GM wields the big stick

Nick Reilly, head of General Motor's international operations, is touring Europe on a mission. He's been to Poland and Belgium. Yesterday in England he met New Labour's august Lord Mandelson, the UK's First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, and Tony Woodley, deputy leader of trade union Unite. Today Reilly is in Spain.

Reilly is using the big stick of closure to threaten governments and unions. With massive overcapacity globally and car scrappage schemes ending, production cannot continue without huge additional bail-outs, reduction of capacity equivalent to three of the eight plants in Europe, and up to 10,000 job losses.

Reilly's mission is to extract the best deal he can as part of the restructuring of one of the now bankrupt behemoths of the capitalist system of production and finance. GM was one of the biggest and most powerful of the global corporations that grew to dominate the world economy during the credit-induced boom of the second half of the 20th century.

Together their power grew to the extent that it changed the role of government. To keep itself afloat, the sales of GM the vehicle producer, became increasingly dependent on the success of its own finance company GMAC – a hugely complicated operation providing insurance and mortgage services in around 40 countries as well as loans for vehicles purchased via its network of dealers.

As the 2008 financial crisis swept the world, sending banks into a spiral of decline, GMAC was given permission to join their ranks as a bank holding company so that it could access funds from the US government's Troubled Assets Relief Programme, which it promptly did. In May this year GMAC was rebranded as the Ally Bank, because according to Sanjay Gupta, GMAC's chief marketing officer “it gives the sense of a trusted partner, the attributes we are trying to convey".

Really? Operating in Britain as mortgage lender GMAC-RFC, the company was fined £2.8m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) last month for mistreating customers who fell into arrears. It has also been told to repay £7.7m, plus interest, to 46,000 of its borrowers.

After setting up as a mortgage business in the UK in 1998, GMAC-RFC grew rapidly to become one of the UK's largest mortgage lenders, but it stopped making new loans last year. The FSA's investigation of the company's lending practices between October 2004 and October 2008 found that charges for dealing with people in arrears were "excessive and unfair"; repossession proceedings were started before all other alternatives had been considered; GMAC staff were not properly trained in dealing with arrears cases and repossessions.

Workers in plants throughout Europe and the rest of the world should not be reassured by the failure of the deal to sell Opel and Vauxhall to the consortium of Canadian parts dealer Magna and Russian finance interests. Neither should they place any faith in the ability of union leaders like Woodley to secure their future.

The logic of capital is ruthless. The downward spiral into recession and slump cannot be reversed by low interest rates or injections of invented cash. GM's 25% production cuts will soon look small. GM workers should be preparing their own plans. They should discuss how to take over their industry, and convert their workplaces to production of zero-carbon vehicles as part of a massive expansion of public transport.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor
18 November 2009
http://www.aworldtowin.net/

The apostles of growth have had their day

following on from Andrew's post on the Tobin Tax.................

Gordon Brown is in big trouble. The financial system he piloted to prominence during his years as Chancellor is in ruins. Rupert Murdoch has turned The Sun against him. The majority of the UK population is in favour of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his letter-writing skills have slipped, angering army wives and mothers.

Brown’s plight is a pale reflection of the political crisis engulfing capitalist governments throughout the world as disaffection grips the masses whose lives are being destroyed by attempts to prevent a slump unparalleled in history. Despite trillions of stimulus dollars, pounds, euros, and the lowest interest rates ever set by central banks, unemployment is soaring worldwide.

In an attempt to repair the damage to his reputation as warm-hearted saviour of the global economy, Brown is trying a populist appeal to the massed ranks of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the many other well-meaning members of the Stamp Out Poverty Coalition.

At the weekend G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Scotland, Brown took up Brendan Barber of the TUC’s call for a tax on financial transactions within the UK – something within the powers of the national government, at least in theory. Having resisted the 30 plus year-old Tobin-tax campaign till now, the UK’s prime minister upped the stakes on the TUC, declaring his support for a tax on global financial transactions.

The chorus of disapproval was almost deafening.

The response from Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner gave a clear and succinct voice to the objective force that is capital. Geithner said there was broad agreement that "growth remains the dominant policy imperative across our economies". US unemployment, which hit a 26-year-high at 10.2% in October, highlighted a "very tough economic environment" that will take a period of sustained growth to correct.

"Government policy has to provide a bridge to growth led by the private sector," he said. "We're now in the middle span of that bridge." In an interview with Sky News, Geithner added: “A day-by-day financial transaction tax is not something we are prepared to support."

Geithner, late of Goldman Sachs, insisted that government had to stay cautious (apart from giving bankers untold billions) and warned: “If we put the brakes on too quickly we will weaken the economy and the financial system, unemployment will rise, more businesses will fail, budget deficits will rise, and the ultimate cost of the crisis will be greater." In other words, business as usual is the goal.

Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF joined the opposition to a transactions tax. Flaherty said Canada was working out how to reduce taxes, while Strauss-Kahn opted for a politer more diplomatic response – it’s just too difficult to measure international transactions. Unsurprisingly the banks including Barclays and HSBC aren’t in favour either.

All of the voices in this song-fest are united in their blind subservience to the status quo. The chorus against a tax on financial transactions shows two things. Firstly, reform of the global capitalist financial system is out of the question. Secondly the dependent relationship that links the state to the productive and financial components of the capitalist economy has to be shattered before we can move forward.

The world is now ready for a society that places the satisfaction of needs as its primary goal. Rather than attempting to tax the proceeds of gambling in the global casino, the casino should be shut down and the capitalist state deconstructed. Geithner, Brown and the other apostles of capitalist growth have had their day.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor
www.aworldtowin.net

'Superbank' throws 5,000 on scrapheap

From today's Morning Star

Lloyds Bank has been accused of "corporate arrogance" and forcing workers to pay for fat cats' mistakes after it announced plans to slash thousands of jobs.

In a fresh wave of cuts designed to reduce costs, Lloyds Banking Group will axe up to 5,000 jobs across the country next year within the group-operations, insurance and retail sectors as a result of a series of reorgnisational moves.

Lloyds has already cut around 10,000 jobs since it took over the failed Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) at the end of last year to form a "superbank."

The impact of the recession caused the government, which holds a 43 per cent stake in the bank, to bail it out to the tune of £17 billion. And only last week the government announced a further £5.7bn investment.

Left Economics Advisory Panel (LEAP) chairman John McDonnell MP said: "The government has just handed another £5.7bn in public money to Lloyds and within a week the bank has announced a further 5,000 job losses.

"This is another slap in the face for the Chancellor and is another reason why we have consistently called for full nationalisation and public control so that public money is not used to subsidise job losses and bankers' and shareholders' greed.

"Yet again this demonstrates that it is the working people who are paying for this recession while the bankers profiteer."

Unite national officer Rob MacGregor has called on Lloyds to put all job losses on hold until it agrees not to enforce any compulsory redundancies.

He said: "This announcement of 5,000 job losses demonstrates the depth of corporate arrogance within this taxpayer-supported bank.

"This country's financial sector should be looking towards the future rather then continuing to slash jobs without proper consideration of how to rebuild the public's confidence in our tarnished banking sector.

"Today marks the start of another dark week for finance workers.

"The government cannot afford to continue to look the other way as hard-working families are punished in this manner."

Ged Nichols, general secretary of the Accord union which represents the largest number of former HBOS staff now working for Lloyds, added: "We always recognised that some job losses were inevitable as Lloyds TSB integrated HBOS operations, but the scale of the changes will leave many staff in shock.

"Some of those who are affected will have a long wait before anything definite happens and they may find the uncertainty very difficult to cope with."

But a statement from the bank has argued that the cuts will be "significantly mitigated."

Lloyds group integration director Mark Fisher said: "We have mitigated the impact on positions through redeployment and the release of contractors and temporary staff."

Tobin Tax conversion by Brown?

At the G20 Summit, Gordon Brown has suggested a Tobin Tax (a tax on financial transactions) to pay for the global bank bailouts and deficits. This came as a massive shock not only to other global leaders, but to all those who have been campaigning for such a tax for several years.

At Prime Minister's questions less than a year ago, Alan Simpson MP suggested a Tobin Tax to "deter speculators from playing the terribly destructive role that they have played in throwing us into the current recession". Brown's response was that a Tobin Tax "has been found by many people who have looked at it not to be implementable".

Just a month before that another Campaign Group MP - Neil Gerrard - was dismissed by Treasury Minister Stephen Timms who said, "The Government have previously studied the technical implications of a proposed tax on sterling currency transactions and reached the view that there would be economic distortions across a range of activities beyond just the foreign exchange markets, the cost of which would be likely to far outweigh the relative costs of raising finance via other mechanisms that Governments use".

No one has yet explained Brown's Damascene conversion. Nevertheless, the severity of the UK's deficit caused the ongoing bank bailouts means that the time is exactly right to consider a tax that could raise billions from the finance sector. Surely logic hasn't reached Brown's thinking?

The mother of all bail-outs

In the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics, the New Labour government has put in a credible bid for victory in the financial events with the sums spent on bailing out the banks. The increasing size of the bail-outs shows one thing – the crisis is getting worse rather than better.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has so far received a world-record £53.5 billion since the onset of the crisis in 2007. That accounts for most of the total of £74 billion of taxpayers’ money the government has put into the banks, including Lloyds and HBOS, over the last two years.

The latest £25.5 billion for the RBS announced by Chancellor Darling yesterday is part of a second bank bail-out which adds up to nearly £40 billion, which is more than the amount handed over in 2008. The government is hoping this will keep the banks afloat whilst they tear themselves apart under direction from the EU’s competition commission.

The dismemberment of systemically important “too-big-too-fail”’ banks is a hot topic for the world’s financial community, but there is no agreement on a co-ordinated package of regulation and reform. Some want to return to the regime established in the wake of the 1929 crash which separated high-risk investment – gambling – from the relatively safer, but less profitable business of balancing deposits and lending.

Others, like the IMF, are busy trying to work out how to reduce the grossly unsustainable government deficits resulting from attempts to prevent global meltdown. All of the schemes under discussion concentrate their attention on repairs to the financial system. None of these can work however.

Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ leading commentator puts it starkly: “It is idiotic to discuss the reduction of the huge fiscal deficits, without considering the nature of the offsetting adjustments in the private and external sectors.” What he implies is that the financial system can’t be fixed without an “extremely perilous” return to credit-led growth.

Yesterday the Indian government gave its verdict on the health of the global economy. It swapped $6.7 billion of its US paper dollars for 200 tonnes of gold bullion put up for sale by the IMF. This is the latest and strongest indication that the Asian countries are moving away from a reliance on the declining dollar. India’s finance minister couldn’t have put his reasons clearer. He said the economies of the US and Europe have collapsed.

The contradictory movement of the tectonic plates of the capitalist financial and economic system is producing seismic shocks throughout the world. Even its most ardent defenders are losing faith in the possibility of a “solution” that is anything but an attempt to repeat the past.

Warren Buffet, the capitalist system’s most long-standing and successful investor of other people’s money has just bought a US railroad, in his biggest ever deal, describing it as “an all-in wager on the future of the American economy”. Burlington Northern Santa Fe is a freight company. Its biggest cargo is coal for power stations. So much for concern about global warming.

Profit-motivated growth has brought us to an historical crossroads. The capitalist road leads to economic destruction, warfare and the collapse of life-support systems. If the historical process could speak to us directly, it would surely urge humanity to move forward to a co-operative social set-up where a financial system that serves only shareholders and speculators is put out of its misery and corporations that plunder the planet become the property of the people as a whole.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor
reposted from A World to Win
http://www.aworldtowin.net

No Way to Run an Economy

I've just got back from the launch of Graham Turner's new book No Way to Run an Economy at Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop.

Thanks to getting an advanced copy I had read all but the last two pages before the launch began (I read the last two pages on the tube back to Charing Cross - like the rest of the book they were excellent).

Graham says he wrote the book - the follow up to The Credit Crunch - out of frustration at the inept handling of the economic crisis (the book is subtitled 'why the system failed and how to put it right') in the UK and US in particular - the book is scathing about the incompetence of the Obama Administration's response.

Turner highlights the misinterpretation and ignorance of Keynes that has exacerbated the current crisis, but also uses Marx to highlight the systemic failings and contradictions in modern capitalism. As Graham joked, "I've heard me be described as a Keynesian because I sometimes use Keynes to demonstrate what's wrong. I've also cited Friedman, does that make me a monetarist? I'm an economist: Marx is useful at looking at the structural problems".

The book does indeed look at the failings of central banks in the US, UK and EU - and invokes Keynes to highlight their mistakes. Likewise though the strength of this book is the more in-depth look at the structural failings and a Marxist critique of neoliberalism. In utilising these two analyses Turner demonstrates an understanding of today's globalised economy that few policymakers have grasped - and it highlights not only what a superb analyst Graham has been throughout this crisis, but how such a thorough understanding of the economy has informed that analysis.

This highly readable book is a comprehensive overview - packed into under 200 pages - of our economy and its current malaise by the most astute chronicler of this economic crisis. Buy it now - and do so from Bookmarks.

Good bank, bad bank? Peoples bank!

The European Union (EU) is expected today to approve plans for the Northern Rock bank to be split in two – so-called “good” and “bad” banks. The Rock has been state-owned since the spring of 2008.

This was an early part of New Labour’s attempts to prevent a complete meltdown after customers queued to withdraw their deposits in 2007 when the default rate on sub-prime mortgages in the United States triggered the global credit collapse.

The idea is that the “good” or profitable business will be sold back to the private sector, whilst the “bad” part containing the “toxic” non-performing loans, including the 125% mortgages pressed onto people desperate for housing at any cost, will be retained in the public sector, to be serviced from taxation.

Once EU approval is in place, the principle is likely to be extended to the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds. Supporters of the plan – and there are many from all the main parties – are keen to see wider competition. They want to open the field up to new entrants such as Tesco, Virgin and a range of foreign banks like National Australia Bank – already owner of the Clydesdale and Yorkshire.

The scheme has its roots in the 1930s’ rescue in the United States of a cascade of failing banks. Today’s proponents point to its success in Sweden after the country went through a property market collapse in 1991 which threatened the financial system.

But they choose to ignore the scale of today’s crisis which has engulfed the world’s much more highly-interconnected financial system so critical to the worldwide production and trading activities that underpin the globalised corporations.

The intertwined crises of collapsing consumer demand, shrinking global trade, declining manufacturing and inactive credit markets spell the end of the post-war era of a spiralling growth of commodity production fuelled by cheap labour and mountains of debt.

Plans to restore the financial system to profitability are necessary but not sufficient to restore the capitalist economy to the growth it so badly depends upon for survival.

Throughout its three and a half centuries, the capitalist system has alternated between periods of competitive growth fuelled by the credit that relied on the impossible dreams of ever-increasing profit and the crashes that followed when the interest payments ceased. As the dust clears it reveals the massive overcapacity that must be eliminated before a renewed period of growth can begin. That is the stage of the crisis that we are in now.

The looming impact of the changing climate provides the measure of the damage inflicted on the planet by half a century of profit-motivated credit-fuelled growth. The system of production for profit must be stopped, terminated, replaced. Its replacement can be democratically-determined sustainable production by communities working co-operatively to satisfy their needs and provide opportunities to fulfil individual and collective potential.

This new era will need a system of accounting for exchange and a means of measuring and redistributing the value generated in production to fund development. It won’t need a vast edifice of speculation. Stock and foreign exchange markets can be closed, gambling in the derivatives casino ended.

With democratic control over the finance system, decisions can be made about which debts can be cancelled and which renegotiated. The “good” and “bad” capitalist banks choice is no choice at all. In their place we want genuine people’s banks that protect savings and extend social investment.

It’ll need a social revolution to make these changes, but what’s the alternative?

Gerry Gold
Economics editor
reposted from A World to Win
http://www.aworldtowin.net/index.html