MacroEconomic Malpractice

If the U.S. economy was a patient, I’m sure we all would be talking medical malpractice by now. After having 8 years of nothing to lecture on during the Clinton years other than, yes Keynesian economics works, we are now on our 9th year of wtf? (Feel sorry for my poor undergrads.) We’re still dealing with the spinning of the complete failure of Voodoo Economics, Trickle-down economics, Reaganomics or Supply Side economics from the free spending, tax dollar giveaway as success story with no real point other than supporting faith based economic hypotheses and the rights of the ultrarich to stay that way in to something it was not. I simply cannot believe that any REAL democratic administration with some roots in the Clinton years could possibly be choosing to continue the failed policies of the right.

So, since I’ve been on a populist rant over Wall Street Bonuses, let me just fuel the fire some more with this little piece in the Washington Post website today with the unsurprising title “Bailout Overseer Says Banks Misused TARP Funds”. No kidding cupcake. Why do you suppose the same risk happy folks that got their bonuses last year are getting big ones this year? We might as well funded a national road trip to Vegas.

Many of the banks that got federal aid to support increased lending have instead used some of the money to make investments, repay debts or buy other banks, according to a new report from the special inspector general overseeing the government’s financial rescue program.

The report, which will be published Monday, surveyed 360 banks that got money through the end of January and found that 110 had invested at least some of it, that 52 had repaid debts and that 15 had used funds to buy other banks.

So, we’re basically funding a real time game of monopoly. Okay, Republicans, let me just explain this to you ONE more time. MONOPOLY is the antithesis of market capitalism. It isn’t Socialism. Socialism is NOT an economic concept any more than GOD is a Buddhist one. It’s the difference between, I buy houses in Houston and I buy All the houses in Houston. We actually prove markets are efficiently working by comparing competitive markets to centrally planned ones and find the same result when they are. However, that’s IFF (if and only if) things in both circumstances are perfect (which they NEVER are). We live in a land of frictions and 30 years of research shows that we’ve just about got as much chance of having the Pure Capitalist dream as we do the Pure Marxist dream. Zip, Zilch, nada, no way! Our lives our lived in imperfect markets where government sometimes steps in to make things worse, and some times steps in to make things better. We’re basically in the search for the middle path.

Right now, we’re funding and sustaining a financial market structure that perpetuates extraordinary profits for the capital owners, less products available to the market, and higher prices for every one. It is also well-researched that bigger institutions do not bring efficiencies of scale to the market so how is this a good thing? Just pick up any basic microeconomics book and study market structures. The bottom line is a welfare loss for the market as resources will be inefficiently used, quantities will be reduced, prices will be higher, and the demand side of the market will experience a loss of welfare. (Sorry, I keep having to remind myself I have the summer away from theory, but I’m an old dog and that’s a new trick for me.) The empirics on this have supported these theories for hundreds of years!

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