FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Truth’ Category

The premium in America has shifted from truth to self-serving distortion, and from trust to manipulation.

The premium we place on truth and trustworthiness is self-evident. Truth is uniquely productive feedback from the real world. Truth (including factual data) is indispensable, for it alone enables us to correct errors, learn from mistakes and improve our effectiveness and communication.

We pay a premium for trust because the cost of dishonesty and artifice is steep.Would you pay more to buy a used car from someone you trust? If you place no premium on trustworthiness, then you buy the “great deal” used car you found online: oops, the “new” battery was spray-painted black, the crankcase leaks, the engine is shot and doesn’t pass smog, and the certificate of ownership is forged.

The premium on truth and trust is eroding under the constant onslaught of officially manipulated data and markets, and a vast array of distortions and propaganda designed to serve the interests of ruling Elites and key constituencies.

We all know the negative premium placed on fact: telling the truth will get you fired. And not just in the corporate world: politicians from the President on down all worship at the altar of the carefully distorted unemployment rate.

The officially sanctioned lying and manipulation are now shameless. Never mind that millions of people have become statistical phantoms (i.e. not in the workforce) to generate that low rate, and college graduates working 3 hours a day (if they’re called in at all) are gleefully counted as employed, as if there is no difference between a full-time job and a marginal one.

President Obama is touting rising auto sales as proof of the “recovery” (and implicitly, of his wise stewardship), studiously avoiding the fact that these stupendous auto sales are the result of offering low-interest rate auto loans to marginal borrowers with near-zero collateral (i.e. skin in the game).

How did blowing a credit bubble and securitizing the debt turn out last time?

Never mind: here we go again. Via Doug Nolan at Prudent Bear:

Springleaf Finance Corp., the lender to borrowers with poor or limited credit, sold $604 million of bonds last month backed by personal loans secured by household goods from furniture to electronics, its first such deal. Demand for riskier asset-backed bonds has grown as the Federal Reserve holds its benchmark interest rate at almost zero for a fifth year. Sales of securities linked to subprime auto loans doubled to $4 billion in January from a year earlier.

Manipulation and carefully crafted distortion erode trust, not just in the individuals employed to repeat the lies but in the institutions that issue them. The ruthless pursuit of self-interest is now the norm; truth is a terribly risky disruptor that must be hidden, masked or countered with plausible lies.

As a nation, we’re like the obese person who looks at himself in the mirror and sees his body as normal–the distortion of truth is so complete that we literally no longer recognize reality. Untruth no longer arouses any moral indignation; we are either too jaded to care, or our moral compass now spins aimlessly from one manipulation to the next.

There can be no trust if there is no truth. How can we trust people who lie to us constantly, who issue one self-serving justification after another for their own parasitic predation? We cannot. How can we trust institutions whose credibility now rests on the continuation of lies that are so embedded in our financial sector and State that their collapse will bring down the entire house-of-cards debtocracy? We cannot.

The premium in America has shifted from truth to self-serving distortion, and from trust to manipulation. This spiritual and moral rot will end gloriously, have no doubt, for the stock market’s permanent ascendancy dissolves all other narratives.

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds

The question is, will someone deliver this between now and November?

You can see the text of this speech here.

Holy cow!  There it is people.  There it is.

http://www.newson6.com/story/16661085/oklahomas-maverick-us-senator-dr-tom-coburn?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=6703607

WASHINGTON, D.C -

He’s blunt, he’s polarizing, and says he’s not like other politicians. What he thinks is Washington’s biggest problem and the disaster he says is looming.

News On 6 anchor Terry Hood traveled to Washington, D.C. to talk with Oklahoma’s maverick U.S. Senator, Dr. Tom Coburn.

Subtlety has never been tom Coburn’s style. In his 14 years in congress, Coburn’s earned a reputation as a maverick who’s willing to fight any bill he thinks is wasting taxpayer dollars.

The list includes everything from the infamous “bridge to nowhere” to funding for breast cancer research.

“The difference is they’re seeing what they see in their life, and I’m seeing how do we best do research in our country,” he said.

And Medicare?

“Any politicians that stands up and says ‘we’re not going to touch your Medicare’ is a liar,” he said.

On Capitol Hill, they call him “Dr. No.”

“I’m pretty blunt, and I tend to see things in black and white,” Coburn

And what Tom Coburn sees now, is nothing short of disaster.

“In the next two years our country is going to be consumed.  Absolutely consumed with debt. We’re bankrupt. We’re getting ready to have a debt crisis and nobody is working on it. We’re two years away from being Greece,” Coburn said.

Coburn’s calling card has always been his willingness to offend both Democrats and Republicans. But with the nation’s skyrocketing debt and the failure of the Super committee, Congress, or the president to hammer out a solution, his frustration may be at an all-time high.

“We have all the capabilities to solve every problem we have. We have none of the leadership in any key office in this country to do that,” he said.

2011 was a pivotal year for Oklahoma’s junior senator. Last summer, as the debt crisis threatened to shut down the federal government, Tom Coburn of Muskogee, Oklahoma emerged as an unlikely hero.

“This plan offers the American people 9 trillion reasons to stop making excuses,” Coburn said on the floor of the senate.

His “Back in Black” proposal–slashing $8 trillion from the deficit while also raising a trillion dollars in new revenue–was hailed by many as a step toward responsible government.

Newsweek called him the “Man of the Hour.” The New York Times gushed that he was the “Lady Gaga of Fiscal Conservatives.” And the President frequently drops his name.

“My friend Tom Coburn is right, we shouldn’t be giving tax breaks to millionaires,” President Obama said during the State of the Union Address.

But on the other side of the aisle, Coburn’s willingness to raise taxes as well as cut spending, outraged some of his most ardent fans.

Coburn says compromise is simply a fact of life in Washington. At the time of this interview, last October, he was still optimistic the tide would turn.

“If I think if we can get through the next two or three years, I think we can fix this,” he said.

Today, those hopes may have dimmed, but Tom Coburn’s determination has not.

While the rest of Washington is caught up in presidential politics, Coburn is renewing his focus on the issue he believes will make or break this country: the deficit.

The huge debt clock that hangs in his front office used to sit in the hallway, the senate ethics commission made him move it inside.

But no one can make Oklahoma’s Junior Senator stop sounding the warning bell. Tom Coburn has four years left in Washington. He has no intention of going quietly.

“I don’t want to be civil if our country is going to crash on the rocks.  I want to have a vigorous and cantankerous debate about the issues and the facts, and I want to be too out there,” Coburn said.

Certainly Senator Coburn’s latest decision on funding for the 9/11 memorial is generating vigorous debate.

But he’s doing more than just blocking bills.

While Coburn wouldn’t give any specifics, he said his “Gang of 6″ is back at work. He’s hoping Congress will not wait until the end of the year to make the budget cuts they agreed to last summer.

NewsOn6

Most policy makers still don’t understand the urgent need to restore trust in our financial system, or the need to prosecute Wall Street executives for fraud and other criminal wrongdoing.

But top economists have been saying for well over a decade that trust is necessary for a stable economy, and that prosecuting the criminals Is necessary to restore trust.

Trust is Necessary for a Stable Economy

In his influential 1993 book Making Democracy Work, Robert Putnam showed how civic attitudes and trust could account for differences in the economic and government performance between northern and southern Italy.

Political economist Francis Fukiyama wrote a book called Trust in 1995, arguing that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation’s prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. He stated that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years.

In 1998, Paul Zak (Professor of Economics and Department Chair, as well as the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and a senior researcher at UCLA) and Stephen Knack (a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Research Department and Public Sector Governance Department) wrote a paper called Trust and Growth, arguing:

Adam Smith … observed notable differences across nations in the ‘probity’ and ‘punctuality’ of their populations. For example, the Dutch ‘are the most faithful to their word.’John Stuart Mill wrote: ‘There are countries in Europe . . . where the most serious impediment to conducting business concerns on a large scale, is the rarity of persons who are supposed fit to be trusted with the receipt and expenditure of large sums of money’ (Mill, 1848, p. 132).

Enormous differences across countries in the propensity to trust others survive
today.

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Trust is higher in ‘fair’ societies.

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High trust societies produce more output than low trust societies. A fortiori, a sufficient amount of trust may be crucial to successful development. Douglass North (1990, p. 54) writes,

The inability of societies to develop effective, lowcost enforcement of contracts is the most important source of both historical stagnation and contemporary underdevelopment in the Third World.

***

If trust is too low in a society, savings will be insufficient to sustain
positive output growth. Such a poverty trap is more likely when institutions -
both formal and informal – which punish cheaters are weak.

Heap, Tan and Zizzo and others have come to similar conclusions.

In 2001, Zak and Knack showed that “strengthening the rule of law, reducing inequality, and by facilitating interpersonal understanding” all increase trust. They conclude:

Our analysis shows that trust can be raised directly by increasing communication and education, and indirectly by strengthening formal institutions that enforce contracts and by reducing income inequality. Among the policies that impact these factors, only education, … and freedom satisfy the efficiency criterion which compares the cost of policies with the benefits citizens receive in terms of higher living standards. Further, our analysis suggests that good policy initiates a virtuous circle: policies that raise trust efficiently, improve living standards, raise civil liberties, enhance institutions, and reduce corruption, further raising trust. Trust, democracy, and the rule of law are thus the foundation of abiding prosperity.

A 2005 letter in premier scientific journal Nature reviewed the research on trust and economics:

Trust … plays a key role in economic exchange and politics. In the absence of trust among trading partners, market transactions break down. In the absence of trust in a country’s institutions and leaders, political legitimacy breaks down. Much recent evidence indicates that trust contributes to economic, political and social success.

Forbes wrote an article in 2006 entitled “The Economics of Trust”. The article summarizes the importance of trust in creating a healthy economy:

Imagine going to the corner store to buy a carton of milk, only to find that the refrigerator is locked. When you’ve persuaded the shopkeeper to retrieve the milk, you then end up arguing over whether you’re going to hand the money over first, or whether he is going to hand over the milk. Finally you manage to arrange an elaborate simultaneous exchange. A little taste of life in a world without trust–now imagine trying to arrange a mortgage.

Being able to trust people might seem like a pleasant luxury, but economists are starting to believe that it’s rather more important than that. Trust is about more than whether you can leave your house unlocked; it is responsible for the difference between the richest countries and the poorest.

“If you take a broad enough definition of trust, then it would explain basically all the difference between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia,” ventures Steve Knack, a senior economist at the World Bank who has been studying the economics of trust for over a decade. That suggests that trust is worth $12.4 trillion dollars a year to the U.S., which, in case you are wondering, is 99.5% of this country’s income.

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Above all, trust enables people to do business with each other. Doing business is what creates wealth.

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Economists distinguish between the personal, informal trust that comes from being friendly with your neighbors and the impersonal, institutionalized trust that lets you give your credit card number out over the Internet.

In 2007, Yann Algan (Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics and University Paris East) and Pierre Cahuc (Professor of Economics at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris)) reported:

We find a significant impact of trust on income per capita for 30 countries over the period 1949-2003.

Similarly, market psychologists Richard L. Peterson M.D. and Frank Murtha, PhD noted in 2008

Trust is the oil in the engine of capitalism, without it, the engine seizes up.

Confidence is like the gasoline, without it the machine won’t move.

Trust is gone: there is no longer trust between counterparties in the financial system. Furthermore, confidence is at a low. Investors have lost their confidence in the ability of shares to provide decent returns (since they haven’t).

In 2009, Paola Sapienza (associate professor of finance and the Zell Center Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University) and Luigi Zingales (Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business) pointed out:

The drop in trust, we believe, is a major factor behind the deteriorating economic conditions. To demonstrate its importance, we launched the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index. Our first set of data—based on interviews conducted at the end of December 2008—shows that between September and December, 52 percent of Americans lost trust in the banks. Similarly, 65 percent lost trust in the stock market. A BBB/Gallup poll that surveyed a similar sample of Americans last April confirms this dramatic drop. At that time, 42 percent of Americans trusted financial institutions, versus 34 percent in our survey today, while 53 percent said they trusted U.S. companies, versus just 12 percent today.

As trust declines, so does Americans’ willingness to invest their money in the financial system. Our data show that trust in the stock market affects people’s intention to buy stocks, even after accounting for expectations of future stock-market performance. Similarly, a person’s trust in banks predicts the likelihood that he will make a run on his bank in a moment of crisis: 25 percent of those who don’t trust banks withdrew their deposits and stored them as cash last fall, compared with only 3 percent of those who said they still trusted the banks. Thus, trust in financial institutions is a key factor for the smooth functioning of capital markets and, by extension, the economy. Changes in trust matter.

They quote a Nobel laureate economist on the subject:

“Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,” writes economist Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel laureate. When we deposit money in a bank, we trust that it’s safe. When a company orders goods, it trusts its counterpart to deliver them in good faith. Trust facilitates transactions because it saves the costs of monitoring and screening; it is an essential lubricant that greases the wheels of the economic system.

In 2009, Time Magazine pointed out:

Traditionally, gold has been a store of value when citizens do not trust their government politically or economically.

In other words, the government’s political actions affect investments, such as gold, and thus the broader economy.

In 2010, a distinguished international group of economists (Giancarlo Corsetti, Michael P. Devereux, Luigi Guiso, John Hassler, Gilles Saint-Paul, Hans-Werner Sinn, Jan-Egbert Sturm and Xavier Vives) wrote:

Public distrust of bankers and financial markets has risen dramatically with the financial crisis. This column argues that this loss of trust in the financial system played a critical role in the collapse of economic activity that followed. To undo the damage, financial regulation needs to focus on restoring that trust.

They noted:

Trust is crucial in many transactions and certainly in those involving financial exchanges. The massive drop in trust associated with this crisis will therefore have important implications for the future of financial markets. Data show that in the late 1970s, the percentage of people who reported having full trust in banks, brokers, mutual funds or the stock market was around 40%; it had sunk to around 30% just before the crisis hit, and collapsed to barely 5% afterwards. It is now even lower than the trust people have in other people (randomly selected of course).

Prosecuting the Criminals Is Necessary to Restore Trust

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t recover:

The legal system is supposed to be the codification of our norms and beliefs, things that we need to make our system work. If the legal system is seen as exploitative, then confidence in our whole system starts eroding. And that’s really the problem that’s going on.

***

I think we ought to go do what we did in the S&L [crisis] and actually put many of these guys in prison. Absolutely. These are not just white-collar crimes or little accidents. There were victims. That’s the point. There were victims all over the world.

***

Economists focus on the whole notion of incentives. People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.

Robert Shiller said recently that failing to address the legal issues will cause Americans to lose faith in business and the government:

Shiller said the danger of foreclosuregate — the scandal in which it has come to light that the biggest banks have routinely mishandled homeownership documents, putting the legality of foreclosures and related sales in doubt — is a replay of the 1930s, when Americans lost faith that institutions such as business and government were dealing fairly.

Economists such as William Black and James Galbraith agree. Galbraith says:

There will have to be full-scale investigation and cleaning up of the residue of that, before you can have, I think, a return of confidence in the financial sector. And that’s a process which needs to get underway.

Galbraith also says that economists should move into the background, and “criminologists to the forefront”.

Government regulators know this – or at least pay lip service to it – as well. For example, as the Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division told Congress:

Recovery from the fallout of the financial crisis requires important efforts on various fronts, and vigorous enforcement is an essential component, as aggressive and even-handed enforcement will meet the public’s fair expectation that those whose violations of the law caused severe loss and hardship will be held accountable. And vigorous law enforcement efforts will help vindicate the principles that are fundamental to the fair and proper functioning of our markets: that no one should have an unjust advantage in our markets; that investors have a right to disclosure that complies with the federal securities laws; and that there is a level playing field for all investors.

Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future. Indeed, William Black notes that we’ve known of this dynamic for “hundreds of years”. And see this, this, this and this.

And when Zak and Knack – quoted above – discuss “enforcing contracts”, “raising civil liberties”, and “reducing corruption”, they are talking about enforcing the rule of law, which means prosecuting violations of the law. Likewise, when they refer to “enhancing institutions”, they mean regulatory and justice systems which enforce contracts and prosecute cheaters.

And when Zak and Knack promote reduction of inequality, that means prosecuting fraud as well. Specifically, as I recently pointed out, prosecuting fraud is the best way to reduce inequality:

Robert Shiller [one of the top housing economists in the United States] said in 2009:

And it’s not like we want to level income. I’m not saying spread the wealth around, which got Obama in trouble. But I think, I would hope that this would be a time for a national consideration about policies that would focus on restraining any possible further increases in inequality.

***

If we stop bailing out the fraudsters and financial gamblers, the big banks would focus more on traditional lending and less on speculative plays which only make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and which guarantee future economic crises (which hurt the poor more than the rich).

***

Moreover, both conservatives and liberals agree that we need to prosecute financial fraud. As I’ve previously noted, fraud disproportionally benefits the big players, makes boom-bust cycles more severe, and otherwise harms the economy – all of which increase inequality and warp the market.

Of course, it’s not just economists saying this.

One of the leading business schools in America – the Wharton School of Business – published an essay by a psychologist on the causes and solutions to the economic crisis. Wharton points out that restoring trust is the key to recovery, and that trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable:

According to David M. Sachs, a training and supervision analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, the crisis today is not one of confidence, but one of trust. “Abusive financial practices were unchecked by personal moral controls that prohibit individual criminal behavior, as in the case of [Bernard] Madoff, and by complex financial manipulations, as in the case of AIG.” The public, expecting to be protected from such abuse, has suffered a trauma of loss similar to that after 9/11. “Normal expectations of what is safe and dependable were abruptly shattered,” Sachs noted. “As is typical of post-traumatic states, planning for the future could not be based on old assumptions about what is safe and what is dangerous. A radical reversal of how to be gratified occurred.”

People now feel more gratified saving money than spending it, Sachs suggested. They have trouble trusting promises from the government because they feel the government has let them down.

He framed his argument with a fictional patient named Betty Q. Public, a librarian with two teenage children and a husband, John, who had recently lost his job. “She felt betrayed because she and her husband had invested conservatively and were double-crossed by dishonest, greedy businessmen, and now she distrusted the government that had failed to protect them from corporate dishonesty. Not only that, but she had little trust in things turning around soon enough to enable her and her husband to accomplish their previous goals.

“By no means a sophisticated economist, she knew … that some people had become fantastically wealthy by misusing other people’s money — hers included,” Sachs said. “In short, John and Betty had done everything right and were being punished, while the dishonest people were going unpunished.”

Helping an individual recover from a traumatic experience provides a useful analogy for understanding how to help the economy recover from its own traumatic experience, Sachs pointed out. The public will need to “hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again.” In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again, he argued.

Note that Sachs urges “hold[ing] the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible.” In other words, just “looking forward” and promising to do things differently isn’t enough.

As Wall Street insider and New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin writes:

“They will pick on minor misdemeanors by individual market participants,” said David Einhorn, the hedge fund manager who was among the Cassandras before the financial crisis. To Mr. Einhorn, the government is “not willing to take on significant misbehavior by sizable” firms. “But since there have been almost no big prosecutions, there’s very little evidence that it has stopped bad actors from behaving badly.”***

Fraud at big corporations surely dwarfs by orders of magnitude the shareholders’ losses of $8 billion that Mr. Holder highlighted. If the government spent half the time trying to ferret out fraud at major companies that it does tracking pump-and-dump schemes, we might have been able to stop the financial crisis, or at least we’d have a fighting chance at stopping the next one.

And as a former congressional aide recently said in some of the most colorful language to date:

“You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,” says a former congressional aide. “That’s all it would take. Just once.”

Washington’s Blog