Krugman Offers No Solutions. Same ol' Same ol'

The following article makes me angry on so many fronts; I don’t even know where to begin:

The article can be found and starts here: 

On Thursday, the European Central Bank announced a series of new steps it was taking in an effort to boost Europe’s economy. There was a whiff of desperation about the announcement, which was reassuring. Europe, which is doing worse than it did in the 1930s, is clearly in the grip of a deflationary vortex, and it’s good to know that the central bank understands that. But its epiphany may have come too late. It’s far from clear that the measures now on the table will be strong enough to reverse the downward spiral.

And there but for the grace of Bernanke go we. Things in the United States are far from O.K., but we seem (at least for now) to have steered clear of the kind of trap facing Europe. Why? One answer is that the Federal Reserve started doing the right thing years ago, buying trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds in order to avoid the situation its European counterpart now faces.

To even begin to compare the US actions to the European Central Bank’s recent actions is archaic and insane to the least, and ignorant and arrogant to the most.  Europe until very recently essentially did not have a true “central bank” in the way one would understand what a “central bank” is.  Each nation in the Euro Currency block has / had its own central bank, taxing policies, economic policies etc. The European Central bank had almost no direct power to even purchase bonds issued by member countries let alone dictate the finances of each member country.  This “one currency, many nations” structure made Europe a completely different animal from the US where the central bank oversees the entire economy of a very large nation and has full autonomy to set policies and manipulate every aspect of monitory authority without any consent from the US government.  NOTHING like this existed in Europe.  In addition, Europe had a handful of countries that NEVER should have been converted to the Euro in the first phase of Euroization of the member countries.  Their governments were completely reckless, their citizens knew full well their economies were no where near on par with the nations that should have been included in the Core and they acted recklessly as their governments.  It all looked fine for a while, but like any economic anomaly such as pegging a currency, the flawed structure was doomed to fail, credit crises or not, until the Euro countries actually established a strong central bank able to act with autonomy and discretion irrespective of the desires of member governments.

You can argue, and I would, that the Fed should have done even more. But Fed officials have faced fierce attacks all the way. Pundits, politicians and plutocrats have accused them, over and over again, of “debasing” the dollar, and warned that soaring inflation is just around the corner. The predicted surge in inflation has never arrived, but despite being wrong year after year, hardly any of the critics have admitted being wrong or even changed their tune. And the question I’ve been trying to answer is why. What is it that makes a powerful faction in our body politic — call it the deflation caucus — demand tight money even in a depressed, low-inflation economy?

Krugman is completely ignoring the true underlying inflation in the US over the past 35 years.  The CPI number calculations have undergone revisions a couple times in the last 30 years that have dramatically altered the outcome.  Using pre 1980 data, inflation is and has been running near 10% for most of the first 15 years of this century, not withstanding a dip during the credit crises. 

Even using data as calculated in 1990 reveals over 6% inflation over the same period.

Anyone who lives in the US knows that the average paycheck adjusted for even the “official” CPI numbers reveals a paltry $200 annual (yes annual) increase in income since 1980!!  This where all you have to do is go to the US Dept of Labor Statistics and see what the earnings of 1980 are worth in 2013 dollars.   You need $294.18 to match the buying power of $100 in 1980.  What does that tell you about the value of a dollar over this time?  What difference does it make that you now make $47,000 when your parents made $16,354 in 1980?  It has the same purchasing power!  And this is BEFORE we know the true results of the Trillions in dollars printed over the last 5 years. Note: the 1980 number came AFTER the serious spiraling of inflation of the 1970’s.  So what is Krugman trying to say about inflation?  That it is a “political issue” whether or not all this money printing is going to have any longer term affect?  Really?  What about China?  The US may have used somewhere near $14 Trillion to bail out the “financial system” during the crises and gone on to print a few Trillion Dollars but China has outshined all nations combined printing a whopping $15 Trillion!!

One thing is clear: Like so much else these days, monetary policy has become very much a partisan issue. It’s not just that talk of dollar debasement comes pretty much exclusively from the right of the political spectrum; inflation paranoia has, to a remarkable extent, become a matter of conservative political correctness, so that even economists who should know better have joined in the chorus. So we can focus the question further: Why do people on the right hate monetary expansion, even when it’s desperately needed?

One answer is the power of truthiness — Stephen Colbert’s justly famed term for things that aren’t true, but feel true to some people. “The Fed is printing money, printing money leads to inflation, and inflation is always a bad thing” is a triply untrue statement, but it feels true to a lot of people. And, yes, a tendency to prefer truthiness to more complicated truth is and pretty much always has been associated with political conservatism, and this tendency is especially strong in an era when leading politicians get their monetary theory from Ayn Rand novels.

Another answer is class interest. Inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors, deflation does the reverse. And the wealthy are much more likely than workers and the poor to be creditors, to have money in the bank and bonds in their portfolio rather than mortgages and credit-card balances outstanding. Back in the Gilded Age, the elite mobilized en masse to defeat William Jennings Bryan, who threatened to take the United States off the gold standard; campaign spending as a percentage of G.D.P. was far higher in 1896 than in any presidential election before or since. Are the wealthy similarly mobilized against easy-money policies today?

Is Krugman serious when he quotes Stephen Colbert, a comedian, then waste 3 paragraphs telling us all the concerns about the recent policies of Central banks from China to Europe, policies that have taken humankind into completely uncharted territory with respect to Central Bank policy and experimentation to counter the largest credit crises in history which was preceded and followed by the largest expansion of debt in history at EVERY level of the economy and continues to expand under near forced direction by central banks today where they are saying “buy debt and issue debt and if you will not we will do both”, is nothing but a political / class issue? Does he even understand inflation?  Saying the “wealthy” are only to be hurt by inflation because they have “bonds in their portfolio” rather than “credit-card balances and mortgages”?  Does he even understand that the “wealthy” own real property that tends to keep up with inflation not the mortgaged and credit-card poor.  In fact, by pure definition, if the “poor” wages rise relative to their mortgage at fixed rates and credit cards capped interest, they would actually be better off as long as they don’t loose their jobs!!  What is he trying to say here?  In one paragraph he is trying to say the rich are not complaining so why should we worry?  Are the wealthy not the ONLY class of people that have benefited from the huge injection of cash which has allowed companies to refinance and issue debt to buy back their stocks and increase dividends with almost free money driving the stock markets higher and higher in the process?  The wealthy are the ones who have seen their bond portfolios increase in value year after year as interest rates fell to zero and are kept there under central bank policies.  The distortions in managing “risk” at every level are so outlandish today in the markets that this distortion is now being called “the new normal” on Wall Street!  Complacency is ripe, risk is high, volatility at historic lows, and everyone is chasing yields pushing rates down on essentially bankrupt nations like Spain, with 20% unemployment below that of the US!  High yield debt almost does not exist as spreads of low grade bonds of all kinds’ trade at premiums to US Treasuries at levels not seen since 2006, at the height of the credit bubble.  I could go on.  So all Krugman has to say is the debate is a political and class debate and not to worry, all central banks should follow the US lead, irrespective of the dynamics on the ground and just print money, buy bonds, support risk taking, force banks to lend, lend, lend….

As far as I know, we don’t have rigorous evidence to that effect. There are certainly a lot of wealthy investors in the debasing-the-dollar crowd, but we don’t know for sure how representative they are — and you could argue that big investors should like the Fed’s expansionary policies, which have been very good for the stock market. But the wealthy may not trust that connection, in part because the inflationary ’70s were very bad for stocks. And we do know that the very wealthy are much more likely than the general public to consider budget deficits our biggest problem, even though fiscal austerity is probably bad for profits. So perceived class interest is probably also a key motivation for the deflation caucus.

Is Krugman serious here?  Comparing today’s Fed’s expansionary policies to the 1970’s?  Does he even have the capability to differentiate the 1970’s oil price driven global inflation surge which came on the heals of the end of the US productivity surge of the 1950-60’s, the tail end of a protracted pointless and expensive war, and the end of US industry’s life cycle of post war investment in production which started the long decline of industrial production?  Does he really get away with comparing this era to today?  Fiscal Austerity?  Does he even comprehend the level of recklessness of the budgets of ALL nations who command the “hard currencies” of the world today and how this is going to radically alter the shape of global finance in the future?

A side note: Europe’s wealthy aren’t as wealthy or influential as their American counterparts, but creditor interests are nonetheless even more powerful than they are here because creditor nations, Germany in particular, have ended up dictating policy for the whole of Europe.

Is he serious here?  Europe’s wealthy may not be on the front page of Bloomberg every day, but they hold their wealth in “productive capacity” and “hard assets” accumulated over a very long time, not just in “paper” i.e.; stocks that have ever risen to unrealistic heights catapulting them to the stratosphere and making them de-facto mouthpiece of the American multinational and reminding people that our nation’s economic structure far more resembles the same 1896 he quotes in this article, with the robber barons, oligopolistic structure of industry and bought out government then some 21^st century successful economic system?  To make a statement like this is completely ignorant, arrogant and ethnocentric as one could make!!

And the important thing to understand is that the dominance of creditor interests on both sides of the Atlantic, supported by false but viscerally appealing economic doctrines, has had tragic consequences. Our economies have been dragged down by the woes of debtors, who have been forced to slash spending. To avoid a deep, prolonged slump, we needed policies to offset this drag. What we got instead was an obsession with the evils of budget deficits and paranoia over inflation — and a slump that has gone on and on.

Once again, even his final statement is hogwash to no end.  He suggest NO structural remedies for what we all know was a “crises” predicated on a never before seen debt bubble facilitated by ever creative “products” designed to off load risk that became the core of the irresponsible lending mantra.  All of these “products” were created and traded in casino fashion, were completely unregulated, dragged in the participation of every financial institution including taxpayer insured banks, were built on the back of every possible category of debt imaginable (and some unimaginable creations).  Yet he suggests that the role of central banks is to somehow “counter” this?  All the central banks on the planet did not have enough firepower to counter the crises. This is blatantly obvious.  They have had to print Trillions of Dollars, everywhere, to make a dent in the disaster.  Yet people like Krugman have NOTHING to offer to cure this complete collapse and failure of the “free market system” other than to say, just print more money so the party can go on!  What a complete looser!

Good Summary of Current Debt Issues

I ran across a rarity, a good summary of the current "sovereign" debt crises. I put "sovereign" in quotes for an important reason. The debt crises is much wider than the current focus on government's problems and calling the current iteration of the debt crises "sovereign" is completely misleading.

The article was on Marketwatch and you can read it here.

It starts out with:

The debt mountain that brought down some of the world's biggest banks and dragged the international financial system to the brink of disaster has simply shifted to governments.

But from then on, it focuses entirely on the debt levels in the hands of governments.

What is desperately missing from EVERYTHING I read about the "credit crises", the "debt crises" the "bailouts" etc. is anything about where all of the "cash" that was "lent" to create all this "debt" went. Wall Street does not "create" money. Lenders lend money based on a fractional reserve system which ultimately "creates" money. However, what really happened over the first decade of this century was the largest wholesale transfer of "cash", "real money" from the legacy banking system, pension funds, 401k's etc. to the unregulated "financial industry" and the pockets of the people who ran / run that industry (which incidentally, after 1999 deregulation included much of the regulated banking industry as well since they were part of larger conglomerate organizations that sought to rape their retail customers with fees that became 1/3 of their profits and steal their savings by transferring their money to the unregulated pyramid schemes and gambling ventures fed by reckless lending) including Private Equity, Hedge Funds and other unregulated financial ventures. Along with the hoarding of cash by countless corporate executives who pull tens of billions of dollars every quarter from both the "publicly traded" companies and those held by "private equity" firms, there was the approximately $5 Trillion in "profits", "bonuses" and "fees" that came out of every transaction over the course of about a decade.. 

This sum of money came to light in a Bloomberg article I read some weeks ago:

The suits provide a window into the offshore structures and secrecy jurisdictions the world’s richest people use to manage, preserve and conceal their assets. According to Tax Justice Network, a U.K.-based organization that campaigns for transparency in the financial system, wealthy individuals were hiding as much as $32 trillion offshore at the end of 2010. Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets, according to research compiled by former McKinsey & Co. economist James Henry.

You should read the entire 5 part series.  Very good stuff.

Now, I had another thought when reading this series.  It seems that from France to England to Singapore and Hong Kong that "governments" are getting fed up with tax evasion while the developed world is mired in debt.  Now it is not the fault of the industialists and financiers that so many governments are bankrupt, but they have benefited from the process more than anyone, in fact they are the chief beneficiaries esp as governments seek to keep the bondholders, stockholders and large depositors "whole" while raping the taxpayers (citizens) of their financial futures.  So as we enter the next "phase" of crises, from debt, to Syria to the implosion of N. Africa and the Middle East to Pakastan and the inability of bankrupt "democratic" nations to deal with the fallout, the piper must be paid.  Technology makes it much easier to track all this cash and now the NSA pretty much has a database of all communications since BEFORE the financial crises, it seems it would not be much effort to root out the cash and say to the holders of these $30 Trillion:

The governments of the world that matter (those industrial nations where all the technology is held irrespective of the slaves that actually produce everything) need to deal with a rapidly disintegrating global stability in order to prevent another wholesale globally destructive war, but we don't have any money.  The $30 Trillion held by the industrialist / global rich, spread out amongst the top bankrupt industrial nations, would just about bring us to break even.  In order to ensure a future (read future stability and markets to sell to) for humanity without wholesale destruction, we are going to confiscate your cash.  We will allow you to keep your productive assets as we will need your productive capacity to wage our campaign to stabilize the planet.  So you may loose your current cash, but you will have the capacity to make it all back inside of a generation (15 years +/-).  You may not like this, but you have no choice.  There simply is nowhere left on earth to hide and we need the money.

 Mark my words on this one.  It is going to happen.

Worthless Consultants and Overpaid Corporate Heads

I have frequently stressed how amazingly incompetent many folks who run major corporations are. Often they are part of a "club" of folks who are offered various posts leading major corporations in various capacities because they are in this "club". I wouldn't mention how one becomes part of this club but obviously it means you have access to the largest pools of money in the nation, corporate profits, cash flows, stock etc. and can rake millions out of the system.

So, occasionally I find an article that demonstrates how these incompetent executives make decisions by hiring consultants to make decisions for them instead of making themselves because well, they are incompetent or they have lawyers that tell them if they can point to a "professional consultant" as the cause of their disastrous decision that will protect them or whatever...

Here is a quote from an FT article I read today:

Citigroup’s disastrous foray into complex securities before the financial crisis was partly based on the recommendation of outside consultants hired to advise the bank’s leaders, a former senior manager revealed.

In testimony on Wednesday to an inquiry into the turmoil, Thomas Maheras, a former co-head of Citi’s investment bank, lifted the lid on a move that led to more than $50bn in losses and forced the US government to bail out the company.

Mr Maheras said that, following a study by a consulting firm – said by people close to the situation to be Oliver Wyman – in 2005, Citi decided to ramp up parts of its fixed income business, including in collateralised debt obligations. Oliver Wyman did not respond to a request for comment.

“Based in part on a careful study from outside consultants hired by our senior-most management, the company decided to expand certain areas of our fixed income business that we believed at the time offered opportunities for long-term growth,” Mr Maheras told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was appointed by Congress.

Citi’s decision came when it was led by chief executive Chuck Prince, a lawyer who had served as general counsel and had relatively limited capital markets experience.

Need I say more?

Banks Paying Back What?

I have been reading about the banks "paying back TARP" and "regaining their freedom" from the Government reigns for some days now with disdain for what is being "sold" to us by the media as a "payback" of money injected into the banks during the "crises" in 2008.

There is still a major crisis. The pittances the banks are paying back are only part of the total sum of what the Fed / Government has done and is still doing to back these institutions. They should remain under supervision for everything they do and their management should be under salary caps. If they don't like it they should all go to work with hedge funds, the unwieldy banking institutions they run broken apart with their retail, banking, insurance operations etc. regulated and their trading arms closed or spun off to the pigs in the Hedge Fund industry (which should be regulated or shut down as well but for now this is highly unlikely).

I would like to remind you that besides the deregulation of banking in 1999 which was done to rubber stamp the mega Citycorp merger with Travelers our legislative body also deregulated leverage rules for leverage "not using bank deposits" as stated in a January 2009 Time Magazine article:

Regulators have long had a lower capital requirement on loans that are not backed by deposits. But in 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) removed rules that capped leverage at 15 to 1 for investment-banking firms like Goldman Sachs. That allowed the firms to vastly expand their lending activities without raising a single new dollar of capital. One big backer of the rule change was reportedly former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was then Goldman's CEO. By that time, the regulatory separation between investment banks and traditional banks had long since been removed, so traditional banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America shifted more and more of their lending operations to their investment-banking divisions, and leverage took off. By the end of 2007, many banks were lending $30 for every dollar they had in the vault. "Changing the net-capital rule was an unfortunate misjudgment by the SEC," says former SEC official Lee Pickard. "It's one of the leading contributors to the current financial crisis." (See who else is to blame.)

Now what is interesting is the "not raising a single dollar of capital" part. They could just go about doubling down on leverage. The "banking" industry had convinced our impotent and incompetent legislators as well as the idiot running the Fed at the time, Greenspan, that banks had installed sophisticated "risk management" tools that would allow them to manage this escalated leverage. I remember reading with amazement the monthly or quarterly updates by "investment banks" on Wall Street on how much capital they could "loose" or was “at risk” in a single day given information they had on hand and risk management practices in place. The numbers had grown to the hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. These were "day" trading risks.

Back to the point, the Fed agreed not only to the injection of cash into the large money center banks in 2008 (agreed with the Treasury) but also to accept all kinds of before unheard of collateral against borrowings from the Fed. In addition the Fed, in bailing out some institutions like City, Bear Sterns, BoA and AIG agreed to assume hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on "assets" removed from their books that were "locked up" in the credit crises. These institutions alone account for nearly $500 Billion in "guarantees" against bad debts / assets on their books (well off books as well for technical / accounting purposes). Plus there is another $300 Billion PLUS that has been borrowed by financial institutions from the markets with implicit guarantees under the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.

In addition the Fed just started it's $1.8 Trillion program to "become" the commercial paper industry, a Trillion and a half has been allocated to buy mortgages from the banks and GSE's, another Trillion program to buy consumer loan-backed securities called TALF, and $300 Billion in outright "injections" by the fed done through bond purchases from the banks.

As I write this, Goldman still has about $20 Billion on it's books it borrowed under TLGP so as far as I am concerned any PIG Institution that still has guaranteed money on it's books is the same as having the money injected directly. They were able to borrow at ridiculously low rates by having the direct guarantee of the government, hence they should be highly regulated until they are COMPLETELY CLEAN of any support by the government.

Oh, well that is not really possible now is it? The government "being" the mortgage market, consumer credit market, commercial backed mortgage market, commercial paper market etc. In other words, none of these intuitions could even continue to function under anything like "normal" market conditions without the FED putting about $7 Trillion in support out there. You can see some of the numbers here.

So, basically, I can say “The Hell with them all”. They so totally ruined the financial system they should not be “free” to do anything without heavy government regulation until this entire mess is cleaned up. So where are the Chiefs going to go if the entire finance industry is heavily regulated? Guess they will just have to accept “government” salaries like doctors in a government health plan until they can learn to “walk” on their own again. Alternatively they could all go to the hedge fund industry until some government with a spine shuts that worthless unregulated industry down completely.

For a little comedy check out this 12 part short video series on the Fed.

For very extensive analysis of Fed workings through the crises check this out.

Finally an "Authority" Advocates Re-regulation

I was in University in the late 1980's and early 1990's studying economics at the University of Maryland when I was faced with two options, grow the company I started or pursue my masters in Economics with my thesis being the need for an international financial regulatory authority. At the time I had lofty ideas of becoming a global economic guru who would advocate the abandonment of the archaic, inefficient, unfair, and destructive way economics was dealt with on an international level. Human beings had managed to create highly sophisticated financial "systems" and global financial "markets" that were rapidly evolving but unfortunately the perspective of human beings was Neanderthalistic.

I had the benefit of studying Economics during the collapse of the S&L industry in the US along with a real estate bust, junk bond market implosion and fairly severe recession. I also was a "student" of economics and finance through real world experience and investing from 1981 which allowed me to experience the severe 1982 recession in the US, the Latin American debt crises, gold price explosion and implosion, oil price implosion and the first destructive false economic "growth" experiment of supply side economics by the Reagan Administration (accompanied by military welfare spending and enemy creation) and brilliantly orchestrated junk bond bubble and accompanying corporate buy out craze.

It was obvious to me during my studies we had a systematically flawed economic model functioning on a national and global scale and there were no way the idiots with ass backwards motivations who ran this model and all of its intuitions would be able to do anything that would be a net benefit to humanity. The same holds true today.

So I had the absolute pleasure of reading this article today on Marketwatch about what Henry Kaufman thinks of the global mess we are in.

Notably his statement:

A: The expectation certainly has to be that the banks are undercapitalized, quite a number of them. There are still probably some additional write-offs to be taken. The value of assets are not down yet to what they are supposed to be marked down to. This would seem to me to be an ongoing problem until we see some improvement in economic activity.

There are further issues facing the banking system. There will have to be a re-regulation of the financial system.

My recommendation has been the centralization of the supervision of the financial markets. Let there be one major oversight institution over markets and institutions. The head of that oversight group should sit as a vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The chairman of the Fed and the head of this oversight group [should] render an annual report to Congress showing what the financial health is of, say, the 25 largest financial institutions of the U.S. And that body should also provide a credit rating for each of those 25 institutions.

And his further remarks:

A: The Federal Reserve has admitted that the deregulation that has occurred has been a mistake. The Fed will support some re-regulation. It has not indicated what the magnitude of that re-regulation will be. Neither will the U.S. Treasury.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury over the last two decades have let the financial markets be on a deregulated basis. We did not supervise financial institutions tightly. The assumption by the authorities, the kind of belief by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve was that those who do well will prosper in the financial markets, those who do poorly will fail. That of course was not allowed to happen because we just don't allow big institutions to fail because of the systemic risks they pose to the entire world and the system at large in the U.S.

As a result, financial markets were allowed to end up in all sorts of risky ventures, and this contributed to the mishaps that we have today.

We live in global financial markets. We have institutions that operate on a global basis. Therefore, we should have an international oversight group over major financial institutions regardless of whether they're in London, New York, Paris or Tokyo. They should come under one major supervisory authority. That authority should set requirements for capital should set rulings for types of leverage that the institution can undertake, should set training practices for the major markets.
If we do not have a unified supervision, the business will flow to those markets that are most liberal. And those markets will then create havoc for the rest of the international financial groups.

I think there's more support coming for that now than when I first wrote about this 15, 20 years ago because I see France pushing in that direction. The Europeans on the Continent are pushing in that direction. The only ones I haven't heard from on this are the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury.

Yes it pleases me greatly to know I was thinking ahead of this smart man. In fact what his article brings to mind were the few (far to few when I think back) conversations I had when I took the liberty of knocking on the door of one of my professors from time to time to ask their opinion of what was happening in the "real economic world" outside of the somewhat antiquated textbooks I had to study with.

If I had a chance to do it all over again I am still not sure I would have taken the path of furthering my economics education instead of pursuing my business. I was very turned off by the bureaucratic and pathetic "counseling" at the state university. When I initially inquired about the masters program they looked at my completed transcripts and suggested I had 2 semesters of classes that were required just to apply (I was like, why in the hell didn't you spell that out when I started my major, idiot?) and the fact that the University of Maryland for all it's efforts was basically churning out graduates to fill a cube at the Department of Labor crunching boring ass stats for yet more bureaucrats. Economics was going through it's "mathematicization" phase and I did not see the subject in the same light.

Perhaps this has something to do with the mess we are in now. Not unlike the "magic" of any idiot being able to create an impressive business plan and financial projection with the wider use of computers and the newly accessible spreadsheet programs in the 1980's that in my view had a great impression on the flow of money then, the movement of Economics by people determined to make it more of a "science" through the use of statistics, mathematics and computer models totally devalued what I saw as the beauty of economics as a social science that could have better application using some of the emerging technologies but not for those technologies to "take over" the discipline in entirety.

I strongly believe the current crises once again came greatly by application of sophisticated mathematics and technology in the creation of financial products that on paper made "investors" believe anything and any return was possible if you could "hedge", "buy protection for" and or otherwise "remove responsibility for losses" through securitization which resulted in the explosion of credit and unbelievably cheap prices.

I have been saying for more than three years now that all of this "protection" was nothing but a house of cards, not to mention the "false" profits created in the sale of the products themselves and it would not last longer than early 2008. Well here we are. We are nowhere near bottom and finally some "smart" people who did stay in the wonderful discipline of Economics, and who shared my views, are being listened to. God bless them...