PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Invierno 2020/2021

[Negrule]

Antes de que estallara la burbuja inmobiliaria la vivienda no tenía el "poder" que tiene ahora, es cierto que los precios estaban infladísimos, pero tenias opciones habitacionales. El tener una buena preparación te aseguraba unas buenas condiciones laborales, y la opción de optar por el alquiler, o la compra, con tranquilidad,  tener unos ahorros te remuneraba algo, etc. Pero hoy en día disponer de una vivienda, de momento es así, tiene un poder inimaginable hace 10/15 años.

Salut,

[sirou]

El impacto de hacerlo sería tan brutal, que se corre el riesgo de una transición violenta, que es lo que hubiera pasado si en 2008 hubieran "dejado al mercado actuar".

Pues yo no consigo ver qué tipo de violencia se hubiera dado. De aquella crisis salió el 14M y se evidenció que la indignación y el cabreo hoy en día se puede desactivar muy fácilmente.

Por otro lado, si nuestro espejo a mirar es Japón (deuda 2xPIB y aterrizaje suave) ya podemos olvidarnos de cualquier esperanza y hacer las maletas.

[Derby]

https://www.reuters.com/article/spain-economy-outlook/spains-gdp-contraction-likely-wider-than-10-pm-says-idUSLUN2HC01H

Spain's GDP contraction likely wider than 10%, PM says

Spain’s gross domestic product has likely to contract by more than 10% this year as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic and the restrictions imposed on economic activity to curb it, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Tuesday.

“We are now 10% poorer than a year ago,” he told a news conference. The government has previously forecast an 11.2% contraction for this year.

He added that the government had decided to keep the country’s minimum wage at the same level in 2021 after a strong increase in the previous year.

[Derby]

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/12/polarization-then-a-crash-michael-hudson-on-the-rentier-economy.html

Polarization, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy

(...)FRIES: So, Michael, how is that industrial capitalism ended up in the stage you describe, one of pro-rentier finance capitalism?

HUDSON: Well, nobody really expected industrial capitalism to enter the stage we’re in now which is finance capitalism. This was not a necessary stage of industrial capitalism because you think of a stage as a kind of natural evolution, Darwinian style where the most efficient stage or form wins out. But what’s happened is instead of evolution, you have a devolution. You have a move backwards. The whole idea of industrial capitalism as explained from Adam Smith to David Ricardo to the John Stuart Mill to Marx, the whole idea was that the destiny of industrial capitalism was to get rid of the remnants of feudalism.

To get rid of the landlord class, of economic rent of natural resource rent. And the idea was to make everybody basically only earn money in proportion to what they contributed to production. Industrial capitalism was supposed to clear away the whole overgrowth of absentee landlordism, of unproductive credit or usury capital.

And that seemed to be happening by the late 19th century. In the field of finance, for instance, you had German and Central European industrial banking creating credit only to create new means of production, to build factories, to create a steel industry.

The Lower House of governments throughout Europe, for instance and the House of Commons over the House of Lords in Britain, in 1909, there was a constitutional showdown in Britain where they passed the land tax law to sort of get rid of landlordism. And the House of Lords vetoed it; constitutional crisis for a whole year. And they passed the law that never again could the House of Lords, the Upper House, veto a revenue bill in the House of Commons.

In every country, the Upper House in government was created and run by the rentier interests. That is by the landlords and the wealthiest interests. And the whole idea of industrial capitalism was to push democratic reform in order to sort of over overthrow the old rentier class.

World War I changed all that. Since World War I, the rentier class began to fight back. Before World War I you finally had the United States pass an income tax law that really only 1% of the American population was liable for the income tax law because there was a cut off point. You had to be fairly rich to pay the income. And most of the income of wealthy people was from either rents or stocks or bonds or financially from loans.

After World War I, all of this was changed. Instead of taxing real estate, instead of taxing the oil and gas industry, they were made pretty much income tax exempt. You had a shift of tax onto labor and industry. And you had industrial capitalism lose out to finance capitalism, not as a step forward but as a lapse backward. As the old post-feudal landlord class and the financial class fought back and sort of took over the development.

And that was greatly increased in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And since then the whole Western world has been characterized by really a kind of neoliberal meaning a pro financial, a pro-rentier economy. And the result is that we have a financial view of the world, not industrial view of the world.

(...)FRIES: You published a book as a dictionary or a Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception titled J is for JUNK ECONOMICS. And in the book you define There Is No Alternative or TINA as: The neoliberal principle that if one can censor awareness of policy alternatives to austerity, people will believe that poverty, inequality and economic polarization are natural, not man-made. What else do pro-finance advocates mean in saying There Is No Alternative?

HUDSON: Well, when Margaret Thatcher said There Is No Alternative, and that was her famous quote, TINA, There Is No Alternative what she meant is the financial sector has put depth charges into the economy saying there’s no alternative if you want to avoid a breakdown.

And the breakdown is right now the economy is a debt deflation. So much of American industry is closing down because of debt. For instance, let’s look at the legacy of the coronavirus which has only catalyzed and accelerated that debt deflation. Imagine the restaurants that are closed since last March, the gyms, the bars. They haven’t done business. So they have not been paying rent. And their employees have not been getting an income to pay their rent.

So what’s happened is that let’s say in January everything is going to go back to normal, although they say here, it’s going to be a March or April. Well, the landlords are going to say: okay, we haven’t been collecting rent for the last year and now you’re going to have to pay all these rent arrears. Well, there is no way that a restaurant or a gym or a bar can pay a year’s back rent and make enough profit to cover it.

So they’re going to say: why should we work for the landlord without getting any pennies for ourselves? We’re just going to go out of business. And so the restaurants are closed down. This again is a reason for the stock market booming. If you close down the privately owned restaurants and the privately owned bars, this is going to let the big food chains come in and take over the whole market. Just like Amazon took over much of the market for books and for things that people buy, the big restaurant chains will come in now that maybe 70% of the restaurants in New York City are expected to go out of business. [Inaud] are going to go out of business.

So, the only way to avoid all of this is to say: okay,we the government are suspending all of the debt service, all the taxes, and all the rents owed during the period when nobody can earn an income to pay.

If you don’t wipe out the arrears of the debt that have accumulated for the back rent, people running into debt in order to live while they’re unemployed, running up their credit card rates, borrowing from the banks or borrowing against the house; if you don’t wipe out this debt, then you’re going to have the economy shut down with debt deflation. Because there won’t be any money to buy goods and services and it’ll be just an accelerating unemployment and a shrinkage of markets.

Now, when Margaret Thatcher said there was no alternative what she meant was: well, wait a minute. If you don’t pay the debts to the banks, they’ll have to lose money. The richest 1% has made a trillion dollars in gains since the virus hit last spring. They’ve made a killing. In the last 10 years all of the growth in the American economy has accrued to the top 5%. All the growth in GDP, Gross Domestic Product, has accrued to the top 5%. Since Obama took office, GDP for the 95% of the population has actually gone down.

And the banks are saying: well, wait a minute; we’ve made a lot of money. We don’t want to have to lose any of it. And they are saying that: well, if you cancel or write down the debts, then we’re just going to close up shop. And we’ll pull out all of the connections of the economy and the banks will go under. They pretend that this is a crisis.

Actually, this is a great opportunity to save the economy. Sheila Bair said in 2009 that the most badly run bank and crooked bank was Citi,Citibank. She wanted to close it down and take it over by the FDIC. There was plenty of money in Citibank to pay all of the insured depositors.

But then, she was overruled by Obama and Tim Geithner, the lobbyist for Wall Street who was connected to Citibank in a shameful conflict of interest. And they didn’t close it down. And Sheila Bair wrote in her biography about this. She found out it was all about the bond holders.

The 1% are the bond holders of the banks and they’re refusing… they would rather have the economy shut down and 10 million more people thrown into the street than lose a single dollar. All of this is what the classical Greeks called wealth addiction, the love of money. They said that the more money you have, the more addicted you are to get more and more.

Now the good thing about canceling the debt is that you cancel savings on the other side of the balance sheet. And the savings are all this immense amount of money that’s accumulated by the rentier sector since Obama took office, really since the 2008 & 2009 crisis. And you’d restore balance to the economy. You would restore a much more equal distribution not only of income but of wealth by having the wealthy people bear the costs of the economy being shut down for the virus.

The rentier sector opposes all of this. And in fact, Biden has already said that because of the huge $8 trillion give away to the financial sector by the Federal Reserve under Trump, we’re going to have to balance the budget.

The cities and States are near bankruptcy. In New York City they’re talking about cutting down the subway system to maybe only 40%. It’ll be very crowded. You’ll be risking your life to go on it because of the virus. The Washington subway system has been closed down on weekends and I think many stations have been closed down.

You’re going to have a breakdown of state and local finance because the landlords are not able to pay the property tax. The cities and states are not getting the income tax because of the unemployment.

You’re going to have a spreading a financial crisis. And again, finance capital firms are going to be able to come in. And you can make, it’s much easier to make a billion dollars off a crisis than it is off a boom. Most of the big fortunes have all been made when the rest of the economy are in crisis. Because everybody’s in distress, you can buy assets at distressed prices.

And that’s why the crisis that’s coming to the United States almost engineered by Wall Street as a grab bag. And it’ll be a grab bag where they’re expecting 50,000 New Yorkers to be homeless. They’re going to be out on the street. Where are they going to go? Crime is already rising here.

You’re having a disaster. And it’s a disaster that is welcomed by the government that is refusing to do any bail out for the cities and states. Refusing any support of the infrastructure system, the transport system. That is only providing money to support the stock and bond holders so that they don’t lose money. And to support the banks so that they remain solvent with quantitative easing, money creation. But without any attempt to revive the industrial economy, the restaurant owners, the few factories that remain and of course the labor force.

(...) FRIES: As the foreclosures begin and the medical deaths increase, how would you define a centrist position? In other words, what’s a centrist?

HUDSON: A Centrist is somebody who looks at all problems as being marginal, not structural and so you can only have a little change. So a centrist is a right wing, neoliberal supporter of the financial sector and implicitly anti-labor and anti-industry. A centrist is someone who doesn’t want any change in the system and just goes with the status quo. Because they can’t imagine that every economy tends to polarize naturally between wealthy people at the top impoverishing the 99% at the bottom. And the centrist doesn’t realize that. A centrist thinks that economies tend to move towardsequality and equilibrium. And the reality is economies move towards this dis-equilibrium, polarization and then there’s a crash. Polarization and then there’s a crash. But a centrist says: don’t do anything at all. So essentially you should just stand aside and let Obama and Biden and the rest standby while the financial sector monopolizes the economy and impoverishes it.

[CHOSEN]

b) Cada capa de la cebolla se lleva su mordida, por orden de mayor a menor: Estado > Promotores > Constructores > Inmobiliarias > Notarios

Estando de acuerdo en el espíritu del mensaje, esto no es así.
Quien más "mordida" se lleva es el jugador. Más grande que la suma de todos los demás juntos.
-El Estado no pilla mas que unos miles.
-Promotores y Constructores lo consiguen vía economías a escala (30, 40 viviendas).
-Las inmobiliarias no rascan ni para sueldos.
-Los notarios, como el Estado, migajas.

Y el riesgo para el casero, como dice asustadísimos, "lo amortigua el Estado" (que somos todos).

Aparte quería agradecer a gregorsamesa el post del otro día, donde dio unos textos muy interesantes sobre Globalización.

[Maloserá]

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/12/polarization-then-a-crash-michael-hudson-on-the-rentier-economy.html

Este artículo es muy bueno y va más allá del capitalismo popular nuestro, habla de neo-feudalismo popular. Y enlaza con el perdón de las deudas del padrenuestro antiguo. Como único medio de resetear una sociedad cuando el rentismo ya no da mas de sí y destruye riqueza.

[sudden and sharp]

[...] Y enlaza con el perdón de las deudas del padrenuestro antiguo. Como único medio de resetear una sociedad cuando el rentismo ya no da mas de sí y destruye riqueza.

Vaya... lo de siempre. El reset^TM. (Quién podía imaginárselo?   )



No way. Ahora somos los pringaos los que queremos Kapitalismo salvaje. 

[Maloserá]

...

No way. Ahora somos los pringaos los que queremos Kapitalismo salvaje.

No me refiero al perdón de deudas hipotecarias. Mas bien algo así como la propuesta de abajo pero multiplicada por 5 o 6.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2020/L-December/Wealth-Commission-report#:~:text=A%20one%2Doff%20wealth%20tax%20is%20a%20tax%20on%20a,that%20is%20above%20the%20threshold.

A one-off wealth tax on millionaire couples paid at 1% a year for five years would raise £260 billion, according to the final report of the Wealth Tax Commission.

[sudden and sharp]

...

No way. Ahora somos los pringaos los que queremos Kapitalismo salvaje.

No me refiero al perdón de deudas hipotecarias. Mas bien algo así como la propuesta de abajo pero multiplicada por 5 o 6.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2020/L-December/Wealth-Commission-report#:~:text=A%20one%2Doff%20wealth%20tax%20is%20a%20tax%20on%20a,that%20is%20above%20the%20threshold.

A one-off wealth tax on millionaire couples paid at 1% a year for five years would raise £260 billion, according to the final report of the Wealth Tax Commission.

Da igual... Como perros viejos, aqui ya no le perdonamos un céntimo a nadie. Queremos ver esa cacareada "destrucción creativa"...

[Derby]

https://www.reuters.com/article/britain-eu/eu-governments-approve-brexit-trade-deal-german-eu-presidency-idUSL8N2J925O

EU governments approve Brexit trade deal - German EU presidency

European Union governments approved on Tuesday a trade deal regulating relations between the 27-nation bloc and Britain, paving the way for its provisional application from Jan 1, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said.

The deal, which preserves Britain’s zero-tariff and zero-quota access to the EU’s single market of 450 million consumers, was reached on Dec 24, 4-1/2 years after Britons voted by a slim margin in a referendum to leave the bloc.

“I am pleased that all EU 27 have given approval. By joining forces, we have succeeded in preventing a chaotic turn of the year,” Maas, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said on Twitter.

The approval is a formality after a deal between London and the EU last week. It is needed for the provisional application of the trade agreement from next year, before it is ratified by the European Parliament by the end of February.

The provisional trade deal is to be signed by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the chairman of EU leaders Charles Michel on Wednesday.

[CHOSEN]

No way. Ahora somos los pringaos los que queremos Kapitalismo salvaje.

Además de esto, fíjate tu que el reset ya ni lo veo.
Vamos, que lo veo imposible.
Si el reset implica poner ese contador virtual a cero, eso implica que el "hactibo" también vale cero (Debe-Haber).
Y son ellos mismos -los popularcapitalistitas- los que no quieren!!!
Si les pones en bandeja eliminar su deuda a cambio de que su activo valga cero, te dirán que no, "porque vale mucho más".
Bueno no hay que elucubrar mucho, lo vimos en el Popular.

[Yupi_Punto]

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/12/polarization-then-a-crash-michael-hudson-on-the-rentier-economy.html

Este artículo es muy bueno y va más allá del capitalismo popular nuestro, habla de neo-feudalismo popular. Y enlaza con el perdón de las deudas del padrenuestro antiguo. Como único medio de resetear una sociedad cuando el rentismo ya no da mas de sí y destruye riqueza.

¿Resetear deudas, pero manteniendo la propiedad privada?

Eso es eliminar hipotecas pero mantener alquileres.
Erections coming...

[wanderer]

[...] Y enlaza con el perdón de las deudas del padrenuestro antiguo. Como único medio de resetear una sociedad cuando el rentismo ya no da mas de sí y destruye riqueza.

Vaya... lo de siempre. El reset^TM. (Quién podía imaginárselo?   )



No way. Ahora somos los pringaos los que queremos Kapitalismo salvaje.

Debt relief? forgiveness? Las deudas pueden dejar de pagarse, pero sólo por las malas, no por por la munificencia o la buena voluntad de los acreedores. El artículo de Naked Capitalism es interesante, pero adolece de una buena proporción de pensamiento Alicia, que diría G.Bueno.

[Derby]

El artículo es del mes de abril pero la reflexión sobre el (transcurso del) tiempo está bien

http://somatosphere.net/2020/epidemic-times.html/

Epidemic Times

Epidemics like Covid-19 fundamentally change the order of time. The present moves faster, the past seems further removed, and the future appears completely unpredictable. Everyday homogenous time splits up into different and often contradictory temporal logics. The time of the virus, the time of capitalism, and the time of political decisions compete, challenge, and clash with each other, impacting human lives in different ways (Adam 1994).(...)

[Derby]

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/case-shiller-index-home-prices-surge-most-2014

Home prices surge by most in over 6 years

U.S. home prices rose in October at their fastest pace in more than six years as a stampede out of city centers resulted in the fewest properties listed for sale on record.

Home prices rose 8.4% year over year in October, according to the national Case-Shiller index, the highest since March 2014. Prices are now 25% above the peak that was reached ahead of the 2008 financial crisis.

“The data from the last several months are consistent with the view that COVID-19 has encouraged potential buyers to move from urban apartments to suburban homes,” Craig Lazzara, managing director at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in a statement.

(...) the recently approved $900 billion stimulus package and policymakers potentially extending foreclosure moratoriums will “help housing market demand and ensure continued home price growth,” she said.