Bernanke

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Bernanke Takes a Beating

Poor old Ben, I feel bad for him. Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an open letter from a long list of right wing leaning economists and other sundry analysts urging him to stop all this QE2 nonsense and get back to the proper course of reducing regulation, helping big business, and thinking of nifty ways to reduce taxes.

Well they don’t quite go that far, but you get my drift. They talk in proper terms: “… we think improvements in tax, spending and regulatory policies must take precedence in a national growth program, not further monetary stimulus.”

This is standard right wing fare and nothing new. And I mean nothing new. Not new in this crisis, and not new at any time in the past three decades.

The problem they believe is that “The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed‰Ûªs objective of promoting employment.”

This sounds awful.

Debasement of the currency? Oh, horrors!

Increased inflation? Oh, double horrors!

The end of the earth is nigh because Ben Bernanke, Republican appointee and conservative though he may be, is pushing an agenda that will result in a debased currency and run away inflation.

And what is this evil policy?

Monetary policy.

Plain and simple. Old fashioned monetary policy. Albeit with a twist: instead of intervening in the market to reduce short term rates, the Fed has resorted to buying longer maturity assets. How dare they!

All that money will inevitably create inflation and send the dollar plunging. There will be a tidal wave of debasement, hyperinflation, and civilization will end – at least at the Harvard Club. Egad. Whatever next? Deficit spending? Apocalypse pending.

Setting aside my constant commentary that I don’t see where this inflation will come from – the inflation rate is miniscule and shrinking fast. There seems to be a problem here. What other policy, pray tell, is the Fed supposed to follow in the face of high unemployment and zero interest rates? There isn’t one. It only has one policy option. And let me repeat: it’s called monetary policy. The kind you would find advocated in the text books these people teach from. Indeed one of the signatories is none other than John Taylor the author of his eponymous rule the Fed uses to determine what interest rates should be. Last I looked that rate, according to the Taylor rule, was -5.0%. Which is not possible by any other route than QE2.

I look forward to a forthcoming revision from Professor Taylor. Along with an apology for having created so evidently a stupid rule.

Let’s just be clear about QE2: it may not work because adding boatloads of cash to an economy awash with cash seems like a long shot. Especially when no one wants to invest that cash in the US. So a great deal of that cash will spill over into the global economy where it will annoy people like the Germans, Japanese, and Chinese all of whom are trying to avoid dealing with their own economic imbalances. They don’t want the dollar to fall because that decline would force them to address issues in their various domestic economies. Like reducing their exports and making more stuff for their own populations. Annoying these folks is not a bad thing when our own survival is at stake.

Further, even were it to work, QE2 looks as if it is too small to drive the economy off the rocks by itself. It needs to be complemented by fiscal policy. Which is not going to happen.

Thus the risk of inflation is practically zero. We have an economy stuck in a glut of over capacity. It is suffering rapidly declining core inflation and appears headed towards deflation. Our problems are not at all those suggested by the signatories. The private sector is stuck. There is little sign that it will improve much, if at all, from where it is now. There is one and only one way out: the government.

Therein lies the rub.

The signatories hate the notion – with a near religious commitment – that the government can do anything to help save the economy. So they want to stifle the Fed. It is a “quasi” arm of the government. So it must be stopped before it succeeds else then ideological basis for the right wing collapses.

It doesn’t matter that ordinary people have a huge stake in the success or failure of policy. Or that the policies put forward by the likes of the signatories are exactly those that caused the crisis.

No not at all.

We the people merely exist to support corporate profit making and a sound currency. Even if that means being unemployed. It’s the American way.

Any intelligent observer of the request for more support for business might ask: what should we do to help businesses invest? After all businesses a knee deep in cash and are not currently investing. What else do they need?

Bernanke answers that by lowering rates in order to induce spending.

The right wingers don’t want to go that route. They want to boost profits by giving out tax breaks. This is despite the fact that profits are good and cash flows sufficient. They want us to believe that throwing more breaks to business will somehow set them in motion.

Why? If they are not in motion now?

So I repeat: the problem is not a supply side problem. It is a demand side problem. People are not buying. So businesses are being cautious. Throwing all the cash in the world onto business balance sheets won’t change a darned thing.

One last gripe: the policy Bernanke is pursuing is straightforward monetary policy with that twist I mentioned. It is monetarism. As in Friedman, doyen of the right. Are these signatories abandoning their intellectual leader?

I wish.

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China Frenzy

Just a quick note: you will have noticed that the Chinese raised their interest rates today. They are trying to fend off inflation and a potentially nasty real estate bubble. How I wish we had done the same thing back in 2004/2005. This action will slow their domestic economy, and thus drain some of the global economy’s demand as well. My feeling is that the are trying to get their shot in before Bernanke goes ahead with his next round of easing which I expect right after the upcoming Fed meetings on November 2nd. The Chinese move will mute the Fed’s action somewhat, and make it a little more difficult to inflate the world economy. It is a classic example of two economies working in different directions and possibly offsetting each other. The Chinese would not have been forced into this move had they allowed their currency to float up from its currently rigged state. They want to keep their currency as weak as possible in order to boost exports. That can only reduce our ability to get our economy going and hurts our already abysmal job creation prospects. Meanwhile we want to weaken the dollar vis their currency to inhibit their trade and boost our own. As long as the two economies remain uncoordinated we should expect more of this head butting contest. Hopefully we take a much harder line and ignore all the Chinese protestations about the inflationary consequences of further stimulus: they want contract their demand to avoid overheating, and for the US to help out by going into contraction mode as well. Since we are already depressed that is not a viable option for us. The conflict is growing.

Watch for this to get more heated.

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What a Strange World

What a very strange world indeed.

This morning we have Joe Stiglitz, who has a reputation for being a bit of a renegade in economics, arguing against more quantitative easing in an op-ed piece for the Financial Times. At the same time we have Gavyn Davies reporting in the same paper that Bernanke is hell bent on just such a policy. Last I looked both Stiglitz and Bernanke were card carrying members of the economics elite. I wonder if they talk to each other.

Meanwhile in France the locals are all in a huff that the government is trying to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. The fun part is that the main core of the striking horde is now made up of students whose retirement is, presumably, a fair way off. The French love strikes and take to them with gusto, but this is ridiculous. By the time those students retire the government will be bankrupt as it tries to pay for retirees living for 25 to 30 years beyond their retirement age, when the funding assumed they’d all only live for about 10 years. So they had better watch what they wish for.

But back to Stiglitz and Bernanke.

The central point that Stiglitz makes is based upon the thinking that earned him the Nobel Prize a few years back. This is that the economy is inherently uncertain. Well he didn’t go that far, he is way too establishment to be that controversial. He couched it in sensible and bureaucratically acceptable terms: there are “asymmetries” of information that disrupt the smooth and perfect workings of the market place. In vernacular terms: I may know something about the thing I am selling that you, that you, the buyer, don’t. Duh. Unfortunately this is the kind of commonsense that passes for dramatic and deep insight bin theoretical economics. Anyway. Stiglitz deploys this stunning piece of thought against the proposed monetary policy we know as “quantitative easing”, or QE2 – the ‘2’ implying this would be a second version.

Here’s his argument: advocates of monetary policy assume that we know the outcome of that policy. They argue there is a clear cause and effect. The cause being the introduction of a wad of cash into the economy. The effect being a surge in investment, and thus spending, associated with that wad of cash. Stiglitz points out, correctly in my view, that the relationship between cash infusion and investment/spending is not that clear. We only have to look at the current situation to see that. The economy is awash with cash that no one seems in a hurry to invest. Plus, the banks are flush yet are not willing to lend. Small businesses especially are finding it hard to get credit, and the rates being charged when credit is granted bear little relation to the Fed funds rate. So the causal link between the central bank’s action and the real economy is less straightforward than the theorists think it is.

Nonetheless Bernanke, ever the earnest academic, is fretting about what to do with the malaise. He has written extensively on the Japanese and their ineffective approach to solving a similar crisis. He berated them for inaction and for being tentative. So his current bout of ineffective and tentative policy making must be – I assume – driving him crazy. He is hemmed in by austerity freaks and assorted other anti-social elements within the economics fraternity, but I get the sense he wants to break free and do QE2 with gusto. The problem is that QE2, like all medicines, has unfortunate side effects. Which Stiglitz, unencumbered by the need to do anything on his own account, is kind enough to point out to us. You see it isn’t just that the connection between monetary easing and investment growth is unclear, there is also the small matter of the implied losses in the easing, and the potentially disruptive effects on global currencies..

When the Fed buys a ton of assets from the markets in order to inject cash into the economy, it is taking a risk. Like all investors it now has a portfolio that rises or falls in value as interest rates rise or fall. This is awkward. The whole point of stimulus is to get the economy going. The implication of a stringer economy is that the Fed will have to raise interest rates to head off potential inflation. The moment it does this its portfolio of bonds goes down in value. In effect the Fed is buying high and selling low. Not very sound. We, the taxpayers, will presumably underwrite that loss. Just add it to our – very extensive – tab.

Then there’s the impact that all those extra dollars will have on foreign markets. They will flood out towards high return economies and thus become “hot” money capital flows into emerging markets. The governments of those nations are none too pleased at the prospect of the Fed undermining their currencies and trade. So currency and trade wars are looming. This is not at all helpful: one of the things that made the Great Depression truly great was the breakdown of trade that went along with the responses made by governments of the day.

So, Stiglitz has a good point.

His alternative is to argue for fiscal policy instead of monetary policy. This is heretical since economic orthodoxy has become beholden to monetary policy being the more efficacious and thus the preferred option. Fiscal policy is viewed as a desperate last resort. Hence the hand wringing and wailing during the whole stimulus debacle. All those orthodox economists being dragged kicking and screaming into a Keynesian policy world was not a pretty picture. Now, as things settle down somewhat, those same economists are all reverting back to type by arguing that we abandon fiscal policy and go back to using the good old monetary approach. This is, by the way, the same policy approach that pumped the economy so full of debt that we created the internet and real estate bubbles. But, hey, who’s counting those?

Yet fiscal policy is far more precise. It can be targeted exactly. And we know what it does. Spending on unemployment assistance is well known to increase demand. The relationship is tight, and as exact as can be in any economy. So too does spending on infrastructure. Fiscal policy just works. The problem is that the cost is entirely exposed for all to see: the deficit rises, and the national debt goes way up. This allows the weaker amongst us to cry wolf: they see the debt as a burden on the future and a possible problem to our creditors. They prefer either that we do not act and just suffer through a depression; or that we sweep the cost of our action under the monetary policy carpet where we can pretend there is no lingering cost at all. But nothing costs nothing. And cleaning up the mother of recessions cannot be cheap. Besides proper government investment is well known to bring long lasting returns to society. Like the internet whose research and development was a government project. Or the interstate road network. Or, more prosaically, keeping thousands of fire and police workers on the job to protect us all from calamity. Fiscal policy works.

And that’s what its opponents cannot abide. The idea that the government is actually good at providing certain services, at lower cost and with wider coverage, than any private provider could is too much for the more ideologically committed free market supporters to bear. So they do everything in their power to denigrate the effectiveness of fiscal policy. Most often without the benefit of any evidence they simply rant about it and attack the supposed increase in government in the economy.

Which brings me to my last point on this strange day.

Despite what you might have heard, the size of government has not increased. It has tracked along with the economy pretty much as usual. The way to look at this analytically is to project what government spending would be as a relationship with the economy’s normal growth path. Once we do that we see that the share of GDP represented by government spending is stable. It has not suddenly exploded and swallowed the economy whole as some of our right wing friends would argue. Not at all. The image of a huge government takeover of the economy comes from two associated phenomena. First: the private sector collapsed into a monumental funk due to its vast over indebtedness. Second: government revenues dropped like stone as a result of that collapse. Taxes dropped because incomes dropped. But government spending kept on rising. In relationship to our severely depressed economy it appears to have grown substantially. But compared with where it would be had we avoided the crisis it is normal.

Which is exactly what we want to happen. That steadiness of government spending helps offset the private sector collapse. Imagine where we would be had the government gone on an austerity kick to balance its books. Deep in depression. On second thoughts don’t imagine that. It’s too ugly to contemplate. Far too ugly.

Yet there are people who would send us down that hole.

What a strange world it has become when some serious people would wish us to be in a depression rather than spending money to save ourselves.

Very strange indeed.

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Don’t Ask, Don’t Act

The military may be having an issue with its notorious”don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but the economy is having an even bigger problem of its own. Policy makers and media don’t ask how big the problem is. Then, if they discover what’s going on by accident, they don’t act proportionately. Don’t ask, don’t act is not the basis for success in today’s crisis. It is the basis for a goodly dose of Japanese disease, which is something we should all want to avoid like the proverbial plague.

The New York Times, belatedly, has an article describing the ills that have befallen Japan in the decade or so since its economy went through a massive bubble, and then began what appears to be a long term swoon into mediocrity. Long gone are the heady days of “Japan Inc.”. Instead the subtle erosion of deflation has sapped all the vibrancy from the economy and made it entirely dependent on exports for growth. That strategy is now souring as the Chinese continue their assault on world trade. Before long the Japanese look destined for second class status and much diminished lifestyles. If they are not there now.

The story in the NYT is truly saddening. The people interviewed respond with a combination of resignation and confusion. They mourn the lost vitality and the yawning gap between the new prospect and the opportunity, now gone, in the old. A whole generation of Japanese people are growing up in diminished and straitened times.

So what’s new?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

In fact the problem I have, and it is very disheartening, is that it has taken this long for the media to take Japanese style sclerosis as a serious enough threat to the US that they assign time and energy to reporting it. Up until now the typical American response has been one of arrogant “it can’t happen here” avoidance. Even the NYT falls into that trap by quoting, with obvious approval, several analysts who make the point that the US economy is somehow more flexible and energetic. This will, they suggest, ensure we do not fall into the same hole.

But we already have.

The issue is not the basic flexibility of the economy. Yes the US is structurally more adept that Japan. It is less tied to old fashioned ways. But that is looking more and more like the days of yore and less like the real US we now live in.

Why?

Politics and a deficient elite.

The problems Japan created for itself were sourced in its inability to meet a huge crisis with an equally huge response. Instead it meandered through years of half measures, politically compromised and watered down policies, and weak steps taken but then retracted. It was an epic example of lack of willpower combined with a bureaucratic complacency. The lack of willpower resided in the political leadership – what there was of it – and its unwillingness to describe the situation properly to the voters. The consequence was that the voters had less tolerance for the necessary scale of policy response. This then fed into the bureaucratic malaise which was typified by constant mistaken advice, fear of error, fear of mockery if mistaken, and fear of over reaction. There was always just sufficient evidence to support weaker measures. That evidence was pounced upon with glee by politicians and bureaucrats wanting to avoid strong policy stands. And even when strong policies were introduced, they were withdrawn at the very first sign, however tentative, of an improvement.

The result has been a dithering and deliberate slippage into perpetual deflation and contraction. The people of Japan have been betrayed by the weakness of their leaders.

That anyone can look at this and not see the obvious and exact parallel now being acted out here is beyond me. I see it very differently: we are already well down the same path, and yet we are in denial of the future we are choosing. We have decided to be mediocre.

Why?

Because fighting our way out is both risky and expensive.

It is risky because leaders actually have to bet their reputations, which is not something one does in a corrupt and weak political system like ours. And it is expensive because the banks did a number on us that we have not seen for seven decades. We seem not to grasp how toxic that combination can be.

And that is our central problem. Far too many commentators evaluate the US ability to avoid the Japanese trap through a rosy prism of self reference and self congratulation. They look at the US circa 1960 and think we are still operating with that level of bold decision and skill. We are not. The evidence is the past two years. We dithered in precisely the same way as the Japanese did. Our policies were riddled through with compromise that undermined their efficacy. The prescriptions were calibrated to be the least we could get away with, rather than strong enough for a certain cure. We have constantly misdiagnosed the depths of the problem, and then under prescribed against that misdiagnosis. And our political system is slow, unwieldy, and corrupt. It is time we took off those rose colored glasses and looked reality in the face.

We are no different. In fact we may be worse given our self absorption.

Even Bernanke, who made a reputation lashing into the Japanese government for its constant addiction to half measures, finds himself having to issue watered down statements and commit to weak policies because of the political atmosphere and the willful misinterpretation of our position.

And then there is the economic team. Ugh. Summers, Geithner and the others are petrified of doing anything that might upset the “system”, by which they mean the banks and the credit markets. It is the public’s interest that counts here, not the banks. The notion that we might be handing on to the next generation a much diminished economy, with weaker prospects and stagnant standards of living, should motivate our leaders to face down and eliminate the opposition of the banks. After all, the potential loss of wealth for society as a whole is vastly greater from stagnation than it is from any short term hissy fit the markets might throw.

Which is why I view the so-called financial reform as such a failure. It was a strategic error not to take on Wall Street and cripple its political influence. Not only would such action have been a popular vote winner, it would have been sound economic policy too: for financial instability remains the premier and most often quoted reason to support weak policy. “We mustn’t rock the financial boat”. That would not be on our minds if we had sunk that particular boat – or rather boarded and taken it over -when the time was opportune.

So, looking back over the last two years, I see a constant stream of decisions and policies that mimic the Japanese situation exactly. Of course the two countries are very different, but so far their reactions have been similar. That does not bode well for the US. More to the point: the fact that we have such recent experience as the Japanese malaise to see and educate us, and that we have ignored that possible education, speaks volumes about our own shortcomings. We have spent two years worrying about a surge in inflation that is nowhere to be seen. We have worried endlessly about budget gaps that need to be closed, but yet. We focus on structural problems that have no meaning without the crisis being dealt with first. We quiver at the sound of a bank CEO talking about the foreclosure problems that the banks themselves created. We dither over tax cuts even though we know the impact they will or will not have. We obsess over ratios that are meaningless in our current context. We underestimate the crisis. We overestimate the impact of our tepid response. We run away from the banking industry even though it was the root cause of our problems. We focus on endless political campaigning rather than government. We capitulate to the power of cash in our electioneering. In short: we have become unable to lead or be led.

And, given the malaise we are slipping into, that worries me a whole lot. Because the end of that road is a very poor legacy to hand into the future. Very poor indeed.

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Jobs; Trade; Banks … Ho Hum And Bun Fights

This is getting dull. Really dull. The economy refuses to shift gears. Wall Street twitters on about nothing in particular. Central Bankers are even more confused and surly than usual. Businesses are sitting on piles of cash and complaining that no one cares about them. Banks are in a snit over being asked to play nicely. Consumers have all but disappeared. Government policy makers wring their hands and smile at the same time. The dark clouds of currency wars have rolled into view. And we go nowhere fast.

Welcome to the crisis part 2.

Oh: the very slightly good news is that new claims for unemployment assistance fell again last week. Whoopee. The drop was by 11,000 all the way to 445,000, which, in normal times, would be viewed as hopelessly inadequate, or a mere blip not worth mentioning, but was the reason that Wall Street roared briefly to life this morning. We exist – I won’t dignify our current state by using the word “live” – in such diminished times that even the most modest step in the right direction can be viewed as a triumph of the first order. Our era has so perverted our language that we no longer can use the word “modest” without feeling slightly apologetic. Personally I blame corporate America for its incessant hyperbole that has undermined the value of words that used to mean something.Modest used to mean, well, modest. Now it means a mix of useless and wimpy. Thus when we run into a putrid performance we have and reach for a proper descriptor we are apt to bring pablum out of our bag. This ends up confusing everyone, and allows the incompetent folks who buy and sell stocks for a living to justify anything. Thus today’s new claims data, which can only be described as the greyest of greys, is greeted in the manner once reserved for the returning Caesars of Rome.

My advice: ignore the hoopla. The claims number represents one of a long series of indifferent and indistinguishable data points, none of which tells us much other than that our malaise continues. Allow me to repeat: we need that claims number to be under 400,000. Better yet, we need it to drop to the mid 300,000 range before we reach for the celebratory fireworks.

Meanwhile ignore Wall Street. Remember they are the folks who trashed the place in the first place. The one fact we have at present is that they know nothing worth our learning.

In other news we are reading a great deal about the brewing trade and currency wars about to blight the world.

The reason is simple: practically every government facing a domestic crisis has written into its escape plan that it will grow out of crisis by pumping up exports. Those of you with an eye for detail will notice that there is a slight problem with this. Someone has to import. Not everyone can export. Whoops. In the old days the game was extremely simple. Japan, Germany, and China exported. The US and the UK imported. That meant that German, Japanese, and Chinese workers lived below their means while Americans and Brits lived above theirs. A better way to look at this is that the Germans, Japanese and Chinese exported unemployment by deliberately under-consuming goods that they made. The surplus was sent abroad. Further: the spare cash that this generated for those economies was recycled back into the US and UK where it pumped up asset prices. This “surplus” of savings on world markets created by the deliberate under consumption in the exporting nations was a major factor in the real estate bubble. At least that’s one theory doing the rounds. Bernanke is a leader of that train of thought.

Now, in the depths of crisis, the importers need to rebalance their economies and reduce the import inflow. But that implies the exporters have to adjust as well. Therein lies the source of tension. The exporters do not want to change their game. Too many local jobs depend on trade. In the case of China, whole industries depend on it, which means millions of recently displaced agricultural workers do too. That’s a big social problem waiting to burst if exporters have to change course. China’s middle class is insufficient to buy all those goods. At least not yet. So they need to keep on exporting. To us.

Which is why they rig their currency and try to play beggar-thy-neighbor with the rest of the world, and particularly with the US. If China were to allow its currency to float by unfixing its relationship with the dollar, it would be revalued upwards. That would make Chinese goods more expensive in foreign markets like the US and would thus reduce their exports. The displaced goods would have to be sold internally within China or those factories would have to close down. Either way the adjustment could be difficult. It would cramp Chinese growth which has averaged 8% a year for a while now. A slowdown from that pace would – potentially – hit their agricultural and poor workers the most since it would remove their opportunity to earn higher wages. The result? Civil unrest. The entire structure of the Chinese elite would feel the strain. It has already been hit by waves of strikes as workers lobby for better conditions and wages. Add in the loss of export industry jobs and the country gets shaky quickly.

Hence the current stand off.

Of course this scenario is being played out across the globe as countries seek to devalue their currencies to dampen Chinese and other exports and boost their own. It is particularly acute in Europe where the German refusal to rebalance their economy is weighing heavily on places like Spain. Since Spain and Germany use the same currency the poor Spanish cannot devalue. They have only one option which is to throw themselves into massive austerity programs. The Germans meanwhile preach such austerity, apparently oblivious that their failure to boost domestic demand created the excess cash that blew Spanish real estate into its bubble – all those German second homes on the Mediterranean coast, not to mention the tourists and their wads of Euros – and is now exporting unemployment along with those BMW’s.

I won’t mention the dire straits the poor Irish are in. Suffice to say that they make the Icelanders look like amateurs when it comes to self destruction.

So, all of a sudden, attention worldwide is on how to rebalance the flow of trade so that excess cash doesn’t slop about creating bubbles, and the exporting nations don’t foist unemployment on everyone else. The recipe for a full blown trade war is nearly complete. Which is very worrisome, since one of the factors that made the Great Depression truly “great” was the trade war of the 1930’s.

And, finally, on a more comical note: the banks are at it again.

This time they are all in a huff over the new capital regulations introduced by the folks in Basel, which is where the organization that dictates these things is based.

The banks argue, rightly, that higher capital implies less credit available. This is correct because capital is held in proportion to assets. So if that proportion is forced higher, the banks have two choices: they can raise more capital and not deploy it as loans; or they can keep their current capital, and reduce the amount of loans from where they now are. Either way the level of lending will drop. The entirely neutral analysts at Goldman Sachs tell us that the drop could cut about 1% off of GDP over the next few years. Conveniently we are not told how much GDP was destroyed by the excess lending of the last few years – that would mess up the story. In any case, the bleating from the banks is now very loud. Fewer loans means lower profits. And we all know what that means: lower bonuses. So I think we can ignore the warnings of lower GDP and cut straight to the one thing we know they care about: that fifth New York apartment. Or: how awful that they might have to forgo the Hamptons home and the Aspen retreat. How mean spirited of us to force such choices on the poor dears. Now this is a true national policy issue.

Not really.

A cursory review of Hyman Minsky and his financial instability hypothesis tells us that less lending is a very good thing. It reduces long run volatility because more of the economy’s wealth relies on equity funding and not debt. That makes it less susceptible to the swings of interest rates and thus more stable. This is good. Very good. The cost for getting this stability is that we will generate less wealth on paper. GDP will, indeed, grow less quickly. But, as we recently learned, wealth that relies on debt is often an illusion – just as illusory as Lehman’s asset values were.

Frankly we could do with less illusion and more reality. Hence we should gird ourselves to ignore the weeping and wailing of Wall Street, even if they have a technically correct point. After all our economy is not theirs to play with. It’s ours.

Not only that, but we want it back.

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