Episodes
Saturday Jun 28, 2014
Alternative Visions – US GDP Drop & Shadow Banks – 06/28/14
Saturday Jun 28, 2014
Saturday Jun 28, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus continues his analysis of the growing influence and instability in the global shadow banking system, including a look at the major role being played by shadow banks in China today. Rasmus explains how shadow banks have been behind the historic $5 trillion in China municipal and provincial real estate (commercial, residential, industrial) debt boom since 2008 and China currency speculation. Rasmus provides a deeper historical analysis of shadow banks in US depressions since the 1830s, and the parallels with China today. Continuing a key point from last week, its not just the shadow banks as institutions, but the ultra high net worth investors globally—the new financial global elite—that are behind the new financial instability building in the global financial system again. Shadow banks + Ultras + proliferating liquid financial asset markets and securities traded in these markets are at the heart of the next debt-deflation-default nexus. Rasmus concludes arguing that money capital flows in a capitalist system cannot be effectively regulated long term, and that’s why financial crises keep returning. The bigger the liquidity explosion, the greater the debt and financial speculation, and the more frequent and greater magnitude the financial crises. Dr. Rasmus concludes the show with an indepth look at the composition of the just announced -2.9% decline in first quarter US GDP, and debunks the mainstream view that the -2.9% was due to the ‘weather’ and that the US economy and GDP will soon ‘snap back’ with a 4%-5% GDP growth rate, as now touted in the mainstream business press. Jack shows how business inventories, net exports, and consumer spending will continue to fare poorly, or modestly at best, in coming quarters—and that the US economy will continue its ‘stop-go’ economic trajectory that is characteristic of an epic recession and its aftermath.
Saturday Jun 21, 2014
Alternative Visions – Shadow Banking Concerns Growing – 06/21/14
Saturday Jun 21, 2014
Saturday Jun 21, 2014
“Dr. Jack Rasmus reviews the growing role and influence of shadow banks in the global financial system, amidst recent growing concern in official circles of the need for their regulation and control to avoid another even deeper financial crash in the future. Rasmus addresses the recent editorial of Mark Carney, chair of the UK’s central bank, the Bank of England, last week on the need to quickly regulate the shadow banking system, and the daily feature stories in the global financial paper, The Financial Times, on shadow banks following Carney’s editorial. Dr. Rasmus argues that “money capital is like water flowing downhill” and cannot be regulated in the long run”. Jack documents the explosion in liquidity and investible financial assets in the global shadow banking system since the 1960s and since the crash of 2008 in particular, and explains the fundamental linkage between the new global financial elite—the global high net worth individual investors(HNWIs)—and the shadow banks as their now preferred investing institutions as they shift their wealth recently from traditional banks to the shadow sector. Referring to recent reports by the Boston Consulting Group and Capgemini, Jack shows how investible assets of HNWIs and the shadow banks have grown faster since 2008 than during the decade preceding the crash of 2008. While global total private wealth has risen by more than $40 trillion, from $111 trillion in 2008 to more than $152 trillion today, the top 200,000 HNWIs share has risen even faster and now exceeds $53 trillion. Jack explains how the growing concentration and acceleration of liquid, investible assets within the HNWIs and Shadow banks is building the preconditions for another, perhaps even greater, financial crash, as debt-leverage based investing and securitization grows again. Jack notes that Bank of England Carney’s recent editorial represents a growing awareness among central bankers that their influence over the shadow banking system may be eroding even further than pre-2008, laying the ground for even greater central banks’ difficulty in re-stabilizing the global capitalist system in the event of another crash.”
Saturday Jun 14, 2014
Saturday Jun 14, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest, 40-year experienced teacher, Gretchen Lipow, discuss last week’s ‘Vergara’ legal decision in California—the latest example of a long series of efforts by politicians and corporate elites to blame teachers for the decline in the quality of K-12 public education in America. Dr. Rasmus explains how David Welch, Silicon Valley tech billionaire, has been behind funding the movement and the legal suit that led to last week’s Vergara decision identifying teacher tenure as the cause of inner city schools’ student underachievement. Lipow explains how Teacher Tenure is just a diversionary tactic by opponents of teachers and public education, and why eliminating it will not change urban schools students’ underperformance, which is the consequence of many cultural-socio-economic factors. Lipow also points out the many procedures that already exist to eliminate poor performing teachers and how ‘tenure’ does not mean a guaranteed lifetime job but just the right to due process. Rasmus explains the bigger context of the Vergara decision: How Vergara is just the latest element in an intensifying decade long attack on teachers and public schools. Vergara is the latest element in a long term Corporate strategy to remake the public education system into a major new profit center for tech companies: No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Core Curriculum, Charter Schools are all examples, Rasmus explains, of the long term plan to standardize K-12 ‘product’ into pre-packaged software and hardware, that will de-professionalize the teacher profession in the process, eventually turn teachers into ‘technology monitors’ in the classroom, and cut education costs by eliminating teachers and lowering wages. Rasmus notes that lower costs from teacher de-professionalization means more spending on K-12 technology and more profits for the David Welch’s, the Bill Gates’, and other tech billionaires who are driving this long term strategy for K-12 education. However, first teacher job security, unions, and bargaining rights must be gutted, Rasmus argues. The Vergara decision therefore represents the latest offensive in this longer term corporate initiative to recast public education into a new multi-billion dollar corporate profit center. (For more on Dr. Rasmus’s view on this theme, see posted on the PRN website his chapter, ‘The Privatization of Public Education’, from his forthcoming book, ‘America’s Ten Crises’).
Saturday Jun 07, 2014
Saturday Jun 07, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest, Steve Breyman, discuss this past week’s just released Obama/EPA proposals to reduce CO2 emissions from existing industrial plants in the US by 30% by 2030. Are conservative environmental groups justified in their praise of the EPA proposals? Are the proposals too little, too late, and cleverly left to the last two years of the Obama administration to ensure nothing will actually happen during the remaining years of Obama’s second term? Jack offers a criticism of the Obama/EPA strategy, noting if Obama were really serious he would have issued an Executive Order to immediately implement the EPA rules. In the present form, Rasmus notes, there will be no implementation of any rules until after the 2016 elections, if even then. Breyman and Rasmus discuss whether the EPA’s 30% ‘target’ for emissions reduction is really only 14%? Whether the EPA rules are proposed in order to provide political ‘cover’ for the administration’s now fast track promotion of natural gas fracking. And whether the EPA proposals ‘sometime later’ are a trade-off to enable Obama to ‘immediately’ approve and sign the XL pipeline after this November 2014 midterm congressional elections? Breyman discusses the likelihood the EPA proposals will reduce CO2 from industrial plants, but stimulate even more C02 and methane carbon emissions from natural gas fracking now destroying water tables and air quality in the Dakotas, Texas and Pennsylvania? Rasmus asks if the rules represent a ‘passing the buck’ by Obama to the states to encourage the latter to develop more state-level ‘cap and trade’ carbon credits trading programs that have elsewhere had little impact on reducing carbon emissions? Can EPA proposals be trusted that, according to multi-state coal-fired plant corporations, like American Electric Power, “allow us to keep coal units running for an extended period” (John McManus, VP of American Electric Power). Listeners are encouraged to check out analyses of the EPA proposals by ‘Rainforest Network’ and ‘Food&Water Watch’ environmental groups, not just the big Washington environmental lobbies, and not to get taken in by the ‘spin machine’ in Washington.