Post-'Fiscal Cliff,' Four Themes To Shape Markets In The New Year (Demo)

On January 13, 2012, Don Lee and Jim Puzzanghera wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the Federal Reserve hopes to bring unemployment below 6.5 percent. The strategy marks a dramatic change in policy, made easier by low inflation.

In the final analysis, JOB OPPORTUNITIES for the majority of Americans is headed to a dead end due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, which are destroying and degrading jobs.

The Federal Reserve is dragging with in-action. There is no question that the Federal Reserve System needs to be reformed  to act as a purveyor of economic growth. The focus should be on OWNERSHIP CREATION, which will result in real JOB CREATION as a result of future economic growth.

Influential economists and business leaders, as well as political leaders, should read Harold Moulton’s The Formation Of Capital, in which he argues that it makes no sense to finance new productive capital out of past savings. Instead, economic growth should be financed out of future earnings (savings), and provide that every citizen become an owner.

The Federal Reserve, which has been largely responsible for the powerlessness of most American citizens, should set an example for all the central banks in the world. Chairman Benjamin Bernanke and other members of the Federal Reserve need to wake-up and implement Section 13 paragraph 2, which directs the Federal Reserve to create credit for local banks to make loans where there isn’t enough savings in the system to finance economic growth. We should not destroy the Federal Reserve or make it a political extension of the Treasury Department, but instead reform it so that the American citizens in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Regions become the owners. The result will be that money power will flow from the bottom up, not from the top down––not for consumer credit, not for credit that doesn’t pay for itself or non-productive uses of credit, but for credit for productive uses to expand the economy’s rate of growth.

The systemic injustices of monopoly capitalism can only be addressed by comprehensive reforms to the tax, monetary and inheritance policies favoring the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to low-wage countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.

The unworkability of the traditional market economy is evidenced by the diverse and growing deficits––federal budget deficit, trade deficit, city, county and state budget deficits––which are making it increasingly impossible for governments at every level to function. The increasing deficit burden is the result of the growing numbers of people who cannot earn, from legitimate participation in production, enough income to support themselves and their families. Thus government is obliged to “redistribute” to starve off economic collapse. The key means of redistribution is taxation––taking from the legitimate producers and giving to the non- or under-producers––to make up the economy’s ever wider income and purchasing power shortfalls.

The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Those who control money control the laws that foster wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery. These laws can and should be changed by the 99 percent and those among the 1 percent who are committed to a just and economically classless market economy, true equality of opportunity, and a level playing field in the future for 100 percent of Americans. By adopting economic policies and programs that acknowledge every citizen’s right to become a capital worker as well as a labor worker, the result will be an end to perpetual labor servitude and the liberation of people from progressive increments of subsistence toil and compulsive poverty as the 99 percent benefits from the rewards of productive capital-sourced income.

The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”

Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687

Sign the WhiteHouse.gov petition at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reform-federal-reserve/PhY3Jswk

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bernanke-stimulus-20121213,0,2161646.story

• “Yield desperation” deepens. For investors and savers, a major downside of central banks’ ultra-low-interest-rate policies since 2008 has been a dwindling number of investments that pay decent interest income. That situation got much worse this year.

Weak economic growth and the Fed’s continued massive purchases of longer-term U.S. Treasury bonds drove the 10-year T-note yield to a generational low of 1.39 percent in late July. It has since rebounded to 1.70 percent, but that’s still just half what the yield was in early 2011.

Investment in real productive capital growth will result in a far better profit dividend return than U.S. Treasury bonds. This action is related to the previous recommendation to reform the Federal Reserve.

Conventionally, most people do not have the right to acquire productive capital with the self-financing earnings of capital; they are left to acquire, as best as they can, with their earnings as labor workers. This is fundamentally hard to do and limiting. Thus, the most important economic right Americans need and should demand is the effective right to acquire capital with the earnings of capital. Note, though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through the “stock market exchanges,” purchased with their earnings as labor workers, their stock holdings are relatively miniscule, as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners.

• The return of the dividend. Faced with an investing public that has largely turned away from equities, many U.S. companies are trying to attract buyers to their shares with an Eisenhower-era strategy: the promise of cash back.

Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index are on track to pay $281 billion in regular dividends to shareholders this year, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P in New York. That would be a record for any year and a 17 percent increase from 2011.

Dividend payout is the key to future economic growth and combined with Federal Reserve reform would enable enable working and non-working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company or other companies and pay for it out of its future dividend yield––on the promise of the capital investment’s future income. This policy direction needs to be designed so that the workers and other owners receive the full property rights and full profit dividend earnings as owners, including full voting rights, not simply treated as beneficial owners with power concentrated at the top of the company, without any accountability or transparency. Under this scenario, employees and non-employees can acquire capital ownership in existing and future growth companies with the earnings of capital. National capital credit insurance would provide the necessary pledge of security for the payback of the capital investment loans.

Capital formation investments are made by companies annually based on projections a number of years out (at least 5 to 10 years) with the expectation that the investment will pay for itself as a result of sustainable growth and consumer demand. Thus, the concept embraces the idea that capital formation is self-financing. The question is who pledges the security and takes the risk of failure to return the expected yield from which to repay the loan.

Such polities, based on Kelsonian binary economic theory, avoids the gambling trade and Wall Street firms that play with your money. This would circumvent that. According to binary economist Louis Kelso: “In a single transaction, you finance tools for the employer and ownership for the employees. The pre-tax yield of corporate assets of prosperous companies varies from 25 to 60 percent. The yield on secondhand securities is around five or six percent. Sure, with capital gains, you can get a little more, but don’t forget, that’s a zero-sum game; for every gainer, there’s a loser. Wall Street doesn’t fly any airplanes or raise any corn or do anything else in the way of producing products and services. It just plays games with your dough. And when you take it out in pensions, you’re going to get less than the company put in for you. You have to; that’s the dynamics of it.”

Capital credit is far more rewarding than consumer credit to, for example, purchase a home. Capital credit is restricted to the purchase of assets that are expected to pay for themselves out of the revenue generated from the capital investment, which it financed, and therefore these assets are expected to earn a continuing flow of profit for whoever owns the assets. Consumer credit, on the other hand, does not generate its own repayment, and in order for the user to repay they must rely on other resources––for most Americans that means their labor worker earnings and personal savings.

What historically empowered America’s original capitalists was conventional savings-based finance and the pledging or mortgaging of assets, with access to further ownership of new productive capital available only to those who were already well capitalized. As has been the case, credit to purchase capital is made available by financial institutions ONLY to people who already own capital and other forms of equity, such as the equity in their home that can be pledged as loan security––those who meet the universal requirement for collateral. Lenders will only extend credit to people who already have assets. Thus, the rich are made ever richer, while the poor (people without a viable capital estate) remain poor and dependent on their labor to produce income. Thus, the system is restrictive and capital ownership is clinically denied to those who need it.

Thus, as Kelso asserted: “The problem with conventional financing techniques is that they address only the productive power of enterprise and the enhancement of the earning power of the rich minority. Sustaining or increasing the earning power of the majority of consumers who are dependent entirely upon the earnings of their labor, or upon welfare, is left to government or governmentally assisted redistribution of income and to chance.”