some small bank reform suggestions

An article by Thomas Phillipson is summarized here:

“I find that the unit cost of intermediation has increased since the mid-1970s and is now significantly higher than it was at the turn of the twentieth century. In other words, the finance industry that sustained the expansion of railroads, steel and chemical industries, and later the electricity and automobile revolutions seems to have been more efficient than the current finance industry.”

He further finds “that this (annual) unit cost is around 2% and relatively stable over time. In other words, I estimate that it costs two cents per year to create and maintain one dollar of intermediated financial asset.”

The bottom-line of Philippon’s findings is that bankers’ compensation is increasing, contributing to a static unit cost, even though technology is automating:

“The income share grows from 2% to 6% from 1870 to 1930. It shrinks to less than 4% in 1950, grows slowly to 5% in 1980, and then increases rapidly to more than 8% in 2010. Surprisingly, the tremendous improvements in information technologies of the past 30 years have not led to a decrease in the average cost of intermediation, or at least not yet.”

And this is the industry we just hugely subsidized. When the state could take advantage of the information technologies, set up a bank in post offices, and pretty much supply commercial banking at a fraction of the price to mainstream America. In my view, banking should be divided up into commercial banking, investment banking, which lends to real companies, and casino banking. The latter includes all derivates and whatnot. It should simply be merged with casinos, and taken out of the financial system entirely. This would allow the gamblers to gamble to their heart's delight without affecting anything outside their sphere. If pension funds were hooked up with the poker prowess of some superbowl poker player, I think it would violate the rules in place. But pension funds are hooked up with other more dangerous poker players. Cut that thread, and we could get back to the real economy of real wealth that is basically unthreatened, at the moment, by a crisis.

christine lagarde puts on the cloak of distance, but it has a hole in it

If I could become rich simply by wishing the death of Chinese mandarin on the other side of the world, would I do it? This is a question that comes up in a famous passage in Pere Goriot, expressing the moral seduction of Rastignac by Vautrin. Rastignac asks a friend of his, Bianchon, if he remembers a passage somewhere in Rousseau “in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leaving Paris, just by an act of will?” Carlos Ginzburg, in his essay, the Killing of A Chinese Mandarin, has traced the way Rastignac’s inexact memory of Rousseau (the passage seems rather to come from Diderot and Chateaubriand) articulates a long tradition, in moral philosophy, concerning distance and the good. Ginzburg points out that distance, in the way Aristotle considered it – where it plays approximately the same role as Gyges rings, a manner of hiding oneself -  becomes, necessarily, different when distance itself becomes different. “… the emergence of a worldwide economic system had already turned the possibility of a financialgain,  involving much longer distances than Aristotle had imagined even in his wildest flights of phantasy,into reality.”

Distance is, in Ginzburg’s take, not portable; it is not something one can wrap around oneself. It is relational and spatial or temporal. However, if we consider it a kind of hiding, it does seem portable. When the airplane pilot drops bombs, the distance is not only relational, a matter of weakening the tie of sympathy that would make the pilot save someone near and not even that dear – but the distance is also portable. It is carried by the pilot into the scene of the bombing; it operates as a cloak.

As a cloak, distance can also be imported into the near. We have seen this happen extensively in the last thirty years. When complaints are made, in the U.S., that free trade is, for instance, destroying the middle class, it is not uncommon for neo-classical economists to take the near – the U.S. worker – as self-indulgent, and the far – the poor third world worker – as the true worthy moral subject. This seems like a rhetorical trick too far… who could possible buy this story? And yet this variation of the distance story is rather popular among economists, who, perhaps to compensate for being rich themselves and advocating policies for the rich, need to validate their own moral bones – hence, where the unfeeling U.S. worker has been killing Chinese mandarins on his way to a living wage, the free trader comes in to avenge the mandarins by denuding the worker.  In this way, the old truism, charity begins at home, is turned upside down.

There is, of course, a problem with the idea that the economist is really helping the Chinese worker – since of course this is a byproduct of helping the Chinese businessman, and the same ruthless logic applies to those Chinese workers, who, garnering a slim, slim part of the social productivity that is based on them, should never demand too much. Still, in moments of “compassion trolling”, the traditional notion of distance is reversed – or rather, the economist wears a cloak of distance that puts him or her at a distance from what is near.

Perhaps this helps us understand Christine Lagarde’s counterproductive comments about Greece. When, in her by now infamous interview with the Guardian, Lagarde was asked about the Greek meltdown, this is how it went:

“So when she studies the Greek balance sheet and demands measures she knows may mean women won't have access to a midwife when they give birth, and patients won't get life-saving drugs, and the elderly will die alone for lack of care – does she block all of that out and just look at the sums?
"No, I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens." She breaks off for a pointedly meaningful pause, before leaning forward.
"Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax."
I say this is counterproductive – because even though this does represent the true heartlessness of the predator class, even that predator class has to prey. By putting the terms of the deal so harshly, Lagarde upset the effort of the EU to entice the Greeks to take the loans that will really simply circulate back to banks and hedgefunders in the EU and the U.S. Once Greece is taken out of the picture, the plutocrats will just have to get the funding directly from the EU states – and this is going to upset people. Moreover, it is French banks and German ones that will follow the Greeks down.
So what was the compulsion there that caused this blip, this moment of truth, in which the claws came out? Perhaps it was the comfort with the cloak of distance. The millionaire to billionaire class has grown very comfortable with morality at a distance. Even if, as we know, the IMF would not lift a finger if all the little villages in Niger were thrown into the sea if if meant that Niger or Nigeria or any other place upset the system of exploitation in place, still, the image of that distant suffering has a very strong symbolic value – a strong shaming value. It can shame the near. Interestingly, the plutocrats have effortlessly poached an old left trope, which rubbed the face of the West’s prosperity in the detritus of the enslaved and the exploited, the colonized and the robbed. The plutocrats borrowed the form, not the content. And as the left has died, the right has played this game to their hearts content. Lagarde was just pushing some old buttons. She must have forgotten that you have to put on your cloak of distance properly. Just as she forgot that it was easy to discover that, as a matter of fact, she herself pays no taxes on her salary.

the scribe and the title

Almost all the titles are lost. That is, almost all the titles of the ancient Egyptian texts that we now possess are lost. “The title of the book, a summary of its contents, or the opening words, were at times written on the reverse side or at the outside of the scroll’s beginning, with the name of the author (“made by”) immediately after it. As scrolls generally lost their edges first, few titles have comedown to us. Fewer authors were identified..Sometimes, however, lists of titltes were written on the walls of temples or pyramids,though the books themselves have not survived. Small deeds and other documents at times were provided with titles. Onne book of the dead was entitled “Book of the Coming into the Day of Osiris Gathesehen, daughter of Mekheperre.” Long texts were sometimes divided by the chapter numbers, marked by ht, “house”.” (Leila Avrin, 91)

It has been a long time since Jacques Derrida published the chapters of On Grammatology concerning Rousseau and writing in Critique. Since that time, the phonocentric, logocentric paradigm in anthropology and archaeology has definitely shifted. The latest researchers on ancient Mesopotamia refer to a “cuneiform culture”, in which, contrary to the older school that saw writing as a tool captured by a scribal elite, literacy spread. Or a form of literacy, for  literacy as a uniform thing, a single kind of learned capacity, has been well and truly debunked, as archaeologists have made sense of the data they possess that show multiple forms of script and signs within script ‘domains’; they have also come to terms with such discoveries as that of Nippur and Isin, where the majority of houses so far excavated have turned up texts. Furthermore, archaeologists are now more interested in the evolution of  script types that went along with the evolution of materials on which the script could be impressed, scratched or painted, as cursive, a select number of syllobograms, and lighter materials that were easier to correct led to the invention of the personal  and business letter.

In the sixties and seventies, the Mesopotamian evidence suggested to some researchers, like Walter Ong and Jack Goody, that the invention of writing operated to change the very cognitive style of human beings. Goody’s essay on the list is The Domestication of the Savage Mind is still a tour de force survey of the effects of the text, although as he admits, his earlier notion of the text was too tied into the phonetic alphabet, which is seen as “easier” and more flexible to use, thus leading to the ability to “write down one’s thoughts.” This may actually be a property of the material one writes them down on and what one writes with – at least, the archaeologists coming after Goody have found that qualities he attributes to alphabetical writing are certainly present in pictographic or logographic systems.  

Here is the central claim, I think, Goody makes about lists:

“My concern here is to show that these written forms were not simply by-products of the interaction between writing and, say, the economy, filling some hitherto hidden “need”, but that they represented a significant change not only in the nature of transactions, but also in the ‘modes  of thought’ that accompanied them, at least if we interpret ‘modes of thought’in terms of the formal, cognitive and linguistic operations which this new technology of the intellect opened up.”

The idea, here, is not that writing itself changes modes of thought, but that writing devises do – hence, the importance of the list, or the written number. Marc Bloch, the most prominent opponent of Goody’s, has used his fieldwork in Madagascar to construct a case in which literacy, and in particular listing texts (for instance, genealogies) do not organize cultural “modes of thought”, but exist as regions within a largely oral culture. Bloch, in turn, has been attacked for the way he has elevated certain observations into generalities – that is, the way he has evolved what Clifford Geertz calls the “deep text.”

The title, I think, has not yet been enough looked at in this context – or Babel, depending on how you come down on the importance of ecriture. Certainly in oral contexts there are titles, but they seem, at least in my experience, to be very loose things. A typical titling episode would be x telling y to “tell that story about x” – with the title here being the “story about”. And in as much as this stimulus does hook onto a story, it does one of the works of calling a name – you call a name and the named thing comes. So too does the story. Interestingly, though, the “story about”, while it can tend towards a stereotypic norm (the story about the priest, the story about Mavis X, etc.) often varies in its composition. Similarly, titles can occur in oral speech that announce what is coming – not what has already been circulated. So, for instance, a person can be called into the office of his or her superior and the latter can say, I’ve called you in to talk about your tardiness (an example taken from my own life!). The monologue or dialogue that ensues has, vaguely, the title, “about X’s inability to get to work on time”. 

All of which is merely to say that oral speech does have self-labeling moments. Thus, when texts get titled, we are not speaking of a completely different communicative form from that which occurs in the oral quotidian. But I want to argue that the title is “freed” by the text, by ecriture. While it fulfills certain labeling functions, it also proceeds towards something as new, something resembling the name of a person, rather than the label of a person. When John Stuart Mill claimed that the proper name was a description, he was conflating label and name. And there is some warrant for that in names: the smith gets name Smith. But what Mill ignores, as a philosopher, is what is obvious to the sociologist: the name is enmeshed in what it means to be familiar with, to know, to love, to hate, etc. The name is not just used to label. Before children learn to use pronominal shifters, they often self-label – or so I have been assured by numerous mothers. Robert says, that chocolate is Robert’s, rather than that chocolate is mine,  because “Robert” is taken by the child to be an extension of himself in a way that “mine” – that code that refers to its message, to the tie between the individual word and the language system in which it is located – is not. “Mine” seems to be a communal dish which anyone can grab between their fingers and bite into  – “Robert’s” is a special snack reserved for Robert.

Textual devises don’t seem to have that same self-reflexivity. They seem to be labeling all the way down, so to speak. And yet if this is so, the title would simply be a label.

We know that this isn’t so. I would call this, the (en)titling instance, the moment in which the scribe enters into literature, in the broadest sense (visual, aural, scripted). The tradition that ascribes to the scribe a monopoly of power over the written meets, in this moment arising thieflike from within the devise itself, an inner movement that structurally breaks the monopoly.

musical chairs in the EU

Marcel Mauss tells a story, in his essay about the techniques of the body, about an incident he observed in WWI.  “In a gesture of collaboration, a British regiment, the Worcester, received permission to incorporate some French drummers and buglers in order to match the French military march. The result, according to Mauss, was a disaster: During almost six months, in the streets of Bailleul, long after the battle of l'Aisne [where the regiment had achieved some success], I often saw the ,following  spectacle: the regiment had conserved its English march and rhythmed it to the French. It even had at its head a small group of French infantrymen who knew how to work the clarions and who sounded the marches better than their men. The unhappy regiment of tall Englishmen could not form. All was discordant in their marching. When they tried to march in time, the music didn’t properly mark their marching. To the point where the Worcester regiment was obliged to suppress the French marching music.”

This moment of unscoring, so to speak, is the collapse of a background experience that, as Heidegger once pointed out, has some epistemological use: for the moment of collapse reveals the intricacy of the background. Heidegger, here, is merely catching up with one of the great kids’ games, musical chairs, in which collapse is an opportunity for a happy scramble, and the consecutive exclusion of the unwary players, until only one player is left.

The European economy is not – yet – World War I, but the law of scoring still applies. There is no one tune to which the nations should all march. That doesn’t mean that one can’t share instruments, but it does mean that sharing instruments does not mean dictating the music. Unfortunately, Germany, which suffered a pretty ragged 90s and an astonishing lack of growth in the last decade up to around 2006, doesn’t understand what any child should know. The German establishment did not grow because it imposed austerity; it grew because it imposed one of the commonest devises of the class war, known as squeezing the “cost” of labor – or excluding labor from the gains of productivity, however you want to put it. What this means is that the German economy is out of step with the rest of Europe. Labor costs there are going up – the working class has had it with the program of mini-jobs and a lack of any raise in wages for ten years. This means, inevitably, that there will be wage driven inflation in Germany, and that Germany will respond by the usual central bank monkeyshines: squeezing credit.

However, this policy is absolute poison for those more healthy EU nations that did not sacrifice their working classes in the 2000s. Luckily for them, in normal circumstances, the German wage  inflation should lead to higher prices in Germany, more competitive prices in Italy, and thus exports into Germany. At the same time, of course, the wage catchup should insure that German goods are not crowded out domestically.

But this isn’t happening. Keynes, supposedly, once asked one of the British bureaucrats who helped build the successful blockade of Germany in WWI why the blockade continued after the German army had laid down its arms. He was told that the bureaucrats and the Navy were so proud of having succeeded in creating the blockade that they just couldn’t bear to see it disappear simply because peace broke out. Change the characters a bit and you have the story of any bureaucracy formed to coerce a social group into agreeing to a certain arrangement.

  

The new spoils system

Mark Thoma, on Economist’s View, has posed the question, one he often refers to: why are politicians (American politicians) so indifferent to the employment problem? Meanwhile, Mark Stoller, on Naked Capitalism, has a postabout the present good fortunes of ex President Clinton and our current spoilssystem – which differs from the old spoils system in that the spoils aren’t enjoyed concurrently with one’s stint in office, but afterwards.

 

I think the Stoller post supplies some answer to the Thoma post.

If you have a return to the pre-1929 distribution of industry, and you add to that the shrinking of the unionized part of the labor force to 1910 levels, then you get lack of concern about unemployment.
A good question might be: why should politicians be concerned about unemployment?
The unemployed, I think it is safe to say, don't have the resources to lobby much, or to make available rentseeking opportunities for politicians in the case they are voted out of office, or their families while in office.
In the nineteeth century, the cheapness of the legal/political sector in America was known to every robber baron, and to the population at large. Chapters of Erie, the book by Charles and Henry Adams, has many comic illustrations of the Vanderbilt or the Gould parties buying state legislators and judges as part of the cost of business.
In the twentieth century, countervailing forces created, for a while a set of tacit norms and enforced rules that made this harder. Watergate, for instance, was driven by the fact that CREEP, the committee to re-elect Nixon, had violated these rules and needed to hide it. This would be unthinkable now. Because Creep was so innocent. A vanity candidacy financed solely by a billionaire is now just part of the view out of the window - nobody is shocked.
The two parties exist, for the most part, to raise the price on bribery. They do a very good job for their elites. The journalists, who can have their faces rubbed into a fact and will still not see it, report on this as though the whole system was driven by campaign financing. This is a pretty fiction. It is really driven by massive elite peculation. Sure, to a certain extent, to position yourself for the big money from lobbying or being absorbed into some corporate borg, you do have to get elected. And certain vain or lazy people may even limit their ambition to political office. But, in the main, elected office only gives one a force that can be sold in any number of ways to enrich one's family and friends, and that is what politics is about. Politics reflects the state of the society, and in this society, being wealthy is everything, and the rest are, at best, consumers, and at worst, losers. It is hard, at the millionaire level, to make petty distinctions between the employed and the unemployed loser. And unlike the 19th century, where the face to face dimension of politics spread bribes and actually activated certain figures to fight for an ideal (a hopelessly hokey idea today), we now have a facebook-to-facebook dimension, which has no organized power and distrusts anyone who tries to organize it - after all, that could mean jail or being accused of being a "terrorist" in the press.
Unemployment, as a political issue, is now among the dodos, like the issue of overcapitalized stock and the like. Nobody cares.

Fortune and the market 1

On November 17, 1400,a Florentine merchant named Ardingo de’ Ricci wrote a letter to some associates in Catalonia, assessing his current business activity, and concluding: “For these reasons we have not decided to traffic in these regions… and we have taken the part of navigating in the Levant, in order if possible not to diminish our resources until fortune finishes its course.” Christian Bec, from whose study I extract this long lost instance of the woes of a middleman, has ventured out from the usual pool of well known literary texts into the lesser known and ordinary texts of merchants to fix the significance and meaning of Fortuna and its courses in the early Renaissance; he found that merchants allude to fortune in a number of ways: to signify a storm at sea, an unexpected turn of events in a war, or, as with Ricci, a general commercial state.

What interests me in the latter is that clearly, a Ricci writing a letter to his investors today would use, without thinking, another word for fortune: market.

The referential range of “market” and “fortune” are, of course, not identical. In the current vogue for “markets in everything”, we still don’t see market used as a synonym for hurricane, or for the events of battle. Nor were the courses of fortune specified in terms of the supply and demand of commodities. The meeting of our terms is oblique, but not, I would claim,  insignificant. In Aby Warburg’s  seminal essay, the Last Will and Testament of Francesco Sassetti (1907), Warburg mentions that a commonality shared by lineage of writers on Fortuna in the ‘antique world’ of the Romans (from Cicero to Boethius) and the world of 14^th and 15^th century Italy (including Ficino) was the set of definitions of fortune in Latin and Italian, which included not only “”accident” and “property”, but also “windstorm”. For the see-venturing businessm, these three divided concepts designated much more only three divided properties of a Storm Fortuna, whose uncanny, unfathomable capacity for transformation from the demon of annihilation to the generously bountiful goddess of wealth evoked the elementary restitution of its originally unified mythic personality under the influence of an old, inherited anthropomorphic pattern of thought.” Americo Castro, in an essay on Don Quixote, spoke of the “unit of consciousness” in which coexist “the spritual and the physical, the abstract and the concrete” – and in this sense, Fortuna signals that kind of concept-in-practice, one that can be divided up for study among different ‘disciplines’ but that, in practice, brings together apparently discrete conceptual moments.

Understanding the overdetermined elements of fortune in the early modern period helps us get clearer about the Fortuna’s wheel – which provided as powerful an image by which to analyse the life of production and trade in the early modern era as the image of equilibrium has done to analyse the life of production and consumption in the modern era. The the wheel of fortune lost its poetic power at some point in the late 17^th century, when the first prophets of a new order – William Petty, Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert, and Bernard Mandeville, among others – devised different images, organized around circulation. But the history of units of consciousness is not a history of unilateral continuities and ruptures, any more than the history of a person is the history of his waking life. 

More socialist revolutionary propaganda - free!

The giant corporation and the state owned enterprise are cut from the same cloth. Victor Berger, the Milwaukee politician who was the first Socialist representative ever elected to the House, tried to get the Sherman Anti-Trust law overthrown in 1912. The reason was simple: according to the logic of the dominant socialist economic policy of the time, the more a corporation became a monopoly, the more it carved out a form that could be used when the state took it over. There was a natural evolution between monopoly and state ownership.

This logic was not only a powerful argument in socialist circles. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the great radical liberals in twentieth century America, also believed that the  monopoly form of the corporation rid itself of the pernicious, profit-seeking behaviors that made capitalism a bain to the common man, and promoted scientific progress and peace between labor and capital.

I understand the logic, but I believe Victor Berger and Galbraith were wrong.

This may seem irrelevant to this week’s news about the Facebook IPO, but I think events that transpired in 1911 and 1912 have a strong bearing on the 21^st century’s corporate mindset.

The facebook IPO was a public relations triumph for billionaires, certainly. While Trayvon Martin, as every rightwing commentator knows, was righteously killed because he wore a hoodie, the hoodie of Mark Zuckerman, the son of a rich dentist who has become a Forbes Magazine icon, is just an adorable sign of the clean American whiz kid. Don’t we all I-Love  him?

But the IPO was also your typical political economic disaster. The price of the stock was put at an incredible 105 times earnings. The New Economy of the nineties names, really, a ratio – that is, the rise in the ratio between price and earnings. In an early era – in the Progressive era – this had another name: overcapitalization. And instead of celebrating an economic mechanism whereby speculators are allowed and encouraged to treat themselves to stunning windfalls, the Progessives justly saw overcapitalization as waste and fraud.

Lawrence Mitchell, in The Speculation Economy, has, I think correctly, seen the first two decades of the 20^th century in America as the period in which the limits of American progressive politics – and by extension, the limits of anti-corporationism in the West – were drawn and hardened. By 1920, the attempt to reform the stock market from the root had failed.

The high point of the reform effort came in 1911. In that year, the House of Representatives passed a bill a bill that was narrowly turned down in the Senate, S. 232. S. 232 would not only have required federal incorporation of all interstate businesses. Here’s Mitchell’s description of it:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more.

S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.” (137)

Martin Sklar, in The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, summarized the spirit of the drafts prepared during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration that stood in the background of the bill’s eventual configuration  in this way: ‘whenever the amount of outstanding stock should exceed the value of assets, the secretary would require the corporation to call in all stock and issue new stock in lieu thereof in an amount not exceeding the value of assets, and each stockholder would be required to surrender the old stock and receive the new issue in an amount proportionate to the old holdings.”

I’ve already manifested my manifesto for a new Soviet version of 21^st century capitalism – one that destroys the corporate form and replaces  it with hundreds of thousands of small scale enterprises in flexible cooperative structures. It does not overturn capitalism, but it does radically turn capitalism around. The limitation of both the corporation and the state is a kind of capitalism with a human face – which is much more radical than where ‘socialism’ is at the moment. For this kind of harmony of opposites, of cooperation and competition, to really work, the speculative economy would have to be radically subordinated to production. The pleasure palace of the oligarchs, the four hundred trillion dollar derivatives structure that burdens the earth (even as it actually does not exist – truly, an extreme case of economic neuroses), will have to be burnt to the ground.

The Facebook IPO is a monument to the folly of our contemporary economic arrangements. These arrangements are undergoing a systematic change that will produce an environment in which the middle class, that compromise formation of 20^th century capitalism, has a dodo’s chance of survival. Revolution from the middle class in the 20^th century usually resulted in fascism. In the 21^st century, however, the speculative and rent-seeking echelon, by steadily increasing the divide between it and everyone else, is creating a new fusion between the middle class and its erstwhile enemies, marginals  of every type, as well as the working class. We will see what comes of it all.