US Economy Is A House Of Cards — Paul Craig Roberts

Posted by aurelius77 on

The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics.

American capitalism itself is an illusion. All financial markets are rigged. Massive liquidity poured into financial markets by the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing inflates stock and bond prices and drives interest rates, which are supposed to be a measure of the cost of capital, to zero or negative, with the implication that capital is so abundant that its cost is zero and can be had for free. Large enterprises, such as mega-banks and auto manufacturers, that go bankrupt are not permitted to fail. Instead, public debt and money creation are used to cover private losses and keep corporations “too big to fail” afloat at the expense not of shareholders but of people who do not own the shares of the corporations.

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Capitalism has been transformed by powerful private interests whose control over governments, courts, and regulatory agencies has turned capitalism into a looting mechanism. Wall Street no longer performs any positive function. Wall Street is a looting mechanism, a deadweight loss to society. Wall Street makes profits by front-running trades with fast computers, by selling fraudulent financial instruments that it is betting against as investment grade securities, by leveraging equity to unprecedented heights, making bets that cannot be covered, and by rigging all commodity markets.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury’s “Plunge Protection Team” aid the looting by supporting the stock market with purchases of stock futures, and protect the dollar from the extraordinary money-printing by selling naked shorts into the Comex gold futures market.

The US economy no longer is based on education, hard work, free market prices and the accountability that real free markets impose. Instead, the US economy is based on manipulation of prices, speculative control of commodities, support of the dollar by Washington’s puppet states, manipulated and falsified official statistics, propaganda from the financial media, and inertia by countries, such as Russia and China, who are directly harmed, both economically and politically, by the dollar payments system.

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The America in which I grew up was self-sufficient. Foreign trade was a small part of the economy. When I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the US still had a trade surplus except for oil. Offshoring of America’s jobs had not begun, and US earnings on its foreign investments exceeded foreign earnings on US investments. Therefore, America’s earnings abroad covered its energy deficit in its balance of trade.

The economic stability achieved during the Reagan administration was shattered by Wall Street greed. Wall Street threatened corporations with takeovers if the corporations did not produce higher profits by relocating their production of goods and services for American markets abroad. The lower labor costs boosted earnings and stock prices and satisfied Wall Street’s cravings for ever more earnings, but brought an end to the rise in US living standards except for the mega-rich. Financial deregulation loaded the economy with the risks of asset bubbles.

Americans are an amazingly insouciant people. By now any other people would have burnt Wall Street to the ground.

Washington has unique subjects. Americans will take endless abuse and blame some outside government for their predicament–Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, China, Russia. Such an insouciant and passive people are ideal targets for looting, and their economy, hollowed-out by looting, is a house of cards.

Full article: US Economy Is A House Of Cards — Paul Craig Roberts (Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy)

2 responses to “US Economy Is A House Of Cards — Paul Craig Roberts”

  1. Much of this commentary is well said. How do we fix the problems so that only this generation, not future ones, bear the burden of “our” mistakes? Have we all been wounded so thoroughly that society’s only focus is a gain/(loss) in terms of individual well-being?
    Solutions:
    1. Let the market fail. The market wants to fail, the market has failed numerous times, so just let it die and the Phoenix will rise from the ashes.
    2. Dismantle the weapons industry. “Defense” contractors are publicly traded companies. Therefore there are stockholders profiting on the deaths of not only American soldiers and American citizens, but also innocent bystanders including children.
    3. Repurpose the military to logical homeland security, energy exploration, civil engineering and humanitarian outreach. Bring the boys back home, give them jobs, rebuild the infrastructure in responsible way to ensure protection against known environmental catastrophies in wait. We already have arguably the largest humanitarian arm in the world, let’s make it bigger and show it off.

  2. “The economic stability achieved during the Reagan administration…”

    You are hilarious, too young to remember or have seriously large rose-tinted glasses on if you actually stand by the above statement.