The real agenda of "free trade" agreements is to provide a back door means for multi-national corporations to institute laws and rules that the US Congress can't or won't pass. Laws/rules like the ones you mentioned about L1 and H1B visas.
"Free trade" agreements are not really about trade. For example, the proposed South Korea FTA. We already trade heavily with South Korea. I see Samsung LCDs, Hyundai autos, LG phones, ... all around me. So trade is not the issue. So what is? More hidden back-door legislation that Congress could never pass in the light of day.
I don't believe that the laws/rules in FTAs should be permitted since only Congress has the constitutional authority to create such laws/rules.
Where did it all start? Was it just after Vietnam when conglomeration was the big bus. school fad? How long after
Nixon went to China did things start to change? (Initially, not all Wal-mart goods were made in China. When did we lose the electronics industries? Recall that during the 70s the Trilateral Commission, as a think thank, was active in trying to convert the U.S. to a service economy. I think we're seeing that it succeeded in some ways and failed in many others.
I share your anger, but perhaps it should be aimed at entire global system with many players that all contributed to this down fall. See: http://buchanan.org/blog
The rail system is one of the greatest developments that United States has. If you look back on history it was the way that they US broke out and was able to expand across the continent. Furthermore it assured our Independence from Empires of the British Maritime trading!! Causing an explosion of American economic development around the world! If Lincoln's policy would have kept going and McKinley not been assassinated the world would be connect by rail today! If you look at the cost of transportation of goods, by air it is to expensive, by sea it too slow but the cheapest, but by freight train is the most reliable mode of transportation however it has not been maintain, and new technology are always coming out with improvements such as the MagLev systems which reach speeds of 300mph!! But in order to redevelop this technology and to make our city and country up to date with the rest of the world we must put the current financial system in to bankruptcy reorganization!!! To get ride of all this toxic paper that's not even good enough to wipe our own asses with. And then we need to set up a multi-national credit system with China,Russia, India and the US as the major backer to make a new economic develop of these system around the world.
They've proven themselves to be traitors and represent a clear and dangerous opponent to the people of the United States. Rip away their citizenship, freeze & confiscate their assets, make sure that their children can't get visas or naturalization to come back. EVER. Until we start treating the con artists like the subhuman race they are, we'll just get more of this crap over and over and over.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
In doing so, the United States bound itself by international agreement not to restrict either of these visa programs in the future, regardless of the state of the U.S. economy or the level of unemployment of similarly qualified U.S. workers.
Why would somebody sign that agreement? how can America benefit from such an agreement? Just plain nuts.
So even if there are no jobs in the U.S, we still have to take 65,000 h1b and unlimited L1 guest workers.
This is a great comment and I have a tendency to agree with you on the system of systemic risk. If one does not isolate each component for potential failure, such as the way CDSes are structured, which as I understand it, are independent to the underlying asset and also have unlimited issuance....
so maybe it even incentivized, as you point out, more bad mortgages, for in that case (I don't know if this went into pricing here) the pay out on a bust is huge, with no downside in owning the asset.
I hope you create an account (upper right). EP is a community blog and forum, which means you can write a forum or blog post on CDSes (or any economic related topic as long as it has cited references, based in economic reality).
Great comment. Also, people CDSes have been in existence about 12 years or so.
Sounds to me like it's just another step in the same problem- trying to save a system that has already collapsed. Oh, I'm not one of those extreme conservatives that want Obama to fail. My biggest fear is that he'll succeed- in saving the system without the type of complete re-engineering we need to eliminate chaos and fraud from the system, which will still be unsustainable in the >70 year cycle.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
Credit Default Swaps are an abomination that should be put back in the "never again" category. Bucket shop laws worked fine for almost 100 years and should be reinstated. Also, as I read the CFMA, they are still illegal for individuals. Do we need a financial sytem based on transactions for which individuals would be prosecuted? (Not sued, prosecuted)
CDS are not a means to hedge risk. They are a means to obfuscate and distribute risk. People involved in the real world that add value to real stuff that people actually willingly pay for understand that avoiding systemic risk is all about avoiding the single point of failure, having redundant systems, etc.. The "financial services industry" (as we no longer seem to have banks, brokers, and insurers) in its infinite wisdom decided that all risk could be hedged, much of it "negative basis" and "money good". What they managed to do was create massive interdependence -- a big Rube Goldberg machine where the slightest hiccup creates a cascading disaster.
Consider mortgage backed securities on NINJA loans. Would YOU have been clamoring for a package of those? Me either.. The demand for mortgage backed securities was high because CDSs produced a high yield negative basis trade. If CDS "protection" was not available, most of the worst loans would never have been made. Investors were clamoring for the guaranteed high-yield securities, and as soon as it became apparent that many of the "guarantees" were worthless, the "liquidity" of the MBSs evaporated. Without CDS, there never would have been any "liquidity" for bad mortgages.
I'm all for hedging, but this isn't a hedge, it's a completely separate transaction that has nothing whatsoever to do with the underlying asset, unlike ANY other form of hedge tat I'm aware of, save interest rate swaps, but that's quite different.
Some have described CDS as equivalent to put options -- they aren't. Had the MBS CDS investors bought puts instead, they would have had to purchase the securities to exercise the options, and they'd have been hard pressed to buy more than exist. The biggest difference, however, is that after exercising the puts, the put seller would own the securities -- representing actual mortgages against actual houses which have value. Even though the sub-prime loans are nowhere near 1% of all mortgages, the houses are still worth 80% of the loans. So.. considering there were never more than about $600 billion in sub-prime loans and way less than $100 billion are actually in foreclosure, how could you have possibly lost more than $100 billion?? This should have been a financial hiccup.. You just can't come anywhere near systemic catastrophe without credit default swaps.
So, while you can rationalize 100 contributing factors and 50 ways to "improve" the situation, the fact remains that these things didn't exist 10 years ago and we had a perfectly functional financial system. If CDSs never existed, we wouldn't be in this mess. Done.
We will learn what Joseph told the Pharoh- that only by saving seed from good years for use during bad, and only by relying on your own natural resources, will your people survive.
I think the majority of free traders and bankers either think they're smarter than everybody else who ever lived, or have failed to understand the economic lessons of the Old Testament.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
Is the problem I see with *all* financial products- they aren't products. They're just paper- invented ideas. They're kind of like software in that way, but they're even less because software instructs machines to create wealth- financial products just tax wealth creation. We'd be better of segregating the financial industry into their own little sandbox and not letting them mess with REAL wealth creation, which while small in comparison (GWP is only $71 trillion or so, compared with the quadrillions WASTED on the financial industry) is at least doing useful work.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
"Could it be that wiping out the middle class by shipping their jobs overseas, exposing them to income instability, labor arbitrage, careers cut short, has serious repercussions?"
Yes.
This has been another in a long series of simple answers to intelligent questions.
Walt Disney fired Arthur Babbitt, the famed animator and creator of Goofy, for trying to form a union? These animators were making Walt Disney tons of money. Without their skills Disney would be worthless. I've lost the respect I previously had for this man. The documentaries I've watched on TV never mentioned these facts.
I think that's what they are fighting about. The key is to get all of these little Als out of the murder and mayhem business. One way to do that is to simply legalize something and that makes competitors pop up all over the place, their entire business model, based on criminal underground networks collapse.
Now that we're entering a slow scale break down...wherein flush jurisdictions are separated from from broker counties...who is likely to be the next Al Capone?
"...Behavioural economics provides the beginnings of an alternative vision as to how individuals operate in a market environment, while multi-agent modelling and network theory give us foundations for understanding group dynamics in a complex society. They explicitly emphasise what neoclassical economics has evaded: that aggregation of heterogeneous individuals results in emergent properties of the group which cannot be reduced to the behaviour of any “representative individual” amongst them. These approaches should replace neoclassical microeconomics completely. The changes to economic theory beyond the micro level involve a complete recanting of the neoclassical vision. The vital first step here is to abandon the obsession with equilibrium.
"The fallacy that dynamic processes must be modelled as if the system is in continuous equilibrium through time is probably the most important reason for the intellectual failure of neoclassical economics. Mathematics, sciences and engineering long ago developed tools to model out of equilibrium processes, and this dynamic approach to thinking about the economy should become second nature to economists."
--Steve Keen http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/
From the reports I've seen on Mexico as well as the border it's one bloody nasty war zone. Have you seen all of the beheading stories? I think on one they "rolled" someone's head into a crowded bar and they are putting "heads" on spikes too.
They are also targeting anyone with money for kidnappings, extortion, so that means anyone with a decent job or money.
You can get a CDS on a security without buying the security- you can't get a Put on a traded index without owning the index, can you?
Then again, the more I dig into these so-called "financial products", the more my scam meeter goes off.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
The real agenda of "free trade" agreements is to provide a back door means for multi-national corporations to institute laws and rules that the US Congress can't or won't pass. Laws/rules like the ones you mentioned about L1 and H1B visas.
"Free trade" agreements are not really about trade. For example, the proposed South Korea FTA. We already trade heavily with South Korea. I see Samsung LCDs, Hyundai autos, LG phones, ... all around me. So trade is not the issue. So what is? More hidden back-door legislation that Congress could never pass in the light of day.
I don't believe that the laws/rules in FTAs should be permitted since only Congress has the constitutional authority to create such laws/rules.
Where did it all start? Was it just after Vietnam when conglomeration was the big bus. school fad? How long after
Nixon went to China did things start to change? (Initially, not all Wal-mart goods were made in China. When did we lose the electronics industries? Recall that during the 70s the Trilateral Commission, as a think thank, was active in trying to convert the U.S. to a service economy. I think we're seeing that it succeeded in some ways and failed in many others.
I share your anger, but perhaps it should be aimed at entire global system with many players that all contributed to this down fall. See: http://buchanan.org/blog
The rail system is one of the greatest developments that United States has. If you look back on history it was the way that they US broke out and was able to expand across the continent. Furthermore it assured our Independence from Empires of the British Maritime trading!! Causing an explosion of American economic development around the world! If Lincoln's policy would have kept going and McKinley not been assassinated the world would be connect by rail today! If you look at the cost of transportation of goods, by air it is to expensive, by sea it too slow but the cheapest, but by freight train is the most reliable mode of transportation however it has not been maintain, and new technology are always coming out with improvements such as the MagLev systems which reach speeds of 300mph!! But in order to redevelop this technology and to make our city and country up to date with the rest of the world we must put the current financial system in to bankruptcy reorganization!!! To get ride of all this toxic paper that's not even good enough to wipe our own asses with. And then we need to set up a multi-national credit system with China,Russia, India and the US as the major backer to make a new economic develop of these system around the world.
There are Calls and Puts traded indices like the SPX or the NDX which are cash-settled options. So in a way a Credit Default Swap is like a Put.
The transnational CEOS.
They've proven themselves to be traitors and represent a clear and dangerous opponent to the people of the United States. Rip away their citizenship, freeze & confiscate their assets, make sure that their children can't get visas or naturalization to come back. EVER. Until we start treating the con artists like the subhuman race they are, we'll just get more of this crap over and over and over.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
I was reading this on the web:
http://www.fairus.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=16328&security=1601...
In doing so, the United States bound itself by international agreement not to restrict either of these visa programs in the future, regardless of the state of the U.S. economy or the level of unemployment of similarly qualified U.S. workers.
Why would somebody sign that agreement? how can America benefit from such an agreement? Just plain nuts.
So even if there are no jobs in the U.S, we still have to take 65,000 h1b and unlimited L1 guest workers.
This is a great comment and I have a tendency to agree with you on the system of systemic risk. If one does not isolate each component for potential failure, such as the way CDSes are structured, which as I understand it, are independent to the underlying asset and also have unlimited issuance....
so maybe it even incentivized, as you point out, more bad mortgages, for in that case (I don't know if this went into pricing here) the pay out on a bust is huge, with no downside in owning the asset.
I hope you create an account (upper right). EP is a community blog and forum, which means you can write a forum or blog post on CDSes (or any economic related topic as long as it has cited references, based in economic reality).
Great comment. Also, people CDSes have been in existence about 12 years or so.
Sounds to me like it's just another step in the same problem- trying to save a system that has already collapsed. Oh, I'm not one of those extreme conservatives that want Obama to fail. My biggest fear is that he'll succeed- in saving the system without the type of complete re-engineering we need to eliminate chaos and fraud from the system, which will still be unsustainable in the >70 year cycle.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
Credit Default Swaps are an abomination that should be put back in the "never again" category. Bucket shop laws worked fine for almost 100 years and should be reinstated. Also, as I read the CFMA, they are still illegal for individuals. Do we need a financial sytem based on transactions for which individuals would be prosecuted? (Not sued, prosecuted)
CDS are not a means to hedge risk. They are a means to obfuscate and distribute risk. People involved in the real world that add value to real stuff that people actually willingly pay for understand that avoiding systemic risk is all about avoiding the single point of failure, having redundant systems, etc.. The "financial services industry" (as we no longer seem to have banks, brokers, and insurers) in its infinite wisdom decided that all risk could be hedged, much of it "negative basis" and "money good". What they managed to do was create massive interdependence -- a big Rube Goldberg machine where the slightest hiccup creates a cascading disaster.
Consider mortgage backed securities on NINJA loans. Would YOU have been clamoring for a package of those? Me either.. The demand for mortgage backed securities was high because CDSs produced a high yield negative basis trade. If CDS "protection" was not available, most of the worst loans would never have been made. Investors were clamoring for the guaranteed high-yield securities, and as soon as it became apparent that many of the "guarantees" were worthless, the "liquidity" of the MBSs evaporated. Without CDS, there never would have been any "liquidity" for bad mortgages.
I'm all for hedging, but this isn't a hedge, it's a completely separate transaction that has nothing whatsoever to do with the underlying asset, unlike ANY other form of hedge tat I'm aware of, save interest rate swaps, but that's quite different.
Some have described CDS as equivalent to put options -- they aren't. Had the MBS CDS investors bought puts instead, they would have had to purchase the securities to exercise the options, and they'd have been hard pressed to buy more than exist. The biggest difference, however, is that after exercising the puts, the put seller would own the securities -- representing actual mortgages against actual houses which have value. Even though the sub-prime loans are nowhere near 1% of all mortgages, the houses are still worth 80% of the loans. So.. considering there were never more than about $600 billion in sub-prime loans and way less than $100 billion are actually in foreclosure, how could you have possibly lost more than $100 billion?? This should have been a financial hiccup.. You just can't come anywhere near systemic catastrophe without credit default swaps.
So, while you can rationalize 100 contributing factors and 50 ways to "improve" the situation, the fact remains that these things didn't exist 10 years ago and we had a perfectly functional financial system. If CDSs never existed, we wouldn't be in this mess. Done.
We will learn what Joseph told the Pharoh- that only by saving seed from good years for use during bad, and only by relying on your own natural resources, will your people survive.
I think the majority of free traders and bankers either think they're smarter than everybody else who ever lived, or have failed to understand the economic lessons of the Old Testament.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
Is the problem I see with *all* financial products- they aren't products. They're just paper- invented ideas. They're kind of like software in that way, but they're even less because software instructs machines to create wealth- financial products just tax wealth creation. We'd be better of segregating the financial industry into their own little sandbox and not letting them mess with REAL wealth creation, which while small in comparison (GWP is only $71 trillion or so, compared with the quadrillions WASTED on the financial industry) is at least doing useful work.
-------------------------------------
Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
"Could it be that wiping out the middle class by shipping their jobs overseas, exposing them to income instability, labor arbitrage, careers cut short, has serious repercussions?"
Yes.
This has been another in a long series of simple answers to intelligent questions.
Walt Disney fired Arthur Babbitt, the famed animator and creator of Goofy, for trying to form a union? These animators were making Walt Disney tons of money. Without their skills Disney would be worthless. I've lost the respect I previously had for this man. The documentaries I've watched on TV never mentioned these facts.
I think that's what they are fighting about. The key is to get all of these little Als out of the murder and mayhem business. One way to do that is to simply legalize something and that makes competitors pop up all over the place, their entire business model, based on criminal underground networks collapse.
Now that we're entering a slow scale break down...wherein flush jurisdictions are separated from from broker counties...who is likely to be the next Al Capone?
"...Behavioural economics provides the beginnings of an alternative vision as to how individuals operate in a market environment, while multi-agent modelling and network theory give us foundations for understanding group dynamics in a complex society. They explicitly emphasise what neoclassical economics has evaded: that aggregation of heterogeneous individuals results in emergent properties of the group which cannot be reduced to the behaviour of any “representative individual” amongst them. These approaches should replace neoclassical microeconomics completely. The changes to economic theory beyond the micro level involve a complete recanting of the neoclassical vision. The vital first step here is to abandon the obsession with equilibrium.
"The fallacy that dynamic processes must be modelled as if the system is in continuous equilibrium through time is probably the most important reason for the intellectual failure of neoclassical economics. Mathematics, sciences and engineering long ago developed tools to model out of equilibrium processes, and this dynamic approach to thinking about the economy should become second nature to economists."
--Steve Keen
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/
here (located in the latest Calculated Risk post).
As people pull this plan apart it's what we first thought, the taxpayer is assuredly going to be the loser.
From the reports I've seen on Mexico as well as the border it's one bloody nasty war zone. Have you seen all of the beheading stories? I think on one they "rolled" someone's head into a crowded bar and they are putting "heads" on spikes too.
They are also targeting anyone with money for kidnappings, extortion, so that means anyone with a decent job or money.
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