Taleb On "Skin In The Game" And His Disdain For Public Intellectuals

Nassim Taleb sits down for a quite extensive interview based around his new book Anti-Fragile. Whether the Black Swan best-seller is philosopher or trader is up to you but the discussion is worth the time as Taleb wonders rigorously from the basic tenets of capitalism - "being more about disincentives that incentives" as failure (he believes) is critical to its success (and is clearly not allowed in our current environment) - to his intellectual influences (and total disdain for the likes of Krugman, Stiglitz, and Friedman - who all espouse grandiose and verbose work with no accountability whatsoever). His fears of large centralized states (such as the US is becoming and Europe is become) being prone to fail along with his libertarianism make for good viewing. However, his fundamental premise that TBTF banks should be nationalized and the critical importance of 'skin in the game' for a functioning financial system are all so crucial for the current 'do no harm' regime in which we live. Grab a beer (or glass of wine, it is Taleb) and watch...

Via Redmond Weissenberger of the Ludwig von Mises Institute Of Canada,
A must see interview with Nassim Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a former trader and hedge fund manager, a best-selling author, and a ground-breaking theorist on risk and resilience.

Government Promises Are Hallucinatory Drugs.

Reality Check

Here is the first political jingle I ever heard.

"They promise you the sky.
They promise you the earth.
But what's a Republican promise worth?
Don't let them take it away!"

It was sung by a quartet at the 1952 national convention of the Democratic Party. If you substitute the word "political" for "Republican," you get the right idea.
I have repeatedly returned to the theme that all welfare schemes are paid for in the present. You cannot get something for nothing. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The resources that are used to fund every government program are extracted in the present from asset owners, and then these assets are transferred to new owners. The losses are borne in the present by the people who pay taxes to the government. Their taxes are then used to finance government spending. The losses that are sustained by those from whom the money is taken are offset politically by the benefits gained by the recipients of money sent to them by the government. This transfer of wealth is inescapable. It is inescapably a cost borne in the present.

Regime Uncertainty and the Fallacy of Aggregate Demand

In a recent New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman once again took to chastising a claim he has infamously dubbed  the “confidence fairy.”  According to the Nobel laureate, the “confidence fairy” is the erroneous belief that ambiguity over future government regulation and taxation plays a significant role in how investors choose to put capital to work.  To Krugman, the anemic economic recovery in the United States shouldn’t be blamed on this “uncertainty” but rather a “lack of demand for the things workers produce.”  Being the most prominent mouthpiece for Keynesian economic policy in modern times, the Princeton professor represents the school’s circular thinking very well.  Keynes and his followers saw most economic slumps as being the result of insufficient spending.  A slowdown in spending means the animal spirits aren’t so aggressive in their lust for immediate consumables.

Zombie Nation

Creating and sustaining a nation of zombies is expensive.

Large sections of the US population have been turned into zombies. Retirees. Medicare dependents. Food stamp recipients. Disabled people. They are not necessarily bad people. They are not necessarily dishonest or lazy. But rather than add to wealth, they consume it. And when you have too many of them, your society consumes more wealth than it produces and you are on the road to The Downside.

But the feds are not only creating individual zombies, they are also creating corporate zombies. An obvious example: “green” energy. Without subsidies, loan guarantees, tax benefits and direct giveaways, the industry as we know it would not exist. Nor would the ethanol industry in the Midwest. Nor the security industry in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.

Some Additional Reflections on the Economic Crisis and the Theory of the Cycle

by Jesus Huerta de Soto

The four years that have passed since the world financial crisis and subsequent economic recession hit have provided Austrian economists with a golden opportunity to popularize their theory of the economic cycle and their dynamic analysis of social conditions. In my own case, I could never have imagined at the beginning of 1998, when the first edition of my book Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles appeared, that 12 years later, due undoubtedly to a financial crisis and economic recession unparalleled in the world since the Great Depression of 1929, a crisis and recession which no other economic paradigm managed to predict and adequately explain, my book would be translated into 14 languages and published (so far) in nine countries and several editions (two in the United States and four in Spain). Moreover, in recent years I have been invited to and have participated in many meetings, seminars, and lectures devoted to presenting my book and discussing its content and main assertions. On these occasions, some matters have come up repeatedly, and though most are duly covered in my book, perhaps a brief review of them is called for at this time. Among these matters, we will touch on the following:

Why Is There a Euro Crisis?

by Philipp Bagus

Today's banks are not free-market institutions. They live in a symbiosis with governments that they are financing. The banks' survival depends on privileges and government interventions. Such an intervention explains the unusual stock gains. On Wednesday night, an EU summit had limited the losses that European banks will take for financing the irresponsible Greek government to 50 percent. Moreover, the summit showed that the European political elite is willing to keep the game going and continue to bail out the government of Greece and other peripheral countries. Everyone who receives money from the Greek government benefits from the bailout: Greek public employees, pensioners, unemployed, subsidized sectors, Greek banks — but also French and German banks.

Social Security, Ponzi Schemes, and Leprechaun Economics

by Gary North

I want to discuss an article. I may be exaggerating, but I regard this article as the most sophisticated exercise in terminal naiveté that I have ever read. It is an intelligent article with respect to the problems that it lays out. It is dealing with the Ponzi scheme economics of the modern world. Certainly, I am in favor of articles that discuss modern government economic policies as Ponzi schemes. I have been doing this for over 45 years, and I see no reason to stop now, especially since we are 45 years closer to the end of the Ponzi schemes.

Yet at the same time, I am always dismayed to see an article written about the inevitable Ponzi scheme collapse of the modern economic world that begins with some version of this assurance: if we act now, we can solve this. It is not too late. The article begins as follows:

What is a hyperinflationary depression and could it happen?

By: Peter Cooper, Arabian Money

Think Zimbabwe a moment. This is the most recent example of a hyperinflationary depression. Basically in Zimbabwe the black nationalists ejected the white farmers and replaced them with locals who could not farm, crashed the economy and started printing money. Hey presto! Rampant hyperinflation and a very depressed economy.

The problem with printing money to solve economic problems is that once started it is very hard to stop. It is always easier to print more than deal with underlying issues such as over-spending and a government-dominated economy. Democratic politicians like turkeys do not usually vote for Thanksgiving.

Fractional Reserve Banking: The Source of All Evil?

by Paul Tustain - Bullion Vault

I'm getting very suspicious of anything which regulators think is "safe" collateral... Fractional Reserve Banking is not responsible for the bad practice of 'creating money', writes Paul Tustain, founder and CEO of BullionVault. It is a speed limit on money creation, put in place by a Central Bank to stop banks doing too much of what comes naturally to them. The Central Bank used to leave lending decisions to bankers, and step in to liquidate them when they screwed up. But in a world of Deposit Protection Insurance and bank bailouts, the Central Bank picks up the tab for excessive money creation. To limit the risk, they impose the 'Fractional Reserve' to try to calm the commercial banks down. But it is only necessary because we have a timid central bank which lacks the gumption to swing its axe in the direction of bad banks.

Our Whole Economy Is a Ponzi Scheme !

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s most prestigious consulting firms, is making waves by stating something that only a few marginal analysts, generally from the Austrian school, are saying : all developed economies have become giant Ponzi schemes (read the essay). The fraud consists in paying interests to the investors with funds provided by newcomers, which can only lead to bankruptcy, as shown by the Madoff affair, last example to date.


In the same way, developed countries have borrowed tomorrow’s riches to finance today’s consumption. According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the total debt of governments, households and companies in the OCDE countries has grown from 160% of GDP in 1980 to 321% in 2010. And most of this debt has been used for financing consumption (bureaucrats’ salaries, household spending) rather than for infrastructure or investment. Most countries being in deficit, a part of their debt goes to... servicing older debt, which is the definition of a Ponzi scheme. On top of that, those countries are guaranteeing « entitlements » (retirement, health care) that are far from being funded.

It’s a mad mad mad mad world

By Detlev Schlichter 

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s new prime minister, has some exciting new ideas about how to make Japan’s economy grow. How about the government borrows a lot of money and spends it on building bridges and roads all over the country?

If that doesn’t sound so new, it is because it isn’t. It is what Japan has been doing for 20 years, and it is the main reason why Japan is now the most heavily indebted nation on the planet – and still not growing a lot. Its debt-to-GDP ratio stands at an eye-watering, world-record 230 percent, which already guarantees that the country’s pensioners-to-be (and Japan has a lot of those) will never be repaid with anything of true value for the government bonds they kept patiently accumulating in their pension funds, and that they optimistically keep calling ‘assets’.

But never mind. The Keynesians agree that this policy was a roaring success, and that this is why the country needs more of it, as, strangely, Japan has still not regained self-sufficient growth after 2 decades of such a policy. Hmmm. Well, in any case, surely the next set of roads and bridges are going to make all the difference. I suggest that this should be called the ‘Krugman-doctrine’, after the outstanding Keynesian thinker, Paul Krugman: even if a few trillion of new government debt and a few trillion of newly-printed paper-money have not revitalized your economy, the next trillion in government deficit-spending and the next trillion in new central-bank money will finally get the economy going. “Just keep the foot on the gas pedal until the economy grows, damn it!”

The Trends to Watch in 2013

Rather than attempt to predict the unpredictable – that is, specific events and price levels – let’s look instead for key dynamics that will play out over the next two to three years. Though the specific timelines of crises are inherently unpredictable, it is still useful to understand the eventual consequences of influential trends.
In other words: policies that appear to have been successful for the past four years may continue to appear successful for a year or two longer. But that very success comes at a steep, and as yet unpaid, price in suppressed systemic risk, cost, and consequence.

Trend #1: Central Planning intervention in stock and bond markets will continue, despite diminishing returns on Central State/Bank intervention

Japan in 2013

The Japanese government for the last twenty three years has employed the Keynesian tools of deficit spending and more recently the monetarist policies of expanding money supply in an attempt to stop the economy from sliding into recession and to develop some growth. On paper, it has only achieved the former objective; in reality it has emasculated the productive capability of her domestic economy.

Before the speculative bubble of the late-1980s the Japanese economy was driven by savings. Her strong savings flow gave Japanese industry access to a stable low-cost source of real capital with which it was able to produce high-quality goods for export at competitive prices. While there was, in the free market sense, much wrong with Japan this characteristic more than compensated for her economic sins. However, the bubble came along, fuelled by the institutional greed of the Zaibatsu which through their banks sanctioned a spectacular expansion of credit, and as bubbles go this one went pop spectacularly. Since then the government has done everything it can to stop banks folding and industrial malinvestments from being liquidated.

Keynesian Economics vs. Austrian Economics

Keynesian Economics & Monetary Economics vs. Austrian Economics

Featuring Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Peter Schiff, and Ron Paul

The Myth of the Failure of Capitalism

[This essay was originally published as "Die Legende von Versagen des Kapitalismus" in Der Internationale Kapitalismus und die Krise, Festschrift für Julius Wolf (1932)]

The nearly universal opinion expressed these days is that the economic crisis of recent years marks the end of capitalism. Capitalism allegedly has failed, has proven itself incapable of solving economic problems, and so mankind has no alternative, if it is to survive, then to make the transition to a planned economy, to socialism.
This is hardly a new idea. The socialists have always maintained that economic crises are the inevitable result of the capitalistic method of production and that there is no other means of eliminating economic crises than the transition to socialism. If these assertions are expressed more forcefully these days and evoke greater public response, it is not because the present crisis is greater or longer than its predecessors, but rather primarily because today public opinion is much more strongly influenced by socialist views than it was in previous decades.

Promises Will be Broken

By Bill Bonner

 
When wealth was easy to identify and easy to control — that is, when it was mostly land — a few insiders could do a fairly good job of keeping it for themselves. The feudal hierarchy gave everybody a place in the system, with the insiders at the top of the heap.
But come the industrial revolution and suddenly wealth was accumulating outside the feudal structure. Populations were growing too…and growing restless. The old regime tried to tax this new money, but the new ‘bourgeoisie’ resisted.
“No taxation without representation,” was a popular slogan of the time. The outsiders wanted in. And there were advantages to opening the doors.
Rather than a small clique of insiders, the governments of the modern world count on the energy of the entire population. This was the real breakthrough of the French Revolution and its successors. They harnessed the energy of millions of citizens, who were ready to be taxed and to die, if necessary, for the mother country. This was Napoleon’s secret weapon — big battalions, formed of citizen soldiers. These enthusiastic warriors gave him an edge in battle. But they also ushered him to his very own Waterloo.
Napoleon Bonaparte himself was an outsider. He was not French, but Corsican. He didn’t even speak French when he arrived in Toulon as a boy.

The Entitlement Cliff

The Welfare States of the Developed World are “long growth.” Without it, their finances are doomed.
First, a little background…
Generally, investors will pay more for a dollar’s worth of earnings from a stock than from a bond. Stocks are riskier than bonds, in the sense that share prices tend to go up and down more, depending on company results. But investors believe this ‘risk premium’ is worth it, because there is more ‘upside’ in stocks; they will grow with the economy. Over the long run, therefore, the rate of return on stock market investing should more or less reflect the stream of dividends received, plus the rate of growth in the economy. If the economy doesn’t grow, however, the risk premium becomes a costly artifact of an earlier age.
Pension and insurance funds, too, count on growth. They collect money. They invest it and make projections based on what they consider a likely rate of return. The difference between what they collect in premiums…and what they need to invest to cover their costs and payouts…is profit. As of 2012, the typical pension fund — such as those operated by state and local governments — was banking on a rate of investment return as much as four times higher than the GDP growth rate. If growth does not pick up, these funds will go broke.

Fiscal Cliff Explained - How Do We Land?

The year 2012 in perspective

by sibileau.com 

“…If you tax a nation to death, destroy its capital markets, nourish its unemployment, condemn it to an expensive currency and give its corporations liquidity at stupidly low costs you can only expect one outcome: Defaults….”

Click here to read this article in pdf format: December 9 2012

Today, I want to summarize what we covered over the year. During 2012, I sought to address both theory and market developments. Under an Austrian approach, I discussed many macroeconomic topics: the effect of zero interest rates, the myth of decoupling (between the US and the Euro zone), collateralized monetary systems (as imposed by the European Central Bank), the technical (but not realistic) possibility of a smooth exit from the Euro zone, the destruction of the capital markets by financial repression, the link between the futures, repo and gold markets and consumer prices (I don’t like the word “consumer prices”, but it is better than speaking of a “price level”), insider trading, circular reasoning in mainstream economics, high-frequency trading, what can precipitate the end game to this crisis, the technicalities of a transition to a gold standard, the conditions for a successful implementation of the gold standard, and the flawed logic behind the Chicago plan, as proposed by Benes & Kumhof.

Let’s now briefly follow up on each of the market themes I covered in 2012:

1.-There has been no decoupling: The Euro zone is coupled to the US dollar zone

At the end of 2011, when the collapse of the banking system in the Euro zone (courtesy of M. Trichet) was dragging the rest of the world, the Swiss National Bank established a peg on the Franc to the Euro and the Federal Reserve extended and cheapened its currency swaps with the European Central Bank. These two measures –indirectly- coupled the fate of the assets in the balance sheets of the Euro zone banks to the balance sheets of the central banks of Switzerland and the US.

What causes hyperinflations and why we have not seen one yet: A forensic examination of dead currencies

by mises.ca

As anticipated in my previous letter, today I want to discuss the topic of high or hyperinflation: What triggers it? Is there a common feature in hyperinflations that would allow us to see one when it’s coming? If so, can we make an educated guess as to when to expect it? The analysis will be inductive (breaking with the Austrian method) and in the process, I will seek to help Peter Schiff find an easy answer to give the media whenever he’s questioned about hyperinflation. If my thesis is correct, three additional conclusions should hold: a) High inflation and high nominal interest rates are not incompatible but go together: There cannot be hyperinflation without high nominal interest rates, b) The folks at the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee will eventually be out of a job, and c) Jim Rogers will have been proved wrong on his recommendation to buy farmland.
(Before we deal with these questions, a quick note related to my last letter: A friend pointed me to this article in Zerohedge.com, where the problem on liquidity being diverted back to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends was exposed, before I would bring it up, on my letter of March 4th. )

A forensic analysis on dead currencies

When I think of hyperinflation, I think of dead currencies. They are the best evidence. There is a common pattern to be found in every one of them and no, I am not talking of six-to-eight-figure denomination bills or shortages of goods. These are just symptoms. Behind the death of every currency in modern times, there has been a quasi-fiscal deficit causing it. Thus, briefly, when someone asks: What causes hyperinflations? The answer is: Quasi-fiscal deficits! Why have we not seen hyperinflation yet? Because we have not had quasi-fiscal deficits!

What is a quasi-fiscal deficit?

A quasi-fiscal deficit is the deficit of a central bank. From Germany to Argentina to Zimbabwe, the hyper or high inflationary processes have always been fueled by such deficits. Monetized fiscal deficits produce inflation. Quasi-fiscal deficits (by definition, they are monetized) produce hyperinflation. Remember that capital losses due to the mark down of assets do not affect central banks: They simply don’t need to mark to market. They mark to model.

Our Collapsing Economy and Currency

by paulcraigroberts.org

 Is the “fiscal cliff” real or just another hoax? The answer is that the fiscal cliff is real, but it is a result, not a cause. The hoax is the way the fiscal cliff is being used.
The fiscal cliff is the result of the inability to close the federal budget deficit. The budget deficit cannot be closed because large numbers of US middle class jobs and the GDP and tax base associated with them have been moved offshore, thus reducing federal revenues. The fiscal cliff cannot be closed because of the unfunded liabilities of eleven years of US-initiated wars against a half dozen Muslim countries–wars that have benefitted only the profits of the military/security complex and the territorial ambitions of Israel. The budget deficit cannot be closed, because economic policy is focused only on saving banks that wrongful financial deregulation allowed to speculate, to merge, and to become too big to fail, thus requiring public subsidies that vastly dwarf the totality of US welfare spending.