Here Comes the Next Crash !

Crisis After Crisis: 10 Years After the Crash, There’s No ‘Reforming’ Global Capitalism

The real battle is now between two post-globalization camps: democratic socialists… and fascists.

By Walden Bello, September 17, 2018. Originally published in Transnational Institute.

 

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It is now clear that financial crises are not discrete events but are linked phenomena that have been unleashed on the globe ever since the financial markets were liberalized during the Reagan-Thatcher era in the early 1980s.

To take just the three most prominent crashes, surplus capital that could not find profitable domestic outlets after the Japanese bubble burst in the late 1980s found its way as speculative capital into Southeast Asia, where it contributed to the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98. The Asian crisis, in turn, helped generate Wall Street’s implosion in 2008, owing to the Asian countries’ channeling the financial reserves they had accumulated to protect them from a repeat of 1997 into the United States — where they helped fuel the subprime real estate boom.

The turbulence that hit global stock markets last February, causing much fright and a paper loss of 4 billion dollars, was a reminder that the next big implosion may be just around the corner. A just concluded study by the Transnational Institute reveals that in 10 critical areas where major reform is needed, few to no measures have been taken to prevent a recurrence of 2007. These areas range from shadow banking to fractional reserve banking to international financial governance to central bank accountability.

Skating on Thin Ice Once More

So, not surprisingly, current indicators show that the world again is skating on thin ice.

First, the “too big to fail” problem has become worse. The big banks that were rescued by the U.S. government in 2008 because they were seen as too big to fail have become even more too big to fail, with the “Big Six” U.S. banks — JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — collectively having 43 percent more deposits, 84 percent more assets, and triple the amount of cash they held before the 2008 crisis.

Essentially, they’ve doubled the risk that felled the banking system in 2008.

Second, the products that triggered the 2008 crisis are still being traded. This includes around $6.7 trillion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) sloshing around, the value of which has been maintained only because the Federal Reserve bought $1.7 trillion of them.

U.S. banks collectively hold $157 trillion in derivatives, about twice global GDP. This is 12 percent more than they possessed at the beginning of the 2008 crisis. Citigroup alone accounts for $44 trillion, or 50 percent more that its pre-crisis holdings, prompting a sarcastic comment from one analyst that the bank seems “to have forgotten the time when they were a buck a share,” alluding to the low point in the bank’s derivatives’ value in 2009.

Third, the new stars in the financial firmament — the institutional investors’ consortium made up of hedge funds, private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and other investor entities — continue to roam the global network unchecked, operating from virtual bases called tax havens, looking for arbitrage opportunities in currencies or securities, or sizing up the profitability of corporations for possible stock purchases. Ownership of the estimated $100 trillion in the hands of these floating tax shelters for the superrich is concentrated in 20 funds.

Warren Proposes a Second New Deal

Elizabeth Warren Proposes a Second New Deal. When Bernie Sanders offered up his definition of socialism in a speech at Georgetown University in 2015, he basically equated it with the governmental programs created by the New Deal. Sanders cited Social Security, and New Dealer Lyndon Johnson’s three-decades-later follow-up, Medicare, as the primary U.S. examples of publicly funded universal programs that provided older Americans with income and access to health care. That, said Sanders, was a tradition he sought to renew, by creating single-payer health care for all, free public university educations, and a host of other programs.

The historic ground on which Sanders took his stand was the experience of the United States when New Deal programs were most effectual. Before they’d been eroded by the financialization and globalization that commenced in the 1970s, FDR’s New Deal gave the nation its one and only period of broadly shared prosperity.

But it wasn’t just the programs FDR signed into law that did the trick. It was also one further bill that didn’t expand government’s capacities and responsibilities as such, but simply gave workers power: the National Labor Relations Act. By enabling workers to join unions without fear of dismissal, the NLRA facilitated the growth of unionization to the point that just over one-third of the nation’s workers were unionized and thereby wielded sufficient power to affect corporate behavior. In the three decades following World War II—the three decades of unions enforcing worker power—median worker income rose in tandem with productivity, and CEOs made on average 20 times what their average employee made.

That world has long since vanished into the mists of time and financialization. As I noted in my Tuesday email, profit margins (that is, the share of revenue going to profits) reached an all-time high in the last quarter, while wages, when factoring in the rise in the cost of living, actually declined.

Comes now Elizabeth Warren, like Sanders, seeking to re-create the New Deal’s creation of a vibrant middle class—but in this instance, not through an updated version of governmental social provision, as Sanders suggested, but through that other dimension of New Deal success: bolstering worker power. Yesterday, Warren introduced a new bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act, which seeks nothing less than the compelled conversion of American corporations from their current creed of maximizing shareholder value to the friendlier confines of benefiting all corporate stakeholders.

To this end, she proposes two fundamental changes. The first is to end corporate chartering by the various states, replacing it through requiring corporations with more than $1 billion in yearly revenues to be federally chartered, and to have those charters redefine the corporations’ mission so that they benefit not just shareholders but their employees and communities as well. The second change she proposes is to require corporations to have 40 percent of their boards of directors elected not by their shareholders but by their employees. In this, she’s following the lead of her colleague Tammy Baldwin, who introduced a bill earlier this year that required corporations to set aside one-third of their board seats to employee representatives. And both senators are following the lead of the Germans, where a 50-50 split of board membership between owner and worker representatives has long been required by law.

As Warren noted in an op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, over the past 35 years the financialization of the American corporation has meant that shareholders now extract more funds from corporations than those businesses devote either to investment in their own enterprise or wage increases for their workers. (University of Massachusetts economist William Lazonick, the doyen of share-buyback scholars, documented these developments in a piece he wrote for the summer issue of the Prospect.)

Warren, then, is seeking to reinvent the “corporate conduct” side of the New Deal, much as Sanders wants to reinvent its social-rights dimension. This is not to say either is opposed to the other’s endeavors: Warren, for instance, supports Sanders’s Medicare for All bill, among other similar proposals. Both also support the next iteration of labor law reform, which would renew the promise of the NLRA by restoring workers’ rights to associate and bargain.