C.J. Howard, political novel “Cybercash”

See it on Amazon USA:

See it on Amazon Canada:

See it on Amazon UK:

or, in Australia at:

Please ask your favorite bookstore and your local library to order

the book: The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles,

by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 2010, 300 p. ISBN: 978-1616141721.

*****The French version of the book is also now available. See:

http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1132

or on Amazon Canada

_____________________________________

Posted, Tuesday January 4, 2011 at 5:30 am

Email to a friend:

or click on Blog at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com

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Economics and ethics at the forefront

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COASTAL BREEZE NEWS

“Economics and Ethics at the Forefront”, p. B2

Dec. 2, 2010

Few are more poised to speak about economics and ethics and how they relate to each other than economist and philosopher Rodrigue Tremblay, an emeritus professor of economics and finance at the University of Montreal and a part time resident of Marco Island with his wife Carole. Dr. Tremblay is the author of thirty nonfiction books, including a basic textbook in Economics, and the 2010’s The Code for Global Ethics (Prometheus Books), and he writes an international blog about geopolitics on the Internet (www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/blog) that is posted in ten languages.

Now that he is semi-retired, Dr. Tremblay feels that he has more time to devote to big issues. He is particularly worried that our current economic and financial problems are as much moral as technical in nature. “Why do political leaders seem to be lying most of the time? Why is uncontrolled greed so prevalent in corporate boardrooms? … Why does materialism seem to trump everything else? Why do we have the uneasy feeling that our society is going in the wrong direction? The very fact that we have to raise such questions may be a sign of the times,” Dr. Tremblay wrote in a recent blog entitled “The Moral Dimension of Things”. “Historically”, he says, “it can be shown that when the moral environment in a society is deteriorating, problems tend to pile up.”

Tremblay thinks that we are presently living in one of those times, characterized by deep and entrenched political corruption, by routine abuse of power and disregard for the rule of law in high places, and by unchecked greed, fraud and deception in the economic sphere. The results are all there to see: Severe and prolonged economic and financial crises, rising social inequalities and social injustice, increasing intolerance toward individual choices, the disregard for environmental decay, the rise of religious absolutism, a return to whimsical wars of aggression (or of pre-emptive wars), to blind terrorism, and to the repugnant use of torture, and even to genocide and to blatant war crimes. These are all indicators that our civilization has lost its moral compass.

And devising such a moral compass is the central object of his most recent book, The Code for Global Ethics. In it, Dr. Tremblay postulates that many of our problems and threats are not only severe but they have also become global in nature. He also thinks that our scientific and technological progress is advancing faster than our moral progress, with the consequence that problems seem to arise faster than our moral ability to face them and solve them. Dr. Tremblay doesn’t hesitate to place part of the blame on old religion-based rules of morality, essentially because they have not incorporated new scientific knowledge discovered over the last four centuries.

Indeed, Dr. Tremblay stresses three facts that have changed forever our worldview and humans’ vision of themselves in the Universe. They are:

• Galileo’s proof, in 1632, that the Earth and humans were not the center of the Universe.

• Darwin’s discovery, in 1859, (“On the Origin of Species”) that humans are the outcome of a very long natural biological evolution.

• And, the Watson-Crick-Wilkins-Franklin’s discovery, in 1953, of the structure of the double helix DNA molecule in human cells, and the devastating knowledge that humans share more than 98 percent of the same genes with chimpanzees.

These discoveries have tremendous consequences for our moral stance and for the pursuit of a global civilization.

Asked what a more universal civilization would look like, Dr. Tremblay answers the following:

“First and foremost, the scope of human empathy would be more universal and more comprehensive, and would not merely apply to some chosen people, to members of a particular religion or to persons belonging to a particular civilization. In practice, this would require that we establish a higher threshold of human morality, beyond the traditional norm of the Golden Rule (“Treat others as you would have others treat you.”) It would require that we adopt what I call a Super Golden Rule of humanist morality that incorporates the humanist rule of empathy: “Not only do to others as you would have them do to you, but also, do to others what you would wish to be done to you, if you were in their place.” — Of course, the corollary also follows: “Don’t do to others what you would not like to be done to you, if you were in their place.”

Dr. Tremblay does not believe that we currently live in such a global civilization. “My best hope, he says, “is that we will avoid falling back into an age of obscurantism and of decadence, and that we will be able to build a truly humanist civilization for the future.”

To meet the basic criterion for such a future global civilization, Dr. Tremblay establishes ten fundamental principles in The Code for Global Ethics.

Sunshine Booksellers on 677 South Collier Blvd. in Marco Island will host a book signing session for Dr. Tremblay’s The Code for Global Ethics, on Tuesday, December 7, from Noon to 2:00 pm. For more information, call (239)393-0353 or (239)389-1688.

For further reference, see “The Code for GLOBAL ETHICS, Ten Humanist Principles”, [ISBN: 978-1616141721], by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz and published this year by Prometheus Books in the United States.

Rodrigue Tremblay

is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal

and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com. He is the author of the book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

The book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, has just been released by Prometheus Books.

Please visit the book site at:

See it on Amazon USA:

See it on Amazon Canada:

See it on Amazon UK:

or, in Australia at:

Please ask your favorite bookstore and your local library to order

the book: The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles,

by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 2010, 300 p. ISBN: 978-1616141721.

*****The French version of the book is also now available. See:

http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1131

or on Amazon Canada

_____________________________________

Posted, Tuesday December 7, 2010, at 5:30 am

Email to a friend:

or click on Blog at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com

Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in French) to:

N.B.: Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise.

Disclaimer: All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly attributed.

Please register to receive free alerts on new postings of articles.

Send an email with the word "subscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com

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The above is presented for educational purposes only.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The Fed and the Debased “Imperial Dollar”: Future Inflation,

Timid Economic Growth and

Higher Interest Rates Ahead

by Rodrigue Tremblay

"Under a paper money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation."

Ben Bernanke, future Fed Chairman (in 2002)

“My thesis here is that cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities in Japan could help solve the problems that each policymaker faces on its own. Consider for example a tax cut for households and businesses that is explicitly coupled with incremental BOJ purchases of government debt – so that the tax cut is in effect financed by money creation. Moreover, assume that the Bank of Japan has made a commitment, by announcing a price-level target, to reflate the economy, so that much or all of the increase in the money stock is viewed as permanent.”

Ben Bernanke, future Fed Chairman (in 2002)

“The Fed, in effect, is telling the markets not to worry about our fiscal deficits, it will be the buyer of first and perhaps last resort. There is no need - as with Charles Ponzi - to find an increasing amount of future gullibles, they will just write the check themselves. I ask you: Has there ever been a Ponzi scheme so brazen? There has not.”

Bill Gross, PIMCO's managing director

On Wednesday, November 3rd, the Bernanke Fed announced that it stands ready to resume money printing to stimulate the economy through quantitative money easing, an euphemism for printing more dollars. Indeed, it intends to buy $600-billion of longer-term Treasury securities until the end of the second quarter of 2011, plus some $300 billion of reinvestments, on top of the some $1.75 trillion of various types of securities, many of which were mortgage backed securities, that it has added in 2009 to its balance sheet, currently standing at a total of $2.3 trillion. There could even be additional increases in newly printed money as the Fed intends to "regularly review and adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability."

After the election of fiscal conservatives on November 2nd, it seems that printing money is the only instrument left for the Obama administration to stimulate the economy. I fail to see, however, what is “conservative” about that. Actively debasing a currency to stimulate an economy used to be a Third-World economic recipe, —A recipe for disaster. Now, the United States government feels that is the only way to get out of the economic doldrums.

But U.S. economic problems are essentially structural in nature, and are due to a bad housing mortgage policy, a bad industrial policy, a bad financial policy, a bad fiscal policy, a bad foreign investment policy, too much entitlement debt, severe demographic problems related to the aging baby-boomers, and to very costly wars abroad. Relying exclusively on monetary quick fixes to correct them misses the mark and may have serious unintended negative consequences down the road.

In fact, it is likely that in the long run, this extreme monetary policy risks exacerbating rather than correcting the problems. Economic structural problems cannot be corrected with monetary means. They rather require real economic solutions. That means correcting the housing mortgage mess and devising an industrial strategy, a fiscal strategy, and an investment strategy that can put the economy back on its tracks of economic growth.

But, for better or worse, the Federal Reserve Board (Fed) seems to be the only branch of the U.S. government left that can still function properly, i.e. that is not caught in a permanent political gridlock. As a consequence, for the time being at least, bankers are in charge of the U.S. economy. Since they are the ones who created many of the current problems, this is not very reassuring.

Let's remind ourselves that the Fed is a semi-public, semi-private organization that has a long history of creating financial asset price bubbles in the U.S and around the world, essentially because the U.S. dollar is an international key-currency widely used around the world and is an important part of other central banks' official reserves.

Thus, the real danger is that the Fed will again overdo it and create unmanageable financial and monetary bubbles in the coming years. —It did it in the past. It did it in the late 1960's and early '70s, and we witnessed the same scenario unfolding with the Greenspan Fed in the late 1990s, when excessive easy money helped inflate the Internet and tech stock market bubble. We saw this again in the early 2000s, when easy Fed money helped inflate the housing bubble. And now, we're seeing it again with the Bernanke Fed. As a general rule, a central bank should not push the monetary gas pedal to the floor and be obliged to slam on the monetary brakes later, thus placing the real economy on a roller-coaster of booms and busts. That is not the way to run a large economy.

But because of the circumstances, the Fed may be at it again. This time it is busy creating a massive bond bubble, some important currency misalignments and a massive gold and commodity price bubble. We should also not forget that abnormally low interest rates and lower bond yields increase the present value of pension liabilities of most defined benefit pension plans.

Therefore, I would not be surprised to see a pension crisis developing in the coming years under the current Fed monetary policy. Of course, all of these bubbles are interrelated but when they come crashing down, four or five years down the road, maybe sooner, the economy may then be in worse shape than it is today. My most likely scenario is for the Fed to keep the monetary gas pedal way down until the 2012 election, and then slam on the monetary brakes thereafter to salvage what will be left of the imperial dollar.

If so, this could be a partial repeat of Japan's experience in mismanaging its economy in the early 1990's until 2000, a period known as the lost decade.

The current Fed's monetary policy is to flood financial markets with liquidity, i.e. newly created dollars, and, in the process, devalue the U.S. dollar, spur American exports and prevent deflationary expectations from taking hold and from making already high debt loads even heavier. For this, the Fed has been engaged since 2009 in round after round of money creation and interest rate reductions to the point of pushing short-term monetary rates close to zero and keeping short-term real rates negative. But if the economy is in a liquidity trap, as it is fair to assume it is, although a central bank can print all the money it wants, this is unlikely to stimulate the real economy for very long. —This is like pushing on a string. Printing money, if it is an emergency temporary measure, can help mitigate the effect of having too much debt and debt-service costs relative to income, as is the case today with many debtors in a debt liquidation mode. However, if this becomes a feature of monetary policy for too long, it can have disastrous consequences.

In general, it can be said that the Fed can manipulate short term interest rates by artificially increasing demand for short term securities, but inflation expectations are a big component of long term interest rates and are much less influenced by the Fed. Therefore, if the Fed's intention of printing large amounts of new money raises fears of future inflation, long term interest rates may rise rather than fall, and this is bound to hurt long-term productive investments.

Moreover, make no mistake, with globalized financial markets, a large chunk of the newly created dollars is flowing out of the United States and is invested in higher interest rate countries, pushing the dollar further down and these countries' currencies further up. Of course, some of the newly created money will immediately find its way in the stock market, but there is no certainty that this will induce already stretched banks to increase their banking loans to businesses.

Another consequence is this: The current outflow of U.S. dollars helps keep the dollar exchange rate low, but when the Fed is forced to aggressively raise interest rates, as it will inevitably be forced to do later on, the reverse will happen and the U.S. dollar will likely overshoot and then become overvalued. This is the case today with the Japanese yen which became unduly strong when the Japanese carry trade (too much cheap money invested abroad returns home) collapsed.

What counts for most people, however, is that the Fed’s zero-interest rate policy has not cured the structural housing mortgage crisis, since home foreclosures are still very high. The Fed now places most of its hopes on a currency devaluation, which is the old trick of the “beggar thy neighbor” policy, i.e. trying to export one country's unemployment to its trading partners by devaluating the currency. This was a form of protectionism much relied upon during the 1929-39 Great Depression. This may work for a while, at least as long as other countries can absorb American exports without launching their own money printing process in order to prevent an appreciation of their currencies.

Indeed, is it likely that countries which see their currencies being revalued by the Fed will remain passive? The Fed is implicitly making the bet that these countries will not retaliate, and that the international dollar-based currency system will remain intact. But for how long? Sooner or later, some central banks around the world will have no choice but to impose capital controls in order to slow down the inflow of unwanted outside money and the onslaught of imported inflation ,and prevent their exchanges rates from rising too high too fast. If they do, the entire process of economic globalization may begin to unravel.

Meanwhile, foreign central banks, for example, could accelerate their rush to dump the U.S dollar and to accumulate gold and other more stable currencies such as the euro, the Swiss franc, the British pound, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar. China has already begun to do just that. The share of dollar official reserves would then decline from about 60 percent presently to perhaps less than 50 percent. That may signal the beginning of the end for the “imperial dollar” which has dominated the international monetary system since the Bretton Woods conference of 1944.

This is to be followed closely.

_____________________________________

Rodrigue Tremblay

is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal

and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com. He is the author of the book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

The book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, has just been released by Prometheus Books.

Please visit the book site at:

See it on Amazon USA:

See it on Amazon Canada:

See it on Amazon UK:

or, in Australia at:

Please ask your favorite bookstore and your local library to order

the book: The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles,

by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 2010, 300 p. ISBN: 978-1616141721.

*****The French version of the book is also now available. See:

or on Amazon Canada

_____________________________________

Posted, Tuesday, November 9, 2010, at 5:30 am

Email to a friend:

http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1129.htm

or click on Blog at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com

Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in French) to:

N.B.: Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise.

Disclaimer: All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly attributed.

Please register to receive free alerts on new postings of articles.

Send an email with the word "subscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com

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Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information and educational purposes only and is not intended in any way as personal advice of any sort.

Comments (7)

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Save the Banks and Kill the Economy

by Rodrigue Tremblay

"The problems we face today cannot be solved by the minds that created them."

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921

"I don't see (subprime mortgage market troubles) imposing a serious problem. I think it's going to be largely contained."

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, April 20 2007

"Providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often ... take unproductive risks at government expense. The typical result ... is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline."

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), (Study of financial crises from 1970 to 2007)

"The dirty little secret ... is that every Republican in this country wants Obama to fail, but none of them have the guts to say so; I am willing to say it."

Rush Limbaugh, radio activist, February 27, 2009

It has become a truism to say that the Democrats and the Obama administration now “own” the crucial issue of the economy. Justly or unjustly, voters are bound to hold them accountable for the poor state of the U.S. economy. This is not an enviable political position to be in just before an election, at a time when disgusted voters are most angry and very anxious about the economy and their economic future. Recent polls indicate that nearly two-thirds of Americans think their nation is in a state of decline and that the economy will remain in the same recessionary state or get worse next year.

Contrary to what President Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the 1930s, President Barack Obama did not confront the banking industry head-on after fraudulent practices caused one of the worst financial crises in U.S. history. In particular, he did not reverse the blanket financial deregulation that the Clinton and Bush administrations engineered in 1999, in 2000, in 2004, in 2005 and in 2007 that allowed for creating mortgage-linked synthetic subprime securities and for betting against them. Instead, his economic operatives (Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Orszag, Emanuel, (L.A.) Sachs, Romer, Bair, ...etc.) threw trillions of public dollars to the largest banks, allowing top bankers to keep enjoying hundreds of million of dollars in yearly bonuses, at a time when some 300,000 Americans are losing their homes through foreclosures every month. Such a persistent epidemic of home foreclosures is creating a tremendous drag on the economy, besides being a social disaster. —The system that is responsible for so many home foreclosures has not been fixed, although valiant attempts have been made to mitigate the process.

Meanwhile, also with the intention of saving the largest banks, regulators began pressing the banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. The Bernanke Fed went so far as to lend money to the largest banks at zero interest rate, while paying interest on the excess reserves the banks kept at the Fed, a practice that resulted in an outright gift to the banks.

All these policies have resulted in tightening credit availability and in provoking the largest plunge in the M3 money supply since the Great Depression. As long as this condition endures, there won't be any substantial economic recovery in the United States.

Just as Obama did for the wars, when he kept in position and even promoted Bush operatives Gates and Petraeus, Obama kept or brought back as his economic team some of the very Wall Street-connected people who were responsible for creating the conditions that led to the financial crisis in the first place.

Now, at mid-term, President Barack Obama is saddled with the devastating image of a defender and promoter of Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and is viewed by many as having sided with Wall Street bankers against Main Street folks, just as George W. Bush did with his Goldman Sachs-connected Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his banking bailouts. To many Americans, indeed, the Obama administration looks more and more like a third-term Bush II administration. For many Americans, it's a nightmare.

The biggest mistake that President Barack Obama seems to have made, at the beginning of his mandate, was to not disassociate himself more clearly from the previous Bush administration. Now, it's too late, and unfortunately for him and the divided Democrats, they are poised to suffer the wrath of an enraged and disillusioned electorate.

Indeed, with U.S. real unemployment rate hovering around 17 percent, with 3 out of 4 workers telling pollsters that they doubt that their wages will increase next year, with many American households' financial situation deteriorating, with home foreclosures approaching 10 million, with huge fiscal deficits and future tax hikes likely, with the Bernanke Fed adopting third-world monetary policies in monetizing the public debt, and with an overall anemic economic growth, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are going into the November 2 midterm elections with many monkeys on their backs and very little public confidence.

The only thing that runs in their favor is the poor quality and vision of their Republican opponents who have followed an obstructionist strategy and have sided time and again with lobbyists, thus blocking most attempts to straighten things up. Only a credible campaign to persuade the electorate in extremis that Democrat incumbents are “less worse” than their Republican opponents, coupled with a high turnout at the polls could prevent a Democratic bloodbath in the U.S. Congress, especially in the House of Representatives, next November. —If not, President Barack Obama will officially become a lame-duck president after November 2, and Congress will be paralyzed at a very crucial time when strong leadership is required to get out of the economic mess. This is a most unappealing perspective.

_____________________________________

Rodrigue Tremblay

is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal

and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com. He is the author of the book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

The book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, has just been released by Prometheus Books.

Please visit the book site at:

See it on Amazon USA:

See it on Amazon Canada:

See it on Amazon UK:

or, in Australia at:

Please ask your favorite bookstore and your local library to order

the book: The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles,

by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 2010, 300 p. ISBN: 978-1616141721.

*****The French version of the book is also now available. See:

or on Amazon Canada

_____________________________________

Posted, Tuesday, September 14, 2010, at 5:30 am

Email to a friend:

http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1129.htm

or click on Blog at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com

Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in French) to: