If the hedge fund $1 billion puts that billion into the stock market then the aggregate value will go up by whatever buying impact that $1 billion has on the market. If the fund pumps $10 billion in, then the demand impact goes up by ten times as much, and the value of the market will reflect that as well.

The take home lesson here is that ALL inflationary scenarios are built on the investor class taking the low interest rate bait and plowing it into the markets. They are most likely highly leveraged bets which makes me instinctively feel that once the losses start, it will be a very rapid decline because of the magnification of losses on the way down--and the subsequent lack of incentives and "risk aversion" (fear) will pull private investment out of the market.

For more on this, and some extra history, see my prior post.

Mass Media and the Crisis of Profitability

As I wrote in a prior blog, I believe we are in a major deflationary and de-leveraging spiral stemming from a crisis of profitability (best summarized as a lack of enough total profitability in investment that employs enough people). Since the decision to invest is made collectively (by incorporated institutions) and individually (by wealthy individuals), any given private sector economy starts with the investor and ends with the investor. It is driven from the top down, economic action only takes place on this if those who control enough capital (some industries require more money/capital than others) invest that capital--and they only invest that capital if they are going to profit or perceive they are going to make a profit.



With that in mind, while I think this is an aggregate phenomenon (as in, I think this Deflationary event exists on the whole, when you add up all the parts, but not necessarily in every sector), there are some sectors of the economy, where the fall in profitability has been much more rapid lately, and that's in the for profit media.



For profit media has not always been with us. It is largely a product of the 20th century. 19th newspapers were political partisan newspapers, and "Nearly all weekly and daily papers were party organs until the early 20th century". The 20th century saw the growth in the power in corporations after they were granted the rights of immortal persons in an 1886 judicial decision (corporations are at all times and countries, artificial creations of government). Alongside the growth in political and economic power, came the rise of the corporate press. Journalistic standards would be developed and enhanced, supposedly "unbiased" and "objective" reporters would be trained to cover both sides of the story, and audiences and citizens were transitioned to this new model. Part of the shift came from the ability to finance newspapers from advertising instead of at the point of purchase of a paper. As the model began to shift to an advertisement driven press, it changed the market. The model of the producer selling content to his audience became the producer selling his audience to an advertiser.

Chris Anderson notes in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, that the advertiser is subsidizing the content so it appears free to the consumer. TV shows are free if you watch the ads, radio and print were built on the same model. We agree that the model of news is changing. In an interview with Der Spiegel he comments that "now that you don't need this access to a commercial channel to distribute (news), anyone can do it. What we do is still useful but what other people do is equally useful. I don't think our way is the most important and it is certainly not the only way of conveying information. So this is why we're in a funny phase. It's going to take us a decade or two to figure out what it is we're doing."

What I anticipate is a return to the partisan press. To produce propaganda (or Public Relations) is ultimately a cheap endeavor, and will continue to fall in cost. To distribute your message has become easier in the sense that it is possible to connect with many people more easily--but it has become more difficult to cut through the noise of so many options competing for neurological real estate. In 1964, you couldn't miss the Beatles or the basic propaganda line established in the U.S. media. In 2014, art, culture, and politics will relate differently because of a continued fragmentation of common social reference points that were once distributed by the corporate propaganda system in the 20th century.

In its place, my guess is that political parties will lock in their own organs of getting out the message. To an extent the GOP has used this strategy already, with considerable success. But this only had the possibility of building a strong base. Completely bypassing the system of corporate media filtering met its match under Clinton and now Obama, both candidates being backed by major corporate money. And while the GOP developed FOX News, and built upon its religious and social conservative base, FOX did and still relies on the advertising for profit model to finance itself. It is an unofficial media organ, tapping into the base created by the conservative movement.

But where advertising was in essence required under the old system, the new system will produce the capacity to distribute information purely for the sake of the message. The option to produce content under the advertising regime will probably remain for some time, but the news outlets, already in a state of decline, will most certainly be replaced by the voices of factions as well as a coalition/party. Whoever wins the game of organizing enough people into a single coalition will be the side that wins the political battles of the future.