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Regulatory Capture: Systematic and Institutionalized Corruption of Regulators under Neoliberal Regime

Nonbarking Dogs of Neoliberal State

News Criminogenic effects of neoliberalism Recommended Links Audacioues Oligarchy and Loss of Trust

Cognitive Regulatory Capture

Corporatist Corruption: Systemic Fraud under Clinton-Bush-Obama Regime

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Casino Capitalism Bulletin, 2008 Casino Capitalism Bulletin, 2009 Casino Capitalism Bulletin, 2010 Casino Capitalism Bulletin, 2011 Casino Capitalism Bulletin, 2012 Political Economy of Casino Capitalism
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Neoclassical Pseudo Theories and Crooked and Bought Economists Invisible Hand Hypothesys: The Theory of Self-regulation of the Markets Insider Trading Banking Bonuses as Money Laundering Brooksley Born and Three Marketeers Lack of transparency
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“Regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them…mellow, and in old age…they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Money! Backroom Deals! Secrecy! Political Power! Captured Government! Scandal! Suspicion! Major Money!

"Americans live in Russia, but they think they live in Sweden."

- Chrystia Freeland


Introduction

GS makes money by manipulating the system in a quasi-legal, morally corrupt manner. They challenge all the rules and use the Revolving Door between regulator and regulated to deliver legal bribes. Society needs better regulators and regulations to protect themselves from parasites like the GS Vampire Squid.

GS is one of the chief proponents of "Free Market" ideology. Free Market" is short for "Free to rip off the "Market" . The words "to rip off" are omitted when they sell the "Free Market" ideology and are reserved for the back rooms and jokes in private email. The rubes are too dim to get it or else think they are the scammers and not the scammed.

Comment at Economist's View
'Why the Fed Is So Wimpy'

Immanuel Wallerstein asked an interesting question: is the current iteration of global capitalism became so dysfunctional that it spells doom for the USA and it's role in the world as well as misery for American people? The current social system (aka " the current iteration of global capitalism') is called neoliberalism, or casino capitalism. It is both ideology and social practice. As Greenspan noted "an ideology is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with [social] reality." (in reply to REP. HENRY WAXMAN)

This second Gilded Age is characterized by rampant speculation and complete dominance of financial oligarchy over the rest of society  (Is There Capitalism After Cronyism The American Conservative) while the government regulators are intentionally (or "institutionally" -- "by design") asleep or looking the other way. In other words regulators are now completely captured by the big banks and are nothing more then stooges of financial oligarchy.  Often they are former staffers of big bands or supporting Wall Street law firms ("criminals with law degree"), or corrupt academicians on temporary assignment in the particular government body. We all remember  operation of  silencing of Brooksley Born in which prominent role was played by completely corrupt academician Lawrence Summers and Goldman Sacks' mole in the government -- Robert Rubin

Wallerstein and his colleagues tried to answer this question in the book Does Capitalism Have a Future? Thier line on thinking can be simplified to the following statement: When capital became unable of reaping large and fairly secure profits from manufacturing it like water tries to find other ways, and first of all criminal.  In other words it start criminalizing finance. From this point of view corruption of regulators is simply "the other way" of reaping large and fairly secure profits in new "permanent stagnation" condition of "Peak Capitalism", which entails less use of more expensive fossil fuels ("end of cheap oil"). Some economists even hypothesize that the US economy can expand only with oil prices below $60 per barrel.

From another point of view, as economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, capitalism is not a steady-state system. It is unstable system in which population constantly experience and then try to overcome one crisis after another. Joseph Schumpeter naively assumed that the net result is reimaging itself via so called “creative destruction".  But what we observe now it "uncreative destruction". In other words casino capitalism is devouring the host. We see that casino capitalism resort of non-creative, semi-criminal ways of maintaining the rate of profits. Actually this is what the US elite did with the country systematically since late 70th.

If we think about capitalism as a set of overlapping networks of power and influence at some point this destruction not only can be far less "creative" then Schumpeter expected. It can be outright criminal resembling the way organized crime operates (The City Of London Has Turned Britain Into A Civilized Mafia State).  For example, it can demonstrate itself in pre-planned, "on-purpose" destruction of the legal framework of the modern state via capture and corruption of regulators. In other words we see that human society can suffer from something like "social cancer", when social organism is destroyed in order for tumor sells to grow. And by tumor here I mean speculative finance and financial oligarchy.  Again this is a social system and as such it does not depend on particular people in power. As Prince Kropotkin observed about prison guards of Petropavlovsk jail in Sanct Petersburg "People are better then institutions". In a very deep way the ability to control speculation in the finance sector now became the central problem of any society that wants to survive in longer term. The idea that speculative behavior is entrepreneurial in nature and accelerates real economic growth is the fatal error of social judgment (Do Safer Banks Mean Less Economic Growth ) .  But as with cancer the key question is Can It Be Contained ?

While under casino capitalism all this "un-creative destruction" is done in order to preserve the level of profits which with end of cheap energy is impossible obtain via manufacturing. That does not exclude periods of "return of good times" when overinvestment in energy led to dramatic drop of oil prices: as soon as weaker players are eliminated the situation gradually returns to the "new normal". We observed two such periods since the neoliberalism became world dominant social system. One immediately after dissolution of the USSR and the second is the current period of low oil prices which started in late 2014.

If we think about capitalism as a set of overlapping networks of power and influence at some point this destruction can be far less "creative" then Schumpeter expected. For example it can demonstrate itself in pre-planned, "on-purpose" destruction of the legal framework of the modern state via capture and corruption of regulators. In other words we see that human society can suffer from something like "social cancel", when social organism is destroyed in order for tumor sells to grow. And by tumor seeks I mean speculative finance. In a very deep way the ability to control speculation in the finance sector now became the central problem of any society that wants to survive in longer term.

The idea that speculative behavior is entrepreneurial in nature and accelerates real economic growth is the fatal error of social judgment (Do Safer Banks Mean Less Economic Growth ) .

If we assume the big finance business model is somewhat similar to cancer, it is logical that they need to attack and immobilize the immune system in order to be able to grow fast. Corruption of regulators also can be viewed as a part of positive feedback loop created in the society by growth of financial sector. As such this is a systemic, institutional problem, not the problem of individual corrupt individuals. It is really an immanent, defining feature of neoliberalism as a social-economic system. In no way it is result of the action of few "bad apples". Much of is institutional and is related to the the structure of regulation of financial sector, which under neoliberalism is specifically designed to encourage capture.

As an immanent feature of neoliberal regimes it is also used as a universal "can opener" for more powerful neoliberal nations to get to the resources of weaker neoliberal nations, and, especially, countries governed by "resource nationalists". Accusations of widespread corruption are typical precursor to staging a neoliberal color revolution in such countries.

In a sense, the USA is probably most corrupt country in the world as neoliberal regime is strongest and the most mature in this country ( Why the Fed Is So Wimpy, by Justin Fox):

Regulatory capture — when regulators come to act mainly in the interest of the industries they regulate — is a phenomenon that economists, political scientists, and legal scholars have been writing about for decades. Bank regulators in particular have been depicted as captives for years, and have even taken to describing themselves as such.

The key feature of neoliberal regime is that large transnational corporation are the key political players which keep Congress and all regulatory agencies of short leash. Or, more correctly, government and top brass of internationals intermarry. The mixture of mechanisms used (revolving door, lobbyism, assigning cronies as heads of regulatory agency (Bush II favorite strategy)) can change with the time but the net result is always the same. As Senator Dick Durbin noted about the Congress Banks Frankly Own The Place. It's more correctly to say "transnationals own the country".

Started by Carter and continued by Reagan deregulation quickly exhausted its positive momentum of fighting excessive bureaucracy and government waste and become the way of stealth imposition of neoliberalism (also known as casino capitalism) on the society. Fundamentally, crony capitalism and corruption are two sides of the same neoliberal coin be it USA, or Russia, or Brazil.

Fundamentally, crony capitalism and corruption are two sides of the same neoliberal coin be it USA, or Russia, or Brazil.

The rampant deregulation implemented in the USA in 90th (dismantling Del Deal, immanent due to the growth of financial sector and its political influence) and "free market capitalism" (as if "free markets" ever existed; government always control the market via control of the currency; in turn large market players often control the government) is really side effect of a larger problem: systemic instability of financial sector. Old mechanisms of purging excessive size of financial sector via anti-Semitism and expulsion of Jews no longer work.

As soon as the political establishment became openly committed to laissez-faire, they essentially invite financial sector to hijack the political power in the society ("Quiet coup"). And financial sector tries to protect their political power by imposing a pretty draconian regime in the form of the National Security State, to exclude any chances of forming a meaningful opposition to their dominance. At this point mousetrap with cheese in form of "free market" propaganda is closed. After that banksters became completely immune from public scrutiny and prosecution, as 2008 events proved to the whole world. In a sense all three last US administrations (Clinton, Bush II and Obama) were/are essentially sock puppets of financial oligarchy.

Regulatory capture

The political appointees to federal regulators as the tool for blocking regulation was the key feature of Casino Capitalism, the variant of neoliberal regime established in the USA. And their actions are among of the most important contributions to the financial crisis. Due to this practice, the regulators were captured by the very businesses they were required to regulate. The chairperson of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, for example, exempted important parts of Enron's business from regulation and, just weeks later, joined Enron' board. It has been the rule, not an exception, for retired regulators to get jobs as auditors of financial firms and become lobbyists. Incumbent regulators have difficulty in conducting effective supervision because of intensive lobbying from their former superiors.

This is not a new phenomenon . As Joy Key reminded us (Better a distant judge than a pliant regulator - FT.com, Nov 2, 2010):

In 1887, Congress passed an act to regulate the US railroad industry. The legislation originated in the demands of farmers and merchants for protection against the “robber barons”.

Despite this background, railroad interests supported the bill. Charles Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, explained his reasoning to a sympathetic congressman, John D. Long. “What is desired,” he wrote, “is something having a good sound, but quite harmless, which will impress the popular mind with the idea that a great deal is being done, when, in reality, very little is intended to be done.”

On the whole, he got what he wanted. The Interstate Commerce Commission established by the act was chaired by a lawyer with experience of the railroad industry – acquired, naturally, by acting on behalf of his railroad clients. When, a decade later, the Supreme Court ruled that a rate-fixing agreement between railroads was illegal, the ICC was crestfallen: surely, the commission said, it should not be unlawful to confer, to achieve what the law enjoins – the setting of just and reasonable rates. Soon after, Congress approved legislation making it a criminal offence to offer rebates on tariffs the ICC had approved, and the commission thereafter operated as the manager of a railroad cartel.

One feature of regulatory capture is that the regulators of an industry start viewing it through the eyes of its principal actors, and to equate the public interest with the financial stability of these institutions. Sometimes such capture is clearly corrupt, as when regulators are directly or indirectly (via revolving door mechanism) are paid by the corporations they oversee. But the truth is that the largest contributors to congressional campaign funding are financial services industries, pharmaceuticals and energy. So they, by definition, have substantial political cloud in neoliberal state.

Sometimes the mechanism is more subtle and acts as "adverse selection" : new appointees are screened as for being "business-friendly", the prerequisite which also smells of corruption. Greenspan is a nice example of such political appointee; but Dugan, Cox (Our Corrupt Federal Regulator) and many others, who so far managed to escape jail, were equally destructive. Generally, bureaucratic institutions always try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

So efficiency of regulators is always less then desired. In other words there is no, and can never be in principle, an ideal regulator.

But institutions undermined by political appointees essentially became a turncoats and the part of the problem, not the part of the solution. In other words from regulators they became enablers of criminal behavior. As simple as that. All this was done under the smoke screen of neoliberalism, which starting from 70th became dominant ideology in the USA and elsewhere.

Simon Johnson, an MIT professor and former IMF chief economist has been a critic of the Bush/Obama bailout from the start, but his devastating essay in the May issue of the Atlantic, "The Quiet Coup," may be the clearest explanation of regulatory capture in the USA, the country that became just richer variant of a classic "banana republic":

Squeezing the oligarchs... is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or — here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique — the assumption of private debt obligations by the government.

Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Simon Johnson says:

So let's say that you have excessive regulation to start with, you bring that down to a sensible level, and then the guys making a ton of a money use that to undermine sensible regulation.

What he's describing is a "Peter Principle" of economics: in a classic cycle over-regulation is first reduced to meaningful regulation and then due to growth of influence (and profits) of financial oligarchy it inevitably reduced to a level of incompetence and at this point seize to effectively regulate the system. After spectacular crash excessive regulations are reinstalled and cycle starts again.
"Peter Principle" of economics: in a classic cycle over-regulation is first reduced to meaningful regulation and then due to growth of influence (and profits) of financial oligarchy it inevitably reduced to a level of incompetence and at this point seize to effectively regulate the system. After spectacular crash excessive regulations are reinstalled and the cycle starts again.

Here is relevant quote from Simon Johnson's paper:

The Bailout Proves the Banks Own the Politicians

The bailout proves the banks own the politicians. The only way we will ever get another Teddy Roosevelt would be to get a wealthy independent elected President who only wants one term and would use his elected mandate to push his agenda against the corporate power structure.

Here he forgot the possibility of repetition of the destiny of JFK. Also neoliberal ideology (like Marxism in the past in the USSR and its satellites) "infects" regulators making them organically unable to perform actions the contradicts it: in this case drastic anti-banks actions. This is a variant of Cognitive Regulatory Capture

It is interesting to note that the trend toward regulatory capture in the past was recognized by nobody else as Stalin, who instituted "purges" explicitly to prevent too complacent behaviour of government bureaucrats who with time forget about the goals of their institutions and are more and more driven by their own profit and privileges motives. While extremely cruel, this was pretty effective methods for keeping regulators in check.

Intellectual capture

An excellent definition of intellectual capture was given by Greenspan in 2009:

"Well, remember that what an ideology is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. "

That means that independence of regulators is not a panacea. They are influenced by dominant ideology like everybody else. So intellectual capture is prevalent even among the most nominally independent regulators, as to live in the society and be free of dominant ideology is very difficult or if want to be successful impossible. Under neoliberalism that gives rise to a very dangerous view: What’s good for Wall Street must be great for the real economy. For example independent central banks, will pursue neoliberal policies if top brass is captured by neoliberal ideology. The regulators may be independent at first, but if they share the ideology (and in this case this is a neoliberal ideology) they invariably fall under the spell —one way or another — of the people they are supposed to control.

Here is a pretty telling dialog reproduced in Democracy Now

So like Marxists pointed long ago "ideas became a material force, when they capture minds of people". That means that the virtues of independence become even more questionable once we factor in the politics. Will an independent regulator or central bank be less prone to political influence from powerful lobbies? That seems doubtful. In his famous article Simon Johnson tells a an interesting and pretty surprising at this time observation: the U.S. has been afflicted by a version of the crony capitalism that has been the scourge of so many emerging markets, except that Wall Street has bought its influence and power not by only and exclusively by bribery but more by financing and shaping the dominant ideology of our times -- neoliberalism (The Quiet Coup - Simon Johnson - The Atlantic, May 2009).

This process of ideological capture he called a Quiet coup. Here are some quotes from Dani Rodriks post (Dani Rodrik's weblog Simon Johnson's morality tale) which discusses the article and point out some questionable attribution of wisdom to IMF, which is an institution that is a key part of pushing neoliberalism to other countries:

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

The solution, to Simon, is equally clear. Finance needs to be cut down to size. What the U.S. needs is what the IMF would have told any country:

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

... ... ...

The second problem the U.S. faces — the power of the oligarchy — is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

As with any story built around clear villains easy solutions, there is something in this account that is quite unsatisfying. For one thing, I think it puts the blame too narrowly on the bankers. Yes, there can be little doubt that banks badly misjudged the risks they were taking on. But they were aided in all this by the broader economics and policymaking community -- not because the latter thought the policies in question were good for bankers, but because they thought these would be good for the economy. Simon himself says as much. So why pick on the bankers? Surely the blame must be spread much more widely.

And I find it astonishing that Simon would present the IMF as the voice of wisdom on these matters--- the same IMF which until recently advocated capital-account liberalization for some of the poorest countries in the world and which was totally tone deaf when it came to the cost of fiscal stringency in countries going through similar upheavals (as during the Asian financial crisis).

Intellectual capture can also occur on the level below ideology. Every regulatory agency is dependent for information on the businesses it regulates. Many of the people who run regulated companies would be affronted by any suggestion that their activities do not serve the public good. But the truth is that few members of the public ever make contact with a regulatory agency; almost always, they need to deal with the professionals from industries they regulate. It does not requires a considerable effort of imagination to understand that any industry tried to use this leverage. So even the regulator with the best intentions comes to see issues eventually start to see the issue from the prism of the framework that was formulated by the corporate officers and professional he deals with on daily basis.. You need to have pretty abrasive or independent type of personality and considerable intellectual curiosity to discount this influence. And these are not the qualities often sought, or found, in regulators.

Lobbying as institutionalized corruption

The IMF’s latest working paper — A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis (Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra, and Thierry Tressel IMF, December 2009) — shows how the powerful mechanism of lobbing created the alliance between Wall Street and Washington policymakers. In other words it convert social system into corporatism. Like military industrial complex, financial oligarchy understands pretty well that money spend on lobbing are money well spend: the most aggressive, the most reckless banks have the greatest return in bailout monies.

Lobbyists are an important mechanism for silencing and subverting federal regulators. Existence of revolving door is a perfect tool for keeping regulators at bay. See Frank Partnoy famous book Infectious Greed that explains how and why large scale financial malfeasance happens. And why it is hardly ever punished. Here is one quote:

"In July 2005, Public Citizen published a report entitled "The Journey from Congress to K Street": the report analyzed hundreds of lobbyist registration documents filed in compliance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act and the Foreign Agents Registration Act among other sources. It found that since 1998, 43 percent of the 198 members of Congress who left government to join private life have registered to lobby.

A similar report from the Center for Responsive Politics found 370 former members were in the "influence-peddling business", with 285 officially registered as federal lobbyists, and 85 others who were described as providing "strategic advice" or "public relations" to corporate clients."

Tremendous resources in their disposal permit lobbyists to win the assignment of red state democrats to the banking committee, so they can get contributions from bankers and serve as Trojan horses which can break any attempt to reform the system. The IMF had shown that money channeled to lobbyists by banks naturally impose on the society riskier lending with less supervision and regulation:

“Our analysis establishes that financial intermediaries’ lobbying activities on specific issues are significantly related to both their mortgage lending behavior and their ex-post performance. Controlling for unobserved lender and area characteristics as well as changes over time in the macroeconomic and local conditions, lenders that lobby more intensively (i) originate mortgages with higher loan-to-income ratios, (ii) securitize a faster growing proportion of loans originated; and (iii) have faster growing mortgage loan portfolios.”

Our analysis of ex-post performance comprises two pieces of evidence: (i) faster relative growth of mortgage loans by lobbying lenders is associated with higher ex-post default rates at the MSA level in 2008; and (ii) lobbying lenders experienced negative abnormal stock returns during the main events of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008.”

The authors identify six key goals that bank achieved by spending huge sums of money for lobbying:
  1. Prevent any tightening of lending laws or new laws aimed to reduce the benefits of short-termist bonus generating strategies
  2. Allow systematic underestimation of default probabilities by overoptimistic bankers;
  3. Not only originate loans that carry more risk, but to convince legislators that such lending is prudent;
  4. To kill bills directed in tightening of lax lending standards
  5. To restrict entry by others preventing competition;
  6. To increase the probability of receiving preferential treatment in a crisis.
In other word lobbying by banks is a systemically dangerous activity that mimics methods used by organized crime (and as such falling under RICO statute) that puts the entire society at risk. Any meaningful actions are now impossible without weakening political influence of the financial industry (the capture of regulators). Unfortunately, for the same reason it is unlikely to occur . . .

Elimination of funding as the way to eliminate regulations

Deregulation has been a big problem in areas of the economy where the beneficiaries of changes in the law purchased the deregulatory changes from the people who controlled the federal government. And even if they can't kill regulation they have another tool in their disposal. Budgets is where regulations are neutered by politicians who did not stop the regulations. Kind of the second line of defense for financial oligarchy:

Rusty:

Logically, regulations benefit those that have a hand in creating them - politicians and lobbyists who represent entrenched business interests. Certainly politicians will try with at least lip service towards some equitable aim in the public interest, but they must work with the entrenched interests to achieve anything and to maintain power. So it makes sense that often regulations serve entrenched interests and thereby increase inequality.

ilsm -> Rusty...

I did some consulting work years ago in the transport industry (did an brief excursion from the military industry complex).

No DoT (FAA, Highways, pipelines, etc) regulation is allowed without support from the industry, thus we see new regulations discussed after each transport related disaster.

Once a regulation is "set", policies for enforcement are devised by the responsible agency, which leads to plans for enforcement, then budgets. Budgets is where regulations are neutered by politicians who did not stop the regulations (keep the gumint off the back of the perps).

See last Sunday's train derailment, or any pipeline explosion.

I worry more about what happens during my colonoscopy, I am much more familiar with neglect in the aerospace world.

Banks as the foundation of the corruption pyramid

Banking corruption is the foundation of all corruption pyramid. We are used to talking about corruption at various levels of government, as well as legislative and judicial branches. We also used to facts of corruption in military-industrial complex, including public procurement. However, in most cases, the foundation of this corruption pyramid are large banks, without which the implementation of most of illegal business activities would be impossible.

Here we are talking about the banking corruption -- the fact that banks and other financial institutions in the context of financial globalization and development of cashless payments have become a major part of the infrastructure of the shadow economy. And are extremely interested in participation in shady activities as those provide much better profit margins then legal activities. Without their mediation and help in money laundering including laundering of criminal assets would be not have the scale it now has. They are also the central player in organizing illegal export of capital abroad to offshore jurisdictions, which, in essence, is just another form of money laundering.

However, the media and the economic mainstream try to dismiss this systemic behaviour of major financial players, creating an image of respectable bankers and respectable businessmen. With few bad apples. In reality many banks have shadow economy as the major source of their income and are committing illegal transactions in the financial market necessary for support of both "gray" and "black" economy.

It is clear that large banks in those condition are especially interested in emasculation of regulators both directly via financing of political campaigns and then forcing the appointment of cronies as heads of regulatory agencies and indirectly, providing "revolving door" for personnel in regulatory agencies.

The Real Regulatory Revolving Door

Corruption can be more subtle. A politician who looks to a career after political office knows that big companies can offer lucrative consultancies and directorships, but representing the public interest does not. Everyone who works in a regulatory agency knows that if they are well regarded in the industry, they are eligible for jobs in the private sector which are far more rewarding than employment in a public agency. At this point serving in government office became just a jumpstart for a career in private industry. And you no longer need to bribe such people. They will be willing accomplices without bribing.

A reader on Naked Vapitalism blog, who has first hand knowledge of some of the major US financial regulators wrote (Sep 2, 2009 | nakedcapitalism.com) about the problem with systemic corruption of lawyers who are working in regulatory agencies. Incentives to switch sides are way too strong and legal prohibitions for such behaviour are absent:

A reader who has first hand knowledge of some of the major US financial regulators flagged a CounterPunch article by Pam Martens as the best discussion of the “revolving door” problem that he had ever seen.

The interesting thing about this article is that it highlights a problem that is not widely recognized and therefore has no safeguards against it. As our correspondent explains:

The most important aspect of this is that the “revolving door” problem is most acute, not with the actual regulated firms, but with the professional firms that provide services to regulated entities, especially law firms (it is also a serious issue with compliance consulting firms, although that is something of a separate issue.)

One reason for that is that the standards are different for lawyers than for financial professionals. Financial professionals are forbidden from joining any company they have recently examined; but lawyers are forbidden only from working on cases they have had contact with –- there are no specific prohibitions on working for law firms that have cases that they have had contact with, as long as they don’t work on those cases (as if that could ever be enforced.)

That means that lawyers like Linda Thomsen, who as head of Enforcement would have been familiar with every case of significance, could go directly to work for a securities law firm already handling cases which she would most certainly have been familiar with, without Ethics making so much as a peep. I don’t know how that can be seen as anything other than a serious conflict of interest.

I strongly disagree with the argument that SEC lawyers have incentives to drop cases to curry favor with future employers. On the contrary; they have every incentive to break big cases, which is the stuff that careers are made of. And it is the law firms, not the financial firms, that will most likely be their future employers.

Where they do have an incentive, however, is to quickly settle those cases; they get credit for making the case, but the penalties inflicted are not enough to cripple the big Wall Street firms that (through the law firms they hire) will be the ultimate source of income for the lawyers after they move into the private sector. If they were to do nothing, they would be seen as incompetent, and nobody would hire them; but if they do too much, they disrupt the revenue stream that ultimately feeds the securities law industry.

A key section of the Martens article, which is worth reading in its entirety:

The team that produced this report on one of the most long-running and convoluted frauds [Madoff] in the history of Wall Street included Inspector General H. David Kotz who came to the SEC-IG post in December 2007 after five years as Inspector General and Associate General Counsel for the Peace Corps. The Deputy Inspector General, Noelle Frangipane, also came to the SEC from the Peace Corps where she had served as Director of Policy and Public Information.

This lack of Wall Street cronyism by the top two in the Inspector General’s office might have been refreshing to some in Congress and compensated for their not knowing the difference between puts and calls and peaks and troughs and the intricacies of Mr. Madoff’s split-strike conversion strategy (he splits with your money while converting you to a pauper). But the background of the member of the team heading up the Inspector General’s Office of Investigations, J. David Fielder, should have rang serious alarm bells to Congressional investigators.

For the ten years leading up to July 2007, J. David Fielder worked for the SEC as a Senior Counsel in the Division of Enforcement. In February 1999, he moved to the Division of Investment Management, first as Senior Counsel on the Task Force for Adviser Regulation, then as Advisor to the Director. In November 2000, SEC Chairman, Arthur Levitt, appointed Fielder Counsel to the Chairman.

In July 2007, Mr. Fielder was invited to join the corporate law firm, Haynes and Boone LLP, as a partner. In other words, Mr. Fielder’s government issue rolodex filled with the names, home numbers and email addresses of his colleagues at the SEC along with the investigatory matters in his head is deemed fungible currency among corporate law firms and can be freely exchanged for partner status, instantaneously moving one from the lowly wages and attendant lifestyle of public servant to the rarefied bracket and luxuriant trappings of corporate law firm partner.

But what happened next is where things get interesting. In March 2009, just as the SEC Inspector General was hot in pursuit of Madoff aiders and abettors, Mr. Fielder gave up his lucrative partner status at Haynes and Boone to accept the lowly post of Assistant Inspector General of Investigations, working under a boss from the Peace Corps. In other words, he gave up big bucks for a demotion at the SEC.

What Mr. Fielder did might not raise alarm bells were it not happening on a regular basis throughout the corridors of Washington and Wall Street. To understand the implications, this maneuver deserves an appropriate name. A revolving door is assumed to mean one gets all the right connections as a public servant and cashes them in to the highest bidder in private industry. That concept doesn’t typically entertain the door revolving back to public servant status. On Wall Street, they call a maneuver like that a round trip: you buy 100 shares and eventually sell the same 100 shares. You end up back where you started: a round trip.

Just how many lawyer round trippers are involved in the Madoff investigation? Enough to raise a strong stench of circular corruption.

Ina Pickle September 2, 2009 at 7:05 am

The correspondent may be right about a revolving door, but he is wrong about the ethical rules governing lawyers. You cannot work against the former client, not just on any cases you had before, but on any new cases. The client owns your loyalty for the rest of your professional life. The client can waive some conflicts, but not others.

So: the rules on lawyers are actually much stricter than the person thinks. Yes, you can SOMETIMES work for a firm that has the other side of a case or deal, provided that you are “chinese walled.” But that is really not common (probably more common in transactional law than litigation). Few lawyers and law firms are willing to take the risk of an accusation – these are career ending events if you were to break the confidence and accidentally share something that hurt the former client. Also, clients get royally pissed that you affiliated with somebody who works against them. What the correspondent doesn’t seem to realize is that the stricter rules tend to make you even more bound to the client because you can tend to be stuck to one large client in fields where competitors tend to sue each other. So in some fields, like oil and gas, a firm might work for several majors. In a field like investment banking, not so much.

With deals, companies will have their preferred lawyers and not change much. Also, the more you move your business around, the more you can block firms from helping your enemies. I have sometimes suspected that firms went on campaigns to sew up potential opposing counsel.

This is a little simplistic, but the person seems to have an overly negative idea of the ethics rules under which lawyers operate. Law firms take conflicts checks VERY seriously, as do individual lawyers. If practices around Wall Street have changed, it is out of necessity. Several investment banks *used* to be a hundred years old: that is a lot of conflicts history. And you would still have to get the clients’ consent.

I honestly believe in regulatory capture. But what you ought to ask yourself, perhaps, is how one can take graduates from the same two or three colleges and business schools, and expect different thinking from them if they are plopped into different work environments? They are still socializing with the same bunch educated at the same two schools, still living with those people, working with those people – but one group is supposed to be policing the other. If you ask me, take a look at everybody who went to Harvard over the past 25 years, and there is the start of your revolving door. The “elites” in all fields across the East Coast already have a lot in common before they start work.

LeeAnne September 2, 2009 at 7:17 am

So Felder has been rehired by the SEC after 2 years of orientation by the law firm Haynes and Boone LLP to become counter intelligence for the Madoff operation back at the SEC? Do we have an espionage thriller here?

A lawless industry fueled by political and regulatory capture would use more than just a few tools perfected by military and criminal organizations for covert activities.

I’m looking forward to an expose of the finance industry’s private investigation and para military organization hires with their personnel migration patterns.


DownSouth, September 2, 2009 at 7:43 am

Yves,

Reforming the polity at this point is more important than reforming the economy. If we attempt economic reform before political reform is accomplished, we’re just going to wind up with more disasters like the 2003 drug benefit for the elderly or the recent (and ongoing) bank bailout. What with Obama’s backroom deals with BigPharma that we already know about, plus heaven knows what else we don’t know about, the more astute observer can already see where healthcare reform is headed–huge benefits to powerful insiders, little benefit to the general good and huge cost to taxpayers.

I notice this post, along with a couple of other recent posts dealing with the Fourth Estate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate , deal more with political reform than with economic reform. I believe this is key, and I salute your efforts, as I am convinced that substantive economic reform is impossible without first achieving political reform.

The most radical creed of the American Revolution was that of the separation of Church and State. As Daniel Yankelovich put it, “the enemy was entrenched inherited privilege embodied in the church and in most branches of European royalty in collusion with each other.” Granted, the revolution was nominally against the British monarchy, but the Founding Fathers were acutely aware that the monarchy and the church were so inextricably interwoven as to be all but one and the same.

Today we face a similar problem, but instead of an unholy alliance between church and state, we have an equally pernicious alliance between major business corporations and state.

The first American revolution institutionalized the separation of church and state. I think we need a second American revolution that promulgates separation of big business and state.

You’ve already posted on a couple of the problem areas that require reform before the deathgrip that big business enjoys on the polity can be loosened. Let me repeat those and add a couple more (this is not meant to be a complete list):

• The Fourth Estate (the press, media)
• The Revolving Door
• Campaign Finance
• The Academe (and here I’m not just talking about the aberrant economics departments and their capture by business interests, but the equally perverse Nobel prize committee)

jake chase, September 2, 2009 at 1:05 pm

The truth about the SEC is not intuitive. One must have worked there as I did forty years ago (when, allegedly, it WAS enforcement minded) to understand that teh agency is a small army of bureaucrats who are simply biding their time either until retirement or escape to lucrative private practice. To the extent any enforcement takes place, it is directed against a fringle element of tin horn promoters, penny stock floggers, arrant confidence men whose pitches are so transparently idiotic that anyone falling for them really has only himself to blame. As for the top tier finaglers, they are strictly off limits. When a white shoe firm has a client with a problem, he calls the man at the top of the enforcement chain, who instructs the juniors accordingly.

Instead of this regulation tapdance, what we need to enforce honesty in business is integrity in the legal system. Unfortunately, we have defendant oriented federal judges who are universally hostile to shareholder interests, as well as state regulation which insulates management against liability in order to pile up franchise fees. Delaware is the leading culprit in this regard. The Congress could solve this problem by insisting upon federal charters for publicly traded corporations. They never will because the corporations will never permit it.

Back to the future

It looks like the USA is repeating all the mistake that were made in early XX century on a new level. During the 19th century, Washington was generally happy to do favors for Wall Street financiers. Railroad tycoons, who often used those railroads as vehicles of extravagant speculation, enjoyed subsidies, tax exemptions, loans, and a whole smorgasbord of financial fringe benefits supplied by pliable congressmen and senators (not to mention armadas of state and local officials).

But in 19th century when panic struck, the mighty, as well as the meek, went down with the ship. Washington felt no obligation to rush to the rescue. And there was blood on the floor.

By early in the 20th century, however, the savage anarchy of the financial marketplace had been at least partially domesticated under the reign of the greatest financier of them all, J P Morgan. Ever since the panic of 1907, the legend of Morgan's heroics in single-handedly stopping a meltdown that threatened to become worldwide, the iron discipline he imposed on more timorous bankers, has been told and re-told each time an analogous implosion looms. Back then, with Morgan performing his role as the nation's unofficial private central banker, president Teddy Roosevelt's administration continued to keep its distance from Wall Street, still unready to offer salvation to desperate financial oligarchs. Not normally sympathetic to Morgan and his crowd, Roosevelt did cheer from the sidelines as the uber-banker performed his rescue operation.

As it turned out, though, the days of Washington agnosticism about Wall Street were numbered. The economy had become too complex and delicate a mechanism and, in 1907, had come far too close to meltdown - even Morgan's efforts couldn't prevent several years of recession -- to leave financial matters entirely in the hands of the private sector. That's why Federal Reserve was established in 1913 under president Woodrow Wilson as a quasi-public authority meant to regulate the country's credit markets -- albeit one heavily influenced the country's principal bankers. That worked well enough until the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed and lasted until World War II.

President Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal did, as a start, engage in some bail-out operations. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, actually created by president Herbert Hoover, continued to rescue major railroads and other key businesses, while some of the New Deal's efforts to help homeowners also rewarded real estate interests. The main emphasis, however, switched to regulation. The Glass-Steagall Banking Act, the two laws of 1933 and 1934 regulating the stock exchange, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other similar measures subjected the financial sector to fairly rigorous public supervision.

Actually, while Reagan administration get its due as as an initiator of the deregulatory binge, Clinton administration role in deregulation is often underestimated. For all practical purposes the OTC derivative dealers could be classified as RICO criminal enterprises since the early nineties. Frank Partnoy’s book, Infectious Greed provides an excellent summary up through 2002. Scot Griffin in his comment to “Wake Up, Gentlemen” ( The Baseline Scenario, Dec 15, 2009 noted:

The explanation for the perceived “flaw” is the recognition of the existence of regulatory capture. That is, the regulators were captured by the very businesses they were required to regulate. The regulators were puppets on a string dancing to the tune of the financial innovators. There was no separate regulatory innovation. It was lock-step by design.

Now, let’s assume there was no regulatory capture. What was the motivation for “regulatory innovation?” The answer is GDP growth.

There’s an argument that “It’s the economy, stupid!” the meme spawned by the first Clinton campaign, has had adverse consequences on the long term health of the economy by focusing government officials and regulators on an arbitrarily short cycle (e.g., 2 to 4 years) just as public corporations are. Again, extending the analogy (started above) of U.S. government as corporation, the voters are shareholders and they vote based on earnings growth. If you recognize that a lot of members of government have been involved in managing public corporations, it is easy to see how they can get caught up in this mentality.

Of course, one might argue correctly that this short-term focus existed long before Clinton.

Crisis of 2008 and disappearance of trust in Wall Street and government regulators

New Deal lasted for at least two political generations. When it was dismantles, the USA was on the sure path to step on the same rake again and again. And sure it stepped. Financial crisis of 2008 was a significant blow, that almost killed the American empire and set back the political influence of the USA almost to pre-WWII levels. The USA found itself almost in the USSR shoes when, like happened with communism in the USSR, the dominant ideology -- neoliberalism -- became a subject of nasty jokes.

In 2008 Wall Street, despite all the efforts of financial oligarchy, had been convicted in the court of public opinion of reckless, incompetent, self-interested, even felonious behavior with consequences so devastating for the rest of the country that government was licensed to make sure it didn't happen again.

In 2008 Wall Street, despite all the efforts of financial oligarchy, had been convicted in the court of public opinion of reckless, incompetent, self-interested, even felonious behavior with consequences so devastating for the rest of the country that government was licensed to make sure it didn't happen again.

Luckily for Wall Street, the financial oligarchy managed to replace Bush II with its Democratic copycat, right of the center senator Obama. Control of both Congress and presidency allowed them to avoid legal consequences of their actions.

But it is clear to everybody with IQ above 100 that the undoing of that New Deal regulatory regime, and its replacement, largely under Republican administrations (although Glass-Steagall was repealed on Bill Clinton's watch), with what some have called the "socialization of risk" has contributed in a major way to the mess we're in today.

Financial sector hypertrophy in the USA, while providing illusion of growth of GDP led to decimation of real economy, which has slipped into a coma as our resources and talents have gone into enriching the well-connected financiers. Jobless recoveries are natural side effect of this story. As Volker noted:

“I have found very little evidence that vast amounts of innovation in financial markets in recent years have had a visible effect on the productivity of the economy”.

In reality it was worse then Volker admitted. "Innovation" in the financial industry has had a negative effect on productivity because it sucks available investment money from socially productive, job creating sectors of the economy such as manufacturing. Another point is the intellectual capital “lost” to financial services. The outsize compensation has moved the best and the brightest to Wall Street, although you can argue whether they were really best and brightest based on the disastrous results of their activities. But the fact that physicians were leaving medicine for finance as well as physicists moving to hedge funds are undisputable.

Offloading of financial risk on taxpayers as a immanent feature on neoliberal regime in the USA

Neoliberal regime that was established in the USA in early 80th made the country legal framework (shredding New Deal regulations) and government behavior (corrupt administrations of Clinton and Bush II) extremely comfortable for financial oligarchy. Beginning with the massive bail-out of the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s, Washington committed itself, at least under conditions of acute crisis, to the policy of off-loading the risks taken by major financial institutions, no matter how irrationally speculative and wasteful, onto the backs of the American taxpaying public.

Beginning with the massive bail-out of the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s, Washington committed itself, at least under conditions of acute crisis, to off-loading the risks taken by major financial institutions, no matter how irrationally speculative and wasteful, onto the backs of the American taxpaying public.

Despite free market/anti-big-government rhetoric, real-life Washington has tacitly acknowledged the degree to which our national economy has become dependent on the financial sector (finance, insurance and real estate - or FIRE). And it will do whatever it takes to keep it afloat. The "socialization of risk" was accompanied by the "privatization of reward". This applies not only to particular institutions like Bear Stearns, or even to mortgage mega-firms like Fannie and Freddie, but to finance in general. When it seemed necessary, public monies were indeed funneled in the general direction of the banking/brokerage community to shore up the whole rickety structure. This allowed one burst bubble -- the dot-com debacle -- to be replaced by another, namely mortgage/collaterized-debt-obligation bubble. Blowing bubbles became substitute for real economy growth.

Backstopping the present bail-out is American taxpayer. Even while Washington was instituting the periodic "socialization" of bad debts, it was systematically abandoning the New Deal's commitment to regulation. That, of course, was in the very period when financial markets became more arcane due to introduction of computers.

It's time for a reversal of course. Stringent re-regulation of FIRE is not enough any more. Washington's mission may, at this late date, be an even more complex one than Roosevelt's faced when instituting New Deal. The government must figure out how to deploy its power to shift the flow of investment capital out of the minefields of speculative paper transactions back into productive channels. The attempt to ride the country of speculative activities of Wall Street, based on the role of dollar as the world reserve currency will fail. The country is just too big to be fed from this activities, and the other players will not be passive for long. Signs of activity in the direction of weakening of dollar role on international arena are visible both in Europe (despite its satellite status) and BRICS.

Instead of Conclusion: Not much hope


"I believe that the fraudulent nature of the GWOT (Global War on Terror) should be a key ingredient of any analysis of our political situation and it should be looked at as a part of the massive financial fraud of that period–the two are not separate. "

From comments, nakedcapitalism.com,
November 15, 2014 |

Current situation does not raise much hope. Looks like corruption of regulators will continue as a firmly established practice. As if it is a goal of the government to support it.

There is overwhelming evidence that those charged with regulating our financial system are simply in the bag of financial oligarchy, including our three most recent Presidents, nearly all Senators and Congressmen, as well as all prominent officials of the SEC, CFTC, Treasury Dept, Federal Reserve, and Agencies. All those revolving doors personalities. There appear to be individual exceptions (Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders), but they just confirm the rule.

Preserving regulatory capture seems to be one issue about which both parties are in complete agreement. Adopted after 2008 reforms are simply lipstick on the pig. The corruption is so deeply ingrained that no public official can be trusted to tell the truth about nation's real financial situation.

What will happen next? Nobody knows. But 401K investors had better understand this level of uncertainty, if not act on it, since now the safer an investment is advertized, the riskier it is likely turn to be. Recent bubble and then crash in TIPs is one telling example.

I think that due to systemic corruption of regulators stars are aligned against the US recovery, whatever it mean. As one commenter Econbrowser blog noted it might make sense to put money on the long term stagnation, Japanese style:

"The game is market manipulation to dilute the Hoi Polloi's credit holdings via interest rates below inflation. It is the same game as was played from the mid-1930's until the early 70's."


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[May 03, 2021] Elon Musk says U.S. SEC is sometimes too close to Wall Street hedge funds

May 03, 2021 | finance.yahoo.com

Tesla Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was an important watchdog for investors but questioned why it was not more proactive against the growth of listed blank-check companies.

"They have an important role to play in protecting the public from getting swindled, but are sometimes too close to Wall St hedge funds imo (in my opinion)," Musk said on Twitter.

"Strange that they aren't taking more action on some of the SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies)," he added.

Reuters reported earlier on Tuesday that the SEC is considering new guidance to rein in growth projections made by SPACs, or listed blank-check companies, including clarification of when they qualify for certain legal protections. That would extend an SEC crackdown on a deal frenzy in SPACs, which the regulator worries is putting investors at risk.

Musk has had his own run-ins with the SEC. He reached a settlement with the regulator after he tweeted in August 2018 that he had "funding secured" to potentially take Tesla private in a $72 billion transaction. In reality, Musk was not close to acquiring funding.

[Mar 07, 2021] SEC Issues Devastating Risk Alert on Private Equity Abuses; Effectively Admits Failure of Last 5+ Years of Enforcement by Yves Smith

Notable quotes:
"... In the Risk Alert below, the itemization of various forms of abuses, such as the many ways private equity firms parcel out interests in the businesses they buy among various funds and insiders to their, as opposed to investors' benefit, alone should give pause. And the lengthy discussion of these conflicts does suggest the SEC has learned something over the years. Experts who dealt with the agency in its early years of examining private equity firms found the examiners allergic to considering, much the less pursuing, complex abuses. ..."
"... Undermining legislative intent of new supervisory authority the SEC never embraced its new responsibilities to ride herd on private equity and hedge funds. ..."
"... The agency is operating in such a cozy manner with private equity firms that as one investor described it: It's like FBI sitting down with the Mafia to tell them each year, "Don't cross these lines because that's what we are focusing on." ..."
"... Advisers charged private fund clients for expenses that were not permitted by the relevant fund operating agreements, such as adviser-related expenses like salaries of adviser personnel, compliance, regulatory filings, and office expenses, thereby causing investors to overpay expenses ..."
"... Current SEC chairman Jay Clayton came from Sullivan & Cromwell, bringing with him Steven Peikin as co-head of enforcement. And the Clayton SEC looks to have accomplished the impressive task of being even weaker on enforcement than Mary Jo White. ..."
"... On the same side though, fraud is a criminal offence, and it's SEC's duty to prosecute. And I believe that a lot of what PE engage in would happily fall under fraud, if SEC really wanted. ..."
"... Crimogenic: Producing or tending to produce crime or criminality. An additional factor is that, in the main, the criminals do not take their money and leave the gaming tables but pour it back in and the crime metastasizes. AKA, Kleptocracy. ..."
"... You might add that the threat of consequences for these crimes makes the criminals extremely motivated to elect officials who will not prosecute them (e.g. Obama). They're not running for office, they're avoiding incarceration. ..."
"... Andrew Levitt, for instance, complained bitterly that Joe Lieberman would regularly threaten to cut the SEC's budget for allegedly being too aggressive about enforcement. Lieberman was the Senator from Hedgistan. ..."
"... More banana republic level grift. What happens when investors figure out they can't believe anything they are told? ..."
"... Can we come up with a better descriptor for "private equity"? I suggest "billionaire looters". ..."
"... Where is the SEC when Bain Capital (Romney) wipes out Toys-R-Us and Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Blum wipes out Payless Shoes. They gain control of the companies, pile on massive debt and take the proceeds of the loan, and they know the company cannot service the loan and a BK is around the corner. ..."
"... Thousands lose their jobs. And this is legal? And we also lost Glass-Steagal and legalized stock buy-backs. The Elite are screwing the people. It's Socialism for the Rich, the Politicians and Govt Employees and Feudalism for the rest of us. ..."
Jun 26, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

We've embedded an SEC Risk Alert on private equity abuses at the end of this post. 1 What is remarkable about this document is that it contains a far longer and more detailed list of private abuses than the SEC flagged in its initial round of examinations of private equity firms in 2014 and 2015. Those examinations occurred in parallel with groundbreaking exposes by Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times and Mark Maremont in the Wall Street Journal.

At least some of the SEC enforcement actions in that era look to have been triggered by the press effectively getting ahead of the SEC. And the SEC even admitted the misconduct was more common at the most prominent firms.

Yet despite front-page articles on private equity abuses, the SEC engaged in wet noodle lashings. Its pattern was to file only one major enforcement action over a particular abuse. Even then, the SEC went to some lengths to spread the filings out among the biggest firms. That meant it was pointedly engaging in selective enforcement, punishing only "poster child" examples and letting other firms who'd engaged in precisely the same abuses get off scot free.

The very fact of this Risk Alert is an admission of failure by the SEC. It indicates that the misconduct it highlighted five years ago continues and if anything is even more pervasive than in the 2014-2015 era. It also confirms that its oft-stated premise then, that the abuses it found then had somehow been made by firms with integrity that would of course clean up their acts, and that now-better-informed investors would also be more vigilant and would crack down on misconduct, was laughably false.

In particular, the second section of the Risk Alert, on Fees and Expenses (starting on page 4) describes how fund managers are charging inflated or unwarranted fees and expenses. In any other line of work, this would be called theft. Yet all the SEC is willing to do is publish a Risk Alert, rather than impose fines as well as require disgorgements?

The SEC's Abject Failure

In the Risk Alert below, the itemization of various forms of abuses, such as the many ways private equity firms parcel out interests in the businesses they buy among various funds and insiders to their, as opposed to investors' benefit, alone should give pause. And the lengthy discussion of these conflicts does suggest the SEC has learned something over the years. Experts who dealt with the agency in its early years of examining private equity firms found the examiners allergic to considering, much the less pursuing, complex abuses.

Undermining legislative intent of new supervisory authority the SEC never embraced its new responsibilities to ride herd on private equity and hedge funds.

The SEC has long maintained a division between the retail investors and so-called "accredited investors" who by virtue of having higher net worths and investment portfolios, are treated by the agency as able to afford to lose more money. The justification is that richer means more sophisticated. But as anyone who is a manager for a top sports professional or entertainer, that is often not the case. And as we've seen, that goes double for public pension funds.

Starting with the era of Clinton appointee Arthur Levitt, the agency has taken the view that it is in the business of defending presumed-to-be-hapless retail investors and has left "accredited investor" and most of all, institutional investors, on their own. This was a policy decision by the agency when deregulation was venerated; there was no statutory basis for this change in priorities.

Congress tasked the SEC with supervising the fund management activities of private equity funds with over $150 million in assets under management. All of their investors are accredited investors. In other words, Congress mandated the SEC to make sure these firms complied with relevant laws as well as making adequate disclosures of what they were going to do with the money entrusted to them. Saying one thing in the investor contracts and doing another is a vastly worse breach than misrepresentations in marketing materials, yet the SEC acted as if slap-on-the-wrist-level enforcement was adequate.

We made fun when thirteen prominent public pension fund trustees wrote the SEC asking for them to force greater transparency of private equity fees and costs. The agency's position effectively was "You are grownups. No one is holding a gun to your head to make these investments. If you don't like the terms, walk away." They might have done better if they could have positioned their demand as consistent with the new Dodd Frank oversight requirements.

Actively covering up for bad conduct . In 2014, the SEC started working at giving malfeasance a free pass. Specifically, the SEC told private equity firms that they could continue their abuses if they 'fessed up in their annual disclosure filings, the so-called Form ADV. The term of art is "enhanced disclosure". Since when are contracts like confession, that if you admit to a breach, all is forgiven? Only in the topsy-turvy world of SEC enforcement.

And the coddling of crookedness continued. From a January post :

The agency is operating in such a cozy manner with private equity firms that as one investor described it: It's like FBI sitting down with the Mafia to tell them each year, "Don't cross these lines because that's what we are focusing on."

Specifically, as we indicated, the SEC was giving advanced warning of the issues it would focus on in its upcoming exams, in order to give investment managers the time to get their stories together and purge files. And rather than view its periodic exams as being designed to make sure private equity firms comply with the law and their representations, the agency views them as "cooperative" exercises! Misconduct is assumed to be the result of misunderstanding and error, and not design.

It's pretty hard to see conduct like this, from the SEC's Risk Alert, as being an accident:

Advisers charged private fund clients for expenses that were not permitted by the relevant fund operating agreements, such as adviser-related expenses like salaries of adviser personnel, compliance, regulatory filings, and office expenses, thereby causing investors to overpay expenses

The staff observed private fund advisers that did not value client assets in accordance with their valuation processes or in accordance with disclosures to clients (such as that the assets would be valued in accordance with GAAP). In some cases, the staff observed that this failure to value a private fund's holdings in accordance with the disclosed valuation process led to overcharging management fees and carried interest because such fees were based on inappropriately overvalued holdings .

Advisers failed to apply or calculate management fee offsets in accordance with disclosures and therefore caused investors to overpay management fees.

We're highlighting this skimming simply because it is easier for laypeople to understand than some of the other types of cheating the SEC described. Even so, industry insiders and investors complained that the description of the misconduct in this Risk Alert was too general to give them enough of a roadmap to look for it at particular funds.

Ignoring how investors continue to be fleeced . The SEC's list includes every abuse it sanctioned or mentioned in the 2014 to 2015 period, including undisclosed termination of monitoring fees, failure to disclose that investors were paying for "senior advisers/operating partners," fraudulent charges, overcharging for services provided by affiliated companies, plus lots of types of bad-faith conduct on fund restructurings and allocations of fees and expenses on transactions allocated across funds.

The SEC assumed institutional investors would insist on better conduct once they were informed that they'd been had. In reality, not only did private equity investors fail to demand better, they accepted new fund agreements that described the sort of objectionable behavior they'd been engaging in. Remember, the big requirement in SEC land is disclosure. So if a fund manager says he might do Bad Things and then proceeds accordingly, the investor can't complain about not having been warned.

Moreover, the SEC's very long list of bad acts says the industry is continuing to misbehave even after it has defined deviancy down via more permissive limited partnership agreements!

Why This Risk Alert Now?

Keep in mind what a Risk Alert is and isn't. The best way to conceptualize it is as a press release from the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations. It does not have any legal or regulatory force. Risk Alerts are not even considered to be SEC official views. They are strictly the product of OCIE staff.

On the first page of this Risk Alert, the OCIE blandly states that:

This Risk Alert is intended to assist private fund advisers in reviewing and enhancing their compliance programs, and also to provide investors with information concerning private fund adviser deficiencies.

Cutely, footnotes point out that not everyone examined got a deficiency letter (!!!), that the SEC has taken enforcement actions on "many" of the abuses described in the Risk Alert, yet "OCIE continues to observe some of these practices during examinations."

Several of our contacts who met in person with the SEC to discuss private equity grifting back in 2014-2015 pressed the agency to issue a Risk Alert as a way of underscoring the seriousness of the issues it was unearthing. The staffers demurred then.

In fairness, the SEC may have regarded a Risk Alert as having the potential to undermine its not-completed enforcement actions. But why not publish one afterwards, particularly since the intent then had clearly been to single out prominent examples of particular types of misconduct, rather than tackle it systematically? 2

So why is the OCIE stepping out a bit now? The most likely reason is as an effort to compensate for the lack of enforcement actions. Recall that all the OCIE can do is refer a case to the Enforcement Division; it's their call as to whether or not to take it up.

The SEC looks to have institutionalized the practice of borrowing lawyers from prominent firms. Mary Jo White of Debevoise brought Andrew Ceresney with her from Debeviose to be her head of enforcement. Both returned to Debevoise.

Current SEC chairman Jay Clayton came from Sullivan & Cromwell, bringing with him Steven Peikin as co-head of enforcement. And the Clayton SEC looks to have accomplished the impressive task of being even weaker on enforcement than Mary Jo White. Clayton made clear his focus was on "mom and pop" investors, meaning he chose to overlook much more consequential abuses by private equity firms and hedgies. The New York Times determined that the average amount of SEC fines against corporate perps fell markedly in 2018 compared to the final 20 months of the Obama Administration. The SEC since then levied $1 billion fine against the Woodbridge Group of Companies and its one-time owner for running a Ponzi scheme that fleeced over 8,400, so that would bring the average penalty up a bit. But it still confirms that Clayton is concerned about small fry, and not deeper but just as pickable pockets.

David Sirota argues that the OCIE was out to embarrass Clayton and sabotage what Sirota depicted as an SEC initiative to let retail investors invest in private equity. Sirota appears to have missed that that horse has left the barn and is in the next county, and the SEC had squat to do with it.

The overwhelming majority of retail funds is not in discretionary accounts but in retirement accounts, overwhelmingly 401(k)s. And it is the Department of Labor, which regulates ERISA plans, and not the SEC, that decides what those go and no go zones are. The DoL has already green-lighted allowing large swathes of 401(k) funds to include private equity holdings. From a post earlier this month :

Until now, regulations have kept private equity out of the retail market by prohibiting managers from accepting capital from individuals who lack significant net worth.

Private equity firms have succeeded in storming that barricade. The Department of Labor published a June 3 information letter that allows private equity funds, or more accurately funds of funds, to be included in certain 401(k) plan offerings, namely, target date funds and balanced funds. This is significant because despite the SEC regularly calling out bad practices with target date funds, they are the strategy used to manage the majority of 401(k) assets .

Moreover, even though Sirota pointed out that Clayton had spoken out in favor of allowing retail investors more access to private equity investments, the proposed regulation on the definition of accredited investors in fact not only does not lower income or net worth requirements (save for allowing spouses to combine their holdings) it in fact solicited comments on the idea of raising the limits. From a K&L Gates write up :

Previously, the Concept Release requested comment on whether the SEC should revise the current individual income ($200,000) and net worth ($1,000,000) thresholds. In the Proposing Release, the SEC further considered these thresholds, noting that the figures have not been adjusted since 1982. The SEC concluded that it does not believe modifications to the thresholds are necessary at this time, but it has requested comments on whether the final should instead make a one-time increase to the thresholds in the account for inflation, or whether the final rule should reflect a figure that is indexed to inflation on a going-forward basis.

It is not clear how many people would be picked up by the proposed change, which was being fleshed out, that of letting some presumed sophisticated but not rich individuals, like junior hedge fund professionals and holders of securities licenses, be treated as accredited investors. In other words, despite Clayton's talk about wanting ordinary investors to have more access to private equity funds, the agency's proposed rule change falls short of that.

Moreover, if the OCIE staff had wanted to undermine even the limited liberalization of the definition of accredited investor so as to stymie more private equity investment, the time to do so would have been immediately before or while the comments period was open. It ended March 16 .

The New York Times reported that Senate Republicans deemed Clayton's odds of confirmation as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York as remote even before the Trump fired Geoffrey Berman to clear a path for Clayton. So the idea that a technical release by the OCIE would derail Clayton's confirmation is a stretch.

So again, why now? One possibility is that the timing is purely a coincidence. For instance, the SEC staffers might have been waiting until Covid-19 news overload died down a bit so their work might get a hearing (and Covid-19 remote work complications may also have delayed its release).

The second possibility is that OCIE is indeed very frustrated with the enforcement chief Peikin's inaction on private equity. The fact that Peikin's boss and protector Clayton has made himself a lame duck meant a salvo against Peikin was now a much lower risk. If any readers have better insight into the internal workings of the SEC these days, please pipe up.

______

1 Formally, as you can see, this Risk Alert addresses both private equity and hedge fund misconduct, but on reading the details, the citing of both types of funds reflects the degree to which hedge funds have been engaging in the buying and selling of stakes in private companies. For instance, Chatham Asset Management, which has become notorious through its ownership of American Media, which in turn owns the National Enquirer, calls itself a hedge fund. Moreover, when the SEC started examining both private equity and hedge funds under new authority granted by Dodd Frank, it described the sort of misconduct described in this Risk Alert as coming out of exams of private equity firms, and its limited round of enforcement actions then were against brand name private equity firms like KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, and TPG. Thus for convenience as well as historical reasons, we refer only to private equity firms as perps.

2 Media stories at the time, including some of our posts, provided substantial evidence that particular abuses, such as undisclosed termination of monitoring fees and failure to disclose that "senior advisers" presented as general partner "team members" were in fact consultants being separately billed to fund investments, were common practices. Yet the SEC chose to lodge only marquee enforcement actions against one prominent firm for each abuse, as if token enforcement would serve as an adequate deterrent. The message was the reverse, that the overwhelming majority of the abuses were able to keep their ill-gotten gains and not even face public embarrassment.


skippy , June 26, 2020 at 4:27 am

Peter Sellers I'll say now – ????

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TtZgs8k8dU

vlade , June 26, 2020 at 4:35 am

TBH, in the view of Calpers ignoring its advisors, I do have a little understanding of the SEC's point "you're grown ups" (the worse problem is that the advisors who leach themselves to the various accredited investors are often not worth the money.

On the same side though, fraud is a criminal offence, and it's SEC's duty to prosecute. And I believe that a lot of what PE engage in would happily fall under fraud, if SEC really wanted.

Susan the other , June 26, 2020 at 11:43 am

Yes, the SEC conveniently claims a conflicted authority – 1. to regulate compliance but without an "enforcement authority", and 2. report egregious behavior to their "enforcement authority". So the SEC is less than a permissive nanny. Sort of like "access" to enforcement authority. Sounds like health care to me.

Yves Smith Post author , June 26, 2020 at 4:06 pm

No, this is false. The SEC has an examination division and an enforcement division. The SEC can and does take enforcement actions that result in fines and disgorgements, see the $1 billion fine mentioned in the post. So the exam division can recommend enforcement to the enforcement division. That does not mean it will get done. Some enforcement actions originate from within the enforcement division, like insider trading cases, and the SEC long has had a tendency to prioritize insider trading cases.

The SEC cannot prosecute. It has to refer cases that it thinks are criminal to the DoJ and try to get them to saddle up.

Maritimer , June 26, 2020 at 5:04 am

Crimogenic: Producing or tending to produce crime or criminality. An additional factor is that, in the main, the criminals do not take their money and leave the gaming tables but pour it back in and the crime metastasizes. AKA, Kleptocracy.

Thus in 2008 and thereafter the criminal damage required 2-3 trillion, now 7-10 trillion.

Any economic expert who does not recognize crime as the number one problem in the criminogenic US economy I disregard. Why read all that analysis when, at the end of the run, it all just boils down to bailing out the criminals and trying to reset the criminogenic system?

(Can I get my economics degree now?)

Adam Eran , June 26, 2020 at 1:33 pm

You might add that the threat of consequences for these crimes makes the criminals extremely motivated to elect officials who will not prosecute them (e.g. Obama). They're not running for office, they're avoiding incarceration.

The Rev Kev , June 26, 2020 at 5:17 am

The SEC has been captured for years now. It was not that long ago that SEC Examination chief Andrew Bowden made a grovelling speech to these players and even asked them to give his son a job which was so wrong-

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/regulatory-capture-captured-on-video-190033/

But there is no point in reforming the SEC as it was the politicians, at the beck and call of these players, that de-fanged the SEC – and it was a bipartisan effort! So it becomes a chicken-or-the-egg problem in the matter of reform. Who do you reform first?

Can't leave this comment without mentioning something about a private equity company. One of the two major internal airlines in Oz went broke due to the virus and a private equity buyer has been found to buy it. A union rep said that they will be good for jobs and that they are a good company. Their name? Bain Capital!

Yves Smith Post author , June 26, 2020 at 5:44 am

We broke the story about Andrew Bowden! Give credit where credit is due!!!! Even though Taibbi points to us in his first line, linking to Rolling Stone says to those who don't bother clicking through that it was their story.

Plus we transcribed his fawning remarks.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/03/secs-andrew-bowden-regulator-sale.html

And he resigned three weeks later.

The Rev Kev , June 26, 2020 at 5:56 am

Of course I remember that story. I was going to mention it but thought to let people see it in virtually the opening line of that story where he gives you credit. More of a jolt of recognition seeing it rather than being told about it first.

Jesper , June 26, 2020 at 6:36 am

Of the three branches of government which ones are not captured by big business? If two out of three were to captured then does it matter what the third does?

In my opinion too much power has been centralised, too much of the productivity gains of the past 40 years have been monetised and therefore made possible to hoard and centralise. SEC should (in my opinion) try to enforce more but without more support then I do not believe (it is my opinion, nothing more and nothing less) that they can accomplish much.

Susan the other , June 26, 2020 at 11:57 am

The SEC is a mysterious agency which (?) must fall under the jurisdiction of the Treasury because it is a monetary regulatory agency in the business of regulating securities and exchanges. But it has no authority to do much of anything. The Treasury itself falls under the executive administration but as we have recently seen, Mnuchin himself managed to get a nice skim for his banking pals from the money Congress legislated.

That's because Congress doesn't know how to effectuate a damn thing – they legislate stuff that morphs before our very eyes and goes to the grifters without a hitch. So why don't we demand that consumer protection be made into hard law with no wiggle room; that since investing is complex in this world of embedded funds and glossy prospectuses, we the consumer should not have to wade through all the nonsense to make decisions – that everything be on the table. And if PE can't manage to do that and still steal its billions then PE should be declared to be flat-out illegal.

Yves Smith Post author , June 26, 2020 at 4:08 pm

Please stop spreading disinformation. This is the second time on this post. The SEC has nada to do with the Treasury. It is an independent regulatory agency. It however is the only financial regulator that does not keep what it kills (its own fees and fines) but is instead subject to Congressional appropriations.

Andrew Levitt, for instance, complained bitterly that Joe Lieberman would regularly threaten to cut the SEC's budget for allegedly being too aggressive about enforcement. Lieberman was the Senator from Hedgistan.

Edward , June 26, 2020 at 7:16 am

More banana republic level grift. What happens when investors figure out they can't believe anything they are told?

RJMc, MD , June 26, 2020 at 8:43 am

It should be noted that out here in the countryside of northern Michigan that embezzlement (a winter sport here while the men are out ice fishing), theft and fraud are still considered punishable felonies. Perhaps that is simply a quaint holdover from a bygone time. Dudley set the tone for the C of C with his Green Book on bank deregulation. One of the subsequent heads of C of C was reported as seeing his position as "being the spiritual resource for banks". If bank regulation is treated in a farcical fashion why should be the SEC be any different?

Susan the other , June 26, 2020 at 12:08 pm

I was shocked to just now learn that ERISA/the Dept of Labor is in regulatory control of allowing pension funds to buy PE fund of funds and "balanced PE funds". What VERBIAGE. Are "PE Fund of Balanced Funds" an actual category? And what distinguishes them from good old straightforward Index Funds? And also too – what is happening before our very glazed-over eyes is that PE is high grading not just the stock market but the US Treasury itself. Ordinary investors should be buying US Treasuries directly and retirement funds should too. It will be a big bite but if it knocks PE out of business it would be worth it. PE is in the business of cooking its books, ravaging struggling corporations, and boldly privatizing the goddamned Treasury. WTF?

Kouros , June 26, 2020 at 12:27 pm

I want to bring this to Yves' attention: the recent SCOTUS decision on Thole v. U.S. Bank that opens the doors wide for corporate America to steal with impunity from the pension plans: https://www.unz.com/estriker/corrupt-supreme-court-gives-green-light-to-corporations-to-steal-from-pensioners/

Glen , June 26, 2020 at 12:51 pm

Can we come up with a better descriptor for "private equity"? I suggest "billionaire looters".

Olivier , June 26, 2020 at 2:00 pm

What about the wanton destruction of the purchased companies? If this solely about the harm done to the poor investors? If so, that is seriously wrong.

flora , June 26, 2020 at 3:27 pm

If, you know, the neoliberal "because markets" is the ruling paradigm then of course there is no harm done. The questions then become: is "because markets" a sensible paradigm? What is it a sensible paradigm of? Is "because markets" even sensible for the long term?

flora , June 26, 2020 at 3:19 pm

an aside: farewell, Olympus camera. A sad day. Farewell, OM-1 and OM-2. Film photography is really not replicated by digital photography but the larger market has gone to digital. Speed and cost vs quality. Because markets. Now the vulture swoop.

Stan Sexton , June 26, 2020 at 8:17 pm

Where is the SEC when Bain Capital (Romney) wipes out Toys-R-Us and Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Blum wipes out Payless Shoes. They gain control of the companies, pile on massive debt and take the proceeds of the loan, and they know the company cannot service the loan and a BK is around the corner.

Thousands lose their jobs. And this is legal? And we also lost Glass-Steagal and legalized stock buy-backs. The Elite are screwing the people. It's Socialism for the Rich, the Politicians and Govt Employees and Feudalism for the rest of us.

[Mar 07, 2021] Bank Regulation Can not Be Heads Banks Win, Tails Taxpayers Lose

Notable quotes:
"... Kane, who coined the term "zombie bank" and who famously raised early alarms about American savings and loans, analyzed European banks and how regulators, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, backstop them. ..."
"... We are only interested observers of the arm wrestling between the various EU countries over the costs of bank rescues, state expenditures, and such. But we do think there is a clear lesson from the long history of how governments have dealt with bank failures . [If] the European Union needs to step in to save banks, there is no reason why they have to do it for free best practice in banking rescues is to save banks, but not bankers. That is, prevent the system from melting down with all the many years of broad economic losses that would bring, but force out those responsible and make sure the public gets paid back for rescuing the financial system. ..."
"... In 2019, another question, alas, is also piercing. In country after country, Social Democratic center-left parties have shrunk, in many instances almost to nothingness. In Germany the SPD gives every sign of following the French Socialist Party into oblivion. Would a government coalition in which the SPD holds the Finance Ministry even consider anything but guaranteeing the public a huge piece of any upside if they rescue two failing institutions? ..."
Mar 31, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
... ... ...

Running in the background, though, was a new, darker theme: That the post-2008 reforms had gone too far in restricting policymakers' discretion in crises. The trio most responsible for making the post-Lehman bailout revolution -- Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson -- expressed their misgivings in a joint op-ed :

But in its post-crisis reforms, Congress also took away some of the most powerful tools used by the FDIC, the Fed and the Treasury the FDIC can no longer issue blanket guarantees of bank debt as it did in the crisis, the Fed's emergency lending powers have been constrained, and the Treasury would not be able to repeat its guarantee of the money market funds.

These powers were critical in stopping the 2008 panic The paradox of any financial crisis is that the policies necessary to stop it are always politically unpopular. But if that unpopularity delays or prevents a strong response, the costs to the economy become greater.

We need to make sure that future generations of financial firefighters have the emergency powers they need to prevent the next fire from becoming a conflagration.

Sotto voce fears of this sort go back to the earliest reform discussions. But the question surfaced dramatically in Timothy Geithner's 2016 Per Jacobsson Lecture, " Are We Safer? The Case for Strengthening the Bagehot Arsenal ." More recently, the Group of Thirty has advanced similar suggestions -- not too surprisingly, since Geithner was co-project manager of the report, along with Guillermo Ortiz, the former Governor of the Mexican Central Bank, who introduced the former Treasury Secretary at the Per Jacobson lecture.

Aside from the financial collapse itself, probably nothing has so shaken public confidence in democratic institutions as the wave of bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse. The redistribution of wealth and opportunity that the bailouts wrought surely helped fuel the populist surges that have swept over Europe and the United States in the last decade. The spectacle of policymakers rubber stamping literally unlimited sums for financial institutions while preaching the importance of austerity for everyone else has been unbearable to millions of people.

Especially in money-driven political systems, affording policymakers unlimited discretion also plainly courts serious risks. Put simply, too big to fail banks enjoy a uniquely splendid situation of "heads I win, tails you lose" when they take risks. Scholars whose research INET has supported, notably Edward Kane , have shown how the certainty of government bailouts advantages large financial institutions, directly affecting prices of their bonds and stocks.

For these reasons INET convened a panel at a G20 preparatory meeting in Berlin on " Moral Hazard Issues in Extended Financial Safety Nets ." The Power Point presentations of the three panelists are presented in the order in which they gave them, since the latter ones sometimes comment on Edward Kane 's analysis of the European banks. Kane, who coined the term "zombie bank" and who famously raised early alarms about American savings and loans, analyzed European banks and how regulators, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, backstop them.

Peter Bofinger , Professor of International and Monetary Economics at the University of Würzburg and an outgoing member of the German Economic Council, followed with a discussion of how the system has changed since 2008. Helene Schuberth , Head of the Foreign Research Division of the Austrian National Bank, analyzed changes in the global financial governance system since the collapse.

The panel took place as public discussion of a proposed merger between two giant German banks, the Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, reached fever pitch. The panelists explored issues directly relevant to such fusions, without necessarily agreeing among themselves or with anyone at INET.

But the point Robert Johnson, INET's President, and I made some years back , amid an earlier wave of talk about using public money to bail out European banks, remains on target:

We are only interested observers of the arm wrestling between the various EU countries over the costs of bank rescues, state expenditures, and such. But we do think there is a clear lesson from the long history of how governments have dealt with bank failures . [If] the European Union needs to step in to save banks, there is no reason why they have to do it for free best practice in banking rescues is to save banks, but not bankers. That is, prevent the system from melting down with all the many years of broad economic losses that would bring, but force out those responsible and make sure the public gets paid back for rescuing the financial system.

The simplest way to do that is to have the state take equity in the banks it rescues and write down the equity of bank shareholders in proportion. This can be done in several ways -- direct equity as a condition for bailout, requiring warrants that can be exercised later, etc. The key points are for the state to take over the banks, get the bad loans rapidly out of those and into a "bad bank," and hold the junk for a decent interval so the rest of the market does not crater. When the banks come back to profitability, you can cash in the warrants and sell the stock if you don't like state ownership. That way the public gets its money back .at times states have even made a profit.

In 2019, another question, alas, is also piercing. In country after country, Social Democratic center-left parties have shrunk, in many instances almost to nothingness. In Germany the SPD gives every sign of following the French Socialist Party into oblivion. Would a government coalition in which the SPD holds the Finance Ministry even consider anything but guaranteeing the public a huge piece of any upside if they rescue two failing institutions?

The full article of Edward Kane

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WheresOurTeddy , March 29, 2019 at 11:49 am

Enforcement of financial laws is not our thing. Just ask Chuck Schumer of the #Non-Resistance:

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/28/sec-democratic-commissioner-chuck-schumer/

Louis Fyne , March 29, 2019 at 12:17 pm

There needs to be an asset tax on/break up of the megas. End the hyper-agglomeration of deposits at the tail end. Not holding my breath though. (see NY state congressional delegation)

To be generous, tax starts at $300 billion. Even then it affects only a dozen or so US banks. But would be enough to clamp down on the hyper-scale of the largest US/world banks. The world would be better off with lot more mid-sized regional players.

thesaucymugwump , March 29, 2019 at 12:17 pm

Anyone who mentions Timmy Geithner without spitting did not pay attention during the Obama reign of terror. He and Obama crowed about the Making Home Affordable Act, implying that it would save all homeowners in mortgage trouble, but conveniently neglected to mention that less than 100 banks had signed up. The thousands of non-signatories simply continued to foreclose.

Not to mention Eric Holder's intentional non-prosecution of banksters. For these and many other reasons, especially his "Islamic State is only the JV team" crack, Obama was one of our worst presidents.

chuck roast , March 29, 2019 at 12:21 pm

Thank you Yves and Tom Ferguson.

Fergusons graph on DBK's default probabilities coincides with the ECB's ending its asset purchase programme and entering the "reinvestment phase of the asset purchase programme".
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.html
The worst of the euro zombie banks appear to be getting tense and nervous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKpzCCuHDVY
Maybe that is why Jerome Powell did his volte-face last month on gradually raising interest rates. Note that the Fed also reduced its automatic asset roll-off. I'm curious if the other euro-zombies in the "peers" return on equity chart are are experiencing volatility also.

Craig H. , March 29, 2019 at 1:04 pm

Apparently the worst fate you can suffer as long as you don't go Madoff is Fuld. According to Wikipedia his company manages a hundred million which must be humiliating. It's not as humiliating as locking the guy up in prison would be by a very long stretch.

Greenspan famously lamented that there isn't anything the regulators can really do except make empty threats. This is dishonest. The regulations are not carved in stone like the ten commandments. In China they execute incorrigible financiers all the time.

John Wright , March 30, 2019 at 10:31 am

Greenspan was never willing to counter any problem that might irritate powerful financial constituencies. For example, during the internet stock bubble of the late 1990's, Greenspan decried the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market. The Greenspan Fed could have raised the margin requirement for stocks to buttress this view, but did not. As I remembered reading, Greenspan was in poor financial shape when he got his Fed job.

His subsequent performance at the Fed apparently left him a wealthy man. Real regulation by Greenspan may have adversely affected his wealth. It may explain why Alan Greenspan would much rather let a financial bubble grow until it pops and then "fix it".

Procopius , March 31, 2019 at 12:30 am

Everybody forgets (or at least does not mention) that Greenspan was a member of the Class of '43, the (mostly Canadian) earliest members of the Objectivist Cult with guru Ayn Rand. Expecting him to act rationally is foolish. It may happen accidentally (we do not know why he chose to let the economy expand unhindered in 1999), but you cannot count on it. In a world with information asymmetry expecting markets to be concerned about reputation is ridiculous. To expect them to police themselves for long term benefit is even more ridiculous.

rd , March 29, 2019 at 3:06 pm

I think Finance is currently about 13% of the S&P 500, down from the peak of about 18% or so in 2007. I think we will have a healthy economy and improved political climate when Finance is about 8-10% of the S&P 500 which is about where I think finance plays a healthy, but not overwhelming rentier role in the economy.

Inode_buddha , March 29, 2019 at 4:51 pm

I think things will be much better when finance is about ~3% of the S&P 500, but no more than that.

[Mar 07, 2021] Regulatory Capture: The Banks and the System That They Have Corrupted

Notable quotes:
"... She soldiered through her painful stomach ailments and secretly tape-recorded 46 hours of conversations between New York Fed officials and Goldman Sachs. After being fired for refusing to soften her examination opinion on Goldman Sachs, Segarra released the tapes to ProPublica and the radio program This American Life and the story went viral from there... ..."
"... In a nutshell, the whoring works like this. There are huge financial incentives to go along, get along, and keep your mouth shut about fraud. The financial incentives encompass both the salary, pension and benefits at the New York Fed as well as the high-paying job waiting for you at a Wall Street bank or Wall Street law firm if you show you are a team player . ..."
Mar 14, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

"But the impotence one feels today -- an impotence we should never consider permanent -- does not excuse one from remaining true to oneself, nor does it excuse capitulation to the enemy, what ever mask he may wear. Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. The worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others."

Simone Weil

"And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else...

If TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car... I think it's inevitable. I mean, I don't think how you can look at all the incentives that were in place going up to 2008 and see that in many ways they've only gotten worse and come to any other conclusion."

Neil Barofsky

"Written by Carmen Segarra, the petite lawyer turned bank examiner turned whistleblower turned one-woman swat team, the 340-page tome takes the reader along on her gut-wrenching workdays for an entire seven months inside one of the most powerful and corrupted watchdogs of the powerful and corrupted players on Wall Street – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The days were literally gut-wrenching. Segarra reports that after months of being alternately gas-lighted and bullied at the New York Fed to whip her into the ranks of the corrupted, she had to go to a gastroenterologist and learned her stomach lining was gone.

She soldiered through her painful stomach ailments and secretly tape-recorded 46 hours of conversations between New York Fed officials and Goldman Sachs. After being fired for refusing to soften her examination opinion on Goldman Sachs, Segarra released the tapes to ProPublica and the radio program This American Life and the story went viral from there...

In a nutshell, the whoring works like this. There are huge financial incentives to go along, get along, and keep your mouth shut about fraud. The financial incentives encompass both the salary, pension and benefits at the New York Fed as well as the high-paying job waiting for you at a Wall Street bank or Wall Street law firm if you show you are a team player .

If the Democratic leadership of the House Financial Services Committee is smart, it will reopen the Senate's aborted inquiry into the New York Fed's labyrinthine conflicts of interest in supervising Wall Street and make removing that supervisory role a core component of the Democrat's 2020 platform. Senator Bernie Sanders' platform can certainly be expected to continue the accurate battle cry that 'the business model of Wall Street is fraud.'"

Pam Martens, Wall Street on Parade

[Sep 20, 2020] The Criminal Prosecution Of Boeing Executives Should Begin by Mike Shedlock

Sep 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

Damning details of purposeful malfeasance by Boeing executives emerged in a Congressional investigation.

FAA, Boeing Blasted Over 737 MAX Failures

On Wednesday, the Transportation Committee Blasted FAA, Boeing Over 737 MAX Failures

The 238-page document, written by the majority staff of the House Transportation Committee, calls into question whether the plane maker or the Federal Aviation Administration has fully incorporated essential safety lessons, despite a global grounding of the MAX fleet since March 2019.

After an 18-month investigation, the report, released Wednesday, concludes that Boeing's travails stemmed partly from a reluctance to admit mistakes and "point to a company culture that is in serious need of a safety reset."

The report provides more specifics, in sometimes-blistering language, backing up preliminary findings the panel's Democrats released six months ago , which laid out a pattern of mistakes and missed opportunities to correct them.

In one section, the Democrats' report faults Boeing for what it calls "inconceivable and inexcusable" actions to withhold crucial information from airlines about one cockpit-warning system, related to but not part of MCAS, that didn't operate as required on 80% of MAX jets.

Other portions highlight instances when Boeing officials, acting in their capacity as designated FAA representatives, part of a widely used system of delegating oversight authority to company employees, failed to alert agency managers about various safety matters .

Boeing Purposely Hid Design Flaws

The Financial Times has an even more damning take in its report Boeing Hid Design Flaws in Max Jets from Pilots and Regulators .

Boeing concealed from regulators internal test data showing that if a pilot took longer than 10 seconds to recognise that the system had kicked in erroneously, the consequences would be "catastrophic" .

The report also detailed how an alert, which would have warned pilots of a potential problem with one of their anti-stall sensors, was not working on the vast majority of the Max fleet . It found that the company deliberately concealed this fact from both pilots and regulators as it continued to roll out the new aircraft around the world.

In Bed With the Regulators

Boeing's defense is the FAA signed off on the reviews. Lovely. Boeing coerced or bribed the FAA to sign off on the reviews now tries to hide behind the FAA.

There is only one way to stop executive criminals like those at Boeing. Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all of their stock and options and hand the money out for restitution.

adr , 1 hour ago

Remember, Boeing spent enough on stock buybacks in the past ten years to fund the development of at least seven new airframes.

Instead of developing a new and better plane, they strapped engines that didn't belong on the 737 and called it safe.

SDShack , 21 minutes ago

What is really sad is they already had a perfectly functional and safe 737Max. It was the 757. Look at the specs between the 2 planes. Almost same size, capacity, range, etc. Only difference was the 757 requires longer runways, but I would think they could have adjusted the design to improve that and make it very similar to the 737Max without starting from scratch. Instead Boeing bean counters killed the 757 and gave the world this flying coffin. Now the world bean counters will kill Boeing.

Tristan Ludlow , 1 hour ago

Boeing is a critical defense contractor. They will not be held accountable and they will be rewarded with additional bailouts and contract awards.

MFL5591 , 1 hour ago

Can you imagine a congress of Criminals Like Schiff, Pelosi and Schumer prosecuting someone else for fraud? What a joke. Next up will be Bill Clinton testifying against a person on trial for Pedophilia!

RagaMuffin , 1 hour ago

Mish is half right. The FAA should join Boeing in jail. If they are not held responsible for their role, why have an FAA?

Manthong , 1 hour ago

"There is only one way to stop executive criminals like those at Boeing.

Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all of their stock and options and hand the money out for restitution."

Correction:

There is only one way to stop regulator criminals like those in government.

Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all of their pensions and ill gotten wealth a nd hand the money out for restitution.

Elliott Eldrich , 43 minutes ago

"There is only one way to stop executive criminals like those at Boeing.

Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all of their stock and options and hand the money out for restitution."

Ha ha ha HA HA HA HA HA! Silly rabbit, jail is for poors...

Birdbob , 1 hour ago

Accountability of Elite Perps ended under Oblaba's reign of "Wall Street and Technocracy Architects" .White collar criminals were granted immunity from prosecution. This was put into play by Attorney Genital Eric Holder. This was the beginning of having an orificial Attorney Genital that facilitated the District of Criminals organized crime empire ending the 3 letter agencies' interference. https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8310187817727287761/1843903631072834621

Dash8 , 1 hour ago

You don't seem to understand the basic principle of aircraft design...it must not require an extraordinary response for a KNOWN problem.

Think of it this way; Ford builds a car that works great most of the time, but occasionally a wheel will fall off at highway speeds...no problem, right? ....you just guide the car to the shoulder on the 3 remaining wheels and all good.

Now, put your wife and kids in that car, after a day at work and the kids screaming in the back.

Still feel good about your opinion?

canaanav , 1 hour ago

I wrote software on the 787. You are right. This was not a known problem and the Trim Runaway procedure was already established. The issue was that the MAX needed a larger horizontal stab and MCAS would have never been needed. The FAA doesnt have the knowledge to regulate things like this. Boeing lost talent too, and gets bailouts and tax breaks to the extent that they dont care.

Dash8 , 1 hour ago

But it was a known problem, Boeing admits this.

Argon1 , 41 minutes ago

LGBT & Ethnicity was a more important hiring criteria than Engineering talant.

gutta percha , 1 hour ago

Why is it so difficult to design and maintain reliable Angle Of Attack sensors? The engineers put in layers and layers of complicated tech to sense and react to AOA sensor failures. Why not make the sensors _themselves_ more reliable? They aren't nearly as complex as all the layers of tech BS on top of them.

Dash8 , 1 hour ago

It's not, but it costs $$....and there you have it.

Argon1 , 37 minutes ago

Its the Shuttle Rocketdyne problem, the upper management phones down to the safety committee and complains about the cost of the delay, take off your engineer hat and put on your management hat. All of a sudden your project launches on schedule and the board claps and cheers at their ability to defy physics and save $ millions by just shouting at someone for about 60 seconds..

canaanav , 1 hour ago

Each AOA sensor is already redundant internally. They have multiple channels. I believe they were hit with a maintenance stand and jammed. That said, AOA has never been a control system component. It just runs the low-speed cue on the EFIS and the stick shaker. It's an advisory-level system. Boeing tied it to Flight Controls thru MCAS. The FAA likely dictated to Boeing how they wanted the System Safety Analysis (SSA) to look, Boeing wrote it that way, the FAA bought off on it.

Winston Churchill , 43 minutes ago

More fundamental is why an aerodynamically stable aircraft wasn't designed in the first place,love of money.

HardlyZero , 13 minutes ago

Yes. In reality the changed CG (Center of Gravity) due to the larger fan engine really did setup as a "new" design, so the MAX should have been treated as "new" and completely evaluated and completely tested as a completly new design. As a new design it would probably double the development and test cost and schedule...so be it.

DisorderlyConduct , 1 hour ago

"Lovely. Boeing coerced or bribed the FAA to sign off on the reviews now tries to hide behind the FAA."

No - what a shoddy analysis.

The FAA conceded many of their oversight responsibilities to Boeing - who was basically given the green light to self-monitor. The FAA is the one that is in the wrong here.

Well, how the **** else was that supposed to end up? This is like the IRS letting people self-audit...

Astroboy , 1 hour ago

Just as the Boeing saga is unfolding, we should expect by the end of the year other similar situations, related to drug companies, pandemia and the rest.

https://thenewroads.com/2019/12/09/forecast-for-2020/

https://thenewroads.com/2020/07/21/great-conjunction-jupiter-and-saturn-next-to-the-solstice-of-december-2020/
play_arrow

highwaytoserfdom , 1 hour ago

It is political economy...

8. The internet was invented by the US government, not Silicon Valley

Many people think that the US is ahead in the frontier technology sectors as a result of private sector entrepreneurship. It's not. The US federal government created all these sectors.

The Pentagon financed the development of the computer in the early days and the Internet came out of a Pentagon research project. The semiconductor - the foundation of the information economy - was initially developed with the funding of the US Navy. The US aircraft industry would not have become what it is today had the US Air Force not massively subsidized it indirectly by paying huge prices for its military aircraft, the profit of which was channeled into developing civilian aircraft.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-20/what-piketty-didnt-say-13-facts-they-dont-tell-you-about-economics

LoneStarHog , 1 hour ago

People believe that corporate executives are immune from prosecution and protected by the fact that they are within the corporation. This is false security. If true purposeful and intended criminal activities are conducted by any corporate executive, the courts can do what is called "Piercing The Corporate Veil" . It is looking beyond the corporation as a virtual person and looking at the actual individuals making and conducting the criminal activities.

Jamie Dimon should be first on this list.

[Jan 01, 2020] FDA Failed to Police Opioids Makers, Thus Fueling Opioids Crisis

Jan 01, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

FDA Failed to Police Opioids Makers, Thus Fueling Opioids Crisis Posted on January 1, 2020 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans.

I had hoped to welcome 2020 with a optimistic post.

Alas, the current news cycle has thrown up little cause for optimism.

Instead, what has caught my eye today: 2019 closes with release of a new study showing the FDA's failure to police opioids manufacturers fueled the opioids crisis.

This is yet another example of a familiar theme: inadequate regulation kills people: e.g. think Boeing. Or, on a longer term, less immediate scale, consider the failure of the Environmental Protection Agency, in so many realms, including the failure to curb emissions so as to slow the pace of climate change.

In the opioids case, we're talking about thousands and thousands of people.

On Monday, Jama Internal Medicine published research concerning the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) program to reduce opioids abuse. The FDA launched its risk evaluation and mitigation strategy – REMS – in 2012. Researchers examined nearly 10,000 documents, released in response to a Freedom of Information ACT (FOA) request, to generate the conclusions published by JAMA.

As the Gray Lady tells the story in As Tens of Thousands Died, F.D.A. Failed to Police Opioids :

In 2011, the F.D.A. began asking the makers of OxyContin and other addictive long-acting opioids to pay for safety training for more than half the physicians prescribing the drugs, and to track the effectiveness of the training and other measures in reducing addiction, overdoses and deaths.

But the F.D.A. was never able to determine whether the program worked, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found in a new review, because the manufacturers did not gather the right kind of data. Although the agency's approval of OxyContin in 1995 has long come under fire, its efforts to ensure the safe use of opioids since then have not been scrutinized nearly as much.

The documents show that even when deficiencies in these efforts became obvious through the F.D.A.'s own review process, the agency never insisted on improvements to the program, [called a REMS]. . .

The FDA's regulatory failure had serious public health consequences, according to critics of US opioids policy, as reported by the NYT:

Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis, said the safety program was a missed opportunity. He is a leader of a group of physicians who had encouraged the F.D.A. to adopt stronger controls, and a frequent critic of the government's response to the epidemic.

Dr. Kolodny, who was not involved in the study, called the program "a really good example of the way F.D.A. has failed to regulate opioid manufacturers. If F.D.A. had really been doing its job properly, I don't believe we'd have an opioid crisis today."

Now, as readers frequently emphasize in comments: pain management is a considerable problem – one I am all too well aware of, as I watched my father succumb to cancer. He ultimately passed away at my parents' home.

That being said, as CNN tells the story in The FDA can't prove its opioid strategy actually worked, study says :

Although these drugs "can be clinically useful among appropriately selected patients, they have also been widely oversupplied, are commonly used nonmedically, and account for a disproportionate number of fatal overdoses," the authors write.

The FDA was unable, more than 5 years after it had instituted its study of the opioids program's effectiveness, to determine whether it had met its objectives, and this may have been because prior assessments were not objective, according to CNN:

Prior analyses had largely been funded by drug companies, and a 2016 FDA advisory committee "noted methodological concerns regarding these studies," according to the authors. An inspector general report also concluded in 2013 that the agency "lacks comprehensive data to determine whether risk evaluation and mitigation strategies improve drug safety."

In addition to failing to evaluate the effective of the limited steps it had taken, the FDA neglected to take more aggressive steps that were within the ambit of its regulatory authority. According to CNN:

"FDA has tools that could mitigate opioid risks more effectively if the agency would be more assertive in using its power to control opioid prescribing, manufacturing, and distribution," said retired FDA senior executive William K. Hubbard in an editorial that accompanied the study. "Instead of bold, effective action, the FDA has implemented the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy programs that do not even meet the limited criteria set out by the FDA."

One measure the FDA could have taken, according to Hubbard: putting restrictions on opioid distribution.

"Restricting opioid distribution would be a major decision for the FDA, but it is also likely to be the most effective policy for reducing the harm of opioids," said Hubbard, who spent more than three decades at the agency and oversaw initiatives in areas such as regulation, policy and economic evaluation.

The Trump administration has made cleaning up the opioids crisis – which it inherited – a policy priority. To little seeming effect so far. although to be fair, this is not a simple problem to solve. And litigation to apportion various costs of the damages various prescription drugmakers, distributors, and doctors caused it far from over – despite some settlements, and judgements (see Federal Prosecutors Initiate Criminal Probe of Six Opioid Manufacturers and Distributors ; Four Companies Settle Just Before Bellwether Opioids Trial Was to Begin Today in Ohio ; Purdue Files for Bankruptcy, Agrees to Settle Some Pending Opioids Litigation: Sacklers on Hook for Billions? and Judge Issues $572 Million Verdict Against J & J in Oklahoma Opioids Trial: Settlements to Follow? )

Perhaps the Johns Hopkins study will spark moves to reform the broken FDA, so that it can once again serve as an effective regulator. This could perhaps be something we can look forward to achieving in 2020 (although I won't hold my breath).

Or, perhaps if enacting comprehensive reform is too overwhelming, especially with a divided government, as a starting point: can we agree to stop allowing self-interested industries to finance studies meant to assess the effectiveness of programs to regulate that very same industry? Please?

This is a concern in so many areas, with such self-interested considerations shaping not only regulation, but distorting academic research (see Virginia Supreme Court Upholds Ruling that George Mason University Foundation Is Not Subject to State FOIA Statute, Leaving Koch Funding Details Undisclosed ).

What madness!

[Dec 06, 2019] Robert Bork Was the Judicial Activist He Warned Us About

Dec 06, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

As the Chicago revolution took hold, Bork's views crept into the judiciary. Eventually in a fit of activism, the courts did away with the prohibition on predatory pricing. In its 1993 decision in Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation , the United States Supreme Court completely re-imagined the Robinson-Patman Act.

The case originally involved the tobacco oligopoly controlled by six firms. Liggett had introduced a cheap generic cigarette and gained market share. When Brown & Williamson saw that generics were undercutting their shares, it undercut Liggett and sold cigarettes at a loss. Liggett sued, alleging that the predatory behavior was designed to pressure it to raise prices on its generics, thus enabling Brown & Williamson to maintain high profits on branded cigarettes.

In its decision, the Court held that in order for there to be a violation of the Clayton Act and the Robinson-Patman Act, a plaintiff must show not only that the alleged predator priced the product below the cost of its production but also that the predator would be likely to recoup the losses in the future. The recoupment test dealt a death blow to predatory pricing lawsuits because it is, of course, impossible to prove a future event.

The Supreme Court parroted Bork, noting that "predatory pricing schemes are rarely tried, and even more rarely successful ." The Court also argued that it was best not to pursue predatory pricing cases because doing so would "chill the very conduct the antitrust laws are designed to protect."

The result has been severe. After 1993, no plaintiff alleging predatory pricing has prevailed at the federal level, and most cases are thrown out in summary judgement. The DOJ and FTC have completely ignored the law and ceased enforcing it.

Through judicial activism and executive neglect, the laws regarding antitrust and predatory pricing have become odd relics, like those on greased pigs and cannibalism.

Predatory pricing is symptomatic of the broader problems when it comes to antitrust. Today, except in extreme circumstances such as outright monopoly, courts are unlikely to block mergers over an increase in market concentration. The Supreme Court has now tilted so far the other way that it prefers to allow too much concentration rather than too little. It made this clear in its Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko LLP decision, where it stated its preference for minimizing incorrect merger challenges rather than preventing excessive concentration.

In the Trinko case, for example, Justice Scalia suggested that those who enforce antitrust laws ought to be deferential to firms with monopoly power, which are "an important element of a free market system."

Scalia continued: "Against the slight benefits of antitrust intervention here, we must weigh a realistic assessment of its costs ." The opportunity to acquire monopoly power and charge monopoly prices is "what attracts 'business acumen' in the first place," he said, and "induces risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth." He wrote that the "mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system."

The result of all this has been an increase of monopolies. Professor John Kwoka reviewed decades of merger cases and concluded that "recent merger control has not been sufficiently aggressive in challenging mergers." The overall effect has been "approval of significantly more mergers that prove to be anticompetitive."

The Sherman Act and the Robinson-Patman Act may be deeply misguided; perhaps they should even be repealed. But they haven't been. Passing new legislation is the proper way to change laws one disagrees with. Getting rid of them in practice via judicial activism or an an unwilling executive is not democratic.

The death of antitrust and predatory pricing reflects not only a failure of jurisprudence but of economics. For all the claims of up-to-the-minute economic sophistication that activist judges have used in the field of antitrust, the scholarship on predatory pricing is wildly out of date. Brooke made Robinson-Patman irrelevant by citing "modern" economic scholarship, yet the research the Supreme Court relied on goes back to studies by John McGee and Roland Koller, published in 1958 and 1969 respectively.

Predatory pricing has only become more rational in a world where winner-take-all platforms are happy to sustain short-term losses for the sake of long-term market share gains. What they lose on one side with free shipping or below cost products, they make up for in other parts of their business.

The rationality of predatory pricing is not some new economic finding. Almost 20 years ago, Patrick Bolton , a professor at Columbia Business School, wrote that "several sophisticated empirical case studies have confirmed the use of predatory pricing strategies. But the courts have failed to incorporate the modern writing into judicial decisions, relying instead on earlier theory no longer generally accepted."

According to Bork, predatory pricing didn't work in theory, but does it work in practice? Antitrust experts remember the Brooke case, but none seem to recall what actually happened to the companies involved in the lawsuit.

After the Supreme Court decision left it without any legal remedy, Liggett succumbed to pressure from Brown & Williamson and raised its prices. The entire industry raised prices too. In the end, Liggett was not able to attract enough market share and ended up selling most of its brands to Phillip Morris a few years later. Ever since, the tobacco oligopoly has raised prices in lockstep twice a year with no competition. No company is foolish enough to lower prices for fear of predatory pricing.

The losers from the judicial activism of Brooke are consumers and the rule of law. The winners are the oligopolies and monopolies who protect their markets.

When it comes to enforcing antitrust, it's worth remembering the words of Robert Bork. As he wrote in 1971 in his seminal piece " Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems ," "If the judiciary really is supreme, able to rule when and as it sees fit, the society is not democratic."

Jonathan Tepper is a founder of Variant Perception , a macroeconomic research company, and co-author of The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition . He is also TAC 's senior fellow on economic concentration issues. This article was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.


polistra24 a day ago

The Supremes have been the Federal legislature since 1803. Recommending restraint is the same thing as ordering one party in a legislature to surrender to the opposite party regardless of majorities.
Kent a day ago
Monopolization is the core of Free Market economics. Free, literally, means free to become a monopoly, free to practice vulture capitalism, free to use superior capitalization to destroy competition, free to move your factory to China.

Free Market is a buzz phrase among bankers and other well-to-do to increase their income at your expense instead of through superior production, design, and advertising methods. If you want to know why we live in such a dysfunctional economy, its because we've abandoned competitive capitalism for a free market economy.

Sid Finster Kent a day ago
Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) noted in Wealth of Nations that if you put two competing businessmen in a room together, not only do they get along just fine, their conversation quickly turns to the subject of how they can work work together to rig markets and screw the consumer for moar profitt.

Adam Smith was a much more interesting and sophisticated thinker than the B-school Cliffs Notes version.

northernobserver a day ago
Libertarian policy corruption, the American Right's original sin.
ElitCommInc. a day ago
I think we could us more purist views of capitalism in conversations about capitalism. The kinds of behaviors engaged designed to put others out of business described in the article is not exemplary of capitalism.

The purpose of capitalism is not explicated with models of destroying competition. And it certainly does not have mechanisms in which the government acts as an arm of business. The notion that the business of "America" (the US) is business is misleading. Because when it comes the government of the US her role is to ensure fair play. And power dynamics used to destroy the ability of another to tap into the available market share is not a capitalist principle. When one reads about the level and kinds of antics that corporate boards and CEO's play to damage competition, to include the use of campaign funds to "buy" or influence unique favors at cost to consumers - then we are talking about kind of faux "law of the jungle". Bailing out business but not the defrauded customers of those same businesses -- mercantilism not capitalism.

And it is these types of behaviors guised as capitalism, that fuels liberal demands for a system of governance that is more akin to communism and socialism. They note the abuses, but apply the wrong remedy.

I would agree that predatory pricing actually undercuts better pricing, improved products or innovation (product creativity).

Liam781 a day ago
Yes he was.
=marco01= 18 hours ago
Conservatives are outraged, still, that Democrats refused to confirm Bork to the Supreme Court.

Never mind the fact the Democrats were fully within their rights not to confirm, advise and consent does not mean rubber stamp, Bork was the guy who actually carried out Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre. Why would conservatives want a corrupt and unethical person like this in the Supreme Court in the first place?

Conservatives' outraged is very ironic considering Reagan still got to nominate another candidate, which the Dems confirmed. Meanwhile in a completely unprecedented and vindictive move, Republicans denied a Democratic president outright his right to a Supreme Court appointment. There is no comparison between these two episodes.

[Oct 08, 2019] Southwest Pilots Blast Boeing in Suit for Deception and Losses from -Unsafe, Unairworthy- 737 Max -

Notable quotes:
"... The lawsuit also aggressively contests Boeing's spin that competent pilots could have prevented the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air crashes: ..."
"... When asked why Boeing did not alert pilots to the existence of the MCAS, Boeing responded that the company decided against disclosing more details due to concerns about "inundate[ing] average pilots with too much information -- and significantly more technical data -- than [they] needed or could realistically digest." ..."
"... The filing has a detailed explanation of why the addition of heavier, bigger LEAP1-B engines to the 737 airframe made the plane less stable, changed how it handled, and increased the risk of catastrophic stall. It also describes at length how Boeing ignored warning signs during the design and development process, and misrepresented the 737 Max as essentially the same as older 737s to the FAA, potential buyers, and pilots. It also has juicy bits presented in earlier media accounts but bear repeating, like: ..."
"... Then, on November 7, 2018, the FAA issued an "Emergency Airworthiness Directive (AD) 2018-23-51," warning that an unsafe condition likely could exist or develop on 737 MAX aircraft. ..."
"... Moreover, unlike runaway stabilizer, MCAS disables the control column response that 737 pilots have grown accustomed to and relied upon in earlier generations of 737 aircraft. ..."
"... And making the point that to turn off MCAS all you had to do was flip two switches behind everything else on the center condole. Not exactly true, normally those switches were there to shut off power to electrically assisted trim. Ah, it one thing to shut off MCAS it's a whole other thing to shut off power to the planes trim, especially in high speed ✓ and the plane noise up ✓, and not much altitude ✓. ..."
"... Classic addiction behavior. Boeing has a major behavioral problem, the repetitive need for and irrational insistence on profit above safety all else , that is glaringly obvious to everyone except Boeing. ..."
"... In fact, Boeing 737 Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner asked the FAA to delete any mention of MCAS from the pilot manual so as to further hide its existence from the public and pilots " ..."
"... This "MCAS" was always hidden from pilots? The military implemented checks on MCAS to maintain a level of pilot control. The commercial airlines did not. Commercial airlines were in thrall of every little feature that they felt would eliminate the need for pilots at all. Fell right into the automation crapification of everything. ..."
Oct 08, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

At first blush, the suit filed in Dallas by the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SwAPA) against Boeing may seem like a family feud. SWAPA is seeking an estimated $115 million for lost pilots' pay as a result of the grounding of the 34 Boeing 737 Max planes that Southwest owns and the additional 20 that Southwest had planned to add to its fleet by year end 2019. Recall that Southwest was the largest buyer of the 737 Max, followed by American Airlines. However, the damning accusations made by the pilots' union, meaning, erm, pilots, is likely to cause Boeing not just more public relations headaches, but will also give grist to suits by crash victims.

However, one reason that the Max is a sore point with the union was that it was a key leverage point in 2016 contract negotiations:

And Boeing's assurances that the 737 Max was for all practical purposes just a newer 737 factored into the pilots' bargaining stance. Accordingly, one of the causes of action is tortious interference, that Boeing interfered in the contract negotiations to the benefit of Southwest. The filing describes at length how Boeing and Southwest were highly motivated not to have the contract dispute drag on and set back the launch of the 737 Max at Southwest, its showcase buyer. The big point that the suit makes is the plane was unsafe and the pilots never would have agreed to fly it had they known what they know now.

We've embedded the compliant at the end of the post. It's colorful and does a fine job of recapping the sorry history of the development of the airplane. It has damning passages like:

Boeing concealed the fact that the 737 MAX aircraft was not airworthy because, inter alia, it incorporated a single-point failure condition -- a software/flight control logic called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System ("MCAS") -- that,if fed erroneous data from a single angle-of-attack sensor, would command the aircraft nose-down and into an unrecoverable dive without pilot input or knowledge.

The lawsuit also aggressively contests Boeing's spin that competent pilots could have prevented the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air crashes:

Had SWAPA known the truth about the 737 MAX aircraft in 2016, it never would have approved the inclusion of the 737 MAX aircraft as a term in its CBA [collective bargaining agreement], and agreed to operate the aircraft for Southwest. Worse still, had SWAPA known the truth about the 737 MAX aircraft, it would have demanded that Boeing rectify the aircraft's fatal flaws before agreeing to include the aircraft in its CBA, and to provide its pilots, and all pilots, with the necessary information and training needed to respond to the circumstances that the Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 pilots encountered nearly three years later.

And (boldface original):

Boeing Set SWAPA Pilots Up to Fail

As SWAPA President Jon Weaks, publicly stated, SWAPA pilots "were kept in the dark" by Boeing.

Boeing did not tell SWAPA pilots that MCAS existed and there was no description or mention of MCAS in the Boeing Flight Crew Operations Manual.

There was therefore no way for commercial airline pilots, including SWAPA pilots, to know that MCAS would work in the background to override pilot inputs.

There was no way for them to know that MCAS drew on only one of two angle of attack sensors on the aircraft.

And there was no way for them to know of the terrifying consequences that would follow from a malfunction.

When asked why Boeing did not alert pilots to the existence of the MCAS, Boeing responded that the company decided against disclosing more details due to concerns about "inundate[ing] average pilots with too much information -- and significantly more technical data -- than [they] needed or could realistically digest."

SWAPA's pilots, like their counterparts all over the world, were set up for failure

The filing has a detailed explanation of why the addition of heavier, bigger LEAP1-B engines to the 737 airframe made the plane less stable, changed how it handled, and increased the risk of catastrophic stall. It also describes at length how Boeing ignored warning signs during the design and development process, and misrepresented the 737 Max as essentially the same as older 737s to the FAA, potential buyers, and pilots. It also has juicy bits presented in earlier media accounts but bear repeating, like:

By March 2016, Boeing settled on a revision of the MCAS flight control logic.

However, Boeing chose to omit key safeguards that had previously been included in earlier iterations of MCAS used on the Boeing KC-46A Pegasus, a military tanker derivative of the Boeing 767 aircraft.

The engineers who created MCAS for the military tanker designed the system to rely on inputs from multiple sensors and with limited power to move the tanker's nose. These deliberate checks sought to ensure that the system could not act erroneously or cause a pilot to lose control. Those familiar with the tanker's design explained that these checks were incorporated because "[y]ou don't want the solution to be worse than the initial problem."

The 737 MAX version of MCAS abandoned the safeguards previously relied upon. As discussed below, the 737 MAX MCAS had greater control authority than its predecessor, activated repeatedly upon activation, and relied on input from just one of the plane's two sensors that measure the angle of the plane's nose.

In other words, Boeing can't credibly say that it didn't know better.

Here is one of the sections describing Boeing's cover-ups:

Yet Boeing's website, press releases, annual reports, public statements and statements to operators and customers, submissions to the FAA and other civil aviation authorities, and 737 MAX flight manuals made no mention of the increased stall hazard or MCAS itself.

In fact, Boeing 737 Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner asked the FAA to delete any mention of MCAS from the pilot manual so as to further hide its existence from the public and pilots.

We urge you to read the complaint in full, since it contains juicy insider details, like the significance of Southwest being Boeing's 737 Max "launch partner" and what that entailed in practice, plus recounting dates and names of Boeing personnel who met with SWAPA pilots and made misrepresentations about the aircraft.

If you are time-pressed, the best MSM account is from the Seattle Times, In scathing lawsuit, Southwest pilots' union says Boeing 737 MAX was unsafe

Even though Southwest Airlines is negotiating a settlement with Boeing over losses resulting from the grounding of the 737 Max and the airline has promised to compensate the pilots, the pilots' union at a minimum apparently feels the need to put the heat on Boeing directly. After all, the union could withdraw the complaint if Southwest were to offer satisfactory compensation for the pilots' lost income. And pilots have incentives not to raise safety concerns about the planes they fly. Don't want to spook the horses, after all.

But Southwest pilots are not only the ones most harmed by Boeing's debacle but they are arguably less exposed to the downside of bad press about the 737 Max. It's business fliers who are most sensitive to the risks of the 737 Max, due to seeing the story regularly covered in the business press plus due to often being road warriors. Even though corporate customers account for only 12% of airline customers, they represent an estimated 75% of profits.

Southwest customers don't pay up for front of the bus seats. And many of them presumably value the combination of cheap travel, point to point routes between cities underserved by the majors, and close-in airports, which cut travel times. In other words, that combination of features will make it hard for business travelers who use Southwest regularly to give the airline up, even if the 737 Max gives them the willies. By contrast, premium seat passengers on American or United might find it not all that costly, in terms of convenience and ticket cost (if they are budget sensitive), to fly 737-Max-free Delta until those passengers regain confidence in the grounded plane.

Note that American Airlines' pilot union, when asked about the Southwest claim, said that it also believes its pilots deserve to be compensated for lost flying time, but they plan to obtain it through American Airlines.

If Boeing were smart, it would settle this suit quickly, but so far, Boeing has relied on bluster and denial. So your guess is as good as mine as to how long the legal arm-wrestling goes on.

Update 5:30 AM EDT : One important point that I neglected to include is that the filing also recounts, in gory detail, how Boeing went into "Blame the pilots" mode after the Lion Air crash, insisting the cause was pilot error and would therefore not happen again. Boeing made that claim on a call to all operators, including SWAPA, and then three days later in a meeting with SWAPA.

However, Boeing's actions were inconsistent with this claim. From the filing:

Then, on November 7, 2018, the FAA issued an "Emergency Airworthiness Directive (AD) 2018-23-51," warning that an unsafe condition likely could exist or develop on 737 MAX aircraft.

Relying on Boeing's description of the problem, the AD directed that in the event of un-commanded nose-down stabilizer trim such as what happened during the Lion Air crash, the flight crew should comply with the Runaway Stabilizer procedure in the Operating Procedures of the 737 MAX manual.

But the AD did not provide a complete description of MCAS or the problem in 737 MAX aircraft that led to the Lion Air crash, and would lead to another crash and the 737 MAX's grounding just months later.

An MCAS failure is not like a runaway stabilizer. A runaway stabilizer has continuous un-commanded movement of the tail, whereas MCAS is not continuous and pilots (theoretically) can counter the nose-down movement, after which MCAS would move the aircraft tail down again.

Moreover, unlike runaway stabilizer, MCAS disables the control column response that 737 pilots have grown accustomed to and relied upon in earlier generations of 737 aircraft.

Even after the Lion Air crash, Boeing's description of MCAS was still insufficient to put correct its lack of disclosure as demonstrated by a second MCAS-caused crash.

We hoisted this detail because insiders were spouting in our comments section, presumably based on Boeing's patter, that the Lion Air pilots were clearly incompetent, had they only executed the well-known "runaway stabilizer," all would have been fine. Needless to say, this assertion has been shown to be incorrect.


Titus , October 8, 2019 at 4:38 am

Excellent, by any standard. Which does remind of of the NYT zine story (William Langewiesche Published Sept. 18, 2019) making the claim that basically the pilots who crashed their planes weren't real "Airman".

And making the point that to turn off MCAS all you had to do was flip two switches behind everything else on the center condole. Not exactly true, normally those switches were there to shut off power to electrically assisted trim. Ah, it one thing to shut off MCAS it's a whole other thing to shut off power to the planes trim, especially in high speed ✓ and the plane noise up ✓, and not much altitude ✓.

And especially if you as a pilot didn't know MCAS was there in the first place. This sort of engineering by Boeing is criminal. And the lying. To everyone. Oh, least we all forget the processing power of the in flight computer is that of a intel 286. There are times I just want to be beamed back to the home planet. Where we care for each other.

Carolinian , October 8, 2019 at 8:32 am

One should also point out that Langewiesche said that Boeing made disastrous mistakes with the MCAS and that the very future of the Max is cloudy. His article was useful both for greater detail about what happened and for offering some pushback to the idea that the pilots had nothing to do with the accidents.

As for the above, it was obvious from the first Seattle Times stories that these two events and the grounding were going to be a lawsuit magnet. But some of us think Boeing deserves at least a little bit of a defense because their side has been totally silent–either for legal reasons or CYA reasons on the part of their board and bad management.

Brooklin Bridge , October 8, 2019 at 8:08 am

Classic addiction behavior. Boeing has a major behavioral problem, the repetitive need for and irrational insistence on profit above safety all else , that is glaringly obvious to everyone except Boeing.

Summer , October 8, 2019 at 9:01 am

"The engineers who created MCAS for the military tanker designed the system to rely on inputs from multiple sensors and with limited power to move the tanker's nose. These deliberate checks sought to ensure that the system could not act erroneously or cause a pilot to lose control "

"Yet Boeing's website, press releases, annual reports, public statements and statements to operators and customers, submissions to the FAA and other civil aviation authorities, and 737 MAX flight manuals made no mention of the increased stall hazard or MCAS itself.

In fact, Boeing 737 Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner asked the FAA to delete any mention of MCAS from the pilot manual so as to further hide its existence from the public and pilots "

This "MCAS" was always hidden from pilots? The military implemented checks on MCAS to maintain a level of pilot control. The commercial airlines did not. Commercial airlines were in thrall of every little feature that they felt would eliminate the need for pilots at all. Fell right into the automation crapification of everything.

[Oct 05, 2019] A Secretive Committee of Wall Street Insiders controls NY FED

Oct 05, 2019 | www.institutionalinvestor.com

A Secretive Committee of Wall Street Insiders Is the Least of the New York Fed's Concerns.

In July 17, Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s $2.2 trillion asset and wealth management division, walked into the wood-paneled tenth-floor conference room at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to address some fellow Wall Street luminaries -- Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio, Dawn Fitzpatrick of Soros Fund Management, short-seller Jim Chanos, and LBO kingpin David Rubenstein among them.

All are members of the Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets (IACFM) -- a forum to provide financial insight to the New York Fed. Chairing the meeting was New York Fed president John C. Williams, vice chair of the powerful, rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, who was a year into his tenure.

Erdoes held forth at the meeting, which included a buffet lunch.

---

And so on.

This is us, we have a unexhaustable desire for these secret meetings to meet, so we vote, every year to convene them. If these secret meeting did not occur then we could never do a deal with the super wealthy and our precious will not be insured.
Reply Saturday, October 05, 2019 at 06:04 PM

[Sep 18, 2019] FAA Hoist on Its Own Boeing 737 Max Petard Multiagency Panel to Issue Report Criticizing Agency Approval Process, Call for Cer

Notable quotes:
"... The aim of the panel, called the Joint Authorities Technical Review, was to expedite getting the 737 Max into the air by creating a vehicle for achieve consensus among foreign regulators who had grounded the 737 Max before the FAA had. But these very regulators had also made clear they needed to be satisfied before they'd let it fly in their airspace. ..."
"... The FAA hopes to give the 737 Max the green light in November, while the other regulators all have said they have issues that are unlikely to be resolved by then. The agency is now in the awkward position of having a body it set up to be authoritative turn on the agency's own procedures. ..."
"... the FAA had moved further and further down the path of relying on aircraft manufactures for critical elements of certification. Not all of this was the result of capture; with the evolution of technology, even the sharpest and best intended engineer in government employ would become stale on the state of the art in a few years. ..."
"... Although all stories paint a broadly similar picture, .the most damning is a detailed piece at the Seattle Times, Engineers say Boeing pushed to limit safety testing in race to certify planes, including 737 MAX ..The article gives an incriminating account of how Boeing got the FAA to delegate more and more certification authority to the airline, and then pressured and abused employees who refused to back down on safety issues . ..."
"... In 2004, the FAA changed its system for front-line supervision of airline certification from having the FAA select airline certification employees who reported directly to the FAA to having airline employees responsible for FAA certification report to airline management and have their reports filtered through them (the FAA attempted to maintain that the certification employees could provide their recommendations directly to the agency, but the Seattle Times obtained policy manuals that stated otherwise). ..."
"... On Monday, the Post and Courier reported about the South Carolina plant that produced 787s found with tools rattling inside that Boeing SC lets mechanics inspect their own work, leading to repeated mistakes, workers say. These mechanic certifications would never have been kosher if the FAA were vigilant. Similarly, Reuters described how Boeing weakened another safety check, that of pilot input. ..."
"... As part of roughly a dozen findings, these government and industry officials said, the task force is poised to call out the Federal Aviation Administration for what it describes as a lack of clarity and transparency in the way the FAA delegated authority to the plane maker to assess the safety of certain flight-control features. The upshot, according to some of these people, is that essential design changes didn't receive adequate FAA attention. ..."
"... But the report could influence changes to traditional engineering principles determining the safety of new aircraft models. Certification of software controlling increasingly interconnected and automated onboard systems "is a whole new ballgame requiring new approaches," according to a senior industry safety expert who has discussed the report with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. ..."
"... For instance, the Journal reports that Canadian authorities expect to require additional simulator training for 737 Max pilots. Recall that Boeing's biggest 737 Max customer, Southwest Airlines, was so resistant to the cost of additional simulator training that it put a penalty clause into its contract if wound up being necessary. ..."
"... Patrick Ky, head of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, told the European Parliament earlier this month, "It's very likely that international authorities will want a second opinion" on any FAA decision to lift the grounding. ..."
"... Most prominently, EASA has proposed to eventually add to the MAX a third fully functional angle-of-attack sensor -- which effectively measures how far the plane's nose is pointed up or down -- underscoring the controversy expected to swirl around the plane for the foreseeable future. ..."
"... It's hard to see how Boeing hasn't gotten itself in the position of being at a major competitive disadvantage by virtue of having compromised the FAA so severely as to have undercut safety. ..."
"... has Boeing developed a plan to correct the trim wheel issue on the 787max? i haven't seen a single statement from them on how they plan to fix this problem. is it possible they think they can get the faa to re-certify without addressing it? ..."
"... Don't forget that the smaller trim wheels are in the NG as well. any change to fix the wheels ripples across more planes than just the Max ..."
"... The self-inflicted wound caused by systematic greed and arrogance – corruption, in other words. Boeing is reaping the wages of taking 100% of their profits to support the stock price through stock buybacks and deliberately under-investing in their business. Their brains have been taken over by a parasitic financial system that profits by wrecking healthy businesses. ..."
"... Shareholder Value is indeed the worst idea in the world. That Boeing's biggest stockholder, Vanguard, is unable to cleanup Boeing's operations makes perfect sense. I mean vanguards expertise is making money, not building anything. Those skills are completely different. ..."
"... One maxim we see illustrated here and elsewhere is this: Trust takes years to earn, but can be lost overnight. ..."
Sep 18, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

The FAA evidently lacked perspective on how much trouble it was in after the two international headline-grabbing crashes of the Boeing 737 Max. It established a "multiagency panel" meaning one that included representatives from foreign aviation regulators, last April. A new Wall Street Journal article reports that the findings of this panel, to be released in a few weeks, are expected to lambaste the FAA 737 Max approval process and urge a major redo of how automated aircraft systems get certified .

The aim of the panel, called the Joint Authorities Technical Review, was to expedite getting the 737 Max into the air by creating a vehicle for achieve consensus among foreign regulators who had grounded the 737 Max before the FAA had. But these very regulators had also made clear they needed to be satisfied before they'd let it fly in their airspace.

The JATR gave them a venue for reaching a consensus, but it wasn't the consensus the FAA sought. The foreign regulators, despite being given a forum in which to hash things out with the FAA, are not following the FAA's timetable. The FAA hopes to give the 737 Max the green light in November, while the other regulators all have said they have issues that are unlikely to be resolved by then. The agency is now in the awkward position of having a body it set up to be authoritative turn on the agency's own procedures.

The Seattle Times, which has broken many important on the Boeing debacle, reported on how the FAA had moved further and further down the path of relying on aircraft manufactures for critical elements of certification. Not all of this was the result of capture; with the evolution of technology, even the sharpest and best intended engineer in government employ would become stale on the state of the art in a few years.

However, one of the critical decisions the FAA took was to change the reporting lines of the manufacturer employees who were assigned to FAA certification. From a May post :

Although all stories paint a broadly similar picture, .the most damning is a detailed piece at the Seattle Times, Engineers say Boeing pushed to limit safety testing in race to certify planes, including 737 MAX ..The article gives an incriminating account of how Boeing got the FAA to delegate more and more certification authority to the airline, and then pressured and abused employees who refused to back down on safety issues .

As the Seattle Times described, the problems extended beyond the 737 Max MCAS software shortcomings; indeed, none of the incidents in the story relate to it.

In 2004, the FAA changed its system for front-line supervision of airline certification from having the FAA select airline certification employees who reported directly to the FAA to having airline employees responsible for FAA certification report to airline management and have their reports filtered through them (the FAA attempted to maintain that the certification employees could provide their recommendations directly to the agency, but the Seattle Times obtained policy manuals that stated otherwise).

Mind you, the Seattle Times was not alone in depicting the FAA as captured by Boeing. On Monday, the Post and Courier reported about the South Carolina plant that produced 787s found with tools rattling inside that Boeing SC lets mechanics inspect their own work, leading to repeated mistakes, workers say. These mechanic certifications would never have been kosher if the FAA were vigilant. Similarly, Reuters described how Boeing weakened another safety check, that of pilot input.

One of the objectives for creating this panel was to restore confidence in Boeing and the FAA, but that was always going to be a tall order, particularly after more bad news about various 737 Max systems and Boeing being less than forthcoming with its customers and regulators emerged. From the Wall Street Journal :

As part of roughly a dozen findings, these government and industry officials said, the task force is poised to call out the Federal Aviation Administration for what it describes as a lack of clarity and transparency in the way the FAA delegated authority to the plane maker to assess the safety of certain flight-control features. The upshot, according to some of these people, is that essential design changes didn't receive adequate FAA attention.

The report, these officials said, also is expected to fault the agency for what it describes as inadequate data sharing with foreign authorities during its original certification of the MAX two years ago, along with relying on mistaken industrywide assumptions about how average pilots would react to certain flight-control emergencies .

The FAA has stressed that the advisory group doesn't have veto power over modifications to MCAS.

But the report could influence changes to traditional engineering principles determining the safety of new aircraft models. Certification of software controlling increasingly interconnected and automated onboard systems "is a whole new ballgame requiring new approaches," according to a senior industry safety expert who has discussed the report with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

If the FAA thinks it can keep this genie the bottle, it is naive. The foreign regulators represented on the task force, including from China and the EU, have ready access to the international business press. And there will also be an embarrassing fact on the ground, that the FAA, which was last to ground the 737 Max, will be the first to let it fly again, and potentially by not requiring safety protections that other regulators will insist on. For instance, the Journal reports that Canadian authorities expect to require additional simulator training for 737 Max pilots. Recall that Boeing's biggest 737 Max customer, Southwest Airlines, was so resistant to the cost of additional simulator training that it put a penalty clause into its contract if wound up being necessary.

It's a given that the FAA will be unable to regain its former stature and that all of its certifications of major aircraft will now be second guessed subject to further review by major foreign regulators. That in turn will impose costs on Boeing, of changing its certification process from needing to placate only the FAA to having to appease potentially multiple parties. For instance, the EU regulator is poised to raise the bar on the 737 Max:

Patrick Ky, head of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, told the European Parliament earlier this month, "It's very likely that international authorities will want a second opinion" on any FAA decision to lift the grounding.

Even after EASA gives the green light, agency officials are expected to push for significant additional safety enhancements to the fleet. Most prominently, EASA has proposed to eventually add to the MAX a third fully functional angle-of-attack sensor -- which effectively measures how far the plane's nose is pointed up or down -- underscoring the controversy expected to swirl around the plane for the foreseeable future.

A monopoly is a precious thing to have. Too bad Boeing failed to appreciate that in its zeal for profits. If the manufacturer winds up facing different demands in different regulatory markets, it will have created more complexity for itself. Can it afford not to manufacture to the highest common denominator, say by making an FAA-only approved bird for Southwest and trying to talk American into buying FAA-only approved versions for domestic use only? It's hard to see how Boeing hasn't gotten itself in the position of being at a major competitive disadvantage by virtue of having compromised the FAA so severely as to have undercut safety.


kimyo , September 17, 2019 at 4:42 am

Boeing Foresees Return Of The 737 MAX In November – But Not Everywhere

Even if Boeing finds solutions that international regulators can finally accept, their implementation will take additional months. The AoA sensor and trim wheel issues will likely require hardware changes to the 600 or so existing MAX airplanes. The demand for simulator training will further delay the ungrounding of the plane. There are only some two dozen 737 MAX simulators in this world and thousands of pilots who will need to pass through them.

has Boeing developed a plan to correct the trim wheel issue on the 787max? i haven't seen a single statement from them on how they plan to fix this problem. is it possible they think they can get the faa to re-certify without addressing it?

marku52 , September 17, 2019 at 1:35 pm

Don't forget that the smaller trim wheels are in the NG as well. any change to fix the wheels ripples across more planes than just the Max

divadab , September 17, 2019 at 8:36 am

The self-inflicted wound caused by systematic greed and arrogance – corruption, in other words. Boeing is reaping the wages of taking 100% of their profits to support the stock price through stock buybacks and deliberately under-investing in their business. Their brains have been taken over by a parasitic financial system that profits by wrecking healthy businesses.

It's not only Boeing – the rot is general and it is terrible to see the destruction of American productive capacity by a parasitic finance sector.

Dirk77 , September 17, 2019 at 9:12 am

+1

Shareholder Value is indeed the worst idea in the world. That Boeing's biggest stockholder, Vanguard, is unable to cleanup Boeing's operations makes perfect sense. I mean vanguards expertise is making money, not building anything. Those skills are completely different.

Noel Nospamington , September 17, 2019 at 10:41 am

Shareholder value does what it intended to do, which is to maximise stock value in the short term, even if it significantly cuts value in the long term.

By that measure allowing Boeing to take over the FAA and self-certify the 737-MAX was a big success, because of short term maximization of stock value that resulted. It is now someone else's problem regarding any long term harm.

Dirk77 , September 17, 2019 at 8:59 am

Having worked at Boeing and the FAA, this report is very welcome. One thing: federal hiring practices in a way lock out good people from working there. Very often the fed managing some project has only a tenuous grasp is what is going on.

But has the job bc they were hired in young and cheap, which is what agencies do with reduced budgets. That and job postings very often stating that they are open only to current feds says it all.

So deferring to the airline to "self-certify" would be a welcome relief to feds in many cases. At this point, I doubt the number of their "sharpest and best intended" engineers is very high.

If you want better oversight, then increase the number and quality of feds by making it easier to hire, and decrease the number of contractors.

Arthur Dent , September 17, 2019 at 10:54 am

I deal with federal and state regulators (not airplane) all the time. Very well meaning people, but in many cases are utterly unqualified to do the technical work. So it works well when they stick to the policy issues and stay out of the technical details.

However, we have Professional Engineers and other licensed professionals signing off on the engineering documents per state law. You can look at the design documents and the construction certification and there is a name and stamp of the responsible individual.

The licensing laws clearly state that the purpose of licensing is to hold public health and safety paramount. This is completely missing in the American industrial sector due to the industrial exemptions in the professional engineering licensing laws. Ultimately, there is nobody technically responsible for a plane or a car who has to certify that they are making the public safe and healthy.

Instead, the FAA and others do that. Federal agencies and the insurance institute test cars and give safety ratings. Lawyers sue companies for defects which also helps enforce safety.

Harry , September 17, 2019 at 1:44 pm

But how can individuals take responsibility? Their pockets arn't deep enough,.

XXYY , September 17, 2019 at 2:57 pm

One maxim we see illustrated here and elsewhere is this: Trust takes years to earn, but can be lost overnight.

Boeing management and the FAA, having lost the trust of most people in the world through their actions lately, seem to nevertheless think it will be a simple matter to return to the former status quo. It seems as likely, or perhaps more likely, that they will never be able to return to the former status quo. They have been revealed as poseurs and imposters, cheerfully risking (and sometimes losing) their customers' lives so they can buy back more stock.

This image will be (rightfully) hard for them to shake.

notabanker , September 17, 2019 at 9:24 pm

So people are going to quit their jobs rather than fly on Boeing planes? Joe and Marge Six-Pack are going to choose flights not based on what they can afford but based on what make of plane they are flying on? As if the airlines will even tell them in advance?

There are close to zero consequences to Boeing and FAA management. Click on the link to the Purdue Sacklers debacle. The biggest inconvenience will be paying the lawyers.

Tomonthebeach , September 17, 2019 at 11:29 am

FAA & Boeing: It's deja vu all over again.

From 1992 to 1999 I worked for the FAA running one of their labs in OKC. My role, among other things, was to provide data to the Administrator on employee attitudes, business practice changes, and policy impact on morale and safety. Back then, likely as now, it was a common complaint heard from FAA execs about the conflict of interest of having to be both an aviation safety regulatory agency and having to promote aviation. Congress seemed fine with that – apparently still is. There is FAA pork in nearly every Congressional district (think airports for example). Boeing is the latest example of how mission conflict is not serving the aviation industry or public safety. With its headquarters within walking distance of Capitol Hill, aviation lobbyists do not even get much exercise shuttling.

The 1996 Valuejet crash into the Florida swamps shows how far back the mission conflict problem has persisted. Valuejet was a startup airline that was touted as more profitable than all the others. It achieved that notoriety by flying through every FAA maintenance loophole they could find to cut maintenance costs. When FAA started clamping down, Senate Majority Leader Daschle scolded FAA for not being on the cutting edge of industry innovation. The message was clear – leave Valuejet alone. That was a hard message to ignore given that Daschle's wife Linda was serving as Deputy FAA Administrator (the #2 position) – a clear conflict of interest with the role of her spouse – a fact not lost on Administrator Hinson (the #1 position). Rather than use the disaster as an opportunity to revisit FAA mission conflict, Clinton tossed Administrator Hinson into the volcano of public outcry and put Daschle in charge. Nothing happened then, and it looks like Boeing might follow Valuejet into the aviation graveyard.

Kevin , September 17, 2019 at 12:34 pm

Boeing subsidies:

Mike , September 17, 2019 at 3:22 pm

Nothin' like regulatory capture. Along with financialized manufacturing, the cheap & profitable will outdo the costly careful every time. Few businesses are run today with the moral outlook of some early industrialists (not enough of them, but still present) who, through zany Protestant guilt, cared for their reputations enough to not make murderous product, knowing how the results would play both here and in Heaven. Today we have PR and government propaganda to smear the doubters, free the toxic, and let loose toxins.

From food to clothing, drugs to hospitals, self-propelled skateboards to aircraft, pesticides to pollution, even services as day care & education, it is time to call the minions of manufactured madness to account. Dare we say "Free government from Murder Inc."?

VietnamVet , September 17, 2019 at 3:57 pm

This is an excellent summary of the untenable situation that Boeing and the Federal Government have gotten themselves into. In their rush to get richer the Elite ignored the fact that monopolies and regulatory capture are always dangerously corrupt. This is not an isolated case. FDA allows importation of uninspected stock pharmaceutical chemicals from China. Insulin is unaffordable for the lower classes. Diseases are spreading through homeless encampments. EPA approved new uses of environmentally toxic nicotinoid insecticide, sulfoxaflor. DOD sold hundreds of billions of dollars of armaments to Saudi Arabia that were useless to protect the oil supply.

The Powers-that-be thought that they would be a hegemon forever. But, Joe Biden's green light for the Ukraine Army's attack against breakaway Donbass region on Russia's border restarted the Cold War allying Russia with China and Iran. This is a multi-polar world again. Brexit and Donald Trump's Presidency are the Empire's death throes.

RBHoughton , September 17, 2019 at 8:40 pm

NC readers know what the problem is as two comments above indicate clearly. Isn't the FAA ashamed to keep conniving with the money and permitting dangerous planes to fly?

Boeing just got a WTO ruling against Airbus. It seems that one rogue produces others. Time to clean the stable and remove the money addiction from safety regulation

The Rev Kev , September 17, 2019 at 11:26 pm

I think that I can see an interesting situation developing next year. So people will be boarding a plane, say with Southwest Airlines, when they will hear the following announcement over the speakers-

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. On behalf of myself and the entire crew, welcome aboard Southwest Airlines flight WN 861, non-stop service from Houston to New York. Our flight time will be of 4 hours and 30 minutes. We will be flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet at a ground speed of approximately 590 miles per hour.

We are pleased to announce that you have now boarded the first Boeing 737 MAX that has been cleared to once again fly by the FAA as being completely safe. For those passengers flying on to any other country, we regret to announce that you will have to change planes at New York as no other country in the world has cleared this plane as being safe to fly in their airspace and insurance companies there are unwilling to issue insurance cover for them in any case.

So please sit back and enjoy your trip with us. Cabin Crew, please bolt the cabin doors and prepare for gate departure."

Arizona Slim , September 18, 2019 at 6:32 am

And then there's this -- Southwest is rethinking its 737 strategy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoRPhfARWkg

[Jun 10, 2019] FAA's Boeing-biased Officials: Recuse Yourselves or Resign by Ralph Nader

Notable quotes:
"... The FAA has a clearly established pro-Boeing bias and will likely allow Boeing to unground the 737 MAX. We must demand that the two top FAA officials resign or recuse themselves from taking any more steps that might endanger the flying public. The two Boeing-indentured men are Acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell and Associate FAA Administrator for Aviation Safety Ali Bahrami. ..."
"... The FAA has long been known for its non-regulatory, waiver-driven, de-regulatory traditions. It has a hard time saying NO to the aircraft manufacturers and the airlines. After the aircraft hijackings directing flights to Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, the FAA let the airlines say NO to installing hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches in their planes. These security measures would have prevented the hijackers from invading the cockpits of the aircrafts on September 11, 2001. The airlines did not want to spend the $3000 per plane. Absent the 9/11 hijackings, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might not have gone to war in Afghanistan. ..."
"... Boeing has about 5,000 orders for the 737 MAX. It has delivered less than 400 to the world's airlines. From its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg to its swarms of Washington lobbyists, law firms, and public relations outfits, Boeing is used to getting its way. ..."
"... Right now, the Boeing/FAA strategy is to make sure Elwell and his FAA quickly decide that the MAX is safe for takeoff by delaying or stonewalling Congressional and other investigations. ..."
"... Time is not on the side of the 737 MAX 8. A comprehensive review of the 737 MAX's problems is a non-starter for Boeing. Boeing's flawed software and instructions that have kept pilots and airlines in the dark have already been exposed. New whistleblowers and more revelations will emerge. More time may also result in the Justice Department's operating grand jury issuing some indictments. More time would let the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led by Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) dig into the failure of accountability and serial criminal negligence of Boeing and its FAA accomplices. Chairman DeFazio knows the history of the FAA's regulatory capture. ..."
"... The FAA and its Boeing pals are using the "trade secret" claims to censor records sought by the House Committee. When it comes to investigating life or death airline hazards and crashes, Congress is capable of handling so-called trade secrets. This is all the more reason why the terminally prejudiced Elwell and Bahrami should step aside and let their successors take a fresh look at the Boeing investigations. That effort would include opening up the certification process for the entire Boeing MAX as a "new plane." ..."
Jun 10, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

The Boeing-driven FAA is rushing to unground the notorious prone-to-stall Boeing 737 MAX (that killed 346 innocents in two crashes) before several official investigations are completed. Troubling revelations might keep these planes grounded worldwide.

The FAA has a clearly established pro-Boeing bias and will likely allow Boeing to unground the 737 MAX. We must demand that the two top FAA officials resign or recuse themselves from taking any more steps that might endanger the flying public. The two Boeing-indentured men are Acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell and Associate FAA Administrator for Aviation Safety Ali Bahrami.

Immediately after the crashes, Elwell resisted grounding and echoed Boeing claims that the Boeing 737 MAX was a safe plane despite the deadly crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

Ali Bahrami is known for aggressively pushing the FAA through 2018 to further abdicate its regulatory duties by delegating more safety inspections to Boeing. Bahrami's actions benefit Boeing and are supported by the company's toadies in the Congress. Elwell and Bahrami have both acquired much experience by going through the well-known revolving door between the industry and the FAA. They are likely to leave the FAA once again for lucrative positions in the aerospace lobbying or business world. With such prospects, they do not have much 'skin in the game' for their pending decision.

The FAA has long been known for its non-regulatory, waiver-driven, de-regulatory traditions. It has a hard time saying NO to the aircraft manufacturers and the airlines. After the aircraft hijackings directing flights to Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, the FAA let the airlines say NO to installing hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches in their planes. These security measures would have prevented the hijackers from invading the cockpits of the aircrafts on September 11, 2001. The airlines did not want to spend the $3000 per plane. Absent the 9/11 hijackings, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might not have gone to war in Afghanistan.

The FAA's historic "tombstone" mentality (slowly reacting after the crashes) is well known. For example, in the 1990s the FAA had a delayed reaction to numerous fatal crashes caused by antiquated de-icing rules. The FAA was also slow to act on ground-proximity warning requirements for commuter airlines and flammability reduction rules for aircraft cabin materials.

That's the tradition that Elwell and Bahrami inherited and have worsened. They did not even wait for Boeing to deliver its reworked software before announcing in April that simulator training would not be necessary for the pilots. This judgment was contrary to the experience of seasoned pilots such as Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. Simulator training would delay ungrounding and cost the profitable airlines money.

Boeing has about 5,000 orders for the 737 MAX. It has delivered less than 400 to the world's airlines. From its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg to its swarms of Washington lobbyists, law firms, and public relations outfits, Boeing is used to getting its way. Its grip on Congress – where 300 members take campaign cash from Boeing – is legendary. Boeing pays little in federal and Washington state taxes. It fumbles contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense but remains the federal government's big vendor for lack of competitive alternatives in a highly concentrated industry.

Right now, the Boeing/FAA strategy is to make sure Elwell and his FAA quickly decide that the MAX is safe for takeoff by delaying or stonewalling Congressional and other investigations.

The compliant Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, under Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), strangely has not scheduled anymore hearings. The Senate confirmation of Stephen Dickson to replace acting chief Elwell is also on a slow track. A new boss at the FAA might wish to take some time to review the whole process.

Time is not on the side of the 737 MAX 8. A comprehensive review of the 737 MAX's problems is a non-starter for Boeing. Boeing's flawed software and instructions that have kept pilots and airlines in the dark have already been exposed. New whistleblowers and more revelations will emerge. More time may also result in the Justice Department's operating grand jury issuing some indictments. More time would let the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led by Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) dig into the failure of accountability and serial criminal negligence of Boeing and its FAA accomplices. Chairman DeFazio knows the history of the FAA's regulatory capture.

Not surprising on June 4, 2019, DeFazio sent a stinging letter to FAA's Elwell and his corporatist superior, Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao, about the FAA's intolerable delays in sending requested documents to the Committee. DeFazio's letter says: "To say we are disappointed and a bit bewildered at the ongoing delays to appropriately respond to our records requests would be an understatement."

The FAA and its Boeing pals are using the "trade secret" claims to censor records sought by the House Committee. When it comes to investigating life or death airline hazards and crashes, Congress is capable of handling so-called trade secrets. This is all the more reason why the terminally prejudiced Elwell and Bahrami should step aside and let their successors take a fresh look at the Boeing investigations. That effort would include opening up the certification process for the entire Boeing MAX as a "new plane."

The Boeing-biased Elwell and Bahrami have refused to even raise in public proceedings the question: "After eight or more Boeing 737 iterations, at what point does the Boeing MAX 8 become a new plane?" Many, including Cong. David Price (D-NC), chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees the FAA's budget, have already questioned the limited certification process.

Heavier engines on the old 737 fuselage changed the MAX's aerodynamics and made it prone-to-stall. It is time for the FAA's leadership to change before the 737 MAX flies with vulnerable, glitch-prone software "fixes".

Notwithstanding the previous Boeing 737 series' record of safety in the U.S. during the past decade – (one fatality), Boeing's bosses, have now disregarded warnings by its own engineers. Boeing executives do not get one, two, three or anymore crashes attributed to their ignoring long-known aerodynamic engineering practices.

The Boeing 737 MAX must never be allowed to fly again, given the structural design defects built deeply into its system.

[Apr 30, 2019] Boeing Kept Mum to Customers, FAA About Disabling of 737 Max Warning System

Apr 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

... ... ...

This basic fact pattern has been revealed to be worse than it first appeared by virtue of Boeing not having been explicit that the angle of attack sensor alerts had been disabled on the 737 Max. Why should Boeing have cleared its throat and said something? Recall that the sales pitch for the 737 Max was that it was so much like existing 737s that it didn't require FAA recertification or pilot simulator training. But the angle of attack sensor alert had been a standard feature in all previous 737s, meaning buyers would assume it was part of the plane unless they were told otherwise. And on top of that, the non-upgraded 737 Max did have lights in the pilots' controls for this alert. But they didn't work unless the buyer had purchased the package of safety extras.

And the proof that Boeing was playing way too cute with its pointed silence about its deactivation of what had been a standard feature? The biggest customer for the 737 Max, Southwest Airlines, had inaccurate information in its pilots' manual because the airline had mistakenly assumed the angle of attack sensor alerts worked as they had on earlier 737s.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Boeing Co. didn't tell Southwest Airlines Co. and other carriers when they began flying its 737 MAX jets that a safety feature found on earlier models that warns pilots about malfunctioning sensors had been deactivated, according to government and industry officials.

Federal Aviation Administration safety inspectors and supervisors responsible for monitoring Southwest, the largest 737 MAX customer, also were unaware of the change, the officials said.

The alerts inform pilots whether a sensor known as an "angle-of-attack vane" is transmitting errant data about the pitch of a plane's nose .

Southwest's management and cockpit crews didn't know about the lack of the warning system for more than a year after the planes went into service in 2017, industry and government officials said. They and most other airlines operating the MAX learned about it only after the Lion Air crash in October led to scrutiny of the plane's revised design.

"Southwest's own manuals were wrong" about the availability of the alerts, said the Southwest pilots union president, Jon Weaks.

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allan , April 29, 2019 at 10:16 am

C-suite still in denial:

Boeing suppliers ramp up schedule for MAX: 52/mo by July, 57/mo by August [Leeham News]

Boeing reduced the production rate on the 737 line in mid-April from 52/mo to 42/mo in response to the grounding of the airplane by regulators worldwide.

The company and others said they didn't know how long the airplane would be grounded.

But Boeing told suppliers to keep producing parts, components and the fuselage at rate 52.

Boeing already had a ramp-up plan in place;

According to the information LNA learned at the, this is the schedule for ramping back up:

• Rate 42/mo, April and May;
• Rate 47, June;
• Rate 51.5, July and August; and
• Rate 57, September.

Boeing originally planned to go to 57/mo in June or July.

Good luck with that. The upside is that this corporate controlled flight into terrain
will someday make a great B-school case study.

Edit: If you Captcha-train an autonomous vehicle not to run into bicycles, and it gets into an accident,
are you legally liable? Asking for a friend.

The Rev Kev , April 29, 2019 at 10:55 am

Oh man, this is bad. Really bad. This story just gets worse and worse over time. It's like one of those Russian Matryoshka dolls – just when you think that you have a handle on what happened, you find that there is a whole new layer of ugliness underneath. When the hell did safety become an optional extra on Boeing aircraft? After reading this, I think that it was a minor miracle that there were no 737 MAX crashes in the continental United States. By the sounds of this article, it would have likely been a Southwest airliner if it had happened. I am wondering what else will come out of this saga that we don't know about yet.

flora , April 29, 2019 at 12:33 pm

+1.

Self-regulation/certification is a sham.
and
Boeing is toast, imo.

Arizona Slim , April 29, 2019 at 1:21 pm

I agree, flora. I also think that the Max is about to become the Chevy Corvair of airliners. As in, unsafe at any speed.

Wyoming , April 29, 2019 at 1:47 pm

I would say that Boeing easily falls into the 'Too big to fail.' category.

So no matter what happened they will be either made whole (more defense contracts, taxpayer bailout if necessary, whatever is needed) or protected in some way tbd. They are a 100 billion a year company with 150,000+ employees and untold numbers of other contractors and jobs depending on their existence. Going away is just not going to happen.

ex-PFC Chuck , April 29, 2019 at 4:02 pm

Never underestimate the MICC's* capability & inclination to look after its own.

*Military Industrial Congressional Complex

737 Pilot , April 29, 2019 at 10:55 am

Okay, Boeing screwed the pooch again, and they should have been more clear in their communications to the airlines. However, let me add some perspective as a 737 operator.

Given the AOA malfunction in either the Lion Air or Ethiopian accidents, an "AOA Disagree" warning annunciation would have possibly been helpful, but not really crucial to the safe recovery of the aircraft. There were plenty of other indications that the AOA's were disagreeing – namely that only one of the stick shakers was activated. Once you get over the initial surprise, it shouldn't have been that hard to determine this fact. The lack of the AOA display and disagree annunciator is not what doomed these crews.

vlade , April 29, 2019 at 11:04 am

I sort of agree and disagree.

I've never had a flight emergency as a pilot, but had a few as a diver. I suspect that for both of those, when they hit, you need to resolve things quickly and efficiently, with panic being the worst enemy.

Panic in my experience stems from a number of things here, but two crucial ones are:
– input overload
– not knowing what to do, or learned actions not having any effect

Both of them can be, to a very large extent, overcome with training, training, and more training (of actually practising the emergency situation, not just reading about it and filling questionairres).

So, if the crews were expecting to see AoA disagree but it wasn't there, they could have easily be misled and confused. The crews weren't (from what I've seen) hugely experienced. So any confusion would have made a bad situation even worse. How big an impact it made is hard to judge w/o any other materials.

marku52 , April 29, 2019 at 3:42 pm

Well it is rarely just one thing that causes an "accident". There are multiple contributors here. But the one basic overarching cause was Boeing's insistence that there-will-not-be-any-additional-training.

Without that management decree, the Max could be flown without the hack of MCAS, just that the pilots be trained on the new pitchup characteristics.

And releasing MCAS into the wild without even alerting pilots to its existence, well, that is manslaughter, if not outright murder.

CraaaaaaaaaazyChris , April 29, 2019 at 4:02 pm

My takeaway from the IEEE article was that the AOA sensor is almost a red herring. The dog that didn't bark was a pitch sensor, and the cardinal sin (from a software perspective) was that the MCAS algo did not consider pitch sensor values when deciding whether or not to angle the plane towards ground.

Synoia , April 29, 2019 at 11:09 am

Blame the pilots then? Is that your point?

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 1:50 pm

I suggest reading some of the other pieces on the 737 debacle on NC. There's been extensive discussion of the details, and yes the pilots may be partially to blame, but are the least culpable out of all parties involved.

GooGooGaJoob , April 29, 2019 at 12:03 pm

Given that story states that Boeing was more or less silent on the disabling of the sensor alerts, it's is reasonable to posit that any 737 pilot stepping into a 737 MAX would expect the sensor to be active.

I can understand the position that a pilot still needs to be skilled enough to not be 100% reliant on sensors, warning lights etc. to fly the plane. However, if I already assume that a sensor is active and it's not providing a signal that I would be potentially anticipating, it's going to seed doubt in my mind in a scenario where you don't have much time at all to think things through.

flora , April 29, 2019 at 12:44 pm

On the other hand: a safety light that is deactivated without telling the airlines and pilots gives false negatives to pilots at a critical juncture. They assume it's active, check it, and see a false negative they don't realize is false.

Imagine having a 'check engine' or 'oil' light on your car's dashboard that's been deactivated. They never come on. But they're still there. The driver assumes they'll light if there's engine trouble that needs attention.

Boeing's actions don't pass the 'reasonable man' test.

Jim A. , April 29, 2019 at 1:23 pm

Yeah, normally if a mechanical gauge "knows" that it isn't working there will be a little flag that pops up across the display. Leaving the light there but inoperative instead of either removing the light or covering it up with an "inoperative" cover is a really bad idea. It is EVEN WORSE than making safety features optional, and that is bad enough.

John k , April 29, 2019 at 1:30 pm

Let's see
First, they didn't know MCAS existed, so had no idea or training in what to do when it was erroneously engaged by system.
Then, they think both Aos sensors are working properly.
And, Boeing tells everybody plane is just like previous versions, no need for simulations.
I'm glad I'm not one of the dead pilots you're blaming.
By the way, it's apparently just chance that the bad sensors affected foreign and not domestic flights, no public reports that superior domestic pilots had no problem when it hit the fan on their watch although some domestic airlines were told (warned) that bad sensor light was optional extra so possibly a domestic plane cancelled flight on account of bad sensor.
But imagine a really experienced pilot would have saved the day so Boeing should say only really experienced pilots should fly the plane? Maybe simulators help you get really experienced, especially with unexpected emergencies?
Personally, I'll avoid the plane for a few years if simulators aren't required hate to have a pilot not experienced with what we now know is not such a rare event.

Old Jake , April 29, 2019 at 3:22 pm

We seem to be forgetting that, in the Lion Air case, a really experienced pilot did save the day the previous day on the same aircraft . The issue was reported, the airline neglected to repair the issue and nobody seems to have told the new aircrew about the issue. This seems to support 737 Pilot's position. It is also another egregious failure, this time on the part of the airline.

dcrane , April 29, 2019 at 3:42 pm

That pilot was a third set of eyes. Since he didn't have to fly the plane, he was free to observe and fortunately his attention eventually focused on the repeating trim wheel movements. A standard two-person crew doesn't have this luxury. Worth keeping in mind.

That lion crew also seems to have written up the problem incompletely. They didn't mention, for example, that they had the stick shaker going for the entire flight.

JerryDenim , April 29, 2019 at 4:51 pm

Your point is legitimate but without the benefit of a CVR recording I think you may be affording too much credit to the jumpseating pilot who is rumored to have provided the flight crew with the excellent advice of disabling the electric stabilizer trim motor. Even if the story is entirely true it's not like turning off the Stab trim motor was esoteric knowledge, maybe 737 pilot can correct me on this but I thought that procedure was a memory item for trim runaway emergencies, meaning the pilots were supposed to have that bit of knowledge firmly committed to memory and they were supposed to execute that procedure without any checklists or undue delay as soon as the condition was recognized. If not a memory item it was in the 737 QRC or QRH emergency procedures guide that is always present for immediate reference on the flight deck. The most important thing the crew of Lion Air 43(?) did (the flight previous to 610 that managed not to crash) was to simply not let themselves become so frazzled they forgot to pull the thrust levers out of the take-off detent after they reached a safe altitude, and not overspeeding an out of trim airplane making a bad situation worse. Maybe the jumpseating pilot had to scream at the crew to reduce thrust and maybe he had to slap the Captain and reduce the thrust levers himself, but absent a CVR recording to verify this slightly far-fetched scenario I would say the previous crew deserves the Lion's share (sorry couldn't resist) of the credit for landing safely.

You are absolutely 100% correct when you point out the non-crashing Captain was far from exemplary. He laid an absolutely vicious trap for the ill-fated crew of flight 610 by failing to mention a great number of things he experienced, especially the uncommanded and unwanted nose down trimming that necessitated turning off the stab trim motor which he also failed to communicate. Not a shining moment for Lion Air pilots, mechanics or Boeing. Despite the obvious and multiple shortcomings and blunders of the Captain/crew of Lion Air 43, I believe that flight proves what the airline pilot commenters here have been saying all along, which is the 737 Max flaws were serious but survivable with a competent crew. That's not the same thing as calling the airplane safe or airworthy and it's certainly not excusing Boeing. They delivered a death trap. Perhaps a bad analogy, but a professional body guard should be able to easily disarm a five year with a knife, but that doesn't mean a murderous five year with a knife isn't dangerous or isn't capable of killing you. Airplanes are machines which inevitably fail and mechanics are humans who make mistakes which is why pilots need to know how to hand fly airplanes absent automation. Reducing thrust during an emergency to avoid overspeeding your airplane really isn't a tall ask for a professional pilot. Pilots get this, non-pilots don't, and it's a point I've grown quite weary of making.

shtove , April 29, 2019 at 1:32 pm

There's been interesting points made back and forth on NC – what do you make of this from Karl Denninger: basically, "You can't fix the problems the 737Max has with software alone"?
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=235578

JerryDenim , April 29, 2019 at 2:27 pm

I made the exact same argument here a couple of days ago, but I will say IF the system was engineered in a way it could have given the Ethiopians a warning prior to eighty knots or V1 (depending on training and pilot judgement) on takeoff, maybe they could have aborted and kept the plane on the ground avoiding the disaster. Having that disagree light or indication immediately after rotation on climbout could have soothed the nerves of the pilots and made them feel more confident trusting the perfectly normal instrumentation on the FO's side of the airplane. But if the high speed clacker, the airspeed tape and the thrust settings aren't enough information to convince a overwhelmed, elevator control fixated pilot that he/she has more than adequate speed to avoid stalling, and they should slow down, then it stands to reason a secondary warning indication would also not break through the mental logjam of two very overwhelmed pilots bombarded by warnings and data. In the case of Lion Air 610 the malfunctioning AOA vane had already caused multiple instrument malfunctions and improper nose down MCAS trimming on three other flights, so it seems like those guys were hellbent on flying that plane no matter what. Even if Lion Air would have had the optional warning system onboard the mechanics most likely would have deferred the warning system as broken. "Ops checks good". They probably would have removed the bulb or stuck a placard on top of it.

And before anyone feels the need to point it out, yes, I'm engaging in speculation, but so is everyone claiming this optional safety system would have made a difference in the two aforementioned tragedies. I'm engaging in speculation as a guy who has reviewed thousands of logbooks and had hundreds, possibly thousands of interactions with airline maintenance technicians. Some of those interactions include contentious debates over what is safe to defer or what can actually legally be deferred so I do have a bit of experience in this department.

Boeing screwed up. They were hasty, they were greedy, they were cavalier, the MCAS trim system with a single point of failure was a terrible design that was most likely criminal. I'm just weighing in on 737 pilot's contention. With a system as poorly designed as the MCAS stall protection trimming, every safety feature available should have come standard from Boeing, but sadly additional fault indications don't always matter in emergency situations. Proper fault diagnosis is only part of any successful emergency outcome. Pilots still have to possess the knowledge and skill required to follow procedures and fly the airplane.

vlade , April 29, 2019 at 10:56 am

The only planes I ever flew you'd fly w/o pretty much any instrumentation (WW2 trainers, hoping to fly a Spitfire or Mustang one day.. ).

But in a modern plane, I'd think that _any_ instrument that is doubled or more (which implies some sort of criticality) should have an automatic "inputs disagree" indicator, which would not be possible to turn off.

Not that you'll have to buy it as a special feature.

JBird4049 , April 29, 2019 at 1:16 pm

I have been thinking about the modern 737. My completely uninformed guess is that the original model, while less "safe" was more informative in a real way than the current one.

In modern cars, especially something like a hybrid, there is not much "feel" to it. In an older old fashion gasoline engine car, there is. I could use the Volkswagen as an example, because it only had some colored lights and the speedometer, and none of the safety features of a modern car. However, I could sense, smell, see just about everything, often subconsciously, even before something went kablowie because there was nothing isolating me from the vehicle and the road. Today, I have to depend on my car's sensors because it has been designed to be quiet and isolating as possible.

John , April 29, 2019 at 11:06 am

The downward slide of corrupt predatory capitalism is not a pretty picture. These cases will continue as long as the responsible executives know they have nothing to lose.

campbeln , April 29, 2019 at 12:30 pm

Just more proof that self regulation works, just look to our favorite sporting events!
There's no need to have refs on the field because everyone involved is a professional and would never cheat, disrespect the sport or do something against the rules because the fans would punish them!
If our sports don't need refs, then surely our markets don't need regulators! Checkmate, big government stooges!

Synoia , April 29, 2019 at 1:20 pm

Absolutely correct. Throw away the huge NFL rule-book, and revert to the rules the of the Roman arena.

It would save the NFL team owners huge amounts of money.

StarryGordon , April 29, 2019 at 12:20 pm

I suppose I am naive, but I am shocked that the behavior of Boeing's management and the FAA are not being treated as a criminal matter. What happened was not a business mistake, it was a crime in which a number of persons deliberately and knowingly decided to risk other people's lives in order to increase profits, as a result of which hundreds of people were killed. I believe the term is 'negligent homicide', upon conviction of which lesser beings than high management and bureaucrats go to jail. In some countries their next of kin would already have received a bill for bullets and services rendered.

Synoia , April 29, 2019 at 1:15 pm

It would be interesting in Ethiopia issues a criminal arrest warrant on these grounds for the Executives of Boeing.

That being the country with jurisdiction for this second crash.

Is there an extradition treaty between Ethiopia and the US?

John k , April 29, 2019 at 1:36 pm

The term used to be criminally negligent homicide, but this no longer applies to those wearing white collars.
Otherwise we would see charges against bankers, opioid pushers, and others.

JBird4049 , April 29, 2019 at 1:30 pm

But Boeing, as part of a duopoly, recognizes that its customers have nowhere to go .at least for the next few years, which might as well be eternity as far as MBAs are concerned.

Even if it meant drastically reducing flights why would any airline buy airplanes that are not guaranteed to be safe? Losing money through fewer paying customers because you are choosing to have fewer flights is better than being boycotted or bankrupted by lawsuits, or arrested and criminally charged.

EoH , April 29, 2019 at 2:00 pm

It is inexplicable that Boeing shut off an indicator system for the Max that had been standard on earlier versions of the 737, when that AoA sensor disagreement indicator was even more important for safe flight.

Turning it on in the Max version was possible but was made part of an extra-cost safety package. How would a purchaser know to buy it when Boeing downplayed its importance so as not to suggest how different the Max was from supposedly similar earlier versions of the 737?

The more that comes out about the conduct of Boeing and its senior management's decisions, the more they look criminally reckless.

WestcoastDeplorable , April 29, 2019 at 4:02 pm

The FAA is mostly responsible for this fiasco because they have a misguided mission. Safety should be their only concern, but over the years that's eroded into a "sort of safety" attitude but mostly being a cheerleader for the aviation industry.
And you can't trust bastards like Boeing to "self-certify" anything, apparently!

Carey , April 29, 2019 at 4:06 pm

Scott Hamilton at Leeham News on Boeing's CEO:

"..It took months before Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg issued a video in which, among other things, he said, "We own it." He was referring to safety of the MAX.

This was widely interpreted as Boeing stepping up and taking responsibility for at least some of the causes of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes.

Last Wednesday, he took it all back.

On the first quarter earnings call, Muilenburg denied there was any "technical slip or gap" in designing the now famous MCAS system. He said "actions not taken" contributed to the crash, a thinly veiled reference once again to pilot error.."

https://leehamnews.com/2019/04/29/pontifications-we-own-it-but/

VietnamVet , April 29, 2019 at 7:03 pm

Boeing and FAA are criminally negligent especially for the Ethiopian Airline crash. The recovered horizontal stabilizer screw jack from the Lion Air crash was found in the full nose down position that forced the plane to dive into the sea. It should have never be in this is flight critical position. Grounding the fleet should have been immediate until the cause and fix were found. On top of all this, it is simply criminal for Boeing to charge Southwest Airlines for additional safety features and then turn them off not telling the airline.

It is tragic that it appears that Americans will have to rely on China to force Boeing to actually fix MCAS and along with Canada to shame the FAA into requiring pilot training on Flight Simulators before flying passengers on the Max.

A Boeing C-Suite executive has to go to jail. If not, there is no chance for the United States of America to survive. With government run by and for profiteers, long term planning is dead. Profit over people. A plague, an economic crash, a world war, a middle-class revolt, flooded coasts, or an autocratic Caesar become inevitable.

[Apr 29, 2019] Ralph Nader Calls Out Boeing for 737 MAX Lack of Airworthiness, Stock Buybacks, and Demands Muilenburg Resign by Lambert Strether

Apr 28, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Ralph Nader has published an open letter to Dennis A. Muilenburg, current CEO of Boeing, which is worth reading in full . There's a personal connection :

[Nader's] niece, 24-year-old Samya Stumo, was among the 157 victims of an Ethiopian Airlines flight crash last month, less than six months after a flight on the same aircraft, the Boeing 737 Max 8, crashed in Indonesia.

Nader comments, in Stumo's obituary in the Berkshire Eagle :

"She was compassionate from the get-go. She'd be 8 years old and she'd get a pail of hot water and go to her great-grandmother and soak her feet and rub her feet and dry them. She was always that way."

Clifford Law has brought suit on behalf of the Stumo family in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. From the complaint :

Blinded by its greed, BOEING haphazardly rushed the 737 MAX 8 to market, with the knowledge and tacit approval of the United States Federal Aviation Administration ("FAA"), while BOEING actively concealed the nature of the automated system defects. Numerous decisions by BOEING's leadership substantially contributed to the subject crash and demonstrate BOEING's conscious disregard for the lives of others, including but not limited to BOEING's role in: designing an aircraft with a powerful automated flight control system [the MCAS] susceptible to catastrophic failure in the event a single defective sensor; failing to properly inform pilots of the existence of the new flight control system and educate and train them in all aspects of its operation; failing to properly address the new system in the aircraft's flight manual; refusing to include key safety features as standard in the aircraft rather than optional upgrades; delivering 737 MAX aircraft with a version of the flight control system that was materially different from the version presented to the FAA during certification; and failing to take appropriate action after BOEING learned that the 737 MAX aircraft was not performing as intended or safety, as was made tragically clear with the crash of Lion Air Flight JT 610.

BOEING's decision to put profits over safety is further evident in BOEING's repeated claims that the 737 MAX 8 is so similar to its earlier models that it does not require significant retraining for those pilots familiar with the older generation of 737s.

All pretty much conventional wisdom at this point! The suit also calls for exemplary (punitive) damages ; I've embedded the complaint at the end of the post, in case any readers care to dig into it. I'm not going to examine the case in this post; rather, I'm going to focus on three items from Naders letter that I think advance the story: His framing for 737 MAX airworthiness; his highlighting of Boeing's stock buybacks; and his call for Boeing CEO Muilenburg's defenestration.

Nader on 737 MAX Airworthiness

From Nader's letter :

Aircraft should be stall-proof, not stall-prone.

(Stalling, in Nader's telling, being the condition the defective MCAS system was meant to correct.) Because aircraft that are aerodynamicallly unstable, llke fighter jets, have ejection seats! Now, a pedant would point out that Nader means commercial aircraft , but as readers know, I eschew pedantry in all contexts. That said, Nader manages to encapsulate the problem in a single sentence (using antithesis , isocolon , and anaphora ). Now, we have pilots in the commentariat who will surely say whether Nader's formulation is correct, but to this layperson it seems to be. From 737 MAX, a fan/geek site, on the business and technical logic of the MCAS system :

The LEAP engine nacelles are larger and had to be mounted slightly higher and further forward from the previous NG CFM56-7 engines to give the necessary ground clearance. This new location and larger size of nacelle cause the vortex flow off the nacelle body to produce lift at high AoA [Angle of Attack]. As the nacelle is ahead of the C of G, this lift causes a slight pitch-up effect (ie a reducing stick force) which could lead the pilot to inadvertently pull the yoke further aft than intended bringing the aircraft closer towards the stall. This abnormal nose-up pitching is not allowable under 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall characteristics". Several aerodynamic solutions were introduced such as revising the leading edge stall strip and modifying the leading edge vortilons but they were insufficient to pass regulation. MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during elevated AoA when flaps are up.

Nader on Stock Buybacks

From Nader's letter , where he is addressing Muilenberg ("you") directly:

Boeing management's behavior must be seen in the context of Boeing's use of its earned capital. Did you use the $30 billion surplus from 2009 to 2017 to reinvest in R&D, in new narrow-body passenger aircraft? Or did you, instead, essentially burn this surplus with self-serving stock buybacks of $30 billion in that period? Boeing is one of the companies that MarketWatch labelled as "Five companies that spent lavishly on stock buybacks while pension funding lagged."

Incredibly, your buybacks of $9.24 billion in 2017 comprised 109% of annual earnings . As you well know, stock buybacks do not create any jobs. They improve the metrics for the executive compensation packages of top Boeing bosses [ka-ching]. Undeterred, in 2018, buybacks of $9 billion constituted 86% of annual earnings .

To make your management recklessly worse, in December 2018, you arranged for your rubberstamp Board of Directors to approve $20 billion more in buybacks. Apparently, you had amortized the cost of the Indonesian Lion Air crash victims as not providing any significant impact on your future guidance to the investor world.

Holy moley, that's real money! Nader's detail on the stock buybacks (see NC here , here , and here ) interested me, because it bears on Boeing's 2011 decision not to build a new narrow-body aircraft in 2011. I summarized the decision-making back in March:

(2) Choice of Airframe : The Air Current describes the competitive environment that led Boeing to upgrade the 737 to the 737 MAX, instead of building a new plane:

Boeing wanted to replace the 737. The plan had even earned the endorsement of its now-retired chief executive. "We're gonna do a new airplane," Jim McNerney said in February of that same year. "We're not done evaluating this whole situation yet, but our current bias is to not re-engine, is to move to an all-new airplane at the end of the decade." History went in a different direction. Airbus, riding its same decades-long incremental strategy and chipping away at Boeing's market supremacy, had made no secret of its plans to put new engines on the A320. But its own re-engined jet somehow managed to take Boeing by surprise. Airbus and American forced Boeing's hand. It had to put new engines on the 737 to stay even with its rival .

Why? The earlier butchered launch of the 787:

Boeing justified the decision thusly: There were huge and excruciatingly painful near-term obstacles on its way to a new single-aisle airplane. In the summer of 2011, the 787 Dreamliner wasn't yet done after billions invested and years of delays. More than 800 airplanes later here in 2019, each 787 costs less to build than sell, but it's still running a $23 billion production cost deficit. . The 737 Max was Boeing's ticket to holding the line on its position -- both market and financial -- in the near term. Abandoning the 737 would've meant walking away from its golden goose that helped finance the astronomical costs of the 787 and the development of the 777X.

So, we might think of Boeing as a runner who's tripped and fallen: The initial stumble, followed by loss of balance, was the 787; with the 737 MAX, Boeing hit the surface of the track.

So, Dennis. How's that workin' out for ya? How does the decision not to build a new plane look in retrospect? Ygeslias writes in Vox, in April:

Looking back, Boeing probably wishes it had just stuck with the "build a new plane" plan and toughed out a few years of rough sales, rather than ending up in the current situation. Right now the company is, in effect, trying to patch things up piecemeal -- a software update here, a new warning light there, etc. -- in hopes of persuading global regulatory agencies to let its planes fly again.

What Nader's focus on stock buybacks shows, is that Boeing had the capital to invest in developing a new plane . From Bloomberg in 2019 :

For Boeing and Airbus, committing to an all-new aircraft is a once-in-a-decade event. Costs are prohibitive, delays are the norm and payoff can take years to materialize. Boeing could easily spend more than $15 billion on the NMA, according to Ken Herbert, analyst with Canaccord Genuity, and Airbus may be forced into a clean-sheet design if sales take off.

The sales force has been fine-tuning the design with airlines for at least five years, creating a "will it or won't it?" drama around the decision on whether to make the plane, known internally at Boeing as the NMA, for new, middle-of-market airplane.

Now, it is true that the "huge and excruciatingly painful near-term obstacles" referred to by the Air Current are sales losses that Boeing would incur from putting a bullet into it's cash cow, the 737, before it turned into a dog (like now?). Nevertheless, Beoing was clearly capable, as Yglesias points put, of "tough[ing]out a few years of rough sales." So what else was "excruciatingly painful"? Losing the stock buybacks (and that sweet, sweet executive compensation). Readers, I wasn't cynical enough. I should have given consideration to the possibility that Muilenburg and his merry men were looting the company!

Nader on Muilenburg

Finally, from Nader's letter :

Consider, in addition, the statement of two Harvard scholars -- Leonard J. Marcus and Eric J. McNulty, authors of the forthcoming book, You're It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most. These gentlemen did not achieve their positions by using strong language. That is why, the concluding statement in their CNN article on March 27, 2019, merits your closer attention:

"Of course, if Boeing did not act in good faith in deploying the 737 Max and the Justice Department's investigation discovers Boeing cut corners or attempted to avoid proper regulatory reviews of the modifications to the aircraft, Muilenburg and any other executives involved should resign immediately. Too many families, indeed communities, depend on the continued viability of Boeing."

These preconditions have already been disclosed and are evidentially based. Your mismanagement is replete with documentation, including your obsession with shareholder value and executive compensation. There is no need to wait for some long-drawn out, redundant inquiry. Management was criminally negligent, 346 lives of passengers and crew were lost. You and your team should forfeit your compensation and should resign forthwith.

All concerned with aviation safety should have your public response.

I can't find anything to disagree with here. However, I'll quote from commenter Guido at Leeham News, March 29, 2019 :

What I don't understand: Muilenburg was the CEO when the MCAS code was implemented. Muilenburg was the CEO when Boeing "tweaked" the certification of the B737Max. It was the Boeing management that decided, that the B737Max must under no circumstances trigger simulator training for pilots.

Muilenburg has for sure not written the code for MCAS by himself, but as the CEO he is responsible for the mess. He is responsible, that the first version of MCAS was cheap and fast to implement, but not safe. It was basically Muilenburg, who allowed a strategy, that was basically: Profits and Quickness before safety. Muilenburg has the responsibility for 346 dead people. You can't kill 346 people with your new product and still be the highly paid CEO of the company. There have to be consequences.

Why are there no calls, that Muilenburg must step down?

Nader has now issued such a call. As [lambert preens modestly] did Naked Capitalism on March 19 .

Conclusion

Wrapping up, Muilenberg has plenty of other lawsuits to worry about :

However, a search of court documents and news reports shows the company is facing at least 34 claims from victims' families and one claim seeking class certification on behalf of shareholders. The claims allege Boeing is responsible for losses after installing an unsafe anti-stall system, called "MCAS" (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), on its 737 Max 8 planes, suspected to have played a role in both crashes. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said it was "apparent" the system had been activated in both crashes.

Added to the uncertainty of potential expenses for Boeing are pending regulator probes. The U.S. Justice Department initiated a criminal investigation into Boeing's Federal Aviation Administration certification, as well as how it marketed its 737 Max 8 planes. The U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General is also conducting an inquiry.

On April 9, the lawsuit seeking class certification was brought on behalf of shareholders who purchased Boeing stock between January 8, 2019 and March 21, 2019. The proposed class period covers a time frame beginning after the Lion Air crash, and extending beyond the Ethiopian Airlines crash, when Boeing's stock experienced a steep decline.

But then again, Muilenberg may know -- or think -- that Boeing, as a national champion, is too big to fail. So, if Boeing gracefully exits from the commercial aviation business, it may find the warm embrace of government contracting more comfortable. Perhaps that's why propaganda like this suddenly started showing up in my Twitter feed:

me title=

I suppose it's too much to ask that the CEO of a too-big-to-fail company be asked to resign, even if he did kill a lot of people. But if Nader can do with the 737 MAX, at the end of his career, what he did with the Corvair ("a one-car accident") , when he was coming up, everybody except for a cabal of looters and liars in Boeing's Chicago C-suite will be a lot better off. So we can hope.

APPENDIX 1: The Rosy Scenario

From Ask the Pilot :

I keep going back to the DC-10 fiasco in the 1970s.

In 1974, in one of the most horrific air disasters of all time, a THY (Turkish Airlines) DC-10 crashed after takeoff from Orly Airport outside Paris, killing 346 people. The accident was traced to a faulty cargo door design. (The same door had nearly caused the crash of an American Airlines DC-10 two years earlier.) McDonnell Douglas had hurriedly designed a plane with a door that it knew was defective, then, in the aftermath of Paris, tried to cover the whole thing up. It was reckless, even criminal. Then, in 1979, American flight 191, also a DC-10, went down at Chicago-O'Hare, killing 273 -- to this day the deadliest air crash ever on U.S. soil -- after an engine detached on takeoff. Investigators blamed improper maintenance procedures (including use of a forklift to raise the engine and its pylon), and then found pylon cracks in at least six other DC-10s, causing the entire fleet to be grounded for 37 days. The NTSB cited "deficiencies in the surveillance and reporting procedures of the FAA," as well as production and quality control problems at McDonnell Douglas.

That's two of history's ten deadliest air crashes, complete with design defects, a cover-up, and 619 dead people. And don't forget the 737 itself has a checkered past, going back to the rudder problems that caused the crash of USAir flight 427 in 1994 (and likely the crash of United flight 585 in 1991). Yet the DC-10, the 737, and America's aviation prestige along with them, have persevered. If we survived the those scandals we can probably manage this. I have a feeling that a year from now this saga will be mostly forgotten. Boeing and its stock price will recover, the MAX will be up and flying again, and on and on we go.

This is how it happens.

Maybe. But in 1974, the United States was commercial aviation. Airbus had launched its first plane, the A300 , only in 1972. We were also an imperial hegemon in a way we are not now. For myself, I can't help noticing that it was Boeing's takeover of a wretched, corrupt McDonnell Douglas -- the famous reverse takeover -- that ultimately turned Boeing from an engineering company into a company driven by finance. With resulits that we see.

APPENDIX 2: The Stumo Complaint

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ChristopherJ , April 28, 2019 at 4:20 pm

The fact that the CEO and the Board have not resigned just shows everyone that they lack all the essential characteristics of human beings.
Stock buybacks should be illegal. Profits should only be distributed via dividends or reinvested. The fact that companies can do this shows how corrupted our governments are.
The rest of the world may forget this one. I won't and there are millions like me who will never step aboard a boeing plane again.
The only thing that will save this company now is the US govt, which is likely.

JBird4049 , April 28, 2019 at 5:00 pm

Boeing's management is not going to jail and likely will keep their jobs. The deaths of over three hundred people means nothing. They are not even American and probably only middle class so they don't have connections to use. The "American" company Boeing has both money and connections.

Money gives you rights and if you don't have it, you are not even a human being.

Just look at 2008. The Vampiric Octopus called Wall Street was saved by the Feds with almost no one going to jail, or even criminally prosecuted. The exceptions of an innocent small community bank in NYC and some low level employees of a very few loan companies. The entire planetary economy came to with in hours of freezing and then collapsing. Millions of Americans lost homes, often through questionably legal foreclosures, with many millions more losing their jobs.

Nothing going to change and I wish I could believe otherwise.

DHG , April 28, 2019 at 5:33 pm

So I should just fire up my own money press then as should everyone else Money was invented as a limiter by the ancient church then adopted by governments.. Money isnt necessary to live and it will b thrown overboard soon enough.

Plenue , April 28, 2019 at 9:03 pm

"Money was invented as a limiter by the ancient church then adopted by governments"

Er, what?

JBird4049 , April 28, 2019 at 11:42 pm

I think money as a concept arose in Sumer about 6-7 thousand years ago with the clay receipts given by the temple of the local city's patron god for livestock and grain stored there.

But my knowledge of money's history is limited. If anyone wants to correct or clarify, please do.

animalogic , April 29, 2019 at 5:34 am

Might be wrong but think (if my memory of Gerber serves) you refer to credit/debt. Actual money (coin) I think arose along side the use of large scale Armies (armies are both highly mobile & inherently amorphous -- ie people come & go, die, are wounded, loot must be traded etc, all of which is difficult in the absence of currency)

The Rev Kev , April 28, 2019 at 8:37 pm

Stock buybacks were once illegal because they are a type of stock market manipulation. But then Reagan got in and wanted to do his banker buddies a favour-

https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/stock-buybacks-were-once-illegal-why-are-they-legal-now-sHh6HZjtyk2styG-qLgnQg/

To think that Boeing has Ralph Nader of all people on their case. With apologies to Liam Neeson, Nader might be saying to Muilenberg right now: "If you are looking for (forgiveness), I can tell you I don't have (forgiveness). But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you go now, that'll be the end of it."
That sounds like good advice that.

drumlin woodchuckles , April 28, 2019 at 9:03 pm

Re-outlawing the "Stock Buyback" would be one useful reNew The Deal reform. Outlawing compensation in stocks, options, or etc. of any kind except money would be another useful Newer Deal reform. Both together would force-multiply each other's effect.

I hope the four Old Real Democrats have people reading these threads and taking any possibly-good ideas back to headquarters. I hope the New Catfood Democrats and their people aren't spying or eavesdropping on these threads.

JerryDenim , April 28, 2019 at 4:52 pm

Wow. Great post Lambert and nice job Mr Nader!

I love how Nader brings stock buy-backs into his letter and basically connects the dots from a recklessly designed aircraft system full circle to an indictment of our current shareholder value system of capitalism and its perverse incentive structure which includes safety shortcuts and runaway executive compensation. Such a perfect case study for this site!

I think Nader really should beat the drum heavily on the perverse incentive structure at Boeing and how executives shortchanged safety to grab more money for themselves because that's an easy story for a jury to understand. I see where Nader is going with the inherently "stall prone" aerodynamic design stuff, and he's not wrong, but I think he may be treading on dangerous ground. Automatic stabilizer trimming systems designed to overcome the negative aerodynamic attributes of the new 737 Max wing/engine design is a confusing rabbit hole for the lay person. Boeing attorneys and expert witnesses may be able to twist the jury's head into a pretzel on this issue. The debate and discussion here concerning process, decision making, design philosophy etc at Boeing has generally been of very high quality, but has a tendency to go off the rails when the discussion dives too deeply into the subject matter of aerodynamics and aircraft systems. I could see the same dynamic playing out in the courtroom. Nader is the master class-action consumer advocacy attorney not me, but I think he should go heavy buybacks and whistle blower warnings while avoiding unforced errors arguing over the not-so-important point of whether or not the 737 Max crashed because it was stall prone or because it was too stall adverse. Two brand new Boeings crashed, people died, Boeing was greedy, Boeing was hasty, the MCAS trim system was garbage and probably criminal. He's got a slam dunk case arguing the MCAS trim system with a single point of failure was poorly designed and recklessly conceived, I think he should just stick to that and the greed angle and avoid the stall prone vs. stall adverse debate. I wish him luck.

Darius , April 28, 2019 at 10:19 pm

They screwed up the plane design then thought an extra layer of software would ameliorate the problem enough. It sucks but it's probably just good enough. Seems pretty simple.

Darius , April 28, 2019 at 10:40 pm

They effed up the hardware and thought they could paper it over with more software. But at least the shareholders and executives did well.

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 1:15 am

As JerryDenim touched on, a good defense lawyer would probably be able to defeat this argument in front of a jury. There are too many examples of successful and safe commercial aircraft with aerodynamic compromises (the hardware, as you call it) that use software fixes to overcome these limitations. The focus in this case would need to be on the implementation of that software and how criminal neglect occurred there.

JerryDenim , April 29, 2019 at 3:31 am

Boeing's attorneys are going to try and make any lawsuits a question of why the airplanes ultimately crashed. I hate to spoil it for anyone, but I can tell you Boeing's attorneys are going to blame it all on the pilots. Airlines and airplane manufactures always do. Nothing new. Dead pilots can't defend themselves, their families don't have millions in the bank and they aren't going to be placing any billion dollar aircraft orders in the future. If anyone has read my frequently maligned comments, you already know the line of attack. Not following the runaway trim procedures and overspeeding the aircraft with takeoff thrust set. That's why Nader or anyone else pursuing Boeing would do well to sidestep the "why did two Boeing 737 Max Jets crash" question and stick to the details surrounding the horribly flawed MCAS trim system and the Boeing corporate greed story. Steer clear of the pilots' actions and the potentially confusing aerodynamics of modern jetliners, keep the focus squarely on the MCAS trim system design process and executive greed.

animalogic , April 29, 2019 at 5:55 am

Anyone prosecuting Boeing will have to deal with Boeing's defence, which as noted, will play up the commoness of such technical compromises. I do wonder whether Boeing will go after the pilots, though.
Any pilots argument naturally raises Boeing's negligence re : training, flight manuals & communication. The prosecution case will naturally play up the greed aspect as cause/motivation/
context for the crashes & Boeing's direct responsibility /negligence.

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 7:49 am

The defense would likely also pull in the airlines and FAA as targets for liability, as both have some responsibility for these matters. Attacking the FAA would be fodder for the de-regulators (Privatize it! Government is incompetent!). The airlines would complain that competition forces them to cut costs, and that they meet all of the (gutted) legal requirements.

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 1:44 am

I agree with focusing on the greed aspect. Nader's letter has some technical errors such as stating the engines were tilted (they were moved horizontally and vertically, not rotated) that show he hasn't fully understood the details. It doesn't help that many of the changes made to the 737 MAX from previous generations are actually quite subtle, and can't really be discussed individually for this context. It is the sum of these changes that made it an extremely deadly aircraft.

Norb , April 29, 2019 at 8:55 am

The other failure/business feature is the concept of modularity. The software designed to fix the aerodynamic complexities is broken down into modular components, and then sold off as "options". Once again greed sabotages the system. Modularity is a great way to gouge customers and lock in higher profits. The level of technical competence needed to properly evaluate what modules are essential complicates the outcome. But then again, this can be rationalized as a feature not a bug. Blame for failure can be passed around- the customer should have purchased the entire package.

The runaway externalities emanating from the current form of capitalism as practiced in the US must be reigned in. Voluntary compliance to some sort of moral code is useless- worse than useless in that corrupt operators can hide behind lame excuses for failure.

The bigger problem is that Government regulations could solve these problems quickly, as in throwing people in jail and confiscating their property. A strong argument can be made for ill-gotten gains. I surely would vote for that if given the chance. Deal drugs and you can loose your home. What about conscious business decisions
leading to harm?

You need a strong force external to these business concerns for this to happen. The separation of government and business. Business should operate at the will of the government. When the government is run with the wellbeing of the people foremost, then issues like crashing planes can be rectified.

When the interests of business and government merge, then what you have is fascism. American fascism will have a happy face. These unfortunate problems of crashing planes and polluted environments will trundle along into the future. Billionaires will continue to accumulate their billions while the rest of us will trundle along.

But one day, trundling along won't be an option. Maybe only outsiders to the US system can see this clearly.

Ray Duray , April 28, 2019 at 7:07 pm

You ask: "So when the original 737 was designed, did the engineers have the option of using these larger engines? Did they decline to do so because it was a flawed design?"

The larger engines currently in use on the 737 Max 8 were not designed until recently. They did not decline because the current engine wasn't even invented.

Here's an abbreviated design history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737#Engines

Edward , April 28, 2019 at 7:31 pm

I guess what I am wondering is if the original designers of the 737 had the option of designing a more powerful engine similar to that used in the 737 MAX but declined to do so. No doubt engine technology has advanced during the 50 years since the first 737's were built. Could the engineers 50 years ago have designed engines like those on the 737 MAX? If so, what were there reasons for not doing so?

I also have a second question. I have been told that stalling can be prevented by placing small wings at the front of an airplane. Would such a design have resolved the problems with the 737 MAX?

Plenue , April 28, 2019 at 9:14 pm

Fifty years of technological improvement, yes. The new engines aren't more powerful, they're more fuel efficient. Airbus had put more fuel efficient engines on its planes, so Boeing rushed new engines of its own into service to compete.

But they're really too large to be mounted on the 737; they mess up the center of gravity. MCAS was a janky software fix to solve a fundamental hardware problem, because Boeing didn't want to design a new plane.

And it didn't want to lose money by requiring airlines to retrain pilots, it sold the plane with the new engines as being exactly the same as the old, a painless upgrade.

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 4:48 am

Canards, as the small wings at the front of aircraft are sometimes called, would likely not have been a fix in this case. There are some light aircraft that use these for stall prevention by utilizing the aerodynamic properties of the wing. Since a stall (absence of lift) is often caused by the nose of aircraft being too high, you can design the canard so that it stalls before the main wing. Thus it's difficult for the whole plane to stall, since the nose will sink when the canard loses lift first and returns the plane to a more appropriate attitude. An example here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_VariEze

And explanation of canards here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canard_(aeronautics)

In high performance aircraft canards are used to increase maneuverability by providing another control surface.

We generally don't see them in commercial aircraft for a few reasons:

These are of course all very coarse generalizations – engineering is all about making technical and economic trade-offs.

A radical example of what can be accomplished by a combination of aerodynamics and software is the B-2 bomber – only one main wing, no tail or canards. I know, it has ejection seats but I sincerely doubt any aeronautical engineer has ever sat down and thought, "Hm, well, that's a sketchy design, but screw it, they can just eject if I messed up".

Edward , April 29, 2019 at 9:56 am

Thanks for this clear explanation. Would it make sense to locate the canards on the cockpit roof?

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 10:44 am

Possibly, here's an example, although these fold as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144

There have been many concept aircraft that also had them mounted high.

Edward , April 29, 2019 at 1:58 pm

So would Boeing have to design a new plane to use canards? It would probably require the 737 MAX pilots to have new training. Boeing also seemed to want to hide the instability problem and the canards would be visual evidence for the problem.

Synoia , April 28, 2019 at 7:14 pm

The 737 Was designed in the '60. High bypass turbo fan engines had yet to be developed then. Upgrading the 737 is like adding a plug in hybrid engine to a Ford F100.

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 4:19 am

The original 737 was designed to be quite low to the ground, to allow for easier boarding in an era before widespread jetway use (models have even been offered with integrated pull out boarding stairs), and to allow for more accessible servicing.

This worked well with the engines of the time, which were often low bypass turbofans, and thus smaller in diameter. This combination of height and engines made sense for the market it was designed.

Most modern commercial engines are high bypass turbofans, and therefore larger in diameter. The move to larger fan diameters has been enabled by advances in materials, manufacturing technology, and simulation software, with the goal of increasing engine power and efficiency.

Another factor influencing the engine size that can be used without extensive redesign is the landing gear operation. Because it folds towards the centerline of the plane, and into pockets in the bottom of the fuselage, there is a limit on how long it can be before it becomes too long and each side would collide with the other. And one would need to redesign the wing box structure to accommodate the moved wheels.

VietnamVet , April 28, 2019 at 6:24 pm

Exactly. This is a textbook case of the looting of America.

The $30 billion dollars made by cutting costs including quality inspection, using an existing airframe, tax cuts and ignoring safety went directly to stock buybacks that benefited stockholders and C-suite compensation.

Just like 2008 Boeing is "too big to fail and jailing the executives would cause it to collapse". Unless Americans demand an end to the corruption and the restoration of the rule of law; the plundering will continue until there is nothing left to live on. Boeing could have designed two brand new safe airliners with that cash that would have provided jobs and efficient transportation into the future but instead the money went into the pockets of the connected rich and killed 346 people.

JBird4049 , April 28, 2019 at 8:39 pm

What really gets me is that ultimately that would have given the fools more money because the orders would have kept on coming and probably increase, which would mean more profit and more compensation for everyone. Of course that would have taken a few years instead of immediately. So now the compensation is going to crash. Oh wait! They will just sell again to themselves, strip the company, and sell the nameplate still affixed to some ruin.

I am starting to understand why the Goths had no resistance when in Italy and during the sack the city of Rome. Centuries earlier the Republic and then the Empire routinely raised multiple armies and dealt with catastrophes both natural and man made. At the end, not only could they not readily create an another army, they could not repair the aqueducts. Like we are becoming, Rome became a hollow shell.

drumlin woodchuckles , April 28, 2019 at 9:09 pm

And probably the only stockholders who even benefited would be the individual or family-dynasty rich stockholders who own many thousands to millions of shares of a particular stock at a time. It takes ownership of that many shares for a tiny benefit-per-share to add up to thousands or millions of tiny little benefits-per-share.

People with pensions or 401ks or whatever may well involuntarily "own" 2 or 3 or maybe 10 shares "apiece" of Boeing. But they derived no benefit from the tiny little benefit per share this maneuver gained for the shares.

ChrisPacific , April 28, 2019 at 7:13 pm

Re: appendix 3, over-steer is counter-intuitive as hell. Once it's underway you have to steer left during a right turn and vice versa. I have watched race drivers do it (very skillfully) at the track, but there is no way I would want to be in a car that did that in a pressure or potential accident situation without a lot of training beforehand.

dearieme , April 28, 2019 at 7:19 pm

"your obsession with shareholder value": shareholder value is not being attended to if the company is driven into the ground by virtue of its planes being driven into the ground.

Clearly the definition of "shareholder value" that these bozos use is as defective as their engineering decision-making.

Hang a few of them pour encourager les autres . And hang a few of the regulators who thought it would be a dandy idea to let the firm regulate itself.

drumlin woodchuckles , April 28, 2019 at 9:11 pm

And hang a few of the lawmakers and lawbuyers who legislatively de-budgeted and money-starved FAA into this " turn it over to the plane-makers" corner as well.

Late Introvert , April 28, 2019 at 9:19 pm

I noticed that Boeing is incorporated in the great state of Delaware. Ah-hem.

dearieme , April 29, 2019 at 11:46 am

Oh well, change their name to BidenAir.

oaf , April 28, 2019 at 9:15 pm

There is another case of air disaster often referred to in what is known as *Human Factors* training a L-1011 which *descended* into the glades; while the crew tried to sort out a problem with a light bulb. I suggest familiarizing with it for perspective. (not to exonerate Boeing; just to encourage keeping an open mind)

JerryDenim , April 29, 2019 at 3:09 am

Ahhh, the infamous Captain Buddy. Immortal tyrant of early CRM training fame

Lambert's mention of the DC-10 and it's fatally flawed, explosive decompressing cargo door sent me down a hole of DC-10 disasters and accident reports. Some of those DC-10 incidents like America Airlines flight 96 could have been major tragedies but were saved by level heads and airmanship that by today's standards would be considered exceptional. The AA 96 crew landed safely with no fatalities after an explosive decompression, a partially collapsed floor and severely compromised flight controls. The crew had to work together and use non-standard asymmetrical thrust and control inputs to overcome the effects of a stuck, fully deflected rudder and a crippled elevator. The pilots of the ill fated United flight 232, another DC-10, are celebrated exemplars of the early CRM case studies, both crew members and a United DC-10 instructor pilot who happened to be occupying the jumpseat all worked together to heroically crash land their horribly stricken craft in Sioux City Iowa with only partial aileron control and assymetrical thrust to control the airplane. No elevator, no rudder control. A good number of passengers perished but most lived. Those pilots in the two instances I mentioned were exceptional, and they had to resort to exceptional means to control their aircraft, but in light of airmanship of that caliber from just a few decades ago, it blows my mind that in 2019 the mere suggestion that professional airline pilots should probably still be capable of moving the thrust levers during a trim emergency is somehow controversial enough to expose oneself to charges of racism and bias?! Different times indeed.

Boeing 737 Max aside, airplanes seem to be a lot safer these days than they were in the 1970's and 80's. Widespread acceptance and adoption of CRM/TEM has made personalities like Captain Buddy and many bad cockpit automation practices relics from the past, but automation itself still looks to be increasingly guilty of deskilling professional pilot ranks. In light of that trend, it's a really good thing passenger jets in 2019 are more reliable than the DC-10 and easier to land than the MD-11.

The Rev Kev , April 29, 2019 at 12:53 am

Two more links on the saga of the 737 MAX-

"The Boeing 737 Max crashes show that 'deteriorating pilot skills' may push airlines to favor Airbus" at https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-max-crashes-deteriorating-pilot-skills-airbus-2019-4/?r=AU&IR=T

"Southwest and FAA officials never knew Boeing turned off a safety feature on its 737 Max jets, and dismissed ideas about grounding them" at https://www.businessinsider.com.au/boeing-737-max-safety-features-disable-southwest-grounding-discussions-2019-4

JerryDenim , April 29, 2019 at 3:55 am

Deteriorating pilot skills. Yep. Now you're getting it. Problem is, more automation equals more pilot skill degradation. Everything is just peachy with highly automated "idiot proof" airplanes until something breaks, then who is supposed to fly the plane if the pilots can't? The flight attendants? Whoever is sitting in 1A? Airbus airplanes malfunction too, as documented in a number of well publicized disasters and not-so-well publicized near disasters, so while this may be an effective marketing pitch to an airline executive not able or not willing to pay for highly skilled, experienced pilots, it's not a solution to a pilot skill crisis. Long term, it makes the situation worse.

The Rev Kev , April 29, 2019 at 10:05 am

Personally I believe in training the hell out of pilots because if I get into a plane, I want a pilot at the controls and not an airplane-driver. I would bet that even I could be trained to fly an aircraft where most of the functions are automated but when things go south, that is when you want a pilot in control. Training is expensive but having an ill-trained pilot in the cockpit is even more expensive.

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 1:09 am

A thought . A completely fresh plane design is not necessarily safer. There is aways a trade off between innovation and proven reliability. It is surprisingly rare for an entirely new aircraft family to be introduced without at least one problem that threatens (but does not always take) lives.

tim , April 29, 2019 at 3:28 am

787 and 737 MAX are not the only problems Boeing have had.

The 737 NG (Next Generation) airplane using composite materials for the aircraft body, was also outsourced, The idea was that the Body parts would be built to exacting specifications, so they could be connected at the stage of final assembly. However, the sub-contractor couldn't live up to the specifications, so Boeing had to manually re-drill holes to connect the fuselage parts.

Not long after we had a series of crashes, where the fuselage broke up into its parts, something almost never seen before in airplanes.

youtube documentary from Australian SBS News:

Alex V , April 29, 2019 at 6:29 am

For clarity, the 737 NG does not have a composite fuselage.

http://www.b737.org.uk/production.htm

skippy , April 29, 2019 at 5:37 am

Umm the investors and market demanded the executive suite too engage in such behavior or suffer the consequences aka hyper reporting et al.

oaf , April 29, 2019 at 9:18 am

There are other Human Factors at play; regarding pilot ability Measuring ability by simply looking at *hours flown* (often referred to as *experience*) is misleading. Relevant details might include just what types of experience. It is possible to get airline positions *ab initio*, or in-house, if you will (with 500 hours, (IIRC) OR:
Prospective pilots from private sector, or military, may be more likely to have diverse backgrounds; including Flight Instructor background, Upset Recovery training; Aerobatic flying; and Glider or sailplane background. These are not necessarily prerequisites for airline hires. Do they make a difference? in emergencies???

The change in Part 135 minimums for non ab-initio applicants has done little or nothing to improve safety. It did financially squeeze some very competent and capable career minded pilots out of the pipeline to the left front seat. (thanks chuck.)(f.u.) His feel-good legislation:*We're doing something about it!*

James McRitchie , April 29, 2019 at 9:22 am

It isn't just Boeing that is using share buybacks to goose CEO pay. Shareholders of American Express have an opportunity to vote to Deduct Impact of BuyBacks on Pay. See American Express 2019 Proxy Vote Recommendations

DJG , April 29, 2019 at 9:25 am

And lest we forget what a good corporate citizen Boeing is now that it has moved to Chicago to take advantage of the many, errrrr, advantages:

https://chicagoist.com/2017/04/28/boeing_pays_just_01_of_its_profits.php

Carolinian , April 29, 2019 at 10:03 am

But, but Nader made Al Gore lose in 2000. Good to see him out of the shadows (he has a podcst BTW).

While Boeing deserves every form of condemnation and Muilenberg should resign I do think the facts that were all laid out in that should-be-Pulitzer-winning Seattle Times series are being stretched a bit. The problem seems to be, not that the plane is prone to fall out of the sky, but that its handling characteristics differ from the earlier, ubiquitous, 737 models. MCAS is the defective part, and Boeing will pay plenty

tempar555510 , April 29, 2019 at 10:22 am

' But, but Nader made Al Gore lose in 2000. ' Please elucidate .

Tom , April 29, 2019 at 12:23 pm

Florida's presidential election in 2000 was expected to be close and likely to be decisive in the electoral college vote. Nader was a fairly popular third-party candidate for president in that election. Many supporters of Gore over Bush pleaded for Nader to exit that race and ask his supporters to vote for Gore. He did neither. In the end the margin of Bush's win in Florida was tiny, if it existed at all, so there was reason to be angry at Nader, as I was at the time, since if he had quit the race in that state, Gore would very likely have become president instead of Bush.

If you're into counterfactual teleology then you might say Nader's stubborn vanity therefore led to the Iraq and Afghan wars. I don't but it's worth being aware that some people do.

GF , April 29, 2019 at 1:52 pm

I can't find the link right now; but, it stated that after close study, most of the voters who voted for Nadar would not have voted for Gore and would have just sat out the election resulting in an even more pronounced victory for Bush. Gore's defeat came from his inability to win his home state of TN.

Carolinian , April 29, 2019 at 12:25 pm

Should have included the /sarc tag.

EoH , April 29, 2019 at 12:24 pm

Concurrence and causation are not the same.

The claim ignores other factors. Gore's lackadaisical campaign, for one, and its poor response to the BushCheney campaign's misuse of the legal system to stop the Florida recount.

It's not Gore's fault the Supreme Court's conservative majority chose to not let the FL supreme court determine what FL law means, and chose to decide the election itself. But his response to the Florida debacle was weak, like his campaign. That might be one reason so many people voted for Nader. That's on Al and on BushCheney.

Nels Nelson , April 29, 2019 at 11:42 am

Some additional information and clarification about the Corvair.

The Corvair had a rear mounted engine and rear wheel drive. This is a poor design from a handling perspective as the rear weight bias produces a pendulum effect making the Corvair prone to oversteer. This tendency was exacerbated by the Corvair's swing axle independent rear suspension with its inherent camber changes as the wheel moved up and down. These characteristics of the Corvair were deadly in that while cornering if you let off the accelerator, the engine brakes the rear wheels creating a condition called "throttle lift oversteer". Under this situation the counterintutive reaction should be to put your foot on the accelerator and not the brakes. Some of you may recall that comedian Ernie Kovacs was killed when his Corvair spun off the road in wet weather and hit a utility pole.

A paradox here is that the Porsche 911 has a design very similar to the Corvair, rear wheel drive, rear mounted engine and rear weight bias and is praised for its handling. The Corvair was sometimes referred to as a poor man's 911. It too was prone to severe and violent oversteer if the throttle was lifted while cornering but in the case of the 911 it was expected that the driver know that while cornering your foot stayed on the accelerator. As the horsepower of 911s increased over the years the tendency to oversteer was tamed by fitting larger tires on the rear wheels. With the advent of technologies like antilock braking systems ,traction control and advanced computers employing torque vectoring to control vehicle stablity, cars today do have their versions of MCAS and the Porsche can be referred to as a triumph of engineering over design.

marku52 , April 29, 2019 at 3:27 pm

The 911 had pivots at both ends of the stub axles. It would lift throttle oversteer (boy would it lift throttle oversteer -lots of fun if you knew what you were doing), but it would not do the jacking rear-end lift that the corvair (pivots only at the differential end of the half shaft) would do.

Oddly, the VW bug had the exact same layout but Ralph never went after it.

EoH , April 29, 2019 at 12:15 pm

Nader is right to point out the design flaws, which seem to have the potential to cascade into failure.

The new engine nacelles create unusual lift. Being placed forward of the center of lift, that causes the nose of the aircraft to rotate vertically upward. If uncorrected, that would cause the aircraft inappropriately to rise in altitude and/or to approach a stall.

The nacelle-induced lift increases with an increase in engine thrust. That increases speed and/or reduces the time the pilot has to react and to correct an inappropriate nose-up attitude.

Boeing seemed unable to correct that design problem through changes in the aircraft's shape or control surfaces. It corrected it, instead, by having the computer step in to fly the aircraft back into the appropriate attitude. Works when it works.

But Boeing seems to have forgotten a CompSci 101 problem: shit in, shit out. If the sensors feeding the computer report bad data, the computer will generate a bad solution. Boeing also seems to have designed the s/w to reset after manual attitude correction by the pilot, forcing a correction loop the pilots would not always win.

Boeing elected not to inform aircraft purchasers or their flight crews of their automated fix to their new aircraft's inherent instability problem. Murphy's Law being what it is – if something can go wrong, it will – the pilots should have been made aware of the recommended fix so that when something went wrong it, they would have a chance of fixing it with a routine response.

Boeing elected not to do that. In the short run, it avoided the need for expensive additional pilot training. In the long run, Boeing would have hoped to increase sales. When hoping for the best, it is normal practice to plan for the worst. Boeing seems not to have done that either.

The Heretic , April 29, 2019 at 4:41 pm

All this talk of CEO and top managment resignation . honestly they probably don't care. They have made millions, if not tens of millions of dollars on bonuses; they can retire once they walk out the door. To change the behaviour of the C-suite you must affect the C-suite directly, charge convict them with at least criminal negligence or worse.. A drunk driver who causes the accident will most likley go to jail if someone dies in the accident, how come a CEO and his mgmt team, can wilfully go against decades of engineering and aviation best practices that are codified, and still only have to resign??

Pat , April 29, 2019 at 7:07 pm

Reality check. Even with all this news . BA closed at:

$379.05 29 April 2019
$342.79 31 August 2018

Yeap the stock price is up from before the crashes. There are good reasons for the Boeing board to be indifferent – there is no punishment.

[Apr 28, 2019] Boeing Didn't Tell Southwest Or FAA That It Had Disabled Critical Safety Alerts On 737 MAX

Notable quotes:
"... The article also discusses how some frontline FAA safety inspectors wanted to ground the MAXes until the "AoA Disagree" indicators were re-enabled, but were overridden by higher-ups who insisted that it was not a primary safety feature. ..."
Apr 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zachary Smith , Apr 28, 2019 3:58:25 PM | link

Here is a headline from a couple of days ago:

FAA could clear Boeing 737 MAX to fly again within weeks

Yes, the very last country to pull the 737-MAX out of use is going to be the first to put it back. There is some serious money being lost by Boeing and the Airlines, and they want to put a stop to it. This is all about millions and millions of Benjamins, for "they" are taking a shortct to save even more money.

A draft report by an FAA-appointed board of pilots, engineers and other experts concluded that pilots only need additional computer-based training to understand MCAS, rather than simulator time.

Simulators are EXPENSIVE, so the plan is to give the pilots a joystick and a computer, and maybe throw in some lectures and videos of other pilots using a real flight simulator. Are you ready to rush to reserve a flight?

This isn't a bad deal just for the flight crews and passengers, but the pure stench of it is contaminating other arenas. A Denier site I'm not going to link has managed to leverage the lack of regulator oversight by the FAA to lots of other places.

Planes, Automobiles, Bicycles, Homes, Hospitals, Schools, and Sidewalks Can All Be Made Unsafe by Mad Science, Rush to Market, and Corrupt Regulators

They don't include "vaccines" in that list because their readers understand perfectly well that if the FAA is a crap agency, why not the FDA as well? Much as I hate to admit it, the Deniers didn't have to break a sweat to score these perfectly valid points.

Does anyone imagine Volkswagen could have gotten away with all those years of cheating on their emissions if the regulators had been doing their jobs?

How did China get away with shipping that cancer-causing blood pressure medicine to the US for so many years? It's safe to assume some bored "regulator" was just waving the stuff on past without doing a single test.

This is going to cost us. I'm out of links, but here is a headline to consider.

Russia's Irkut aircraft manufacturer has posted the first video of a direct flight by its MS-21-300 airliner from Irkutsk to Ulyanovsk-Vostochny Airfield.

The brand-new Russian passenger craft is designed to transport up to 211 people over a distance of 6,400 kilometres.

There are competitors out there, and they can't be fended off by "sanctions" forever. Allowing unwatched & unregulated companies to run amok is going to hurt us all in the long term.

S , Apr 28, 2019 5:21:07 PM | link

There is a brand new Boeing piece at Naked Capitalism.

Ralph Nader Calls Out Boeing for 737 MAX Lack of Airworthiness, Stock Buybacks, and Demands Muilenburg Resign

Boeing management's behavior must be seen in the context of Boeing's use of its earned capital. Did you use the $30 billion surplus from 2009 to 2017 to reinvest in R&D, in new narrow-body passenger aircraft? Or did you, instead, essentially burn this surplus with self-serving stock buybacks of $30 billion in that period? Boeing is one of the companies that MarketWatch labelled as "Five companies that spent lavishly on stock buybacks while pension funding lagged. "

Feathering the Corporate Nest while stiffing the workers. Just what Wall Street loves. "Ugly" at Boeing isn't a 'skin deep' issue - it's that way clear to the bone!

Zachary Smith | Apr 28, 2019 4:28:00 PM

Boeing Didn't Tell Southwest Or FAA That It Had Disabled Critical Safety Alerts On 737 MAX

The article also discusses how some frontline FAA safety inspectors wanted to ground the MAXes until the "AoA Disagree" indicators were re-enabled, but were overridden by higher-ups who insisted that it was not a primary safety feature.

[Apr 25, 2019] Mish Boeing 737 Max Unsafe To Fly, New Scathing Report By Pilot, Software Designer

Apr 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

A pilot with 30 years of flying experience and 40 years of design experience rips decisions made by Boeing and the FAA.

Gregory Travis, a software developer and pilot for 30 years wrote a scathing report on the limitations of the 737, and the arrogance of software developers unfit to write airplane code.

Travis provides easy to understand explanations including a test you can do by sticking your hand out the window of a car to demonstrate stall speed.

Design shortcuts meant to make a new plane seem like an old, familiar one are to blame.

This was all about saving money. Boeing and the FAA pretend the 737-Max is the same aircraft as the original 737 that flew in 1967, over 50 years ago.

Travis was 3 years old at the time. Back then, the 737 was a smallish aircraft with smallish engines and relatively simple systems. The new 737 is large and complicated.

Boeing cut corners to save money. Cutting corners works until it fails spectacularly.

Aerodynamic and Software Malpractice

Please consider How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer . Emphasis is mine.

The original 737 had (by today's standards) tiny little engines, which easily cleared the ground beneath the wings. As the 737 grew and was fitted with bigger engines, the clearance between the engines and the ground started to get a little um, tight.

With the 737 Max, the situation became critical. The engines on the original 737 had a fan diameter (that of the intake blades on the engine) of just 100 centimeters (40 inches); those planned for the 737 Max have 176 cm. That's a centerline difference of well over 30 cm (a foot), and you couldn't "ovalize" the intake enough to hang the new engines beneath the wing without scraping the ground.

The solution was to extend the engine up and well in front of the wing. However, doing so also meant that the centerline of the engine's thrust changed. Now, when the pilots applied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to "pitch up," or raise its nose. This propensity to pitch up with power application thereby increased the risk that the airplane could stall when the pilots "punched it"

Worse still, because the engine nacelles were so far in front of the wing and so large, a power increase will cause them to actually produce lift, particularly at high angles of attack. So the nacelles make a bad problem worse.

I'll say it again: In the 737 Max, the engine nacelles themselves can, at high angles of attack, work as a wing and produce lift. And the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing's center of lift, meaning the nacelles will cause the 737 Max at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic malpractice of the worst kind.

It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But instead of going back to the drawing board and getting the airframe hardware right, Boeing relied on something called the "Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System," or MCAS.

It all comes down to money , and in this case, MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction. The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other 737 was the key to the 737 Max's fleet fungibility. That's probably also the reason why the documentation about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.

Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft's operating handbook or to pilot training, and someone -- probably a pilot -- would have piped up and said, "Hey. This doesn't look like a 737 anymore." And then the money would flow the wrong way.

When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it's about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot's control columns forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column -- indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening .

MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the pilots think they are flying the plane. I n a fight between the flight management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer will bite humans until they give up and (literally) die . Finally, there's the need to keep the very existence of the MCAS system on the hush-hush lest someone say, "Hey, this isn't your father's 737," and bank accounts start to suffer.

Those lines of code were no doubt created by people at the direction of managers.

In a pinch, a human pilot could just look out the windshield to confirm visually and directly that, no, the aircraft is not pitched up dangerously. That's the ultimate check and should go directly to the pilot's ultimate sovereignty. Unfortunately, the current implementation of MCAS denies that sovereignty. It denies the pilots the ability to respond to what's before their own eyes.

In the MCAS system, the flight management computer is blind to any other evidence that it is wrong, including what the pilot sees with his own eyes and what he does when he desperately tries to pull back on the robotic control columns that are biting him, and his passengers, to death.

The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far out of their league and did not know it. How can they can implement a software fix, much less give us any comfort that the rest of the flight management software is reliable?

So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max. That is big strike No. 1. Boeing then tried to mask the 737's dynamic instability with a software system. Big strike No. 2. Finally, the software relied on systems known for their propensity to fail (angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to cross-check the outputs of the angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other angle-of-attack sensor. Big strike No. 3.

None of the above should have passed muster. It is likely that MCAS, originally added in the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have ever saved. It doesn't need to be "fixed" with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed altogether .

Numerous Bad Decisions at Every Stage

Ultimately 346 people are dead because of really bad decisions, software engineer arrogance, and Boeing's pretense that the 737 Max is the same aircraft as 50 years ago.

It is incredible that the plane has two sensors but the system only uses one. A look out the window was enough to confirm the sensor was wrong.

Boeing also offered "cheap" versions of the aircraft without some controls. The two crashed flights were with the cheaper aircraft.

An experienced pilot with adequate training could have disengaged MACS but in one of the crashed flights, the pilot was desperately reading a manual trying to figure out how to do that.

Flight Stall Test

If you stick you hand out the window of a car and your hand is level to the ground. You have a low angle of attack. There is no lift. Tilt your hand a bit and you have lift. Your arm will rise.

When the angle of attack on the wing of an aircraft is too great the aircraft enters aerodynamic stall. The same thing happens with your hand out a car window.

At a steep enough angle your arm wants to flop down on the car door.

The MACS software overrides what a pilot can see by looking out the window.

Useless Manuals

If you need a manual to stop a plane from crashing mid-flight, the manual is useless. It's already too late. The pilot had seconds in which to react. Yet, instead of requiring additional training, and alerting pilots of the dangers, Boeing put this stuff in a manual.

This was necessary as part of the pretense that a 737 is a 737 is a 737.


Swamidon , 2 minutes ago link

In my day Pilot's were repeatedly cautioned not to fly the aircraft to the scene of an accident since nobody survives a high speed crash or a stall. Non-pilots can vote me down but the proper action at the second the pilot lost control of his aircraft that close to the ground should have been to pull power, drop flaps, and make a soft field landing that some passengers would have survived.

wide angle tree , 2 minutes ago link

Sure it's a flying turd, but it will be back in the air soon. The CEO can spew buzzwords at the speed of sound. The FAA will approve any fix Boeing pukes forth cause nobody has the moral courage to stand in the way of making the big money.

I Write Code , 8 minutes ago link

I saw that article in Spectrum and while it makes some points about software development he mixes it up with generic claims way beyond his expertise. Editors at Spectrum should be fired.

Hope Copy , 10 minutes ago link

Cirrus Jet got grounded due to this MACS problem.. This CODE is all over the place and probably in AIRBUS also [(.. I'm betting that it was stolen from AIRBUS] Computer controlled fly by wire is death-in-a-box as it can always be hacked.

arby63 , 17 minutes ago link

Scary stuff there.

paul20854 , 18 minutes ago link

Boeing thinks it will fix the problem with its "MCAS" software. While it may do so on paper, there remains the problem of the weight distribution of engines, cargo and fuel which is placing the center of gravity behind the center of pressure for this modified aircraft during flight near the stall point. That problem is faulty aerodynamics. Any aircraft that is inherently aerodynamically unstable should never be flown in a commercial setting. Ground them all. Fire the stupid fools who allowed this beast to fly, including those at the FAA. And finally, sell your Boeing stock.

N3M3S1S , 12 minutes ago link

Sell your Boeing Stock FIRST

Born2Bwired , 19 minutes ago link

Recommend reading entire missive which was sent to me by a retired Aircraft Captain this morning.

ZH link didn't work for me.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer.amp.html

The guy is a very clear writer and explains things quite well.

edit: looks like there is now a sign in wall that wasn't there from my tablet.

Scaliger , 20 minutes ago link

Wing fences (see: wikipedia, for photos) are the only solution to the Leading Edge Extension,

that the upwards and wider jet engine cowling imposes.

This extension causes the wing stall problem.

Wing fences improve the longitudinal flow, on the expense of lateral flow,

thus delay border layer separation, thus curb wing stall.

robertocarlos , 38 minutes ago link

There's a picture of a man who jet skied over Niagara Falls. He wore a parachute but it failed to open in time. I think he needed more height.

jewish_master , 42 minutes ago link

Glorified Tesla.

oobilly , 43 minutes ago link

Single point failure designed into the plane isnt much of a business plan.

piavpn , 46 minutes ago link

Just remember to fart well.

Have a nice farty day.

robertocarlos , 49 minutes ago link

It's a POS and they are going to ram it down our throats in July. If you have to fly then you have to take this plane.

Ohanzee , 40 minutes ago link

Not really. Don't fly with Boeing.

Aubiekong , 52 minutes ago link

Hiring engineers for diversity and not for ability has consequences...

bluskyes , 39 minutes ago link

.gov gravy requires diversity

arby63 , 10 minutes ago link

Can you say EEO. That's causing all sorts of issues throughout the economy--especially in manufacturing.

[Apr 22, 2019] Boeing s 737 Max Debacle The Result of a Dangerously Pro-Automation Design Philosophy

Notable quotes:
"... "One of the problems we have with the system is, why put a system like that on an airplane in the first place?" said Slack, who doesn't represent any survivors of either the Lion Air or Ethiopia Airlines crashes. "I think what we're going to find is that because of changes from the (Boeing 737) 800 series to the MAX series, there are dramatic changes in which they put in controls without native pitch stability. It goes to the basic DNA of the airplane. It may not be fixable." ..."
"... But it's also important that the pilots get physical feedback about what is going on. In the old days, when cables connected the pilot's controls to the flying surfaces, you had to pull up, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to descend. You had to push, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to ascend. With computer oversight there is a loss of natural sense in the controls. There is only an artificial feel, a feeling that the computer wants the pilots to feel. And sometimes, it doesn't feel so great. ..."
"... An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have a tendency to go further into the stall. This is called "dynamic instability," and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic -- fighter jets -- are also fitted with ejection seats. ..."
"... The airframe, the hardware, should get it right the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to fly predictably. This has been an aviation canon from the day the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. ..."
"... When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it's about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot's control columns forward. It turns out that the flight management computer can put a lot of force into that column -- indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening. ..."
"... MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the pilots think they are flying the plane. In a fight between the flight management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer will bite humans until they give up and (literally) die ..."
"... Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. "Raise the nose, HAL." "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." ..."
"... Travis also describes the bad business incentives that led Boeing to conceptualize and present the 737 Max as just a tweak of an existing design, as opposed to being so areodynamically different as to be a new plane .and require time-consuming and costly recertification. To succeed in that obfuscation, Boeing had to underplay the existence and role of the MCAS system: ..."
"... Travis also explains why the FAA allows for what amounts to self-certification. This practice didn't result from the usual deregulation pressures, but from the FAA being unable to keep technical experts from being bid away by private sector players. Moreover, the industry has such a strong safety culture (airplanes falling out of the sky are bad for business) that the accommodation didn't seem risky. ..."
"... The 737 Max saga teaches us not only about the limits of technology and the risks of complexity, it teaches us about our real priorities. Today, safety doesn't come first -- money comes first, and safety's only utility in that regard is in helping to keep the money coming. The problem is getting worse because our devices are increasingly dominated by something that's all too easy to manipulate: software ..."
Apr 22, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Even though Boeing is scrambling to fix the software meant to counter the 737 Max's increased propensity to stall as a result of the placement of larger, more fuel=efficient engines in a way that reduced the stability of the plane in flight, it's not clear that this will be adequate in terms of flight safety or the public perception of the plane. And even though the FAA is almost certain to sign off on Boeing's patch, foreign regulators may not be so forgiving. The divergence we've seen between the FAA and other national authorities is likely to intensify. Recall that China grounded the 737 Max before the FAA. In another vote of no confidence, even as Boeing was touting that its changes to its now infamous MCAS software, designed to compensate for safety risks introduced by the placement of the engines on the 737 Max, the Canadian air regulator said he wanted 737 Max pilots to have flight simulator training, contrary to the manufacturer's assertion that it isn't necessary. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Airlines is developing 737 Max flight simulator training .

But a fundamental question remains: can improved software compensate for hardware shortcomings? Some experts harbor doubts. For instance, from the Spokane Spokesman-Review :

"One of the problems we have with the system is, why put a system like that on an airplane in the first place?" said Slack, who doesn't represent any survivors of either the Lion Air or Ethiopia Airlines crashes. "I think what we're going to find is that because of changes from the (Boeing 737) 800 series to the MAX series, there are dramatic changes in which they put in controls without native pitch stability. It goes to the basic DNA of the airplane. It may not be fixable."

"It is within the realm of possibility that, if much of the basic pitch stability performance of the plane cannot be addressed by a software fix, a redesign may be required and the MAX might not ever fly," [aviation attorney and former NASA aerospace engineer Mike] Slack said.

An even more damming take comes in How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer in IEEE Spectrum (hat tip Marshall Auerback). Author Greg Travis has been a software developer for 40 years and a pilot. He does a terrific job of explaining the engineering and business considerations that drove the 737 Max design. He describes why the plane's design is unsound and why the software patch in the form of MCAS was inadequate, and an improved version is unlikely to be able to compensate for the plane's deficiencies.

Even for those who have been following the 737 Max story, this article has background that is likely to be new. For instance, to a large degree, pilots do not fly commercial aircraft. Pilots send instructions to computer systems that fly these planes. Travis explains early on that the As Travis explains:

In the 737 Max, like most modern airliners and most modern cars, everything is monitored by computer, if not directly controlled by computer. In many cases, there are no actual mechanical connections (cables, push tubes, hydraulic lines) between the pilot's controls and the things on the wings, rudder, and so forth that actually make the plane move ..

But it's also important that the pilots get physical feedback about what is going on. In the old days, when cables connected the pilot's controls to the flying surfaces, you had to pull up, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to descend. You had to push, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to ascend. With computer oversight there is a loss of natural sense in the controls. There is only an artificial feel, a feeling that the computer wants the pilots to feel. And sometimes, it doesn't feel so great.

Travis also explains why the 737 Max's engine location made the plane dangerously unstable:

Pitch changes with power changes are common in aircraft. Even my little Cessna pitches up a bit when power is applied. Pilots train for this problem and are used to it. Nevertheless, there are limits to what safety regulators will allow and to what pilots will put up with.

Pitch changes with increasing angle of attack, however, are quite another thing. An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have a tendency to go further into the stall. This is called "dynamic instability," and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic -- fighter jets -- are also fitted with ejection seats.

Everyone in the aviation community wants an airplane that flies as simply and as naturally as possible. That means that conditions should not change markedly, there should be no significant roll, no significant pitch change, no nothing when the pilot is adding power, lowering the flaps, or extending the landing gear.

The airframe, the hardware, should get it right the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to fly predictably. This has been an aviation canon from the day the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.

Travis explains in detail why the MCAS approach to monitoring the angle of attack was greatly inferior to older methods .including having the pilots look out the window. And here's what happens when MCAS goes wrong:

When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it's about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot's control columns forward. It turns out that the flight management computer can put a lot of force into that column -- indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.

Indeed, not letting the pilot regain control by pulling back on the column was an explicit design decision. Because if the pilots could pull up the nose when MCAS said it should go down, why have MCAS at all?

MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the pilots think they are flying the plane. In a fight between the flight management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer will bite humans until they give up and (literally) die

Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. "Raise the nose, HAL." "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Travis also describes the bad business incentives that led Boeing to conceptualize and present the 737 Max as just a tweak of an existing design, as opposed to being so areodynamically different as to be a new plane .and require time-consuming and costly recertification. To succeed in that obfuscation, Boeing had to underplay the existence and role of the MCAS system:

The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other 737 was the key to the 737 Max's fleet fungibility. That's probably also the reason why the documentation about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.

Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft's operating handbook or to pilot training, and someone -- probably a pilot -- would have piped up and said, "Hey. This doesn't look like a 737 anymore."

To drive the point home, Travis contrasts the documentation related to MCAS with documentation Cessna provided with an upgrade to its digital autopilot, particularly warnings. The difference is dramatic and it shouldn't be. He concludes:

In my Cessna, humans still win a battle of the wills every time. That used to be a design philosophy of every Boeing aircraft, as well, and one they used against their archrival Airbus, which had a different philosophy. But it seems that with the 737 Max, Boeing has changed philosophies about human/machine interaction as quietly as they've changed their aircraft operating manuals.

Travis also explains why the FAA allows for what amounts to self-certification. This practice didn't result from the usual deregulation pressures, but from the FAA being unable to keep technical experts from being bid away by private sector players. Moreover, the industry has such a strong safety culture (airplanes falling out of the sky are bad for business) that the accommodation didn't seem risky. But it is now:

So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max. That is big strike No. 1. Boeing then tried to mask the 737's dynamic instability with a software system. Big strike No. 2. Finally, the software relied on systems known for their propensity to fail (angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to cross-check the outputs of the angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other angle-of-attack sensor. Big strike No. 3.

None of the above should have passed muster. None of the above should have passed the "OK" pencil of the most junior engineering staff, much less a DER [FAA Designated Engineering Representative].

That's not a big strike. That's a political, social, economic, and technical sin .

The 737 Max saga teaches us not only about the limits of technology and the risks of complexity, it teaches us about our real priorities. Today, safety doesn't come first -- money comes first, and safety's only utility in that regard is in helping to keep the money coming. The problem is getting worse because our devices are increasingly dominated by something that's all too easy to manipulate: software

I believe the relative ease -- not to mention the lack of tangible cost -- of software updates has created a cultural laziness within the software engineering community. Moreover, because more and more of the hardware that we create is monitored and controlled by software, that cultural laziness is now creeping into hardware engineering -- like building airliners. Less thought is now given to getting a design correct and simple up front because it's so easy to fix what you didn't get right later .

It is likely that MCAS, originally added in the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have ever saved. It doesn't need to be "fixed" with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed altogether.

There's a lot more in this meaty piece . Be sure to read it in full.

And if crapification by software has undermined the once-vanuted airline safety culture, why should we hold out hope for any better with self-driving cars?


Fazal Majid , April 22, 2019 at 2:11 am

Automation is not the issue. Boeing cutting corners and putting only one or two angle of attack sensors is. Just like a man with two clocks can't tell the time, if one of the sensors malfunctions, the computer has no way of knowing which one is wrong. That's why Airbus puts three sensors in its aircraft, and why Boeing's Dreamliner has three computers with CPUs from three different manufacturers to get the necessary triple redundancy.

Thus this is really about Boeing's shocking negligence in putting profits above safety, and the FAA's total capture to the point Boeing employees did most of the certification work. I would add the corrosion of Boeing's ethical standards was completely predictable once it acquired McDonnell-Douglas and became a major defense contractor.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 8:08 am

I beg to differ since it looks like you didn't read the article in full, as a strongly recommended. The article has a section on the cost of fixing hardware problems versus software problems. Hardware problems are enormously costly to fix.

The plane has a hardware problem resulting from Boeing not being willing to risk having to recertify a fuel efficient 737. So rather than making the plane higher off the ground (new landing gear, which other articles indicate was a non-starter since it would lead to enough other changes so as to necessitate recertification) and trying to fix a hardware problem with software. That has two knock-on problems: it's not clear this will ever be adequate (not just Travis' opinion) and second, it's risky given the software industry's propensity to ship and patch later. Boeing created an additional problem, as Travis stresses, by greatly underplaying the existence of MCAS (it was mentioned after page 700 in the documentation!) and maintaining the fiction that pilots didn't need simulator training, which some regulators expect will be the case even after the patch.

You also miss the point the article makes: the author argues (unlike in banking), the FAA coming to rely on the airlines for certification wasn't a decision they made, but an adaptation to the fact that they could no longer hire and retain the engineers they needed to do the work at the FAA on government pay scales. By contrast, at (say) the SEC, you see a revolving door of lawyers from plenty fancy firms. You have plenty of "talent" willing to work at the SEC, but with bad incentives.

Susan the other` , April 22, 2019 at 10:57 am

Thank you for reviewing this. 700+ pages! I thought it was paywalled bec. so slow to download. The resistance to achieving fuel efficiency is front and center these days. One thing I relate it to is the Macron attitude of punishing the fuel consumer to change the market. Cart before horse. When the FAA sent down fuel efficiency requirements it might have been similarly preemptive, now in hindsight. There should have been legislation and regulation which adjusted the profitability of the airline industry via better tax breaks or regulations against aggressive competition. The safety of airlines would have been upheld if the viability of the company were protected. So even domestic protectionism when it comes to safety. And in so doing, the FAA/congress could also have controlled and limited airline use which tries to make up in volume for all the new costs it incurs. It's a serious problem when you are so carefree as a legislator that you let the free market do it. What a mess. Quality is the first thing to go.

foppe , April 22, 2019 at 11:41 am

reminds me of what was said about risk departments inside banks -- deliberately lowly paid, so that anyone with skills would move on or easily be hired away. Was it you? Bill Black? Luyendijk? I don't remember. Either way..

Marley's dad , April 22, 2019 at 11:45 am

I did read the article completely and I was an aircraft commander of a C-141A during the Viet Nam war and I am a degreed electrical engineer.

Having flown the C-141A for several thousand hours I am very familiar with the aircraft pitching up almost uncontrollably. A favorite trick that C -141 flight instructors pulled on pilots new to aircraft was to tell the student pilot to "go around" (for the first time during his training) on an approach. The student pilot followed the flight manual procedure and started to raise the nose while advancing the throttles to full power. However, what wasn't covered in the flight manual was the fact that a HUGE trim change occurred when the engines went from near idle to full power. To regain control, it took both hands (arms) to move the yoke away from your chest while running nose down trim. While you were doing this the airplane was trying to stand on its tail. On the other hand none of us ever forgot the lesson.

The C-141 was not fly by wire; however all control surfaces were equipped with hydraulic assist and "feel springs" to mimic control feel without the hydraulics. The feel springs for the elevators must have been selected using a human subject like Arnold Schwarzenegger because (in my opinion) they were much stronger than necessary. The intent was to prevent the pilots from getting into excessive angles of pitch, which absolutely would occur if you weren't prepared for it on a "go around".

What Fazal & V have said is basically correct. The max has four angle of attack vanes. The MAIN problem was that Boeing decided to go cheap and only connect one of the vanes to the MCAS. If they had connected two, the MCAS would be able to determine that one of them was wrong and disconnect itself. That would have eliminated the pitch down problem that caused the two crashes.

Connecting that second AOA vane would not have created any certification issues and would have made Boeing's claim about the "Max" being the "same" as previous versions much closer to the truth. Had they done that we wouldn't be talking about this.

Another solution would have been to disable the MCAS if there was significant counter force on the yoke applied by the pilot. This has been used on autopilot systems since the 1960's. But not consistently. The proper programming protocol for the MCAS exists and should have been used.

I agree that using only one AOA vane and the programming weren't the only really stupid things that Boeing did in this matter. Insufficient information and training given to the pilots was another.

flora , April 22, 2019 at 12:05 pm

Yes.
second, it's risky given the software industry's propensity to ship and patch later.
-this is one of the main themes in the Dilbert cartoon strip.

the author argues (unlike in banking), the FAA coming to rely on the airlines for certification wasn't a decision they made, but an adaptation to the fact that they could no longer hire and retain the engineers they needed to do the work at the FAA on government pay scales.

-That's what happens when you make 'government small enough to drown in a bathtub' , i.e. starve of the funds necessary to do a good job.

My 2¢ . Boeing's decision to cut manufacturing corners AND give the autopilot MCAS system absolute control might have been done (just a guess here, based on the all current the 'self-driving' fantasies in technology ) to push more AI 'self-drivingness' into the airplane. (The 'We don't need expensive pilots, we can use inexpensive pilots, and one day we won't need pilots at all' fantasy.) Imo, this makes the MCAS system, along with the auto AI self-driving systems now on the road no better than beta test platforms And early beta test platforms, at that.

It's one thing when MS or Apple push out a not quite ready for prime time OS "upgrade", then wait for all the user feedback to know where it the OS needs more patches. No one dies in those situations (hopefully). But putting not-ready for prime time airplanes and cars on the road in beta test condition to get feedback? yikes . my opinion.

Anarcissie , April 22, 2019 at 3:31 pm

It is interesting that a software bug that appears in the field costs very roughly ten times as much as one caught in QA before being released, yet most managements continue to slight QA in favor of glitzy features. I suppose that preference follows supposed customer demand.

WestcoastDeplorable , April 22, 2019 at 2:14 pm

It's not only the 737 Max that endangers Boeing's survival; it's this:

https://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/boeing787/

15 workers at their N. Charleston SC assembly plant were asked if they would fly on the plane they build there; 10 said NO WAY!

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 3:23 am

Boeing, the FAA, and the airlines seriously screwed up the introduction of this aircraft so badly it cost lives. The article by Travis is however written by someone out of his depth, even though he has more familiarity with aircraft and software than the average person. There are numerous factual errors and misrepresentations, which many commenters (with more detailed knowledge of the subjects) on the article point out. One of the principles of aviation safety is to identify and fix failures without finger pointing, in order to encourage a culture of openness and cooperation. The tone of the article takes the opposite approach while trying to argue from (undeserved) authority. I agree with his critique that these incidents are a result capitalism run amok – that should, in my opinion, be separate from a discussion of the technical problems and how to fix them.

Thuto , April 22, 2019 at 4:51 am

If Boeing had adhered to that cardinal principle of openness, there might be no failure to fix via "a culture of openness and cooperation". These catastrophic failures were a result of Boeing not being open with its customers about the safety implications of its redesign of the 737 Max and instead choosing the path of obfuscation to sell the idea of seamless fleet fungibility to airlines.

Knifecatcher , April 22, 2019 at 5:00 am

Looking through the comments the complaints about the article seemed to be in one of three areas-

– Questioning the author's credentials (you're just a Cessna pilot!)
– Parroting the Boeing line that this was all really pilot error
– Focusing on some narrow technical element to discredit the article

The majority of comments were in agreement with the general tenor of the piece, and the author engaged politely and constructively with some of the points that were brought up. I thought the article was very insightful, and sometimes it does take an outsider to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

I'd like to see a reference for your assertion that the "principles of aviation safety" preclude finger pointing. Unless I'm very much mistaken the whole purpose of an FAA accident investigation is to determine the root cause, identify the responsible party, and, yes, point fingers if necessary.

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 5:57 am

This is one example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

The general point I was trying to make, perhaps poorly worded, is that the only goal is to identify the problem and fix it, and not to focus primarily on assigning blame as vigorously as possible. Mistakes occur for many reasons – some of them nefarious, some not. Excessive finger pointing, especially before a full picture of what went wrong has been developed, fosters a tendency to coverups and fear, in my opinion.

Regarding your other points, the technical details are vital to understand clearly in almost any aviation incident, as there is never one cause, and the chain of events is always incredibly complex. Travis' analysis makes the answers too easy.

skippy , April 22, 2019 at 6:23 am

From what I understand the light touch approach was more about getting people to honestly divulge information during the investigation period, of which, assisted in determining cause.

I think you overstate your case.

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 6:58 am

This "light touch" approach is used throughout the aviation industry, all the way from initial design to aircraft maintenance, as the purpose is to make sure that anyone, no matter the rank or experience, can bring up safety concerns before incidents occur without fear of repercussions for challenging authority. It's likely that this cornerstone of aviation culture was ignored at too many points along the way here.

I am not defending Boeing, the FAA, or the airlines. Serious, likely criminal, mistakes were made by all.

I however take issue with Travis' approach of assigning blame this early and vigorously while making errors in explaining what happened. He especially attacks the the development process at Boeing, since software is his speciality, although he makes no claims as to having worked with real time or avionics software, aside from using products incorporating it. These are quite different types of software from normal code running a website or a bank. He does not, and can not, know what occurred when the code was written, yet makes significant declarations as to the incompetence of the engineers and coders involved.

If he were leading the investigation, I believe the most likely outcome would be pushback and coverup by those involved.

flora , April 22, 2019 at 12:19 pm

It's likely that this cornerstone of aviation culture was ignored at too many points along the way here.

I am not defending Boeing, the FAA, or the airlines. Serious, likely criminal, mistakes were made by all.

I however take issue with Travis' approach of assigning blame this early

I don't disagree with your description of how it used to be. However, since the FAA has reduced its regulatory role, and by extension given aircraft manufactures more leash to run with ideas that shouldn't be followed, we're left with the situation that large, potentially crippling tort lawsuits are one of the only checks left on manufacturer stupidity or malfeasance. Think of the Ford Pinto bolt-too-long-causing-gas-tank-explosions case. If the FCC won't make manufacturers think twice when internal engineers say 'this isn't a good idea, isn't a good design', maybe the potential of a massive lawsuit will make them think twice.

And this is where we get into pointing the finger, assigning blame, etc. I'm assuming there are good engineers at Boeing who warned against these multiple design failure and were ignored, the FCC was see-no-evil here-no-evil, and the MCAS went forward. Now come the law suits. It's the only thing left to 'get Boeing's attention'. I don't know if Travis' is too early. It's likely there's been plenty of chatter among the Boeing and industry engineers already. imo.

charles 2 , April 22, 2019 at 3:35 am

Training a pilot is building a very complicated automation system : what kind of thought process do you expect within the short timeframe (few minutes) of a crisis in a cockpit ? Kant's critique of pure reason ?Somehow people seem more comfortable from death coming from human error (I.e. a bad human automation system) that death coming from a design fault, but a death is a death

The problem is not automation vs no automation, it is bad corner-cutting automation vs good systematic and expensive automation. It is also bad integration between pilot brain based automation and system automation, which also boils out to corner cutting, because sharing too much information about the real behaviour of the system (if only it is known accurately ) increases the complexity and the cost of pilot training.

Real safety comes from proven design (as in mathematical proof). It is only achievable on simple systems because proofing is conceptually very hard. A human is inevitably a very complex system that is impossible to proof, therefore, beyond a certain standard of reliability, getting the human factor out of the equation is the only way to improve things further. we are probably close to that threshold with civil aviation.

Also, I don't see anywhere in aircraft safety statistics any suggestion of "crapification" of safety see https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Accidents-Per-Mln-Flights-1977-2017.jpg Saying that the improvement is due only the better pilot training and not to more intrinsically reliable airplanes is a stretch IMHO.

Similarly, regarding cars, the considerable improvement in death per km travelled in the last 30 years cannot be attributed only to better drivers, a large part comes from ESP and ABS becoming standard (see https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811182 ). If this is not automation, what is ?

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 7:57 am

It looks as if you didn't read the piece. The problem, which the author makes explicit, is the "ship now, patch later" philosophy that is endemic in software design.

And it would be better to look at flight safety stats within markets. You have great swathes of the emerging world starting to fly on airplanes during this period. I'm not saying the general trend isn't correct, but I would anticipate it's to a significant degree attributable to the maturation of emerging economy air systems. For instance, I flew on Indonesia's Garuda in the early 1990s and was told I was taking a safety risk; I'm now informed that it's a good airline. Similarly, in the early 1980s I was doing business in Mexico, and the McKinsey partner I was traveling with (who as a hobby read black box transcripts from plane crashes) was very edgy on the legs of our travels when we had to use AeroMexico (as in he'd natter on in a way that was very out of character for a typical older WASP-y guy, he was close to white knuckle nervous).

Marley's dad , April 22, 2019 at 10:28 am

Garuda's transition from "safety risk" to "good airline" was an actual occurrence. At one point Garuda and all other Indonesian air lines were prohibited from flying in the EU because of numerous crashes that were the result of management issues, that forced the airline(s) to change their ways.

Darius , April 22, 2019 at 10:11 am

ABS is an enhancement. MCAS is a kludge to patch up massive weaknesses introduced into the hardware by a chain of bad decisions going back almost 20 years.

Boeing should have started designing a new narrow-body when they cancelled the 757 in 2004. Instead, they chose to keep relying on the 737. The end result is MCAS and 300+ deaths.

Harrold , April 22, 2019 at 11:16 am

I'm not sure Boeing can design a fresh aircraft any more.

Olga , April 22, 2019 at 4:17 am

"There are numerous factual errors and misrepresentations, which many commenters (with more detailed knowledge of the subjects) on the article point out."
Not sure why anyone would mis-characterise comments. The first comment points out a deficiency, and explains it. There was only one other commenter, who alleged errors – but without explaining what those could be. He was later identified by another person as a troll. Almost all other comments were complimentary of the article. So why make the above assertion?

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 7:43 am

We have a noteworthy number of newbie comments making poorly-substantiated digs at the Spectrum IEEE piece. We've also seen this sort of non-organic-looking response when we've put up pro-union pieces when political fights were in play, like Wisconsin's Scott Walker going after unions.

AEL , April 22, 2019 at 9:29 am

Travis does indeed play fast and loose with a number of things. For example, his 0-360 engine does *not* have pistons the size of dinner plates (at a 130mm bore it isn't even the diameter of a particularly large saucer). MCAS is a stability augmentation system not stall prevention system and the 737 MAX wasn't "unstable" it was insufficiently stable. The 737 trim system acts on the stabilizer not the elevator (which is a completely different control surface). etc.

For the most part, it doesn't affect the thrust of his arguments which are at a higher level. However it does get distracting.

Harrold , April 22, 2019 at 11:19 am

"the 737 MAX wasn't "unstable" it was insufficiently stable"

The passengers are not "dead", they are insufficiently alive.

Olga , April 22, 2019 at 12:00 pm

Thank you – I was beginning to wonder what the difference was between unstable and insufficiently stable. Not that this is a subject to make jokes about.

JBird4049 , April 22, 2019 at 1:50 pm

Not that this is a subject to make jokes about.

Yeah, but sometimes the choice is to laugh or cry, and after constantly going WTF!?! every time I read about this horror, even mordantly grim humor is nice.

Walt , April 22, 2019 at 2:30 pm

Yes, stabilizer trim on the 737 acts on the horizontal stabilizer, not the elevator or "pilots' control columns."

As a former "73" pilot, I too find the author's imprecision distracting.

ChristopherJ , April 22, 2019 at 5:21 am

Investigators pipe up, but my understanding of a proper investigation is: a. find out what happened; b. find out why the incident occurred; c. what can be done to prevent.

The public opinion has already sailed I think, against the company. If negligent, adverse-safety decisions were made, the head people should be prosecuted accordingly.

Yet, I feel this isn't going to happen despite the reality that billions of humans never want to fly a boeing jet again. Why would you risk it? Toast and deservedly imho

Ape , April 22, 2019 at 5:35 am

"Agile" "use-case driven" software development: very dangerous, takes the disruptive, crappification approach (under some hands) of trying to identify the minimum investment to hit the minimal requirements, particularly focusing on an 80/20 Pareto rule distribution of efforts.

Which may be good enough for video delivery or cell-phone function, but not for life-critical or scientifically-critical equipment

JeffC , April 22, 2019 at 12:59 pm

Many people here are assuming Boeing uses modern software-development methodology in spite of flaws that make such an approach iffy in this field. Why assume that?

When I worked, many years ago now, as a Boeing software engineer, their software-development practices were 15 years behind the rest of the world. Part of that was sheer caution and conservatism re new things, precisely because of the safety culture, and part of it was because they did not have many of the best software people. They could rarely hire the best in part because cautious, super-conservative code is boring. Their management approach was optimized to get solid systems out of ordinary engineers with a near incomprehensible number of review and testing steps.

Anyone in this audience worked there in software recently? If not, fewer words about how they develop code might be called for. Yes, the MCAS system was seriously flawed. But we do not have the information to actually know why.

False Solace , April 22, 2019 at 1:40 pm

> Anyone in this audience worked there in software recently? If not, fewer words about how they develop code might be called for.

4/16 Links included a lengthy spiel from Reddit via Hacker News by a software engineer who worked at Boeing 10 years ago (far more recently than you) which detailed the horrors of Boeing's dysfunctional corporate culture at length. This is in addition to many other posts covering the story from multiple angles.

NC has covered this topic extensively. Maybe try familiarizing yourself with their content before telling others to shut up.

JeffC , April 22, 2019 at 2:32 pm

Excuse me? Are ad hominem attacks fine now? I didn't tell anyone to "shut up" or contradict the great amount of good reporting on Boeing's management dysfunction.

I just pointed out that at one time, yes way back there, there was a logic to it and that the current criticism here of its software-development culture in particular seems founded on a combination of speculation and general disgust with the software industry.

Whatever else I am or however wrong I may sometimes be, I am an engineer, and real engineers look for evidence.

NN , April 22, 2019 at 5:50 am

Moving the engines in itself didn't introduce safety risks, this tendency to nose up was always there. The primary problem is Boeing wanted to pretend MAX is the same plane as NG (the previous version) for certification and pilot training purposes. Which is why the MCAS is black box deeply hardwired into the control systems and they didn't tell pilots about it. It was supposed to be invisible, just sort of translating layer between the new airframe and pilots commanding it as the old one.

And this yearning for pre-automation age, for directly controlling the surfaces by cables and all, is misguided. People didn't evolve for flying, it's all learned the hard way, there is no natural way to feel the plane. In fact in school they will drill into you to trust the instruments and not your pedestrian instincts. Instruments and computers may fail, but your instincts will fail far more often.

After all 737 actually is old design, not fly by wire. And one theory of what happened in the Ethiopian case is that when they disengaged the automatic thing, they were not able to physically overcome the aerodynamic forces pushing on the plane. So there you have your cables & strings operated machine.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 7:40 am

I don't see basis for your assertion about safety risks given the counter-evidence in the form of the very existence of the MCAS software. Every article written on it points out it was to prevent the possibility of the plane stalling out when "punching up". And as the article describes, there were two design factors, the placement of the engines and the nacelles, which led to it generating too much lift in certain scenarios.

And your argument regarding what happened when the pilot turned off the autopilot is yet another indictment of Boeing's design. This is not "Oh bad pilots," this is "OMG, evidence of another Boeing fuckup." This is what occurred when the pilots disabled MCAS per instructions.

Have you not heard of purely mechanical systems that allow for the multiplication of force? It's another Boeing design defect that the pilots couldn't operate the flight stabilizer when the plane was under takeoff stresses. That's a typical use case! And it was what Boeing told pilots to do and it didn't work! From Reuters (apparently written before the black box detail revealed that the pilots could not control the stabilizers):

Boeing pointed to long-established procedures that pilots could have used to handle a malfunction of the anti-stall system, regardless of whether the pilots knew MCAS existed.

That checklist tells pilots to switch off the two stabilizer trim cutout switches on the central console, and then to adjust the aircraft's stabilizers manually using trim wheels.

And that's one of they should worry about most, since that's one of highest risk times for flight, and the plane should have been engineered with that scenario in mind. This raises the possibility that the inability of the pilots to handle the plane manually in takeoff also somehow resulted from the changes to the aerodynamics resulting from the placement of the bigger engines.

This is his argument about how the reliance on software has led to undue relaxation of good hardware design principles:

The original FAA Eisenhower-era certification requirement was a testament to simplicity: Planes should not exhibit significant pitch changes with changes in engine power. That requirement was written when there was a direct connection between the controls in the pilot's hands and the flying surfaces on the airplane. Because of that, the requirement -- when written -- rightly imposed a discipline of simplicity on the design of the airframe itself. Now software stands between man and machine, and no one seems to know exactly what is going on. Things have become too complex to understand.

NN , April 22, 2019 at 9:08 am

I'll cite the original article:

Pitch changes with power changes are common in aircraft. Even my little Cessna pitches up a bit when power is applied. Pilots train for this problem and are used to it.

Again, the plane already had the habit of picthing up and the changes didn't add that. The question isn't if, but how much and what to do about it. Nowhere did I read MAX exceeds some safety limits in this regard. If Boeing made the plane to physically break regulations and tried to fix it with software then indeed that would be bad. However, I'm not aware of that.

As for the Ethiopian scenario, I was talking about this article . It says when they tried manual, it very well could be beyond their physical ability to turn the wheels and so they were forced to switch electrical motors back on, but that also turned up MCAS again. In fact it also says this seizing up thing was present in the old 737 design and pilots were trained to deal with it, but somehow the plane become more reliable and training for this failure mode was dropped. This to me doesn't look like good old days of aviation design ruined by computers.

JerryDenim , April 22, 2019 at 5:57 pm

You should read the Ethiopian Government's crash preliminary crash report. Very short and easy to read. Contains a wealth of information. Regarding the pilot's attempt to use the manual trim wheel, according to the crash report, the aircraft was already traveling at 340 knots indicated airspeed, well past Vmo or the aircraft's certified airspeed when they first attempted to manually trim the nose up. It didn't work because of the excessive control forces generated by high airspeeds well beyond the aircraft's certification. I'm not excusing Boeing, the automated MCAS nose down trim system was an engineering abomination, but the pilots could have made their lives much easier by setting a more normal thrust setting for straight and level flight, slowing their aircraft to a speed within the normal operating envelope, then working their runaway nose-down pitch emergency.

none , April 22, 2019 at 6:21 am

I didn't like the IEEE Spectrum piece very much since the author seemed to miss or exaggerate some issues, and also seemed to confuse flying a Cessna with being expert about large airliners or aerospace engineering. The title says "software engineer" but at the end he says "software executive". Executive doesn't always mean non-engineer but it does mean someone who is full of themselves, and that shows through the whole article. The stuff I'm seeing from actual engineers (mostly on Hacker News) is a little more careful. I'm still getting the sense that the 737 MAX is fundamentally a reasonable plane though Boeing fucked up badly presenting it as a no-retraining-needed tweak to the older 737's.

There's some conventional wisdom that Boeing's crapification stems from the McDonnell merger in 1997. Boeing, then successful, took over the failing and badly managed McDonnell. The crappy McDonnell managers then spent the next years pushing out the Boeing managers, and subsequently have been running Boeing into the ground. I don't know how accurate that is, but it's a narrative that rings true.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 7:20 am

You are misrepresenting the Hacker News criticisms, and IMHO they misrepresent the piece. They don't question his software chops. And if you really knew the software biz, "software executive" often = developer who built a company (and that includes smallish ones). The guy OWNS a Cessna, which means he's spent as much on a plane as a lot of people spend on a house. If he was a senior manager as you posit, that means at large company, and no large company would let an employee write something like this. He's either between gigs or one of the top guys in a smallish private company where mouthing off like this won't hurt the business. Notice also his contempt for managers in the article).

He's also done flight simulator time on a 757, and one commentor pointed out that depending on the simulator, it could be tantamount to serious training, as in count towards qualifying hours to be certified to fly a 757.

They do argue, straw manning his piece, that he claims the big failure is with the software. That in fact is not what the article says. It says that the design changes in the 737 Max made it dynamically unstable, which is an unacceptable characteristic in any plane, no matter what size. He also describes at length the problem of relying on only one sensor as an input to the MCAS and how that undermined having the pilots be able to act as a backup .by looking at each other's instrumentation results.

The idea that he's generalizing from a Cessna is absurd. He describes how Cessnas have the pilot having greater mechanical control than jets like the 737. He describes how the pilots read the instrument results from each side of the plane, something which cannot occur in a Cessna, a single pilot plane. He refers to the Cessna documentation to make the point that the norm is to over-inform pilots as to how changes in the software affect how they operate the plane, not radically under-inform them as Boeing did with the 737 Max.

As to the reasonableness of Travis' concerns, did you miss that a former NASA engineer has the same reservations? Are you trying to say he doesn't understand how aircraft hardware works?

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 8:02 am

A few points:

He owns a 1978 Cessna 172 , goes for about $70K, so not quite house prices, more like a nice Tesla, whose drive by wire systems he seems to trust far more for some reason.

In regard to "dynamic instability" being unacceptable, this is a red herring. Most modern airliners rely on flight characteristic augmentation systems in normal operation, trim systems being the most common. Additionally, there are aircraft designed to be unstable (fighters) but rely on computers to fly them stably, to greatly increase manoeuvrability.

In regard to Cessnas being single pilot planes, the presence of flight controls on both sides of the cockpit would somewhat bring into question this assertion .? Most 172s do however have only one set of instrumentation. When operating with two pilots (as with let's say a student pilot and instructor) you would still have the issue of two pilots trying to agree on possibly faulty readings from one set of non-redundant instruments.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 8:27 am

No, it's a 1979 Cessna, and you don't know when he bought it and how much use it had, since price is significantly dependent on flight hours. The listings I show it costs over $100K. A quick Google search says a plane with a new feel is closer to $300K. Even $100K in equity is more than most people put down when buying a house

He also glides, and gliders often own or co-own their gliders.

The author acknowledges your point re fighters. Did you miss that he also says they are the only planes where pilots can eject themselves from the aircraft? Arguing from what is acceptable for a fighter, where you compromise a lot on other factors to get maneuverability, to a commercial jet is dodgy.

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 9:39 am

According to the registration it became airworthy in 1978, so perhaps that is the model year.

https://uk.flightaware.com/resources/registration/N5457E

Regarding fighters and instability, I'm not the one that stated it's "an unacceptable characteristic in any plane, no matter the size".

I am completely on Travis' side when it comes to the issues with culture and business that brought on these incidents. Seeing however that these affected and overrode good engineering, I believe it's vitally important that the engineering is discussed as accurately as possible. Hence my criticism of the piece.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 1:08 pm

Had you looked at prices as you claimed to, Cessnsa 172s specify the year in the headline description. 1977 v. 1978 v 1979 on a page I got Googling for 1979.

You are now well into the terrain of continuing to argue for argument sake.

PlutoniumKun , April 22, 2019 at 8:34 am

I agree with you that the article is good and the criticisms I've read seem largely unmerited (quite a few of those btl on that article are clearly bad faith arguments), but just to clarify:

That in fact is not what the article says. It says that the design changes in the 737 Max made it dynamically unstable, which is an unacceptable characteristic in any plane, no matter what size.

My understanding (non-engineer, but long time aviation nerd) is that many aircraft, including all Airbus's are dynamically unstable and use software to maintain stability. The key point I think that the article makes is that there is a fundamental difference between designing hardware and software in synchronicity to make a safe aircraft (i.e Airbus), and using software as a fudge to avoid making hard decisions when the hardware engineers find they can't overcome a problem without spending a fortune in redesigns.

Hard engineering 'fudges' are actually really common in aircraft design – little bumps or features added to address stability problems encountered during testing – an example being the little fore planes on the Tupolev 144 supersonic airliner. But it seems Boeing took a short cut with its approach and a lot of people paid for this with their lives. Only time will tell if it was a deep institutional failure within Boeing or just a flaw caused by a rushed roll-out.

I've personal experience of a catastrophic design flaw (not one that could kill people, just one that could cost hundreds of millions to fix) which was entirely down to the personal hang-ups of one particular project manager who was in a position to silence internal misgivings. Of course, in aircraft design this is not supposed to happen.

Thuto , April 22, 2019 at 6:21 am

I'm reminded of the famous "software is eating the world" quote by uber VC Marc Andreessen. He posits that in an era where Silicon valley style, software led disruption stalks every established industry, even companies that "make things" (hardware) need a radical rethink in terms of how they see themselves. A company like Boeing, under this worldview, needs to think of itself as a software company with a hardware arm attached, otherwise it might have its lunch eaten by a plucky upstart (to say nothing of Apple or Google) punching above its weight.

It's not farfetched to imagine an army of consultants selling this "inoculate yourself from disruption" thinking to companies like Boeing and being taken seriously. With Silicon valley's obsession with taking humans out of the loop (think driverless cars/trucks, operator-less forklifts etc) one wonders whether these accidents will highlight the limitations of technology and halt the seemingly inexorable march towards complex automation reducing pilots to cockpit observers coming along for the ride.

jonst , April 22, 2019 at 6:41 am

so perhaps Trump lurched blindly into the truth?

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/12/trump-says-planes-too-complex-after-crash-of-boeing-jet-in-ethiopia.html

WobblyTelomeres , April 22, 2019 at 7:30 am

"native pitch stability"

Let me guess. The author prolly flies a Cessna 172. [checks article]. Yep.

The 172 is one of the most docile and forgiving private planes ever. Ignore that my Mom flew hers into a stand of trees.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 8:32 am

Ad homimem and therefore logically invalid. Plus reading comprehension problem. The "native pitch stability" comment was from Mike Slack, a former NASA engineer, and not Travis, the Cessna owner.

Mel , April 22, 2019 at 9:39 am

I think that the point is that there are aircraft that don't take over the controls and dive into the ground. It's possible to have these kinds of aircraft. These kinds of aircraft are good to have. It's like an existence proof.

Octopii , April 22, 2019 at 8:28 am

No, not dangerously pro-automation. More like dangerously stuck in the past, putting bandaids on a dinosaur to keep false profits rolling in. AF447 could be argued against excessive automation, but not the Max.

tegnost , April 22, 2019 at 9:13 am

i think they are real profits. And the automation that crashed two planes over a short time span and it wasn't excessive? Band aids on what was one of the safest planes ever made (how many 737's crashed pre 737 max? the hardware problem was higher landing gear along with engines that were larger and added lift to the plane. MCAS was intended to fix that. It made it worse. I won't be flying on a MAX.

Carolinian , April 22, 2019 at 8:29 am

Thanks for the article but re the above comments–perhaps that 737 pilot commenter should weigh in because some expert commentary on this article is badly needed. My impression from the Seattle Times coverage is that the MCAS was not implemented to keep the plane from falling out of the sky but rather to finesse the retraining issue. In other words a competent pilot could handle the pitch up tendency with no MCAS assist at all if trained or even informed that such a tendency existed. And if that's the case then the notion that the plane will be grounded forever is dubious indeed.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 8:44 am

This isn't quite correct, and I suggest you read the article in full.

The issue isn't MCAS. It is that MCAS was to compensate for changes in the planes aerodynamics that were so significant that it should arguably have been recerttified as being a different plane. That was what Boeing was trying to avoid above all Former NASA engineer Mike Slack makes that point as well. Travis argues that burying the existence of MCAS in the documentation was to keep pilots from questioning whether this was a different plane:

It all comes down to money, and in this case, MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction. The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other 737 was the key to the 737 Max's fleet fungibility. That's probably also the reason why the documentation about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.

Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft's operating handbook or to pilot training, and someone -- probably a pilot -- would have piped up and said, "Hey. This doesn't look like a 737 anymore." And then the money would flow the wrong way.

Carolinian , April 22, 2019 at 9:30 am

I think you just said what I said. My contention is that the only reason the plane could ever be withdrawn is that the design is so inherently unstable that this extra gizmo–the MCAS–was necessary for it to fly. Whereas it appears the MCAS was for marketing purposes and if it had never been added to the plane the two accidents quite likely may never have happened–even if Boeing didn't tell pilots about the pitch up tendency.

But I'm no expert obviously. This is just my understanding of the issue.

Darius , April 22, 2019 at 11:48 am

From what I've read at related links in the last week, a significant element is common type rating. Manufacturers don't have to go through expensive recertification if their modifications are minor enough, earning a common type rating. Thus, the successive incarnations of the 737 over the decades.

I'm only a layman, but a citizen who tries to stay informed and devours material on this topic. The common type rating merry go round needs to stop. It seems at least that a new engine with a different position that alters the basic physics of the plane shouldn't qualify for common type rating, which should be reserved only for the most minor of modifications.

barrisj , April 22, 2019 at 12:30 pm

As one who has followed the entirety of the MAX stories as detailed by the Seattle Times aviation reporters, it all comes back to "first principles": a substantive change in aerodynamics by introduction of an entirely new pair of engines should have required complete re-engineering of the airframe. We know that Boeing eschewed that approach, largely for competitive and cost considerations, and subsequently tried to mate the LEAP engines to the existing 737 airframe by installing the MCAS, amongst other design "tweaks", i.e., "kludging" a fix. Boeing management recognized that this wouldn't be the "perfect" aircraft, but with the help of a compliant FAA and a huge amount of "self-assessment", got the beast certified and airborne -- -- until the two crashes, that is. Whether the airlines and/or the flying public will ever accept the redo of MCAS and other ancillary fixes is highly problematic, as the entire concept was flawed from the kick-off.
Also, it should be mentioned in passing that even the LEAP engines are having some material-wear issues:
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/cfm-reviews-fleet-after-finding-leap-1a-durability-i-442669/

b , April 22, 2019 at 8:46 am

Th IEEE Spectrum piece is somewhat reasonable but the author obvious lacks technical knowledge of the 737. He also does not understand why MCAS was installed in the first place.

For example:
– "However, doing so also meant that the centerline of the engine's thrust changed. Now, when the pilots applied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to "pitch up," or raise its nose.
– The MAX nose up tendency is a purely aerodynamic effect. The centerline of the thrust did not change much.

– "MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, "
– No. It is implemented in the Flight Control Computer of which there are two. (There is only on FMC unit.)

-" It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column -- "
– The Elevator Feel unit is not a computer but a deterministic hydraulic-mechanical system.

– "Neither such [software] coders nor their managers are as in touch with the particular culture and mores of the aviation world as much as the people who are down on the factory floor, "
– The coders who make the Boeing and Airbus systems work are specialized in such coding. Software development for aircrafts It is a rigid formularized process which requires a deep understanding of the aviation world. The coders appropriately implement what the design engineers require after the design review confirmed it. Nothing less, nothing more.

and more than a dozen other technical misunderstandings and mistakes.

If the author would have read some of the PPRUNE threads on the issue or asked an 737 pilot he would have known all this.

Senator-Elect , April 22, 2019 at 10:35 am

This.

Harrold , April 22, 2019 at 11:28 am

And yet the fact remains that the 737MAX is grounded world wide and costing Boeing and airlines millions every day.

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 1:11 pm

Given what has happened with Boeing manufacture (787s being delivered with tools and bottles rattling around in them), you have no basis for asserting how Boeing does software in practice these days.

And you have incontrovertible evidence of a coding fail: relying on only one sensor input when the plane had more than one sensor. I'm sorry, I don't see how you can blather on about safety and coders supposedly understanding airplanes with that coded in.

JeffC who actually worked at Boeing years ago and said the coding was conservative (lots of people checked it) because they were safety oriented but also didn't get very good software engineers, since writing software at Boeing was boring.

johnf , April 22, 2019 at 9:05 am

I still have some trouble blaming the 737 losses, ipso facto, on using automation to extend an old design. There are considerably more complex aircraft systems than MCAS that have been reliably automated, and building on a thoroughly proven framework usually causes less trouble than suffering the teething problems of an all new design.

At the risk of repeating the obvious, a basic principle of critical systems, systems which must be reliable, is that they can not suffer from single point failures. You want to require at least two independent failures to disturb a system, whose combined probability is so low that other, unavoidable failure sources predominate, for example, weather or overwhelming, human error.

This principle extends to the system's development. The design and programming of a (reliable) critical system can not suffer from single point failures. This requires a good many, skilled people, paying careful attention to different, specific stages of the process. Consider a little thing I once worked on: the indicator that confirms a cargo door is closed, or arguably, that is neither open nor unlatched. I count at least five levels of engineers and programmers, between Boeing and the FAA, that used to validate, implement and verify the work of their colleagues, one or more levels above and/or below: to insure the result was safe.

I bet what will ultimately come out is that multiple levels of the validation and verification chain have been grievously degraded ("crapified") to cut costs and increase profits. The first and last levels for a start. I am curious and will ask around.

Darius , April 22, 2019 at 11:58 am

The MAX isn't a proven framework. Boeing fundamentally altered the 737 design by shifting the position of the engines. The MCAS fudge doesn't fix that.

The Rev Kev , April 22, 2019 at 9:10 am

My own impression is that there seems to be a clash between three separate philosophies at work here. The first is the business culture of Boeing which had supplanted Boeing's historical aviation-centric ways of doing things in aircraft design. The bean-counters & marketing droids took over, outsourced aircraft construction to such places as non-union workshops & other countries, and thought that cutting corners in aircraft manufacture would have no long-term ill effects. The second philosophy is that of software design that failed to understand that the software had to be good to go as it was shipped and had little understanding of what happens when you ship beta-standard software to an operational aircraft in service. This was to have fatal consequences. The third culture is that of the pilots themselves which seek to keep their skills going in an aviation world that wants to turn them into airplane-drivers. If there is any move afoot to have self flying aircraft introduced down the track, I hope that this helps kill it.
Boeing is going to take a massive financial hit and so it should. Heads should literally roll over this debacle and it did not help their case when they went to Trump to keep this plane flying in the US without thought as to what could have happened if a US or Canadian 737 MAX had augured in. The biggest loser I believe is going to be the US's reputation with aviation. The rest of the aviation world will no longer trust what the FAA says or advise without checking it themselves. The trust of decades of work has just been thrown out the door needlessly. Even in the critical field of aircraft crash investigation, the US took a hit as Ethiopia refused the demands that the black boxes be sent to the US but sent them instead to France. That is something that has flown under the radar. This is going to have knock-on effects for decades to come.

Susan the other` , April 22, 2019 at 11:56 am

Beginning to look like a trade war with the EU. airbus, boeing, vw, US cars; but haven't seen Japan drawn into this yet. Mercedes Benz is saying EV cars are nonsense, they actually create more pollution than diesel engines and they are recommending methane gasoline (that sounds totally suicidal), and hydrogen power. Hydrogen has always sounded like a good choice, so why no acclaim? It can only be the resistance of vested interests. The auto industry, like the airline industry, is frantically trying to externalize its costs. Maybe we should all just settle down and do a big financial mutual insurance company that covers catastrophic loss by paying the cost of switching over to responsible manufacturing and fuel efficiency. Those corporations cooperate with shared subsidiaries that manufacture software to patch their bad engineering – why not a truce while they look for solutions?

voislav , April 22, 2019 at 9:34 am

The whole 737 development reminds me of a story a GM engineer told me. Similarly to the aviation industry, when GM makes modifications to an existing part on a vehicle, if the change is small enough the part does not need to be recertified for mechanical strength, etc. One of the vehicles he was working on had a part failure in testing, so they looked at the design history of the part. It turns out that, similarly to 737, this was a legacy part carried over numerous generations of the vehicle.

Each redesign of the vehicle introduced some changes, they needed to reroute some cabling, so they would punch a new hole through the part. But because the change was small enough the engineering team had the option of just signing off on the change without additional testing. So this went on for years, where additional holes or slits were made in the original part and each change was deemed to be small enough that no recertification was necessary. The cumulative change from the original certification was that this was now a completely different part and, not surprisingly, eventually it failed.

The interesting part of the story was the institutional inertia. As all these incremental changes were applied to the part, nobody bothered to check when was the last time part was actually tested and what was the part design as that time. Every step of the way everybody assumed their change is small enough not to cause any issue and did not do any diligence until a failure occured.

Which brings me back to the 737, if I am not mistaken, 737 MAX is, for certification purposes, considered an iteration of the original 737. The aircraft though is very different than the original, increased wingspan (117′ vs 93′), length (140′ vs. 100′). 737 NG is similarly different.

So for me the big issue with the MAX is the institutional question that allowed a plane so different from the original 737 certification to be allowed as a variant of the original, without additional pilot training or plane certification. Upcoming 777X has the same issue, it's a materially different aircraft (larger wingspan, etc.) that has a kludge (folding wingtips) to allow it to pass as a variant of the original 777. It will be interesting to see, in the wake of the MAX fiasco, what treatment does the 777X get when it comes to certification.

Susan the other` , April 22, 2019 at 12:35 pm

The FAA needs to be able to follow these tweaks. Maybe we citizens need a literal social contract that itemizes what we expect our government to actually do.

Matthew G. Saroff , April 22, 2019 at 9:35 am

There are also allegations of shoddy manufacturing on the 787 at Boeing's South Carolina (union busting) facility .

BTW, I do not believe that the problems are insoluble, or as a result of a design philosophy, but rather it is a result of placing sales over engineering.

There are a number of aerodynamic tweaks that could have dealt with this issue (larger horizontal tail comes to mind, but my background is manufacturing not aerodynamics), but this would require that pilots requalify for a transition between the NG and the MAX, which would likely mean that many airlines would take a second look at Airbus.

Carolinian , April 22, 2019 at 10:37 am

Your link was fully discussed in yesterday's Links.

cm , April 22, 2019 at 10:41 am

Yeah, that was a fascinating (and scary) article. Worth reading!

vomkammer , April 22, 2019 at 9:41 am

We should avoid blaming "software" or "automation" for this accident. The B737 MAX seems to be a case of "Money first, safety second" culture, combined with insufficent regulatory control.

The root of the B737 MAX accidents was an erroneous safety hazard assessment: The safety asessment (and the FAA) believed the MCAS had a 0.6 authority limit. This 0.6 limit meant that an erroneous MCAS function would only have limited consequences. In the safety jargon, its severity was classifed as "Major", instead of "Catastrophic".

After the "Major" classification was assigned, the subsequente design decions (like using a single sensor, or perhaps insufficient testing) are acceptable and in line with the civil aviation standards.

The problem is that the safety engineer(s) failed to understand that the 0.6 limit was self-imposed by the MCAS software, not enforced by any external aircraft element. Therefore, the MCAS software could fail in such a way that it ignored the limit. In consequence, MCAS should have been classifed "Catastrophic".

Everybody can make mistakes. We know this. That is why these safety assessments should be reviewed and challenged inside the company and by the FAA. The need to launch the MAX fast and the lack of FAA oversight resources surely played a greater role than the usage of software and automation.

oaf , April 22, 2019 at 9:46 am

Yves: Thanks for this post; it has (IMO) a level-headed perspective. It is not about assigning *blame*, it is about *What, Why, and How to Prevent* what happened from re-occurring. Blame is for courts and juries. Good luck finding jurors who are not predisposed; due to relentless bombardment with parroted misinformation and factoids.

YY , April 22, 2019 at 10:13 am

I wonder how often MCAS kicked in on a typical 737MAX flight, in situation where the weather vane advising of angle attack was working as per normal. Since we are excluding the time when auto-pilot is working and also the time when the flaps are down, there is only a very small time window immediately after take off. I would venture to guess that the MCAS would almost always adjust the plane at least once. This is once too many, if one is to believe that the notion of design improvement includes improvement in aerodynamic behavior. The fact that MCAS could only be overridden by disabling the entire motor control of the trim suggests that the MCAS feature is absolutely necessary for the thing to fly without surprise stalls. There is no excuse in a series of a product for handling associated with basic safety becoming worse with a new model. Fuel efficiency is laudable and a marketable thing, but not when packaged together with the bad compromise of bad flight behavior. If the fix is only by lines of code, they really have not fixed it completely. We know they are not going to be able to move the engines or the thrust line or increase the ground clearance of the plane so the software fix will be sold as the solution. While it probably does not mean that there will be more planes being trimmed to crash into the ground, it does make for some anxiety for future passengers. Loss of sales would not be a surprise but more of a surprise will be the deliveries that will be completed regardless.

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 10:34 am

MCAS was intended to rarely if ever activate. It is supposed to nudge the aircraft to a lower angle of attack if AoA is getting high to cause instability in certain parts of the flight envelope. An overly aggressive takeoff climb would be an example. Part of the problem is that a faulty AoA sensor resulted in the system thinking it was at this extreme case, repeatedly, and in a way that was difficult for the pilots to identify since they had not been properly trained and the UX was badly implemented.

YY , April 22, 2019 at 10:52 am

Yes I've heard that. But do not believe it, given how it is implemented. So I really would like to know how it behaves in non-catastrophic situations. If so benign, why not allow it to turn off without turning off trim controls? Did not the earlier 737's not need this feature?

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 2:19 pm

In a non-catastrophic situation, and if functioning correctly, it's my understanding it would felt by the flight crew as mild lowering of the nose by the system. This is is to keep the plane from increasing angle of attack, which could lead to a stall or other instability.

It's my understanding MCAS should be treated as a separate system from the trim controls, although they both control the pitch of the stabilator. Trim controls are generally not "highly dynamic", in that the system (or pilot) sets the trim value only occasionally based primarily on things like the aircraft weight distribution (this could however change during a flight as fuel is burned, for example). MCAS on the other hand, while monitoring AoA continuously in flight modes where it is activated only kicks in to correct excessive inputs from the pilots, or as a result of atmospheric disturbances (wind shear would be one possible cause of excessive AoA readings).

Neither trim nor MCAS are required to manually fly the plane safely if under direct pilot control and the the pilot is fully situationally aware.

Earlier 737s did not need this feature due to different aerodynamic properties of the plane. They however still have assistive features such as stick shakers to help prevent leaving the normal flight envelope.

Some technical details here:

http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm

Alex V , April 22, 2019 at 2:47 pm

I've read a bit more in regard to allowing MCAS to turn off without turning off trim, I have no idea why it was implemented as it was, since previous 737s allow separate control of trim and MCAS. More here:

https://feitoffake.wordpress.com/2019/04/06/overview-of-many-failures-by-boeing-in-designing-the-boeing-737-max/

This however still doesn't change the fact that neither is required to fly the plane, given proper training and communication, both of which were criminally lacking.

John , April 22, 2019 at 10:13 am

IBG, YBG corporate decisions by people who will probably never fly in these planes, complete regulatory capture and distract with the little people squabbling over technical details. In China there would probably already have been a short trial, a trip to the river bank, a bullet through the head, organ harvesting for the corporate jocks responsible. Team Amrika on the way down.

Synoia , April 22, 2019 at 10:27 am

On the subject of software, the underlying issue of ship and patch later is because the process of software is full of bad practice.

Two examples, "if" and "new".

If is a poor use of a stronger mechanism, FSMs, or Finite State Machines.
'new' is a mechanism that leads to memory leaks, and crashes.

I developed some middleware to bridge data between maineframs and Unix systems that ran 7×24 for 7 years continuously without a failure, because of FSMs and static memory use.

Anarcissie , April 22, 2019 at 5:14 pm

The problem of poor quality in software, like poor quality in almost anything else, is not technological.

BillC , April 22, 2019 at 10:50 am

In an email to me (and presumably to all AAdvantage program members) transmitted at 03:00 April 17 UTC ( i.e. , 11 PM April 16 US EDT), American Airlines states that it is canceling 737 MAX flights through August 19 (instead of June 5 as stated by the earlier newspaper story cited in this post).

Eliminating introductory and concluding paragraphs that are marketing eyewash (re. passenger safety and convenience), the two payload paragraphs state in their entirety:

To avoid last-minute changes and to accommodate customers on other flights with as much notice as possible before their travel date, we have made the decision to extend our cancellations for the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft through August 19, 2019, while we await recertification of the MAX.

While these changes impact only a small portion of our more than 7,000 departures each day this summer, we can plan more reliably for the peak travel season by adjusting our schedule now. Customers whose upcoming travel has been impacted as a result of the schedule change are being contacted by our teams.

I'm surprised this has not already appeared in earlier comments. Anybody else get this?

Yves Smith Post author , April 22, 2019 at 1:13 pm

Will update, thanks!

Peak BS , April 22, 2019 at 11:24 am

Now do Tesla & their bs Tesla Autonomy Investor Day please.

It appears to have it all from beta testing several ton vehicles on public roads, (like BA's beta testing of the MAX) to regulatory capture( of NTSB, & NTHSA as examples) and a currently powerful PR team.

Apparently they're going to show off their "plan" how one will be able to use their Tesla in full autonomous mode while every other OEM sez it can't be done by the end of this year let alone within a couple decades as the average person perceives autonomous driving.

Watch it live here at 11am PCT: https://livestream.tesla.com

737 Pilot , April 22, 2019 at 2:05 pm

First of all, I didn't read the article, so I'm not going to critique it. There were some comments in the excerpt that Yves provided that I think require some clarification and/or correction.

The 737 is not a fly-by-wire (FBW) aircraft. There are multiple twisted steel control cables that connect the flight control in the cockpit to the various control surfaces. The flight controls are hydraulically assisted, but in case of hydraulic (or electric) failure, the cable system is sufficient to control the aircraft.

In both the 737NG and the MAX, there are automation functions that can put in control inputs under various conditions. Every one of these inputs can be overridden by the pilot.

In the case of the recent MAX accidents, the MCAS system put in an unexpected and large input by moving the stabilizer. The crews attempted to oppose this input, but they did so mostly by using elevator input (pulling back on the control column). This required a great deal of arm strength which they eventually could not overcome. However, if either pilot had merely used the strength of their thumb to depress the stabilizer trim switch on the yoke, they could have easily opposed and cancelled out whatever input MCAS was trying to put in. Why neither pilot took this fairly basic measure should be one of the key areas of investigation.

These comments are not intended in any way to exonerate Boeing, the FAA, and the compromises that went into the MAX design. There is a lot there to be concerned about. However, we are not dealing with a case of an automation system that was so powerful and autonomous that pilots could not override what it was trying to do.

marku52 , April 22, 2019 at 5:13 pm

Bjorn over at Leeham had this analysis:
"the Flight Crew followed the procedures prescribed by FAA and Boeing in AD 2018-23-51. And as predicted the Flight Crew could not trim manually, the trim wheel can't be moved at the speeds ET302 flew."

In other words, the pilots followed the Boeing recommended procedure to turn off the automatic trim, but at the speeds they were flying and the large angle that MCAS has moved the stabilizer to, the trim wheels were bound up and could not be moved by human effort.

https://leehamnews.com/2019/04/05/bjorns-corner-et302-crash-report-the-first-analysis/

They then turned electric trim on to try to help their effort, and MCAS put the nose down again.

Also: Did no one ever test the humans factors of this in a simulator? At HP, when we put out a new printer, we had human factors bring in average users to see if using our documentation, they could install the printer.

It is mind-blowing to me that Boeing and the FAA can release an Air Worthiness Directive (The fix after the Lion crash) that was apparently never simulator tested to see if actual humans could do it.

stevelaudig , April 22, 2019 at 2:50 pm

The bureaucratic decision-making model is the same as that which gifted us with the Challenger 'accident' which was no accident.

ChrisPacific , April 22, 2019 at 4:13 pm

None of the above should have passed muster. None of the above should have passed the "OK" pencil of the most junior engineering staff, much less a DER [FAA Designated Engineering Representative].

That's not a big strike. That's a political, social, economic, and technical sin .

This is the thing that has been nagging me all along about this story. The "most junior engineering staff" thing is not an exaggeration – engineers get this drilled into them until it's part of their DNA. I read this and immediately thought that it points to a problem of culture and values (a point I was pleased to see the author make in the next paragraph). Bluntly, it tells us that the engineers are not the ones running the show at Boeing, and that extends even to safety critical situations where their assessment should trump everything.

One of two things needs to happen as a result of this. Either Boeing needs to return to the old safety first culture, or it needs to go out of business. If neither happens, we are going to see a lot more planes falling out of the sky.

VietnamVet , April 22, 2019 at 7:15 pm

I want to reemphasize that all airplane crashes are a chain of events; if one event does not occur there are no causalities. Lion Air flight should never have flow with a faulty sensor. But afterwards when the elevator jackscrew was found in the full nose down position that forced the plane to dive into the Java Sea, Boeing and FAA should have grounded the fleet until a fix was found. The deaths in Ethiopia are on them. The November 2018 737-8 and -9 Airworthiness Directive was criminally negligent. Without adequate training the Ethiopian Airline pilots were overwhelmed and not could trim the elevator after turning off the jackscrew electric motor with the manual trim control due to going too fast with takeoff thrust from start to finish. With deregulation and the end of government oversight, the terrible design of the 737 Max is solely on Boeing and politicians who deregulated certification. Profit clearly drove corporate decisions with no consideration of the consequences. This is popping up consistently now from VW to Quantitative Easing, or the restart of the Cold War. Unless the FAA requires pilot and copilot simulator training on how to manually trim the 737 Max with all hell breaking loose in the cockpit, the only recourse for customers is to boycott flying Boeing. Ultimately the current economic system that puts profit above all else must end if humans are to survive.

[Apr 22, 2019] Claims of Shoddy Production Draw Scrutiny to a Second Boeing Jet

Apr 22, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , April 21, 2019 at 01:21 AM

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner-production-problems.html

April 20, 2019

Claims of Shoddy Production Draw Scrutiny to a Second Boeing Jet
By Natalie Kitroeff and David Gelles

Workers at a 787 Dreamliner plant in South Carolina have complained of safety lapses, echoing broader concerns about the company.

Boeing is facing questions about rushed production on another jet, the 737 Max, which was involved in two deadly crashes.

ilsm -> anne... , April 21, 2019 at 04:02 AM
The Air Force has delayed delivery of new KC 46's, a B767 rigged to refuel other airplanes for "quality" issues.

[Apr 16, 2019] Boeing has called its 737 Max 8 'not suitable' for certain airports

Apr 16, 2019 | www.latimes.com

Before last month's crash of a flight that began in Ethiopia, Boeing Co. said in a legal document that large, upgraded 737s "cannot be used at what are referred to as 'high/hot' airports."

At an elevation of 7,657 feet -- or more than a mile high -- Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport falls into that category. High elevations require longer runways and faster speeds for takeoff.

[Apr 15, 2019] Trump Says You cannot break the laws of physics and then fix them with software.

Apr 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

remove Share link Copy Trump would have been better off Tweeting something like...

"The safety of the flying public worldwide is of the utmost importance to all of us. I have been in constant contact with Boeings CEO and have complete confidence that the improvements they are making will make the 737MAX one of the safest planes ever built. No 737 MAX will take to the skies that I would not put my own family member on".

Not everything is about BRANDING

play_arrow 4 play_arrow 3 Reply Report

DrBrown314 , 22 minutes ago link

See the problem with the max is it will never be safe. What boeing did was try and put a square peg in a round hole. To save costs both in certification and pilot training boeing decided to just take the 737 airframe and put bigger more fuel efficient engines on it so they wouldn't loose market share to airbus. That was a stupid mistake. The bigger engines hung so low they had to mount them higher and more forward thus creating aerodynamic issues. The new engine mounting causes air flow disruption over the inner wing during climb out. That is why they messed with the mcas. You cannot break the laws of physics and then fix them with software. Sorry that will never work.

Cobra Commander , 40 minutes ago link

Boeing is still delivering the 73NG and should make an offer to the airlines to replace each MAX order 1 for 1 with a 737-800 or -900 at cost. The traveling public will have immediate confidence, the airlines can fill schedules, and Boeing can clean house on the MAX "leadership" team.

Cobra!

[Apr 10, 2019] Boeing Sued For Defrauding Shareholders After Fatal Crashes

Notable quotes:
"... Boeing "effectively put profitability and growth ahead of airplane safety and honesty" by rushing the 737 MAX to market without "extra" or "optional" safety features - a practice that has outraged the company's critics - as it feared ceding market share to Airbus SE. Moreover, Boeing failed to disclose a conflict of interest surrounding its 'regulatory capture' of the FAA, which was revealed to have outsourced much of the approval process for the 737 MAX to Boeing itself. ..."
"... Of course, this shareholder lawsuit is only the tip of the legal iceberg for Boeing. The company will likely face a blizzard of lawsuits filed by family members of those killed during the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, the first of which has already been filed. ..."
Apr 10, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Boeing shareholders who lost money selling their stock after the Ethiopian Airlines crash are suing the company for concealing unflattering material information from the public, defrauding shareholders in the process, Reuters reports.

The class-action lawsuit, filed in Chicago, is seeking damages after the March 10 crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 wiped $34 billion off Boeing's market cap within two weeks. But if true, the crux of the lawsuit might have broader repercussions for the company as it tries to convince regulators to lift a grounding order that has kept the Boeing 737 MAX 8 grounded since mid-March.

In essence, the suit alleges that the company concealed safety concerns about the 737 MAX and its anti-stall software following the Lion Air crash in October that killed 189 people, but did nothing to alert the public or correct the issue.

Boeing "effectively put profitability and growth ahead of airplane safety and honesty" by rushing the 737 MAX to market without "extra" or "optional" safety features - a practice that has outraged the company's critics - as it feared ceding market share to Airbus SE. Moreover, Boeing failed to disclose a conflict of interest surrounding its 'regulatory capture' of the FAA, which was revealed to have outsourced much of the approval process for the 737 MAX to Boeing itself.

Lead plaintiff Richard Seeks bought 300 Boeing shares in early March and sold them at a loss after the shares dumped more than 12% in the weeks after the second crash, which would have left him with a loss between $15,000 and $20,000. The lawsuit seeks damages for Boeing investors who bought the company's shares from Jan. 8 to March 21. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and CFO Gregory Smith have also been named as defendants.

Of course, this shareholder lawsuit is only the tip of the legal iceberg for Boeing. The company will likely face a blizzard of lawsuits filed by family members of those killed during the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, the first of which has already been filed.

Though its shares have recovered from their post-grounding lows, they have hit another bout of turbulence this week after the company announced that it would slash production of the 737 MAX by 20%, before announcing that its aircraft orders in Q1 fell to 95 from 180 a year earlier.


Know thy enemy , 2 hours ago link

Having grown up in Seattle within 15 miles of Plant 2 on Boeing Field, I know a lot about The Boeing Company. I went to private high school with Bill Boeing III and during college had a great summer job at Troy Laundry delivering shop towels and uniforms to all of the Boeing plants in the region.

I used to laugh because, when I drove the laundries 20ft UPS style box van through those enormous sliding doors into Everett's 747 Plant to deliver fresh laundry and pickup soiled's, I would spend the next 4-hours driving around 'inside' the building. I got to know dozens of workers by name, who 'worked the line'.

After college, more than 20% of my graduating class went to work at 'the lazy B' as it was commonly known. Not me. I went into sales and started selling computers.....to Boeing and the FAA.

As the size my computer sales territory was increased to include the entire West Coast I began to fly Boeing aircraft almost everyday for 10-years. and on-board those aircraft I met and flew with many Boeing executives.

One day I happened to sit next the 'current' Boeing HR director, and after getting to know him confided that I frequently smoked marijuana after work. To which he replied, "I would gladly have the 15% of our work force that are alcoholics, or into hard drugs smoke pot because it's effects are short-term but when people come to work 'hung-over or jacked-up' that is when bad **** happens and mistakes are made".

Even though, I had been 'on the line' and met many Boeing employees I had not realized until that moment the seriousness of what he was saying. The HR guy went on to say, that they 'had to have redundancy at every step in the construction process to ensure bad workmanship didn't make it into the final product'.

Fast forward 20-years; and Boeing airplanes are falling from the sky......and it's not a surprise to me.

IronForge , 3 hours ago link

BA are better off ending the 737MAX; and replacing Orders with another Model Line.

Shockwave , 2 hours ago link

The legacy 737 "NG" is a solid aircraft, and its still being produced down the same build lines as the MAX. Just the previous generation. That plane drove the vast majority of Boeings sales. It woulndt be hard to scale down MAX production and just go back to producing the NG, but they wont do that.

They'll fix the MAX and move on, and as long as no more crashes occur, eventually the public will forget.

JustPastPeacefield , 56 minutes ago link

Thats a hard sell to airlines when the competing plane has a 15% lower operating cost.

silverer , 3 hours ago link

The FED can't let the stock price fall on a company of that size, so the FED trading desk will lend assistance. There is a certain evil in this, because the stock deserves to fall, and when it doesn't, it has the effect of vindicating the company for the events that occurred. This is why free markets should never be meddled with. It's actually immoral.

CatInTheHat , 3 hours ago link

This is utterly predictable and something I've already said repeatedly: Boeing did not tell pilots or its customers about the mechanism. Boeing is criminally liable for the MURDER of 300+ people. Families will sue and cancellations will follow.

Then this:

"In essence, the suit alleges that the company concealed safety concerns about the 737 MAX and its anti-stall software following the Lion Air crash in October that killed 189 people, but did nothing to alert the public or correct the issue.

Boeing "effectively put profitability and growth ahead of airplane safety and honesty"

Pilots complained about the problem and were IGNORED.

This is good to see. Boeing needs to be held accountable for MURDER. But instead Trump slaps tariffs on the competitor, AIRBUS, to pay for Boeing's criminality.

This will not stop companies choosing AIRBUS and its good safety record over a bunch of psychopathic murderers. If Boeing had put safety first, it's competitor would not be picking up business..ironic...

3-fingered_chemist , 3 hours ago link

I still don't understand the point of the MCAS. Clearly it causes the plane to do a face plant into the ground. However, like in that one situation where the jump seat pilot knew to turn it off, the plane flew fine. Boeing says the MCAS is to prevent the plane from stalling at steep angles of attack, but the plane seems to stay in the air better without it. So which is it? The fact is the Boeing neglected to put it in the manual suggests it was done on purpose. The fact that they sold a version with no redundancy to the AOC sensor seems to be have done on purpose. Since Boeing is basically an arm of the DOD, the question should be who was on the flights that crashed? That's the missing link in this debacle.

ArtOfIgnorance , 3 hours ago link

Check out " moonofalabama.org ", very good explanation, plus some further links to pilot forums.

From what I understand, the pilots get into some sort of "catch 22"....even if they switch of the MACS, they are doomed.

I'm not I anyway in the flying biz, but work in power generating control systems, and funny enough, use quite a lot of Rosemount sensors in ex areas. They are good sensors, but always use two in mission critical operations.

Why Boeing opted for just one, really blows my mind.

What would an extra sensor cost, 10.000USD?, altogether with new software..bla-bla.

Now look what this is costing them.

Well, this is what happens when MBA bean counters take over a former proud engineering company.

Tragic.

Urban Roman , 3 hours ago link

From what I understand, the pilots get into some sort of "catch 22"....even if they switch of the MACS, they are doomed.

Sort of like that. The flight surface is controlled by a big screw. Normally an electric motor spins the nut that drives the screw up and down. The switch cuts out the motor, and they have hand cranks to move the screw. But in this last crash, the too-clever-by-half software system had already run the screw all the way to the 'nose down' end, and it would have taken them several minutes of hand cranking to get it back to the center position. They didn't have several minutes, and the motor is capable of driving the screw the other way. Since the problem was intermittent (software kicks in on a time interval), they were hoping it would behave for a few seconds, and switched the motor back on. It didn't.

On a side note, the Airbus does not have these hand-crank controls. Everything is run by the computer -- so if anything goes wrong, the pilot must 'reason' with the computer to correct it. . . "Sorry Dave, I can't do that".

Well, this is what happens when MBA bean counters take over a former proud engineering company.

This reminds me of Feynman's analysis of what went wrong with the Space Shuttle Challenger. The engineers said the O-rings would be too stiff and brittle, and the launch should wait until it warmed up a bit. But a delay was costing the shuttle program a million dollars a minute, or whatever.

Feynman explained that the early space program was run by the pocket-protector guys with slide rules. And it worked. But over time the management had been replaced by people whose careers depended on influencing other people and not on matter, energy, and materials.

Shockwave , 2 hours ago link

Another thing, the pilots had commanded full throttle and never throttled back during the whole ordeal. So when they killed the trim motor, they couldn't overcome the aerodynamic force on the stab to move the trim screw back into position.

Apparently they could have got the trim corrected ENOUGH to make a difference if they could have moved it more easily, but at the speeds they were going, the airspeed over the stab was too high to manually move the screw fast enough to make a difference.

jerry-jeff , 1 hour ago link

another interesting point is that the system is deactivated when flaps are selected...only works when aircraft is in 'clean' config.

Shockwave , 1 hour ago link

Interesting. Did not know that.

Shockwave , 2 hours ago link

Sort of. When you kill the electric trim motor, you have to use a manual wheel to adjust trim. The issue came that their airspeed was so high that the load on the stab made it nearly impossible to move without the electric motor.

They had been at full throttle from rotation until they hit the dirt. The pilot had told the copilot to throttle back but it got lost in the chaos somewhere and never happened.

So when they killed the trim motor and tried to move it manually, they had to overcome all the aerodynamic force on the stab, and they just couldnt do it at those airspeeds without the electric motor to overcome the force.

MilwaukeeMark , 3 hours ago link

The bigger the fuselage the bigger the engines needed. The bigger the engines needed the more forward on the wing they go to keep from scraping on the ground. The more forward on the wing the more unbalanced then plane became. They've stretch a frame which was developed in the 60's beyond its original design.

MilwaukeeMark , 4 hours ago link

The executives who oversaw the fiasco that is now Boeing, long ago parachuted out with multi million dollar pensions and stock options while their Seattle workers had their pensions slashed. They're now assembling Dreamliners in NC with off the street non unionized labor, former TacoBell and Subway workers. They moved their Corp headquarters to Chicago away from where the actual work was being performed to pursue the "work" of stock buy backs and cozying up to the FAA. All the above a recipe for disaster. A perfect mirror of how the 1/10th of 1% operate in the Oligarchy we call America.

thunderchief , 4 hours ago link

Boeing is in full on crisis mode because of the 737 Max fiasco.

Anything else they say or do is pure show and fraud.

The are not to far from losing the entire narrowbody airline market, pretty much the meat and bones of Airline production.

Today Airbus still has the A-320 neo, and Russia and China are chomping at the bit with the MC21 and C919, all far more advanced and superior than a 1960's designed stretched pulled and too late 737 .

If Boeing loses market share and the narrow body airline market, shame on the USA.

This will become a text book expample of the fall of a nation and empire.

How can a Company like Boeing have technology like the B2 and everything the DOD gives them and lose the international market for narrowbody airliners..

To call this a national disgrace is a compliment to Boeing and the US aerospace industies complete disregard and hubris in such an important component of worldwide aviation.

This in not a sad chapter for Boeing, its sad for the USA

south40_dreams , 4 hours ago link

Boeing is headquartered in Shitcago, how fitting

wally_12 , 3 hours ago link

Don't forget K-Cars, Vega, Pinto, Aztec etc. Auto industry has the type of idiots as Boeing.

Government bailout on the horizon.

south40_dreams , 3 hours ago link

Not bailout, coverup and lots and lots of lipstick will be applied to this pig

IronForge , 2 hours ago link

BeanCounters, Parasitoids, and Bells-WhistlesMktg Types Running an Aerospace/Aviation Engineering and Defense Tech Conglomerate into the Ground - Literally.

Civil Aviation Div "Jumped the Shark" the moment they passed on a redesigned Successor to the 737 Base Model in the mid 2000s and decided to strap on Larger Engines and GunDeck the Revision and Certifications.

So Sad Too Bad. No Sympathies for BA.

Catullus , 4 hours ago link

Failure to disclose regulatory capture is a tough one. Do you issue an 8K on that one? Maybe bury it in the 10K in risk statements

"We maintain several regulatory relationships that will rubber stamp approvals for our aircraft. In the event of a major safety violation, those cozy relationships could be exposed and we be found to not only be negligent, but also nefariously so through regulatory capture."

You bought an airline manufacturer that had a malfunction. There's plenty of people to blame, but it's part of the business you own.

boooyaaaah , 4 hours ago link

Question?
Are the millennials too dishonest for freedom

Free markets, free exchange of ideas and information

The truth shall set you free

Arrow4Truth , 2 hours ago link

They have no comprehension of freedom, which translates to, they are incapable of seeing the truth. The indoctrination has worked swimmingly.

haley's_vomit , 4 hours ago link

Nikki 'luvsNetanyahu' Haley is Boeing's 'rabidjew' answer to their "look! up in the sky! it's Silverstein's Air Force"

[Apr 10, 2019] Boeing's 737 Max 1960s Design, 1990s Computing Power and Paper Manuals

Apr 10, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

The 737 Max is a legacy of its past, built on decades-old systems, many that date back to the original version. The strategy, to keep updating the plane rather than starting from scratch, offered competitive advantages. Pilots were comfortable flying it, while airlines didn't have to invest in costly new training for their pilots and mechanics. For Boeing, it was also faster and cheaper to redesign and recertify than starting anew.

But the strategy has now left the company in crisis, following two deadly crashes in less than five months. The Max stretched the 737 design, creating a patchwork plane that left pilots without some safety features that could be important in a crisis -- ones that have been offered for years on other planes. It is the only modern Boeing jet without an electronic alert system that explains what is malfunctioning and how to resolve it. Instead pilots have to check a manual.

The Max also required makeshift solutions to keep the plane flying like its ancestors, workarounds that may have compromised safety. While the findings aren't final, investigators suspect that one workaround, an anti-stall system designed to compensate for the larger engines, was central to the crash last month in Ethiopia and an earlier one in Indonesia.

"They wanted to A, save money and B, to minimize the certification and flight-test costs," said Mike Renzelmann, an engineer who worked on the Max's flight controls. "Any changes are going to require recertification." Mr. Renzelmann was not involved in discussions about the sensors.

... ... ...

On 737s, a light typically indicates the problem and pilots have to flip through their paper manuals to find next steps. In the doomed Indonesia flight, as the Lion Air pilots struggled with MCAS for control, the pilots consulted the manual moments before the jet plummeted into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people aboard.

"Meanwhile, I'm flying the jet," said Mr. Tajer, the American Airlines 737 captain. "Versus, pop, it's on your screen. It tells you, This is the problem and here's the checklist that's recommended."

Boeing decided against adding it to the Max because it could have prompted regulators to require new pilot training, according to two former Boeing employees involved in the decision.

The Max also runs on a complex web of cables and pulleys that, when pilots pull back on the controls, transfer that movement to the tail. By comparison, Airbus jets and Boeing's more modern aircraft, such as the 777 and 787, are "fly-by-wire," meaning pilots' movement of the flight controls is fed to a computer that directs the plane. The design allows for far more automation, including systems that prevent the jet from entering dangerous situations, such as flying too fast or too low. Some 737 pilots said they preferred the cable-and-pulley system to fly-by-wire because they believed it gave them more control.

In the recent crashes, investigators believe the MCAS malfunctioned and moved a tail flap called the stabilizer, tilting the plane toward the ground. On the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight, the pilots tried to combat the system by cutting power to the stabilizer's motor, according to the preliminary crash report.

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Once the power was cut, the pilots tried to regain control manually by turning a wheel next to their seat. The 737 is the last modern Boeing jet that uses a manual wheel as its backup system. But Boeing has long known that turning the wheel is difficult at high speeds, and may have required two pilots to work together.

In the final moments of the Ethiopian Airlines flight, the first officer said the method wasn't working, according to the preliminary crash report. About 1 minute and 49 seconds later, the plane crashed, killing 157 people.

Steve Lovelien Waukesha,WI 25m ago

The Seattle Times published what I consider a devastating article a few Sundays ago. It highlighted the depth to which Boeing and the FAA cut corners on the certification of the Max, more specifically the characterization of the impact of a failure of the new MCAS system. This allowed them to utilize the cheaper single sensor AOA vane instead of 2 or 3. The aircraft also got delivered with the MCAS system applying many more nose down units of trim than what was published in the certification process. Topping it off was the failure of Boeing to disclose to its customers that the MCAS system was installed or what abnormal or emergency procedures would accompany the system.


Catalin Iasi 2h ago

True, there are two kinds of pilots, and some are better. BUT no pilot should be put in a critical situation by bad and rushed design. What was Boeing thinking? `Yes, there is slight chance that things can go wrong... but if the pilot is experienced, if the weather is fine, if the FO is focused (and so on...) they will surely make it.' Why taking that risk? They should design a plane that even a drunk pilot can handle.
AeroEngineer Toronto 2h ago
The MCAS moves the entire horizontal tail (aka horizontal stabilizer) not just "a tail flap called the stabilizer". Normal stabilizer trim also moves the whole horizontal stabilizer. Presumably the "flap" being referred to here, incorrectly, is the elevator, a flight control surface on the trailing edge of the horizontal tail, which is control by pulling and pushing the flight control column. Both horizontal stabilizer trim and elevator affect the pitch (nose up, nose down) of the aircraft. Typically, horizontal stabilizer trim is used to maintain a particular attitude (e.g. level flight in cruise) without requiring the pilot to continously apply significant forces to the control column, which is tiring. When MCAS engages it effectively is attempting to "cancel out" the pilot's elevator command (pulling back on the control column to bring the nose up by ) by moving the horizontal stabilizer to counteract the pilots action (rotating the the horizontal stabilizer so that it's leading edge points down).
Tony Boston 2h ago
Boeing should have gone with a clean sheet of paper design. Look at the Airbus A220, previously known as Bombardier C Series. It has nearly similar seating, yet it carries less fuel, but has a longer range than the MAX8. Modern wing design. Heck, Boeing should have just bought Bombardier 10 years ago. Now they are in the arms of Airbus.
Ed N Southbury,CT 2h ago
Why doesn't BA just trash the entire max8 program and become a subcontractor for A320s instead? After all there is a demand for 5000 aircraft that now will not be fulfilled. Boeing management should be put on trial for criminal negligence.
Jim Mooney Apache Junction, AZ 2h ago
Finally, a comprehensive report that doesn't go on and on about software. The problem was a mechanical and training one, and instead of fixing the problems, the Bean Counters took over and went on the cheap.

[Apr 09, 2019] Boeing's 737 Max 1960s Design, 1990s Computing Power and Paper Manuals - The New York Times

Apr 09, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

Pilots start some new Boeing planes by turning a knob and flipping two switches.

The Boeing 737 Max, the newest passenger jet on the market, works differently. Pilots follow roughly the same seven steps used on the first 737 nearly 52 years ago: Shut off the cabin's air-conditioning, redirect the air flow, switch on the engine, start the flow of fuel, revert the air flow, turn back on the air conditioning, and turn on a generator.

The 737 Max is a legacy of its past, built on decades-old systems, many that date back to the original version. The strategy, to keep updating the plane rather than starting from scratch, offered competitive advantages. Pilots were comfortable flying it, while airlines didn't have to invest in costly new training for their pilots and mechanics. For Boeing, it was also faster and cheaper to redesign and recertify than starting anew.

But the strategy has now left the company in crisis, following two deadly crashes in less than five months . The Max stretched the 737 design, creating a patchwork plane that left pilots without some safety features that could be important in a crisis -- ones that have been offered for years on other planes. It is the only modern Boeing jet without an electronic alert system that explains what is malfunctioning and how to resolve it. Instead pilots have to check a manual.

The Max also required makeshift solutions to keep the plane flying like its ancestors, workarounds that may have compromised safety. While the findings aren't final, investigators suspect that one workaround, an anti-stall system designed to compensate for the larger engines, was central to the crash last month in Ethiopia and an earlier one in Indonesia.

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The Max "ain't your father's Buick," said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilots' union who has flown the 737 for a decade. He added that "it's not lost on us that the foundation of this aircraft is from the '60s."

Dean Thornton, the president of Boeing, with an engine on the first 737-400 in 1988 in Seattle. The larger engines for Boeing's new Max line of jets prompted a number of design issues. Credit Benjamin Benschneider/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press
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Dean Thornton, the president of Boeing, with an engine on the first 737-400 in 1988 in Seattle. The larger engines for Boeing's new Max line of jets prompted a number of design issues. Credit Benjamin Benschneider/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press

[Boeing was "go, go, go " to beat Airbus with the 737 Max.]

The Max, Boeing's best-selling model, with more than 5,000 orders, is suddenly a reputational hazard. It could be weeks or months before regulators around the world lift their ban on the plane, after Boeing's expected software fix was delayed . Southwest Airlines and American Airlines have canceled some flights through May because of the Max grounding.

The company has slowed production of the plane, putting pressure on its profits, and some buyers are reconsidering their orders. Shares of the company fell over 4 percent on Monday, and are down 11 percent since the Ethiopia crash.

"It was state of the art at the time, but that was 50 years ago," said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing engineer who helped design the Max's cockpit. "It's not a good airplane for the current environment."

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The 737 has long been a reliable aircraft, flying for decades with relatively few issues. Gordon Johndroe, a Boeing spokesman, defended the development of the Max, saying that airlines wanted an updated 737 over a new single-aisle plane and that pilots were involved in its design.

"Listening to pilots is an important aspect of our work. Their experienced input is front-and-center in our mind when we develop airplanes," he said in a statement. "We share a common priority -- safety -- and we listen carefully to their feedback." He added that American regulators approved the plane under the same standards they used with previous aircraft.

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Boeing introduced the 737 Max as a reliable fuel- and cost-efficient solution to air travel in the 21st century. After two fatal Max crashes, all of the Max aircraft in the world are believed to have been grounded. Credit Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

[ Boeing announced that it was going to cut production of the 737 Max. ]

Boeing's chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, said in a statement on Friday that the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia appeared to have been caused by the Max's new anti-stall system. "We have the responsibility to eliminate this risk, and we know how to do it," he said.

At a factory near Seattle on Jan. 17, 1967, flight attendants christened the first Boeing 737, smashing champagne bottles over its wing. Boeing pitched the plane as a smaller alternative to its larger jets, earning it the nickname the "Baby Boeing."

Early on, sales lagged Boeing's biggest competitor, McDonnell Douglas. In 1972, Boeing had delivered just 14 of the jets, and it considered selling the program to a Japanese manufacturer, said Peter Morton, the 737 marketing manager in the early 1970s. "We had to decide if we were going to end it, or invest in it," Mr. Morton said.

Ultimately, Boeing invested. The 737 eventually began to sell, bolstered by airline deregulation in 1978. Six years later, Boeing updated the 737 with its "classic" series, followed by the "next generation" in 1997, and the Max in 2017. Now nearly one in every three domestic flights in the United States is on a 737, more than any other line of aircraft.

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Each of the three redesigns came with a new engine, updates to the cabin and other changes. But Boeing avoided overhauling the jet in order to appease airlines, according to current and former Boeing executives, pilots and engineers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the open investigations. Airlines wanted new 737s to match their predecessors so pilots could skip expensive training in flight simulators and easily transition to new jets.

Boeing 737 Max: What's Happened After Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air Crashes

Boeing has come under intense scrutiny after its best-selling 737 Max jet was involved in two deadly crashes in five months.

Boeing's strategy worked. The Federal Aviation Administration never required simulator training for pilots switching from one 737 to the next.

"Airlines don't want Boeing to give them a fancy new product if it requires them to retrain their pilots," said Matthew Menza, a former 737 Max test pilot for Boeing. "So you iterate off a design that's 50 years old. The old adage is: If it's not broke, don't fix it."

It did require engineering ingenuity, to ensure a decades-old jet handled mostly the same. In doing so, some of the jet's one-time selling points became challenges.

For instance, in the early years of the 737, jet travel was rapidly expanding across the world. The plane's low-slung frame was a benefit for airlines and airports in developing countries. Workers there could load bags by hand without a conveyor belt and maintain the engines without a lift, Mr. Morton said. In the decades that followed, the low frame repeatedly complicated efforts to fit bigger engines under the wing.

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By 2011, Boeing executives were starting to question whether the 737 design had run its course. The company wanted to create an entirely new single-aisle jet. Then Boeing's rival Airbus added a new fuel-efficient engine to its line of single-aisle planes, the A320, and Boeing quickly decided to update the jet again.

The 737 Max 8 at Boeing's plant in Renton, Wash. Nearly one in every three domestic flights in the United States is on a 737, more than any other line of aircraft. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
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The 737 Max 8 at Boeing's plant in Renton, Wash. Nearly one in every three domestic flights in the United States is on a 737, more than any other line of aircraft. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

"We all rolled our eyes. The idea that, 'Here we go. The 737 again,'" said Mr. Ludtke, the former 737 Max cockpit designer who spent 19 years at Boeing.

"Nobody was quite perhaps willing to say it was unsafe, but we really felt like the limits were being bumped up against," he added.

Some engineers were frustrated they would have to again spend years updating the same jet, taking care to limit any changes, instead of starting fresh and incorporating significant technological advances, the current and former engineers and pilots said. The Max still has roughly the original layout of the cockpit and the hydraulic system of cables and pulleys to control the plane, which aren't used in modern designs. The flight-control computers have roughly the processing power of 1990s home computers. A Boeing spokesman said the aircraft was designed with an appropriate level of technology to ensure safety.

When engineers did make changes, it sometimes created knock-on effects for how the plane handled, forcing Boeing to get creative. The company added a new system that moves plates on the wing in part to reduce stress on the plane from its added weight. Boeing recreated the decades-old physical gauges on digital screens.

As Boeing pushed its engineers to figure out how to accommodate bigger, more fuel-efficient engines, height was again an issue. Simply lengthening the landing gear to make the plane taller could have violated rules for exiting the plane in an emergency.

Boeing 737 engines at the company's factory in 2012. By 2011, Boeing executives were starting to question whether the 737 design had run its course. Credit Stephen Brashear/Associated Press
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Boeing 737 engines at the company's factory in 2012. By 2011, Boeing executives were starting to question whether the 737 design had run its course. Credit Stephen Brashear/Associated Press
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Instead, engineers were able to add just a few inches to the front landing gear and shift the engines farther forward on the wing. The engines fit, but the Max sat at a slightly uneven angle when parked.

While that design solved one problem, it created another. The larger size and new location of the engines gave the Max the tendency to tilt up during certain flight maneuvers, potentially to a dangerous angle.

To compensate, Boeing engineers created the automated anti-stall system, called MCAS, that pushed the jet's nose down if it was lifting too high. The software was intended to operate in the background so that the Max flew just like its predecessor. Boeing didn't mention the system in its training materials for the Max.

Boeing also designed the system to rely on a single sensor -- a rarity in aviation, where redundancy is common. Several former Boeing engineers who were not directly involved in the system's design said their colleagues most likely opted for such an approach since relying on two sensors could still create issues. If one of two sensors malfunctioned, the system could struggle to know which was right.

Airbus addressed this potential problem on some of its planes by installing three or more such sensors. Former Max engineers, including one who worked on the sensors, said adding a third sensor to the Max was a nonstarter. Previous 737s, they said, had used two and managers wanted to limit changes.

The angle of attack sensor, bottom, on a Boeing 737 Max 8. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
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The angle of attack sensor, bottom, on a Boeing 737 Max 8. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

"They wanted to A, save money and B, to minimize the certification and flight-test costs," said Mike Renzelmann, an engineer who worked on the Max's flight controls. "Any changes are going to require recertification." Mr. Renzelmann was not involved in discussions about the sensors.

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The Max also lacked more modern safety features.

Most new Boeing jets have electronic systems that take pilots through their preflight checklists, ensuring they don't skip a step and potentially miss a malfunctioning part. On the Max, pilots still complete those checklists manually in a book.

A second electronic system found on other Boeing jets also alerts pilots to unusual or hazardous situations during flight and lays out recommended steps to resolve them.

On 737s, a light typically indicates the problem and pilots have to flip through their paper manuals to find next steps. In the doomed Indonesia flight, as the Lion Air pilots struggled with MCAS for control, the pilots consulted the manual moments before the jet plummeted into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people aboard.

"Meanwhile, I'm flying the jet," said Mr. Tajer, the American Airlines 737 captain. "Versus, pop, it's on your screen. It tells you, This is the problem and here's the checklist that's recommended."

Boeing decided against adding it to the Max because it could have prompted regulators to require new pilot training, according to two former Boeing employees involved in the decision.

The Max also runs on a complex web of cables and pulleys that, when pilots pull back on the controls, transfer that movement to the tail. By comparison, Airbus jets and Boeing's more modern aircraft, such as the 777 and 787, are "fly-by-wire," meaning pilots' movement of the flight controls is fed to a computer that directs the plane. The design allows for far more automation, including systems that prevent the jet from entering dangerous situations, such as flying too fast or too low. Some 737 pilots said they preferred the cable-and-pulley system to fly-by-wire because they believed it gave them more control.

In the recent crashes, investigators believe the MCAS malfunctioned and moved a tail flap called the stabilizer, tilting the plane toward the ground. On the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight, the pilots tried to combat the system by cutting power to the stabilizer's motor, according to the preliminary crash report.

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Once the power was cut, the pilots tried to regain control manually by turning a wheel next to their seat. The 737 is the last modern Boeing jet that uses a manual wheel as its backup system. But Boeing has long known that turning the wheel is difficult at high speeds, and may have required two pilots to work together.

In the final moments of the Ethiopian Airlines flight, the first officer said the method wasn't working, according to the preliminary crash report. About 1 minute and 49 seconds later, the plane crashed, killing 157 people.

Correction : April 8, 2019

An earlier version of this article transposed the death tolls in two crashes involving Boeing's 737 Max jets. In the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last year, 189 people died, not 157; 157 people were killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash last month, not 189. Rebecca R. Ruiz and Stephen Grocer contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research. A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2019 , on Page A 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Boeing's 737 Max: '60s Design Meets '90s Computing Power. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

[Apr 08, 2019] Trump deadly deregulation

Apr 04, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , April 05, 2019 at 01:50 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/trump-deadly-deregulation.html

April 4, 2019

Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You: Trust the pork producers; fear the wind turbines. By Paul Krugman

There's a lot we don't know about the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. And it is, of course, hugely important what happens in the 2020 election. But one thing seems sure: Even if he's a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.

Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them "very fine people."

Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)

Some will come from the administration's continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren't getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.

But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump's agenda of deregulation -- or maybe we should call it "deregulation," because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.

Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what's going on.

One is the administration's plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It's not as if we've seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?

Now, you could see the Trump administration's willingness to trust the meat industry to keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule. And there's something to that, but it's not the whole story, as illustrated by another event: Trump's declaration the other day that wind turbines cause cancer.

Now, you could put this down to personal derangement: Trump has had an irrational hatred for wind power ever since he failed to prevent construction of a wind farm near his Scottish golf course. And Trump seems deranged and irrational on so many issues that one more bizarre claim hardly seems to matter.

But there's more to this than just another Trumpism. After all, we normally think of Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, as people who minimize or deny the "negative externalities" imposed by some business activities -- the uncompensated costs they impose on other people or businesses.

For example, the Trump administration wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of mercury from power plants. And in pursuit of that goal, it wants to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from taking account of many of the benefits from reduced mercury emissions, such as an associated reduction in nitrogen oxide.

But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids -- but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.

So it's deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others. What's going on?

Part of the answer is, follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.

There are probably other things, too. If you're a party that wishes we could go back to the 1950s (but without the 91 percent top tax rate), you're going to have a hard time accepting the reality that hippie-dippy, unmanly things like wind and solar power are becoming ever more cost-competitive.

Whatever the drivers of Trump policy, the fact, as I said, is that it will kill people. Wind turbines don't cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do -- along with many other ailments. The Trump administration's own estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to implement its full agenda -- not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination against industries it doesn't like, such as renewable energy -- the toll will be much higher.

So if you eat meat -- or, for that matter, drink water or breathe air -- there's a real sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he's turned out of office next year, for many Americans it will be too late.

ilsm -> anne... , April 05, 2019 at 03:56 PM
"uninsured" in the for profit system is a terrible measure!

US health outcomes in relation to OEDC remains sad.

point -> anne... , April 05, 2019 at 07:19 PM
One wonders how when expected deaths are 1/x and activity is x, then the product does not mean 1 expected death, and then ordinary legal consequences.
mulp -> anne... , April 06, 2019 at 03:25 AM
Trump does not want to go back to the 50s when government policy was to greatly increase costs by paying more workers more, while driving down prices, and elinimating rents and scarcity profits.

Trump wants to kill jobs that are paid, but force work that is unpaid.

Well, if you means 1850, by the 50s, that's when Trump would have excelled by raping his slaves to create more workers he would force to work, probably Brazil style, worked to death to cut costs, based on continued enslavement of slaves, ie, no ban on slave imports after 1808.

JohnH -> anne... , April 06, 2019 at 03:39 PM
Trump may be trying to kill us...but do Democrats have a plan to save us? So far, I can discern no coherent message or plan from corrupt, comatose Democrats other than 'Trump is guilty [of something or other.]
mulp -> JohnH... , April 07, 2019 at 03:11 PM
You are simply rejecting Democrats calls to reverse policies since 1970 to MAGA as failed liberal policies because its not new, never tried before, and not free.

The growth of the 50s and 60s was too costly, requiring people to work, save, and pay ever rising prices, taxes, and living costs.

You want economics where you can buy a million dollar home for $50,000 and have schools funded by modest property taxes on million dollar homes, but with low tax rates on houses assessed at $40,000.

TANSTAAFL

The only way working class families get better off is by paying higher costs.

Zero sum.

Christopher H. said in reply to anne... , April 07, 2019 at 11:00 AM
The Jungle was written about Chicago and Chicago just elected 5 (possibly 6) socialists to the City Council (which is made up of 50 total alderman).

Chicago also elected a black lesbian mayor but she's not that progressive.

I guess Krugman would dismiss this all as "purity" politics.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/andre-vasquex-democratic-socialist-pat-oconnor-40th-ward-aldermanic-election/

04/05/2019, 05:37pm

Meet the democratic socialist who sent Rahm's floor leader packing

By Mark Brown

There's never been a Chicago politician who quite fits the profile of Andre Vasquez, the former battle rapper and current democratic socialist who just took down veteran 40th Ward Ald. Patrick O'Connor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's city council floor leader.

That probably scares some people.

But those folks might want to nod to the wisdom of the 54 percent of voters in the North Side ward who waded through an onslaught of attack ads and concluded they have nothing to fear from the 39-year-old AT&T account manager, his music or his politics.

I stopped by Vasquez's campaign office to satisfy my own curiosity about this new breed of aldermen. Vasquez will be part of a Chicago City Council bloc of at least five, probably six democratic socialists who, if nothing else, will alter the debate on a range of issues.

Vazquez said he understands democratic socialism as "just injecting a healthy dose of democracy in a system we already have.

"Where we see the influence of big money and corporations in our government, where we see the corruption in the council, where we see elected officials as bought and paid for, to me, democratic socialism is providing a counterbalance," he said.

Vasquez also reminded me that generalizing about democratic socialists is as foolish as generalizing about Democrats.

"I think even within democratic socialism there's such a spectrum of different folks, right? I tend to be a counterbalance to some of the louder stuff, the louder hardcore, what some would view as extreme," said Vasquez, noting that he sometimes takes flak within democratic socialist circles because he's never read Marx and doesn't "bleed rose red."

"Everyone's got their part to play," he said. "Somebody's going to be the loud one in the room because you need that kind of impetus to move things forward. And someone's got to be the one who's making deals on legislation. You can't have ideological fights and think you're going to come up with solutions."

Though Vasquez prefers the dealmaker role, his background suggests he also could get loud if the occasion demanded.

Until he decided it was time to do something else with his life around 2010, Vasquez was a battle rapper who performed under the stage name Prime. He had enough success to pay the bills for a while, touring nationally and appearing on MTV's "Direct Effect" and HBO's "Blaze Battle."

For old people like me who are unclear on the concept (begging the pardon of the rest of you), battle rapping involves performers trading insults in rhyme put to music.

"Then, imagine you have a crowd around you," Vasquez explained. "And now people are cheering you on, and the insults are getting more vicious and intricate, and it becomes a sporting match. Right? So, in that arena, you're getting heralded for how well you can insult the person in front of you while rhyming and improvising all as this stream of consciousness is coming out."

I suggested a battle rap might occasionally be just the antidote to the drudgery of a council meeting, but Vasquez wasn't amused.

The problem with battle rapping, as 40th Ward voters were reminded ad nauseam during the runoff campaign, is that the genre relies heavily on crude insults invoking disrespectful terms for women and LGBTQ individuals.

"The issue is toxic masculinity plagues everything," said Vasquez, who obliquely fronted an apology for his past verbal misdeeds early in the campaign -- and more directly when hit with a barrage of negative mailers detailing a greatest hits of his transgressions.

A lesser candidate would have been toast at that point, but Vasquez had girded himself in advance through his door-to-door organizing.

By then, enough 40th Ward residents knew who Vasquez really was -- the son of Guatemalan immigrants, a city kid from the neighborhoods who had become a family guy with two young kids and a late-discovered talent for politics -- that they couldn't be scared off.

Vasquez, who lives in Edgewater, was introduced to politics when he felt the Bern in 2014 and volunteered for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. A left-leaning community group, Reclaim Chicago, then recruited Vasquez to expand upon his organizing talents -- and taught him how to build a classic grassroots campaign.

The result is a new Latino alderman in a ward where fewer than one-fifth of the voters are Latino. And a Democratic Socialist representing a ward previously ruled by Emanuel's floor leader.

"I'm not trying to plant a flag," Vasquez said. "I'm trying to make sure that people can live here and not be forced out."

Christopher H. said in reply to Christopher H.... , April 07, 2019 at 11:02 AM
"Vasquez, who lives in Edgewater, was introduced to politics when he felt the Bern in 2014 and volunteered for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. A left-leaning community group, Reclaim Chicago, then recruited Vasquez to expand upon his organizing talents -- and taught him how to build a classic grassroots campaign."

I like the centrists like Krugman and liberals here like EMike who dismiss Bernie as a cult of personality. No he's spurring local organizing which doesn't revolve around him.

mulp -> Christopher H.... , April 07, 2019 at 03:34 PM
Will Bernie as president build walls around big cities like Chicago, build iron Curtains, to keep the rich inside these cities where all their wealth is taxed away every year, and they are prevented from moving to the towns outside Chicago city limits?

[Apr 08, 2019] A320 series vs B737 Max 8

Notable quotes:
"... In fact Airbus 320 series never had the same issue as it was properly designed from scratch and not like Max 8 retrofitted to carry bigger engines by that changing distribution of balance of the Aircraft and hence requiring steeper ascending angle and faster speed (for the same wing design) and hence by design more prone to stalling while in takeoff phase. ..."
"... So what is the same in B737 Max and A320 was response of AI software to sensor failures and specific external conditions of flight. In both cases such scenarios were never trained in simulators. ..."
Apr 08, 2019 | www.wsws.org

Kalen4 days ago

Thanks for the report but I may add that AI auto pilot systems on Airbus are not same or similar to MCAS as they are all integrated in autopilot on A320 series while on B737 Max 8 they are completely separate from one another not communicating at all.

In fact Airbus 320 series never had the same issue as it was properly designed from scratch and not like Max 8 retrofitted to carry bigger engines by that changing distribution of balance of the Aircraft and hence requiring steeper ascending angle and faster speed (for the same wing design) and hence by design more prone to stalling while in takeoff phase.

The problem with A320 crash over Atlantic was failure of one or two of two sensors and while in cruise phase of flight autopilot AI software response was just inappropriate in fact detrimental as pilots were blinded disoriented during night over the ocean trying to figure out where they are as conflicting data was coming in.

It seems by some accounts they trusted autopilot decisions and suggestions and simply descended, hit into ocean almost horizontally.

So what is the same in B737 Max and A320 was response of AI software to sensor failures and specific external conditions of flight. In both cases such scenarios were never trained in simulators.

[Apr 08, 2019] Why aren't Boeing executives being prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Evidence has mounted implicating in both crashes an automated anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was installed by Boeing in response to the new plane's tendency to pitch upward and go into a potentially fatal stall. On a whole number of fronts -- design, marketing, certification and pilot training -- information from the black boxes of the two planes points to a lack of concern for the safety of passengers and crew on the part of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, reaching the level of criminality. ..."
"... Despite the presence on the plane of two angle-of-attack sensors, which signal a potential stall and trigger the automated downward pitch of the plane's nose, MCAS relied on data from only one of the sensors. This means the standard redundancy feature built into commercial jets to avert disasters resulting from a faulty sensor was lacking. Boeing's main rival to the 737 Max, the European-built Airbus A320neo, for example, uses data from three sensors to manage a system similar to MCAS. ..."
"... Pilot certification for a commercial plane typically requires hundreds of hours of training, both in simulators and in actual flights. Boeing itself is now mandating at least 21 days of training on new Max planes. ..."
"... There is no innocent explanation for these obvious safety issues. They point to reckless and arguably criminally negligent behavior on the part of Boeing executives, who rushed the new plane into service and marketed it against the Airbus A320neo on the basis of its cost-saving features. ..."
"... This is highlighted by a press release the day of the Ethiopian Airlines crash in which Boeing stated that "for the past several months and in aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610," the company "has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX." ..."
"... In other words, both Boeing and the FAA were aware, possibly even before the October 2018 Lion Air crash and certainly afterward, that a system critical to the safe operation of the aircraft needed to be fixed, and still allowed the plane to continue flying. The wording also suggests that the plane shouldn't have been certified for flight in the first place. ..."
"... This was aided and abetted by the Trump administration, which shielded Boeing as long as it could by not ordering the FAA to ground the plane immediately after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. There were no doubt immense concerns that such a move would cut into Boeing's multibillion-dollar profits and affect its stock price, which has nearly tripled since the election of Trump in November 2016, accounting for more than 30 percent of the increase in the Dow Jones index since then. ..."
"... The relationship between Trump and Muilenburg is only a symptom of the much broader collusion between the airline industry and the US government. Starting in 2005 and expanded during the Obama administration, the FAA introduced the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, which allows the agency to appoint as "designees" airplane manufacturers' employees to certify their own company's aircraft on behalf of the government. ..."
"... This is the logical end of the deregulation of the airline industry as a whole that was spearheaded by the Democratic Carter administration, which passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. With the help of liberal icon Edward Kennedy, the legislation disbanded the Civil Aeronautics Board, which up to that point treated interstate airlines as a regulated public utility, setting routes, schedules and fares. ..."
Apr 04, 2019 | www.wsws.org

It is nearly a month since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which slammed into the ground only six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa airport, killing all 157 people on board. That disaster came less than five months after the fatal crash of Lion Air Flight 610 only 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta airport, killing all 189 passengers and crew members.

Both crashes involved the same airplane, the Boeing 737 Max 8, and both followed wild up-and-down oscillations which the pilots were unable to control.

In the weeks since these disasters, there have been no calls within the media or political establishment for Boeing executives to be criminally prosecuted for what were evidently entirely avoidable tragedies that killed a total of 346 people. This speaks to the corrupt relationship between the US government and the aerospace giant -- the biggest US exporter and second-largest defense contractor -- as well as the company's critical role in the stock market surge and the ever-expanding fortunes of major Wall Street investors.

Black box recordings and simulations show that in the 60 seconds the pilots had to respond to the emergency, faulty software forced the Lion Air flight into a nose dive 24 separate times, as the pilots fought to regain control of the aircraft before plunging into the ocean at more than 500 miles per hour.

Evidence has mounted implicating in both crashes an automated anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was installed by Boeing in response to the new plane's tendency to pitch upward and go into a potentially fatal stall. On a whole number of fronts -- design, marketing, certification and pilot training -- information from the black boxes of the two planes points to a lack of concern for the safety of passengers and crew on the part of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, reaching the level of criminality.

The most recent revelations concerning the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash, based on preliminary findings from the official investigation, show that the pilots correctly followed the emergency procedures outlined by Boeing and disengaged the automated flight control system. Nevertheless, the nose of the plane continued to point downward. This strongly suggests a fundamental and perhaps fatal flaw in the design of the aircraft. Numerous questions have been raised about the design and certification process of the 737 Max 8 and MCAS, including:

Despite the presence on the plane of two angle-of-attack sensors, which signal a potential stall and trigger the automated downward pitch of the plane's nose, MCAS relied on data from only one of the sensors. This means the standard redundancy feature built into commercial jets to avert disasters resulting from a faulty sensor was lacking. Boeing's main rival to the 737 Max, the European-built Airbus A320neo, for example, uses data from three sensors to manage a system similar to MCAS.

Boeing Vice President Mike Sinnett admitted last November that cockpit warning lights alerting pilots of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor were only optional features on the Max 8. The MCAS system was absent from pilot manuals and flight simulators, including for the well-known flight training program X-Plane 11, which came out in 2018, one year after the first commercial flight of the 737 Max 8. Pilot training for the 737 Max 8, which has different hardware and software than earlier 737s, was a single one-hour computer course.

Pilot certification for a commercial plane typically requires hundreds of hours of training, both in simulators and in actual flights. Boeing itself is now mandating at least 21 days of training on new Max planes.

There is no innocent explanation for these obvious safety issues. They point to reckless and arguably criminally negligent behavior on the part of Boeing executives, who rushed the new plane into service and marketed it against the Airbus A320neo on the basis of its cost-saving features.

Threatened with a loss of market share and profits to its chief competitor, Boeing reduced costs by claiming that no significant training on the new Max 8 model, with the money and time that entails, was necessary for pilots with previous 737 experience.

Such imperatives of the capitalist market inevitably downgrade safety considerations. This is highlighted by a press release the day of the Ethiopian Airlines crash in which Boeing stated that "for the past several months and in aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610," the company "has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX."

In other words, both Boeing and the FAA were aware, possibly even before the October 2018 Lion Air crash and certainly afterward, that a system critical to the safe operation of the aircraft needed to be fixed, and still allowed the plane to continue flying. The wording also suggests that the plane shouldn't have been certified for flight in the first place.

This was aided and abetted by the Trump administration, which shielded Boeing as long as it could by not ordering the FAA to ground the plane immediately after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. There were no doubt immense concerns that such a move would cut into Boeing's multibillion-dollar profits and affect its stock price, which has nearly tripled since the election of Trump in November 2016, accounting for more than 30 percent of the increase in the Dow Jones index since then.

Trump himself received a call from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg two days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, during which Muilenburg reportedly continued to uphold the Max 8's safety. The FAA finally grounded the plane on March 13, after every other country in the world had done so.

The relationship between Trump and Muilenburg is only a symptom of the much broader collusion between the airline industry and the US government. Starting in 2005 and expanded during the Obama administration, the FAA introduced the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, which allows the agency to appoint as "designees" airplane manufacturers' employees to certify their own company's aircraft on behalf of the government.

As a result, there was virtually no federal oversight on the development of the 737 Max 8. FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell told Congress, "As a result of regular meetings between the FAA and Boeing teams, the FAA determined in February 2012 that the [Max 8] project qualified [a] project eligible for management by the Boeing ODA." This extended to the MCAS system as well.

This is the logical end of the deregulation of the airline industry as a whole that was spearheaded by the Democratic Carter administration, which passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. With the help of liberal icon Edward Kennedy, the legislation disbanded the Civil Aeronautics Board, which up to that point treated interstate airlines as a regulated public utility, setting routes, schedules and fares.

In a rational world, the ongoing Senate hearings and Department of Justice investigations would have already brought criminal charges against Muilenburg, Sinnett, Elwell and all those involved in overseeing the production, certification and sale of the 737 Max 8. This would include the executives at Boeing and all those who have helped to deregulate the industry at the expense of human lives.

Under capitalism, however, Boeing will get little more than a slap on the wrist. Experts estimate the company will likely be fined at most $800 million, less than one percent of the $90 billion Boeing expects in sales from the Max 8 in the coming years. As in Hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street crash in 2008, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, the brunt of this disaster will be borne by the working class.

The Boeing 737 Max 8 disasters point to the inherent incompatibility between safe, comfortable and affordable air transport and private ownership of the airline industry, as well as the division of the world economy between rival nation-states. These catastrophes were driven by both the greed of Boeing executives and big investors and the intensifying trade conflict between the United States and Europe.

The technological advances that make it possible for travelers to move between any two points in the world in a single day must be freed from the constraints of giant corporations and the capitalist system as a whole. Major airlines and aerospace companies must be expropriated on an international scale and transformed into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities, as part of the establishment of a planned economy based on social need, not private profit.

Bryan Dyne

[Apr 07, 2019] The rejection of the USSA version of neoliberalism with its rampant deregulation and corruption has already started

Apr 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

To Hell In A Handbasket , 2 hours ago link

Too many hooray, we are the USSA, America is the best cheerleaders, have no idea of the gravity of the situation they will face, when the dollar and by extension the Petrodollar implodes.

The rejection of the USSA has already started, but the average Yank hasn't noticed. When Ethiopia, can reject a direct request from Uncle Scam and send the Black-Boxes to Europe, because the USSA cannot be trusted, says it all. It is the little things we miss, things that seem small and insignificant, that actually reveals a lot and the Ethiopian rejection was one.

The world has simply had enough of USSA diktats and subsidising them. The USSA is merely 4% of the worlds population, that consumes 24.8% of the worlds resources and this situation is totally untenable. A nation of exceptionalists. 5%? Yes. The rest? lol

[Apr 06, 2019] MAXimized danger Are 200+ new Boeing 737s plagued with glitch that led to crash in Indonesia -- RT World News

Apr 06, 2019 | www.rt.com

A technical issue that Boeing flagged in a safety warning after the deadly 737 MAX 8 crash in Indonesia could happen to any other aircraft, and it's "not unlikely" that the manufacturer knew about it, aviation experts told RT. Earlier this week, Boeing issued a safety update to pilots flying its newest 737 MAX airliner, warning of a possible fault in a sensor that could send the aircraft into a violent nosedive.

That sensor measures air flow over a plane's wings, but its failure can lead to an aerodynamic stall.

Boeing's new 737 MAX may 'abruptly dive' due to errors – media Boeing's new 737 MAX may 'abruptly dive' due to errors – media

International aviation experts told RT that a problem of this kind could doom aircraft of any type. The tragedy that happened to Lion Air's Boeing 737 MAX is not the first of its kind to involve a faulty

"Pitot tube" – a critical air-speed sensor that measures the flow velocity – explained Elmar Giemulla, a leading German expert in air and traffic law.

"This is not unusual in the way it happened before," he noted, mentioning incidents similar to the Lion Air crash. Back in 1996, a Boeing 757 operated by Turkey's Birgenair stalled and crashed in the Caribbean because of a blocked pitot tube. Likewise, erroneous air-speed indications, coupled with pilot errors, led to the crash of an Air France Airbus A330 over the Atlantic in 2009.

While the problem is not entirely new, it is unclear how Boeing had tackled it, according to Giemulla. "It is not very unlikely" that Boeing knew about the problem, he said, warning that "more than 200 planes are concerned and this could happen tomorrow again."

There is so much experience with [using Pitot tubes] that it surprises me very much that this could happen to a newly developed plane.

However, the expert doubted that there has been any cover-up of the issue, instead suggesting that "obviously gross negligence" had been involved.

A 737 MAX 8 servicing Lion Air flight 610 last week ploughed into the waters of the Java Sea shortly after take-off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. Investigators say there is a possibility that inaccurate readings fed into the MAX's computer could have sent the plane into a sudden descent.

#FAA statement on the Emergency Airworthiness Directive (AD) for all @Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. The AD can be found at https://t.co/FoRI5vOeby . pic.twitter.com/JDGdPfos6g

-- The FAA (@FAANews) November 7, 2018

[Apr 06, 2019] The MC-21 will safely handle passengers in the 140 to 160 passengers and is a mid range plane that can go as far as 4,000 miles.

Apr 06, 2019 | peakoilbarrel.com

Hightrekker x Ignored says: 04/06/2019 at 9:27 am

If markets were truly free and there was real capitalism then airlines would be looking at the new and excellent Russian MC-21 which does what Boeing was trying to do with the 737 Max. The MC-21 will safely handle passengers in the 140 to 160 passengers and is a mid range plane that can go as far as 4,000 miles.

Instead – Boeing lobbies the corrupt U.S. AIPAC Congress to keep a Boeing monopoly of death traps like the 737 Max allowing some Airbus sales. They also blocked a nice Bombardier mid range jet from Canada.

I've flown in the Bombardier in South America– it is a fine aircraft.

[Apr 06, 2019] 'Blinded by its greed' Boeing sued by family of passenger in Ethiopian Air 737 crash

Notable quotes:
"... "Sadly, these two entirely preventable airline crashes demonstrate that the FAA is ill-equipped to oversee the aerospace industry and will downplay serious hazards and safety risks to the public rather than sound the alarm about safety concerns, problems, issues and hazards that pose substantial, probable, and/or foreseeable risks to human life," attorneys for Stumo said in the lawsuit. ..."
"... "Boeing, and the regulators that enabled it, must be held accountable for their reckless actions." The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee said this week that whistleblowers have come forward to report that FAA safety inspectors, including those involved with approvals for the 737 Max, lacked proper training and certifications. ..."
"... But legal experts have said the second disaster could prove even more damaging for the company. That's because plaintiffs will argue the manufacturer was put on notice by the earlier tragedy that there was something dangerously wrong with its planes that should have been fixed. ..."
Apr 06, 2019 | smh.com.au

The parents of Samya Stumo, 24, alleged Boeing was "blinded by its greed" and rushed the 737 Max 8 to market with the "knowledge and tacit approval" of the FAA, while hiding defects in its automated flight-control system. The suit also cites a similar flaw in the Lion Air flight of a 737 Max 8 jet that crashed into the Java Sea on October 29 , killing 189.

Earlier on Thursday, the Ethiopian transport minister called on Boeing to review the 737 Max flight-control system before allowing planes to be used, after a preliminary government report showing the doomed jetliner couldn't recover from an uncommanded and persistent nose dive shortly after takeoff.

The complaint alleges that decisions by Boeing leaders contributed to the crash and "demonstrate Boeing's conscious disregard for the lives of others," including designing an aircraft with a flight-control system that is "susceptible to catastrophic failure" in the event of a single defective sensor made by Rosemount Aerospace.

'Ill-equipped'

"Sadly, these two entirely preventable airline crashes demonstrate that the FAA is ill-equipped to oversee the aerospace industry and will downplay serious hazards and safety risks to the public rather than sound the alarm about safety concerns, problems, issues and hazards that pose substantial, probable, and/or foreseeable risks to human life," attorneys for Stumo said in the lawsuit.

"Boeing, and the regulators that enabled it, must be held accountable for their reckless actions." The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee said this week that whistleblowers have come forward to report that FAA safety inspectors, including those involved with approvals for the 737 Max, lacked proper training and certifications.

Senator Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, said those claims prompted him to investigate potential connections between training and certification shortcomings and the FAA's evaluation of the airliner.

The Senate panel's probe is the latest in a string of investigations by US officials and lawmakers into how the FAA cleared the 737 Max as safe to fly. The Transportation Department's inspector general is reviewing the FAA's process for approving the airworthiness of new jets and aiding a Justice Department criminal probe.

Criminal probe

A grand jury convened by US prosecutors last month subpoenaed a former Boeing engineer demanding he provide testimony and documents related to the 737 Max.

FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell has said the agency "welcomes external review of our systems, processes and recommendations." Boeing faces the prospect of substantial payouts to the families of passengers if it's found responsible for both the Ethiopia Air and Lion Air crashes.

But legal experts have said the second disaster could prove even more damaging for the company. That's because plaintiffs will argue the manufacturer was put on notice by the earlier tragedy that there was something dangerously wrong with its planes that should have been fixed.

[Apr 06, 2019] Ethiopian Airlines Abandons Boeing Orders Due To Stigma From 737 Max Crash

Apr 06, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Posa , 2 hours ago link

The company failed itself by replacing engineers with Wall Street accountants.... typical US corporation destroyed from withing by asset strippers, chiselers, deregulators... the complete gamut of "free enterprise" vampires leaving the US economy in shambles.

Shockwave , 5 minutes ago link

Agree with that, theres been a serious drive to focus on bean-counting and bringing in "mainstream" business leadership from companies like GE/Toyota/3m (think outsourcing/stock buybacks/automate/layoff type)

Its one of the few companies that has a real hard time getting rid of skilled labor, because building an aircraft is an incredibly huge undertaking, with lots of hand fitting and a wide array of technical skills, so getting rid of the labor hasnt worked to this point.

But they're trying hard to get inline with the typical "modern" business model, and it hasnt been great for morale.

[Apr 06, 2019] When Will The Boeing 737 MAX Fly Again - Simple Flying

Apr 06, 2019 | simpleflying.com

Boeing has been working on a fix to the anti-stall software for some time now. However, Reuters today reported that regulators including EASA knew that the MAX's trim control was confusing.

[Apr 06, 2019] Boeing Will Face A Skeptical Flying Public When It Fixes the 737 Max Jets OvationMR

Apr 06, 2019 | www.ovationmr.com
How much do you trust each of the following to determine whether the fixes to the Boeing 737 Max make it safe to fly? The pilot's union The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airlines (e.g. American, United, Southwest) The Trump Administration Boeing Congress
Completely trust 33% 32% 30% 29% 25% 22% 21%
Mostly trust 34% 33% 30% 36% 22% 30% 23%
Somewhat trust 22% 26% 29% 26% 16% 28% 28%
Do not trust 11% 9% 10% 9% 37% 20% 28%

[Apr 06, 2019] Would you fly Boeing 737 Max 8 ever again - Quora

Notable quotes:
"... No. Possibly Boeing & the FAA will solve the immediate issue, but they have destroyed Trust. ..."
"... It has emerged on the 737MAX that larger LEAP-1B engines were unsuited to the airframe and there is no way now to alter the airframe to balance the aircraft. ..."
"... Boeing failed to provide training or training material to pilots or even advise them the existence of MCAS. There was a complex two step process required of pilots in ET302 and JT610 crashes and their QRH handbook did not explain this: ..."
Apr 06, 2019 | www.quora.com

Would you fly Boeing 737 Max 8 ever again? Update Cancel

Simon Gunson , PPL aviation enthusiast Answered Mar 25, 2019 · Author has 141 answers and 981.7k answer views

No. Possibly Boeing & the FAA will solve the immediate issue, but they have destroyed Trust.

Other brands of aircraft like Airbus with AF447 established trust after their A330 aircraft plunged into the Atlantic in a mysterious accident.

With Airbus everyone saw transparency & integrity in how their accidents were investigated. How Boeing & FAA approached accident investigation destroyed public Trust.

By direct contrast in the mysterious disappearance of MH370, Boeing contributed nothing to the search effort and tried to blame the pilot or hijackers.

With the 737MAX in Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes Boeing again tried to blame pilots, poor training, poor maintenance and then when mechanical defect was proven, Boeing tried to downplay how serious the issue was and gave false assurances after Lion Air that the plane was still safe. ET302 proved otherwise.

It is no longer possible to trust the aircraft's certification. It is no longer possible to trust that safety was the overriding principle in design of the Boeing 737 MAX nor several other Boeing designs for that matter.

The Public have yet to realize that the Boeing 777 is an all electric design where in certain scenarios like electrical fire in the avionics bay, an MEC override vent opens allowing cabin air pressure to push out smoke. This silences the cabin depressurization alarms.

As an electrical failure worsens, in that scenario another system called ELMS turns off electrical power to the Air Cycle Machine which pumps pressurized air into the cabin. The result of ELMS cutting power means the override vent fails to close again and no new pressurized air maintains pressure in the cabin. Pilots get no warning.

An incident in 2007 is cited as AD 2007–07–05 by the FAA in which part but not all of this scenario played out in a B777 at altitude.

MH370 may have been the incident in which the full scenario played out, but of course Boeing is not keen for MH370 to be found and unlike Airbus which funded the search for AF447, Boeing contributed nothing to finding MH370.

It has emerged on the 737MAX that larger LEAP-1B engines were unsuited to the airframe and there is no way now to alter the airframe to balance the aircraft.

It also emerged that the choice to fit engines to this airframe have origins in a commercial decision to please Southwest Airlines and cancel the Boeing 757.

Boeing failed to provide training or training material to pilots or even advise them the existence of MCAS. There was a complex two step process required of pilots in ET302 and JT610 crashes and their QRH handbook did not explain this:

Boeing pilots had less than 40 SECONDS to over-ride automated system

The MAX is an aerodynamically unbalanced aircraft vulnerable to any sort of disruption, ranging from electrical failure, out of phase generator, faulty AOA sensor, faulty PCU failure alert, digital encoding error in the DFDAU.

Jason Eaton Former Service Manager Studied at University of Life Lives in Sydney, Australia 564k answer views 50.7k this month Answered Mar 24, 2019 ·

No I wouldn't. I'm not a pilot or an aerospace technician but I am a mechanical engineer, so I know a little bit about physics and stuff.

The 737–8 is carrying engines it was never designed for, that cause it to become inherently unstable. So unstable in fact, that it can't be controlled by humans and instead relies on computer aided control to maintain the correct attitude, particularly during ascent and descent.

The MCAS system is, effectively, a band aid to fix a problem brought about by poor design philosophy. Boeing should have designed a new airframe that complements the new engines, instead of ruining a perfectly good aircraft by bolting on power units it's not designed to carry, and then trying to solve the resulting instability with software. And if that isn't bad enough, the system relies on data from just the one sensor which if it doesn't agree with, it'll force the aircraft nose down regardless of the pilots' better judgement.

That might be ok for the Eurofighter Typhoon but it's definitely not ok for fare paying passengers on a commercial jetliner.

So, no. I won't be flying on a 737–8 until it's been redesigned to fly safely. You know, like a properly designed aeroplane should. 4.8k Views · View 36 Upvoters

[Apr 06, 2019] Boeing's effort to get the 737 Max approved to fly again, explained - 3420634 Promediapost

Notable quotes:
"... Under the circumstances, Boeing's best option was to just take the hit for a few years and accept that it was going to have to start selling 737s at a discount price while it designed a whole new airplane. That would, of course, be time-consuming and expensive, and during the interim, it would probably lose a bunch of narrow-body sales to Airbus. ..."
"... As late as February 2011, Boeing chair and CEO James McNerney was sticking to the plan to design a totally new aircraft. ..."
"... Committing to putting a new engine that didn't fit on the plane was the corporate version of the Fyre Festival's "let's just do it and be legends, man" moment, and it unsurprisingly wound up leading to a slew of engineering and regulatory problems. ..."
"... The problem is that an airplane is a big, complicated network of interconnected parts. To get the engine under the 737 wing, engineers had to mount the engine nacelle higher and more forward on the plane. But moving the engine nacelle (and a related change to the nose of the plane) changed the aerodynamics of the plane, such that the plane did not handle properly at a high angle of attack ..."
"... But note that the underlying problem isn't really software; it's with the effort to use software to get around a whole host of other problems. ..."
"... Looking back, Boeing probably wishes it had just stuck with the "build a new plane" plan and toughed out a few years of rough sales, rather than ending up in the current situation. Right now the company is, in effect, trying to patch things up piecemeal -- a software update here, a new warning light there, etc. -- in hopes of persuading global regulatory agencies to let its planes fly again. ..."
"... That said, on March 27, FAA officials faced the Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Aviation and Space at a hearing called by subcommittee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX). Regulators committed at the hearing to revamp the way they certify new planes , in light of the flaws that were revealed in the previous certification process. ..."
"... a central element of this story is the credibility of the FAA's process ..."
Apr 06, 2019 | www.promediapost.com

Claiming responsibility was part of an attempt to get the planes approved to fly again. Boeing was trying to say that it now understands why the planes crashes -- flawed software -- and has a plan in place to replace it with new software that will eliminate the problem and persuade regulators to get the planes off the ground. But then Friday morning, the company announced that it had found a second, unrelated software flaw that it also needs to fix and will somewhat delay the process of getting the planes cleared to fly again.

All of which, of course, raises the question of why such flawed systems were allowed to fly in the first place.

And that story begins nine years ago when Boeing was faced with a major threat to its bottom line, spurring the airline to rush a series of kludges through the certification process -- with an underresourced Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seemingly all too eager to help an American company threatened by a foreign competitor, rather than to ask tough questions about the project.

The specifics of what happened in the regulatory system are still emerging (and despite executives' assurances, we don't even really know what happened on the flights yet). But the big picture is coming into view: A major employer faced a major financial threat, and short-term politics and greed won out over the integrity of the regulatory system. It's a scandal. The A320neo was trouble for Boeing

Jet fuel is a major cost for airlines. With labor costs largely driven by collective bargaining agreements and regulations that require minimum ratios of flight attendants per passenger, fuel is the cost center airlines have the most capacity to do something about. Consequently, improving fuel efficiency has emerged as one of the major bases of competition between airline manufacturers.

If you roll back to 2010, it began to look like Boeing had a real problem in this regard.

Airbus was coming out with an updated version of the A320 family that it called the A320neo , with "neo" meaning "new engine option." The new engines were going to be more fuel-efficient, with a larger diameter than previous A320 engines, that could nonetheless be mounted on what was basically the same airframe. This was a nontrivial engineering undertaking both in designing the new engines and in figuring out how to make them work with the old airframe, but even though it cost a bunch of money, it basically worked. And it raised the question of whether Boeing would respond.

Initial word was that it wouldn't. As CBS Moneywatch's Brett Snyder wrote in December 2010 , the basic problem was that you couldn't slap the new generation of more efficient, larger-diameter engines onto the 737:

One of the issues for Boeing is that it takes more work to put new engines on the 737 than on the A320. The 737 is lower to the ground than the A320, and the new engines have a larger diameter . So while both manufacturers would have to do work, the Boeing guys would have more work to do to jack the airplane up. That will cost more while reducing commonality with the current fleet. As we know from last week, reduced commonality means higher costs for the airlines as well.

Under the circumstances, Boeing's best option was to just take the hit for a few years and accept that it was going to have to start selling 737s at a discount price while it designed a whole new airplane. That would, of course, be time-consuming and expensive, and during the interim, it would probably lose a bunch of narrow-body sales to Airbus.

The original version of the 737 first flew in 1967, and a decades-old decision about how much height to leave between the wing and the runway left them boxed out of 21st-century engine technology -- and there was simply nothing to be done about it.

Unless there was.

Boeing decided to put on the too-big engines anyway

As late as February 2011, Boeing chair and CEO James McNerney was sticking to the plan to design a totally new aircraft.

"We're not done evaluating this whole situation yet," he said on an analyst call , "but our current bias is to move to a newer airplane, an all-new airplane, at the end of the decade, beginning of the next decade. It's our judgment that our customers will wait for us."

But in August 2011, Boeing announced that it had lined up orders for 496 re-engined Boeing 737 aircraft from five airlines .

It's not entirely clear what happened, but, reading between the lines, it seems that in talking to its customers Boeing reached the conclusion that airlines would not wait for them. Some critical mass of carriers (American Airlines seems to have been particularly influential) was credible enough in its threat to switch to Airbus equipment that Boeing decided it needed to offer 737 buyers a Boeing solution sooner rather than later.

Committing to putting a new engine that didn't fit on the plane was the corporate version of the Fyre Festival's "let's just do it and be legends, man" moment, and it unsurprisingly wound up leading to a slew of engineering and regulatory problems.

New engines on an old plane

As the industry trade publication Leeham News and Analysis explained earlier in March, Boeing engineers had been working on the concept that became the 737 Max even back when the company's plan was still not to build it. In a March 2011 interview with Aircraft Technology, Mike Bair, then the head of 737 product development, said that reengineering was possible. "There's been fairly extensive engineering work on it," he said. "We figured out a way to get a big enough engine under the wing."

The problem is that an airplane is a big, complicated network of interconnected parts. To get the engine under the 737 wing, engineers had to mount the engine nacelle higher and more forward on the plane. But moving the engine nacelle (and a related change to the nose of the plane) changed the aerodynamics of the plane, such that the plane did not handle properly at a high angle of attack . That, in turn, led to the creation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). It fixed the angle-of-attack problem in most situations, but it created new problems in other situations when it made it difficult for pilots to directly control the plane without being overridden by the MCAS.

On Wednesday, Boeing rolled out a software patch that it says corrects the problem, and it hopes to persuade the FAA to agree.

But note that the underlying problem isn't really software; it's with the effort to use software to get around a whole host of other problems.

1of x: BEST analysis of what really is happening on the #Boeing737Max issue from my brother in law @davekammeyer , who's a pilot, software engineer & deep thinker. Bottom line don't blame software that's the band aid for many other engineering and economic forces in effect.

-- Trevor Sumner (@trevorsumner) March 16, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Recall, after all, that the whole point of the 737 Max project was to be able to say that the new plane was the same as the old plane. From an engineering perspective, the preferred solution was to actually build a new plane. But for business reasons, Boeing didn't want a "new plane" that would require a lengthy certification process and extensive (and expensive) new pilot training for its customers. The demand was for a plane that was simultaneously new and not new.

But because the new engines wouldn't fit under the old wings, the new plane wound up having different aerodynamic properties than the old plane. And because the aerodynamics were different, the flight control systems were also different. But treating the whole thing as a fundamentally different plane would have undermined the whole point. So the FAA and Boeing agreed to sort of fudge it.

The new planes are pretty different

As far as we can tell, the 737 Max is a perfectly airworthy plane in the sense that error-free piloting allows it to be operated safely.

But pilots of planes that didn't crash kept noticing the same basic pattern of behavior that is suspected to have been behind the two crashes, according to a Dallas Morning News review of voluntary aircraft incident reports to a NASA database:

The disclosures found by the News reference problems with an autopilot system, and they all occurred during the ascent after takeoff. Many mentioned the plane suddenly nosing down. While records show these flights occurred in October and November, the airlines the pilots were flying for is redacted from the database.

These pilots all safely disabled the MCAS and kept their planes in the air. But one of the pilots reported to the database that it was "unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models."

The training piece is important because a key selling feature of the 737 Max was the idea that since it wasn't really a new plane, pilots didn't really need to be retrained for the new equipment. As the New York Times reported, "For many new airplane models, pilots train for hours on giant, multimillion-dollar machines, on-the-ground versions of cockpits that mimic the flying experience and teach them new features" while the experienced 737 Max pilots were allowed light refresher courses that you could do on an iPad.

That let Boeing get the planes into customers' hands quickly and cheaply, but evidently at the cost of increasing the possibility of pilots not really knowing how to handle the planes, with dire consequences for everyone involved.

The FAA put a lot of faith in Boeing

In a blockbuster March 17 report for the Seattle Times, the newspaper's aerospace reporter Dominic Gates details the extent to which the FAA delegated crucial evaluations of the 737's safety to Boeing itself . The delegation, Gates explains, is in part a story of a years-long process during which the FAA, "citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes."

But there are indications of failures that were specific to the 737 Max timeline. In particular, Gates reports that "as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process" and that "when time was too short for FAA technical staff to complete a review, sometimes managers either signed off on the documents themselves or delegated their review back to Boeing."

Most of all, decisions about what could and could not be delegated were being made by managers concerned about the timeline, rather than by the agency's technical experts.

It's not entirely clear at this point why the FAA was so determined to get the 737 cleared quickly (there will be more investigations), but if you recall the political circumstances of this period in Barack Obama's presidency, you can quickly get a general sense of the issue.

Boeing is not just a big company with a significant lobbying presence in Washington; it's a major manufacturing company with a strong global export presence and a source of many good-paying union jobs. In short, it was exactly the kind of company the powers that be were eager to promote -- with the Obama White House, for example, proudly going to bat for the Export-Import Bank as a key way to sustain America's aerospace industry.

A story about overweening regulators delaying an iconic American company's product launch and costing good jobs compared to the European competition would have looked very bad. And the fact that the whole purpose of the plane was to be more fuel-efficient only made getting it off the ground a bigger priority. But the incentives really were reasonably aligned, and Boeing has only caused problems for itself by cutting corners.

Boeing is now in a bad situation

One emblem of the whole situation is that as the 737 Max engineering team piled kludge on top of kludge, they came up with a cockpit warning light that would alert the pilots if the plane's two angle-of-attack sensors disagreed.

But then, as Jon Ostrower reported for the Air Current , Boeing's team decided to make the warning light an optional add-on, like how car companies will upcharge you for a moon roof.

The light cost $80,000 extra per plane and neither Lion Air nor Ethiopian chose to buy it, perhaps figuring that Boeing would not sell a plane (nor would the FAA allow it to) that was not basically safe to fly. In the wake of the crashes, Boeing has decided to revisit this decision and make the light standard on all aircraft.

Now, to be clear, Boeing has lost about $40 billion in stock market valuation since the crash, so it's not like cheating out on the warning light turned out to have been a brilliant business decision or anything.

This, fundamentally, is one reason the FAA has become comfortable working so closely with Boeing on safety regulations: The nature of the airline industry is such that there's no real money to be made selling airplanes that have a poor safety track record. One could even imagine sketching out a utopian libertarian argument to the effect that there's no real need for a government role in certifying new airplanes at all, precisely because there's no reason to think it's profitable to make unsafe ones.

The real world, of course, is quite a bit different from that, and different individuals and institutions face particular pressures that can lead them to take actions that don't collectively make sense. Looking back, Boeing probably wishes it had just stuck with the "build a new plane" plan and toughed out a few years of rough sales, rather than ending up in the current situation. Right now the company is, in effect, trying to patch things up piecemeal -- a software update here, a new warning light there, etc. -- in hopes of persuading global regulatory agencies to let its planes fly again.

But even once that's done, Boeing faces the task of convincing airlines to actually buy its planes. An informative David Ljunggren article for Reuters reminds us that a somewhat comparable situation arose in 1965 when three then-new Boeing 727 jetliners crashed.

There wasn't really anything unsound about the 727 planes, but many pilots didn't fully understand how to operate the new flaps -- arguably a parallel to the MCAS situation with the 737 Max -- which spurred some additional training and changes to the operation manual. Passengers avoided the planes for months, but eventually came back as there were no more crashes, and the 727 went on to fly safely for decades. Boeing hopes to have a similar happy ending to this saga, but so far it seems to be a long way from that point. And the immediate future likely involves more tough questions.

A political scandal on slow burn

The 737 Max was briefly a topic of political controversy in the United States as foreign regulators grounded the planes, but President Donald Trump -- after speaking personally to Boeing's CEO -- declined to follow. Many members of Congress (from both parties) called on him to reconsider, which he rather quickly did, pushing the whole topic off Washington's front burner.

But Trump is generally friendly to Boeing (he even has a former Boeing executive, Patrick Shanahan, serving as acting defense secretary, despite an ongoing ethics inquiry into charges that Shanahan unfairly favors his former employer), and Republicans are generally averse to harsh regulatory crackdowns. The most important decisions in the mix appear to have been made back during the Obama administration, so it's also difficult for Democrats to go after this issue. Meanwhile, Washington has been embroiled in wrangling over special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, and a new health care battlefield opened up as well.

That said, on March 27, FAA officials faced the Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Aviation and Space at a hearing called by subcommittee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX). Regulators committed at the hearing to revamp the way they certify new planes , in light of the flaws that were revealed in the previous certification process.

The questions at stake, however, are now much bigger than one subcommittee. Billions of dollars are on the line for Boeing, the airlines that fly 737s, and the workers who build the planes. And since a central element of this story is the credibility of the FAA's process -- in the eyes of the American people and of foreign regulatory agencies -- it almost certainly won't get sorted out without more involvement from the actual decision-makers in the US government.

This article was originally published by Vox. Read the original article here .

[Apr 06, 2019] Ralph Nader Boeing 737 Max 'should never fly again' - Chicago Tribune

Apr 06, 2019 | www.chicagotribune.com

Ralph Nader, the noted consumer rights advocate, called for a recall and consumer boycott of the Boeing jet grounded by regulators across the globe after two deadly crashes.

His niece, 24-year-old Samya Stumo, was among the 157 victims of an Ethiopian Airlines flight crash last month, less than six months after a flight on the same aircraft, the Boeing 737 Max 8, crashed in Indonesia.

"Those planes should never fly again," said Nader, speaking by phone at a news conference after Stumo's family filed a lawsuit against Chicago-based Boeing, one of its suppliers and Ethiopian Airlines. The family also filed a claim against the Federal Aviation Administration .

Stumo's family's lawsuit is one of several filed by relatives of passengers killed in the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes. All those families have "such huge holes" because of the aircraft's problems, said Nadia Milleron, Stumo's mother, who said she had met others who lost loved ones in Ethiopia.

"As someone who's lost the dearest person in my life, I want her death not to be in vain. I don't want anybody else to die," she said at the news conference in Chicago.

"Those in charge of creating and selling this plane did not treat Samya as they would their own daughters," said Milleron, who was visibly emotional as she spoke about her daughter.

"This could have been prevented, and that's what makes me cry," she said.

Nader's book "Unsafe at Any Speed" helped bring about a series of auto safety laws , including the creation the federal agency that became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees the auto industry. He later turned his attention to various consumer protection efforts related to food, drug and workplace safety and clean air and water.

On Thursday, he took aim at Boeing, blaming the crashes on design problems that he argued were the result of the company's focus on getting the plane on the market quickly to compete with its rival manufacturer Airbus.

He also criticized the relationship between Boeing and the federal agency tasked with overseeing aviation industry safety.

"If we don't end the cozy relationship between the patsy FAA and the Boeing company, 5,000 of these fatally flawed planes will be in the air all over the world with millions of passengers," Nader said.

Boeing said Thursday it is reviewing a preliminary report on last month's crash from Ethiopian authorities that said the same anti-stall system that came under scrutiny in the Lion Air crash was activated on the Ethiopian Airlines flight.

Most accidents are the result of a chain of events, but when that system is activated in error, it adds to "what is already a high-workload environment," Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a video released by the company on Thursday.

"It's our responsibility to eliminate this risk. We own it, and we know how to do it," he said.

Boeing said it is still working with the FAA and regulatory agencies to develop and certify a software update designed to keep the system from being activated unintentionally, along with additional training for pilots.

Nader said he doesn't think the software fix is enough to make the plane safe since it can't predict all potential problems with a plane that is "prone to stall."

While Boeing has worked to show it is taking steps to address safety concerns, the FAA is planning changes to its oversight of airplane development, which delegates some authority for certifying new aircraft to their manufacturers, the Associated Press reported .

[email protected]

Twitter @laurenzumbach

Copyright © 2019, Chicago Tribune

[Apr 06, 2019] Ethiopian Airline Crash - Boeing Advice To 737 MAX Pilots Was Flawed

Notable quotes:
"... [We] can now reveal how it's possible the aircraft can crash despite using the Cut-Out switches. To verify, we ran it all in a simulator together with MentourPilot Youtube channel over the last days. ..."
"... Nowhere is it described the trim could be impossible to move if the Cut-Out switches were cut at the slightest miss-trim at the speeds flown. And there is no warning on when to move the Cut-Out switches, the checklist says "Cut, then trim manually." This is not the whole truth . ..."
"... The high speed of 340kts indicated airspeed and the trim at 2.3 units causes the Stabilator manual trim to jam, one can't move it by hand. The crew is busy trying to hand trim the next two minutes but no trim change is achieved. ..."
"... It's easy to say "Why didn't they trim then?". Because they are going down at 20 degrees nose down (which is a lot, a normal landing approach is 3°) and at 400kts. Then you just pull for all you have. And the aircraft is not reacting to the largest Control Column displacement since takeoff. This makes them pull even harder, the aircraft is unresponsive and they are fighting for theirs and all the passenger lives. ..."
"... Moreover their description of the MCAS was incomplete . It is only now known that the MCAS trims the stabilizer at a speeed of 0.27 units (degrees) per second while the pilots electric trim moves the stabilizer at only 0.18 units per second: ..."
"... If MCAS keeps tripping, and if pilots do not shut off electric trim entirely, the result is what Tajer describes as a two-steps-back, one-step-forward scenario, with MCAS maintaining an edge. ..."
"... "The MCAS knows but one speed, which is 0.27, which is the most-aggressive speed," Tajer says. "If you look at the balance sheet on it, MCAS is winning, and you are losing." ..."
"... That additional problem pertains to software affecting flaps and other flight-control hardware and is therefore classified as critical to flight safety, said two officials with knowledge of the investigation. ..."
"... This is not about sensor failure. It is about the profit of cheap parts and greed. The insiders at Boeing tipped off the Big Boys that they needed more than the gizmos installed on export versions if they were going to survive. ..."
"... Engineering Manufacturing company with a sales division works alright. But a Sales Company with a manufacturing subsidiary does not, as we see. Boeing is typical for end-stage Imperial Corporations - all show, no go, and get the money quick... ..."
"... A mistake is one or two errors. This was one horrible string of deliberate corner cutting, about 7-8 totally disastrous decisions by the management, that could have only led to deaths of people uninformed enough to purchase the travel risk from this plane supplier. ..."
Apr 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
< to include the new system into training material for the pilots which Boeing, for commercial reasons, did not do.>

After the Lion Air crash the Federal Aviation Administration issued an Airworthiness Directive 2018-23-51 which adviced 737 MAX pilots how to handle an MCAS failure.


full picture

The FAA told 737 MAX pilots to use the Stabilizer Trim Cutoff switches to interupt the power supply for the system's actuator, a motor driven jackscrew in the back of the airplane. The pilots should then use the manual trim wheels in the cockpit, which move the jackscrew and stabilizer via steel cables, to righten the aircraft.

On March 10 a 737 MAX flown by Ethiopian Airline crashed shortly after take off. 157 people died. Radar data and debris found showed that the cause was likely a similar MCAS failure as had happened on the Indonesian Lion Air flight.

All 737 MAX planes were grounded with the U.S. being the last country to order it.

Some U.S. pilots, as well as some commentators here, publicly blamed the darker skin pilots for not using the simple procedure the FAA had put out: "Why didn't they just flip the switches? Stupid undertrained third-world dudes."

It now turns out that the well trained and experienced pilots on the Ethiopian Airline flight did exactly what Boeing and the FAA told them to do. From the Ethiopean Airlines press release (pdf):

The preliminary report clearly showed that the Ethiopian Airlines pilots who were commanding Flight ET 302/10 March have followed the Boeing recommended and FAA approved emergency procedures to handle the most difficult emergency situation created on the airplane. Despite their hard work and full compliance with the emergency procedures, it was very unfortunate that they could not recover the airplane from the persistence of nose diving.

The procedure Boeing and the FAA advised to use was insufficient to bring the aircraft back under control. It was in fact impossible to recover the plane. The possibility of this to happen was discussed in pilot fora and on specialized websites for some time.

The MCAS system moves the front of the stablizer up to turn the nose of the airplane down. The plane then decends very fast. The aerodynamic forces (the "wind") pushing against the stabilizer gets so strong that a manual counter-trim becomes impossible.

Avionics engineer Peter Lemme details the physics involved in this.


via Seattle Times - full picture

Lemme concludes:

With the 737MAX cutout switches, MCAS runaway is stopped by throwing both switches, losing electric trim altogether. In this case, the flight crew must rely on manual trim via turning the trim wheel/crank. As discussed above, the manual crank can bind up , making flying much more difficult.

Bjorn Fehrm, a senior engineeer and pilot now writing at Leeham News , came to a similar conclusion :

[We] can now reveal how it's possible the aircraft can crash despite using the Cut-Out switches. To verify, we ran it all in a simulator together with MentourPilot Youtube channel over the last days.
...
At a miss-trimmed Stabilator, you either have to re-engage Electric trim or off-load the Stabilator jackscrew by stick forward, creating a nose-down bunt maneuver, followed by trim.

Stick forward to trim was not an option for ET302, they were at 1,000ft above ground. According to The Wall Street Journal, the ET302 crew re-engaged electrical trim to save the situation, to get the nose up. It was their only chance. But too late. The aggressive MCAS kicked in and worsened the situation before they could counter it.

On the FAA's Airworthiness Directive Fehrm writes:

Nowhere is it described the trim could be impossible to move if the Cut-Out switches were cut at the slightest miss-trim at the speeds flown. And there is no warning on when to move the Cut-Out switches, the checklist says "Cut, then trim manually." This is not the whole truth .

An detailed analysis of the flight recorder data as documented in the preliminary crash report confirms the conclusions :

The high speed of 340kts indicated airspeed and the trim at 2.3 units causes the Stabilator manual trim to jam, one can't move it by hand. The crew is busy trying to hand trim the next two minutes but no trim change is achieved.

via Leeham News - bigger

The pilots then do the only thing possible. They reengage the electric stabilizer trim to righten the aircraft.

But the aggressive MCAS, trimming with a speed 50% higher than the pilot and for a full nine seconds, kicks in at 8 with a force they didn't expect. Speed is now at 375kts and MCAS was never designed to trim at these Speed/Altitude combinations. Dynamic pressures, which governs how the aircraft reacts to control surface movements, is now almost double it was when last MCAS trimmed (Dynamic pressure increases with Speed squared).

The Pilots are thrown off their seats, hitting the cockpit roof. Look at the Pitch Attitude Disp trace and the Accel Vert trace. These are on the way to Zero G and we can see how PF loses stick pull in the process (Ctrl Column Pos L). He can barely hold on to the Yoke, let alone pull or trim against.

His reduced pull increases the pitch down further, which increases the speed even more. At 05.45.30 the Pilots have hit the seats again (Accel Vert trace and Ctrl Columns force trace) and can start pulling in a desperate last move. But it's too late. Despite them creating the largest Control Column movement ever, pitch down attitude is only marginally affected.

The pilots and their passengers lose the fight:

It's easy to say "Why didn't they trim then?". Because they are going down at 20 degrees nose down (which is a lot, a normal landing approach is 3°) and at 400kts. Then you just pull for all you have. And the aircraft is not reacting to the largest Control Column displacement since takeoff. This makes them pull even harder, the aircraft is unresponsive and they are fighting for theirs and all the passenger lives.

A diligent safety anlysis would have predicted this outcome. Neither Boeing nor the FAA seems to have done such after the first 737 MAX crashed. They provided an Airworthiness Directive with procedures that were insufficiant to correct the system induce misbehavior.

Moreover their description of the MCAS was incomplete . It is only now known that the MCAS trims the stabilizer at a speeed of 0.27 units (degrees) per second while the pilots electric trim moves the stabilizer at only 0.18 units per second:

"It's like a Tasmanian devil in there," says Dennis Tajer, a 737 pilot and communications chair for Allied Pilots Association, which represents American Airlines' pilots.
...
If MCAS keeps tripping, and if pilots do not shut off electric trim entirely, the result is what Tajer describes as a two-steps-back, one-step-forward scenario, with MCAS maintaining an edge.

"The MCAS knows but one speed, which is 0.27, which is the most-aggressive speed," Tajer says. "If you look at the balance sheet on it, MCAS is winning, and you are losing."

The insufficient advice to pilots given after the first crash only adds to the long list of criminal mistakes Boeing made and which the FAA allowed to pass.

Today the Washington Post reports of another software defect which the FAA demands to have fixed:

Boeing confirmed to The Washington Post that it had found a second software problem that the Federal Aviation Administration has ordered fixed -- separate from the anti-stall system that is under investigation in the two crashes and is involved in the worldwide grounding of the aircraft.

That additional problem pertains to software affecting flaps and other flight-control hardware and is therefore classified as critical to flight safety, said two officials with knowledge of the investigation.

The criminals at Boeing again offer no explanation and play down the issue:

In a statement, Boeing called the additional problem "relatively minor" but did not offer details of how it affects the plane's flight-control system. "We are taking steps to thoroughly address this relatively minor issue and already have the solution in work to do that," it said.

What other 'features' were secretly implemented into the 737 MAX without sufficiant analysis about their side effects and consequences?

---
Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the 737 MAX crashes:

Posted by b on April 5, 2019 at 05:53 AM | Permalink

Jen , Apr 5, 2019 6:27:26 AM | link

"... The Pilots are thrown off their seats, hitting the cockpit roof ..."

I should think that at that point in the narrative, one of the flight crew must either have fallen unconscious or ended up too injured to be able to do anything, let alone fight a rogue MCAS system.

I presume the pilots would still have their seatbelts on, unless the forces generated by the constant battle to stabilise the aircraft while fighting the MCAS system were too strong and broke the seatbelts or dislocated the seats themselves.

As for other "features" that were secretly placed into the 737 MAX jets that Boeing "neglected" to tell FAA or its clients about, what about the "features" that should have been made compulsory but which Boeing decided were optional at the clients' own expense?


jared , Apr 5, 2019 6:42:51 AM | link

I imagine Boing would be worried if they were not prime military contractor. They will be protected.
Tom Welsh , Apr 5, 2019 6:57:06 AM | link
As a layman, my main question at this stage is: "Who is going to prison and for how long?" Everyone involved in the decision to sell those flying death traps should be tried for manslaughter at the least. The guilty ones should serve prison sentences appropriate for criminals who caused hundreds of people to die for their own profit.

How long a sentence does a poor man get, who kills a well-off tourist for the money in his wallet - or even for his shoes?

Now multiply that by several hundred - adding on, of course, extra years to allow for the Boeing executives' privileged lives, top-flight education, and (above all) the generous sufficiency they already enjoy.

In China such people are routinely shot, which seems the right course. In the USA, while poor people are executed all the time, apparently the wealthy and privileged get a free pass.

b , Apr 5, 2019 6:59:17 AM | link
@Jen - I don't read that "hitting the cokpit roof" as literal description.

@all - I have added a new Washington Post report of an additional software defect at the end of the above piece.

jared , Apr 5, 2019 7:01:57 AM | link
Is a direct result of Boing monopoly - they are division of the military. And why did european agency roll-over? Will this warrant cancellation of orders?
Tom Welsh , Apr 5, 2019 7:09:05 AM | link
Oh, and the people at the FAA need to be tried in a criminal court too. Not only were they criminally negligent - they did it while being generously remunerated by the taxpayer. Perhaps a few years as galley slaves would be appropriate punishment - to teach them not to be lazy.
Ger , Apr 5, 2019 7:34:32 AM | link
This cheap seat Boeing export death trap was doomed from the beginning. Once these planes nose 'up' it is heading to a crash. Any engineer with a basic understanding of aero dynamic/physics knows this. This is not about sensor failure. It is about the profit of cheap parts and greed. The insiders at Boeing tipped off the Big Boys that they needed more than the gizmos installed on export versions if they were going to survive.

Tom @3 makes note the Chinese have a great quality control program. Boeing execs will up their kickback slop to US politicians and the final report will say, 'well accidents will happen'.

Taffyboy , Apr 5, 2019 7:59:26 AM | link
You can be sure that if this was Airbus, and two were crashed in the USA, that there would be hearings, threats, congressional investigations, lawsuits, calls for criminal investigations, Wall Street shorting the company, ...and on and on until the company would be disbanded.

Criminal, well yes but so what! Peons do not matter, right.

Walter , Apr 5, 2019 8:14:29 AM | link
Engineering Manufacturing company with a sales division works alright. But a Sales Company with a manufacturing subsidiary does not, as we see. Boeing is typical for end-stage Imperial Corporations - all show, no go, and get the money quick...

Sorta like GE's BWR's and Fukushima, fake it on the cheap and run with the money to retirement.

b , Apr 5, 2019 8:36:24 AM | link
The full 33 pages Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau Preliminary Report from the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.
donkeytale , Apr 5, 2019 8:59:32 AM | link
Now we learn (from Krugman, but still) the American meat industrial complex is also now self-regulating thanks to the Donald.

"Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You
Trust the pork producers; fear the wind turbines."

I'm reaching for the broccoli...oh wait....the organic broccoli

Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 5, 2019 9:01:05 AM | link
The Pilots are thrown off their seats, hitting the cockpit roof ..."
Posted by: Jen | Apr 5, 2019 6:27:26 AM | 1

My interpretation is the same as yours. It's an incident report which is supposed to be bland statements of fact - neither overstated nor understated. If the report says the pilots hit the roof then that's what happened (airliner cockpits don't have cathedral ceilings so only inches clearance when standing erect).

OTOH I find it hard to believe that the pilots would unbuckle before they had achieved cruise status and given passengers the OK to do the same.

Seat belts can break but not under the relatively mild stresses generated by violent flight maneuvers of an intact aircraft.

Kiza , Apr 5, 2019 9:14:57 AM | link
When I purchase an airline ticket I purchase the risk profile of the airline and the risk profile of the plane manufacturer, because either can kill me.

A mistake is one or two errors. This was one horrible string of deliberate corner cutting, about 7-8 totally disastrous decisions by the management, that could have only led to deaths of people uninformed enough to purchase the travel risk from this plane supplier.

Uninformed just like I was before I recently saw some old investigative footage about Boeing's disregard for elementary quality in the earlier 737 hull manufacturing and the company's treatment of the whistleblowers trying to help the company by exposing such wrong doing: "Just put a coat of paint on it".

Intentionally (spin) or unintentionally, there is too much talk about detail such as software, pilot capability and decisions, training and the lack of it and so on. This only hides the big picture of an utter disregard for the value of human life, traded off for management bonuses and stock holder dividends. It is a complete reversal of the original engineering-focused Boeing which made Boeing an icon that it used to be. Perhaps, somewhere in the Washington lobbying swamp the dividing line between the engineering for killing people and the engineering for transporting people became too blurred. As the profit strategy, on MIC business overcharge, on airliner business underdeliver, and ruthlessly so on both: rip-off money from the tax-payers and lives from the travellers.

Please convince me that this is not a symptom of the rot of the whole society, when an icon such as Boeing sinks deep into nastiest morally debased profiteering. I posit that the society which so easily kills people using bombs, rockets and drones cannot make good quality products any more. This is because killing and destroying is just too easy compared with creating something good . Without the good will of the people in a society to morally rebalance, the societal endeavours for creation can never compete against the endeavours for destruction. In other words, US had become too much about destruction to be still capable of creation.

Finally, there would be one way to get back on the right track - life-in-jail for both Boeing and FAA involved. It is ultimately ironic that in the highly criticised China the shitbags would probably be put in front of a firing squad for corruption. In US, they will receive bonuses and continue on to the next killing enterprise. Until they finally launch nuclear tipped missiles against the creation oriented foreign competitors. Do they still know of any other way to win?

Avid Lurker , Apr 5, 2019 9:33:24 AM | link
Touching and informative press conference with the Stumo family (Ralph Nader's grandniece, Samyo Stumo, was killed on the 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia) and two law firms that filed a lawsuit against Boeing and others. At @ 28 min one lawyer displays an anonymous email from a 737 MAX pilot detailing how the MCAS system can thwart a pilot's ability to recover control of the jet. This email was posted to a pilots' forum/aviation network after the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last October.

Attorneys file suit for family of woman killed in Ethiopian plane crash

Ric G , Apr 5, 2019 9:34:15 AM | link
Boeing has solved all their problems with the 737 Maxxx.

They are opening a fast food franchise and bolting the planes to concrete blocks. No problemo!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/peoplesdaily/article-3781574/Not-usual-plane-meal-look-inside-China-s-4-million-fine-dining-restaurant-converted-retired-Boeing-737.html

Walter , Apr 5, 2019 9:45:44 AM | link
@Steve...if you say it, then it's true. Of course, if you knew more about it, then you would say something else.

But real expert Gundersen says differently. I worked with some of the GE engineers, and I know what they said.

You are 100% incorrect about the diesels, the problem included primary, ultimate heat sink loss due to the elevation of the pumps, and the pressure vessels we know to be unsafe.

GE BWR's designed in the US by US GE engineers, some of whom quit rather than sign off on the design..."fuze was lit for Fukushima in 1965" >see fairewinds, amigo.

b4real , Apr 5, 2019 9:52:06 AM | link
They're in for it now... Remember when GM CEO Maria Barra went to jail for those faulty ignition cylinders ?

/sarc

This is a feature of capitalism. If left unfettered, it will consume itself.

In a just world, Syria would shoot down an F35 with an S300.

b4real

Kiza , Apr 5, 2019 9:57:26 AM | link
@SteveK9 12
As far as I understand, the main Fukushima problem was the concrete reactor encasing design which did not cater for the possibility of excessive hydrogen release from the reactor. It worked well when not in trouble, but in an accident situation (who would have expected an accident) the concrete encasing without a release valve became a pressure cooker filled with flammable hydrogen. What a surprise that it went boom!?

What you write here about the water cooling system generators you probably believe in but it resembles the pilot blaming spin of Boeing. The truth has a nasty tendency to end up owned by those with most money.

I always remember how our old friend pharaoh Ramses paid hundreds of stone masons to go around Egypt and chisel out the achievements of all the previous pharaohs and chisel in his. Then even several thousands of years later, when the archeologists finally learned to read hieroglyphs, they only had propaganda and spin left to read. Thus nothing less than the son of the supreme Egyptian deity the sun god Ra, the propaganda paying Ramses became the greatest pharaoh of all time.

bevin , Apr 5, 2019 9:58:50 AM | link
"As a layman, my main question at this stage is: 'Who is going to prison and for how long?'"
The first to go should obviously be the individuals in charge of the FAA. These people, I imagine, were appointed by Obama. When we look at the regulatory system in the US bear in mind that the current irresponsibility arose in a long descent-since the days of Nixon I suspect-into neo-liberal corporate capture.
Just recently the deceits practised in the fake science which allowed the licensing of Round Up were revealed. The entire system is rotten and nowhere is it more corrupt than in the United States.
Pft , Apr 5, 2019 10:04:18 AM | link
" They reengage the electric stabilizer trim to righten the aircraft"

That's the problem. While the plane may have remained unstable due to the lack of rapid response of the manual trim control and difficulties turning.the wheel at high speed low altitude flight,the planes altitude was still increasing. They should have either returned to the airport or continued ascent in the hope they could restore trim at high altitude and low air pressure.

Altitude immediately plummeted when they rengaged the MCAS and the plane was not recoverable at that point.

Such mistakes should be made in flight simulators . Hence it's lack of training at fault here, and the blame for that is still on Boeing.

Not sure even the flight simulator training will solve this mess
TBH

J Swift , Apr 5, 2019 10:22:12 AM | link
This whole business is sickening and infuriating. What is especially infuriating is that the FAA is extremely onerous in enforcement of ancient regulations with respect to general aviation. The owner of a small plane is actually prohibited from casually upgrading any of the antiquated instruments, even radios, on his Made in 1975 private plane, and must stick with what was originally certified by the manufacturer as originally constructed--unless he is willing to expend huge amounts of money to find an updated, certified (e.g., "safe") upgraded component from someone willing to go the lengthy and expensive process of having the FAA certify that product, then have a certified mechanic install the certified part and certify it was done according to the precise procedures established. In effect, the FAA actively discourages safety improvements of the general aviation fleet by unthinking resistance to technological change.

Unless you're Boeing.

Having experience with the "other" FAA, this is what's especially dumbfounding to me. While there may be some justification in permitting a trusted manufacturer to establish and certify as safe minor details, anything involving the actual flight characteristics of the plane should NEVER be delegated, and doubly so with respect to commercial airliners. And how could any regulator be anything but incredulous if a manufacturer says "Well, we've decided to make this commercial airliner INHERENTLY UNSTABLE, but we have a whole box of bandaids which should do a bang-up job of keeping it in the air!" WTF!! "Fail-safe" isn't actually a fix or a mechanism, the term is supposed to describe a design philosophy, in which if there is a failure, the resulting condition is still safe (well, at least not less safe). Ditto redundancy, which is why it is unheard-of that such an apparently vital bandaid relied on only one sensor.

It's one thing to build a fighter that is inherently unstable (although even that is perhaps questionable), but an airliner filled with passengers? Ludicrous. And the FAA and Boeing both know it, and knew it from the start. In a just world heads would literally roll, but sadly, nothing real is likely to happen.

Piotr Berman , Apr 5, 2019 10:31:04 AM | link
I already thought that the whole setup had faulty logic. If the plane could be adequately controlled by pilots, "manually", then extra training would be cheaper than introducing an automatic system. If the plane could not be adequately controlled by the pilots, "switching to manual" is futile.

I have a minor experience with "automatic control" when the chip of my car went wrong. In old, old times one has to add a bit of extra gas to start the car engine, and as a result one could flood the engine, then wait a few minutes for the gasoline to evaporate and try again. In contemporary cars you do not press gas at all when you start, and the chip regulates how much gasoline should be injected to the engine based on its temperature. Then after 10 years of happy use the chip "noticed" that the engine is cold when it is actually hot. So I am driving on a windy narrow road and the car accelerates going 40 mph without pressing the gas (65 kmh), 15 mhp above the legal speed limit, and did I mention that the road had curves? Frankly, it happened few times before that, but on a straight road you just get the feel of cruise control. Anyway, brakes remedied the situation, luckily, they could overcome the engine and the chip was replaced for mere 800 dollars.

Here it seems that Boeing designers entered the kludge road and kept compensating for this or that and lost the total picture. Isn't it suspicious that the automatic trim was so aggressive? I also do not understand at all what "manual" means, seem impossible that actual muscle force of the pilot was applied to the tail? Should there be an emergence procedure in which a cabin steward under voice control of the captain adjusts the tail with a crank, or perhaps something like a capstan that could be moved by the entire cabin crew? That would be a true manual system.

My conclusion is that once you rely on automatic solutions because the crew cannot do it in some situations, you must crank up the reliability to something "average million years without failure or more". It is not a ship that can drop anchors, giving a few days to figure out the problem etc. (although this is something that should be avoided too). Boeing setup was something that should flunk students in Industrial Engineering (they have courses on control systems). For example, an internal device with a gyroscope could track the speed and its three-dimensional angle, so if one of external sensors malfunction the system can automatically decide which reading makes more sense. External sensor measure speed in respect to air which is important too, but if the plane approaches the ground, that should be noted to,. With few gismos you could get sufficient redundancy with some "voting scheme" or a "decision tree".

J Swift , Apr 5, 2019 10:41:56 AM | link
Just use logic for a moment. Boeing: We're presenting this new (redesigned) plane for certification, and it comes with it's very own MCRASH system. FAA: MCRASH system...what's that? Boeing: Well, the plane has a pronounced tendency to go into stalls and fall out of the sky. FAA: That's an interesting feature. Are pilots going to be able to handle these aggravated power-on stalls (the worst kind, incidentally)? Boeing: Oh, no. There's no way pilots would be able to detect the condition and react quickly enough to save the plane, so we've devised an automated system that is faster than a human can react to save the day. We present MCRASH.

I mean, seriously!

Piotr Berman , Apr 5, 2019 10:43:43 AM | link
From annals of idiocy in design. Some time in the 1st decade of this century the Polish state rail road decided to embrace modernity and introduced automatic ticketing system. It would fabulously till the end of that year when it shut down. Apparently, there was a "sanity check" disallowing tickets to have arrival before the departure, someone forgot about the pesky case of arrival after New Year following departure in December, and the system could not cope with a wave of "illegal requests". Luckily, because the system did not operate that long prior to collapse, there were still people who could manually write the tickets until the bug was removed.
Piotr Berman , Apr 5, 2019 10:46:06 AM | link
would -> work, I must say that the setup not allowing to correct the post after it is made is also an example of a "suboptimal" design, many sites give you 10-15 minutes with a permission to edit or delete.
Uncoy , Apr 5, 2019 10:57:41 AM | link
Berman, you wrote:
would -> work, I must say that the setup not allowing to correct the post after it is made is also an example of a "suboptimal" design, many sites give you 10-15 minutes with a permission to edit or delete.

B hosts Moon of Alabama on Typepad. Typepad costs $15/month, including hosting and support (best value in web hosting for a busy weblog). Typepad apparently doesn't have a post-comment grace period editing option or B would have added it.

I used to be an advocate of MoA moving over to WordPress (I'm a full time software architect/designer who builds WordPress driven web application and a pro video player). There's lots of nice bells and whistles which could be added including comment editing and a much more attractive and innovative design.

Having seen the endless security issues and silly site breaking updates which Matt Mullenweg and Automattic have pushed out over the last four years, B would be wise to stay put on Typepad. Typepad is clunky, it's a bit ugly but it works reliably and is inexpensive. Maintaining and updating a WordPress site costs either lots of man hours or lots of money (good IT help is not cheap).

terrorist lieberal , Apr 5, 2019 11:37:47 AM | link
Tom @ 5,

Obviously you know no one will ever be prosecuted or lose anything. This country is in the hands of the rich and powerful, just note how the great Obama couldn't jail one crooked banker and they all got to keep everything they stole at the expense of millions and millions of people, lives ruined, and they live the high life as some exceptional people, yeah right, God Bless America, home of the biggest terrorist organization the world has known.

terrorist lieberal , Apr 5, 2019 11:39:09 AM | link
Sorry, meant for Tom at comment 3
james , Apr 5, 2019 11:54:53 AM | link
thank you b! who is going to be held accountable? i say no one...

@13 donkeytale.. that sounds about right... i imagine it's happening in any industry where money is involved in the usa - which is basically every industry.. get rid of the mechanisms for protecting people and just make sure to protect the moneyed interests..

capitalism devoid of morals and ethics is just peachy..

Pnyx , Apr 5, 2019 12:02:42 PM | link
Thanks for the comprehensive account of what happened. I really hope this will result in a hefty judicial price tag for the cynicals and greedies at Boeing.
b , Apr 5, 2019 12:33:03 PM | link
@taffyboy

You can be sure that if this was Airbus, and two were crashed in the USA, that there would be hearings, threats, congressional investigations, lawsuits, calls for criminal investigations, Wall Street shorting the company, ...and on and on until the company would be disbanded.

There were two Boeing MAX crashes outside of the U.S. and there ARE now hearings, threats, congressional investigations, lawsuits and even a criminal investigation. Boeing's stock price fell by some 10% since the second crash.
-
@Hoarsewhisperer @14

It's an incident report which is supposed to be bland statements of fact - neither overstated nor understated. If the report says the pilots hit the roof then that's what happened (airliner cockpits don't have cathedral ceilings so only inches clearance when standing erect).

The phrase "the Pilots are thrown off their seats, hitting the cockpit roof" is not from the incident report but from an interpretation at the Leeham News site. It is not meant literally.

It is based on a suddden change on g-force in the plane which goes from around 1g to 0g when MCAS again kicks in. This has the effect that the pilots are suddenly weightless and no longer have power to pull the yoke back.

Source and effect of this are visible in the diagram.
-

Peter AU 1 , Apr 5, 2019 1:14:13 PM | link
Do airline pilots wear seatbelts on take off. I take it there would be some rules and regulations on this. I have always taken it for granted the pilots would be wearing seatbelt on take off and landing, also if expecting turbulence during a flight.
Impossible to control anything if you're getting tossed around.
ritzl , Apr 5, 2019 1:26:26 PM | link
Unless the EU and other governing bodies divorce themselves from our seemingly privatized FAA, expect more of this. Unless, of course, ALL flight safety orgs, globally, are equally corrupted.

I have no idea if global corruption is the case/or worse, but there is now pretty strong evidence that the US FAA is not the unassailable leader in certification protocols that the whole planet has depended upon - up to now.

karlof1 , Apr 5, 2019 1:29:56 PM | link
Hmmm.... Proper retribution. Load Boeing's Board of Directors, senior engineers that signed off on the entire MAX project, senior accountants, any others tied to the entire boondoggle, all FAA "regulators" who approved boondoggle, and all others who helped cause the fatalities into several MAX airplanes designed to fail just as the ill-fated jets did manned by the Boeing pilots who approved the faulty design and force them to takeoff with flight paths over water. Yes, proper retribution for the crime. Cruel and unusual objections? No. Proper retribution.

The entire Neoliberal philosophy must suffer a similar fate along with its promoters and their Neocon allies. The Class War has always been deadly. It's high time elites began taking casualties. Too radical? Take a good look at the world and the circumstances of those besieged by Neoliberals and Neocons and try to argue against.

ritzl , Apr 5, 2019 1:31:55 PM | link
And, Jeez, if you want to get into the whole "death of empire" thingy, this FAA failure would be among the top tier of exhibits.

Thanks b, and all posters here. This is a truly GREAT site. I recommend it whenever I talk politics in personL

Meshpal , Apr 5, 2019 1:41:34 PM | link
Zerohedge has an article that says the pilots should have reduced engine power.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-05/experts-say-ethiopian-air-pilots-failed-do-one-thing-could-have-prevented-deadly

That is a true statement, but with so many things going wrong – you need to understand that it is a basic instinct of pilots to keep engine power up so you can climb and get out of trouble.

Very basic: Power = Good and No-Power = Bad.

So they should have reduced power and done a slight nose down to unload the jack screw and re-trimmed manually. The problem was they had no altitude to work with, just 1000 ft or so.

So the end story is that not only did the pilot do well, but the low-hour co-pilot was also surprising competent. It was team work all the way.

So the bottom line is that our Western system has become so corrupt that it is no longer even safe to fly. And this is just the beginning. It is all downhill from now on. More gender studies and who needs engineers anyway?

deal with it , Apr 5, 2019 2:41:14 PM | link
Boeing Max 8 was a flying design mistake.
Boeing, You Ain't no Airbus!
You can' t just slap some heavier bulkiet engines on a tinny single body crap that barely flew straight at the first time and expect everything to be right, slapping some hiden software autocorrections on just in case.. and sell this crap all over the world. Enjoy the torrent of lawsuits now!
You ain't no European aircraft maker. They tend to think 2 to 3 design steps ahead in to the future.
You guys at the US cant even barrely ellect a pres. who is right in the head.
SteveK9 , Apr 5, 2019 3:26:36 PM | link
Apologies to everyone for the thread hijack, but nuclear power nonsense annoys me.
@Walter 18

Gundersen is a very well-known anti-nuke fanatic and a liar. His qualifications are BS. At this point I think you and I can leave it and either of us can read more if we are so inclined.

@Kiza 20

Hydrogen release was an effect from the overheating and meltdown, caused by the lack of emergency cooling. There were no hydrogen recombiners present in these reactors, although they had been installed in every BWR in the US long before.

As I mentioned the reactor nearest the quake suffered no damage, because its emergency generators continued to operate, as they were not flooded. I forgot the plant name ... you could look it up ... it actually served as a shelter during the flood. As a consequence there was no release of hydrogen there (this happens when the zirconium cladding on the fuel reacts with water at high temperature to release hydrogen).

I'm not an expert in reactor design (although I have a PhD in Chemical Physics). I reached my own conclusions a very long time ago, and am not really interested in digging up evidence or providing explanations. There is a mountain of information out there if one wants to look ... and I don't mean Greenpeace (although the founder, Patrick Moore is currently a supporter of nuclear power).

deal with it , Apr 5, 2019 3:34:13 PM | link
Oh and btw, about United States aviation related products leading the race in global aviation...

Struggling to produce an effective design for an airframe for the Martian atmosphere (planet Mars) back in the earlier decade, using the top of the line comercial aviation simulation products with aircraft design options bundled in, as a way of researching a NASA info web campaign about flying vehicles on Mars, managed after much trying to produce a somehow reliable generic airframe for that very thin atmosphere and low gravity environments, which it would generaly resemble a mix of U2's and Predator drones frames (twice large than a U2 wing span) but with major tail wings modifications and you would get adequate performance if you flew it inside the enormous Martian cannyons which have a higher atmosphere pessure than rest of Martian surface. Mil air force drones were generally non existant as information back then. The software was the only product FAA approved a license for actual comercial aviation simulation training hours for training of real pilots...End of story, this design came third ...and the actual algorithms in the software decided that an actual UFO shaped craft would be behaving much better in Martian wind/atmosphere... We incorporated the solution of small rockets for generating initial lift for take off and emergency altitude.
FAA and the leading edge researchers decided that the ALIENS WOULD WIN!
I was almost sure that even Nasa people (which names was on the program approval credits) used same software without noticing anything strange before the Aliens stole the win...

Bart Hansen , Apr 5, 2019 3:51:35 PM | link
So the jack screw that manually controls the stabilizer did not work due to high speed. Isn't that what hydraulics are for?

After all, Slim Pickens managed to kick that bombay door open in Strangelove

Hoarse, I also was confused by the reasoning in the Seattle paper. But then again, I learned all I know about the affect of air flowing over a surface in flight by sticking my hand out the car window as a kid.

تابلو چلنیوم , Apr 5, 2019 4:32:53 PM | link
To avoid such crashes, training is needed more professionally and, in addition, the worn-out parts of the planes should be removed and replaced with new ones. In the vast majority of aircraft, due to high costs, little importance is given to worn parts, which causes people to fall and get dead.
Scotch Bingeington , Apr 5, 2019 4:44:34 PM | link
@ Meshpal | 38
More gender studies and who needs engineers anyway?

I think you're barking up the wrong tree there. I wholeheartedly agree with the second (sarcastic) bit, no doubt about that. But the guy who had overall responsibility for the 737 MAX desaster holds a "degree" in "Business Administration". James McNerney, B.A. from Yale, MBA from Harvard, member of Delta Kappa Epsilon - Chairman, President and CEO of The Boeing Company 2005-2016. I have a strong feeling that gender studies wouldn't exactly be his cup of tea. Just an ordinary, boring, utterly predictable, Pavlovian, run-of-the-mill business tosser. He thought he could do it all, and so off he went, again and again. From British United Provident Association (healthcare) to G.D. Searle (pharmaceuticals) to Procter & Gamble to McKinsey to General Electric to 3M. And what the heck, let's add Boeing into the mix with a pay of 30 million USD in 2014 alone. What a spec-taaaa-cular career!

jayc , Apr 5, 2019 5:29:21 PM | link
Easy to anticipate a consumer boycott of this plane. I wouldn't buy a ticket on a Max 8 flight, and began double-checking the airliner after the crash last October.
bbbar , Apr 5, 2019 6:04:28 PM | link
Horsewhisperer @ 7

In horizontal flight the stabilizer exerts a moderate amount of downward force to keep the tail level (so as to balance the torques on the airplane). When the infographic says "a small downward force pushes the nose down" it is merely saying the downward force on the tail was now less than that required to keep the plane level, so the tail rose and the nose fell.

S , Apr 5, 2019 6:33:36 PM | link
@تابلو چلنیوم : I suggest you read the article first, then comment.
Kiza , Apr 5, 2019 6:41:32 PM | link
@SteveK9 40

With respect for your PhD in Chemistry Physics, you are obviously not an engineer. In most societies, it is around the third year of study that engineers learn about redundancy and contingency planning. Therefore, not thinking trough all the possible disaster scenarios when designing life-critical contraptions is simply criminal: Fukushima nuclear power plants.

Perhaps Boeing should have hired a couple of engineering interns to tell them that they must not:
1) slap unsuitable new engines on an obsolete old air frame,
2) try to fix a serious hardware problem using software,
3) override pilots with their lives on the line by the decisions of some software cretin paid by the hour with no skin in the game,
4) hang lives of 180 people on a single sensor unavailable for replacement on an airport in Timbuktu,
5) play the no-training-needed tune when the structure of the product was substantially changed and operator training was essential and so on.

The engineers are blue collar workers, the more so the closer they are to the assembly floor. They have no decision power, they do what they are told. Yet, it is a society in deep moral crisis when the engineers keep silent whilst virtually all basic tenants of the proper design are broken by the profiteers managing them. Doing all the wrong things and expecting the right result? No, not really, just grab the money and run. Après nous le déluge.

BTW, I heard from a Lockheed lobbyist that Lockheed would never do something like this. They only rip off the US tax payers for godzillion of dollars whilst making the best killing machines that money can buy.

ken , Apr 5, 2019 6:50:29 PM | link
God,,, What humans will do to save little pieces of paper loosely called money. This is criminal. The entire board should be charged with murder or at least manslaughter. But it won't happen. Corpgov will step in to save them as they're to big to jail.
S , Apr 5, 2019 7:01:44 PM | link
Absolutely heartbreaking.

It is my understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that the only thing the pilots could have done was to realize -- by a pure miracle -- that the captain's AoA sensor has failed and switch to the first officer's flight computer, which was connected to another, working AoA sensor. Of course, if Boeing had installed their "mismatching AoA data" indicator as a standard feature, the pilots wouldn't really need a miracle.

VietnamVet , Apr 5, 2019 7:38:26 PM | link
Boeing is slowing the production rate of 737 Max by 20%. Another chicken has come home to roost. To safely fly the aircraft with passengers, a new flight control system is required with multiple sensors including gyroscopes plus triple redundant electronics. Not just two position sensors as proposed by Boeing which is the pilot flipping a coin in the chaotic 40 seconds to do the right thing while the plane is trying to kill you. Pilot and co-pilot training on flight simulators is also required. If the FAA approves anything less, sooner or later, another 737 Max will crash. Similarly, the Trump Administration is turning over pork inspection to the slaughter houses. A million Chinese pigs were culled to attempt to stop the spread of African Swine Fever but the deadly pig disease continues to spread through Asia. One day soon the contagion will be fatal to humans. Climate change is here. The forever wars continue. The bottom line is that public safety which is the basic function of government is collapsing. Oligarchs are getting rich on the bodies of the dead.
Yeah, Right , Apr 5, 2019 8:00:58 PM | link
@38 Meshpal "Zerohedge has an article that says the pilots should have reduced engine power."

From the report: "At 05:39:42, Level Change mode was engaged. The selected altitude was 32000 ft. Shortly after the mode change, the selected airspeed was set to 238 kt."

Then a minute later: "From 05:40:42 to 05:43:11 (about two and a half minutes), the stabilizer position gradually moved in the AND direction from 2.3 units to 2.1 units. During this time, aft force was applied to the control columns which remained aft of neutral position. The left indicated airspeed increased from approximately 305 kt to approximately 340 kt (VMO). The right indicated airspeed was approximately 20-25 kt higher than the left."

Note that the pilots were getting conflicting airspeed readings (the difference would eventually grow to around 50 kt).

There is nothing in the report that suggests that either of the pilots opened the throttles, and by the time the "overspeed clacker" started its warning the pilots had rather more pressing problems to deal with.

I don't quite understand why this isn't addressed in the report: the pilots set the speed to 238 kt, and if they then opened the throttles the report should have said so (it doesn't). But if they didn't touch the throttle then what accounts for the speed being at 305 kt (rather than 238 kt) when the plane started its first dive?

Ghost Ship , Apr 5, 2019 8:07:11 PM | link
>>>> SteveK9 | Apr 5, 2019 3:26:36 PM | 40
There is a mountain of information out there if one wants to look ... and I don't mean Greenpeace (although the founder, Patrick Moore is currently a supporter of nuclear power).

No, Patrick Moore was not the founder of Greenpeace :

Patrick Moore Did Not Found Greenpeace
Patrick Moore frequently portrays himself as a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace, and many news outlets have repeated this characterization. Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace. Phil Cote, Irving Stowe, and Jim Bohlen founded Greenpeace in 1970. Patrick Moore applied for a berth on the Phyllis Cormack in March, 1971 after the organization had already been in existence for a year.
karlof1 , Apr 5, 2019 8:07:43 PM | link
Vietnam Vet #@51--

Thanks for confirming that the retribution I prescribe @36 is right and proper as is what must follow. Only one quibble with your comment, the death trap MAXs should never, ever again be certified as airworthy as they clearly are not .

UnionHorse , Apr 5, 2019 8:12:05 PM | link
Meme Change, consider speaking of the

Pentagon Complex.

MIC is unknown. Link to Ike's Farewell early and often.

Speak the names of every contractor, not just Lockheed, etc... Get the list out of them...

Cheers to naming the Pentagon Complex

My very best regards to all,

Arioch , Apr 5, 2019 8:27:33 PM | link
> I forgot the plant name ... you could look it up

@SteveK9 | Apr 5, 2019 3:26:36 PM | 40

It was all the same. Fukushima Dai-Ichi (Number One) was the Nuclear Power Plant consisting of 6 "Reactor Buildings"

#1 was relatively small, US-designed US-built one. It had passive residual cooling - gravity-powered water flow from the tank.

#2 was larger reactor in the same Mark-1 containment, US-designed and US-buit. The residual cooling though could not be gravity-driven. It required the pump (or maybe there was a way to set temperature-driven convection, if valves could be put right - i heard it but did not dig into it)

Obviously, USA does not care about tsunami-driven floods: USA has enough soil to build NPPs away from sea shores.

#3 and #4 were those larger reactors in more modern containment, US-designed but build by Japanese companies. Japanese did know what tsunami is, but they dared not to deviate from USA designs until they make succesfulyl working verbatim coopies.

#5 and #6 were Japanese-built after they got experience with #3 and #4 and proived they can do verbatim copies. Those latter blocks were altered: for #1 to #4 shore ground was removed to almost ocean sea levelm as close to the shorelines earth was considered wet and unreliable, but #5 and #6 were instead moved away from the sea enough to earth be stable even on elevation.

When the wave came, blocks #1 to $4 were flooded (with their electric circuits probably located in basements a la Americana, thus immediately got short-circuited with salted sea water), and diesels were located immediately at water edge with all the consequences for the communications. Blocks #5 and #6, located away from the sea shopre and on elevated grounds, and their diesels located near them, were not reached by the tsunami.

P.S. but people still repeat old propaganda about Chernobyl being sabotaged by suicidal operating crew, what do you want... When people read MSM they do not care much what exactly happened, so they just swallow it without labour of critical acclaim. If much later they suddenly grow interested in some issues - their "point of view" is already long internalized, so they do search relentlessly now - but for ideas supporting their pre-formed cognitive bias.

P.P.S. I agree though that hi-jacking Boeing-related thread for in-depth discussion of NP issues would be not proper to do.

Arioch , Apr 5, 2019 8:33:40 PM | link
> it is merely saying the downward force on the tail was now less than that required

Posted by: bbbar | Apr 5, 2019 6:04:28 PM | 46

That was what i settled upon too, in the end.
But the way infographics worded it was baflfing at least.

They probably simplified words to keep the mdigestible for laymen? But well, they overdid, greatly.

karlof1 , Apr 5, 2019 8:39:49 PM | link
Ralph Nader on "Boeing's Homicides . Why is it that only he and I seem to understand:

"THE BOEING 737 MAX MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO FLY AGAIN." {Emphasis original]

The discussion here resembles that being conducted by Boeing to exonerate itself. The MAX was purposely designed to be unsafe. Nader puts it thusly:

" The overriding problem is the basic unstable design of the 737 Max. An aircraft has to be stall proof not stall prone . An aircraft manufacturer like Boeing, notwithstanding its past safety record, is not entitled to more aircraft disasters that are preventable by following long-established aeronautical engineering practices and standards." [My Emphasis]

Trying to fix something so fundamentally broken that people with priceless lives are jeopardized if the fix(es) fail is so utterly immoral words fail to detail just how deep that immorality is. It's not just Righteous Indignation or even Righteous Indignation on Steroids--it goes well beyond that to the utterly dysfunctional immorality of placing profit over the safety of something money cannot buy or replace-- PEOPLE'S LIVES .

james , Apr 5, 2019 8:55:15 PM | link
i agree with nader.... thanks karlof1..
psychohistorian , Apr 5, 2019 9:15:44 PM | link
@ karlof1 with the Nader quote

You know that I and others agree as well with your strong sentiments.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out as a telltale of empire's demise or resilience.

It is not just the 737 Max that I would stay off. Think about the profit mentality that built/allowed the Max to go forward and extrapolate that to the replacement parts for all the other Boeing planes. Do people not understand that the same mentality of profit over safety that brought down the 737 Max is putting other, considered more reliable, Boeing planes at risk....for a few pennies more

Americans are brainwashed into believing that profit belongs between them and good health care so it could be described as a slippery slope to write of 99% of humans not valuing their lives very highly......because brainwashed by TV is my observation

So , Apr 5, 2019 9:26:33 PM | link
There are people in Boeing that need to see the inside of a prison cell forever.
I remember in 2008 during the recession depression seeing an idiot at the beach wearing a Goldman Sachs t shirt. I looked at the idiot in disbelief saying nothing. The next time I see an idiot in SC/Georgia I will not be holding my tongue. "Relentlessly focused on safety" my ass. The crapification continues.
So , Apr 5, 2019 9:31:35 PM | link
Their money and profits are more important than our lives. That's where we are and its all we need to know
S , Apr 5, 2019 9:31:37 PM | link
And the "AoA Disagree" indicator is not even a physical light indicator, as I initially thought, but a purely software feature for the primary flight display ! Unbelievable! 346 people had to die because someone decided to charge an exorbitant fee for a few lines of code that basically consist of two conditionals, a timer variable, and a bitmap blit call.
dh-mtl , Apr 5, 2019 9:35:14 PM | link
On March 12, in a comment posted on MOA, I wrote:

'It looks like the 55 year old 737 air-frame design, which is very low to the ground when compared to more modern designs, is incompatible with the bigger engines required for fuel efficiency.

Being very low to the ground, Boeing was forced to put the engines out in front, which upset the airplane's balance, making the plane essentially unstable. To counter the instability they added the 'MCAS?' control system.

This solution violates a fundamental tenant of design for safety-critical systems. The tenant of 'fail-safe'. If something goes wrong the system is supposed to fail in a manner that preserves safety. For the 737 Max, when the this stability control system fails, the plane is fundamentally unstable. For this system it is not 'fail-safe'. It is 'fail-crash'.'

This is pretty much in agreement with (Posted by: karlof1 | Apr 5, 2019 8:39:49 PM | 58).

I fully agree with the sentiment that this plane should never fly again. I can't imagine any thinking person volunteering to get on to such a fundamentally flawed aircraft.

Zachary Smith , Apr 5, 2019 9:57:18 PM | link
@ Meshpal #38
That is a true statement, but with so many things going wrong – you need to understand that it is a basic instinct of pilots to keep engine power up so you can climb and get out of trouble.

Very basic: Power = Good and No-Power = Bad.

This is what I've heard for as long as I've been reading about airplanes. A search turned up some "sayings" popular with pilots.

It's best to keep the pointed end going forward as much as possible.

The only time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire.

Speed is life, altitude is life insurance. No one has ever collided with the sky.

If you're gonna fly low, do not fly slow! ASW pilots know this only too well.

I've just visited a West Australian newspaper - the one where the brand spanking new Aviation Editor spoke of stupid pilots and unbearably wonderful Boeing. They have a new essay about the Report, but 1) the jackass troll for Boeing has been given a minder in the form of a co-author, and 2) the article plays it straight this time.

Boeing admits 737 software was factor in crashes

The Ethiopian crew performed all of the procedures provided by Boeing but was unable to control the aircraft.

ben , Apr 5, 2019 10:02:06 PM | link
Just more death by deregulation. What's a few hundred deaths compared to Trillions in profits?

This equation extends through most of the U$A's corporate mindset...

Bob , Apr 5, 2019 11:03:17 PM | link
Now with Ralph Nader aboard lets hope that Boeing will have to pay a very high fine https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.5084648/ralph-nader-lost-his-grandniece-in-the-ethiopian-airlines-crash-now-he-s-taking-on-boeing-1.5084655

In case nobody came up with this information up to now, also the US Military doesn't let their pilots fly the new delivered KC-46 tankers https://www.stripes.com/news/loose-tools-and-debris-left-during-manufacturing-led-to-grounding-of-kc-46-tankers-1.570889

The problems of the B737 Max are not a disaster for Boeing, but for the over 300 fatalities.
They lost no shareholder value or return, they lost their lives.
They are also certainly not represented by expensive top lawyers like Boeing itself, who can then mitigate, delay or even completely avert the consequences of Boeing's decisions.
They, the people (who had confidence in American technology/products), crashed on the ground, burned or plunged into the sea without ever having had the slightest chance of averting the disaster.

Grieved , Apr 6, 2019 12:01:45 AM | link
@66 ben

"death by deregulation"

Perfect description.

~~

@67 Bob

Interesting story you linked on the Boeing KC-46. The Air Force pilots won't fly it because the loose tools and debris they found in the planes raised doubts about the planes manufacturing integrity. The crisis was/is one degree (of four graduated degrees of seriousness) away from shutting down the production line completely.

What's key is how Boeing proceeded to address the problem: by taking employee time away from production in order to perform final inspection, i.e. quality control. Which makes it clear where the original quality control was lost, by being absorbed into production, to make more product per employee hour.

And this is just one, visible part of the process, where we can observe concrete examples of inadequate QC.

Commenters here who point to these plane crashes as a failure in the integrity of Boeing itself are exactly correct. The flawed plane built by the flawed company was an inevitable fruit of the poisoned tree.

And I agree that one would be mad to trust anything bearing Boeing's name ever again. One would be wise also to look for similar poisoned trees in all fields, and thread one's way cautiously though this perilous, neoliberalized world.

stuart dodd , Apr 6, 2019 12:25:48 AM | link
Posted by: Bart Hansen | Apr 5, 2019 3:51:35 PM | 42

So the jack screw that manually controls the stabilizer did not work due to high speed. Isn't that what hydraulics are for?

By design.

The screw is designed to work within certain criteria.
1.Load,caused by thick or thin air pressure depending on altitude, on the moving part.
2. Speed, which again increases the load depending on the planes speed through the air, on the moving part.

The speed and altitude are known from the panes onboard sensors.

Great load will possibly damage or break away the moving part, leading to an uncontrollable crash.

Hence use of the jack screw adjustment, by the hydraulic system, will only be available within its design envelope of load and speed.

james , Apr 6, 2019 12:53:13 AM | link
yeah ben... perfect description as grieved notes...

"@66 ben

"death by deregulation"

Perfect description."

no one will be held accountable...

[Apr 05, 2019] Ilargi Meijer Boeing's Problem Is Not Software

Apr 05, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Ilargi Meijer: Boeing's Problem Is Not Software

by Tyler Durden Thu, 04/04/2019 - 20:45 65 SHARES Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

We had already been told that in the Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 crash which killed all 157 people on board, the 4-month old 737 MAX 8's anti-stall software reengaged itself four times in 6 minutes as the pilots struggled to straighten the plane post-takeoff. In the end, the anti-stall software won and pushed the plane nose-down towards the earth. Now, Ethiopia -finally?!- released its report in the March 10 crash:

Minister of Transport Dagmawit Moges said that the crew of the Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on 10 March "performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer but were not able to control the aircraft." As result, investigations have concluded that Boeing should be required to review the so-called manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system on its 737 Max aircraft before the jets are permitted to fly again, she said.

The results of the preliminary investigation led by Ethiopia's Accident Investigation Bureau and supported by European investigators were presented by Ms Moges at a press conference in Addis Ababa on Thursday morning.

Ethiopia is being kind to Boeing. However, though the anti-stall software played a big role in what happened, Boeing's assertion (hope?!) that a software fix is all that is needed to get the 737MAX's back in the air around the globe rests on very shaky ground (no pun intended whatsoever).

737 MAX 8. The angle-of- attack (AOA) sensor is the lower device below the cockpit windshield on both sides of the fuselage. (Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times)

The Seattle Times did an article on March 26 that explains a lot more than all other articles on the topic combined. The paper of course resides in Boeing's backyard, but can that be the reason we haven't seen the article quoted all over?

If the assertions in the article are correct, it would appear that a software fix is the least of Boeing's problems. For one thing, it needs to address serious hardware, not software, issues with its planes. For another, the company better hire a thousand of the world's best lawyers for all the lawsuits that will be filed against it.

Its cost-cutting endeavors may well be responsible for killing a combined 346 people in the October 29 Lion Air crash and the Ethiopian Airlines one. Get a class-action suit filed in the US and Boeing could be fighting for survival.

Here's what the Seattle Times wrote 9 days ago:

Lack Of Redundancies On Boeing 737 MAX System Baffles Some Involved In Developing The Jet

Boeing has long embraced the power of redundancy to protect its jets and their passengers from a range of potential disruptions, from electrical faults to lightning strikes. The company typically uses two or even three separate components as fail-safes for crucial tasks to reduce the possibility of a disastrous failure. Its most advanced planes, for instance, have three flight computers that function independently, with each computer containing three different processors manufactured by different companies . So even some of the people who have worked on Boeing's new 737 MAX airplane were baffled to learn that the company had designed an automated safety system that abandoned the principles of component redundancy, ultimately entrusting the automated decision-making to just one sensor -- a type of sensor that was known to fail.

That one paragraph alone is so potentially damaging it's hard to fathom why everyone's still discussing a software glitch.

Boeing's rival, Airbus, has typically depended on three such sensors. "A single point of failure is an absolute no-no," said one former Boeing engineer who worked on the MAX, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the program in an interview with The Seattle Times. "That is just a huge system engineering oversight. To just have missed it, I can't imagine how." Boeing's design made the flight crew the fail-safe backup to the safety system known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. The Times has interviewed eight people in recent days who were involved in developing the MAX, which remains grounded around the globe in the wake of two crashes that killed a total of 346 people.

The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) was already a late addition that Boeing had not planned for initially. They wanted a plane that was so like older ones that no training would be needed, but did put a much heavier engine in it, which was why MCAS was needed. As I wrote earlier today, they cut corners until there was no corner left. On hardware, on software, on pilot training (simulator), everything was done to be cheaper than Airbus.

The angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor of the 737 MAX is the bottom piece of equipment below just below the cockpit windshield. (Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)

A faulty reading from an angle-of-attack sensor (AOA) -- used to assess whether the plane is angled up so much that it is at risk of stalling -- is now suspected in the October crash of a 737 MAX in Indonesia, with data suggesting that MCAS pushed the aircraft's nose toward Earth to avoid a stall that wasn't happening. Investigators have said another crash in Ethiopia this month has parallels to the first.

Boeing has been working to rejigger its MAX software in recent months, and that includes a plan to have MCAS consider input from both of the plane's angle-of-attack sensors, according to officials familiar with the new design. "Our proposed software update incorporates additional limits and safeguards to the system and reduces crew workload," Boeing said in a statement. But one problem with two-point redundancies is that if one sensor goes haywire, the plane may not be able to automatically determine which of the two readings is correct , so Boeing has indicated that the MCAS safety system will not function when the sensors record substantial disagreement.

The underlying idea is so basic and simple it hurts: safety come in groups of three: three flight computers that function independently, with each computer containing three different processors manufactured by different companies , and three sensors. The logic behind this is so overwhelming it's hard to see how anyone but a sociopathic accountant can even ponder ditching it.

And then here come the clinchers:

Some observers, including the former Boeing engineer, think the safest option would be for Boeing to have a third sensor to help ferret out an erroneous reading, much like the three-sensor systems on the airplanes at rival Airbus. Adding that option, however, could require a physical retrofit of the MAX.

See? It's not a software issue. It's hardware, and in all likelihood not just computer hardware either.

Clincher no. 2:

Andrew Kornecki, a former professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who has studied redundancy systems in Airbus and Boeing planes, said operating the automated system with one or two sensors would be fine if all the pilots were sufficiently trained in how to assess and handle the plane in the event of a problem. But, he said, if he were designing the system from scratch, he would emphasize the training while also building the plane with three sensors.

The professor is not 100% honest, I would think. There is zero reason to opt for a two-sensor system, and 1001 reasons not to. It's all just about cost being more important than people. That last bit explains why Boeing went there against better judgment:

[..] Boeing had been exploring the construction of an all-new airplane earlier this decade. But after American Airlines began discussing orders for a new plane from Airbus in 2011, Boeing abruptly changed course , settling on the faster alternative of modifying its popular 737 into a new MAX model. Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing engineer who worked on designing the interfaces on the MAX's flight deck, said managers mandated that any differences from the previous 737 had to be small enough that they wouldn't trigger the need for pilots to undergo new simulator training.

That left the team working on an old architecture and layers of different design philosophies that had piled on over the years, all to serve an international pilot community that was increasingly expecting automation. "It's become such a kludge, that we started to speculate and wonder whether it was safe to do the MAX," Ludtke said. Ludtke didn't work directly on the MCAS, but he worked with those who did. He said that if the group had built the MCAS in a way that would depend on two sensors, and would shut the system off if one fails, he thinks the company would have needed to install an alert in the cockpit to make the pilots aware that the safety system was off.

There you go: A two-sensor system is fundamentally unsound, and it's therefore bonkers to even discuss, let alone contemplate it.

And if that happens, Ludtke said, the pilots would potentially need training on the new alert and the underlying system. That could mean simulator time, which was off the table. "The decision path they made with MCAS is probably the wrong one," Ludtke said. "It shows how the airplane is a bridge too far."

Kudos to the Seattle Times for their research. And yeah, we get it, at over 5000 orders for the plane, which costs $121 million each, there's big money involved. Here's hoping that Boeing will find out in the courts just how much.

[Apr 05, 2019] Additional Software Issue Discovered In Boeing 737 MAX

Apr 05, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

The preliminary report contains flight data recorder information indicating the airplane had an erroneous angle of attack sensor input that activated the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) function during the flight, as it had during the Lion Air 610 flight.

To ensure unintended MCAS activation will not occur again, Boeing has developed and is planning to release a software update to MCAS and an associated comprehensive pilot training and supplementary education program for the 737 MAX.

As previously announced, the update adds additional layers of protection and will prevent erroneous data from causing MCAS activation. Flight crews will always have the ability to override MCAS and manually control the airplane.

Boeing continues to work with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other regulatory agencies worldwide on the development and certification of the software update and training program.

Boeing also is continuing to work closely with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as technical advisors in support of the AIB investigation. As a party providing technical assistance under the direction of investigating authorities, Boeing is prevented by international protocol and NTSB regulations from disclosing any information relating to the investigation. In accordance with international protocol, information about the investigation is provided only by investigating authorities in charge.

* * *

Update (1100ET) : Ethiopian investigators have called on Boeing to carry out a full review of the anti-stall system on its 737 Max aircraft after finding pilots of a plane that crashed near Addis Ababa last month had followed the stipulated emergency procedures but were unable to save the aircraft.

Key highlights from the report make it very clear this is Boeing's problem...

As The FT reports, Ethiopian minister of transport Dagmawit Moges called on the embattled aircraft manufacturer to carry out a full review of the anti-stall system on its 737 Max aircraft before they are allowed to fly again , after finding that the pilots were not to blame for the crash last month.

Boeing stock is higher somehow on the back of all this??

Presumably trade hype/hope trumps crash liabilities.

Read the Full Report here...

[Apr 05, 2019] U.S. lawsuit filed against Boeing over Ethiopian Airlines crash - Reuters

Apr 05, 2019 | www.reuters.com

A lawsuit against Boeing Co was filed in U.S. federal court on Thursday in what appeared to be the first suit over a March 10 Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash that killed 157 people.

The lawsuit was filed in Chicago federal court by the family of Jackson Musoni, a citizen of Rwanda, and alleges that Boeing, which manufactures the 737 MAX, had defectively designed the automated flight control system.

Boeing said it could not comment on the lawsuit.

"Boeing ... is working with the authorities to evaluate new information as it becomes available," it said, adding all inquiries about the ongoing accident investigation must be directed to the investigating authorities.

The 737 MAX planes were grounded worldwide following the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, which came five months after a Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people.

Boeing said on Wednesday it had reprogrammed software on its 737 MAX to prevent erroneous data from triggering an anti-stall system that is facing mounting scrutiny in the wake of two deadly nose-down crashes in the past five months.

The planemaker said the anti-stall system, which is believed to have repeatedly forced the nose lower in at least one of the accidents, in Indonesia last October, would only do so once per event after sensing a problem, giving pilots more control.

The crash of Boeing's passenger jet in Ethiopia raised the chances that families of the victims, even non-U.S. residents, will be able to sue in U.S. courts, where payouts are much larger than in other countries, some legal experts have said.

Wednesday's complaint was filed by Musoni's three minor children, who are Dutch citizens residing in Belgium.

The lawsuit says Boeing failed to warn the public, airlines and pilots of the airplane's allegedly erroneous sensors, causing the aircraft to dive automatically and uncontrollably.

Ethiopian officials and some analysts have said the Ethiopian Airlines jet behaved in a similar pattern as the 737 MAX involved in October's Lion Air disaster. The investigation into the March crash, which is being led by the Ethiopian Transport Ministry, is still at an early stage.

[Apr 03, 2019] Bad News For Boeing Preliminary Report Shows Anti-Stall Software Sealed Flight ET302's Fate

Apr 03, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Bad News For Boeing: Preliminary Report Shows Anti-Stall Software Sealed Flight ET302's Fate

by Tyler Durden Wed, 04/03/2019 - 08:06 251 SHARES

Thought it hasn't been publicly released yet, a preliminary report on the circumstances that caused flight ET302 to plunge out of the sky just minutes after takeoff was completed earlier this week, and some of the details have leaked to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. And for Boeing shareholders, the findings aren't pretty.

Appearing to contradict Boeing's insistence that procedures for deactivating its MCAS anti-stall software were widely disseminated, and that pilots at airlines around the world had been trained on these procedures, WSJ reported that the pilots of ET302 successfully switched off MCAS as they struggled to right the plane after the software had automatically tipped its nose down. As they struggled to right the plane, the pilots ended up reactivating the software, while trying a few other steps from their training, before the plane began its final plunge toward a field outside Addis Ababa, where the ensuing crash killed all 157 people on board.

Though the pilots deviated from Boeing's emergency checklist as they tried to right the plane, investigators surmised that they gave up on the procedures after they failed to right the plane. But when MCAS reengaged, whether intentionally, or on accident, it pushed the nose of the plane lower once again.

The pilots on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 initially reacted to the emergency by shutting off power to electric motors driven by the automated system, these people said, but then appear to have re-engaged the system to cope with a persistent steep nose-down angle. It wasn't immediately clear why the pilots turned the automated system back on instead of continuing to follow Boeing's standard emergency checklist, but government and industry officials said the likely reason would have been because manual controls to raise the nose didn't achieve the desired results.

After first cranking a manual wheel in the cockpit that controls the same movable surfaces on the plane's tail that MCAS had affected, the pilots turned electric power back on, one of these people said. They began to use electric switches to try to raise the plane's nose, according to these people. But the electric power also reactivated MCAS, allowing it to continue its strong downward commands, the people said.

Reuters , which was also the recipient of leaks from investigators, offered a slightly different version of events. It reported that MCAS was reengaged four times as pilots scrambled to right the plane, and that investigators were looking into the possibility that the software might have reengaged without prompting from the pilots.

After the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people back in October, Boeing and the FAA published a bulletin reminding pilots to follow the emergency procedures to deactivate the software if a faulty sensor - like the one that is believed to have contributed to the Lion Air crash - feeds erroneous data to the system.

The data show the pilots maneuvered the plane back upward twice before deactivating the software. But between the two reports, one detail is made abundantly clear. The software's reengagement is what doomed everybody aboard. That is an unequivocally bad look for Boeing, which has been deflecting questions about the software's bugs, and gaps in the dissemination of its training materials, while working on an update that the company says will make the software less reliant on automated systems.

ersl , 3 hours ago link

The aviation industry has been trying to make the human pilots obsolete, just as in so many industries. But they all do their, these days, their R & D on the job. Recall the Amazon Robot that went berserk recently. The idea is to rid all industry of people progressively so that they can end up not needing people at all. They'll end up with nothing. Some how they think that if they take people out then profits will be assured, which is actually psychotic. They have had remote auto pilot for 7 decades now. They can bring down any aircraft at will, and do so regularly. They can shut down or affect engines remotely, or alter the actions as is imbedded into just about all new machinery, other than knives, forks and spoons. Yet they still need consumers and workers to create hedged exchange to profit from. That is the dilemma industry owners are facing, that without pesky people they are doomed as much as the doom they are creating for even their own off spring = psychosis.

[Apr 02, 2019] In 737MAX the pilot simply cannot take full control the aircraft when he needs to do so. Hence the pilots in the 737MAX cases scrambling to work through the problem by checklist, if you're doing this something is going wrong and will be wrong.

Apr 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Gravatomic , Apr 1, 2019 11:23:03 AM | 66 ">link

The 757 and 767 are a more obvious airframe to build upon, as a response to the Airbus the new 737MAX design was very poorly thought out, it's airframe vs. engine placement and thrust. Having trained on Boeing 767-300ERs myself a pilot becomes very in tune with it's quirks and it does have them, speed bugs and so on.

When you watch certain aircraft taking off in routine operations, unreasonable angles of attack V-speed, now many pilots will engage 1 autopilots minutes after take off while flaps are partially extended still(it stabalizes a positive rate of climb), this is so that the aircraft is more efficient, cost effective and reaches it's crusie altitude and destination on time.

The 767 has 3 autopilot computers, 2 of them receive data as to angle of attack and speed when the stall warning activates as the stick shakes, the autopilots are off, period, no more input from the computers other than warnings - these too can often lead to confusion and sometimes with fatal results.

Sometimes you will re-engage one after you've corrected the airspeed (nose down) and stall to regain and maintain a efficient airflow lift. Although in some cases the pitot tubes malfunction to due ice, so trusting what the machine was telling the pilots can be fatal.

[In 737MAX] The pilot simply cannot take full control the aircraft when he needs to do so. Hence the pilots in the 737MAX cases scrambling to work through the problem by checklist, if you're doing this something is going wrong and will be wrong.

Ever notice the difference between a soft smooth landing and a 'rough one' that shakes passengers - note these are totally normal landings, the computer assisted ones in clear blue skies and calm winds are not.

That's the pilots on a VFR or visual landing which the computer usually tries to interfere with, if a hybrid semi-assisted landing, especially on an ILS glideslope in bad weather.

A pilot should know these skills but many now do not. They have to rely on the input from the computers and Boeing tried unsuccessfully to introduce this new MCAS system seamlessly, when you've got 3 autopilots why is only 1 receiving the flight data of angle of attack and v-speed?!

[Mar 31, 2019] EU Agency Said to Have Skipped 737 Max Meeting in Snub to Boeing

Mar 31, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

There was a prominent no-show among the 200 regulators, pilots and airline managers that Boeing Co. invited to preview a crucial software update for the 737 Max this week, said people familiar with the matter: European safety officials.

The planemaker is sending a team across the Atlantic to brief the European Union Aviation Safety Agency on the proposed changes after two of the jetliners plunged to the ground within five months, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Representatives of EASA didn't return requests for comment.

Intentional or not, EASA's snub points to the delicate politics Boeing faces in convincing regulators the Max is safe as the company seeks to restore confidence in its best-selling jet, which has been grounded for more than two weeks. The reputation of U.S. regulators has taken a hit in the scrutiny of the 737 Max's approval process, and foreign agencies are less likely to rubber-stamp aircraft certifications simply because they have been cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration.

EASA is expected to play an influential role in determining how long and complicated the review of the Max will be, while safety officials from China to Canada have vowed to conduct their own rigorous analysis.

"EASA's determination should be important for the rest of the world, given its sophistication and perceived independence," Seth Seifman, analyst with JPMorgan Chase & Co., said in a note to clients.

A spokesman for the FAA declined to comment.

'Productive' Sessions

"We had productive information sessions this week and continue to work closely with our customers and regulators on software and training updates for the 737 Max," Boeing spokesman Paul Bergman said by email.

As of late Friday, the Chicago-based planemaker was still finishing up paperwork needed to certify a software upgrade and revised pilot training for the 737 Max. One prominent pilots union criticized the proposed training as insufficient.

The software changes, intended to prevent stall-prevention software from engaging in normal flight, have been in the works since the system pointed a Lion Air jet's nose downward about two dozen times before pilots lost control Oct. 29. That accident killed 189 people, while 157 died when an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crashed March 10.

While certifying the software upgrade is the first step toward returning the Max to flight, it doesn't assure the grounding will be speedily lifted by the FAA or its counterparts around the world. The EU, China and Canada all grounded the 737 Max more quickly than the FAA in the wake of the Ethiopian crash.

Software Changes

The break between FAA and overseas authorities on the initial decision to ground the plane, combined with worldwide public furor and a U.S. criminal probe of the Max certification, "all make it hard for us to see how foreign regulators can avoid coming back with their own questions and doing some of their own due diligence," Seifman said in his report.

Crash investigators suspect that a damaged or malfunctioning sensor triggered anti-stall technology in the Ethiopian Airlines plane, Bloomberg reported Friday. Investigators think that caused the plane's nose to point downward, and the pilots struggled to counteract the software-based system, according to people familiar with the crash probe. That scenario would be similar to the crash that brought down the Lion Air flight last year in Indonesia.

Click here to read Bloomberg's report on the sensor investigators are focusing on.

Boeing is planning software revisions that restrict the number of times the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, kicks in to a single interaction. The update is also designed so that MCAS can't command the horizontal stabilizer to push a plane's nose down with more force than what pilots can counter by pulling back on the steering column.

The enhancements appeared to work as billed, said pilots who viewed demonstrations of the upgrades by company test pilots in flight simulators at the event March 27 in Renton, Washington.

"We were confident flying the aircraft in its present state," said Roddy Guthrie, American Airlines Group Inc. 's 737 fleet captain, who was at the Boeing briefings. The improvements "were needed. They've put some checks and balances in the system now that will make the system much better."

Simulator Demonstrations

Still, Boeing representatives faced caustic comments from some at the Wednesday session, said one of the people familiar with the discussions. As Boeing test pilots demonstrated old and new versions of MCAS, attendees were especially interested in re-enacting the sequence of events leading to the Lion Air crash, the person said. Pilots also demonstrated how the 737 Max would behave if an angle-of-attack vane was sheared off by, say, a bird strike.

Click to read how Boeing rival Airbus is treading carefully with the 737 Max grounded.

One pilot group walked away from the event feeling that Boeing needs to do more work on a new 30-minute iPad course, followed by a test, that is intended to help pilots of the older generation of 737 planes prepare for the Max. The newest version of Boeing's workhorse single-aisle jet debuted less than two years ago.

Pilots who saw the preliminary version of the training "characterized it as nice for an elementary level of understanding, but pilots will definitely need a more textured and layered instructional piece," said Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots at American. "That was the hands-down consensus."

Boeing was receptive to the comments, Tajer said.

-- With assistance by Alan Levin

[Mar 29, 2019] Boeing Doubles Down on 737 Max, Rejects Need for Simulator Training naked capitalism

Notable quotes:
"... Boeing compromised on sound engineering with the 737 Max . Recall the origins of the problem: Boeing was at risk of losing big orders to a more fuel-efficient Airbus model. Rather than sacrifice market share, Boeing put more fuel-efficient, larger engines on the existing 737 frames. The placement of the engine created a new safety risk, that under some circumstances, the plane could "nose up" at such a steep angle as to put it in a stall. The solution was to install software called MCAS which would force the nose down if the "angle of attack" became too acute. ..."
"... Merriam-Webster defines kludge -- sometimes spelled kluge -- as "a haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a computer or programming problem." Oxford defines it as, in computing, "A machine, system, or program that has been badly put together, especially a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem." ..."
"... In the case of the 737 Max, it's the combination of how two separate problems interacted -- a plane whose design introduced aerodynamics issues and what now appears to have been a poorly designed anti-stall system -- that seems to be drawing many to turn to Granholm's term. The problems were compounded in many ways, including by the fact that pilots were not told of or trained for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) before the Lion Air crash, which killed all 189 on board. ..."
"... "My concern is that Boeing may have developed the MCAS software as a profit-driven kludge to mitigate the Max 8's degraded flight characteristics due to the engine relocation required to maintain ground clearance," commented Philip Wheelock on a New York Times story about the plane's certification process this week. "Not convinced that software is an acceptable solution for an older design that has been pushed to its inherent aeronautical design limits." ..."
"... "Indeed, it seems the 737 MAX was a kludge to an existing design, and that MCAS was a kludge on top of that," said a commenter on Hackaday . ..."
"... Boeing has long embraced the power of redundancy to protect its jets and their passengers from a range of potential disruptions, from electrical faults to lightning strikes. The company typically uses two or even three separate components as fail-safes for crucial tasks to reduce the possibility of a disastrous failure. So even some of the people who have worked on Boeing's new 737 MAX airplane were baffled to learn that the company had designed an automated safety system that abandoned the principles of component redundancy, ultimately entrusting the automated decision-making to just one sensor -- a type of sensor that was known to fail. ..."
"... That no one who wrote the MCAS software for the 737 MAX seems to have even raised the issue of using multiple inputs, including the opposite angle of attack sensor, in the computer's determination of an impending stall is mind-blowing. ..."
"... As a lifetime member of the software development fraternity, I don't know what toxic combination of inexperience, hubris, or lack of cultural understanding led to this. But I do know that it's indicative of a much deeper and much more troubling problem. The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far out of their league and did not know it. How can we possibly think they can implement a software fix, much less give us any comfort whatsoever that the rest of the flight management software, which is ultimately in ultimate control of the aircraft, has any fidelity at all? ..."
"... And we're giving short shrift to how Boeing compounded the problem, for instance, by making it an upcharge to have the 737 Max have a light showing that its angle of attack sensors disagreed (the planes did have two, but bizarrely, only one would be giving data to the MCAS system on any day), or hiding the fact that there was a new safety automated safety system in two paragraphs after page 700 in the flight manual. ..."
"... It's about an airplane manufacturer that put engines on an airframe they weren't designed for, having to add a flight control override to guard against said airplane's new tendency to nose up, and then adding insult to injury by driving that system with a single sensor when two are available. Oh – and charging airlines extra for the privilege of their pilots being told when one of those sensors is providing bad data. ..."
"... Officials investigating the fatal crash of a Boeing Co. BA 0.06% 737 MAX in Ethiopia have reached a preliminary conclusion that a suspect flight-control feature automatically activated before the plane nose-dived into the ground, according to people briefed on the matter, the first findings based on data retrieved from the flight's black boxes. ..."
"... Boeing is doubling down on its mistakes . The lesson of the Tylenol poisoning is that if a company has a safety problem, even if it isn't its fault, it needs to do everything it can to rectify the defects and protect customers. If there is any doubt, the company needs to err of the side of safety. ..."
"... Here, unlike with Johnson & Johnson, the failings that led to 737 Max groundings all originated with Boeing. Yet rather than own the problems and go overboard on fixing them to restore confidence in the plane and in Boeing, Boeing is acting as if all it has to put in place are merely adequate measures. ..."
"... [Former Boeing engineer Mr. [Rick] Ludtke [who worked on 737 MAX cockpit features] recalled midlevel managers telling subordinates that Boeing had committed to pay the airline $1 million per plane if its design ended up requiring pilots to spend additional simulator time. "We had never, ever seen commitments like that before," he said. ..."
"... I hope the pilots in our readership speak up, but as a mere mortal, I've very uncomfortable with pilots being put in a position of overriding a system in emergency conditions when they haven't even test driven it. When I learn software, reading a manual is useless save for learning what the program's capabilities are. In order to be able to use it, I have to spend time with it, hands on. Computer professionals tell me the same thing. It doesn't seem likely that pilots are all that different. ..."
"... Boeing does not seem to comprehend that it is gambling with its future. What if international flight regulators use the Max 737 as a bloody flag and refuse to accept FAA certifications of Boeing planes, or US origin equipment generally? Do you think for a nanosecond that the European and Chinese regulators wouldn't use disregarding the FAA as a way to advance their interests? Europe would clearly give preference to Airbus, and the Chinese could use Boeing to punish the US for going after Huawei. ..."
"... And yet we do not see anyone suggesting the obvious solution to this problem; eliminating the 737 MAX type of aircraft altogether. ..."
"... I don't think that Boeing can afford to drop the 737 MAX. This aircraft was in response to the Airbus as they did not have any new aircraft designs on the boards to take it on. So they modified a 1970s design as a profitable stopgap solution. ..."
"... Boeing were designing a follow-on to the 737, but panicked when the A320Neo came and went for the MAX instead as they could deliver it much quicker and cheaper than a new aircraft. ..."
"... If its true that they are another example of a once great engineering company enslaved to the quarterly results, then it may well be that all work on the replacement stopped when they put their engineers to work on the MAX line. If that's the case, then they really are screwed. Ten years is an absolute minimum to get a brand new aircraft delivered to customers from a standing start. ..."
"... The newer versions of the 737 have nearly twice the max takeoff weight of the original, but with the same landing gear and nearly the same wing area. ..."
"... Airbus probably can't produce enough Neo to make up for the shortfall, but they essentially own the Bombardier C-Series now (ironically, made in Mobile, Alabama and relabelled the Airbus 220) which could prove an excellent investment by Airbus. ..."
"... Regarding the FAA I have read in Spanish press that Daniel Elwell declared in the congress (translated from Spanish) that "I can't believe that airline companies tried to save a few thousand dollars on a feature that increases safety". This is a bad try to shift blame from Boeing to airline companies and if anything will reduce (eliminate) the international confidence on FAA regulations. ..."
"... Managers telling this to engineers before a plane is designed is one thing. Telling it to them after the plane been designed but while its user interface is being designed is outrageous. ..."
"... And I think the plane actually has two (one on each side) , but for some reason, their inputs weren't combined. There's a slight subtlety that the air flow is 3 dimensional, so when the plane is turning, and particularly turning+climbing, the readings of the two might vary slightly – but that's for the software to sort out. They reportedly didn't hook both of them up to both flight computers – why is an interesting question. There's probably a practical reason, but ..."
"... What the folks at Boeing may not realise is that the more they double-down on this bizarre tactic of using spin-doctoring as a crisis management tool aimed at an audience that is rapidly losing trust in the company ( and frankly may no longer believe anything coming out of the corporate communications department at Boeing), the harder it's going to be to reverse course by coming out and saying "we screwed up and will do whatever it takes to fix this". This debacle has all the makings of a large scale cover up and the continued mala fide attempts to deflect focus away from taking ownership of and accountability for this crisis will only result in continued assault on an already battered reputation. ..."
"... As an aside, the malaise at the FAA has been much documented on these pages and elsewhere recently, from the egregious abdication of its regulatory responsibilities to Boeing to having a top position go unfilled for over a year, my question to US readers is whether a comparable level of capture by corporate interests has similarly defanged the FDA? ..."
Mar 29, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Boeing compromised on sound engineering with the 737 Max . Recall the origins of the problem: Boeing was at risk of losing big orders to a more fuel-efficient Airbus model. Rather than sacrifice market share, Boeing put more fuel-efficient, larger engines on the existing 737 frames. The placement of the engine created a new safety risk, that under some circumstances, the plane could "nose up" at such a steep angle as to put it in a stall. The solution was to install software called MCAS which would force the nose down if the "angle of attack" became too acute.

Before getting to today's updates, experts have deemed the 737 Max design to be unsound. For
The word "kludge" keeps coming up when pilots and engineers discuss Boeing's 737 Max , from Quartz:

Again and again, in discussions of what has gone wrong with Boeing's 737 Max plane in two deadly crashes within five months, an unusual word keeps coming up: kludge.

Merriam-Webster defines kludge -- sometimes spelled kluge -- as "a haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a computer or programming problem." Oxford defines it as, in computing, "A machine, system, or program that has been badly put together, especially a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem."

In the case of the 737 Max, it's the combination of how two separate problems interacted -- a plane whose design introduced aerodynamics issues and what now appears to have been a poorly designed anti-stall system -- that seems to be drawing many to turn to Granholm's term. The problems were compounded in many ways, including by the fact that pilots were not told of or trained for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) before the Lion Air crash, which killed all 189 on board.

"My concern is that Boeing may have developed the MCAS software as a profit-driven kludge to mitigate the Max 8's degraded flight characteristics due to the engine relocation required to maintain ground clearance," commented Philip Wheelock on a New York Times story about the plane's certification process this week. "Not convinced that software is an acceptable solution for an older design that has been pushed to its inherent aeronautical design limits."

"Indeed, it seems the 737 MAX was a kludge to an existing design, and that MCAS was a kludge on top of that," said a commenter on Hackaday .

Lambert found more damning takes, which he featured in Water Cooler yesterday. First from the Seattle Times :

Boeing has long embraced the power of redundancy to protect its jets and their passengers from a range of potential disruptions, from electrical faults to lightning strikes. The company typically uses two or even three separate components as fail-safes for crucial tasks to reduce the possibility of a disastrous failure. So even some of the people who have worked on Boeing's new 737 MAX airplane were baffled to learn that the company had designed an automated safety system that abandoned the principles of component redundancy, ultimately entrusting the automated decision-making to just one sensor -- a type of sensor that was known to fail. Boeing's rival, Airbus, has typically depended on three such sensors. "A single point of failure is an absolute no-no," said one former Boeing engineer who worked on the MAX, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the program in an interview with The Seattle Times. "That is just a huge system engineering oversight. To just have missed it, I can't imagine how."

And the second, from software developer Greg Travis who happens also to be a pilot and aircraft owner:

That no one who wrote the MCAS software for the 737 MAX seems to have even raised the issue of using multiple inputs, including the opposite angle of attack sensor, in the computer's determination of an impending stall is mind-blowing.

As a lifetime member of the software development fraternity, I don't know what toxic combination of inexperience, hubris, or lack of cultural understanding led to this. But I do know that it's indicative of a much deeper and much more troubling problem. The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far out of their league and did not know it. How can we possibly think they can implement a software fix, much less give us any comfort whatsoever that the rest of the flight management software, which is ultimately in ultimate control of the aircraft, has any fidelity at all?

Ouch.

And we're giving short shrift to how Boeing compounded the problem, for instance, by making it an upcharge to have the 737 Max have a light showing that its angle of attack sensors disagreed (the planes did have two, but bizarrely, only one would be giving data to the MCAS system on any day), or hiding the fact that there was a new safety automated safety system in two paragraphs after page 700 in the flight manual. As Wall Street Journal reader Erich Greenbaum said in comments on an older article, How Boeing's 737 MAX Failed :

No – this isn't about "planes that fly by themselves." It's about an airplane manufacturer that put engines on an airframe they weren't designed for, having to add a flight control override to guard against said airplane's new tendency to nose up, and then adding insult to injury by driving that system with a single sensor when two are available. Oh – and charging airlines extra for the privilege of their pilots being told when one of those sensors is providing bad data.

The 737 Max has gotten a bad name not just for itself but also for the airlines that were big buyers. Southwest had taken the most 737 Max deliveries, and American was second. I happened to be looking at American for flights last night. This is what I got when I went to aa.com:

I came back to the page later to make sure I hadn't hit the 737 Max message randomly, by loading the page just when that image came up in a cycle .and that doesn't appear to be the case. I landed on the 737 Max splash a second time.

This result suggests that American has gotten so many customer queries about the 737 Max that it felt it had to make providing information about it a priority. If you click through, the next page explains how all 737 Max planes have been grounded, that American is using other equipment to fly on routes previously scheduled for those planes, but it has still had to cancel 90 flights a day.

Evidence is mounting that the MCAS system was responsible for the Ethopian Air crash in addition to the Lion Air tragedy . From the Wall Street Journal this evening :

Officials investigating the fatal crash of a Boeing Co. BA 0.06% 737 MAX in Ethiopia have reached a preliminary conclusion that a suspect flight-control feature automatically activated before the plane nose-dived into the ground, according to people briefed on the matter, the first findings based on data retrieved from the flight's black boxes.

The emerging consensus among investigators, one of these people said, was relayed during a high-level briefing at the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday, and is the strongest indication yet that the same automated system, called MCAS, misfired in both the Ethiopian Airlines flight earlier this month and a Lion Air flight in Indonesia, which crashed less than five months earlier. The two crashes claimed 346 lives.

Boeing is doubling down on its mistakes . The lesson of the Tylenol poisoning is that if a company has a safety problem, even if it isn't its fault, it needs to do everything it can to rectify the defects and protect customers. If there is any doubt, the company needs to err of the side of safety.

Here, unlike with Johnson & Johnson, the failings that led to 737 Max groundings all originated with Boeing. Yet rather than own the problems and go overboard on fixing them to restore confidence in the plane and in Boeing, Boeing is acting as if all it has to put in place are merely adequate measures.

Reuters, which has a bias towards understatement, has an atypically pointed farming Boeing's refusal to recommend pilot simulator training for the MCAS:

Boeing Co said it will submit by the end of this week a training package that 737 MAX pilots are required to take before a worldwide ban can be lifted, proposing as it did before two deadly crashes that those pilots do not need time on flight simulators to safely operate the aircraft.

In making that assessment, the world's largest planemaker is doubling down on a strategy it promoted to American Airlines Group Inc and other customers years ago. Boeing told airlines their pilots could switch from the older 737NG to the new MAX without costly flight simulator training and without compromising on safety, three former Boeing employees said.

Specifically, the Wall Street Journal reported that Southwest, which is the biggest buyer of the 737 Max, got Boeing to agree to a financial penalty if the new plane required additional simulator training :

The company had promised Southwest Airlines Co. , the plane's biggest customer, to keep pilot training to a minimum so the new jet could seamlessly slot into the carrier's fleet of older 737s, according to regulators and industry officials.

[Former Boeing engineer Mr. [Rick] Ludtke [who worked on 737 MAX cockpit features] recalled midlevel managers telling subordinates that Boeing had committed to pay the airline $1 million per plane if its design ended up requiring pilots to spend additional simulator time. "We had never, ever seen commitments like that before," he said.

I've never flown Southwest and now I will make sure never to use them.

I hope the pilots in our readership speak up, but as a mere mortal, I've very uncomfortable with pilots being put in a position of overriding a system in emergency conditions when they haven't even test driven it. When I learn software, reading a manual is useless save for learning what the program's capabilities are. In order to be able to use it, I have to spend time with it, hands on. Computer professionals tell me the same thing. It doesn't seem likely that pilots are all that different.

In other words, Boeing's refusal to recommend simulator training looks to be influenced by avoiding triggering a $31 million penalty payment to Southwest. This is an insane back-assward sense of priorities. Boeing had over $10 billion in profits in 2018. A $31 million payment isn't material and would almost certainly be lower after tax.

Boeing does not seem to comprehend that it is gambling with its future. What if international flight regulators use the Max 737 as a bloody flag and refuse to accept FAA certifications of Boeing planes, or US origin equipment generally? Do you think for a nanosecond that the European and Chinese regulators wouldn't use disregarding the FAA as a way to advance their interests? Europe would clearly give preference to Airbus, and the Chinese could use Boeing to punish the US for going after Huawei.

Boeing's comeuppance is long overdue. The company's decision to break its union, outsource, and move to Chicago as a device for shedding seasoned employees was a clear statement of its plan to compromise engineering in the name of profit. Something like the Max 737 train wreck was bound to happen.


ambrit , March 29, 2019 at 4:51 am

And yet we do not see anyone suggesting the obvious solution to this problem; eliminating the 737 MAX type of aircraft altogether.

The crashes of the early de Havilland Comet commercial jet aircraft all but destroyed English commercial jet production. Boeing should suffer a similar fate as de Havilland. Indeed, since the Comet crashes were the result of a previously unsuspected design flaw, and Boeing's problems are self inflicted, Boeing should suffer a more drastic punishment.

The Rev Kev , March 29, 2019 at 5:12 am

I don't think that Boeing can afford to drop the 737 MAX. This aircraft was in response to the Airbus as they did not have any new aircraft designs on the boards to take it on. So they modified a 1970s design as a profitable stopgap solution.

If they dump the 737 MAX then they have nothing good to go for years. In that space of time Airbus would move in and take over many of Boeing's markets and there would be new aircraft from Russia and China coming online as well.

I do not think that it would destroy Boeing as the US government would bail it out first, but it would be a colossal setback. I doubt that they would end up on this list-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_aircraft_manufacturers_of_the_United_States

Jon D Rudd , March 29, 2019 at 9:05 am

I understand that it can take up to ten years to develop a new aircraft, but the basic design of the 737 has been around since the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" (!). Given that Airbus, like Avis, was going to be trying harder for more market share, was it totally beyond Boeing's capacity to develop a follow-on for the 737 over the past, say, 20 years?

PlutoniumKun , March 29, 2019 at 9:39 am

Boeing were designing a follow-on to the 737, but panicked when the A320Neo came and went for the MAX instead as they could deliver it much quicker and cheaper than a new aircraft. What I don't know is if they are still working on a replacement or if they shelved the plans entirely.

If its true that they are another example of a once great engineering company enslaved to the quarterly results, then it may well be that all work on the replacement stopped when they put their engineers to work on the MAX line. If that's the case, then they really are screwed. Ten years is an absolute minimum to get a brand new aircraft delivered to customers from a standing start.

scott 2 , March 29, 2019 at 7:51 am

The 737 was designed to be low to the ground because it was to serve small airports where the passengers had to climb stairs to enter (which I remember doing at Burbank and Ontario years ago) The 737 Max is what you would get if the 757 and 737 had a child. The newer versions of the 737 have nearly twice the max takeoff weight of the original, but with the same landing gear and nearly the same wing area.

Perhaps a shorter version of the 757 would have been the correct move, but Southwest would have screamed bloody murder.

Pilot and aircraft owner here.

John A , March 29, 2019 at 4:56 am

The problem for airlines is the need to have more energy efficient aircraft for both cost and environment pressure reasons. The 737 max is a response to the airbus 321neo, but as I understand it, Airbus does not have the capacity to takeover cancelled orders for the 737 max.

Do airlines stick with older 737 or brazen it out with Boeing that the max problems have been resolved? And passengers. I imagine they will fall into the brackets I will never fly on a 737 max, or I trust Boeing/airline, or a fatalistic if my number is up, my number is up'.

I regularly fly with Norwegian in Europe. However I for one will never fly a max and will now prefer SAS with the 321neo. As for Ryanair, that has max on order, if they take delivery, bye bye them.

Maybe the new Russian and Chinese versions can be an option? Or will Trump sanction any airline brave enough to order them instead of Boeing?

PlutoniumKun , March 29, 2019 at 5:34 am

Airbus probably can't produce enough Neo to make up for the shortfall, but they essentially own the Bombardier C-Series now (ironically, made in Mobile, Alabama and relabelled the Airbus 220) which could prove an excellent investment by Airbus.

There are four other potential competitors –

The French have a significant input to the Sukhoi, while Bombardier were involved with the Comac. None of those are direct replacements (they are generally smaller and shorter range), but they might suit many airlines who need aircraft quickly but won't touch the Max.

None of the above can match the Boeing or Airbus for state of the art engineering, but they are cheaper to buy, so they may well now be more attractive to budget airlines and third world airlines. The big one to look out for is Ryanair – they've long been Boeings biggest customer outside the US and have stuck with 737's consistently.

They will do their usual tactic of demanding huge discounts every time Boeing look weak, and no doubt they will do the same now. But they may decide to look elsewhere (especially as they don't really need the longer range as they operate exclusively in Europe). If they opt for something like the A220 or the Irkut, then that will be an enormous blow to Boeing, because others will follow Ryanairs lead.

The Rev Kev , March 29, 2019 at 5:49 am

PK, you said that the Sukhoi Superjet had significant French input. Does that mean physical components as well? If so, I would be surprised after the Mistral amphibious assault ships fiasco. On this topic, I saw this week how the French were taking out German components out of joint French-German weapons systems and replacing them with French ones as the Germans are wary about arming countries like Saudi Arabia and so have a say in these joint systems much to the disgust of the French, hence the swap-out so the French can continue to sell these systems.

PlutoniumKun , March 29, 2019 at 6:43 am

I was thinking of the engines , which are a joint project between a French and Russian company. Ironically, the core of the engine for the Sukhoi is the M88, the engine the French developed for the Rafaele fighter. The French are exceptionally good at using military research to help their commercial companies, and vice versa.

The French are also very ruthless (i.e. immoral) when it comes to export sales. This is why they usually only partner with the British, as they know the British share their rather loose definition of ethical policy in weapons sales. And they insist on Frenchifying their systems as much as they can so there is nobody to interfere with sales.

Ignacio , March 29, 2019 at 6:04 am

Kludge translates in spanish into "chapuza" and in my view expresses very well the "solution" that Boeing brougth to the 737 Max.

Regarding the FAA I have read in Spanish press that Daniel Elwell declared in the congress (translated from Spanish) that "I can't believe that airline companies tried to save a few thousand dollars on a feature that increases safety". This is a bad try to shift blame from Boeing to airline companies and if anything will reduce (eliminate) the international confidence on FAA regulations.

Ignacio , March 29, 2019 at 6:15 am

Boeing is doubling down on its mistakes. The lesson of the Tylenol poisoning is that if a company has a safety problem, even if it isn't its fault , it needs to do everything it can to rectify the defects and protect customers. If there is any doubt, the company needs to err of the side of safety.

And that might, precisely the difference between the Tylenol and the 737 MAX affairs. Boeing knows it is their fault and the blame feeling prevents them to act as rationally as Johnson&Johnson did.

allan , March 29, 2019 at 6:53 am

The Reuters article also says the following, which seems incredibly damning:

At Boeing's factory in Renton, Washington, managers told engineers working on the MAX, including its anti-stall system known as MCAS, their designs could not trigger Level C or D training designations from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the three former Boeing employees and a senior industry executive with knowledge of MAX development told Reuters. Otherwise, pilots would have to spend time in simulators before flying the new planes.

Managers telling this to engineers before a plane is designed is one thing. Telling it to them after the plane been designed but while its user interface is being designed is outrageous.

Ptb , March 29, 2019 at 7:56 am

Good review.

Certainly a relatively delicate sensor with external moving parts is a super obvious point of failure that any engineer would flag down instantly.

And I think the plane actually has two (one on each side) , but for some reason, their inputs weren't combined. There's a slight subtlety that the air flow is 3 dimensional, so when the plane is turning, and particularly turning+climbing, the readings of the two might vary slightly – but that's for the software to sort out. They reportedly didn't hook both of them up to both flight computers – why is an interesting question. There's probably a practical reason, but

Sometimes in industry what happens is you are updating a system or product, you don't want to re-certify your electronics (to make schedule or cost) , but you used all the input capacity on your logic systems/comms/wiring and still need more. So you have to "get creative" squeezing functionality into your legacy electronics. I really hope it wasn't something like that.

Jim A , March 29, 2019 at 8:11 am

ISTR that there was a crash in South America a few years back because both artificial horizons were getting info from a single pitot tube that had been taped over when the plane was being washed. The thing is, there was a switch in the cockpit to select whether the dual instruments were both using the left pitot, both the right one, or one on each. Using two sensors is not a new idea.

Jim A. , March 29, 2019 at 9:02 am

I mingled two accidents in my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copa_Airlines_Flight_201
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroper%C3%BA_Flight_603

John Beech , March 29, 2019 at 8:12 am

As a business owner who also happens to be a pilot and aircraft owner, I've been following this fiasco with great care. While not widely reported, Boeing submitted a software update to the FAA back in January. They're still dragging their feet and as a consequence, folks needlessly died the EA crash. To those who would say, "Nope, this is all on Boeing and the FAA for letting them run roughshod over the regulations!", let me share a bit of news with you to help you grok what dealing with the FAA is like.

Did you know AVGAS (aviation gasoline, e.g. the fuel used in the entire piston-powered fleet) still has lead in it? This, decades after MOGAS (motor vehicle gasoline, e.g. what we buy for our automobiles) was banned from using tetraethyl lead (TEL) as an antiknock compound!

Yet there's a drop in replacement available. Drop in meaning, refiners like Shell, Mobile, et al can begin mixing and distributing it using existing pipelines and trucks without so much as having to first clean the equipment or change anything whatsoever. So why isn't it used? It's because the FAA has been dragging their feet on approval. Put another way, the FAA would rather people continue being adversely affected by lead in the environment than fast tracking this.

http://www.gami.com/g100ul/news.php

Source? I know the owner of the company, and stand up guy if ever there was on, plus I've got friends who have flown with this fuel – extensively to help with testing. Bottom line? It works!

And while there's speculation this has to do with big oil not wanting to pay the patent holder and thus lobbying the FAA to obstruct permission, I'm not going down that rabbit hole. Suffice to say this stuff has been available for years and the patent clock is running down so you figure it out. Me? I do believe it's all about the Benjamins and am greatly saddened we're still damaging the environment when a replacement fuel is available we could begin using by next week! I kid you not.

Carolinian , March 29, 2019 at 8:59 am

Just to confirm, my town is on the Colonial pipeline that runs up the east coast and one of the local terminal's operators told me that they do add the lead for avgas here at the distribution facility. Switching to a different octane booster would be quite possible.

On the other hand I'm not sure the limited amount of leaded gas used by prop planes should be considered that big an environmental hazard (perhaps as someone who hangs around airports you feel differently).

Jim A. , March 29, 2019 at 8:14 am

–I'm guessing that sort of safety practice wasn't inculcated into the software engineers in the same way that it was for old school aerospace engineers. Software is often a poorly documented, partially tested black box.

oaf , March 29, 2019 at 8:17 am

Trim systems have been a part of airplanes from the earliest experiments with powered flight. They can be as simple as a bungee cord pulling on a stick, or as complex as multiple computers interacting in a *fly-by-wire* scenario. Pilots have to demonstrate more than awareness of these systems; they must demonstrate competency in their operation and oversight.They have been trained in how to identify, override, and compensate for malfunctions in any misbehaving flight control system in the aircraft for which they receive authorization. One big unknown here (in my mind) is whether a malfunctioning trim system would (or should) have been obvious to the flight crew. Another other big question is whether means of deactivation (not speaking of *override*) of the system was the same as in the previous 737 variants. Typically; this might involve pulling a labeled circuit breaker to remove power, and then manually adjusting a trim wheel on the console; or near the flight controls.

"an aircraft is a mechanical device; any component of which can fail" which I remember but increasingly; a COMPLEX electrical-mechanical device .with input from multiple people's minds and hands

The history of aircraft design and flight testing is full of unanticipated complications; frequently addressed by tweaks to details of structure and/or operational limits. The goal is to cover all possible permutations of problematic interactions of aircraft; environment, and human beings. There is a great deal of precedence in this topic.

the phrase *due diligence* comes to mind .

Thuto , March 29, 2019 at 8:17 am

What the folks at Boeing may not realise is that the more they double-down on this bizarre tactic of using spin-doctoring as a crisis management tool aimed at an audience that is rapidly losing trust in the company ( and frankly may no longer believe anything coming out of the corporate communications department at Boeing), the harder it's going to be to reverse course by coming out and saying "we screwed up and will do whatever it takes to fix this". This debacle has all the makings of a large scale cover up and the continued mala fide attempts to deflect focus away from taking ownership of and accountability for this crisis will only result in continued assault on an already battered reputation.

As an aside, the malaise at the FAA has been much documented on these pages and elsewhere recently, from the egregious abdication of its regulatory responsibilities to Boeing to having a top position go unfilled for over a year, my question to US readers is whether a comparable level of capture by corporate interests has similarly defanged the FDA? I only ask because I see a lot of supplements and other medicinal products sold here in South Africa with the "Approved by the US FDA" seal of approval and wonder whether deferring to US regulators by international regulatory bodies is still a good idea under the current climate.

oaf , March 29, 2019 at 8:32 am

The following statistical categories might generate interesting numbers.

#1: Total flight operations of all 737 types since introduction. (wheels up to wheels down)
#2: Same for Max variant in question.
#3: Difficulty reports filed for all 737 (flight related)
#4: Difficulty reports filed for Max (flight related)

TG , March 29, 2019 at 9:11 am

Boeing is, sadly, not making a 'mistake.' Boeing is too big to fail. Why should Boeing care?

EoH , March 29, 2019 at 9:30 am

Flight simulators are expensive and scheduling will likely be backed up, given the large number of existing and planned 737 Max aircraft. It's an important problem to fix, but not with the current workaround, which seems to be to use a tablet computer instead.

One would think a tablet computer would be a poor platform for a computer game, let alone to simulate flying a commercial aircraft with new s/w or h/w, the flight conditions under which they fail, and how to respond to them. All a tablet computer could simulate is turning the pages in the flight manual.

EoH , March 29, 2019 at 9:34 am

Your note should be a useful reminder to the current generation of executives at Johnson & Johnson.

They and their peers at other companies seem to have discarded the crisis management gold standard established by J & J during the Tylenol scare. It is cheaper, it seems, and provides fewer avenues of attack for the tort bar, to substitute scripts provided by the apology industry, which can trace its origins to that same Tylenol scare.

[Mar 29, 2019] Boeing Anti-Stall Software Mistakenly Activated Before Deadly Crash, Investigators Believe

Notable quotes:
"... All this is ignoring the real issue with complex aircraft today. To save money airlines pushed to eliminate the Flight Engineer. ..."
"... As the MCAS system has such authority to cause the plane to crash, a system like this should be quadruple-redundant to prevent a single source of bad data from causing a catastrophic loss of life. ..."
Mar 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Lysander Spooner , 2 minutes ago link

All this is ignoring the real issue with complex aircraft today. To save money airlines pushed to eliminate the Flight Engineer.

The one time this scenario was avoided was when a jump seat pilot saw what was going on. Both the captain and the co pilot had tunnel vision just trying to fly the damn plane. It's a myth modern aircraft are less complex the older generation aircraft that required a Flight Engineer. The computers work fine when everything is ok or the issue is straight forward but when complexity enters during an emergency its far more complex than any old piston or early jet aircraft.

None of these crashes would have occurred if a flight engineer was onboard. They have the big picture on the air-frame and train to know that air frame backwards an forwards. The pilots fly the aircraft while the flight engineer operates the systems.

Ask any qualified pilot these questions. You will get the same answer as above.

PriceAction , 4 minutes ago link

As the MCAS system has such authority to cause the plane to crash, a system like this should be quadruple-redundant to prevent a single source of bad data from causing a catastrophic loss of life.

This is compounded by the fact the pilots were unable to easily override the system and unable to know _why_ they could not control the plane when MCAS malfunctioned.

There should be outrage that this was allowed to go into production.

crazytechnician , 7 minutes ago link

These aircraft would be impossible to fly without automation. You would need at least 3 or 4 pilots and 15 engineers to keep on top of everything. There are hundreds of systems running in the background. Airbus A series for example have anywhere between 80 to 120 million lines of code depending on the type and configuration. Pilot's these days are computer terminal operators. Errors are unavoidable in software until they fail.

The trick is simulation , clearly Boeing did not simulate any of this , this aircraft should not have been certified.

olibur , 13 minutes ago link

All families on behalf of 350 victims must sue the lying Boeing.

terrific , 13 minutes ago link

The solution is less reliance on automation, at least not until AI is actually able to intervene when sensors and software malfunction, and ESPECIALLY not with aircraft, for God's sake.

pismobird , 13 minutes ago link

One H1b to anotherH1b, "I thought you were supposed to fix those 297 stubbed out error conditions on the MCAS stall sensor?" "No, I fixed the stubbed out error conditions on the SQUALL sensor!"

"It's right there on the assignment schedule."

"What's the matter can't you read English?"

( The H-1B is a visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H) that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. )

I got out of the coding business when they started putting these MFturkeys in charge!

Mactruck , 17 minutes ago link

This tragedy is as much about government corruption (FAA approvals) as it is about a POS company, it's shitbag execs, or third world pilots for that matter.

Rusticus2.0 , 19 minutes ago link

Without cross limiting; where 2 or more inputs cross reference each other and limit output if the variation exceeds a predetermined setpoint; Boeing employed a control system with a single point failure.

Analogous to a cars cruise control speeding up if the speedometer failed and registered zero mph.

Not if_ But When , 23 minutes ago link

I read that the Operator's Manual for this aircraft is 1400 pages. Is that possible? And if so, is this MCAS system info just hidden on page 419 like in a financial document? 1400 pages is almost as long as the cautions in a new drug advertisement. And I'm sure the technical translations for Indonesian and Ethiopian pilots are perfectly done and readily understood.

ScratInTheHat , 14 minutes ago link

That is why commercial pilots get paid high wages to do their jobs and know the aircraft they are flying. They just don't walk into a new aircraft cold turkey. This issue is covered in the manual and it is an issue that any pilot would note as a big deal. In 1965/66 the well-loved 727 had 4 crashes because pilots didn't know the aircraft. This is the same thing.

PriceAction , 3 minutes ago link

As the MCAS system has such authority to cause the plane to crash, a system like this should be quadruple-redundant to prevent a single source of bad data from causing a catastrophic loss of life.

This is compounded by the fact the pilots were unable to easily override the system and unable to know _why_ they could not control the plane when MCAS malfunctioned.

There should be outrage that this was allowed to go into production.

N0TME , 26 minutes ago link

So the MCAS doesn't take into account speed, just the AOA?

thomas.thomas73 , 27 minutes ago link

I g­­­­e­­­­t p­­­­a­­­­i­­­­d o­­­­v­­­­e­­­­r $­­9­­0 p­­­­e­­­­r h­­­­o­­­­u­­­­r w­­­­o­­­­r­­k­­­­i­­­­n­­­­g f­­­­r­­­­o­­­­m h­­­­o­­­­m­­­­e w­­­­i­­­­t­­­­h 2 k­­­­i­­d­­­­s a­­­­t h­­­­o­­­­m­­­­e. I n­­­­e­­­­v­­­­e­­r t­­­­h­­o­­­­u­­­­g­­­­h­­­­t I­­­­'­­­­d b­­­­e a­­­­b­­­­l­­­­e t­­­­o d­­­­o i­­­­t b­­­­u­­­­t m­­­­y b­­­­e­­­­s­­­­t f­­r­­i­­e­­n­­d e­­a­­r­­n­­s o­­v­­e­­r 1­­0­­k a m­­o­­n­­t­­h d­­o­­i­­n­­g t­­h­­­­i­­­­s a­­­­n­­­­d s­­­­h­­­­e c­­­­o­­­­n­­­­v­­­­i­­­­n­­­­c­­­­e­­­­d m­­­­e t­­­­o t­­r­­y. T­­h­­e p­­o­­t­­e­­n­­t­­i­­a­­l w­­i­­t­­h t­­h­­i­­s i­­s e­­n­­­­d­­l­­e­­­­s­­­­s. H­­­­e­­­­r­­­­e­­­­s w­­­­h­­­­a­­­­t I'v­­­­e b­­­­e­­­­e­­­­n d­­­­o­­­­i­­­­n­­­­g,

►►●►●►●►►●►●►●► http://www.worktoday33.com

bluskyes , 29 minutes ago link

Somebody turned off airplane mode on their phone.

DrBrown314 , 29 minutes ago link

The FAA had the final call on this and they failed to do their job. The MCAS was never designed to mask the airflow issues created by hanging over sized engines on an airframe designed for smaller nacelles. These bigger engines had to be mounted higher and more forward creating airflow disruption over the wing during critical climb out conditions. This bird should never have flown! It was flawed from the get go and the FAA let it slide. Now hundreds of people are dead!

archie bird , 33 minutes ago link

lol their shares are going to go down faster than one of their planes when all the lawsuits start happening

beemasters , 29 minutes ago link

If the US government doesn't intervene, all would be very easy lawsuits to win. But I suspect there will be political pressure placed to limit the liability of Boeing or a deal struck to have US taxpayers bail them out.

OliverAnd , 33 minutes ago link

I do not believe this story or any other story of how the Boeing 737 crashed. On a private jet the engines are set in the tail. If the angle of attack is high, little to no air will flow into the engines as the wings block sufficient air movement thus stalling. Hondajet has improved this by placing the engines on the wing. The engines of a Boeing 737 are placed in front of the wing, thus there should be very little effect to the airflow, unless of course the angle of attack is approaching a very large attack angle of over 70 degrees.

HRClinton , 20 minutes ago link

70° ? WTF r u smoking?

Commercial planes typically stall at AOA = 17°

If the AOA is too great, you have more drag than lift, causing the stall.

bogbeagle , 20 minutes ago link

We are talking about an aerodynamic stall of the flying surfaces.

Different thing from compressor stall.

boattrash , 18 minutes ago link

With power settings reduced to lower fuel consumption aka costs, it doesn't really make a damn where the engines are mounted.

Fed-up with being Sick and Tired , 33 minutes ago link

The question is thus begged: did this NEW Anti-Stall System replace one that had caused issues in the past? WAS THIS NEW SYSTEM needed? Are pilots not trained to invoke changes to NOSE ATTITUDE when stall indicators, in the past, were alarmed?

William Dorritt , 35 minutes ago link

Who wrote the software ?????

Cruise Control in my 16 year old car

Deactivates when I touch the gas or brakes

Boeing should buy some used cars as

reference models for their automated features.

Who wrote the software

Indians or Chinese who have never owned a car ?????

reddpill , 36 minutes ago link

The "let's assassinate some peps" system, through which remote control access and false data injection into a so called "closed" system exists. The public are done being played as fools, Boeing. How much did you sell the encryption keys for access into that closed system to 3rd parties? Why did that northern Scandinavian country spend millions removing this very system from their purchased Boeing planes? Was it because they knew? The CEO of Lion Air knows also.

beemasters , 37 minutes ago link

New ads for Boeing now include: "Safety features sold separately."

Seal Team 6 , 38 minutes ago link

This makes a big assumption, that being the AOA was faulty and MCAS came on for no reason. That's a big assumption and probably very wrong. MCAS comes on in stalls or high bank turns which we know the ethiopian pilot executed a high bank turn. The likely scenario is that the inexperienced third world pilot with his 0 hours of training on the Max miscalculated the weight of the plane on takeoff and stalled it in a turn right after he put the gear up and took the flaps off. MCAS came on as it was supposed to do, and would be the right thing to do to save the plane. If he had taken his hands off the yoke and gone to have a pee, all those people would still be alive as the computer, which is much smarter than the third world pilot, would have flown the plane. Not understanding his plane, the 28 year old pilot fought the MCAS at 1000 feet and bought the farm. The next shoe to drop will be the more interesting one. They have already released the innuendo, next to come will be the hard facts. Let's see.

bogbeagle , 29 minutes ago link

Interesting.

Wouldn't be the first stall initiated by a change of configuration. See:BA 548, Stansted, circa 1970.

HushHushSweet , 38 minutes ago link

The sensor could also have been remotely triggered to cause the crash.

XBroker1 , 39 minutes ago link

Ok, now hold up that piece of metal and pose for the camera. Let's make this look like the real thing. -Boeing

richsob , 41 minutes ago link

The only winners in this will be the lawyers. My Dad frequently told me that lawyers were bleached souls in tan suits. I didn't understand at the time but I do now.

crazytechnician , 42 minutes ago link

The MCAS will be easily fixed but the real question is why did they install this in the first instance ? Is it a bandage over something else ?

Ignorance is bliss , 43 minutes ago link

BA stock is up pre-market. I guess this story is another nothin burger that can be fixed with software.

jewish_master , 38 minutes ago link

we now exist in idiocracy : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leyn-oS5ASI

Wahooo , 43 minutes ago link

These planes are simply too complex anymore. If they can't be flown by a drunk pilot, they should be grounded.

Dormouse , 45 minutes ago link

We know that's not exactly what happened because Trump called them out with his double meaning "737 killers" talking about CA death penalty and this obvious deep state distraction murder.

PeteMMM , 46 minutes ago link

Surely this will mean the plane has to be 're-certified' after maybe modifications like additional sensors, software updates and extra pilot training have been factored in. Increasingly looking like there will be no 'quick fix', and admitting MCAS was at fault is going to open Boeing up to tons of lawsuits, not to mention cancelled orders. They'll need to drop the 737 MAX name too I would guess, it's too tarnished now.

Shatzy48 , 47 minutes ago link

I'm very surprised that a responsible company like Boeing would put out such a bad system. The program should have used readings from both sensors to ensure accuracy, and the cockpit warning mechanism should not have been optional equipment given the critical nature of the system.

Wahooo , 45 minutes ago link

Yeah it's puzzling. Someone in India fucked up big time.

beemasters , 34 minutes ago link

If they were responsible, they would have halted and recalled all productions by now.

not-me---it-was-the-dog , 47 minutes ago link

i stopped flying boing when they started producing self-immolating plastic planes.

(so that's where elon stole the idea!)

[Mar 29, 2019] Boeing (BA) 737 Stall Prevention System On in Ethiopia Air Crash

Notable quotes:
"... The stall-prevention system on the Boeing Co. 737 Max jet automatically switched on before the crash in Ethiopia this month, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing preliminary findings from data on the aircraft's black boxes. ..."
Mar 29, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

The stall-prevention system on the Boeing Co. 737 Max jet automatically switched on before the crash in Ethiopia this month, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing preliminary findings from data on the aircraft's black boxes.

The conclusion was relayed at a briefing at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday and is the strongest indication yet that the same system malfunctioned in both the Ethiopian Airlines flight and the Lion Air disaster in Indonesia in October, the newspaper said.

[Mar 29, 2019] Regulators Knew Of 737 MAX Trim Problems - Certification Demanded Training That Boeing Failed To Deliver

Notable quotes:
"... The MCAS system is poorly engineered and the design should never have been certified in the first place. But the issue is even worse. The certification that was given relied on false data. ..."
"... The first MCAS design, on which the safety analysis and certification was based, allowed for a maximum trim movement by MCAS of 0.6 degree of a maximum of 5 degree. Flight tests proved that to be too little to achieve the desired effects and the maximum movement was changed to 2.5 degree. ..."
"... No safety analysis for the much greater movement was conducted. The FAA and foreign regulators were not informed of it. Their certification of the 737 MAX was based on misleading data. ..."
"... But even those certifications were only conditional. They required from Boeing to include relevant training material that explained the MCAS trim system and its potential problems to the pilots. ..."
"... The original certification for the 737 MAX was issued by the U.S. regulator FAA. The European regulator EASA based its certification on the one the FAA provided but it added several of its own requirements. There is now documentary evidence that Boeing neglected to fulfill at least one of those requirements. ..."
"... The FAA is as regulator far too cozy with lobbyists and aircraft manufacturers. It outsources too much of the certification testing to the manufacturers. It should not have allowed Boeing to install a MCAS that depended on a sole sensor. ..."
"... "It's become such a kludge, that we started to speculate and wonder whether it was safe to do the MAX," Ludtke said. ..."
"... MCAS was not the only change that made the 737 MAX a 'kludge'. The design errors were inexcusable . Boeing did not inform the regulators when it quadrupled the maximum effect the MCAS system could have. These changes had side effects that were not properly analyzed. Failure of the system was hazardous and extremely difficult to handle . Indicators lights showing that the system may have failed, a safety feature, were sold as extras . ..."
"... It will take quite long to certify the changes Boeing announced for the 737 MAX. Lawsuits were filed against the company. Orders were canceled . The company is under criminal investigation. The commercial damage to Boeing will likely be larger than currently estimated. It comes on top of a recent WTO ruling that Boeing illegally received billions of dollars in subsidies and will need to compensate its competition. ..."
"... The development and production of the 787 Dreamliner, announced in 2003, was outsourced all over the world. That led to years of delays and billions in development cost overruns. In 2010 Airbus announced the A-320 NEO as a better alternative to the 737 NG. Boeing was still busy to get the 787 into the air. It had neither the engineering capacity nor the money to counter the NEO with a brand new plane. It hastily revamped the 737, a design from the 1960s, into the 737 MAX. It promised to airlines that the new plane would not require to retrain their pilots. MCAS was specifically designed to allow for that. It was a huge mistake. ..."
"... Boeing once was an engineering company with an attached sales department. It 2001, when it moved its headquarter to Chicago , it became a dealership with an attached engineering wing. The philosophical difference is profound. It is time for the company to find back to its roots. ..."
Mar 29, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Regulators Knew Of 737 MAX Trim Problems - Certification Demanded Training That Boeing Failed To Deliver

A recently discovered document proves that Boeing ignored requirements international regulators made when they certified Boeing's 737 MAX airplane.

After the recent Boeing 737 MAX incident in Ethiopia we explained why it happened. Even before the plane type was grounded by the FAA we wrote:

Boeing, The FAA, And Why Two 737 MAX Planes Crashed

Our early take was confirmed by the reporting of other media which we also discussed:

Flawed Safety Analysis, Failed Oversight - Why Two 737 MAX Planes Crashed

The basic problem:

For commercial reasons Boeing wanted the new 737 version to handle like the old ones. But changes in the new version required an additional system to handle certain flight situations. The development of that system and the safety analysis of its implications were rushed through. Pilots were not informed of it and not trained to counter its failure.

The added 'maneuver characteristics augmentation system' (MCAS) depended on only one sensor. When the sensor provided false data MCAS engaged and pointed the planes towards the ground. Manual trim using the plane's trim wheel was required to regain flight stability. The pilots were not aware of that. The regulators who certified the plane as safe were unaware of the extend of the problem:

The MCAS system is poorly engineered and the design should never have been certified in the first place. But the issue is even worse. The certification that was given relied on false data.

The first MCAS design, on which the safety analysis and certification was based, allowed for a maximum trim movement by MCAS of 0.6 degree of a maximum of 5 degree. Flight tests proved that to be too little to achieve the desired effects and the maximum movement was changed to 2.5 degree.

No safety analysis for the much greater movement was conducted. The FAA and foreign regulators were not informed of it. Their certification of the 737 MAX was based on misleading data.

But even those certifications were only conditional. They required from Boeing to include relevant training material that explained the MCAS trim system and its potential problems to the pilots.

The original certification for the 737 MAX was issued by the U.S. regulator FAA. The European regulator EASA based its certification on the one the FAA provided but it added several of its own requirements. There is now documentary evidence that Boeing neglected to fulfill at least one of those requirements.

The one page document, first described by Reuters , is included in the Explanatory Note Issue 10 (pdf) to the EASA Boeing 737 type certification which was issued in February 2016.

Page 15 of the Explanatory Note discusses "Longitudinal trim at Vmo". Vmo is the maximum operational speed. The trim sets the nose of the plane up or down, independent of other pilot input. Too high up and the plane with lose lift and stall, too low down and the plane will hit terrain.

A failure of the MCAS system could trim the nose down. As a countermeasure the pilots would have to switch the trim system off. They would then manually trim the plane back into a level flight. This was a concern. The EASA note says:

Subsequent to flight testing, the FAA-TAD expressed concern with compliance to the reference regulation based on an interpretation of the intent behind "trim". The main issue being that longitudinal trim cannot be achieved throughout the flight envelope using thumb switch trim only.

EASA considered the need to use manual trim "unusual". But it allowed it to pass because the required training material would "clearly explain" the issue:

The need to use the trim wheel is considered unusual, as it is only required for manual flight in those corners of the envelope.

The increased safety provided by the Boeing design limits on the thumb switches (for out-of-trim dive characteristics) provides a compensating factor for the inability to use the thumb switches throughout the entire flight envelope. Furthermore, the additional crew procedures and training material will clearly explain to pilots the situations where use of the trim wheel may be needed due to lack of trim authority with the wheel mounted switches.


Full document

While the EASA was convinced (by Boeing?) that those situations would be discussed in "additional crew procedures and training material", Boeing did not include it in the training materials for the airlines that bought the planes:

Those situations, however, were not listed in the flight manual, according to a copy from American Airlines seen by Reuters.

Without the additional procedures and training material the 737 MAX would not have been certified. By providing the plane without the required training material Boeing essentially handed incomplete planes to its customers.

The FAA is as regulator far too cozy with lobbyists and aircraft manufacturers. It outsources too much of the certification testing to the manufacturers. It should not have allowed Boeing to install a MCAS that depended on a sole sensor.

But the bigger culprit here is clearly Boeing. The plane was developed in a rush . Even its own engineers doubted that it was safe:

Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing engineer who worked on designing the interfaces on the MAX's flight deck, said managers mandated that any differences from the previous 737 had to be small enough that they wouldn't trigger the need for pilots to undergo new simulator training.

That left the team working on an old architecture and layers of different design philosophies that had piled on over the years, all to serve an international pilot community that was increasingly expecting automation.

"It's become such a kludge, that we started to speculate and wonder whether it was safe to do the MAX," Ludtke said.

MCAS was not the only change that made the 737 MAX a 'kludge'. The design errors were inexcusable . Boeing did not inform the regulators when it quadrupled the maximum effect the MCAS system could have. These changes had side effects that were not properly analyzed. Failure of the system was hazardous and extremely difficult to handle . Indicators lights showing that the system may have failed, a safety feature, were sold as extras .

And today we learned that Boeing did not even provide its customers with the "clear explanations" the certifications required it to deliver.

These were not 'mistakes' by some lowly technicians. These were breaches of legal requirements and of trust.

It will take quite long to certify the changes Boeing announced for the 737 MAX. Lawsuits were filed against the company. Orders were canceled . The company is under criminal investigation. The commercial damage to Boeing will likely be larger than currently estimated. It comes on top of a recent WTO ruling that Boeing illegally received billions of dollars in subsidies and will need to compensate its competition.

All these are consequences of bad management decisions.

The development and production of the 787 Dreamliner, announced in 2003, was outsourced all over the world. That led to years of delays and billions in development cost overruns. In 2010 Airbus announced the A-320 NEO as a better alternative to the 737 NG. Boeing was still busy to get the 787 into the air. It had neither the engineering capacity nor the money to counter the NEO with a brand new plane. It hastily revamped the 737, a design from the 1960s, into the 737 MAX. It promised to airlines that the new plane would not require to retrain their pilots. MCAS was specifically designed to allow for that. It was a huge mistake.

Boeing once was an engineering company with an attached sales department. It 2001, when it moved its headquarter to Chicago , it became a dealership with an attached engineering wing. The philosophical difference is profound. It is time for the company to find back to its roots.

Posted by b on March 29, 2019 at 09:29 AM | Permalink

[Mar 25, 2019] When psycho automation left this pilot powerless

When it works it's great; when it not it can lead to a disaster. They make computer No.1 and the pilot No.2.
Mar 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

D Jaquith , 1 year ago

Lesson learned all AI must have an OFF switch.

Komputar , 2 days ago

This happened at 37,000 feet, if this was triggered while taking off at 3,700 feet - none would be alive to tell the story.

[Mar 24, 2019] This aviation expert says Boeing made 'disastrously bad decision' on training for 737 MAX

Mar 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

The recent Ethiopian Airlines crash led to the grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX planes across much of the globe. But as new details emerge about the cause of the model's second crash within five months, questions are being raised about how the plane's safety was approved in the first place. John Yang talks to Jeff Wise, a pilot and author of a book about MH370, the flight that vanished in 2014.


Kellie Hickman , 1 day ago

Hundreds of lives lost...because of nothing more than corporate greed and its enablers at the FAA.

Ray Quinn , 1 day ago

World to Boeing. Safety features are not optional! SMH😑

Zemli Drakona , 1 day ago

The warning light should be always on and should say "This plane sucks!"

die Macsmannschaft , 23 hours ago

No wonder Airbus become the new prince on the air! No wonder european produce luxurious goods, not the US!

LA's Totally Awesome , 1 day ago (edited)

So it was like driving a car while the "check engine" light is on X1000

K Me , 22 hours ago

Imagine buying a car with ABS, but the ABS failure light was an "optional extra".

CK Man , 1 day ago

$80,000 for a safety warning light! It should have been standard. How could they justify charging $80,000 for a warning light? It's like Ford charging $800 for Brake Fluid warning light, they would never have gotten away with that!

Africanknight88 , 19 hours ago

LAWSUIT and CRIMINAL CHARGES NEED TO BE FILED!!!! ....Now take that "optional".....my lord 😤🤬

Brandon E. Smith , 23 hours ago

It took only 346 lives to "improve" safety. 🙄 Boeing has always been a horrible, horrible company.

GNegasi , 1 day ago

How design or structural problems can be solved in a software update???

Jenny Kevin , 1 day ago

please don't hide the true, and don't the victim,

numbersix100 , 18 hours ago

I'll never fly on a 737 max, it's inherently unbalanced with its engines so far forward

Armando D'SOUZA , 20 hours ago

First make plane stable in flying mode when engines are producing force to move forward.

[Mar 24, 2019] Boeing 737 Max approval documents subpoenaed by fraud unit - YouTube

Mar 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Published on Mar 21, 2019

With the 737 Max still grounded after last week's deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash, the focus turns to Boeing. The company offered a warning system that -- for a price -- might have helped prevent the crashes. Kris Van Cleave reports.


Edmund Ming Yip Kwong , 2 days ago

This is so evil. Very disappointed at this multi-billion corporation

Arun K P , 2 days ago

I didn't know safety features were optional on planes 😂 wtf.

Suprianto , 2 days ago

$80 thousand for a warning light??? Unbelievable.... How much money can an indicator light cost? Software for detecting sensor malfunction should've been there in the first place.... For such a critical sensor, those safety systems should've been built into the systems in a $120 million dollar plane in the first place.

Ester F , 2 days ago (edited)

Why charge more for safety? It should be included by default. Then they kept saying it was safe for flight but excluded a crucial piece. It's all for profit... smh. 🧐 they are trying to deflect blame on the airline. Those planes should have never been sold in the first place.

Schmoo , 2 days ago

WOW! An add-on safety feature? Are you kidding me? That's just pure evil!

Rust belt McCLanahan Crawling , 2 days ago

Actually they should be charged with manslaughter for both plans ! Enough playing games with just a public court hearing then a fine ! Some Big People need to be held accountable by full law ! Jail time !

Crude Rude , 2 days ago (edited)

Wow.... just wow.... So they're releasing a flawed, unfinished product that requires glitchy software they have to patch and are also offering DLC?

Wenderz 26 , 1 day ago

That is like selling cars with no brakes, airbags, or seat belts, expecting the consumer to pay extra for necessary safety equipment . UNBELIEVABLE!

The Watchful Hunter , 2 days ago

I bet Boeing has been frantically shredding and wiping documents off hard drives for a week.

Mr. Sarcastic , 2 days ago (edited)

To bad all Airlines didn't buy the Super Deluxe "I really want to Live Package" from Boeing.

Hermes Trismegistus , 2 days ago

Once again, profit over safety! Those Boeing executives are money hungry demons! What a bunch of egotistical beasts!

Ryan Davis , 2 days ago

I would bet that the actual labor and materials are less than $2000. The engineering had already been completed as it is an option. Why then would safety be optional? Criminal greed, or a low value placed on human lives. Whomever is responsible has no moral or social compass and should be punished. Not with a fine but a lengthy prison term in Leavenworth.

Joseph Holland Pontes , 2 days ago

Oh no DLC is also optional to airplanes.

Dr Evil , 2 days ago

They should never have extra charge on safety features . Evil company

jaja smile , 2 days ago

80K just cost them billions ......

george movies , 1 day ago

Boeing and FAA, GUILTY! MASS KILLING . FIRST DEGREE MURDERERS.

David L , 1 day ago (edited)

I never thought capitalism was evil. Boeing: our planes were NOT safe to fly unless you pay extra.

Q & A , 2 days ago

That's one expensive bulb. 😳

105 Wonky , 1 day ago

You can have these 2 safety features which could potentially save lives, but your gonna have to pay 🤦‍♂️

Henry kirya , 1 day ago (edited)

if we can have recalls for cars, why cant we have the same for aircraft and force those chaps to install foolproof sensors in triplicate, complete with warning inidicators at no additional cost to the airlines!

[Mar 24, 2019] Ethiopian Airlines crash 'It seems amazing that Boeing have not provided the proper training' - YouTube

Notable quotes:
"... Profit before people. Computer says no! Failsafe failed. No manual over ride. Sorry folks. Say Your prayers. The problem maybe rebranded. Best case scenario. Impeccable flying from technical progress made. ..."
"... Totally unnecessary crash that was caused by cutting corners and greed. ..."
Mar 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

leemsy lazy , 1 week ago

Imagines if Airbus was crashing in America like that.

Mulya hadi purnama , 1 week ago

Very Clearly, Unsafety... " Recall " and Grounded all Boeing Type 737 Max 8...Most Dangerous aircraft, almost 400 people's dead in 6 Months !!!

rocco decrescentis , 4 hours ago

No resignation! Like dumbbell n.45 used to say: You are fired!!

Robert Stephens , 1 day ago

When you see documentary of broken dreams. You'll be surprised as i was is that Boeing is using lithium batteries on these aircraft.

Zelalem Zemene , 1 week ago (edited)

Ethiopian Airlines is one of the best known safe reputation. Of course Indonesian Airlines is the best too. The crash was very similar after take off and dive into the ground. Boing is just protecting itself for its market.

Global Solutions , 6 days ago

Boeing needs to be sued for $2 billion for each victim of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines plus $300 billion in punitive damages, and jail time for some executives ~ they knowingly put up unsafe planes. In its early days, the 737 also had several cashes.

QECHEW , 4 days ago (edited)

Obviously Boeing knew about the shortcomings of their design in earlier stages and instead of fixing their design they chose to use a software to fix it without informing the airlines or giving pilots adequate training in order to save costs.

GH1618 , 1 week ago

What is more surprising is that the angle-of-attack sensor system is not fail-safe.

Al Bundy , 6 days ago

Did the pilot's do the mandatory operating system Flash Player updates before takeoff?

Andy Roo , 16 hours ago

Profit before people. Computer says no! Failsafe failed. No manual over ride. Sorry folks. Say Your prayers. The problem maybe rebranded. Best case scenario. Impeccable flying from technical progress made.

Kamau Phillip , 1 week ago

The American pilots complained of the same issues with the same plane model but Boeing did nothing to correct the situation why????? ???

globalvillager700 , 3 days ago

Totally unnecessary crash that was caused by cutting corners and greed.

B M , 1 week ago

Prediction: Director of the FAA will resign!

Shinrin Yoku , 1 week ago

The MC-21300 is a much better plane anyway. Why do airlines not order it I wonder.

[Mar 24, 2019] Flying the Boeing 737 Max 8 A pilot's view from inside the cockpit - YouTube

Mar 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Probir Ghosh , 5 days ago

Its a shame that Boeing didn't tell this little piece of information to the rest of the world.

Ed Estrella , 5 days ago

You're telling me that lack of knowledge is what got over 300 people killed.... Beyond disturbing..

KimsonJohn , 5 days ago

Ipad course GTFOH! This is no cooking recipe. ..it's people's lives!

Weez naz , 5 days ago

56 minutes with an iPad lesson... Jesus Christ

sando wando , 1 day ago (edited)

PR stunt proudly paid by Boeing after being in bed with the WP. 😤

John S , 5 days ago

This piece of PR brought to you by Boeing!

Carl Johnson , 5 days ago

Nice ad after two crashes in less than six months

David Njabia , 5 days ago (edited)

Boeing must be lobbying really hard and it's a shame that a respectable entity like Washington Post is helping the narrative to shift the blame to pilots who are now dead. If it's a Boeing, I'll have second thoughts.

Tewoflos Telahun , 5 days ago

This video is brought to you by Boeing ! Please, Washington Post, be less biased next time.

lucius1976 , 5 days ago

1:39 MCAS = Mass Coffin Automation System

Jason L , 2 days ago

'commitment' OH PLEASE.....america was the last to ground their 737s.

Ab Xarbi , 15 hours ago

I tried to show this video to an Ethiopian, and he almost killed me.

MrXperx , 4 days ago

1. Boeing wanted a new plane with larger enginers but without spending money on a new fuselage. 2. Sold their planes to customers saying that Max type is same as the NG and that no cost is involved for retraining pilots. 3. Make the MCAS system so that the new and plane and old plane feel theoretically same to the pilot. 4. Not tell pilots about MCAS or hide critical details about the system. 5. 300+ people dead. I hope the Boeing management can sleep well knowing they have blood on their hands.

Stephen Courton , 5 days ago

Sounds like they created a dangerously unstable craft that requires a computer system to keep from stalling. Even if pilot turns off plane may have already got in situation hard to recover from manually especially near ground. Two planes found this out.

scrimmo , 21 hours ago

Time for Boeing and FAA officials to be locked up

ludovicoC , 2 days ago

To paraphrase Dr. Strangelove: "The whole point of the [MCAS] is lost IF YOU KEEP IT A SECRET! WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL THE [PILOTS], EH

[Mar 24, 2019] US Transport Department Looks Into Boeing 737 Max 8's Approval

Mar 20, 2019 | www.youtube.com

US Transport Department Looks Into Boeing 737 Max 8's Approval | al Jazeera English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ge8v5cIxm0

New investigations are starting into the certification of the Boeing 737 Max 8 after two fatal crashes in less than six months.


Damon Reynolds , 3 days ago

At the root of almost every problem today is 'cost cutting' for short term profits to satisfy roaming vulture capitalist greed. Why is the FAA 'under funded'? Why is it 'too expensive' to give pilots the sim time they need even after hundeds of people are dead??

Ardhi Adhary Arbain , 3 days ago

Ask manufacturer's engineers to check the plane for their own certification? That's crazy.

srinivas reddy , 3 days ago

I think boeing, FAA and US are working for each other I feel no surprise if they find no wrong doing

MVE , 3 days ago

profit over safety, that's what it is all about

DJ DA VINCI , 3 days ago

Did u know that when u turn off the MCAS it reset itself back on. Victims family should sue Boeing and the FAA till their last dime.

MegaTriumph1 , 3 days ago

Engines too far forward wings too swept back computer and pilot can't find center of balance and it piledrives into earth, its not a mystery. If I wanted to take a perfectly good 737 and turn it into an unflyable plane, well they did it.

Major Skies , 3 days ago

Just fix the auto pilot issue. Also, what in all of God's green earth? Pilots only learned about flying this new model with just textual information? No simulation? No wounder pilots of both airlines were confound by the conflicting warnings blaring at them in the cockpit.

GreenStorm01 , 3 days ago

First.

dinesh prabhu , 3 days ago

Ha ha ha there is no money for the faa, but the government had enough money to go on a bombing run around the world. So now who is responsible ? Boeing faa or other aviation authorities like the icao or others ? Who is going to be jailed for this mass murdering? Since they have accepted it so the faa chief should be put behind bars for lying about the inspection and the certificate !!!!!!

[Mar 24, 2019] FAA 'dropped ball' on Boeing 737 Max 8 - official - YouTube

FAA rep is a clown! It is not FAA fault and Boeing was under pressure. If one of your family was in one of those crashes, you would never shill for those corporate murders.
Mar 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Leon Eldarion , 5 days ago

He is a clown! It is not FAA fault and Boeing was under pressure. If one of your family was in one of those crashes, you would never shill for those corporate murders.

gtud65 cutting , 2 days ago

If BOEING company is from another country, then USA 🇺🇸 Boeing air plane ✈ crashed The Boeing company will be closed immediately

Sammy Woo , 2 days ago

Ex FAA employees have come out and say FAA doesn't have the expertise and have to rely on Boeing for aspects of the certifications, why? because dumb Americans buy politicians ever selling lower taxes. Hey dudes, u gotta spend money to hire good people duh! something gotta give. Cheap government, cheap results. U deserve what u paid for America.

Robert May , 13 hours ago

The MCAS system was not revealed to the first receivers of the Max 8's, nor was it in the Manuals. Boeing thought it would quietly do it's job in the background, but they were wrong. After the first accident from Lion Air, out of Indonesia, then all airliners were informed of this. The pilots in Ethiopia may or may not have been aware of this, and if they were they lacked insufficient training on how to deal with this problem. The MCAS system works to bring the nose of the plane down so it can fly at a level flight. MCAS get's it's information from AOA sensors that send info to the plane as to what angle the plane is flying at. Pilots have reported that the AOA sensors are faulty and sending "wrong information" and "activating" the MCAS system when it shouldn't have, causing the planes nose to point downward, and causing the plane to go into a nose dive, and this is what happened. Basically the MCAS was needed because Boeing redesigned the engines, that were bigger, and were mounted differently -- more forward and up on the wing, throwing off the center of gravity of the new 737 Max 8.The old 737 does not have this problem. AOA sensors, stands for Angle of Attack, to make sure air flow is right both over and under the wings, to make the plane aerodynamic. According to reports from pilots, you can "disengage" the MCAS SYSTEM, buy pulling back on the yoke, and this will do it. At the same time there are wheels by the throttle that you turn manually, to trim the planes stabilizer manually by yourself. This was done many times by well trained American pilots, who averted crashes with this jet. So, proper training and awareness could have saved a lot of lives. Let's not forget these MAX 8 jets have been flying for a couple years, with thousands of flights in North America and developed countries with "no" accidents, and pilots say the plane flies beautifully. They say it's a very smooth flying aircraft, and a pleasure to pilot. So, who's responsible for this -- well it's Boeing, for non disclosure of the MCAS system, and what to do, if it functions in error, and how to manually disengage the system. In my opinion, all pilots should know how to manually take a plane from takeoff, and land it smoothly with no automation, or computers to help them -- just like in the old days. Over the last 20 years, there have been so very few major aircraft go down. I'm all for automation, but I fully support proper pilot training should some of this automation fail -- like faulty sensors. It's completely crazy to rely on robots or Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) to fly planes, if you don't understand how the computers work, and how they fly the plane, and in the event of a failure of the computer, you can then shut it off, and have "no problem" , and take control of the aircraft yourself,- "manually" with a lot of confidence. I SHOULD ADD - this MCAS system and it's AOA sensors, should all be mandatory on a plane, and not be sold as extras, same as brakes on a car. You don't play around with peoples lives, to make a few extra dollars, selling "options." These features "must be standard equipment", on all these aircraft sold, PERIOD. This is why I'm "very against" self driving cars'. Can you imagine all the accidents that will happen from "faulty sensors." WOW , it will be a nightmare. Faulty sensors could be caused by snow, ice, extreme heat or cold. Are we getting so lazy that we need to have Artificial Intelligence driving our cars. No thanks for me, I'll drive my own car, and hope that people will rebel against this idea, and the makers of these cars, won't sell any of them, and thus, taking them off the market.This Boeing Max 8 should send a good example, of things to come if we allow driverless cars. Not for me, and I hope the general public will agree with this.

You Tube , 2 days ago

Terrorists aren't needed to bring down airliners and frighten the public. Boeing and a failed Trump policy, that won't staff FAA department with a permanent and qualified leader, are managing the same thing through their fashionable neglect and arrogance.

Jackyboy335 , 3 days ago (edited)

The word Federal is part of this....right ? Profit is king...right ? "...we are a country of laws.."....right ?

Armando D'SOUZA , 3 days ago

Just look at the investigation of sinking and tilting Mellilium Tower in sanfransico. Building concrete Foundation and glasses are cracking and investigators are still studying what caused the two glass windows to crack. Similar investigation is going on how these two Boeing max crashed.

AJJ Against Jihadi Justin , 5 days ago

The FAA is in Boeings pocket book. Search... problems with Boeing 737 next generation with structural dangers reported on sbs datline australia

Vic Chavez , 5 days ago

Trump privatized the faa and this is what happens.

Wizkin Li , 5 days ago

No no no, this time it's all A320 neo 's fault

osidartaha2 , 4 days ago

Deadly strategie from Boeing for quick profits and market shares . Airliners are built to be operated for at least a couple of decades Boeing was providing worldwidely flying coffins made by mixing new technologies (leap engine ) with cheap and old technologies (1/2 century old airframe).A new well designed aircraft is stable, well-balanced without extra software's help.

barrych mak , 4 days ago

Check also the Boeing 767-300 nosedive crash on 23 Feb 2019 ! 3 Boeing nosedive crashes in 5 months !!!

I.P. Knightly , 3 days ago

Trump nominated his personal pilot to head up the FAA. After 2 years, they still have an "acting" director. Tim Boeing shows up at Mar-a-lago every weekend. What could possibly go wrong?

Peter Wexler , 1 day ago

I dissented this.

yin ng , 5 days ago

Same as to Ask Wall Street to regulate Wall Street and the Bankers to regulate themselves. Or ask the committed criminals to jail themselves.

Paradigm , 5 days ago

Byproduct of revolving doors.

Paul Forester , 3 days ago

This been a long time coming. Who cut the FAA? BOTH PARTIES DID! The system is gonna fall apart because too much damage has been done. Just keep paying people peanuts and have them try to do a skilled job. My cousin quit the airline industry because they don't want people to be able to pay for the education needed for these jobs. Like who program these systems.

roxar69 , 19 hours ago

So the merica is not really a saint..so now it not america dream but america dreaming..

Marcus Coyle , 5 days ago

Looks like I'll be getting that 🚲 sooner than later. I won't be traveling by plane for a few Give it time for all the smoke to clear and heads to roll😳

[Mar 23, 2019] Boeing Crapification 737 MAX Play-by-Play, Regulatory Capture, and When Will CEO Muilenburg Become the Sacrificial Victim by Lambert Strether

Notable quotes:
"... By Lambert Strether of Corrente . ..."
"... "It's a very, very serious investigation into basically, was there fraud by Boeing in the certification of the 737 MAX 8 ?" Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation attorney who is representing six families whose relatives died in the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes, explained. ..."
"... Rosenberg expects the criminal probe to question whether Boeing fully disclosed to the FAA the engineering of the 737 Max 8's MCAS flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), during the plane's certification process. The flight control system was designed to prevent the plane from stalling. ..."
"... Unfortunately for Boeing and the passengers its crashed aircraft were carrying, the MCAS system was very poorly implemented. ..."
"... The single sensor was the result of regulatory capture, not to say gaming; see below. ..."
"... Black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash. ..."
"... Regulatory Capture : Commercial aircraft need to be certified by the FAA before launch. The Washington Post labels today's process "self-certification": ..."
"... In practice, one Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer would act as the FAA's representative , signing on behalf of the U.S. government that the technology complied with federal safety regulations, people familiar with the process said. ..."
"... (Note that a 10-year-old process would have begun in the Obama administration, so the regulatory process is bipartisan.) I understand that " safety culture " is real and strong, but imagine the same role-playing concept applied to finance: One bankers plays the banker, and the other banker plays Bill Black, and after a time they switch roles . Clearly a system that will work until it doesn't. More: ..."
"... The process was occurring during a period when the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General was warning the FAA that its oversight of manufacturers' work was insufficient. ..."
"... The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes. ..."
"... Alert readers will note the similarity to the Neoliberal Playbook , where government systems are sabotaged in order to privatize them, but in this case regulatory capture seems to have happened "by littles," rather than out of open, ideological conviction (as with the UKs's NHS, or our Post Office, our Veteran's Administration, etc.). ..."
"... Several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process. Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing . ..."
"... In this atmosphere, the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification, was delegated to Boeing . ..."
"... It should be clear at this point that the central claims of Muilenburg's letter are false. ..."
"... The self-certification debacle that allowed MCAS to be released happened on Muilenburg's watch and is already causing Boeing immense reputational damage, and a criminal case, not to mention the civil cases that are surely coming, will only increase that damage. Mr. Market, the Beltway, and even Trump, if his trade deals are affected, will all soon be bellowing for a sacrificial victim. Muilenburg should recognize the inevitable and gracefully resign. Given his letter, it looks unlikely that he will do the right thing. ..."
"... Beyond that ultimate problem is the ultimate regulatory problem: regulatory capture of the FAA by the airline companies. As a result, the FAA represents "its customers" the airplane makers, not the public users and customers. This is like the banks capturing the Fed, the Justice Dept. and Treasury to promote their own interests by claiming that "self-regulation" works. Self-regulation is the polite word for fraudulent self-indulgence. ..."
"... I would be surprised if the European Airbus competitors do not mount a campaign to block the 737-Max's from landing, and insisting that Boeing buy them back. This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes. ..."
"... This probably will throw Trump's China trade fight into turmoil, as China was the first country to ground the 737-Max's and is unlikely to permit their recovery without a "real" federal safety oversight program. Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane, so as to represent users and stakeholders, not only stockholders. ..."
"... The moral: Neoliberalism Kills. ..."
"... Rule #2 of Neoliberalism: Go die. ..."
"... > "Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane." ..."
"... As if the 737 MAX were the chlorinated chicken of aircraft. ..."
"... "This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes." ..."
"... Regulatory capture is rampant throughout the economy. Boeing self-certification being delegated by the FAA is not unlike the situation with electric transmission utilities. ..."
"... that is subject to both FERC and NERC regulation. ..."
"... In hindsight Boeing would have perhaps been better off to leave off the MCAS altogether and depend on pilot retraining to cover the altered handling. ..."
"... Reports I've read indicates that Boeing ignored even the clearly inadequate certification. "Documentation provided to the FAA claims that the MCAS system can only adjust the horizontal tail on the plane by 0.6 degrees out of a maximum of five-degrees of nose-down movement. But that limit was later increased to 2.5-degrees of nose-down movement. Boeing didn't communicate the change from 0.6-degrees to 2.5-degrees until after Lion Air." ..."
"... Boeing could also be liable for damages due to 737 groundings and due to delays in delivery of contracted planes. ..."
"... The analogy has been made between this the 737 MAX story and the Tylenol story. J&J got out in front of the problem and saved the product (and their company). Boeing's problem is of that order, and Muilenberg -- that letter! -- seems incapable of understanding that; insular, arrogant. One more reason to fire the dude toot sweet. If he comes out of his next review with a raise -- Everything Is Like CalPERS™ -- consider shorting Boeing ..."
"... Allowing this to happen seems the ultimate in short term thinking by Boeing. US manufacturers have always had an advantage over competitors because the FAA was held in such high regard worldwide that it was the de facto world safety regulatory body – every country followed its lead. But this chipping away of its authority has led to a near fatal loss of faith, and will no doubt lead to European and Asian regulatory authorities being strengthened. And no doubt commercial realities will mean they will look much more closely at US manufactured aircraft if there is some benefit to their own manufacturers. ..."
"... The Times thinks Boeing is too big to fail. Without a blockbuster Max, I don't see how Boeing maintains its current status in the industry. ..."
"... I also think they have been completely afflicted by the defense contractor mentality. ..."
"... Yes, the famous McDonnell-Douglas reverse takeover , where financial engineers inserted their sucking mandibles into an actual ..."
"... Note that Muilenberg came up through the defense side of the company not the commercial aircraft side. He may simply not have been equipped to understand FAA regulation at any deep level, hence the rot that finally surfaced. ..."
"... The tragedy is that corporate media in pursuit of profits will keep us up to date but will never mention the 6 or 8 minutes of terror for the 346 souls aboard the two flights. They will cover the criminal negligence trial if there are ever indictments. But, the news reports never will say that neoliberalism, deregulation, and privatization are the root causes of the deaths. ..."
"... Boeing also clearly did not know its customers . It should be engineering for the sort of pilots who are going to be hired by Lion Air, or any rapidly expanding airline in what we used to all the Third World. Hegemony, it seems, makes you insular and provincial. ..."
"... "The FAA, citing lack of funding and resource": I don't suppose I'll survive to see any arm of government not blame lack of funds for its boneheaded or corrupt incompetence. ..."
"... That's how I feel. The tech doc department at Boeing sounds like a horrible place to work; MBAs or their goons telling you all the time to do stuff you know is wrong. It's not surprising people were willing to talk to the Seattle Times; I bet there are more people. (Hey, Seattle Times! How about people testing the 737 MAX in simulators (assuming this is done)). ..."
"... Interestingly, and maybe relevant to the problem of confusion for the pilots, is that Boeing has had another automatic trim-modifier operating on its 737s for some time, the speed-trim system (STS): ..."
"... This system also modifies the stabilizer position during manual flight. Like MCAS, it was brought in to improve stability under certain flight conditions (the reasons for which are far beyond my knowledge). There is an indication that the pilots on the flight before the Lion Air crash misinterpreted MCAS actions for STS behavior. ..."
"... authority would revert to the pilot ..."
"... How many years ago did Wall Street take over the fortunes of the company? Why did they move their headquarters from their birthplace of Seattle to Chicago? Why did they start assembling planes in South Carolina and China? Was it to improve aviation safety? Or, to allow the profiteering parasites to feed off the carcass of the company? ..."
"... President Trump, here's a reelection tip: "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American airspace must be maintained in the U.S." ..."
"... Amazingly, Trump seems to have done OK on this. First, he didn't cave to Muilenberg's (insane, goofy, tone-deaf) request to keep the 737 flying; then he frames the issue as complexity (correct, IMNSHO), and then he manages to nominate a Delta CEO as head of the FAA . ..."
"... we're seeing signs that a crapification process has begun on the safety side in this industry. (It has been proceeding for years on the service/amenities side.) ..."
"... Considering the fact that all these 737s are grounded as no airline trust them to not kill a plane load of passengers and crew, this is a really big deal. Putting aside the technical and regulatory issues, the fact is that the rest of the world no longer trusts the US in modern aviation so what we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal. ..."
"... Loss or at least wobbliness of imperial hegemony, like. It's not just the aircraft, it's US standards-setting bodies, methods, "safety culture," even -- dare we say it -- English as the language of aviation. French is no longer the language of diplomacy, after all, though it had a good run. ..."
"... Because markets. Neoliberalism puts everything up for sale. Including regulation. Oversimplifying absurdly: And so you end up with the profit-driven manufacturer buying the regulator, its produce killing people, and the manufacturer canceling its future profits. That's what the Bearded One would call a contradiction.* ..."
"... know your customer ..."
"... Like you, I am a retired software engineer, so I have followed an aviation blog discussion of this issue quite closely since it emerged as a probable software and system design failure. As the blog is open to all, its signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, but it seems not too difficult for any technically-minded person to separate the wheat from the chaff. My current understanding, which I believe others here are in a position to correct, if necessary: ..."
"... this story is really fascinating and seems to be true a sign of the times. ..."
"... The Post's article on the FAA and Regulatory Capture is incomplete. The process for the FAA (and probably MANY government agencies) started under Reagan, did not revert to safety under Clinton (make government smaller and all that), and then accelerated under Bush II in 2005 (not a bi-partisan time). In particular, big changes to the FAA were made in 2005 that were executive in nature and did not require Congressional approval. CF: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/ ..."
Mar 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Lambert Strether of Corrente .

At some point in the future, I'd like to do failure matrix for the pathways to misfortune ( example of such a matrix here ) that precipitated two deadly Boeing 737 MAX crashes on take-off in five months , but I don't feel that I have enough information yet. (I'm not unsympathathetic to the view that the wholesale 737 MAX grounding was premature on technical grounds , but then trade and even geopolitical factors enter in, given that Boeing is a "national champion.") We do not yet have results from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders of either aircraft, for example. But what we do know is sufficiently disturbing -- a criminal investigation into Boeing had already been initiated after the Lion Air crash, but before the Ethiopian Airlines crash -- that I think it's worthwhile doing a play-by-play on the causes of the crashes, so far as we can know them. About that criminal investigation :

According to the Wall Street Journal, a Washington D.C. grand jury issued a March 11 subpoena requesting emails, correspondence, and other messages from at least one person involved in the development of the aircraft.

"It's a very, very serious investigation into basically, was there fraud by Boeing in the certification of the 737 MAX 8 ?" Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation attorney who is representing six families whose relatives died in the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes, explained.

"Nobody knows the answer to that yet," Rosenberg cautioned, adding that he had not yet seen the Justice Department's subpoena and therefore could not know its full scope.

Rosenberg expects the criminal probe to question whether Boeing fully disclosed to the FAA the engineering of the 737 Max 8's MCAS flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), during the plane's certification process. The flight control system was designed to prevent the plane from stalling.

Bloomberg comments :

A possible criminal investigation during an aircraft accident investigation is highly unusual . While airline accidents have at times raised criminal issues, such as after the 1996 crash of a ValuJet plane in the Florida Everglades, such cases are the exception.

Before we get to the play-by-play, one more piece of background: CEO Dennis Muilenburg's latest PR debacle, entitled " Letter from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg to Airlines, Passengers and the Aviation Community ." The most salient material:

Safety is at the core of who we are at Boeing, and ensuring safe and reliable travel on our airplanes is an enduring value and our absolute commitment to everyone. This overarching focus on safety spans and binds together our entire global aerospace industry and communities. We're united with our airline customers, international regulators and government authorities in our efforts to support the most recent investigation, understand the facts of what happened and help prevent future tragedies. Based on facts from the Lion Air Flight 610 accident and emerging data as it becomes available from the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 accident, we're taking actions to fully ensure the safety of the 737 MAX. We also understand and regret the challenges for our customers and the flying public caused by the fleet's grounding.

Boeing has been in the business of aviation safety for more than 100 years, and we'll continue providing the best products, training and support to our global airline customers and pilots. This is an ongoing and relentless commitment to make safe airplanes even safer .

Soon we'll release a software update and related pilot training for the 737 MAX that will address concerns discovered in the aftermath of the Lion Air Flight 610 accident.

Fine words. Are they true? Can Boeing's "commitment to everyone to ensure " safe and reliable travel" really be said to be "absolute"? That's a high bar. Let's see!

I've taken the structure that follows from a tweetstorm by Trevor Sumner (apparently derived from a Facebook post by his brother-law, Dave Kammeyer ). However, I've added topic headings, changed others, and helpfully numbered them all, so you can correct, enhance, or rearrange topics easily in comments (or even suggest new topics). Let me also caveat that this is an enormous amount of material, and time presses, so this will not be as rich in links as I would normally like it to be. Also note that the level of abstraction for each topic varies significantly: From "The Biosphere" all the way to "Pilot Training." A proper failure matrix would sort that out.

* * *

(1) The Biosphere : The 737 MAX story beings with a customer requirement for increased fuel efficiency. This is, at bottom, a carbon issue (and hence a greenhouse gas issue , especially as the demand for air travel increases, especially in Asia). New biosphere-driven customer demands will continue to emerge as climate change increases and intensifies, and hence the continued 737 MAX-like debacles should be expected, all else being equal. From CAPA – Centre for Aviation :

The main expected impacts of climate change on aviation result from changes in temperature, precipitation (rain and snow), storm patterns, sea level and wind patterns. In addition, climate change is expected to lead to increased drought, impacts on the supply of water and energy, and changes in wildlife patterns and biodiversity. Consequences for aviation include reduced aircraft performance, changing demand patterns, potential damage to infrastructure, loss of capacity and schedule disruption.

All of these factors will affect aircraft design, manufacturing, maintenance, and use, stressing the system.

(2) Choice of Airframe : The Air Current describes the competitive environment that led Boeing to upgrade the 737 to the 737 MAX, instead of building a new plane:

Boeing wanted to replace the 737. The plan had even earned the endorsement of its now-retired chief executive. We're gonna do a new airplane," Jim McNerney said in February of that same year. "We're not done evaluating this whole situation yet, but our current bias is to not re-engine, is to move to an all-new airplane at the end of the decade." History went in a different direction. Airbus, riding its same decades-long incremental strategy and chipping away at Boeing's market supremacy, had made no secret of its plans to put new engines on the A320. But its own re-engineered jet somehow managed to take Boeing by surprise. Airbus and American forced Boeing's hand. It had to put new engines on the 737 to stay even with its rival .

Why? The earlier butchered launch of the 787:

Boeing justified the decision thusly: There were huge and excruciatingly painful near-term obstacles on its way to a new single-aisle airplane. In the summer of 2011, the 787 Dreamliner wasn't yet done after billions invested and years of delays. More than 800 airplanes later here in 2019, each 787 costs less to build than sell, but it's still running a $23 billion production cost deficit. .

The 737 Max was Boeing's ticket to holding the line on its position "both market and financial" in the near term. Abandoning the 737 would've meant walking away from its golden goose that helped finance the astronomical costs of the 787 and the development of the 777X.

So, we might think of Boeing as a runner who's tripped and fallen: The initial stumble, followed by loss of balance, was the 787; with the 737 MAX, Boeing hit the surface of the track.

(3) Aerodynamic Issues : The Air Current also describes the aerodynamic issues created by the decision to re-engine the 737:

Every airplane development is a series of compromises, but to deliver the 737 Max with its promised fuel efficiency, Boeing had to fit 12 gallons into a 10 gallon jug. Its bigger engines made for creative solutions as it found a way to mount the larger CFM International turbines under the notoriously low-slung jetliner. It lengthened the nose landing gear by eight inches, cleaned up the aerodynamics of the tail cone, added new winglets, fly-by-wire spoilers and big displays for the next generation of pilots. It pushed technology, as it had done time and time again with ever-increasing costs, to deliver a product that made its jets more-efficient and less-costly to fly.

In the case of the 737 Max, with its nose pointed high in the air, the larger engines "generating their own lift" nudged it even higher. The risk Boeing found through analysis and later flight testing was that under certain high-speed conditions both in wind-up turns and wings-level flight, that upward nudge created a greater risk of stalling. Its solution was MCAS , the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System control law that would allow for both generations of 737 to behave the same way. MCAS would automatically trim the horizontal stabilizer to bring the nose down, activated with Angle of Attack data. It's now at the center of the Lion Air investigation and stalking the periphery of the Ethiopian crash.

(4) Systems Engineering : Amazingly, there is what in a less buttoned-down world that commercial aviation would be called a Boeing 737 fan site, which describes the MCAS system in more technical terms :

MCAS was introduced to counteract the pitch up effect of the LEAP-1B engines at high AoA [Angle of Attack]. The engines were both larger and relocated slightly up and forward from the previous NG CFM56-7 engines to accomodate their larger diameter. This new location and size of the nacelle causes it to produce lift at high AoA; as the nacelle is ahead of the CofG [Center of Gravity] this causes a pitch-up effect which could in turn further increase the AoA and send the aircraft closer towards the stall. MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during steep turns with elevated load factors (high AoA) and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall.

Unfortunately for Boeing and the passengers its crashed aircraft were carrying, the MCAS system was very poorly implemented. Reading between the lines (I've helpfully labeled the pain points):

Boeing have been working on a software modification to MCAS since the Lion Air accident. Unfortunately although originally due for release in January it has still not been released due to both engineering challenges and differences of opinion among some federal and company safety experts over how extensive the changes should be.

Apparently there have been discussions about potentially adding [A] enhanced pilot training and possibly mandatory [B] cockpit alerts to the package. There also has been consideration of more-sweeping design changes that would prevent [C] faulty signals from a single sensor from touching off the automated stall-prevention system.

[A] Pilot training was originally not considered necessary, because MCAS was supposed to give 737 MAX the same flight characteristics as earlier 737s; that's why pilots weren't told about it. (This also kept the price low.) [B] Such alerts exist now, as part of an optional package, which Lion did not buy. [C] The single sensor was the result of regulatory capture, not to say gaming; see below.

(The MCAS system is currently the system fingered as the cause of both the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes; we won't know for sure until the forensics are complete. Here, however, is the scenario for an MCAS-induced crash :

Black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash.

(5) Regulatory Capture : Commercial aircraft need to be certified by the FAA before launch. The Washington Post labels today's process "self-certification":

The FAA's publication of pilot training requirements for the Max 8 in the fall of 2017 was among the final steps in a multiyear approval process carried out under the agency's now 10-year-old policy of entrusting Boeing and other aviation manufacturers to certify that their own systems comply with U.S. air safety regulations.

In practice, one Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer would act as the FAA's representative , signing on behalf of the U.S. government that the technology complied with federal safety regulations, people familiar with the process said.

(Note that a 10-year-old process would have begun in the Obama administration, so the regulatory process is bipartisan.) I understand that " safety culture " is real and strong, but imagine the same role-playing concept applied to finance: One bankers plays the banker, and the other banker plays Bill Black, and after a time they switch roles . Clearly a system that will work until it doesn't. More:

The process was occurring during a period when the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General was warning the FAA that its oversight of manufacturers' work was insufficient.

Four years after self-certification began, fires aboard Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets led to the grounding of the fleet and a wave of questions about whether self-certification had affected the FAA's oversight.

Why "self-certification"? Investigative reporting from the Seattle Times -- the article is worth reading in full -- explains:

The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.

Alert readers will note the similarity to the Neoliberal Playbook , where government systems are sabotaged in order to privatize them, but in this case regulatory capture seems to have happened "by littles," rather than out of open, ideological conviction (as with the UKs's NHS, or our Post Office, our Veteran's Administration, etc.).

(6) Transfer of Authority to Boeing : In the case of the 737 Max, regulatory capture was so great that certification authority was transferred to Boeing. In order to be certified, a "System Safety Analysis" for MCAS had to be performed. The Seattle Times :

The safety analysis:

Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.

Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane's nose downward. Assessed a failure of the system as one level below "catastrophic."

But even that "hazardous" danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor -- and yet that's how it was designed.

So who certified MCAS? Boeing self-certified it. Once again The Seattle Times :

Several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process. Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing .

"There wasn't a complete and proper review of the documents," the former engineer added. "Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates."

In this atmosphere, the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification, was delegated to Boeing .

(I'm skipping a lengthy discussion of even more technical detail for MCAS, which includes discrepancies between what Boeing self-certified, and what the FAA thought that it had certified, along with the MCAS system acting like a ratchet, so it didn't reset itself, meaning that each time it kicked in, the nose was pitched down even lower. Yikes. Again, the article is worth reading in full; if you've ever done tech doc, you'll want to scream and run.)

(7) Political Economy : This tweet is especially interesting, because even I know that Muddy Waters Research is a famous short seller:

MuddyWatersResearch ‏ Verified account @ muddywatersre Mar 18

What's the result? Two $ BA planes have been grounded: 787 and Max. Last FAA grounding of a type of plane was 1979. In the case of the Max, FAA outsourced more than planned bc BA was 9 months behind Airbus 320neo 3/4 2 replies 4 retweets 19 likes

This is a great example of real short-termism by a corporate. It's clearly in $ BA LT interest to have robust cert system, but those chickens come home to roost years later, allowing mgmt to meet ST expectations. BTW, semi-annual reporting would do NOTHING to fix this mentality. 4

And here we are! There are a myriad of other details, but many of them will only prove out once the black boxes are examined and the forensics are complete.

* * *

It should be clear at this point that the central claims of Muilenburg's letter are false. I understand that commercial aviation is a business, but if that is so, then Muilenburg's claim that Boeing's commitment to safety is "absolute" cannot possibly be true; indeed, the choice to re-engine the 737 had nothing to do with safety. Self-certification makes Boeing "a judge in its own cause," and that clearly contradicts Muilenburg's absurd claim that "safety" -- as opposed to profit -- "is at the core of who we are."

The self-certification debacle that allowed MCAS to be released happened on Muilenburg's watch and is already causing Boeing immense reputational damage, and a criminal case, not to mention the civil cases that are surely coming, will only increase that damage. Mr. Market, the Beltway, and even Trump, if his trade deals are affected, will all soon be bellowing for a sacrificial victim. Muilenburg should recognize the inevitable and gracefully resign. Given his letter, it looks unlikely that he will do the right thing.


John A , , March 19, 2019 at 4:34 pm

Maybe they should have appointed aviation expert Nikki Haley to the Boeing board earlier.

Yikes , , March 19, 2019 at 4:35 pm

Sacrificial Victims were spread over land and sea in Kenya and Indonesia. Muilenburg and Obbie The Wan both are the criminals who profit.

dcrane , , March 19, 2019 at 4:36 pm

That should be "five months" not "five weeks" in the first sentence. Lion Air crashed on 29 October 2018.

Howard Beale IV , , March 19, 2019 at 4:39 pm

IIRC, one of the big constraints that was leveled was the need to keep the 737, regardless of version, into the same height relative to all other generations of the 737, whereas Airbus kept their height a lot higher than the 737.

If you look at many 737's over the years, some of the engine's nacelles were flat at the bottom to accommodate larger engine. Why? Boeing kept the height the same in order to maintain built-in stairs that, with virtually all airports having adjustable jetways, was basically redundant.

When you compare an A320xeo against a B737, you'll find that the Airbus rides higher when it comes to the jetways.

Michael Hudson , , March 19, 2019 at 4:42 pm

It seems to me that the Boeing 737-Max with the heavier, larger fuel-saving engines is so unbalanced (tilting over and then crashing if not "overridden" by a computer compensation) that it never should have been authorized in the first place.

When Boeing decided to add a much larger engine, it should have kept the airplane in balance by (1) shifting it forward or backward so that the weight did not tip the plane, and (2) created a larger landing-gear base so that the large engines wouldn't scrape the ground.

The problem was that Boeing tried to keep using the old chassis with the larger engines under the wings – rather than changing the wings, moving them forward or aft, and expanding the plane to permit a more appropriate landing gear.

The computer system has been blamed for not being a "smart enough" workaround to tell the plane not to plunge down when it already is quite close to the ground – with no perception of altitude, not to mention double-checking on the wind speed from both sensors.

Beyond that ultimate problem is the ultimate regulatory problem: regulatory capture of the FAA by the airline companies. As a result, the FAA represents "its customers" the airplane makers, not the public users and customers. This is like the banks capturing the Fed, the Justice Dept. and Treasury to promote their own interests by claiming that "self-regulation" works. Self-regulation is the polite word for fraudulent self-indulgence.

I would be surprised if the European Airbus competitors do not mount a campaign to block the 737-Max's from landing, and insisting that Boeing buy them back. This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes.

This probably will throw Trump's China trade fight into turmoil, as China was the first country to ground the 737-Max's and is unlikely to permit their recovery without a "real" federal safety oversight program. Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane, so as to represent users and stakeholders, not only stockholders.

The moral: Neoliberalism Kills.

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 19, 2019 at 5:13 pm

Rule #2 of Neoliberalism: Go die.

> "Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane."

As if the 737 MAX were the chlorinated chicken of aircraft.

* * *

I'm not sure about redesigning the wing and the landing gear. That might be tantamount to designing a new plane. (I do know that the landing gear is so low because the first 737s needed to accommodate airports without jetways, and so there may be other facets of the design that also depend on those original requirements that might have to be changed.)

Synoia , , March 19, 2019 at 7:45 pm

Correct – redesign the wing = new plane.

Cal2 , , March 19, 2019 at 7:45 pm

Rule #3 of Neoliberalism:

Their profits = Your cancer, which presents even more profit taking. I.e. Bayer makes the carcinogenic pesticides AND the chemotherapy drugs.

Carey , , March 20, 2019 at 10:19 am

Precisely this. Thank you.

John Zelnicker , , March 19, 2019 at 7:46 pm

@Michael Hudson
March 19, 2019 at 4:42 pm
-- -- -

"This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes."

That would be great for Mobile as the Airbus A320neo is assembled here.

Octopii , , March 20, 2019 at 7:38 am

And provides time for the A220 to ramp up in Mobile as well. Not a direct competitor for the 737 but a very good airplane developed by Bombardier.

Carey , , March 20, 2019 at 11:20 am

Also, the MC-21 is in final testing now; still using Western engines, for the moment. One to watch, maybe.

Which is worse - bankers or terrorists , , March 20, 2019 at 4:17 am

Engineering logs seem to indicate that larger landing gear cannot be added without re-engineering the plane.

115 kV , , March 20, 2019 at 8:15 am

Regulatory capture is rampant throughout the economy. Boeing self-certification being delegated by the FAA is not unlike the situation with electric transmission utilities.

After the 2003 northeast & Canada blackout, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It directed FERC to create an "electric reliability organization". Previously there were voluntary organizations set up after the 1966 blackout to establish operating standards in the industry. One of them was the North American Electric Reliability Council which morphed into the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) in 2006.

NERC is headquartered in Atlanta and employs hundreds of people. The standards setting generally takes place in NERC Committees and Subcommittees and sometimes from FERC itself. These are typically packed with industry people, with a patina of diversity that includes some governmental types and large industrial consumers. Let it suffice to say the electric transmission industry itself largely sets the rules how it operates.

Now consider the article in yesterday's NYT " How PG&E Ignored California Fire Risks in Favor of Profits ". The transmission circuit featured in the article (the Caribou-Palermo line) that caused the destruction of Paradise is a transmission line that is subject to both FERC and NERC regulation. As described in the article the circuit had many previous failures and was well beyond its design life.

However, both FERC and NERC have a laser focus on "market players" (think Enron or JP Morgan) and system operations (e.g., prevent collapses like the blackout of 2003). AFIK, neither FERC or NERC have prescriptive standards for routine maintenance or inspection and replacement (i.e., very expensive capital replacement that was not done on the Caribou-Palermo line), these are left to the discretion of the transmission owner. While substantive information about electric reliability is maintained by industry trade groups and submitted to FERC, what is available to the public is generally useless and subjected to scrubbing and polishing (often under the guise of Critical Energy Infrastructure Information).

We can see how self-policing work, can't we??? Rent-seeking market players can arbitrage markets, inflating prices consumers pay and make billions in profits, while California burns.

The neglectful rot in California is endemic in the industry as a whole.

A little bit of dignity , , March 19, 2019 at 4:47 pm

How about seppuku for the entire top management?

Robert Hahl , , March 20, 2019 at 7:14 am

If an airplane crashes in the forest, and no American were killed, did it make a sound?

Carolinian , , March 19, 2019 at 5:07 pm

That Seattle Times investigative story is indeed very good and a rare instance of newspaper writers troubling to carefully and cogently explain a technical issue.

In hindsight Boeing would have perhaps been better off to leave off the MCAS altogether and depend on pilot retraining to cover the altered handling.

One reason they may not have was that crash several years ago of a commuter plane in upstate NY where the plane started to stall and the confused pilot pulled up on the controls rather than making the airplane dive to regain speed. Still one has to believe that no automation is better than badly designed or malfunctioning automation.

allan , , March 19, 2019 at 5:31 pm

"depend on pilot retraining to cover the altered handling"

IANAP, but maybe the problem is that "nose up" situations can go south very quickly. For those with the stomach for it, there are videos on youtube of the 747 freighter that went nose up at Bagram a few years ago (perhaps due to loose cargo shifting backwards on takeoff). It was over very quickly.

ChrisPacific , , March 19, 2019 at 5:37 pm

Yes, I was impressed with it. Unfortunately the investigation precludes Boeing from responding as they did indicate they would have had something to say about it otherwise. But the analysis looks pretty cut and dried:

  1. Boeing underestimated the risk rating for the sensor, excluding the possibility of a catastrophic failure as occurred in the two incidents to date;
  2. Boeing also failed to implement the redundancy that would have been required even for their lower risk rating;
  3. Manual correction by the pilot as a possible risk mitigation was constrained by the fact that pilots weren't trained on the new system due to commercial factors.

Fixing any one of those three issues would have averted the disasters, although #3 is pretty precarious as you're relying on manual pilot actions to correct what is a clear systems defect at that point.

It sounds like #1 was partly because they failed to account for all the scenarios, like repeat activation raising the risk profile in certain circumstances. This is very easy to do and a robust review process is your best defense. So we could add the tight timelines and rushed process as a contributing factor for #1, and probably the others as well.

XXYY , , March 20, 2019 at 12:08 pm

People who work on accident investigation would probably agree on 2 things:

So while there is much to be profitably learned by investigating everything here, an effective "fix" may be surprisingly (or suspiciously) small in scope. There will be much clamoring for the whole plane to be resigned or scrapped, for better or worse.

anon in so cal , , March 19, 2019 at 6:28 pm

The Colgan crash, whose pilot, Renfrew, was chatting with the co-pilot below the allowed altitude? And who had apparently lied about his background, and had a pay-to-play pilot's license?

I think the Air France Airbus 447 also had a high-altitude stall (due to a faulty air speed sensor) and needed its nose pushed down, not up (which the copilots didn't realize).

Also, very informative article / OP, thanks for posting.

Synoia , , March 19, 2019 at 7:47 pm

MCAS was added to change the behavior of the plane from to tend to stall as speed increases. That is stall and crash, because such a high speed stall makes polit recovery very, very difficult.

In addition the MCAS driven amount of elevator change was initially 0.6 to 2.5, which indicates the 0.6 increment was found to be too low.

Carolinian , , March 19, 2019 at 8:07 pm

Well they are planning to keep it but

According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing will change the MCAS software to give the system input from both angle-of-attack sensors.

It will also limit how much MCAS can move the horizontal tail in response to an erroneous signal. And when activated, the system will kick in only for one cycle, rather than multiple times.

Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS.

–Seattle Times

So apparently the greater elevator setting is not so necessary that they are not willing to reduce it. Also the max power setting would normally be on take off when the pilots are required to manually fly the plane.

Synoia , , March 20, 2019 at 12:12 pm

It is about speed, not power. I presume that MCAS was developed to solve a problem, nose up behaviour.

Carey , , March 20, 2019 at 10:28 am

Yes, that was an excellent Seattle times piece. Surprising to see that kind of truth-telling and, especially, *clarity* in an MSM piece these days. So what's the angle?

voislav , , March 19, 2019 at 5:48 pm

Reports I've read indicates that Boeing ignored even the clearly inadequate certification. "Documentation provided to the FAA claims that the MCAS system can only adjust the horizontal tail on the plane by 0.6 degrees out of a maximum of five-degrees of nose-down movement. But that limit was later increased to 2.5-degrees of nose-down movement. Boeing didn't communicate the change from 0.6-degrees to 2.5-degrees until after Lion Air."

Apparently this was done after simulations showed that 0.6 degrees was inadequate and the new 2.5 degree setting was not extensively tested before the planes were rolled out. IANAL, but this may be a serious problem for Boeing. Boeing could also be liable for damages due to 737 groundings and due to delays in delivery of contracted planes.

Big question is how 737 issues will affect 777X rollout, due at the end of the year. If 777X certification is called into question, this may cause further delays and put it at a further disadvantage against A350.

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 3:17 am

The 777 has been a great plane. Let's all pray the MBAs didn't fuck it up, too.

If I were Boeing, I'd have a team looking into the 777 certification process right now. And I'd set up a whistleblower line (so the Seattle Times doesn't get to the story first).

The analogy has been made between this the 737 MAX story and the Tylenol story. J&J got out in front of the problem and saved the product (and their company). Boeing's problem is of that order, and Muilenberg -- that letter! -- seems incapable of understanding that; insular, arrogant. One more reason to fire the dude toot sweet. If he comes out of his next review with a raise -- Everything Is Like CalPERS™ -- consider shorting Boeing

Chris , , March 20, 2019 at 1:35 pm

Thanks, Lambert, for post and comments. I don't know if this angle has been covered or explored: the relatively new way that Boeing now "manufactures" "tests" and "assembles" parts of its planes. I had dinner with new acquaintance, Boeing engineer for decades (I live near a plant in WA state). For the last few years, this engineer is stationed half year in Russia annually to oversee assembly there. In this newish, more profitable manufacturing system for Boeing, the parts come in from around the world with sketchy quality control, are then assembled by Russian workers this engineer (and other Boeing employees sent from States) supposedly oversees. But the engineer doesn't speak Russian and has too little access to translators .Needless to say, this engineer is planning an exit as soon as possible. Having grown up in WA state for 60 years with neighbors/friends who were Boeing engineers, assemblers, line workers, etc it makes me heart sick to see the current decimation of talent, rigor and wages with additional far-flung assembly factories (Russia with few translators?! who knew?). Might these manufacturing/assemblying "improvements" also be a contributing factor in these terrifying woes for Boeing?

PlutoniumKun , , March 19, 2019 at 5:57 pm

Thanks for this Lambert, fantastically informative and interesting post.

Self regulation only works when liability is transferred with it – over example, in construction whereby certification by the engineers or architects designing the building are also taking on liability in the event something goes wrong. It seems unlikely that this is the situation with Boeing.

Allowing this to happen seems the ultimate in short term thinking by Boeing. US manufacturers have always had an advantage over competitors because the FAA was held in such high regard worldwide that it was the de facto world safety regulatory body – every country followed its lead. But this chipping away of its authority has led to a near fatal loss of faith, and will no doubt lead to European and Asian regulatory authorities being strengthened. And no doubt commercial realities will mean they will look much more closely at US manufactured aircraft if there is some benefit to their own manufacturers.

Airbus will no doubt try to take advantage – just as Boeing (with some justification) tried to focus attention on the Air France Airbus loss which was attributed at least in part to excessive automation. China is pushing hard with its new Comac aircraft, but they seem to be poorly regarded worldwide (only Chinese airlines are buying). The Canadians have missed their chance with the Bombadier C-series.

JBird4049 , , March 19, 2019 at 6:07 pm

The more I read of this the more baffling it is. What was there stopping Boeing from just highlighting the changes and installing an easy manual override instead of this hidden change with effectively no way to permanently do so? Especially when in crisis mode? One could make a case of no extra training needed so long as the pilot knows about it and can easily turn it off.

Darius , , March 19, 2019 at 6:30 pm

I didn't see this before I posted my response. A more concise statement of my thoughts. This plus more robust redundant sensors. Penny wise and pound foolish.

The Times thinks Boeing is too big to fail. Without a blockbuster Max, I don't see how Boeing maintains its current status in the industry.

Synoia , , March 19, 2019 at 7:52 pm

One could make a case of no extra training needed so long as the pilot knows about it and can easily turn it off.

That's the expensive re-certification Boeing wanted to avoid.

Robert Hahl , , March 20, 2019 at 7:52 am

That would entail simulator training, that would entail modifying the simulators and the curriculum.

Darius , , March 19, 2019 at 6:22 pm

I am leaning towards thinking the kludgy design of the 727 Max could have been rolled out with no major problems if Boeing had been up front about design changes, made a robust and conservative MCAS, fully at the command of the pilot, and provided ample training for the new aircraft.

They still could have saved billions on the airframe. They would have had to acknowledge the significant modifications to the airlines with the attendant training and other costs and delays. They would have lost some sales. They still would have been far ahead of Airbus and light years ahead of where they are now.

I also think they have been completely afflicted by the defense contractor mentality.

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 3:08 am

> I also think they have been completely afflicted by the defense contractor mentality.

Yes, the famous McDonnell-Douglas reverse takeover , where financial engineers inserted their sucking mandibles into an actual engineering culture. The merger took place in 1997, 22 years ago, which is not so long, really. Note also that the finance guys drove the decision to outsource as much 787 manufacturing as possible , which creates headaches for real engineering, so the initial stumble with the 787 that led to the 737 fall is down to them, too.

Note that Muilenberg came up through the defense side of the company not the commercial aircraft side. He may simply not have been equipped to understand FAA regulation at any deep level, hence the rot that finally surfaced.

VietnamVet , , March 19, 2019 at 6:50 pm

The 737 Max crashes and Brexit are the chickens coming home to roost. NC is a treasure for your coverage of both.

Clearly upper management in Chicago only knows short term finance. Boeing stuck with old fashion hydraulic controls in the 737 but faced with an unacceptable flight characteristics of the larger more efficient engines added a fly-by-wire system to compensate for it.

The criminal charges are that besides being a faulty design (it relies on one fragile exposed sensor that if out of position keeps triggering dives until switched off) but Boeing hid it and self-certified that it was safe. Adding a discrepancy warning and position indicator for the two independent flight sensors to the cockpit video display is an extra cost feature.

Neither of the planes that crashed had the added safety display. All are cost saving measures. Finally, if a faulty sensor triggers dives, the pilot at the controls is busy with both hands on the yoke forcing the airplane to stay in the air with stall and proximity warnings are sounding. The second pilot also must realize what's going on, immediately turn off the electricity to the screw jack motor and manually turn the stabilizer trim wheel to neutral.

You can't learn this on an iPad. Both pilots should practice it together in a Flight Simulator. If the co-pilot was experienced, unlike the one in the Ethiopian crash; just maybe, they could have survived the repeated attempts by the airplane to dive into the ground on takeoff.

The tragedy is that corporate media in pursuit of profits will keep us up to date but will never mention the 6 or 8 minutes of terror for the 346 souls aboard the two flights. They will cover the criminal negligence trial if there are ever indictments. But, the news reports never will say that neoliberalism, deregulation, and privatization are the root causes of the deaths.

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 3:01 am

> if a faulty sensor triggers dives, the pilot at the controls is busy with both hands on the yoke forcing the airplane to stay in the air with stall and proximity warnings are sounding. The second pilot also must realize what's going on, immediately turn off the electricity to the screw jack motor and manually turn the stabilizer trim wheel to neutral. You can't learn this on an iPad. Both pilots should practice it together in a Flight Simulator. If the co-pilot was experienced, unlike the one in the Ethiopian crash; just maybe, they could have survived the repeated attempts by the airplane to dive into the ground on takeoff.

That's what I mean by horrid UI/UX. Might as well as both pilots to pat their heads and rub their tummies in synch. And since the two pilots have to both understand what's going on, we've multiplied the chances for failure.

Boeing also clearly did not know its customers . It should be engineering for the sort of pilots who are going to be hired by Lion Air, or any rapidly expanding airline in what we used to all the Third World. Hegemony, it seems, makes you insular and provincial.

EoH , , March 20, 2019 at 4:54 pm

Added cost, "mandatory" safety feature. Does not seem to square with the [soon to be former?] CEO's apology-industry written claim to be committed to absolute safety.

You can't make this stuff up.

dearieme , , March 19, 2019 at 7:03 pm

"The FAA, citing lack of funding and resource": I don't suppose I'll survive to see any arm of government not blame lack of funds for its boneheaded or corrupt incompetence.

But the bigger picture: suppose the FAA is to do its job properly. From where is it going to recruit its staff?

Smaller picture: it doesn't really matter whether the cocked-up MCAS killed all those people or not. Even if it's innocent of the charge, the account of its development and application is a horror story.

Bigger picture: what other horrors have been hidden by Boeing?

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 2:48 am

> the account of its development and application is a horror story.

That's how I feel. The tech doc department at Boeing sounds like a horrible place to work; MBAs or their goons telling you all the time to do stuff you know is wrong. It's not surprising people were willing to talk to the Seattle Times; I bet there are more people. (Hey, Seattle Times! How about people testing the 737 MAX in simulators (assuming this is done)).

Sounds like the MBAs in Chicago have been busy planting land mines everywhere. Somebody stepped on this one; there are others.

oaf , , March 19, 2019 at 7:05 pm

The unfortunate pilots were made test pilots; the unsuspecting passengers: Guinea pigs. Lab rats. And paid for the privilege. Some others may share this opinion. Change one little thing? Chaos Theory Rules. Same with weather/climate; folks. That rant is for later.

oafstradamus

dcrane , , March 19, 2019 at 7:08 pm

Boeing stuck with old fashion hydraulic controls in the 737 but faced with an unacceptable flight characteristics of the larger more efficient engines added a fly-by-wire system to compensate for it.

Interestingly, and maybe relevant to the problem of confusion for the pilots, is that Boeing has had another automatic trim-modifier operating on its 737s for some time, the speed-trim system (STS):

https://leehamnews.com/2019/02/01/bjorns-corner-pitch-stability-part-7/

This system also modifies the stabilizer position during manual flight. Like MCAS, it was brought in to improve stability under certain flight conditions (the reasons for which are far beyond my knowledge). There is an indication that the pilots on the flight before the Lion Air crash misinterpreted MCAS actions for STS behavior.

Synoia , , March 19, 2019 at 7:55 pm

Safety is at the core of who we are at Boeing

Yes, after money.

drumlin woodchuckles , , March 19, 2019 at 8:08 pm

At what point does "crapification" become insufficient to describe Boeing's product and process here? At what point do we have to speak of " ford-pintofication"?

barrisj , , March 19, 2019 at 8:15 pm

OK, I'm told to resubmit my crib re: "Boeing options" from the ZeroHedge "tweetstorm" by Trevot Sumner, and include a link got it:

Economic problem. Boeing sells an option package that includes an extra AoA vane, and an AoA disagree light, which lets pilots know that this problem was happening. Both 737MAXes that crashed were delivered without this option. No 737MAX with this option has ever crashed

https://mobile.twitter.com/trevorsumner/status/1106934369158078470

Ooops! "Options package"? Wait, a "package" that in the interim corrects a potentially catastrophic mfg. defect and airlines have to pay for it? Whoa, here's your late capitalism in play.

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 2:45 am

> Boeing sells an option package that includes an extra AoA vane, and an AoA disagree light

This is one of the details I could not get to (and we don't 100% know this is an issue until the forensics are done. Right now, we have narrative. Truly excellent narrative to be sure -- if only we thought of government the same way as pilots think of their aircraft! -- but narrative nonetheless).

Let me see if I have this right. Pilots, chime in!

"Authority" is one of the big words in this discussion; MCAS takes authority away from the pilot (and can do in such a drastic fashion as to crash the plane). Worse, the default case is that it can do so on the basis of a single sensor reading. In a design appropriate to the consequences for failure (i.e., a different design from that described in the "System Safety Analysis" that Boeing self-certified) MCAS would take readings from two sensors, and if they disagreed, authority would revert to the pilot . That's a general principle at Boeing, and so it's reasonable for pilots to assume that they retain authority of MCAS has not told them they don't have it any more.

Hence, the disagree light, which tells the pilots to take back authority because the sensors are confused. However, I think there are UI/UX issues with that, given that the 737 cockpit is extremely noisy and pilots have a lot to do on take-off. So a light might not be the answer. (The light also strikes me as a kludge; first, MCAS feels to me like a kludge, in that we're making the aircraft flyable only through software.* Fine for fighter jets, which can be inherently unstable, but perhaps not so fine for commercial aircraft? Then we have a second kludge, a light to tell us that the first kludge has kicked in. I dunno.)

NOTE * However, it's also true that automation affects flight characteristics all the time. So I'm not sure how savage to make this indictment.

rowlf , , March 20, 2019 at 6:00 am

The AOA indication is Service Bulletin 737-31-1650 (there may be others) and is on the both Pilot Flight Displays (PFDs). Pilots would likely abort a takeoff if they saw the indication come on before getting airborne.

California Bob , , March 19, 2019 at 8:20 pm

In hindsight, it appears Boeing should have made Mulally CEO. He appears to be competent.

Cal2 , , March 19, 2019 at 8:25 pm

"Boeing has been in the business of aviation safety for more than 100 years, "

How many years ago did Wall Street take over the fortunes of the company? Why did they move their headquarters from their birthplace of Seattle to Chicago? Why did they start assembling planes in South Carolina and China? Was it to improve aviation safety? Or, to allow the profiteering parasites to feed off the carcass of the company?

I want to fly on Boeing planes put together by well paid members of the Seattle Machinists Union, not low wage peons. Let's not even mention the maintenance of American aircraft in China and El Salvador.

https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2018/04/20/southwest-airlines-should-have-inspected-engines.html

President Trump, here's a reelection tip: "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American airspace must be maintained in the U.S."

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 2:32 am

> President Trump, here's a reelection tip:

> "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American airspace must be maintained in the U.S."

Amazingly, Trump seems to have done OK on this. First, he didn't cave to Muilenberg's (insane, goofy, tone-deaf) request to keep the 737 flying; then he frames the issue as complexity (correct, IMNSHO), and then he manages to nominate a Delta CEO as head of the FAA .

And your suggestion is very good one. I wonder if he could do that by executive order? And I wonder how many grey-beards would come off the golf courses to help out? I bet a lot.

oaf , , March 19, 2019 at 8:47 pm

The aircraft is NOT CRAP!!! However. It should have been flown A WHOLE LOT MORE before receiving certification.

*Real* test pilots should have their a–es on the line ; operating for a lot more hours at *the edge of the envelope*, as it is known. Stability should be by design; not software*patch*. Patch this!

What portion of its' MCAS system flight testing was in computer simulation? Like the so-called Doppler Radar; which *magically* predicts what the future will bring; while the experts pitch it as fact? And make life-or-death decisions on the theoretical data???
Rush to market; markets rule. We can die.

dcrane , , March 19, 2019 at 9:19 pm

The aircraft is NOT CRAP!!!

Agreed, but I think we're seeing signs that a crapification process has begun on the safety side in this industry. (It has been proceeding for years on the service/amenities side.)

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 2:25 am

> The aircraft is NOT CRAP!!!

Didn't say it was. The headline reads "Boeing Crapification," not "737 Crapification."

That said, the 737 clearly has issues, as Boeing itself knew, since if they'd had their druthers, they would have launched a new plane to replace it. See point #2.

> What portion of its' MCAS system flight testing was in computer simulation?

That is a very good question. If I understand the aerodynamics issues aright, MCAS would be most likely to kick in at takeoff, which raises a host of UI/UX issues because the pilots are very busy at that time. So was MCAS not tested in the simulators? If so, how on earth was a scenario that included sensor failure not included? It may be that there are more issues with Boeing's engineering process than the documentation issues raised by the Seattle Times, though those are bad enough.

Ron D , , March 20, 2019 at 4:18 pm

I say the 737-whatever is a flying Turd, and always has been. It has a bad wing design which means it has to fly nose up compared to other models( I always remember that when going to the restroom while going somewhere on one). And because of its poor design it has to takeoff and land at higher speeds. So when flying into someplace like Mexico City it can be quite a harrowing experience, and the smell of cooking brakes is relatively normal.

Boeing never should have let go of the 757. Now that was a good plane that was simply ahead of its time.

The Rev Kev , , March 19, 2019 at 8:53 pm

Considering the fact that all these 737s are grounded as no airline trust them to not kill a plane load of passengers and crew, this is a really big deal. Putting aside the technical and regulatory issues, the fact is that the rest of the world no longer trusts the US in modern aviation so what we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal.

We now know that the FAA does not audit the work done for these aircraft but the airlines themselves do it. It cannot be just Boeing but the other aircraft manufacturers as well. Other countries are going to be asking some very hard questions before forking over their billions to a US aircraft manufacturer in future. Worse is when Ethiopia refused to hand over the black boxes to the US but gave them instead to a third party.

That was saying that based on how you treated the whole crash, we do not trust you to do the job right and not to change some of the results. It has been done before, ironically enough by France who the Ethiopians gave the black boxes to. And when you lose trust, it takes a very long time to gain it back again – if ever. But will the changes be made to do so? I would guess no.

notabanker , , March 19, 2019 at 9:44 pm

But if the discount foreign airlines had just trained their pilots and paid for the non-crashintothegroundat500mph upgrade, all of this could have been avoided.

The Rev Kev , , March 20, 2019 at 12:55 am

Do you think that there was an app for that?

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 2:23 am

> we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal

Loss or at least wobbliness of imperial hegemony, like. It's not just the aircraft, it's US standards-setting bodies, methods, "safety culture," even -- dare we say it -- English as the language of aviation. French is no longer the language of diplomacy, after all, though it had a good run.

Because markets. Neoliberalism puts everything up for sale. Including regulation. Oversimplifying absurdly: And so you end up with the profit-driven manufacturer buying the regulator, its produce killing people, and the manufacturer canceling its future profits. That's what the Bearded One would call a contradiction.*

NOTE * There ought to be a way to reframe contradiction in terms of Net Present Value which would not be what we think it is, under that model.

Synoia , , March 19, 2019 at 10:05 pm

Thank you Lambert, this is very complete.

Can Boeing survive? Yes, as a much smaller company. What is upsetting to me, is that the Boeing management has sacrificed thousands of Jobs.

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 2:10 am

> Thank you Lambert, this is very complete.

I wish it were as complete as it should be! There are a ton of horrid details about sensors, the UI/UX for the MCAS system, 737 cockpit design, decisions by the marketing department, and training and maintenance for Asian airlines that I just couldn't get to. (Although most of those presume that the forensics have already been done.) But I felt that dollying back for the big picture was important to. Point #1 is important, in that all the factors that drove the 737 decision making are not only still in place, they're intensifying, so we had better adjust our systems (assuming Boeing remains a going concern -- defenestrating Muilenberg would be an excellent way to show we accept the seriousness of customer and international concern).

Bill Smith , , March 19, 2019 at 10:56 pm

Bloomberg is reporting that : "The Indonesia safety committee report said the plane had had multiple failures on previous flights and hadn't been properly repaired."

And the day before when the same plane had the problem that killed everyone the next day: "The so-called dead-head pilot on the earlier flight from Bali to Jakarta told the crew to cut power to the motor driving the nose down, according to the people familiar, part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize."

Lambert Strether Post author , , March 20, 2019 at 2:14 am

There's an enormous expansion of air travel in Asia. The lower end -- not flag -- carriers like Lion Air and also Air Asia are in that business to be cheap ; they're driven by expansion and known to be run by cowboys.

That said, know your customer . I would translate this into an opportunity for Boeing to sell these airlines a service package for training their ground operations. But it seems that cutting costs is the only thing the MBAs in Chicago understand. Pilots, pipe up!

Bill Smith , , March 20, 2019 at 7:13 am

Pilot training and requirements are in the hands of the country, not Boeing. If the story that the copilot of the Ethiopian Airlines plane had only 200 hours of experience that is astounding.

In the US that requirement is 1500 hours. In addition most US airlines would require more than that. And then they slot 'beginning' pilots for flights in good (better) weather as high minimums pilot.

Bill Smith , , March 20, 2019 at 7:17 am

"sell these airlines a service package" That won't help an airline that is in the business to be cheap. The Indonesia airplane was repeatedly reported for problems in prior days/flights that was never fixed.

Basil Pesto , , March 20, 2019 at 2:42 am

indeed I was just about to mention this same story. The link is here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-19/how-an-extra-man-in-cockpit-saved-a-737-max-that-later-crashed?utm_campaign=news&utm_medium=bd&utm_source=applenews

and this quote makes an interesting follow-on to the thread yesterday with 737 Pilot (which Lambert linked to in the first paragraph here):

"The combination of factors required to bring down a plane in these circumstances suggests other issues may also have occurred in the Ethiopia crash, said Jeffrey Guzzetti, who also directed accident investigations at FAA and is now a consultant.

"It's simply implausible that this MCAS deficiency by itself can down a modern jetliner with a trained crew," Guzzetti said."

Setting aside Mr Guzzetti's background (dismissing his claim here as tendentious right off the bat would strike me as uncharitable), and without wishing to exculpate anyone, it does lend some credence to the idea that Ethiopia Airlines may have some contributory negligence here, staffing the flight with such an inexperienced first officer.

JBird4049 , , March 20, 2019 at 12:25 pm

Setting aside Mr Guzzetti's background (dismissing his claim here as tendentious right off the bat would strike me as uncharitable), and without wishing to exculpate anyone, it does lend some credence to the idea that Ethiopia Airlines may have some contributory negligence here, staffing the flight with such an inexperienced first officer.

One can often point to inexperience, incompetence, stupidity, incompetence or just bad luck when some disaster happens, but Boeing counted on perfect performance from flight crews to successfully work with a workaround needed for other workarounds that needed perfect performance to not catastrophically fail. I know enough about complexity that you cannot depend on perfection because something will always fail.

BillC , , March 20, 2019 at 7:25 am

Your excellent summary lacks some MCAS details that are not widely reported by the general-audience press.

Like you, I am a retired software engineer, so I have followed an aviation blog discussion of this issue quite closely since it emerged as a probable software and system design failure. As the blog is open to all, its signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, but it seems not too difficult for any technically-minded person to separate the wheat from the chaff. My current understanding, which I believe others here are in a position to correct, if necessary:

A. The requirement for MCAS apparently emerged very late in the MAX's development, when it became clear that the upper cowling around the larger engines, being moved up and forward with respect to earlier 737 versions, adds nose-up force as the angle of attack (AoA) approaches the upper limits of the MAX's operating envelope because at such angles, the cowling itself generates lift beyond that of the wing.

B. As perceived by a pilot flying manually (not on autopilot), this added nose-up force makes it easier to pull back on the control column ("stick"), increasing the AoA further. This is like a car running off the asphalt onto a muddy shoulder: the steering wheel wants to turn the wrong way (toward the ditch) rather than the right way (back on the road).

C. An FAA regulation prohibits certification of an aircraft that presents the pilot with changing stick forces near stall that nudge the pilot toward the wrong reaction, 14 CFR 25.203(a) , IIRC (unfortunately, I can't find the original blog citation).

D. MCAS was put in place to satisfy this certification requirement -- not to automagically correct stalls without pilot action.

E. Other means of meeting this requirement exist, ranging from an airframe redesign that avoids the extra nose-up effect of the larger repositioned engines down to a "stick pusher" that increases the force a pilot would need to pull the stick back further in this situation.

F. Any of the other options would negate one or both of the MAX's chief selling points: little cost or schedule impact to Boeing (in a rush to meet the Airbus 320 NEO challenge) and to its customers ("No new flight crew training necessary, because to the pilot, the MAX feels just like its 737 predecessors.") That is, all the other options introduce new hardware to a completed design and the more fundamental changes could require new type certification.

G. The easiest fix was pure software: at high indicated AoA, under manual control, and with flaps up, automatically rotate the horizontal stabilizer a little bit nose-down, which increases the pressure needed to pull the stick back (nose-up). No need to tell the pilot about this in training or real time, since it's just to make MAX feel like any other 737.

H. The design presented for certification described a single small rotation. Testing showed this was insufficient to provide the tactile feedback necessary for certification in all cases, so the software fix was obvious: if the trigger conditions still hold after a 5 sec. pause, do it again.

I. Apparently nobody asked at that point, "What if the AoA indication is stuck high?" We're under schedule and cost pressure, so who wants to complexify things by (1) adding additional sanity-checking to the aircraft's AoA computations or (2) limiting how many times we add a little bit of nose-down.

J. When these details combine with a consistently erroneous AoA reading, MCAS can -- if not repeatedly countermanded or disabled and manually reversed -- eventually rotate the horizontal stabilizer to its maximum nose-down position, where it was found in both recent incidents, IIRC.

Even if the pilots figure out that's what's happening amid a cacophony of seemingly contradictory instrument readings and warnings (stick-shaker, trim wheel clacking, alarm chimes, and synthesized voices), the pilots still have to (1) cut power to the electrical trim systems and (2) restore the required trim, which may then require as many as 50 manual turns of a trim wheel. If you're near the ground, time is short

A minority of commenting pilots assert that any competently trained cockpit crew should be able to identify MCAS misbehavior quickly and power off automatic trim per the same checklist that was prescribed for "runaway automatic trim" on every 737 variant, MAX included. Most seem to agree that with aircraft control difficulties, multiple alarms, and disagreement among the pilot's and first officer's airspeed and AoA readings almost from the moment of takeoff (not yet officially confirmed), an MCAS-commanded runaway trim event may feel very different from the runaway trim flavors for which pilots have had simulator training, making problem identification difficult even given knowledge of the earlier Lion Air incident.

I imagine most software developers and engineers have seen cost/schedule pressures lead to short cuts. If their life was at stake, I doubt that many would think self-certification that such a project complies with all relevant safety requirements is a good idea.

ShamanicFallout , , March 20, 2019 at 12:59 pm

Thank you for that. And just 'wow'. I don't really know anything about aircraft/flying but this story is really fascinating and seems to be true a sign of the times. I guess we'll know what the current 'temperature' is out there when the fallout (civil liability, criminal liability, plane orders cancelled/ returned, etc) manifests. If Boeing skates, we'll know we've got a long way to go.

Cheryl from Maryland , , March 20, 2019 at 8:15 am

The Post's article on the FAA and Regulatory Capture is incomplete. The process for the FAA (and probably MANY government agencies) started under Reagan, did not revert to safety under Clinton (make government smaller and all that), and then accelerated under Bush II in 2005 (not a bi-partisan time). In particular, big changes to the FAA were made in 2005 that were executive in nature and did not require Congressional approval. CF: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/

drfrank , , March 20, 2019 at 9:22 am

Yes, but. Part of what we are seeing in this case is a rush to judgement based on less than full evidence and analysis, and so prejudices and ideological positions (which I share actually) are plainly to be seen (and perhaps worth analyzing). "Crapification," says the headline.

Yet, I cannot say that I disagree with BA's business decisions as such in a highly competitive environment as regards the tradeoffs in the development of the MAX and there is a certain absurdity in the idea that Boeing would knowingly take a high reputational risk, in an industry where failure is front page news (contrast banking or pharma failures).

I have no reason to believe that an FAA fully in charge of all aspects of certification would have prevented these crashes, as banking and drug regulators have not kept us safe either. What seems worthy of note is that neither the airlines that buy the product nor the foreign aviation regulators nor pilots' associations do their own testing and certification, in an area where more redundancy would be good. Nor is there any kind of private third party watchdog testing, like a Moody's or S&P, evaluating potentially toxic products and services for a price.

Finally, I suppose we have to ask ourselves why the price of the stock is holding up fairly well even as the news flow on these tragedies is helping the short sellers. Lest we forget that Boeing is the 5th largest defense contractor in the US.

oaf , , March 20, 2019 at 10:01 am

Is engine throttle automated in the flight regime where these accidents occurred? Or are the pilots controlling power? Is the lag in thrust response interacting with the MCAS in an unanticipated way? Aerodynamic lift of nacelles is mentioned several times; there is another lift factor relating to the thrust angle; which is not necessarily aligned with the fuselage axis in flight. Departure procedures often require speed limits and altitude changes; so it is likely multiple power demand levels get set through takeoff and climb until cruise altitude is reached. Does Autopilot/Flight Director integrate with MCAS; or are they independent systems? Even without touching flight controls; power changes affect pitch forces. I am wondering if consequences of manual power changes on an otherwise automated departure were adequately investigated in the certification of the MCAS. Please excuse my ignorance of these details.

oaf , , March 20, 2019 at 11:18 am

Regulatory elements that have been getting attention include the use of *standard* weights for passengers; IIRC, 170 lbs for US (and possibly ICAO) passengers comes to mind . Many aircraft accidents have an element of disregard for proper weight distribution, either accidental, or negligent. For instance: Tail-heavy bad! Intentional loading outside of subsequently approved C.G. and/or max weight limits is a common, if not ubiquitous part of determining certification limits.There is a safety factor in the certificated limits; but banking on this; using estimates; is proven risky or disastrous when actual weights, and distribution thereof, is uncertain. Cargo with false weight values could also occur. One might find incentive to claim lower weights than actual to save on freight charges. How many 170 lb passengers do you know? I am not familiar with scales being used to check aircraft weight and balance before takeoff; only calculations; based on formulas and charts.
Scales ARE USED during certain maintenance procedures; for airworthiness certificates; and following certain modifications.

Jack , , March 20, 2019 at 11:50 am

Here is an interesting article by a professional pilot blogger Patrick Smith. He calls the 737, "the Frankenplane", and traces its history all the way back to the 707 in 1959. According to Smith, "We wonder if the 737 MAX even needed to exist in the first place. Somewhere deep down, maybe the heart of this whole fiasco is Boeing's determination to keep the 737 line going, variant after variant, seemingly forever. I'm not saying this is the reason for what happened in Indonesia or Ethiopia, but the whole 737 program just seems misguided and unnecessary. Instead of starting from scratch with a new airframe, they took what was essentially conceived as a regional jet in the mid-1960s, and have pushed and pushed and pushed the thing -- bigger and bigger engines, fancier avionics and more seats -- into roles it was never intended for. The "Frankenplane," I call it.
See the article here .
As a pilot myslef, I feel the airlines have a lot to answer for as well. Their constant "dumbing down" of pilots, which comes from making pilots work long hours for low pay, results in pilots not being the best of the best. And training is a cost to airlines. Training doesn't result in revenue. Better to have the pilots actually flying, hence Boeing selling this new version of the 737 as not requiring further training. But, training and practice is everything in flying. Flying a plane is actually a relatively easy skill to acquire. Most people can learn to fly a trainer in 5 hours or so. Most people solo (fly the plane without an instructor) with only 10-20 hours of instruction. It takes a lot longer to learn how to drive a car for most people (45 hours is the average). So it really isn't that difficult .until something goes WRONG. That is when the training kicks in. An often quoted flying truism, is that flying is "99% boredom and 1% stark terror". What happened with these two crashes is that you had some inexperienced pilots who were not fully trained on the systems (a lot of that blame goes to Boeing). When things start going wrong, information overload can easily occur if you have not been properly trained, even with two pilots.

Carey , , March 20, 2019 at 1:44 pm

Maybe this is the link mentioned above:

http://www.askthepilot.com/ethiopian-737max-crash/

allan , , March 20, 2019 at 11:57 am

"you had some inexperienced pilots"

The captain, Yared Getachew, had more than 8,000 hours of flying under his belt.
(It is true that the first officer only had 200.)

You have to wonder how the average US commercial pilot would have done under the circumstances.

(Reply to Jack at 11:50 am)

EoH , , March 20, 2019 at 3:15 pm

Thanks for that correction. We can expect a deluge of blame-the-other-guy PR from the aircraft manufacturer and certification agencies. Billions are on the line for Boeing if a cascade of judgments it made materially contributed to these crashes. The usual strategic corporate bankruptcy might follow. I presume Boeing is considered much TBTF by the USG.

JerryDenim , , March 20, 2019 at 12:19 pm

Great job summarizing and connecting dots Lambert. I might add one more bullet point though. Items #5 and #6 were aided, abetted and perhaps somewhat necessitated by 'ye ole NeoLiberal playbook' you spoke of, but more specifically, the current regulatory FAA/Boeing milieu is attributable to years of budget cuts and strategically applied austerity. The old Grover Norquist, ' not destroyed, but small and weak enough to be drowned in a shallow bath' saw. Exact same thing we've witnessed with other formally effective regulators like the EPA, the SEC or the IRS.

I remember having a conversation with an FAA maintenance inspector, an old timer, about ten years ago. He looked to be upwards of seventy, and he told me he was eight years beyond eligibility for a full retirement. He informed me that a few years back he was supervising a team of ten people that was now down to two. Their positions had been cut outright or eliminated after they resigned or transferred when the remaining positions were made miserable by the increased workload and bureaucratic headaches. The inspector said he had not retired yet because he knew he would not be replaced and he felt the work was important. I asked him if his department was atypical and he said it was not. Same thing, across the board, with the exception of the executive level desk jobs in DC and Oklahoma City. Readers can draw their own conclusions but when it comes to funding Federal regulators, I believe you should never attribute anything to incompetence that you could attribute to malice.

No doubt Neo-Liberal ideologues in high places pushing the corrosive "customer/client" model of regulating along with the requisite deference and obsequious to industry played a large role as well.

"Chickens coming home to roost" Indeed.

EoH , , March 20, 2019 at 2:44 pm

I understand the published materials to boil down to this possible scenario:

To remain competitive and profitable, Boeing needed to improve the fuel efficiency and flight characteristics of a mainstay medium-haul aircraft. Instead of designing a new aircraft, it modified an existing airframe. Among other changes, it added more powerful engines, new lift and control surfaces, and enhanced computerized controls.

The modified Max aircraft **did not** fly like the earlier version. That meant Boeing would have to disclose information about those changes. It would need to train pilots in them, in how to integrate new protocols into existing ones, and in what to do if the enhanced computer controls malfunctioned, requiring the pilot to regain manual control.

These steps could have increased cost and time to market, might have involved new certifications, and might have reduced sales. Boeing appears to have relied on enhanced computer flight controls to avoid them.

The newly enhanced computerized controls meant that the computer would do more of the actual flying – the part that was different from the pre-Max version – and the pilot less. It gave the pilot the virtual – but not real – experience of flying the older aircraft, obviating the need, in Boeing's judgment, for additional disclosures and training. That worked except when it didn't. (See, driverless car development.)

One possible failure mode derives from the Max's reliance on a single sensor to detect its angle of attack, the aircraft's nose-up or nose-down deviation from level flight. Reliance on a single sensor would make it harder to detect and correct a fault. (Boeing's version of commitment to "absolute" safety.)

In these two crashes, the sensor may have given a faulty reading, indicating that the aircraft's nose was higher than it should have been for that stage of flight, an attitude that risked a stall. The programmed response was to drop the nose and increase power. A normal reaction to a real stall, this response can become catastrophic when unexpected or when the pilot cannot correct it.

In both crashes, it appears that the pilot did attempt to correct the computer's error. Doing so, however, reset the automated control, leading the computer to reread the faulty sensor to mean "stall." It again dropped the nose and increased speed. The pilot recorrected the error in what would become a deadly loop, a tug of war that ended in a powered dive into the ground.

Seal , , March 20, 2019 at 3:52 pm

This is like #Immelt at #GE

VietnamVet , , March 20, 2019 at 4:17 pm

What is interesting is what comes next. The FAA was drowned in the bath tub along with the EPA, FDA, SEC, etc. It doesn't have the money or staff to recertify the 737 Max. An incompetent Administration that is interested only in extracting resources is in charge. It is clear that Boeing hid the changes to save money and time. Adding a warning indicator that the flight sensors are not in the correct position to the pilot's display, including it in the preflight checklist, plus flight training would have prevented the Indonesian crash. But these changes would have raised questions on the adequacy of the new flight critical system and may have delayed certification overseas. It is easy to overlook problems if your paycheck is at risk. The Boeing managers who pushed this through deserve jail time for manslaughter.

Canada said it will recertify the 737 Max before it flies in their airspace. China won't recertify the Max until the Trump Trade War is over. Also, a delay boosts their replacement airliner. If Chicago and DC paper this over like the 2008 Great Recession; the final nails will have been hammered into the coffin of the hegemon. Trust is gone

[Mar 23, 2019] The Other Recent Deadly Boeing Crash No One Is Talking About - Slashdot

Mar 23, 2019 | tech.slashdot.org

The Other Recent Deadly Boeing Crash No One Is Talking About (nymag.com) 65 Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday March 23, 2019 @01:34PM from the searching-for-answers dept. New York magazine's Intelligencer remembers last month's crash of a Boeing 767 carrying cargo for Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service -- and shares a new theory that its cause wasn't a suicidal pilot or an autopilot malfunction:

In online pilot discussion forums, a third idea has been gaining adherents: that the pilots succumbed to a phenomenon called somatogravic illusion, in which lateral acceleration due to engine thrust creates the sensation that one is tipping backward in one's seat .

The effect is particularly strong when a plane is lightly loaded, as it would be at the end of a long flight when the fuel tanks are mostly empty, and in conditions of poor visibility, as Atlas Air 3591 was as it worked its way through bands of bad weather. The idea is that perhaps one of the pilots accidentally or in response to wind shear set the engines to full power, and then believed that the plane had become dangerously nose-high and so pushed forward on the controls.

This would cause a low-g sensation that might have been so disorienting that by the time the plane came barreling out of the bottom of the clouds there wasn't enough time to pull out of the dive.

It has been speculated that this might have been the cause of another bizarre and officially unsolved accident from three years ago: Flydubai Flight 981, which crashed 2016 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia....

While it's still too early to draw any kind of conclusions about Atlas Air 3591, the possibility exists that a firm conclusion will never be drawn -- and if it is, the cause could turn out not to be a design flaw or software malfunction that can be rectified, but a basic shortcoming in human perception and psychology that cannot be fixed as long as humans are entrusted with the control of airplanes.


BobC ( 101861 ) , Saturday March 23, 2019 @02:26PM ( #58321314 )

Re:Flying by Instruments? ( Score: 5 , Informative)

Yes, commercial pilots are taught to "fly their instruments". General aviation pilots may enjoy more "seat-of-the-pants" flying, but even they are taught to trust instruments over human perceptions, which are easily fooled, as even simple demos will show.

I used to work for an aircraft instrument maker, and our user interfaces, everything the pilot interacts with, got more care and attention than the rest of the instrument. Of course we had to display nothing but totally accurate data, and do so promptly, but we also had to do so in ways that were obvious and clear, so the pilot can take in the most important information with a quick glance.

The pilot's standard "scan" is perhaps the most-trained skill. To look at everything on the instrument panels and outside the windows often enough to not miss anything, yet slow enough to take in all vital information.

When things get hectic, the pilot still does this scan, interrupting it as needed to deal with situations, but still doing it. Because, as the saying goes, "trouble often comes in threes": Stopping everything to handle an initial situation may mask what's really going on, and lead to a cascade of failures.

With ever more data being aimed at the pilot, there is a distinct risk of information overload, especially when tired, or during tense but otherwise normal situations, such as take-off, landing, or flying through turbulence. This overload often encourages the pilot to rely more on signals from the body, which need less conscious processing, rather than focus on all that data.

Here, again, is where commercial pilots receive extra training, but perhaps not often enough. This is one of the factors that keep commercial pilot mandatory retirement ages so low: The risk of overload increases with age, even when all other factors match those of a younger person.

Plus, staying in peak training for decades is fatiguing, and relatively few can do so "naturally". Which is one of the reasons we're running out of commercial aircraft pilots.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but this overload risk is often handled by adding more automation, more automatic systems to "help" the pilot. So much so that actually manually "driving" a commercial aircraft, with hands on the controls, is an increasingly rare part of a normal flight.

Our instruments also tried to take pilot fatigue into account, saving our brightest and loudest alarms only for the most desperate situations, to punch-through that overload to help ensure prompt and correct reactions.

One product I worked on was a TAWS (Terrain Awareness and Warning System) instrument, which basically stayed quiet unless there was a risk of the pilot flying into the ground, to help prevent "CFIT" accidents (Controlled Flight Into the Ground). It has special modes for take-off and landing, though our instrument was designed to actually *avoid* making the pilot depend on it's display: Useful for information as part of the scan, but not to be used to navigate the aircraft. Our main function was to provide visual and audible alerts only when needed.

I believe 100% of US commercial aircraft (and perhaps now even biz-jets) are required to have TAWS on-board and active. Any TAWS-equipped plane approaching the ground outside of an approved approach path for a know airport will give the pilot "Terrain ahead. Pull up! Pull up!" alerts until the hazard no longer exists.

Unfortunately, if a stall is also immanent, the pilot will simultaneously receive an alert to push the nose down. And increase power. And other things as well. An overload of alerts, which a skilled and calm pilot will respond to with the most correct action. But which can overload a stressed or tired pilot, or one with the beginnings of a cold or flu.

The thing is, every alert can be silenced, to reduce the confusion and distractions. But an overloaded pilot can forget even this simple aid to keeping full awareness and control.

This is a big part of why pilots are so often blamed for crashes: Because, for whatever reason, they failed to take the appropriate action demanded by the situation.

As a former aircraft instrument developer, I was always well aware of my instruments' contribution to the pilot's mental load. Our teams agonized over tiny changes to font selection and sizes and colors and contrast. And how many button presses were needed to accomplish a function. And how easy it was to switch modes or silence an alert. Which is why we had a massive alpha test system that got even the earliest versions of our instruments in front of pilots with experimental aircraft and ratings. (Experimental aircraft and the pilots who fly them are rare and precious things to instrument developers, even when we owned and operated our own corporate test aircraft.)

Fortunately, our efforts paid off, and pilots (and the FAA) loved our instruments. Some of our design innovations were adopted into instrument regulations by the FAA, so all manufacturers had to build to our standard. But always hovering over our success was the fear of news of the crash of a plane flying our instruments. And the fear that information overload from our instruments would be shown to be a contributing factor.

Which is why part of our required reading was any and all reports (mainly NTSB and NASA) that even mention pilot overload. Even a decade after leaving that industry, I still read these reports.

rnturn ( 11092 ) , Saturday March 23, 2019 @01:55PM ( #58321174 )
Oh... Are we back to t"pilot error" excuses again? ( Score: 2 )
``...the cause could turn out not to be a design flaw or software malfunction that can be rectified, but a basic shortcoming in human perception and psychology that cannot be fixed as long as humans are entrusted with the control of airplanes.''

On the other hand, we have two recent examples of what can happen when a flight computer is given control of the plane and it is unable to avoid doing something stupid like -- as the old euphemism goes -- `make inadvertent contact with the terrain'.

Until we know more about how this was supposed work and exactly why it didn't , I think I'll trust the human with his hands on the controls more than the flight computer.

(Thankfully, the occasions for my needing to fly are few and far between.)

Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) writes: < MJennings.USA@NOT_any_of_THISgmail.com > on Saturday March 23, 2019 @01:39PM ( #58321082 ) Homepage
Design errors in the 737 MAX-guidance system ( Score: 2 )

Everything I've been able to learn has indicated that there are major design errors in the guidance system of the Boeing 737 MAX-8

ebonum ( 830686 ) , Saturday March 23, 2019 @02:02PM ( #58321206 )
Artificial horizon? ( Score: 3 )

If you look at it and you are headed down (and you have good airspeed), you don't need to keep trying to nose down - regardless of what your senses are telling you.

What about looking at how the altimeter is changing?

The artificial horizon gives you a lot of information when your sense of direction is playing tricks on you (in the clouds and feeling like you are going up,down, rolling, etc.)

[Mar 21, 2019] The Lives the Free Market Took

Mar 21, 2019 | jacobinmag.com

BY
BRANKO MARCETIC

The people who died in last Sunday's plane crash were not just killed by Boeing. Their deaths stemmed from an ideology that puts business interests above human life.


... ... ...

Boeing is not just a lobbying juggernaut that donates prodigiously to politicians all over the country; it's also a company in which numerous members of Congress are personally invested, and it cultivates mutually beneficial financial relationships with top officials . Meanwhile, as William McGee of Consumer Reports told Amy Goodman , these issues are rooted in the FAA's lax, business-friendly oversight of the very industry it's meant to regulate, a case of regulatory capture that stretches back long before this administration.

Whatever the black box from the Ethiopian Airlines flight reveals, the lives put at risk by lax regulations are not apolitical tragedies; they are caused by an administration that time and again has shown itself to be callous and indifferent to the lives of the people it claims to fight for, whether Puerto Ricans left to fend for themselves in the wake of natural disaster, or federal workers used as bargaining chips in a game of political brinkmanship.

But more than that, they are victims of an ideology that tells us the greatest insult to human life is not the death and misery that comes from unchecked greed, but efforts to democratically control it through public institutions. The real problems aren't unsafe products, pollution, dangerous chemicals, and the like, we're told, but "red tape" and the taxes used to fund the bodies regulating them. Meanwhile, activists like Nader have long been painted as " wacky " extremists in the pursuit of some quixotic ideological crusade simply for trying to do things like prevent people from dying in cars without seat belts .

When social-democratic policies are enacted, wealthy people take less home after taxes, and businesses are inconvenienced by regulations meant to secure the common good. But when neoliberal policies are put in place, people and their families go hungry, they lose their homes, they get injured on the job, they get sick, and, sometimes, they die. The public should be enraged by the actions of governments like Trump's and Trudeau's; but we should also be angry at a political narrative that tells us trying to stop such tragedies is "ideological" instead of common sense. We owe it to the crash victims to create no more of them.


[Mar 21, 2019] The Boeing 737 Max 8- a Case Study in Uncreative Destruction

Mar 21, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

On May 12, 2010, the New York Times ran an article by economics editor Catherine Rampell titled "The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind"that focused on the largely middle-aged unemployed who will probably never work again. For example, 52 year old administrative assistant Cynthia Norton has been working part-time at Walmart while sending resumes everywhere but nobody gets back to her. She is part of a much bigger picture:

Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that occupation by the end of last year. There have also been outsize job losses in other occupation categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by 40 percent.

But Ms. Rampell finds the silver lining in this dark cloud:

This "creative destruction" in the job market can benefit the economy.

Pruning relatively less-efficient employees like clerks and travel agents, whose work can be done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes American businesses more efficient. Year over year, productivity growth was at its highest level in over 50 years last quarter, pushing corporate profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.

The term "creative destruction" might ring a bell. It was coined by Werner Sombart in his 1913 book "War and Capitalism". When he was young, Sombart considered himself a Marxist. His notion of creative destruction was obviously drawn from Karl Marx, who, according to some, saw capitalism in terms of the business cycle. With busts following booms, like night follows day, a new round of capital accumulation can begin. This interpretation is particularly associated with Volume Two of Capital that examines this process in great detail. Looking at this material, some Marxists like Eduard Bernstein drew the conclusion that capitalism is an infinitely self-sustaining system.

By 1913, Sombart had dumped the Marxist commitment to social revolution but still retained the idea that there was a basis in Karl Marx for upholding the need for "creative destruction", a view buttressed by an overly positive interpretation of this passage in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

By the 1930s, Sombart had adapted himself fairly well to the Nazi system although he was not gung-ho like Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt. The wiki on Sombart notes:

In 1934 he published Deutscher Sozialismus where he claimed a "new spirit" was beginning to "rule mankind". The age of capitalism and proletarian socialism was over and with "German socialism" (National-Socialism) taking over.

But despite this, he remained critical. In 1938 he wrote an anthropology text that found fault with the Nazi system and many of his Jewish students remained fond of him.

I suspect, however, that Rampell is familiar with Joseph Schumpeter's use of the term rather than Sombart since Schumpeter was an economist, her chosen discipline. In 1942, he wrote a book titled Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that, like Sombart, retained much of Karl Marx's methodology but without the political imperative to destroy the system that utilized "creative destruction". He wrote:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

The wiki on Schumpeter claims that this theory is wedded to Nikolai Kondratiev's "long wave" hypothesis that rests on the idea that there are 50 year cycles in which capitalism grows, decays and enters a crisis until a new round of capital accumulation opens up. Not only was the idea attractive to Schumpeter, it was a key part of Ernest Mandel's economic theories. Unlike Schumpeter, Mandel was on the lookout for social agencies that could break the cycle and put development on a new footing, one based on human need rather than private profit.

Returning to Rampell's article, there is one dimension entirely missing. She assumes that "creative destruction" will operate once again in order to foster a new upswing in the capitalist business cycle. But how exactly will that manifest itself? All the signs point to a general decline in business activity unless there is some kind of technological breakthrough equivalent to the computer revolution that fueled growth for decades. Does anybody believe that "green manufacturing" will play the same role? I don't myself.

One thing does occur to me. Sombart's book was written in 1913, one year before WWI and was even titled eerily enough "War and Capitalism". One wonders if the Great War would be seen as part and parcel of "creative destruction". War, after all, does have a knack for clearing the playing field with even more finality than layoffs. Schumpeter wrote his in 1942, one year into WWII. My guess is that he did not theorize war as the ultimate (and necessary?) instrument of creative destruction but history will record that WWII did introduce a whole rafter of new technology, including aluminum, radar, nuclear power, etc., while bombing old modes of production into oblivion. What a great opportunity it was for capitalism to rebuild Japan, especially after firebombing and atomic bombs did their lovely work.

In my view, there's something disgusting about this "creative destruction" business especially when it is articulated by a young, pro-capitalist Princeton graduate like Catherine Rampell who wrote for Slate, the Village Voice and other such b-list publications before crawling her way up into an editorial job at the NYT. She clearly has learned how to cater her reporting to the ideological needs of the newspaper of record, growing more and more reactionary as the crisis of capitalism deepens.

[Mar 21, 2019] Neoliberalism at 30,000 Feet

Mar 21, 2019 | jacobinmag.com

hen United Airlines flight 1462 made an unexpected landing in Chicago last month, it was not due to mechanical issues, weather conditions, or flight logistics, but a battle over legroom in the aisles. As one passenger tried to recline her seat and another used a $20 device called a Knee Defender to prevent the occupant ahead of him from leaning back, the battle over personal space descended into a scuffle. The pilot opted to make an additional stop to remove the unruly passengers.

Flight 1462 hasn't been alone. Not just the random dispute of irate travelers, similar flights have been diverted because of the airlines' frenzied drive to wring as much money out of customers as possible. Airlines are increasingly cramming more passengers onto each flight, termed "densification," and regularly overbooking flights. Any aspect of a flight that was once provided free of charge -- from a checked bag to a complementary drink to using a credit card to pay for a ticket -- can now be charged à la carte.

So relentless has this nickel and diming been that when news reports claimed the discount airline Ryan Air was about to start charging for in-flight bathroom use, many people took them seriously. But the story wasn't true -- it was all a ploy for free press from a company unwilling to pay for advertising, help disabled passengers, or provide ice for drinks.

Such frugality is only one of the problems wrought by airline deregulation. If the greatest benefit of deregulation has been that more people can afford to fly, it has come at the cost of increased tumult within the industry and reduced pay for workers.

Before the airlines were deregulated under President Jimmy Carter, the Civil Aeronautics Bureau (CAB) maintained flight pricing structures, airport gate access, and flight paths. There were rules that stipulated which airlines could compete in which market and what prices they could charge. Loosening restrictions meant abandoning the CAB and its pricing structures, and allowing an unmediated flow of competition.

With fewer restrictions, upstart fly-by-night airlines could compete against major airlines like American/US Airways, United, Delta, Alaskan, and Hawaiian Airways. Such competition, conservative and liberal advocates claimed, would bring down flight costs, providing more savings and convenience to the customer.

But allowing this level of competition also unleashed chaos. While the discount airlines would win over passengers for a time by offering flights half as expensive, the major airlines would respond by slashing their prices in an attempt to drive the upstarts out of business.

By drastically reducing ticket costs, the major airlines would take on an unsustainable amount of debt that, combined with the loss of business to the new entrants, would lead to layoffs or bankruptcy. Pension funds were then raided and labor contracts voided to pay for the price wars. With each airline company collapse, thousands of employees were laid off, decimating union membership.

To compete, the legacy airlines also drove down the salaries of their pilots, and cut benefits and vacation time. Besides a reduction in compensation, a two-tiered pay system has been set up with decent pay for incumbent pilots and markedly low wages for new entrants. Starting salaries for pilots are now as low as $15,000 a year, even as CEO pay rises inexorably. Remarking on a career in which he had seen his pay cut in half and his pension eliminated, captain Sully Sullenberger told the BBC in 2009 that he did not know "a single professional pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps."

While unions were still strong in the industry, they were constantly embroiled in bitter labor disputes. Between the voided contracts and the hemorrhaging membership caused by regular bankruptcy, they were left fighting to maintain wage standards in an unnecessarily competitive industry.

The only way discount airlines could offer such low prices was by paying their workers less, using less experienced pilots and sometimes non-unionized labor, offering fewer frills, and running spartan operations that only serviced a handful of routes with a single type of jet liner (thus simplifying pilot and mechanic training). Instead of a single union representing employees across the industry -- typified by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), which represented a majority of pilots -- some discount airlines maintained relationships with offshoot unions with smaller membership rolls and less leverage.

The discount airlines also depended on secondary, class-B airports that charged less in landing fees. But those discounts eventually disappeared when the secondary airports no longer needed to cut their fees to attract business.

To maintain their dominance over the market, the major airlines shifted from a direct city-to-city flight standard to the hub-and-spoke system of today. The hub-and-spoke setup allowed large centralized airports like Dallas-Ft. Worth and Atlanta to be ruled by a single company that determines which flights can use which terminals and at what cost.

While the hub-and-spoke system has some benefits, it's largely inefficient, dependent as it is on multi-stage connecting flights. Combined with the need to cut costs, it would also cause longer airport delays as planes were left waiting on the tarmac to make sure all passengers from connecting flights made it aboard. A single delay in a connecting flight could throw passengers' itineraries askew, leaving them stuck in a random airport overnight.

The major airlines used other tricks to keep out nascent airlines. They paid off travel agents and travel reservation sites to give preference to their particular airline. They introduced frequent flier miles to maintain brand allegiance.

Upstart discount airlines like Southwest were able to survive the vicious price wars by leaning on quality of service and direct flights, but most did not. The list of companies that were liquidated, temporarily or permanently, as a result is impressively long considering what it takes to start an airline: America West, PanAm, TransWorld, Western, Piedmont, Frontier, Northwest, National, Texas International, People Express, ValuJet, Air Florida, Eastern, Braniff, Skytrain, Pacific Southwest, Western Pacific, and many more.

Once bankrupt, the major airlines then bought the upstarts, creating an effective oligopoly. So much for competition.

Already on a spending spree during the heady years of the 1990s dot-com boom, buying up failed companies only saddled major airlines with more debt. While most people assume that the airlines had to be bailed out in 2001 because of the decrease in traffic after the September 11 attacks, it was also because the airlines were insolvent from previous financial problems, largely as a result of the price wars.

The actions of the major airlines may seem ruthless, but they were largely protecting their position in a deregulated industry that allowed the discount airlines to undercut labor standards just to offer cheaper prices to customers. They were defending themselves from disruption.

Considering the skill, education, and investment needed to maintain a safe and reliable airline, it is not exactly a business that needs to be disrupted. Running an airline is labor intensive, and it only turns a profit at random intervals. There's little money to be skimmed off.

With profit margins so thin, tickets on a half-empty flight have to cost twice as much as a fully booked one. Which is why, for a time, smaller cities that weren't necessarily travel hubs bore the brunt of deregulation. Routes that weren't fully booked experienced skyrocketing flight costs, which, for small-town travelers, was a huge disincentive to fly.

The bilking of transportation costs to and from smaller cities after a run of chaotic competition is eerily similar to what happened during the railway mania of the 1800s. Investors rushed to build rail lines everywhere and anywhere while money was flush. But once cash became tight, the rail industry used their monopoly power to charge exorbitant prices for anybody trying to ship in and out of smaller towns like Cincinnati. Such predatory pricing is what led to transportation regulation in the first place.

Since the 2001 airline bailout, things have calmed down a bit. It no longer costs $600 to fly from New York to Pittsburgh. Fewer discount airlines are entering the market, and the handful that are still in operation work with the major airlines on various routes (e.g. "flight provided by Frontier"). The price wars have settled to a quiet struggle played out on online travel registration websites like Kayak.com and Hipmunk.com, which have wholly replaced the job of travel agents.

But for airlines, the lower revenue from cheaper tickets has to be made up somewhere, and convenience may be the easiest element to remove. Airlines are pushing petty indignities on passengers and flight attendants by way of a million miscellaneous charges. Half the time, the discounts saved by cheaper tickets from deregulation are recouped in add-on fees. Eventually airlines may just offer extra-saver flights devoid of the most basic accommodations and simply force passengers who can't afford first-class seats to be stacked in the cargo hold like cord wood.

So what's the alternative? The airline industry is close to being a natural monopoly, there's little reason to foster competition. Indeed, the industry would benefit from nationalization or a well-regulated public option. At the very least, more regulation is necessary.

Without subsidization and some rules about flight costs, there is little incentive for the airline industry to provide affordable flights to locations that aren't fully booked. The irony is that we already subsidize airline travel. It just occurs through bailouts and bankruptcies after each airline has fought tooth and nail for market dominance. Public funds wind up paying for a wasteful, inefficient system characterized by irrational, destructive competition.

Through regulation or more aggressive means, it's quite possible to ensure good wages and working conditions and safe, affordable, reliable service -- all without blackout dates, three layovers, or all-out battles for legroom.

[Mar 21, 2019] With Personal Connection to Crash, Ralph Nader Takes on Boeing - WSJ

Mar 21, 2019 | www.wsj.com

He has long been a vocal critic of the Federal Aviation Administration, saying the agency lacks the resources and willpower to aggressively police airlines and manufacturers.

Mr. Nader said Boeing may be exposed to civil and possibly criminal liability. After the first fatal crash in October -- a Lion Air flight that crashed into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff -- company officials "were put on notice about the problem" with an automated stall-prevention system that can misfire and override pilot commands by repeatedly pushing down an aircraft's nose, he said.

The Justice and Transportation Departments are scrutinizing Boeing's dealings with the FAA over safety certifications, people familiar with the matter have said.

... ... ...

Mr. Nader has expressed his concerns to lawmakers and former regulators, and called for congressional hearings. Before the U.S. grounded the planes last week, he championed the idea of a sweeping boycott of all versions of 737 MAX aircraft. He also has stressed the importance of having Mr. Muilenburg, Boeing's CEO, testify on Capitol Hill about safety issues with the fleet.

Criticizing Boeing's original design of the automated flight-control feature, dubbed MCAS, Mr. Nader said it reflected a misguided view driven by engineering overconfidence and called it "the arrogance of the algorithms."

[Mar 21, 2019] Ralph Nader's Grandniece Died in Ethiopian Plane Crash; Now He Is Urging Boycott of Boeing Jet Democracy Now!

Mar 21, 2019 | www.democracynow.org

... ... ...

RALPH NADER : Boeing is used to getting its way with the patsy FAA . And this time, however, it's in really hot water. If it continues to dig its heels in, it's going to expose itself and its executives to potential criminal prosecution, because they are now on notice, with two crashes -- Indonesia and Ethiopia. There's probably a lot more to come out in terms of the technical dissent, in the, what was called, "heated discussions" about the plane software between the FAA , the pilots' union, Boeing. And you can't suppress technical dissent forever. And Senators Markey and Blumenthal are calling for the release of all the relevant information. And while that happens, the planes must be grounded. You see, they're on notice now. This is the future of passenger business for Boeing. They've got orders for over 3,000 planes from all over the world. They've produced and delivered about 350. Southwest is the leading owner and operator of these planes. It's digging its heels in, and so is American Airlines, I believe, and Air Canada. And Boeing is not going to get away with this, because this is not some old DC-9 about to be phased out. This is their future strategic plan. And they better own up. 2013, they grounded the 787 because of battery fires, and they had about 50 or 60 of those planes. So, there's plenty of precedent.

And the most important thing that people can do is: Do not fly this plane, the 737 MAX 8 and 9. Ask the airline, when you book the flight, whether it's that plane. The airline should not dare charge you for reservation changes. And I'm calling for a boycott of that plane. If several hundred thousand air passengers boycott that plane and there are more and more empty seats, that will do more to bring Boeing around than the patsy FAA and a rather serene Congress, which, by the way, gets all kinds of freebies from the airlines that ordinary people don't get. We've sent a survey last year, twice, to every member of Congress, asking them to disclose all these freebies. We didn't get one answer. And that helps account for, over the years, the total reluctance of members of Congress even to do such things as deal with seat size, restroom space and other conveniences, never mind just the safety of the aircraft. So, this is important for consumers. Just don't fly 737 MAX 8 or 9. Make sure that you're informed about it. And for up-to-date information, you can go to FlyersRights.org . That's run by Paul Hudson, who lost his daughter in the Pan Am 103, 30 years ago, and has been a stalwart member of the FAA Advisory Committee. And that's where you get up-to-date information, FlyersRights.org .

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we're also joined by William McGee, who's the aviation adviser for Consumer Reports . Could you give us your perspective on what's happened here? And also, could you expand on what Ralph Nader was talking about, about the use of artificial intelligence in these new planes?

WILLIAM McGEE: Sure, absolutely, Juan. You know, there are so many unanswered questions here, but many of them are focused on the time period between the first crash in late October with Lion Air and the crash on Sunday with Ethiopian. Again, for perspective here, as Ralph noted, we're not talking about old aircraft. This is an airplane that's only been in service since 2017. This is the Boeing 737 MAX 8, a recent derivative of the 737. Now, in that time period, the aircraft that crashed in October was 2 months old; the one that crashed on Sunday was 4 months old. This is really unprecedented in all the years that I've been in this industry. We don't see brand-new airplanes crash on takeoff like this under similar circumstances.

... ... ...

WILLIAM McGEE: Absolutely. And, you know, this goes back many years. Ralph mentioned that the FAA is known throughout the industry, even among some of its own employees and to airline employees, as the "tombstone agency." And that phrase comes from the fact that the FAA has shown time and time again that it is reluctant to act unless there's a tragedy and, unfortunately, unless there are fatalities. Now, we have seen this as recently as last year, when, you may recall, over Philadelphia, a Southwest 737 had a major engine malfunction that punctured a hole in the fuselage and killed a woman who was nearly sucked out of the aircraft. Well, what wasn't as well reported was that two years prior, that same engine type and that same airline, Southwest, same aircraft type, 737, also had an uncontained engine failure. But in 2016, there were no injuries, and there were no fatalities. Instead of the FAA stepping in and saying, "We need to, you know, have all of these engine blades inspected on this engine type, on all the carriers that are operating it," the FAA asked the industry, "What would you like to do? How long would you like to take to look at this?" And the industry dragged its heels, not surprisingly, and said, "We need more time." Two years later, in 2018, there was a fatality. And then, two days after that, last April 2018, two days after that woman was killed, the FAA issued what's called an AD, an airworthiness directive. That's what should have been issued in 2016, where that death wouldn't have happened. So, we have seen this time and again.

And you mentioned Attention All Passengers , my book. Much of the book, about a third of it, is devoted to the issue of the FAA oversight of airline maintenance. We could easily talk about it for two or three more days. But the bottom line is that the entire model of how the airline industry works in the United States has been changed dramatically in the last 15 years or so. All airlines in the United States -- without question, all of them -- in 2019, outsource some or most or just about all of their maintenance, what they call heavy maintenance. Much of it is done outside of the United States -- El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, China, Singapore. Again, we're talking about U.S. airlines. And although the FAA , on paper, says there is one standard for maintenance of U.S. airlines, the reality is there isn't. There are waivers given all the time, so that when work is done outside the United States, there are waivers so that there are no security background checks, there are no alcohol and drug screening programs put in place. And, in fact, many -- in some cases, most -- of the technicians cannot even be called mechanics, because they're not licensed. They're not licensed as they're required to be in the U.S. So, basically, you have two sets of rules. You have one that's for in-house airline employees and another for the outsourced facilities. And this all leads back to the FAA . I have sat in a room with FAA senior officials and asked them about this, and they say that they don't think it's a problem. It is a problem.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what impact --

WILLIAM McGEE: I've spoken to --

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What impact have the mergers, of the constant mergers of airlines, had, so we basically have a handful of U.S. airlines now, on all of this?

WILLIAM McGEE: Oh, no question. We have an oligopoly now. And, you know, even just going back as far as 2001, you know, there were four or five major carriers that we don't have anymore: America West, Continental, US Airways, TWA . You know, so what we have now is effectively an oligopoly. And this is unprecedented in the history of the aviation industry here in the United States. And so, you know, even when -- Ralph was talking about boycotts, and, you know, it's an excellent idea. But it's more challenging now than it would have been a few years ago. You know, there might have been more pressure on Southwest and American 10 or 15 years ago, when consumers had more choices. Now it's getting harder and harder for consumers to express their displeasure. We saw this after the Dr. Dao incident, where that passenger was dragged off United. In the long term, it didn't really affect United's bookings. It would have in another time, but so many people are locked in, particularly outside New York, Washington, Los Angeles. They're locked in, where they don't have a lot of choice on carriers.

AMY GOODMAN : Ralph Nader, I wanted to get your response both to this news that they were working on a fix -- they know there's a software glitch, that somehow, when on automatic pilot, when the plane is taking off, it takes this precipitous dive, and the way to deal with it is to take it off automatic and put it on manual. Now, AP has been doing a deep dive into the database of pilots complaining over and over again about this problem and saying they have to quickly switch to manual to prevent the plane from nosediving into the ground. And this latest news from The Wall Street Journal that while they're talking about this glitch being fixed in the next five weeks or so, that five weeks were lost in January because of the government shutdown.

RALPH NADER : Well, that's what Paul Hudson wrote in his press release at Flyers Rights. The focus has got to be on inaccurate or nonexisting information in Boeing's training manuals and inadequate flight training requirements. They sold this plane on the basis, among other things, of having larger engines. It's supposed to be 10 percent more fuel-efficient. But they sold it on the grounds that "You don't have to really train your pilots, airlines. This is really just a small modification of the reliable 737 that's all over the world." The question really comes down to cost cutting. They tantalize the airlines by saying, "This isn't really a new plane. It's very easy to fly, if you can fly a 737." And that turned out to be quite false...

... ... ...

[Mar 21, 2019] Pentagon to probe if Shanahan used office to help Boeing

Mar 21, 2019 | finance.yahoo.com

The Pentagon's inspector general has formally opened an investigation into a watchdog group's allegations that acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has used his office to promote his former employer, Boeing Co.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed an ethics complaint with the Pentagon's inspector general a week ago, alleging that Shanahan has appeared to make statements promoting Boeing and disparaging competitors, such as Lockheed Martin.

Shanahan, who was traveling with President Donald Trump to Ohio on Wednesday, spent more than 30 years at Boeing, leading programs for commercial planes and missile defense systems. He has been serving as acting Pentagon chief since the beginning of the year, after James Mattis stepped down.

The probe comes as Boeing struggles to deal with a public firestorm over two deadly crashes of the Boeing 737 Max 8 jetliner within the last five months. And it focuses attention on whether Trump will nominate Shanahan as his formal pick for defense chief, rather than letting him languish as an acting leader of a major federal agency.

Dwrena Allen, spokeswoman for the inspector general, said Shanahan has been informed of the investigation. And, in a statement, Pentagon spokesman Tom Crosson said Shanahan welcomes the review.

"Acting Secretary Shanahan has at all times remained committed to upholding his ethics agreement filed with the DoD," said Crosson. "This agreement ensures any matters pertaining to Boeing are handled by appropriate officials within the Pentagon to eliminate any perceived or actual conflict of interest issue(s) with Boeing."

During a Senate hearing last week, Shanahan was asked by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., about the 737 Max issue. Shanahan said he had not spoken to anyone in the administration about it and had not been briefed on it. Asked whether he favored an investigation into the matter, Shanahan said it was for regulators to investigate.

On Wednesday, Blumenthal said that scrutiny of Shanahan's Boeing ties is necessary. "In fact, it's overdue. Boeing is a behemoth 800-pound gorilla -- raising possible questions of undue influence at DOD, FAA and elsewhere," said Blumenthal.

Shanahan signed an ethics agreement in June 2017, when he was being nominated for the job of deputy defense secretary, a job he held during Mattis' tenure. It outlined the steps he would take to avoid "any actual or apparent conflict of interest," and said he would not participate in any matter involving Boeing.

The CREW ethics complaint, based to a large part on published reports, including one by Politico in January, said Shanahan has made comments praising Boeing in meetings about government contracts, raising concerns about "whether Shanahan, intentionally or not, is putting his finger on the scale when it comes to Pentagon priorities."

One example raised by the complaint is the Pentagon's decision to request funding for Boeing 15EX fighter jets in the 2020 proposed budget. The Pentagon is requesting about $1 billion to buy eight of the aircraft.

Shanahan, 56, joined Boeing in 1986, rose through its ranks and is credited with rescuing a troubled Dreamliner 787 program. He also led the company's missile defense and military helicopter programs.

Trump has seemed attracted to Shanahan partially for his work on one of the president's pet projects -- creating a Space Force. He also has publicly lauded Shanahan's former employer, Boeing, builder of many of the military's most prominent aircraft, including the Apache and Chinook helicopters, the C-17 cargo plane and the B-52 bomber, as well as the iconic presidential aircraft, Air Force One.

This is only the third time in history that the Pentagon has been led by an acting chief, and Shanahan has served in that capacity for longer than any of the others.

Presidents typically take pains to ensure the Pentagon is being run by a Senate-confirmed official, given the grave responsibilities that include sending young Americans into battle, ensuring the military is ready for extreme emergencies like nuclear war and managing overseas alliances that are central to U.S. security.


3 hours ago Why did Trump appoint a former Boeing executive and industry lobbyist to the the Secretary of Defense to replace General Mattis? What in Shananhan's background makes him qualified to lead our nation's military forces? 3 hours ago WITHOUT A DOUBT HE DID., ALSO INVESTIGATE NIKKI HALEY'S APPOINTED ON BOEING'S BOARD TO REPLACE SHANAHAN. FOLLOW THE HOEING KICKBACKS(MONEY), TO DONALD TRUMP'S FAMILY. 3 hours ago Shanahan probably helped Boeing on the promise of a later payback just like Ms. Nikki Haley did while Gov of SC where Boeing built a new plant on her watch. She helped big time to keep the Unions out of the new Boeing plant and now Boeing is going to put her on their board of directors. Nothing like a bit of an obvious payoff. 2 hours ago Reminds me of the Bush Jr days in the White House. During the Gulf War (#2) Vice President #$%$ Cheney awarded oil company Halliburton (Cheney was CEO before accepting the VP job) to deliver meals for the troops. The contract was ?No Bid.? Why was an oil company delivering food to troops with a no bid contract? After Cheney?s Job was over being VP he went back to being CEO at Halliburton and moved Halliburton?s headquarters to Dubai. What an American! 2 hours ago Now we understand why Boeing & the FAA hesitated to ground those planes for few days despite many countries who did grounded those plane which is a precedent for a country to ground & NOT wait for the manufacturer. ONLY after Canada grounded those planes Boeing & the FAA & that's because Canada IS a the #1 flight partner of the US ! 4 hours ago Years ago there was a Boeing procurement scandal and Trump does love the swamp he claims to hate.

[Mar 20, 2019] Reuters natch, are trying to pretend it's somehow the pilot's or airline's fault, but the their own reporters show it ain't

Mar 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

FFS , Mar 20, 2019 2:26:33 PM | link

OT: Reuters natch, are trying to pretend it's somehow the pilot's or airline's fault, but the their own reporters show it ain't

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-indonesia-crash-exclusive-idUKKCN1R10F7

[Mar 20, 2019] Was the 737 Max problem just bad software by Stephen Bryen

Mar 18, 2019 | www.asiatimes.com

he crash of the Ethiopian Max-8 Flight 409 on March 10, 2019, resulted in the grounding of all the Boeing 737 Max series aircraft – even the last hold-out, the United States, belatedly grounded them when President Trump acted and overruled the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that opposed any halt to flights.

In the United States, the FAA certifies aircraft as airworthy, puts out bulletins and advisories on problems and fixes and often is the "go to" agency for many aviation flight authorities around the world.

The 737 Max series is a new version of the venerable 737, equipped with new engines and other modifications that have impacted the aircraft's performance in good ways and bad.

Almost every expert today puts the blame for both flight disasters on faulty software that took over running the plane's flight control system. Many have pointed to Boeing's alleged lack of transparency in telling pilots what to do if the software malfunctioned. In addition, there had been at least eight pilot-reported flight control incidents prior to the first Lion Air crash.

Experienced pilots

Three of the pilots on the two doomed planes each had more than 8,000 hours flying experience – quite a lot – and the pilots of the Ethiopian airlines had additional information on the plane's flight characteristics and what to do in an emergency.

While we are still awaiting a final report on last year's Lion Air crash, we do have a quite informative initial report, although it lacks hard findings. In the Ethiopian case, we only have flight track information from ground radar and some incomplete reporting on what the pilots were saying to ground control. More will become available as the flight recorders are analyzed.

Yet despite this, we can understand some of what happened and clearly it is more than a single software glitch. This may help explain why Boeing did not meet its proposed deadline of January for installing updated software. Now in March Boeing says the replacement software will be available in April. But even if it is, there are more issues involving both hardware and software.

The software which so far has received virtually all the attention is called MCAS, for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. MCAS was added to the Max-8 series because new, heavier and larger engines replaced the old engines and as a result, the updated Max planes had a strong tendency to pitch nose up.

The new engine, CFM Leap-1B, was selected by Boeing because it was much more fuel efficient than the older models, one of the big reasons customers want the 737 Max.

The new engines forced re-engineering of parts of the 737.

Fitting the new engines meant moving them forward and lengthening the front landing gear to keep the engines from scraping on the ground. In turn, this changed the plane's center of gravity and also altered the air flow on the wings.

MCAS was a band-aid to fix the pitch up problem caused by the relocated and heavier new engines. MCAS is designed to push the nose down and prevent the aircraft from going into a stall. MCAS was intended to deal only with a specific flight risk.

The problems

Here are some of the problems one finds when reviewing the Preliminary Air Accident Investigation Report on the Lion Air crash.

1. MCAS operates by receiving information from a special sensor that measures the flying angle of the plane and takes over the flight controls if the angle is too great – meaning the aircraft could stall. A stall happens when a plane has too low an airspeed and not enough lift and the plane will literally fall out of the air.

There are two sensors that measure the angle of attack or nose-up condition of the Boeing 737 Max, one that provides data to the pilot and another that provides data to the copilot. The sensors are known as Angle of Attack Sensors, or AoA.

In the Lion Air aircraft, the pilot's AoA sensor had been found to be faulty on an earlier flight as reported by the pilot. That AoA sensor was replaced and tested by aircraft maintenance before the fatal flight.

The pilot gets no console or other warnings that his AoA sensor might be faulty. The pilot can ask his copilot what reading he is getting and see if there is a difference. That is exactly what happened on the Lion Air flight.

It would appear that the MCAS software is driven by information from the pilot's sensor. If the sensor itself is not at fault, there could still be wiring and connection problems that could feed bad information to MCAS. These conditions cannot be determined in flight.

If it is true that MCAS relies on information from only one sensor, that could be a design error. Modern aircraft are famous for built-in flight system redundancy, but apparently not in the case of MCAS. In addition, the pilot cannot manually change the MCAS choice of sensor.

2. No one has yet explained why the pilot's stick shaker was running on from the start of the flight and never stopped. The stick shaker is a motor with an unbalanced flywheel that is attached to the pilot's control stick, and another is attached to the co-pilot's stick. The stick shaker is supposed to warn the pilot of a potential stall. But why was it on nearly the whole time? And why was the co-pilot's stick shaker not on?

3. The pilots are supposed to be able to shut down MCAS, which only operates when the aircraft is manually operated, by switching the electronic trim control to off. The trim control is what MCAS uses to change the nose pitch of the 737 Max. But in the Lion Air case, we know the pilots turned off the electronic trim control. But MCAS kept adjusting the trim nose down, against the pilots' wishes. Or possibly something else was driving the trim control nose down, such as a shorted circuit or bad wiring.

4. The pilots also tried turning the aircraft's autopilot on, according to the report. MCAS is only supposed to work when the autopilot is off, that is only when the plane is operated under manual pilot control. The autopilot should have disabled MCAS but apparently it did not – in fact, the Lion Air autopilot would not turn on. There is no explanation for this. Was the autopilot locked out by MCAS? Or was there some other software or hardware foul up?

5. Pilots also had a very difficult time handling the aircraft stick, meaning that the flight control stick required a great deal of force to operate, especially when the pilots were, repeatedly, trying to recover the plane that was headed nose down, gaining speed and losing altitude. Stick force "feel" in 737s is artificial and is controlled by a couple of pitot tube sensors at the rear of the aircraft above the horizontal stabilizer.

There have been repeated problems on older 737s with the planes forward and rear pitot tubes, due partly to icing conditions and to pitot tube heater problems which are supposed to remove ice. Some pitot tubes have failed because of fouling. Pitot tubes detect aircraft speed and they do this by comparing the force of incoming air on the pitot tubes to what are called static ports located elsewhere on the plane. Accidents have been attributed to faulty or fouled pitot tubes.

It is not clear how the flight speed information from the pitot tubes is integrated into the MCAS if it is. But speed information is fed into the flight computer and if it is faulty it could create ambiguities in the MCAS and the flight computer.

6. Would better pilot training have helped pilots avoid disaster? Boeing has been criticized for not initially providing information about MCAS to Max pilots, and only later issuing a bulletin on how to deal with some MCAS anomalies. Boeing also apparently did not offer any additional pilot training, leaving pilots to find their way through a morass of complex problems made worse by possible hardware and software faults.

As it is, it appears the Lion Air pilots acted in the best way they could but were unable to overcome the instability of the aircraft as it headed nose down to disintegrate in the ocean. We don't yet know how the Ethiopian Airline pilots performed, but they had the advantage of advisories from Boeing and the FAA. Still, the same final result.

What is clear is that there is more than one single cause for the two aircraft crashes. And we know that other planes experienced control problems but recovered. These disasters suggest there was a complex of problems that caused the two disasters.

Boeing's engineers need to assess the entire flight control system, the electronics and mechanics, before a satisfactory solution is at hand.

[Mar 19, 2019] Trump Forced to Ban Boeing Poor Quality of American Planes to Affect Russian Airlines the Least! - YouTube

350 planes were grounded.
Notable quotes:
"... The United States held out to the last. Trump personally requested to ground the flagship aircraft of the American company only late evening yesterday, when Canada joined the interdiction. ..."
Mar 16, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Subscribe to Vesti News https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa8M...

Today, Russia, following Europe and America, banned the flights of Boeing 737 MAX. Dozens of countries have stopped using this aircraft after the Sunday crash in Ethiopia.

The United States held out to the last. Trump personally requested to ground the flagship aircraft of the American company only late evening yesterday, when Canada joined the interdiction.


Putin The Great , 2 days ago (edited)

737 is out of date considering the modern bigger fuel efficient engines don't fit it.They're just applying band aid to fix it's short coming. Airbus A320 has no problems with these new engines as it sits higher.

orderoutofchaos621 , 2 days ago

Sukhoi superjet 100 and MC 21 should be prioritised by Russian airlines.

Richie Blackmore. , 3 days ago

40 countries banned these aircraft from their airspace..... Comparable to the vicious, aggressive, malign, thoughtless, selfish and self aggrandising SANCTIONS the US regime and its vassals slap on innocent countries in attempts to impoverish or/and change their governments!!!!!!!!!

But this is self inflicted!!!!!! I hope the US regime can see the irony in this!!!!

0pTicaL823 , 2 days ago

Boeing should thank China for being the first to ground it's entire fleet, if one of the 96 planes that China operated, god forbid, had gone down, Boeing is done, 3-strikes you're out

statinskill , 2 days ago (edited)

Something is wrong with these planes and it is a good thing that they're being grounded world-wide until the problem is fixed. It is prudent both from the side of Rosaviatsiya and the FAA to not permit these planes to fly in the meanwhile to prevent further potential tragedies. However this is no reason to simply write off the huge fleet of Boeing 737 MAX planes in service world-wide. Right now engineers at Boeing are working on the problem and then those planes will be retrofitted asap. Personally I have no particular concerns flying in a Boeing 737 MAX once the problem is fixed.

[Mar 18, 2019] Boeing (BA) Secures $250M Deal to Support LRSO Cruise Missile

Mar 18, 2019 | finance.yahoo.com

Zacks Equity Research , Zacks March 18, 2019

The Boeing Company BA recently won a $250 million contract to offer weapon system integration for the Long Range Stand-Off (LRSO) Cruise Missile. Work related to the deal is scheduled to be completed by Dec 31, 2024.

The contract was awarded by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Per the terms of the deal, this aerospace giant will provide aircraft and missile carriage equipment development and modification, engineering, testing, software development, training, facilities and support necessary to fully integrate the LRSO Cruise Missile on the B-52H bomber platform.

Attributes of LRSO

The LRSO is a nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missile, under development. It is set to replace the current AGM-86 air launched cruise missile (ALCM). LRSO, might be up to about 50% longer than Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER) and still be suitable for internal carriage by the B-2 and B-52.

Our View

AGM-86 ALCM has been serving the U.S. Air Force quite efficiently. However, with increasingly sophisticated air defense systems developed by America's nemeses, especially Russia, demand for a new stealth nuclear-armed cruise missile capable of either destroying these defenses or penetrating them has been increasing consistently. In this scenario, the LRSO comes as the most credible stealthy and low-yield option available to the United States (according to Strategic Studies Quarterly Report).

Boeing's B-52, which has been the U.S. Air Force's one of the most preferred bombers, is completely dependent on long-range cruise missiles and cannot continue in the nuclear mission beyond 2030 without LRSO. As B-52 is expected to play a primary role in the U.S. nuclear mission for at least next decade and ALCM is already well beyond its originally planned end of life, we may expect more contracts similar to the latest one to usher in from the Pentagon in the coming days. This, in turn, should prove conducive to Boeing.

Price Performance

In a year's time, shares of Boeing have gained about 16.5% against the industry's 2.2% decline.

[Mar 18, 2019] The Boeing debacle is the latest example of regulatory capture by D. Saint Germain

Mar 15, 2019 | medium.com

How the Boeing 737 Max grounding and the Genoa bridge collapse show us that allowing companies to self-certify the safety of their products can be deadly

On Wednesday the United States joined 42 other countries in grounding Boeing's 737 Max 8 jets, days after a crash in Ethiopia of a 737 Max 8 jet left 157 people dead. The United States was a holdout, taking days longer to ground the planes than most of Europe. Our Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said, in those days between, that they weren't grounding the planes because " the agency's own reviews of the aircraft show no 'systematic performance issues.' "

There were some conflicting accounts of exactly how the US came to ground the 737 Max 8. A statement from Boeing on Wednesday read that "Boeing has determined  --  out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety  --  to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft."

In other words, Boeing claimed it was their idea / recommendation that the FAA ground the aircraft. Meanwhile, Donald Trump declared that he grounded the aircraft by executive order, forcing the FAA's hand.

Which begs the question  --  why did it take a presidential decree and/or the company itself to get the FAA, the main agency responsible for overseeing airplane transit in the United States, to ground potentially dangerous aircraft?

As James Hall, the former National Transportation Safety Board chairman, explained in the Times , in 2005 the FAA turned its safety certification responsibilities over to the manufacturers themselves (if manufacturers met some requirements). In plain speak, this means that Boeing got to decide if Boeing's airplanes were safe enough to fly  --  with no additional third-party checks.

The FAA said the purpose of this change was to save the aviation industry roughly $25 billion between 2006 to 2015.

Given this, it makes you wonder if the statement on Tuesday by Acting FAA Administrator Daniel K. Elwell  --  that the agency had conducted its own review  --  was factual, or if the agency had simply reviewed the safety review that Boeing had conducted on itself. It also clarifies why Boeing came to recommend to the FAA that their planes be grounded, rather than the FAA taking any decisive action on their own.

The term for this maze, where a government safety agency allows an industry to regulate itself so the industry can save some money , and where the industry itself has to be the one to recommend to government that their product shouldn't be in operation pending investigation, is regulatory capture .

From Wikipedia : "Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating."

The issue, in short, is that it is rarely in a business' self-interest to ensure the absolute safety of their products. Safety testing takes time, money, and if inspections reveal problems that need fixing, more money. Corporations are profit maximizers and pursue whatever method they need to minimize cost (including minimizing fixing flaws in their products) and maximize profit.

Without the threat of outside inspection or serious repercussions, there are few incentives to fix potential problems. Insurance covers accidents, and most mega-corporations have funds set aside in their operating budgets to pay the (generally small, relative to their operating budgets) fines governments may impose if and when a problem is discovered.

This is why it is unlikely that industry will ever sufficiently regulate itself on safety issues. Remember Edward Norton's job in "Fight Club"? "The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A. Multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B. Multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A x B x C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

The United States isn't alone in turning over self-certification of its transportation and infrastructure to industry. The Genoa Bridge Collapse in Italy last year, in which 43 people died, is another case.

The Morandi Bridge is a privately-owned toll bridge, publicly built but later sold off to Autostrade, a company majority owned by the Benetton clothing family. As a private infrastructure company, Autostrade has a profit maximization goal of keeping bridge maintenance costs low and toll profits high. Thanks to further privatization efforts of the Italian government, the safety and inspection of bridges is also conducted by private companies. In the case of the Morandi Bridge, the inspection company responsible for safety checks and certification of the bridge was owned by Autostrade's parent company, leaving the company that owns the bridge to self-certify its safety. The result, as the world saw, was a bridge that collapsed.

As Texas engineer Linwood Howell said in the Times, "the engineers inspecting the bridge would have their own professional liabilities to worry about, including the profits of the company that was paying them," i.e. a clear conflict of interest between maintaining basic safety and ensuring their own jobs.

Meanwhile, as Italian law professor Giuliano Fonderico noted , "the government behaved more like its first priority was cooperating with Autostrade, rather than regulating it."

These current examples of regulatory capture are the latest in a series of examples from recent times; others have pointed to regulatory capture in the Federal Reserve during the economic crisis , and the Mineral Management Service during the BP Oil Spill , to name two. Unfortunately it is only when a tragedy occurs that the public expresses concern.

George Stigler, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in Economics in part for his work around regulatory capture in 1982, believed that it was likely that industry would come to dictate the regulatory issues within their industries because of personal connections, a greater understanding of issues facing industry than the general public, but mostly, a public ignorance around what their regulators are up to.

Perhaps it is time for people to pay a little more attention to what our regulators, who we pay to protect us from bridge collapses and plane crashes, are up to. There are some people with big ideas on fixes for regulatory capture, but public demand will also need to exist for real reform efforts to take place.

[Mar 16, 2019] Boeing 737 Crashes Raise Tough Questions on Aircraft Automation - Bloomberg

Mar 16, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

Tom Enders just couldn't resist the swipe at the competition. It was June 2011, and the chief executive officer of Airbus SE was on a stage at the Paris air show after the planemaker won in a matter of days an unprecedented 600 orders for its upgraded A320neo airliner, while Boeing Co. stood on the sidelines.

"If our colleagues in Seattle still maintain we're only catching up with their 737, I must ask myself what these guys are smoking," Enders blurted out, to the general amusement of the audience, while Boeing representatives at the back of the room looked on.

Boeing had wavered on its decision whether to follow Airbus's lead and re-engine the 737 or go with an all-new aircraft. Customers were willing to wait for "something more revolutionary," as Jim Albaugh, at the time Boeing's head of commercial aircraft, said then.

But the European manufacturer's blow-out success with the A320neo, essentially a re-engined version of its popular narrow-body family, would soon force Boeing's hand.

As the A320neo became the fastest-selling plane in civil aviation history as Airbus picked off loyal Boeing customers like American Airlines Group Inc. , the U.S. company ditched the pursuit of an all-new jet and responded in July 2011 with its own redesign, the 737 Max.

"The program was launched in a panic," said Sash Tusa, an analyst at Agency Partners , an equity research firm in London. "What frightened Boeing most of all was losing their biggest and most important customer. American Airlines was the catalyst."

It turned out that Chicago-based Boeing wasn't too late to the party in the end: While the Max didn't quite replicate the neo's order book, it did become the company's fastest seller as airlines scrambled to cut their fuel bills with new engines that promised savings of 20 percent or more. All told, the Max raked in about 5,000 orders, keeping the playing field fairly level in the global duopoly between Airbus and Boeing.

Close Scrutiny

Now the 737 Max is grounded globally, after two almost factory-fresh jets crashed in rapid succession. As a result, the repercussions of Boeing's response to Airbus's incursion are under the microscope. Getting particular scrutiny are the use of more powerful, fuel-saving engines and automated tools to help pilots control the aircraft.

After the grounding, Boeing said that it "continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max, and that it was supporting the decision to idle the jets "out of an abundance of caution." The company declined to comment beyond its public statements.

In late October, a plane operated by Lion Air went down minutes after taking off in Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. Then on March 10, another 737 Max crashed, this time in Ethiopia en route to Kenya. Again, none of the 157 people on board survived the impact.

There are other similarities that alarmed airlines and regulators and stirred public opinion, leading to the grounding of the 737 Max fleet of more than 350 planes. According to the Federal Aviation Administration , "the track of the Ethiopian Airlines flight was very close and behaved very similar to the Lion Air flight."

How Boeing Safety Feature Became a Suspect in Crashes: QuickTake

After decades of steadily declining aircraft accidents, the question of how two identical new planes could simply fall out of the sky minutes after takeoff has led to intense scrutiny of the 737 Max's systems. Adding to the chorus in the wake of the crash was President Donald Trump, who lamented the complexities of modern aviation, suggesting that people in the cockpit needed to be more like nuclear physicists than pilots to command a jet packed with automated systems.

"Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT," the president said in the first of a pair of tweets on March 12, darkly warning that "complexity creates danger."

Analog Machine

Automation plays a limited role in the 737 Max. That's because the aircraft still has essential analog design and layout features dating back to the 1960s, when it was conceived. It's a far older concept than the A320, which came to market at the end of the 1980s and boasted innovations like fly-by-wire controls, which manipulate surfaces such as flaps and horizontal tail stabilizers with electrical impulses and transducers rather than heavier hydraulic links.

Upgrading the 737 to create the Max came with its own set of issues. For example, the 737 sits considerably lower to the ground, so fitting the bigger new engines under the wings was a structural challenge (even with the squished underbelly of the engine casing). In response, Boeing raised the front landing gear by a few inches, but this and the size of the engines can change the plane's center of gravity and its lift in certain maneuvers.

Boeing's technical wizardry for the 138- to 230-seat Max was a piece of software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. It intervenes automatically when a single sensor indicates the aircraft may be approaching a stall. Some pilots complained, though, that training on the new system wasn't sufficient and properly documented.

"The benefits of automation are great, but it requires a different level of discipline and training,'' said Thomas Anthony, director of the Aviation Safety and Security Program at the University of Southern California. Pilots must make a conscious effort to monitor the plane's behavior. And reliance on automation means they will take back control only in the worst situations, he said.

Errant Sensor

With the Lion Air crash, data from the recovered flight recorders points to a battle in the cockpit between the software and the pilots who struggled in vain to keep control. The data showed that an errant sensor signaled the plane was in danger of stalling and prompted the MCAS to compensate by repeatedly initiating a dive. The pilots counteracted by flipping a switch several times to raise the nose manually, which temporarily disabled MCAS. The cycle repeated itself more than two dozen times before the plane entered its final deadly dive, according to the flight data.

With the flight and cockpit voice recorders of the Ethiopian plane now in France for analysis, the interaction between the MCAS system and the pilots will again be under close scrutiny, probably rekindling the broader debate about who or what is in control of the cockpit.

That man-versus-machine conundrum has been central to civil aviation for years. Automation has without doubt made commercial flying much safer, as planemakers added systems to help pilots set engine thrust, navigate with greater precision and even override human error in the cockpit.

For example, automation on modern aircraft keeps pilots within a so-called flight envelope to avoid erratic maneuvers that might destabilize the aircraft. Analyses of flight data show that planes have more stable landings in stormy, low-visibility conditions when automation is in charge than on clear days when they land by sight.

Sully's Miracle Landing

The most daring descent in recent memory, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in early 2009, is Exhibit A of how an interconnected cockpit worked hand-in-hand with an experienced pilot. Automatic pitch trim and rudder coordination assisted manual inputs and kept the Airbus A320 steady on its smooth glide into the icy water. The drama showed that automation can play a crucial support function, provided a pilot is fully trained and the aircraft properly maintained.

"Some people are saying modern aircraft such as the 737 Max are too complex," said Dave Wallsworth, a British Airways captain on the Airbus A380 double-decker. "I disagree. The A380 is a far more complex aircraft and we fly it very safely every day. Pilots are capable of understanding aircraft systems so long as the manuals contain the information we need."

Airbus traditionally has pushed the envelope on automation and a more modern cockpit layout, with larger screens and steering by joystick rather than a central yoke, turning pilots into something akin to systems operators. Boeing's philosophy, on the other hand, has been to leave more authority in the hands of pilots, though newer designs also include some computerized limits. Like Airbus planes, the latest aircraft from Seattle -- where Boeing makes most of its jetliners -- are equipped with sophisticated autopilots, fly-by-wire controls or systems to set speed during landings.

"The big automation steps came in the 1980s with the entry into service of the A320 and the whole fly-by-wire ethos," said John Strickland, an independent aviation analyst. "I don't think automation per se is a problem, we see it in wide-scale use in the industry, and as long as it is designed to work hand-in-hand with pilots and pilots understand how to use it, it shouldn't be an issue."

Erratic Movements

But the counter-argument is that increasingly complex systems have led computers to take over, and that many pilots may have forgotten how to manually command a jet -- particularly in a moment of crisis. That criticism was leveled at Airbus, for example, after the mid-Atlantic crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009 that killed all 228 people on board. Analysis of the flight recorders showed the crew was confused by stall warnings and unreliable speed readings, leading to erratic maneuvers that ended in catastrophe.

>

"I grew up on steam gauges and analog, and the modern generation on digital and automation," said Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association and a Boeing 737 captain for the Dallas-based airline. "No matter what you grew up on, you have to fly the plane. If the automation is doing something you don't want it to do or that you don't understand, you have to disconnect it and fly the plane."

A 2013 report by the FAA found more than 60 percent of 26 accidents over a decade involved pilots making errors after automated systems abruptly shut down or behaved in unexpected ways. And the 2016 inspector general's report at the FAA noted that as the use of automation increases, "pilots have fewer opportunities to use manual flying skills."

"As a result, the opportunities air carrier pilots have during live operations to maintain proficiency in manual flight are limited and are likely to diminish," the report found.

The grounding of the 737 Max fleet has left Boeing in crisis. The company couldn't get through with its message that the plane was safe to fly, as the group of regulators and airlines idling the jet kept expanding. The 737 program is Boeing's cash cow, accounting for a third of its profit, and Boeing's stock dropped sharply in the days after the disaster.

Get in Line

The Max gave Boeing a relatively cheap path back into the narrow-body game that it was at risk of losing to the Airbus neo. At the time, Boeing had to make a quick decision, as it was still burdened financially by the 787 Dreamliner wide-body that was over budget and behind schedule.

Both manufacturers have said they won't come out with an all-new single-aisle model until well into the next decade, preferring to wait for further technological advancements before committing to massive spending. The success of both the neo and the Max bought the companies that extra time, with orders books stretching years into the future.

Half a century after it was launched almost as an afterthought, the 737 program has become the lifeblood of Boeing that helps finance the rest of the corporation -- the biggest U.S. exporter. It's the one aircraft that Boeing cannot afford to give up.

"The Max was the right decision for the time," said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with the consultancy Teal Group . "Yes, there may be an issue with MCAS needing a software patch. Yes, there may need to be some additional training. But these are not issues that cause people to change to the other guys' jet. The other guys have a waiting line, and when you get to the back of that line, you burn more fuel."

-- With assistance by Alan Levin, Benjamin D Katz, Margaret Newkirk, Michael Sasso, and Mary Schlangenstein

[Mar 14, 2019] Boeing 737 Max an artificial intelligence event by James Thompson

Mar 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

Conventional wisdom is that it is too early to speculate why in the past six months two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes have gone down shortly after take off, so if all that follows is wrong you will know it very quickly. Last night I predicted that the first withdrawals of the plane would happen within two days, and this morning China withdrew it. So far, so good. (Indonesia followed a few hours ago).

Why should I stick my neck out with further predictions? First, because we must speculate the moment something goes wrong. It is natural, right and proper to note errors and try to correct them.(The authorities are always against "wild" speculation, and I would be in agreement with that if they had an a prior definition of wildness). Second, because putting forward hypotheses may help others test them (if they are not already doing so). Third, because if the hypotheses turn out to be wrong, it will indicate an error in reasoning, and will be an example worth studying in psychology, so often dourly drawn to human fallibility. Charmingly, an error in my reasoning might even illuminate an error that a pilot might make, if poorly trained, sleep-deprived and inattentive.

I think the problem is that the Boeing anti-stall patch MCAS is poorly configured for pilot use: it is not intuitive, and opaque in its consequences.

By the way of full disclosure, I have held my opinion since the first Lion Air crash in October, and ran it past a test pilot who, while not responsible for a single word here, did not argue against it. He suggested that MCAS characteristics should have been in a special directive and drawn to the attention of pilots.

I am normally a fan of Boeing. I have flown Boeing more than any other plane, and that might make me loyal to the brand. Even more powerfully, I thought they were correct to carry on with the joystick yoke, and that AirBus was wrong to drop it, simply because the position of the joystick is something visible to pilot and co-pilot, whereas the Airbus side stick does not show you at a glance how high the nose of the plane is pointing.

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/fear-of-flying-and-safety-of-gruyere/

Pilots are bright people, but they must never be set a badly configured test item with tight time limits and potentially fatal outcomes.

The Air France 447 crash had several ingredients, but one was that the pilots of the Airbus A330-203 took too long to work out they were in a stall. In fact, that realization only hit them very shortly before they hit the ocean. Whatever the limitations of the crew (sleep deprived captain, uncertain co-pilot) they were blinded by a frozen Pitot air speed indicator, and an inability to set the right angle of attack for their airspeed.

For the industry, the first step was to fit better air speed indicators which were less likely to ice up. However, it was clear that better stall warning and protection was required.

Boeing had a problem with fitting larger and heavier engines to their tried and trusted 737 configuration, meaning that the engines had to be higher on the wing and a little forwards, and that made the 737 Max have different performance characteristics, which in turn led to the need for an anti-stall patch to be put into the control systems.

It is said that generals always fight the last war. Safety officials correct the last problem, as they must. However, sometimes a safety system has unintended consequences.

The key of the matter is that pilots fly normal 737s every day, and have internalized a mental model of how that plane operates. Pilots probably actually read manuals, and safety directives, and practice for rare events. However, I bet that what they know best is how a plane actually operates most of the time. (I am adjusting to a new car, same manufacturer and model as the last one, but the 9 years of habit are still often stronger than the manual-led actions required by the new configuration). When they fly a 737 Max there is a bit of software in the system which detects stall conditions and corrects them automatically. The pilots should know that, they should adjust to that, they should know that they must switch off that system if it seems to be getting in the way, but all that may be steps too far, when something so important is so opaque.

What is interesting is that in emergencies people rely on their most validated mental models: residents fleeing a burning building tend to go out their usual exits, not even the nearest or safest exit. Pilots are used to pulling the nose up and pushing it down, to adding power and to easing back on it, and when a system takes over some of those decisions, they need to know about it.

After Lion Air I believed that pilots had been warned about the system, but had not paid sufficient attention to its admittedly complicated characteristics, but now it is claimed that the system was not in the training manual anyway. It was deemed a safety system that pilots did not need to know about.

This farrago has an unintended consequence, in that it may be a warning about artificial intelligence. Boeing may have rated the correction factor as too simple to merit human attention, something required mainly to correct a small difference in pitch characteristics unlikely to be encountered in most commercial flying, which is kept as smooth as possible for passenger comfort.

It would be terrible if an apparently small change in automated safety systems designed to avoid a stall turned out have given us a rogue plane, killing us to make us safe.


Anatoly Karlin , says: Website March 11, 2019 at 2:36 pm GMT

Pilots are used to pulling the nose up and pushing it down, to adding power and to easing back on it, and when a system takes over some of those decisions, they need to know about it.

I have read that Boeing kept MCAS out of the limelight as otherwise the 737 MAX would need to be certified as a new plane and airlines would need to do $$$ pilot retraining, making their product less competitive.

James Thompson , says: Website March 11, 2019 at 3:09 pm GMT
@Anatoly Karlin Interesting. It is certainly hard to understand why MCAS was shrouded in secrecy, when it was potentially lethal.
Captain 737 , says: March 11, 2019 at 7:38 pm GMT
Interesting response from a "by-stander", who compares a sophisticated aircraft with a new model car !!!

As an experienced captain on 737s (not the MAX) I say, let the investigation begin; and let us not have by-standers giving their penny worth. A normal 737 . is there also an abnormal 747 or 777 or 787, or a 737 ??

Pilots carry the can . but, are the most respected profession in the world. What ever happened, let the investigation decide the outcome, and not the "un-trained" (is there such a term !!!!).

If one takes a look at the (released to date) information about the Lion Air crash – "unreliable airspeeds" (the airspeed indicator is providing erroneous information during a critical phase of flight (like climb out after take-off)) could have been the cause of that aircraft crash – not AI.

A simple explanation – the airspeed indicator is "unreliable", as one moment the indication is under-speed, then overspeed, followed by under-speed, and so it goes; like a yoyo going up and down; the indicated speed is erroneous and the pilots cannot rely on what is presented on the airspeed indicator. Pilots, according to the Boeing Training Manual, are trained to handle unreliable airspeeds – the key is to fly the plane based solely on pitch attitude and thrust (there are memory items for unreliable airspeed occurrences, along with the reference items in aircraft's Quick Reference Handbook – the QRH (Boeing term) is the pilots "bible" for any issues and problems when the aircraft is in the air !! ).

The point of the above paragraph is to enlighten the 'un-trained' as to not speculate too soon with ideas and a "hypothesis" of what may have happened, until the knowledgeable ones – the aircraft manufacturer (probably being the most knowledgable), the country's aviation authority, the engine manufacturer, and (dear I say) the FAA (the Yanks just cannot help themselves delving into other countries' affairs; when for 9/11 not one minutes was spent by anyone (FAA, Boeing, no one) investigating the so-called crashes of four aircraft – on one day, within one and a half hours of each other, and in the most protected airspace in the world (got the hint !!) – I have digressed, though for reason .. have completed their investigations.

I can assure you that no pilot wants to crash a plane we (pilots) all want to live to 100, and beyond.

Humans make mistakes, but technology needs humans to correct technology's mistakes. Boeing build reliable and trustworthy aircraft; pilots undertake their duties in a safe and controlled manner (according to training and aircraft manufacturer stipulated standards); but errors happen – and the investigator is there to establish what happened, so that these do not happen again. Unfortunately, it is just possible that the cause of the first MAX accident is the same as the second. But, let the knowledgable ones determine that fact – and let me, and us, not speculate.

AI in the MAX hhmmmmm – let Boeing release that information, before we start speculating again (on AI – is an auto pilot AI; the B737 I fly has two auto pilots; is that double AI ??).

To the rest of the travelling public – airline travel remains, and has been, the safest form of transport for decades. I am confident that the status quo will remain.

Time will reveal the answers to these two accidents, when the time is right – when the investigators (for both) have concluded their deliberations.

My guess is, the majority of people will have forgotten these two MAX events (but, for those who have lost loved ones), as some other crisis/event will have occurred in their lives and/or in the world.

Dieter Kief , says: March 11, 2019 at 7:38 pm GMT
@Anatoly Karlin

737 MAX would need to be certified as a new plane and airlines would need to do $$$ pilot retraining, making their product less competitive.

Short sighted businessmen – Nothing lasts for long

Joni Mitchell – – – Chinese Cafè on Wild Things Run Fast

The Anti-Gnostic , says: Website March 11, 2019 at 7:45 pm GMT
I think the problem is that the Boeing anti-stall patch MCAS is poorly configured for pilot use: it is not intuitive, and opaque in its consequences.

I think that's the case with a lot of current technology. Human factors and tactileness don't seem to get much weight in current engineering.

Simply Simon , says: March 12, 2019 at 12:26 am GMT
@Captain 737 I respect your analysis especially coming from a seasoned 737 captain. I have over 5,000 flying hours in single and twin-engine, conventional and jet, all military. I have not flown since 1974 so the advances in auto-pilot technology are beyond my comprehension. My question to you is simple–I think. If the aircraft took off in VFR conditions I assume the pilots knew the pitch attitude all during the takeoff phase. Is there no way to manually overpower the auto-pilot once the pilots knew the pitch attitude was dangerously high or low?
kauchai , says: March 12, 2019 at 2:37 am GMT
If this is a made in china airplane, the empire would mobilize the whole world to ground the entire fleet. The diatribes, lies, cruel sick jokes, lawsuits, etc, etc, would fly to the heavens.

But NO, this is an empire plane. Designed, built and (tested?) in the heart of the empire. And despite the fact that more than 300 people had died, IT IS STILL SAFE to fly!

LOL! LOL!

Anonymous [414] Disclaimer , says: March 12, 2019 at 3:41 am GMT
Quite a short and to-the-point article, although the link to "artificial intelligence" is tenuous at best.

What is sold as Artificial Intelligence nowadays is massive statistical processing in a black box (aka as "Neural Network Processing"), it's not intelligent. The most surprising fact is that it works so well.

Neural Networks won't be in high-assurance software soon. No-one knows what they really do once configured (although there are efforts underway to attack that problem ). They are impossible to really test or design to specification. Will someone underwrite that a system incorporating them does work? Hardly. You may find them in consumer electronics, research, "self driving cars" that never really self-drive without surprises and possibly bleeding edge military gear looking for customers or meant to explode messily anyway.

But not in cockpits. (At least I hope).

Check out this slideshow about the ACAS-X Next Generation Collision Airborne Collision Avoidance System. It has no neural network in sight, in fact if I understand correctly it doesn't even have complex decision software in-cockpit: it's all decision tables precomputed from a high-level, understandable description (aka. code, apparently in Julia) to assure safe outcome in a fully testable and simulatable approach.

In this accident, we may have a problem with the system, as opposed to with the software. While the software may work correctly and to specification (and completely unintelligently) the system composed of software + human + physical machinery will interact in interesting, unforeseen, untested ways, leading to disaster. In fact the (unintelligent software + human) part may disturbingly behave like those Neural Networks that are being sold as AI.

Anonymous [414] Disclaimer , says: March 12, 2019 at 4:16 am GMT
A disquieting item on your morning cereal box:

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/boeing-cited-by-pentagon-over-quality-concerns-going-back-years-1.522343

https://www.stripes.com/news/air-force/air-force-won-t-accept-any-more-boeing-tankers-until-manufacturing-process-is-cleaned-up-1.571108

Anonymous [427] Disclaimer , says: March 12, 2019 at 4:46 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin I'm guessing that it would require a change in the TCDS and possibly a different type rating, which would be anathema for sales.

I'm a little airplane person, not a big airplane person (and the 737 is a Big Airplane even in its smallest configuration) but I know there have been several instances where aircraft had changes that required that pilots of the type have a whole different type rating, even though the changes seemed minor. I'm guessing airlines are training averse and don't want to take crews off revenue service beyond what is statutorily required. The margins in airline flying are apparently much leaner now than in the glory days.

I never approved of allowing fly by wire in commercial airliners, I never even really liked the idea of FADEC engine control (supervisory DEC was fine) because a classical advantage of gas turbines (and diesels) was that they could run in an absolutely electrically dead environment once lit. Indeed, the J-58 (JT11-D in P&W parlance) had no electrical system to speak of beyond the instrumentation: it started by mechanical shaft drive and ignited by triethyl borane chemical injection. The Sled could make it home on needle-ball and alcohol compass, and at least once it did. Total electrical failure in any FBW aircraft means losing the airplane. Is the slight gain in efficiency worth it? I'm told the cables, pulleys, fairleads and turnbuckles add 200 pounds to a medium size airliner, the FBW stuff weighs 80 or so.

The jet transports we studied in A&P school had a pitot head and static port on either side of the flight deck and the captain and F/O had inputs from different ones, though IIRC the altimeter and airspeed were electrically driven from sensors at the pitot head or inboard of it. I have a 727 drum-pointer (why are three pointer altimeters even legal anymore??) altimeter and it has no aneroids, just a couple of PCBs full of TTL logic and op amps and a DB style connector on the back. Do crews not cross check airspeed and altitude or is there no indicator to flag them when the two show something different?

Also, not being a jet pilot myself, my understanding is that anyone with T-38 experience is forever after thinking in terms of AOA and not airspeed per se, because that airplane has to be flown by AOA in the pattern, and classically a lot of airline pilots had flown Talons. Is there no AOA indicator in the 737? Flying in the pattern/ILS would make airspeed pretty dependent on aircraft weight, and on a transport that can change a lot with fuel burn, do they precisely calculate current weight from a totalizer and notate speeds needed? (I presume airliners don't vary weight other than fuel burn, not being customarily in the business of throwing stuff out of the airplane, although they used to fly jumpers out of a chartered 727 at the parachute meet in Quincy)

dearieme , says: March 12, 2019 at 12:00 pm GMT
@Captain 737 Why are you pretending to be a pilot, and a pompous one at that?
dearieme , says: March 12, 2019 at 12:06 pm GMT
Many problems in the world arise because many computing people reckon themselves very clever when they are merely rather clever. And often they combine what cleverness they have with a blindness about humans and their ways. I shouldn't be at all surprised if programmers at Boeing decided that they always knew better than pilots and doomed the planes accordingly.

I saw recently an expression that made me grin: "midwits". It describes rather well many IT types of my acquaintance.

dearieme , says: March 12, 2019 at 12:51 pm GMT
Another human cost of midwittery:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6797193/More-500-village-postmasters-wrongly-hounded-stealing-millions-system.html

Fabian Forge , says: March 12, 2019 at 4:55 pm GMT
@fish And that's the problem, as Mr. Kief also points out. The individuals at the decision making level (let's call them "executives") don't or can't think that far ahead, at least when the corporation they run is concerneed.

It really is a time-preference problem.

Fabian Forge , says: March 12, 2019 at 5:06 pm GMT
@dearieme One corollary is that the Midwits take such joy in their cleverness that they assume their wit has value in and of itself. This is most evident when they design clever solutions to invented problems. Billions of dollars of venture capital have been set on fire in that way, when technical and financial midwittery combine.
Dieter Kief , says: March 12, 2019 at 10:55 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov It's almost nitpicking. But – James Thompson says it above: The MCAS in this Boing model 737 MAX 8 is used to cover up a basic construction flaw. This has undoubtedly worked for quite some time – but it came with a risk. And this risk might turn out to have caused numerous deaths. In this case, if it will turn out, that the MACS system didn't do what it was supposed to do and thus caused numerous deaths – will this then be looked upon as a problem of the application of artificial intelligence? Yes, but not only . It was a combination of a poorly built (constructed) airliner and software, which might not have been able to compensate for this flawed construction under all conditions.

It's cheaper to compensate via software – and this might (might) turn out to be a rather irresponsible way to save money. But as I said: Even in this case, the technical problem would have to be looked upon as twofold: Poor construction plus insufficient software compensation. I'd even tend to say, that poor construction would then be the main (=basic) fault. With the zeitgeisty (and cheap!) software-"solution" for this poor construction a close second.

Eagle Eye , says: March 12, 2019 at 11:25 pm GMT
@Captain 737 Curiously, this is "Captain 737″'s first and only comment here.

It's almost as if Boeing hired a high-priced PR firm whose offerings include pseudonymous online "messaging" to "shape opposition perceptions" etc. Note the over-obvious handle. (Just like globalist shills like to pretend to be regular blue-collar guys in small fly-over towns.)

By their words shalt ye know them.

PREDICTION: In 3-4 years, we will "discover" a long paper trail of engineers warning early on about the risk of hastily kludging a half-assed anti-stall patch MCAS onto a system that had undergone years of testing and refinement WITHOUT the patch.

Only somebody PAID not to see the problem could fail to perceive that this means that as so altered, the ENTIRE SYSTEM goes back to being technically immature.

Anonymous [427] Disclaimer , says: March 13, 2019 at 12:00 am GMT
@Dieter Kief What "basic construction flaw" are we discussing here? The 737 airframe is pretty well established and has a good record-there have been incidents but most have been well dealt with.
Dieter Kief , says: March 13, 2019 at 12:39 am GMT
@Anonymous I've read today, that in the aviation world there is a consensus, that what James Thompson says in his article is right:
"Boeing had a problem with fitting larger and heavier engines to their tried and trusted 737 configuration, meaning that the engines had to be higher on the wing and a little forwards, and that made the 737 Max have different performance characteristics, which in turn led to the need for an anti-stall patch to be put into the control systems."

– A German engineer wrote in a comment in the Berlin daily Die weLT, this construction flaw makes the 737 MAX 8 something like a flying traktor . He concluded, that Boing proved, that you can make a tractor fly, alright. But proper engineering would have looked otherwise – and would for sure had come at a higher cost.
(The different performance charactersitics mentioned by James Thompson is an extraordinarily nice way to express, that the 737 MAX 8 is a tad more likely to stall, just because of the very design-changes, the bigger turbines made necessary. And this is a rather nasty thing to say about an airplane, that a new design made it more likely to stall! ).

Sparkon , says: March 13, 2019 at 1:54 am GMT
@Anonymous

What "basic construction flaw" are we discussing here? The 737 airframe is pretty well established and has a good record.

I 'm not so sure about the good record, and I too suspect the underlying problem is the 737 itself – the entire 737 airframe and avionics.

Worst crash record

LET 410 – 20
Ilyushin 72 – 17
Antonov AN-1 – 17
Twin Otter – 18
CASA 212 – 11
DC-9/MD80 – 10
B737-100 / 700 – 10
Antonov 28 – 8
Antonov 32- 7
Tupolev 154- 7

[a/o 2013 – my bold]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Least-safe-aircraft-models-revealed/

The 737 family is the best selling commercial airliner series in history with more than 10,000 units produced. However, this airplane in its various configurations has had many crashes since it first entered service in 1968.

[Mar 13, 2019] Boeing, The FAA, And Why Two 737 MAX Planes Crashed

Notable quotes:
"... To implement a security relevant automatism that depends on only one sensor is extremely bad design. To have a flight control automatism engaged even when the pilot flies manually is also a bad choice. But the real criminality was that Boeing hid the feature. ..."
"... The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed went down in a similar flight profile as the Indonesian plane. It is highly likely that MCAS is the cause of both incidents. While the pilots of the Ethiopian plane were aware of the MCAS system they might have had too little time to turn it off. The flight recorders have been recovered and will tell the full story. ..."
"... The FAA certifies all new planes and their documentation. I was for some time marginally involved in Airbus certification issues. It is an extremely detailed process that has to be followed by the letter. Hundreds of people are full time engaged for years to certify a modern jet. Every tiny screw and even the smallest design details of the hardware and software have to be documented and certified. ..."
"... How or why did the FAA agree to accept the 737 MAX with the badly designed MCAS? How could the FAA allow that MCAS was left out of the documentation? What steps were taken after the Indonesian flight crashed into the sea? ..."
"... That the marketing department has more say than the engineers who design and test the hardware and the software in passenger jets tells us a great deal about the Potemkin-style workplace culture that prevails in Boeing and similar large US corporations. The surface sheen is more important than the substance. The marketing brochures and manuals are no different from mainstream news media in the level of BS they spew. ..."
"... The Indonesian pilots did not have the time to figure out and realise that something else was controlling the plane's flight, much less deactivate what is effectively a second autopiloting system. ..."
"... B is right. This is a criminal act of deception and fraud thats cost hundreds their lives. Boeing executives responsible should be prosecuted and then jailed. ..."
"... while all the technical discussion around how to fly a plane is truly interesting, what's really at issue here is corporate and institutional betrayal of trust. ..."
"... The corporate aspect is Boeing, obviously. The institutional aspect is FAA, which used to lead the world in trust when it came to life and death matters. ..."
"... But now, in what Bloomberg, even while trying to support FAA, has no choice but to report as a "stunning rebuff" to FAA's integrity, countries around the world are grounding this flawed plane. Germany, among others, has closed its airspace to the 737. ..."
"... "Should anyone be flying 737MAXes before the black box data has been evaluated?" ..."
"... Before, the civilian airliners were falling out of the sky because of an immature technology, that is because of the learning curve. Now that the technology involved is fully mature the airliners are falling out of the sky for profit taking. ..."
"... Is it really so hard to connect the secrecy about MCAS and why it was needed in the first place? The lawyers will have a ball of the decade with this: the defendant created a secret software solution to turn a Lego airplane into a real airplane, made the software dependent on a single sensor, and made it difficult to switch the software off. ..."
"... I cannot believe that Boeing shares dropped only 7.5%, this is a statement of how untouchable Boeing is and how protected it will be by the Corrupt. ..."
Mar 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Boeing, The FAA, And Why Two 737 MAX Planes Crashed psychohistorian , Mar 12, 2019 4:55:32 PM | link

On Sunday an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed, killing all on board. Five month earlier an Indonesian Lion Air jet crashed near Jakarta. All crew and passengers died. Both airplanes were Boeing 737-8 MAX. Both incidents happened shortly after take off.

Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are now grounded about everywhere except in the United States. That this move follows only now is sad. After the first crash it was already obvious that the plane is not safe to fly.

The Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320 types are single aisle planes with some 150 seats. Both are bread and butter planes sold by the hundreds with a good profit. In 2010 Airbus decided to offer its A-320 with a New Engine Option (NEO) which uses less fuel. To counter the Airbus move Boeing had to follow up. The 737 would also get new engines for a more efficient flight and longer range. The new engines on the 737 MAX are bigger and needed to be placed a bit different than on the older version. That again changed the flight characteristics of the plane by giving it a nose up attitude.

The new flight characteristic of the 737 MAX would have require a retraining of the pilots. But Boeing's marketing people had told their customers all along that the 737 MAX would not require extensive new training. Instead of expensive simulator training for the new type experienced 737 pilots would only have to read some documentation about the changes between the old and the new versions.

To make that viable Boeing's engineers had to use a little trick. They added a 'maneuver characteristics augmentation system' (MCAS) that pitches the nose of the plane down if a sensor detects a too high angle of attack (AoA) that might lead to a stall. That made the flight characteristic of the new 737 version similar to the old one.

But the engineers screwed up.

The 737 MAX has two flight control computers. Each is connected to only one of the two angle of attack sensors. During a flight only one of two computer runs the MCAS control. If it detects a too high angle of attack it trims the horizontal stabilizer down for some 10 seconds. It then waits for 5 seconds and reads the sensor again. If the sensor continues to show a too high angle of attack it again trims the stabilizer to pitch the plane's nose done.

MCSA is independent of the autopilot. It is even active in manual flight. There is a procedure to deactivate it but it takes some time.

One of the angle of attack sensors on the Indonesian flight was faulty. Unfortunately it was the one connected to the computer that ran the MCAS on that flight. Shortly after take off the sensor signaled a too high angle of attack even as the plane was flying in a normal climb. The MCAS engaged and put the planes nose down. The pilots reacted by disabling the autopilot and pulling the control stick back. The MCAS engaged again pitching the plane further down. The pilots again pulled the stick. This happened some 12 times in a row before the plane crashed into the sea.

To implement a security relevant automatism that depends on only one sensor is extremely bad design. To have a flight control automatism engaged even when the pilot flies manually is also a bad choice. But the real criminality was that Boeing hid the feature.

Neither the airlines that bought the planes nor the pilots who flew it were told about MCAS. They did not know that it exists. They were not aware of an automatic system that controlled the stabilizer even when the autopilot was off. They had no idea how it could be deactivated.

Nine days after the Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 ended in a deadly crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive.


bigger

The 737 MAX pilots were aghast. The APA pilot union sent a letter to its members:

"This is the first description you, as 737 pilots, have seen. It is not in the AA 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor is there a description in the Boeing FCOM (flight crew operations manual)," says the letter from the pilots' union safety committee. "Awareness is the key with all safety issues."

The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed went down in a similar flight profile as the Indonesian plane. It is highly likely that MCAS is the cause of both incidents. While the pilots of the Ethiopian plane were aware of the MCAS system they might have had too little time to turn it off. The flight recorders have been recovered and will tell the full story.

Boeing has sold nearly 5,000 of the 737 MAX. So far some 380 have been delivered. Most of these are now grounded. Some family members of people who died on the Indonesian flight are suing Boeing. Others will follow. But Boeing is not the only one who is at fault.

The FAA certifies all new planes and their documentation. I was for some time marginally involved in Airbus certification issues. It is an extremely detailed process that has to be followed by the letter. Hundreds of people are full time engaged for years to certify a modern jet. Every tiny screw and even the smallest design details of the hardware and software have to be documented and certified.

How or why did the FAA agree to accept the 737 MAX with the badly designed MCAS? How could the FAA allow that MCAS was left out of the documentation? What steps were taken after the Indonesian flight crashed into the sea?

Up to now the FAA was a highly regarded certification agency. Other countries followed its judgment and accepted the certifications the FAA issued. That most of the world now grounded the 737 MAX while it still flies in the States is a sign that this view is changing. The FAA's certifications of Boeing airplanes are now in doubt.

Today Boeing's share price dropped some 7.5%. I doubt that it is enough to reflect the liability issues at hand. Every airline that now had to ground its planes will ask for compensation. More than 330 people died and their families deserve redress. Orders for 737 MAX will be canceled as passengers will avoid that type.

Boeing will fix the MCAS problem by using more sensors or by otherwise changing the procedures. But the bigger issue for the U.S. aircraft industry might be the damage done to the FAA's reputation. If the FAA is internationally seen as a lobbying agency for the U.S. airline industry it will no longer be trusted and the industry will suffer from it. It will have to run future certification processes through a jungle of foreign agencies.

Congress should take up the FAA issue and ask why it failed.

Posted by b on March 12, 2019 at 04:39 PM | Permalink

Comments next page " @ b who wrote
"
But the engineers screwed up.
"

I call BS on this pointing of fingers at the wrong folk

Engineers get paid to build things that accountants influence. The West is a world in which the accountants have more sway than engineers.

It is all about the money b and to lead folks in some other direction is not like what I think of you.

The elite that own global private finance and everything else killed those people in the planes because they set the standards that the accountants follow and then force the engineers to operate within

The profit narrative is bad for humanity.


bj , Mar 12, 2019 4:57:15 PM | link

A whistleblower at Boeing would have been nice.
bevin , Mar 12, 2019 5:00:23 PM | link
"Congress should take up the FAA issue and ask why it failed."
If there had been any chance of that happening, the planes would probably still be flying and dead passengers alive.
This, if you are right and I suspect that you are, is symptomatic of an empire dying of corruption. It is no accident that both the new secretary of defence and the neo-con cult itself were born of Boeing. A fact memorialised in the UK where the Blairites rally in the Henry Jackson society.
Lochearn , Mar 12, 2019 5:00:42 PM | link
Last night I wrote on a previous thread:
Over the space of a few months 2 almost new Boeing 737 MAX aircraft have crashed. Rather than going to the expense of designing an entirely new fuselage and normal length landing gear for its larger and much more powerful 737 MAX engines Boeing stuck with the now ancient 737 fuselage design that sits only 17 inches from the ground – necessitating changes to the positioning of the engines on the wing, which together with the vast increase in power, created aerodynamic instability in the design that Boeing tried to correct with software, while not alerting pilots to the changes.
Through the 1980s and early 1990s Boeing executives had largely resisted pressure from Wall Street to cut staff numbers, move plant to non-union states and outsource. The 777 was the last real Boeing, though significant outsourcing did take place – but under the strict control and guidance of Boeing engineers. After the "reverse" takeover of MacDonnell Douglas in 1997 the MDD neoliberal culture swamped Boeing and its HQ was moved from the firm's home near Seattle to Chicago so executives could hobnob with speculators. Wall Street had taken down another giant.
David Park , Mar 12, 2019 5:01:36 PM | link
The story I have most interest in, at the moment, is the state of the power blackout in Venezuela and whether this was a cyber attack by the United States. If it was, it is, in my opinion, a weapon of mass destruction and a very major war crime. The story seems to be fading from the news so I'm hoping b. will be able to gather more information about it.

But I find every story by b, worthwhile!

Ghost Ship , Mar 12, 2019 5:04:07 PM | link
I don't know if this is true by my sister who was an engineer working on military jets said that she'd heard that because of various design requirements, the 737-MAX was inherently unstable but stability was provided by the fly-by-wire system. In military jets, this feature provides greater maneuverability and survivability but has no place on civilian aircraft as the outcome of a system failure would be catastrophic with the pilots being unable to do anything about it. Anyone heard anything similar?
james , Mar 12, 2019 5:09:31 PM | link
b - thanks for addressing this.. subservient canada is also flying them still..) canada is going the same way as the usa-faa - into a ditch long term... it is really sad for the people who have died and for the fact that as @1 psychohistorian notes - the decisions are being put in the hands of the wrong people...
Barbara Ann , Mar 12, 2019 5:11:56 PM | link
Excellent piece b.
karlof1 , Mar 12, 2019 5:13:53 PM | link
Gotta agree with psychohistorian @1, that the engineers aren't totally responsible. Deregulation pukes at FAA, bean counters at Boeing and their managers who approved it all are morally culpable. Airline executives aren't immune either, although many will likely plead ignorance.
mourning dove , Mar 12, 2019 5:17:18 PM | link
If the US were a sane country, a Congressional investigation would follow, but it's not, and Congress is going to be more concerned with Boeing's bottom line than in public safety or the integrity of the FAA. That's probably why the planes haven't been grounded in the US. Congress is much more likely to impede investigation and accountability.
dave , Mar 12, 2019 5:17:28 PM | link

the dreamliner is the plane of the future barack hussein obarmie


The Boeing Broken Dreams Al Jazeera Investigations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os

karlof1 , Mar 12, 2019 5:19:49 PM | link
David Park @5--

You'll want to read this !

Steven , Mar 12, 2019 5:26:50 PM | link
You omit important facts: the pilots know by heart how to quickly cut off electronic control of the stabilizers and fly manually. The pilots on the preceding lion air flight had had the same problem, and immediately solved it. The defective sensor should have been immediately replaced, and would have in the United States. On the next flight, the pilots (the copilot being quite unexperienced) spent 10 minutes not doing what they were trained to do in an emergency where the stabilizers are out of control: disable them.

When some flight crews get it right, but others don't, it's not a design flaw but a problem with the flight crews.

I can't agree with your conclusions.

Lochearn , Mar 12, 2019 5:30:48 PM | link
Through the history of Boeing senior executives lived in modest middle-class houses. They traveled on Boeing aircraft to get pilot's responses. But when Phil Condit (Wall Street's man) took over he immediately bought private jets and started living the lifestyle. The difference between productive capitalism and financial capitalism.
Tom Welsh , Mar 12, 2019 5:34:56 PM | link
"How or why did the FAA agree to accept the 737 MAX with the badly designed MCAS?"

Because it would be against the state religion to stop, or delay, a huge corporation earning even more money.

dave , Mar 12, 2019 5:36:39 PM | link
the broken dreams documentary above spells it out very clearly the documentary is from 2014.
it even has undercover folks in the boeing factory saying they would not fly on one.


if you fly you should watch that old al jazeera investigation.
the company does not pay tax and
the head of boeing paid himself 100s of millions of dollars

corporate manslaughter
could be

Zachary Smith , Mar 12, 2019 5:39:20 PM | link
But the bigger issue for the U.S. aircraft industry might be the damage done to the FAA's reputation.

I'd counter this by asking "what reputation?"

I've known for years how it took take a "smoking hole" for the FAA to get off the can and actually do something about a problem with an airplane or airline. But things evolve, and here we have TWO such smoking holes and the FAA still allows it to fly. I'm not trying to pick on the current FAA leader, for the man is utterly typical of the people who are allowed to gain his position. From his wiki:

But the bigger issue for the U.S. aircraft industry might be the damage done to the FAA's reputation.

Elwell joined Airlines for America (A4A) in 2013[3] where he was the Senior Vice President for Safety, Security, and Operations. Elwell left this role in 2015.

(Skipping to the A4A wiki:) Airlines for America
Officially, the A4A has announced five "core elements" of a national airline policy include reducing taxes on the industry, reducing regulation , increased access to foreign markets, making the industry more attractive for investors , and improving the air traffic control system.

I suspect that grounding the 737-MAX would contradict the goal of "making the industry more attractive for investors".

More on the FAA's Tombstone Mentality

About an hour ago I sent out an all-points email suggesting my family members avoid boarding a 737 MAX until the facts are better known and solutions are in place. The FAA may not care about them taking risks, but I sure do.

Tom Welsh , Mar 12, 2019 5:39:22 PM | link
Boeing has a get-out-of-jail-free card.

"Boeing is among the largest global aircraft manufacturers; it is the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world based on 2017 revenue, and is the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing

Jen , Mar 12, 2019 5:39:56 PM | link
I agree with Psychohistorian @ 1 in less forthright terms: the engineers did not "screw up". On the contrary they most likely did what they could with the money and the time deadline they were given to carry out what essentially was a patch-up job that would make Boeing look good, save money and maintain its stock in sharemarkets.

Probably the entire process, in which the engineers played a small part - and that part in which they had no input into whoever was making the decisions - was a disaster from start to finish. The engineers should have been consulted at an early stage in the re-design of the aircraft's flight and safety features. Only when the appropriate re-design has been tested, changed where necessary and given the thumbs-up by relevant pilots' unions and other organisations with regard to passenger safety can the marketing department go ahead and advise airlines who buy the redesigned planes what training their pilots need.

That the marketing department has more say than the engineers who design and test the hardware and the software in passenger jets tells us a great deal about the Potemkin-style workplace culture that prevails in Boeing and similar large US corporations. The surface sheen is more important than the substance. The marketing brochures and manuals are no different from mainstream news media in the level of BS they spew.

One can think of other organisations where the administration has more power in the corporate decision-making process and eats up more of the corporate budget while the people who do the actual work are increasingly ignored in boardrooms and their share of the budget correspondingly decreases. Hospitals and schools come to mind.

Lochearn , Mar 12, 2019 5:45:36 PM | link
@ 19

Boeing got taken over Wall Street, which means cheapest solution to anything. Engineers are stuck with what they are given. What part of that do you still not understand.

viking3 , Mar 12, 2019 5:55:18 PM | link
A mitigating factor to the flightcrew is the take-off to 10,000ft is the busiest time. There is enough going on without having to deal with runaway stab. This is especially true for new crew to a new aircraft. Rode in many cockpits before 9.11.01 when company employees were allowed and the standing rule was no conversations below 10,000 and keep you eyes open for traffic. I also include my Maintenance brethren in that equation. Spent 30 years as a Avionics Tech. on both military and commercial aircraft so I am not really fond of giving flightcrew a break but I might this time.
karlof1 , Mar 12, 2019 5:59:13 PM | link
Jen @19--

Dilbert , the comic strip , from today and yesterday nails the marketing angle. And this isn't the first time Scott Adams has targeted marketers.

ancientarcher , Mar 12, 2019 5:59:44 PM | link
Good point @4 Lochearn

Why is Boeing suffering from this design problem and not A320neo is that 737's wings are much lower to the ground than the A320. Unfortunately, more fuel-efficient engines require a larger air inlet, so the newer generation engines are much larger than the previously installed V2500 or CFM56 (anyone can verify that - the older engines are much, much smaller than the newer ones).

When Airbus introduced the Pratt & Whitney GTF on its A320s (calling it the neo - new engine option), it led to an increase (high single digits %) increase in fuel efficiency. Boeing had to respond to that. If they wanted to increase the height of the wings of the 737 from the ground, they would have had to redesign the fuselage which would have cost billions (and which they should have done, in hindsight). Instead, they listened to the investors and the bean counters as you have called them here and they jiggled the position of the wings a bit and introduced the new automatic stabiliser.

The people at Boeing are good or at least the engineers are. Imagine how many times this problem would have been brought up by someone for him/her to be shut down. It's not like they were not aware of the issue, but they were unwilling to let their bottom line suffer. Instead, they were okay with carrying the risk of killing hundreds of people.

That is what boggles my mind!

dh-mtl , Mar 12, 2019 6:00:43 PM | link
Lochearn | Mar 12, 2019 5:00:42 PM | 4;
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Mar 12, 2019 5:04:07 PM | 6

Agree with both of your comments. It looks like the 55 year old 737 air-frame design, which is very low to the ground when compared to more modern designs, is incompatible with the bigger engines required for fuel efficiency.

Being very low to the ground, Boeing was forced to put the engines out in front, which upset the airplane's balance, making the plane essentially unstable. To counter the instability they added the 'MCAS?' control system.

This solution violates a fundamental tenant of design for safety-critical systems. The tenant of 'fail-safe'. If something goes wrong the system is supposed to fail in a manner that preserves safety. For the 737 Max, when the this stability control system fails, the plane is fundamentally unstable. For this system it is not 'fail-safe'. It is 'fail-crash'.

Why would Boeing do this? Because Bombardier was building a clean sheet design, that would eat the 737's lunch. Boeing (and Airbus) were desperate to do something quick to minimize the 20% fuel burn advantage of the C-series. The more modern Airbus 320 air frame allowed it to re-engine their plane. Boeing's did not. But Boeing went ahead anyway and built an fundamentally unstable airplane, because the alternative was to walk away from their most important market.

To me, this looks like it could be catastrophic for Boeing. It reminds me of G.M.'s 'Corvair' moment (Unsafe at any speed), from the 1960s.

Jen , Mar 12, 2019 6:02:28 PM | link
Steven @ 13: The Indonesian Lion Air jet still crashed with all onboard dying, even after the pilots did as you said. B's post explains why: the MCAS system has to be deactivated separately as it is still active when autopilot is off and the pilots are flying manually. The Indonesian pilots did not have the time to figure out and realise that something else was controlling the plane's flight, much less deactivate what is effectively a second autopiloting system.
james , Mar 12, 2019 6:09:41 PM | link
how is this for reassuring? press release from boeing today... this info is from someone else, and i haven't verified it..

"For the past several months and in the aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610, Boeing has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX, designed to make an already safe aircraft even safer."

witters , Mar 12, 2019 6:10:37 PM | link
"Boeing got taken over Wall Street, which means cheapest solution to anything. Engineers are stuck with what they are given. What part of that do you still not understand."

Why they colluded with and indeed implemented what they knew to be - and now proven to be - a mass killing system. What do you not understand here?

james , Mar 12, 2019 6:11:02 PM | link
very un- assuring.. https://gizmodo.com/boeing-promises-to-release-software-update-for-737-max-1833224836
Whozhear , Mar 12, 2019 6:15:58 PM | link
Great article B.

There is much more behind the covering up of this "design flaw" from the start. The concept that, in this day and age, sensors used in the aviation field and close to brand new are defective is a stretch of the imagination. The current effort by Boeing to do a software upgrade, I suspect, is cover for something more damaging.

How easy is it these days to access the MAX's operation and flight control computers? Can it be done via WI-fi or Bluetooth from the airfield? We are well aware that in the newer heavies Seattle can take basic control via satellite.

Whozhear , Mar 12, 2019 6:19:12 PM | link
@ 5

You may also find this interesting........ https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/4837334.html

Steven , Mar 12, 2019 6:24:25 PM | link
@jen @james

You clowns don't understand what you're telling me I'm "getting wrong." MCAS ISN'T part of the autopilot, and I never said it was.

737 pilots have to be able to do about 10 procedures in their sleep. One is when the electrical control of the horizontal stabilizers doesn't work; Aa few steps but basically pull a breaker and revert to manual control only, no power assist.

The crew on the previous flight did this and flew on with zero problem.

It's outrageous that lionair didn't find out why emergency procedures had had to be used and fix them before they let the airplane fly again.

If airlines do not adhere to Minimal safety standards, it's not Boeing's fault if it's planes crash.

Jonathan , Mar 12, 2019 6:35:04 PM | link
@35 Steven,

Is Boeing paying you to miss this part:

"This is the first description you, as 737 pilots, have seen. It is not in the AA 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor is there a description in the Boeing FCOM (flight crew operations manual)," says the letter from the pilots' union safety committee. "Awareness is the key with all safety issues."
Kadath , Mar 12, 2019 6:41:49 PM | link
Well it's good to know that Canada is still allowing this death trap to fly, I couldn't bare the thought that Boeing might lose more stock value merely because of a defective product that kills! Seriously though, the silence from the Canadian media on this subject is deafening. CBC news didn't even cover the banning of these planes in the rest of the world until an hour ago and even then they seemed more concerned about the impact on Boeing then the you know 300 people killed because of this flawed plane. Eventually (before Friday) I think Canada will be forced to ground it's fleet of 737-8s. With the current corruption scandal, Trudeau is too weak right now to stand up in Question period and claim the 737-8s are safe to fly. Even Trump is getting in on the action and blaming Boeing for the accidents. FAA may end up being the biggest loser from this situations with a huge hit to its' trustworthiness, I remember when the FAA would issue emergency maintenance/inspection orders after any crash suspected to be caused by maintenance issues and ground entire fleets of aircraft if two planes crashed within 2 years. You know, the FAAs behaviour now reminds me of the old Soviet joke, "our planes never crash, their just indefinitely delayed"
Meshpal , Mar 12, 2019 6:46:17 PM | link
These people did not die they were murdered. Long ago, I had worked with Boeing on a computer project and I had the highest respect for the company and engineers. Facts and reality were paramount for Boeing. Things started a slow downhill slope when that TWA flight that was accidentally shot down by a missile. I noticed how uncomfortable the engineers were to talk about it – just a short comment that the fuel tank was not the cause. When politics and management go away from reality and facts, it is just a matter of time. But for the life of me I do not understand how Boeing can come to this:

Fault 1: As B says, it should never have been designed like this.
Fault 2: Don't tell the pilots about MCSA.
Fault 3: Real time flight tracking altitude data show wild swings – red light ignored. No need to wait for a plane to crash.
Fault 4: Lion Air Flight 610 crash showed that this MCSA system is at fault and nothing much was done. The murder of 189 people.
Fault 5: Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 murdering an additional 157 people.
Fault 6: FAA says everything is ok.

Especially the Ethiopian Flight 409 crash should never have happened. This issue became well known to engineers and flight crews world wide after Lion Air. A good question is: was the disable MCSA switch now a memory item or a check list item for the flight crew? Or did Boeing want to wait for the final report of Lion Air?

I noticed that the Ethiopian pilot was not western, but looks like from Indian decent. I would not doubt his abilities, but rather say that he would follow the rules more than a western pilot. Western pilots would network and study this thing on their own and would not wait for Boeing. They would have penciled this into their flight deck routine - just to be safe.

JohnT , Mar 12, 2019 6:51:38 PM | link
David Park #5

I read this yesterday regarding the Venezuela power outages. Possible Stuxnet infestation ala Iran 2010?

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/03/11/trump-regime-electricity-war-in-venezuela-more-serious-than-first-believed.html

Alpi57 , Mar 12, 2019 6:54:45 PM | link
One can always find a benefit in the sanctions, albeit coincidental. Iran avoided a lot of damage from Boeing. They had ordered 140 of 737's. All got canceled. Congratulations.
ancientarcher , Mar 12, 2019 6:59:53 PM | link
@40 Alpi57
Iran always has the option of buying the Irkut MC-21 which in my opinion is the best narrowbody plane that anyone can buy now. Fully redesigned body with significantly higher composite percentage and comes with the best engine in the world for narrowbodies - the P&W GTF. And Russia will be happy.

What's not to like

Likklemore , Mar 12, 2019 7:07:19 PM | link
Before you guys and gals bash b, hop over to Zerohedge citing Dallas Morning News revealing FAA database Pilots on Boeing 737Max complained for months...Manual inadequate ...criminally insufficient .just for starters.
karlof1 , Mar 12, 2019 7:10:30 PM | link
james @32--

That Canada didn't is crazy :

"In a remarkable rebuke, nations from the U.K. to Australia have rejected public reassurances from the FAA and grounded Boeing's 737 Max."

Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 12, 2019 7:28:54 PM | link
I was a big fan of the 6-part BBC doco series Black Box from the 1990s. The main conclusion drawn was that the industry is way too fond of blaming as many mishaps as possible on Pilot Error, and way too slow to react to telltale signs that a particular aircraft model might have a fatal flaw. There was a tendency to ignore FAA edicts for inspection of a suspected design weakness. Two cases that come to mind were incorrectly locked DC 9 cargo doors ripping off with a big chunk of the plane plus half a dozen occupied seats, and a tendency of 727s to nose-dive into the "surface" at Mach 0.99.

I'll be very surprised if any part of b's analysis, conclusions and predictions turns out to incorrect.

World 3 - USA 0 , Mar 12, 2019 7:31:57 PM | link
Lights in Venezuela on. US Boeing stocks down. More evidence for the Lockheed f-16 downing. Reports it was a dogfight between an old MiG-21 (with modernised radar and missiles) that brought the modern US Lockheed f-16 down and maybe not from a launch of MiGs modern bvr missile.

Things are looking up.

Zachary Smith , Mar 12, 2019 7:33:32 PM | link
@ ancientarcher @41

The problem with a "new" airplane is the Western Content. Over a certain percentage, the US basically controls the situation. Another issue is servicing the things. If an airplane is sitting in Podunk Airport with a broken widget, the airline wants it fixed right now! Some planes like the 737 have been around for decades and there are probably parts for it - even at Podunk. A new plane will probably be grounded until a new part is transported in - a process which will take many hours even in the best of circumstances. Advantage to the 737 and other 'legacy' airplanes.

Just saw an interesting headline at Reuters - I'd suppose it is some friendly advice from Wall Street disguised as "news".

Breakingviews - Boeing needs to think faster than its watchdog

Change "watchdog" to "lapdog" and that would be about right. It seems to me a sensible proposal, for if Boeing must take a beating out of this, the company ought to at least adopt a pose of "really caring" and "doing the right thing". Try for the brownie points.

psychohistorian , Mar 12, 2019 7:40:55 PM | link
@ Zachary Smith who wrote
"
It seems to me a sensible proposal, for if Boeing must take a beating out of this, the company ought to at least adopt a pose of "really caring" and "doing the right thing".
"

China is coming to teach the West morals which are currently ranked below profit and ongoing private control of global finance

aspnaz , Mar 12, 2019 7:54:05 PM | link
@35 Steven

The Ethiopian airlines flight was an international flight, so the pilots will have been certified to international standards. I don't know the details of international standards for type training, but you are basically saying that the fault is not with Boeing, it is with the type training of international pilot crews. Can you elaborate and does this mean that we are equally in danger regardless of the aircraft model and that it is just coincidence that both these crew failures were on 737 Max models?

EV , Mar 12, 2019 8:07:08 PM | link
The evidences and recognizably legitimate information (there is always a lot of through-the-hat blather-yap from internet-"engineers") suggests thrust angle, not structure or CG destabilization. "larger" engines are not necessarily significantly heavier, but, today, and if more efficient, will be larger diameter for more fan, for more thrust (which in jet and fan engines is more power). Larger diameter nacelles will require modification of placement, higher, lower, larger weight will require modification of placement, forward, backward. Clearance restrictions may require modification of engine thrust-line angle, relative to fuselage, and fuselage-fit control surface lines (which include flight surfaces). Thrust changes with thrust changes, which means thrust-angle change will change thrust-effect at differing thrust amounts: Take-off and climb thrusts are near maximums, wherefore angular component will be near max then (cruise maximums are less, or less effective, or radical, for altitude air thinning).

What this means is that if larger engines on a 737 MAX, for larger bulk are slightly angled for clearance,the angling may have little effect except in specific instances and attitudes, such as take-off and climb. It sounds as if Boeing angled thrust slightly for engine fitting, and assumed a computer control fix could handle the off-line thrust component effect during the short duration times it was sufficient to effect flight characteristics, which, if the thrust-angling was up, would add a nose-up tail-down thrust rotation component, greater at greater power. to compensate which the software would add nose-down control surface counteraction, as incident described.

What it sounds like the pilot in the first, non-crash, case most likely did, that saved the aircraft, was not 'disable' an automatic system he had no information about, for it being not intended for disablement, but was reduce power, reducing the off-line thrust effect, so the auto system backed off. In the other incidents, especially if the airports were get-em-high-fast airports (to 'leave' the noise at the airport) the pilots would incline to not reduce power, and would be more likely to get into a war with the too automated auto-system, the way Tesla drivers can do with their over-automated systems.

All auto-control "AI" systems need human-override options built in, so that human-robot stand-offs to impact cannot occur. The real culprits in stand-off accident situations are the techie-guppies who think robotic control can always do everything better, and fail to think of the situation where the "right" response is wrong.

Jen , Mar 12, 2019 8:19:36 PM | link
Steven @ 35:

Lion Air's engineers had previously identified and tried to fix issues with the jet that crashed in October 2018.

The day before the jet took off from Jakarta airport and crashed, killing all 189 onboard, one of its Angle of Attack sensors had been replaced by engineers in Denpasar. Unfortunately the source I checked (see link below) doesn't say if this replacement AoA sensor was the one linked to the computer running the MCAS on the flight.

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20181029-0

fast freddy , Mar 12, 2019 8:26:15 PM | link
Bean Counters:

Delta once initiated a fuel saving measure whereby aircraft were insufficiently topped off with fuel to prevent pilots from wasting fuel. Once this information began to leak, the measure was ended.

psychohistorian , Mar 12, 2019 8:40:43 PM | link
@ fast freddy with the Bean Counters example

Thanks for Bean Counters! I so much wanted to use Bean Counters in my rant but thought I should stick to their standard appellation....

Bean Counters need to be taken seriously because they are not going to go away in any form of social organization and represent where the rubber meets the road when it comes to social decision making/risk management

Bean Counters (along with their bosses) need to be required to place morals as a higher value than profit and forced to operate with maximum public transparency and input; then, all will be good.

Pnyx , Mar 12, 2019 8:41:19 PM | link
Thank you for the accurate information. The basic problem seems to be that the low-consumption engines protrude too far. A well-designed, reliable aircraft becomes a faulty design. To try to solve this using software is a precarious approach. The FAA should have rejected this in principle. But because to design an aircraft completely from scratch naturally takes longer and would have given the competitor Airbus time to take over the to much market share, this 'solution' was accepted. This type of corruption will cost the u.s. a lot.

But first let's wait for Tronald's tweet, which will certainly be aired by tomorrow at the latest, in which he states that the 737 Max is a great, great aircraft - if not the best ever...

Kiza , Mar 12, 2019 8:49:51 PM | link
There is no doubt that both Boeing and FAA are to blame, but we pay the Government to ensure safety. Businesses have always chased profit, some more ruthlessly than others. But when the real corruption sets in then the Government regulator works for the businesses at the expense of the public . Regarding FAA reputation, there was a time when US was the leader in aviation, military as well as commercial. This means that the best experts were in US and thus FAA had the best and the most knowledgeable people. It is similar with FDA, all countries in the World used to follow the touchstone drug approvals by FDA. Now the "Federal" in any US acronym has become a synonym for "Corruption" (FBI anyone?).

The expertise does not matter any more, only greasing of the hands does. In the old times, anyone from FAA whose signature was on this planes approval to fly would get a life sentence in jail. But 330 people dead is less than a days worth of US global victims - business as usual for US. It is just that these victims are getting much more publicity than the silent victims. We will be lucky if anyone influential from FAA even resigns let alone goes to jail. There will be many more dead before the World understands this new reality.

Would you fly on any Boeing plane designed or delivered after the company was taken over by the Wall Street wizards in the 90s?

Peter AU 1 , Mar 12, 2019 8:53:28 PM | link

Re the engineers - they agreed to build an out of balance aircraft (thrust vs weight and drag) and to try and rectify this with software. What we will do for money. Both the bean counters and engineers are at fault, perhaps the beancounters and shiney butts more so as they did not inform buyers and pilots of the faults.
Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 12, 2019 8:56:22 PM | link
Posted by: fast freddy | Mar 12, 2019 8:26:15 PM | 52
(Fuel 'economy')

QANTAS once decreed that pilots rely on brakes and treat reverse thrust as emergency-only procedure, until a 747 skidded off the end of a runway with the nose-wheel inside the cabin and bruised engines = lots of down-time + very large repair bill.

Clueless Joe , Mar 12, 2019 8:58:46 PM | link
Fast Freddy:

Not just Delta; Ryanair did the same, at least until there was a major storm in Spain (Valencia, I think) and all flights had to be rerouted to other airports. That was fine, with dozens of planes flying around waiting for a window to land, until the handful of Ryanair planes that had been rerouted to Madrid and other places called for emergency landings, because they didn't have enough fuel to fly for even 30 minutes longer than planned flights.

I'm still amazed that the EU regulators and EU fucking commission didn't downright dismantle such a bloody greedy and downright criminal company. That they basically did nothing is proof enough, imho, of the insane level of capitalism-worship and of corruption going on in Brussels (of course it's even worse in Washington DC, but that's basically a given).

bevin , Mar 12, 2019 9:19:41 PM | link
the toronto star is carrying this story
Headline:
"Ottawa exempts Boeing 737 Max jets from standards meant to minimize passenger injuries"

"Air Canada and WestJet are flying the Boeing 737 Max aircraft exempt from regulatory standards meant to limit passenger injuries in the event of an accident, the Star has learned."

What does it mean?

Pft , Mar 12, 2019 9:51:59 PM | link
B is right. This is a criminal act of deception and fraud thats cost hundreds their lives. Boeing executives responsible should be prosecuted and then jailed.

Instead the safety agency regulating them will cover it up, backed by the criminal congress.

We see similar crimes against humanity being committed in many other areas. FDA, CDC, EPA, FCC , USDA, etc covering up for Big Agra, Big Pharma, Big Telecom with dangerous products like vaccines, glyphosate,4G/5G, GMO foods, gene edited livestock, etc. Safety standards are lax and inadequate, safety testing is minimal and in some cases fraudulent or completely lacking. Defects and adverse effects are covered up. A revolving door between these agencies and the industry they cover presents significant conflict of interest. These industries finance congressional members campaigns. Public safety is sacrificed for the greater good (profits and personal gain). Whistleblowers are muzzled, attacked or ridiculed as the MSM are their lap dogs.

That said, the airline industry has had a remarkable safety record over the last 30 years if you can overlook their failure to have adequate locks on cockpit doors in 2001. However, the lack of competition and increasing corruption and continuing moral decay we see in society , government and industry has obviously taken its toll on the industry. This is inexcusable. Heads should roll (dont hold your breath).

El Cid , Mar 12, 2019 9:57:08 PM | link
Congress flies on these aircraft to and fro from Washington to their districts. It is to their interests to have these Boeing 737 permanently grounded.
ben , Mar 12, 2019 10:13:18 PM | link
psycho @1 said;"The West is a world in which the accountants have more sway than engineers."

Case closed, and anyone who thinks senior execs should be prosecuted and jailed are right.

BUT, never would happen in today's pro-corporate U$A mentality..

Profits uber alles!!

Kadath , Mar 12, 2019 10:23:36 PM | link
Re: 59 Bevin, "Ottawa exempts Boeing 737 Max jets from standards meant to minimize passenger injuries"

- what this means is that Washington called Ottawa and ordered little Justin that he had to allow the 737 8's to fly and Justin said yes sir! However, someone at the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, told Justin that the threat these plane pose to travellers was so obvious that they couldn't just ignore it and that they would instead have to issue a waiver to show that they have done due diligence - apparently this person or someone else within the department then called the Star in order to leak the information and embarrass Justin into reversing his decision. I imagine tomorrow at 4:00pm during the question hour, Justin will get raked through the coals over his - Justin's whole defense of his actions during the Lavin scandal has been "I needed to protect Canadian jobs", I imagine the NDP or Conservatives will then retort something along the lines of "you'll break the law to protect Jobs, why won't you obey the law to protect Canadian lives!", I should point out that 8 Canadians were killed in the most recent crash in Ethiopia

paul , Mar 12, 2019 10:28:00 PM | link
Steven @ 35: watch this

from 2014: 32min in john woods aerospace engineer whistle blower https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os

acementhead , Mar 12, 2019 10:39:09 PM | link
Steven is correct. Totally correct. I suspect that he is an airline pilot, as am I. Everybody else is wrong at least in part and most between 50% and 100%(The description of the cause of the QANTAS hull loss).

Pilots MUST know all about aircraft systems operation. It is crazy for Boeing to have functions not in the AFM.

The system in question is not operative with autopilot engaged. In manual flight if at any time one gets an uncommanded stab trim movement one should immediately disable electrical trim(One switch, half a second, no "procedure" required. In manual flight if the trim wheel moves and you hadn't touched the trim switches you have uncommanded trim. Immediately disable electrical trim.

There is procedure for reestablishment of electrical trim, that does take time. The defeat of the runaway trim does not take time. B737 has provision for manual trim(but it's very slow.

Bob , Mar 12, 2019 10:47:40 PM | link
Also a very interesting read about the JT610 Flight https://www.satcom.guru/2018/11/first-look-at-jt610-flight-data.html
VietnamVet , Mar 12, 2019 10:47:49 PM | link
I grew up reading Boeing's weekly employee newspaper. Times have changed too much since then. Moving the headquarters from Seattle to Chicago and a second 787 assembly line in South Carolina to bust their unions are proof that Boeing is a multinational corporation superior to national governments. The company is the Empire's armorer for profit. It is criminal to design an unstable passenger airplane that must be controlled by fly by wire sensors and computers to stay in the air. The problem is the aircraft industry duopoly and deregulation. Airbus has lost at least three aircraft to problems with the pilot computer interface. I was shocked when NBC put this first last night. I though it would be silenced. I blame Trump Derangement Syndrome. His trade wars and dissing have ticked off the world. When China grounded the 737 Max 8 everybody followed to show what they really think about the North American Empire. This could be devastating to the last manufacturing industry left in the USA.
Deal , Mar 12, 2019 10:58:29 PM | link
Boeing in my view took a cynical decision. That is, there would only be a few crashes within a set period. Thus the insurance companies would pick up the tab for their profits. However the loss of two planes so close together could destroy the company. The aforesaid insurance companies will not pay a single dime if they can stick corporate murder charges onto Boeing.

This smells of the Ford Pinto scandal where Ford knew that there was a problem with the fuel system if the car was rear-ended ( the vehicle burst into flames ) but it was cheaper to pay the compensation than fix the problem.

Kalen , Mar 13, 2019 12:25:40 AM | link
B is missing the point that fitting new engines caused airplane to take off close to stalling horizontal speeds and angles at very low altitude and more steeply ascending to flight altitude and that has left little time for pilots to react. That is very dangerous as much weaker tail wind may confuse pilots and sensors. To remedy that without recertification AI software was installed to react faster and overriding actions of pilot who was assumed not be aware of situation at the moment he had to immediately react at the latest.

Lack of sensor redundancy is also criminal as determination of sensor malfunction is critical for pilot. That is AI application correcting "human" physical mental deficiencies and that is deadly trap.

If it goes to court, interesting case will be, whose error was that as MCAS system acted correctly against pilot based on faulty sensor causing pilot to make mistake recovering from correct but suicidal software actions.

People must be warned of cultish trust in technology and AI which is ultimate guilty party together with greed that killed those people.

Pft , Mar 13, 2019 1:01:16 AM | link
Frances@70

There are unlimited dollars for any intervention they choose, publicly allocated or not. There is a reason 21 trillion in pentagon spending is unaccounted for. This does not count dark money from illicit means used to fund covert operations.

The fact its public just means Trump wants congress to sanction it, which they will. Seized Venezuela assets will serve as collateral for future reimbursement.

Grieved , Mar 13, 2019 1:02:08 AM | link
@65 acementhead - "It is crazy for Boeing to have functions not in the AFM"

No, it's criminal. And while all the technical discussion around how to fly a plane is truly interesting, what's really at issue here is corporate and institutional betrayal of trust.

The corporate aspect is Boeing, obviously. The institutional aspect is FAA, which used to lead the world in trust when it came to life and death matters.

But now, in what Bloomberg, even while trying to support FAA, has no choice but to report as a "stunning rebuff" to FAA's integrity, countries around the world are grounding this flawed plane. Germany, among others, has closed its airspace to the 737.

This situation has only a little to do with how to fly a plane. It has vastly more to do with the face of capitalism we see leering at us as our families live their last few moments, on the way to the ground. It has to do with how the corporate spin departments will attempt to cover up and evade responsibility for these crimes.

And it has to do with how the global consumer market will start to book its flights based not on price or time or seat location but on make of plane.

And despite your claim that "Everybody else is wrong at least in part..." , I doubt very much that most of the commenters here are wrong in their appreciation of the situation.

snake , Mar 13, 2019 1:07:41 AM | link
@68 No Deal

I don't think Boeing made a decision, they had little choice (stockholders were first, the jobs were essential to the politicians, and market share would become competitive if Boeing dropped out), it was the pressure of the system that charted their course.

Capitalism is about competition in a just, fairly well managed government regulated environment. In order for capitalism not to over step the bounds of competitive capitalism; government must remain present, to prevent foul play and to deny all hints of monopoly power...

Capitalism without an honest government becomes organized crime or, worse, it degenerates to allow private enterprise and special interest to dictate how the rule making and military arms of government should be used, against domestic and foreign competition. . Economic Zionism is what I call this last degenerative stage.

Defensively EZ teaches the winner to completely and totally destroy the infrastructure, the resources and the people (including competitive personnel with the brains to develop competition) of those who refuse to conform or those who insist on competing; offensively , EZ teaches the winner to take all and to take-over, own and keep the goodies taken from those destroyed, and in the matter of profit making and wealth keeping EZ teaches only winners are allowed to produce-and -profit everyone else is to be made to feed the monopoly that eliminated competition produced. The residual of eliminated, decimated competitive opposition = monopoly power

It is the king of the mountain monopoly that produces the wealth and power and feeds the corruption that makes the rich richer.

I think this case makes clear, privatization of government responsibility nearly always turns sour . The Government should take over and keep the operation of all of the Airlines strictly in government hands (privatization is proven to be problematic). When I grew up all of the airlines were so tightly regulated they were part of the government; the airlines were investors and operators following government rules and regulations. pricing was based on point to point fixed in price and terms (and the same for all airlines) and that was a time when aircraft design was not so accurate, meals were served and jets were nearly not existent but still there were very few accidents. Same for the Trucking Industry and the railroad.. Why should roads be government obligations, but rail, trucks and planes be privately owned?

I am not a communist or a socialist, I just know that private influence will always find a way to wrongly influence public sector employees when private interest wants something from government.

V , Mar 13, 2019 1:43:43 AM | link
VietnamVet | Mar 12, 2019 10:47:49 PM | 67

Agreed!

For a number issues/reasons, I quit flying in 2007, vowing never to set foot in an aircraft again. Trains or ships, okay. So far so good; the 737 Max just firms my rsolve...

Circe , Mar 13, 2019 2:17:54 AM | link
The aircraft did not undergo piece by piece certification or type certification . It underwent supplemental type certification that shortens the investigative process.

max 8 Certification

This is a potential disaster for Boeing. The stock is falling and it'll go into free fall if decision is made to ground this aircraft. FAA will also face a legal tsunami. If this is the reason they didn't ground the planes yet; it's going to look really damning when the find themselves in court later.

Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 13, 2019 2:21:34 AM | link
This is shaping up to be unnecessarily messy for the industry. Yesterday's Oz edition of PBS Newshour went over most of the topics touched on in b's posting but stopped short of finger-pointing although it insinuated that Boeing had blundered. Today's edition posed a question I was going to pose here...

"Should anyone be flying 737MAXes before the black box data has been evaluated?"

The answer, delivered by a female ex-Inspector General (of precisely what I didn't hear) is "No. Absolutely not!"

james , Mar 13, 2019 2:39:06 AM | link
@35 steven... i will take that as a compliment, referring to me as a clown.. i have high regard for clowns, although i don't think there is anything funny about the topic at hand.. innocent people dying and it being based on a corporation that might be negligent in it's responsibility to it's passengers, is something we will have to wait and find out about.. i am definitely not thinking it is pilot error here, as you suggest.. i saw what the canadian airpilot association said - essentially they don't believe Canada should be flying them either, as i read it..

@43 karlof1.. as i pointed out in the link @7 - the fact canada allows them to continue to be flown makes no sense to me..poor judgment call is what it looks like to me.. the canuck gov't and etc are living in the shadows of what b has described about the FAA.. a lot of credibility is on the line here as i see it..

i apologize for not reading all the comments, as i was out most of the day and just got back..

acementhead , Mar 13, 2019 2:48:25 AM | link

Kalen said

"...fitting new engines caused airplane to take off close to stalling horizontal speeds and angles at very low altitude and more steeply ascending to flight altitude and that has left little time for pilots to react. That is very dangerous as much weaker tail wind may confuse pilots and sensors. ..."

This is absolute garbage. Nothing but a "word salad" it has nothing to do with reality.

The Ethiopian crash is due to a useless pilot. A different crew, on the same plane, the day before had the same problem. They handled it correctly, which is EASY, and completed the day's flying without problem. Third world airlines have HUGE numbers of absolutely incompetent pilots.

Anyone interested in the operational aspects of this should go to an aviation site. PPRUNE has some good discussion of this event. There are a few idiots posting but very few. Most people there are very knowledgeable. I had a look at Airliners.net mostly rubbish.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 13, 2019 3:16:03 AM | link
Kalen 69
Installing the new engines changed the angle of thrust. In a balanced aircraft, engine thrust is pushing centrally on wight and drag.
If the thrust is below center of weight, it will nose up while accelerating. If thrust is below center of drag, the aircraft will be trying to nose up while cruising.

The original aircraft was most likely balanced, with thrust centered to weight and drag. Mounting new engines lower means the aircraft will tend to nose up when accelerating, and nose up during cruise. Relying on sensors and software to keep an unstable aircraft stable is not a good thing. To not notify pilots of this problem is worse than not a good thing.

psychohistorian , Mar 13, 2019 3:24:41 AM | link
@ acementhead with insistence that the pilot was at error.

Without the black box data you are sticking your **ck out a long way. I find it interesting that in both your comments you are insistent that the pilot was the problem. You wrote in your first comment
"
Pilots MUST know all about aircraft systems operation. It is crazy for Boeing to have functions not in the AFM.
"
The 2nd sentence is your only criticism of Boeing but then you spend the rest of the comment describing what the pilot should have done.....before black box data says what happened.

Kiza , Mar 13, 2019 3:45:44 AM | link
When a relative asked me recently why did the new Ethiopian plane crash, I generated a sound-bite like explanation. Before, the civilian airliners were falling out of the sky because of an immature technology, that is because of the learning curve. Now that the technology involved is fully mature the airliners are falling out of the sky for profit taking.

The scariest thing is that 737MAX model was a botched Boeing reaction to the market change towards budget flight. If the plane manufacturer and the approval authority were prepared to cut corners so badly to remain "market competitive", one can only imagine the compromises that budget airlines are making to sell cheap whilst increasing profits. Some airlines must be treating planes worst than buses are treated by the bus companies.

US citizens entrust their wallets to the private bank, The Federal=Corrupt Reserve, which prints money and gives it to the most exceptional among the exceptional (did you think that there was no hierarchy within the exceptionality?). We entrust our heads to the Federal=Corrupt Aviation Administration whose bureaucrats work for the porky revolving door consulting jobs that come after a stint in the Corrupt.

Kiza , Mar 13, 2019 4:01:48 AM | link
@Peter AU 1

As Aussies would say: using software to solve a hardware problem is like putting lipstick on a pig. More than 300 people dead are a terrible testament to this wisdom.

Yet, it is fascinating that you are blaming the engineers and some others are asking in the comments for whistleblowers in Boeing and FAA.

Well, if I were an engineer at Boeing I would probably have resigned if asked to do this design monstrosity of putting unfitting engines on a differently designed plane - creating a Lego airplane, but I never had a home mortgage over my head. Regarding whistleblowing, we all know how suicidal it is, why do supposedly intelligent people expect other to be so dumb to commit one? Before you expect others to self-sacrifice ask yourself if you would do so in their shoes.

b , Mar 13, 2019 4:01:57 AM | link
It seems that the U.S. now wants to manipulate the investigation of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. WSJ U.S., Ethiopia Maneuver Over Crashed Plane's Black Boxes Washington wants NTSB to download data from recorders, while African nation's officials prefer U.K. experts.
U.S. air-safety investigators on Tuesday engaged in intense behind-the-scenes discussions with their Ethiopian counterparts regarding where the black-box recorders found amid the wreckage of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 will be downloaded, according to people familiar with the matter.
Peter AU 1 , Mar 13, 2019 4:15:37 AM | link
Kiza 85 "Before you expect others to self-sacrifice ask yourself if you would do so in their shoes."
"Self sacrifice" ... Most of my life I have been self employed, but for a few years when I was young and then as I got older and ill health slowed me down, I have worked for others.

If told to do a job that I believed was destined to fail, I would pull out. What you call self sacrifice simply comes down to money, and as I put in an earlier comment "what we do for money" Engineers that put this schumozzel together were simply putting in the hours to received their pay check at the end of the week with no thought as to the people hurt or killed when this bodge job failed. The fault is equally with engineers who sell their souls for money and the bean counters who did not inform purchasers or pilots.

Kalen , Mar 13, 2019 4:16:24 AM | link
@aceme..

What you wrote is asinine garbage, my friend. Everybody except for bribed FAA dumped B737 Max 8 until notice. It is simply too dangerous to fly.

It is you who are trolling for Boeing, the problem was discovered five months ago never fixed, blamed pilots despite previous complaints. Now FAA admitted that fact by demanding software fix in April or they will ground the fleet. PILOT ERROR????? Of course not and they know it.

Not only worldwide airlines dumped this model so far but also they closed the airspace for them in EU, China, HK etc.,because the plane is dangerous and may require recertification of plane and pilots since Boeing lied about it and its flight parameters,p the trust was broken, they were cheating with deadly consequences was revealed. Expect hundreds of lawsuits, as American were also onboard.

Interestingly that anti-stalling software cannot be disabled on the ground only in flight in manual mode only after it was engaged exactly for reasons I mentioned about near-stalling dangerous flight parameters.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 13, 2019 4:27:42 AM | link
b 86

US Boeing are very much competing with France airbus and also the coming Chinese Russian airliner. The US is very much batting for the home team (as the mad monk told the Australian Broadcasting Commission to do so).

Kiza , Mar 13, 2019 6:14:40 AM | link
Is it really so hard to connect the secrecy about MCAS and why it was needed in the first place? The lawyers will have a ball of the decade with this: the defendant created a secret software solution to turn a Lego airplane into a real airplane, made the software dependent on a single sensor, and made it difficult to switch the software off.

The networked Western pilots learned how to compensate for the faulty design, but non-networked foreign pilots never got in on the flying tricks needed for this new plane because it was never been in their training. Also, the critical sensor may not be available on an airport in Ethiopia or Indonesia or .....

I cannot believe that Boeing shares dropped only 7.5%, this is a statement of how untouchable Boeing is and how protected it will be by the Corrupt.

[Mar 10, 2019] U.S. SEC to review stock trading rules in big potential shakeup by John McCrank

Mar 10, 2019 | finance.yahoo.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is launching a review of the main set of rules governing stock trading, opening the door to the biggest potential changes in a decade-and-a-half, the head of the agency said on Friday.

The possible changes are aimed at making it easier to trade illiquid stocks, making more trading information available to investors, and improving the speed and quality of public data feeds needed for trading.

The SEC in 2005 adopted a broad framework called Regulation National Market System that was largely aimed at ensuring retail investors get the best price possible and preventing trades from being executed at prices that are inferior to bids and offers displayed on other trading venues.

Since then, faster, more sophisticated technology has put a bigger focus on rapid-fire, high-speed trading. There has also been an influx of new electronic stock exchanges, fragmenting liquidity and increasing costs for brokers around exchange connectivity and market data needed to fuel algorithmic trading.

"It is clear that the market challenges we faced in the early 2000s are not the same as the issues that we confront over a decade later," Jay Clayton, chairman of the SEC, said at an event in New York.

To get a better grasp of current market issues, the SEC held a series of roundtable discussions with industry experts last year that led to potential rule-making recommendations around thinly-traded securities, combating retail fraud, and market data and market access, Clayton said.

Some areas the SEC is looking at include:

The 2019 review follows an active 2018 for the SEC.

The regulator adopted rules to increase transparency around broker-dealer stock order routing and private off-exchange trading venues. It also ordered a pilot program to test banning lucrative rebate payments that exchanges make to brokers for liquidity-adding stock orders.

(Reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Tom Brown)

https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/3-6-3/html/r-sf.html

Sign in to post a message. 17 viewing1 person reacting

judi 1 hour ago What about Naked Shorting? It is out of control and no one including the SEC is doing anything to stop it??

Tara 41 minutes ago The rules implemented in 2005 did nothing to help retail traders with accounts under 25K.
When are you going to address the real issue of stock price manipulation? Also, bring back the uptick rule. And while you are at it, we need rules to punish dishonest analysts who publish opinions of price that are so far off the charts, they never reflect actual earnings often announced days later.

Rob 38 minutes ago They are going to make it more in favor of big boys aka the banks

[Dec 16, 2018] Trump Models His War on Bank Regulators on Bill Clinton and W's Disastrous Wars by Bill Black

Notable quotes:
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... The idea that examiners should not criticize any bank misconduct, predation, or 'unsafe and unsound practice' that does not constitute a felony is obviously insane. ..."
"... The trade association complaint that examiners dare to criticize non-felonious bank conduct – and the WSJ ..."
"... I have more than a passing acquaintance with banking, banking regulation, and banking's rectitude (such an old fashioned word) in the importance for Main Street's survival, and for the country's as a whole survival as a trusted pivot point in world finance , or for the survival of the whole American project. I know this sounds like an over-the-top assertion on my part, however I believe it true. ..."
"... Obama et al confusing "banking" with sound banking is too ironic, imo. ..."
"... It was actually worse than this. The very deliberate strategy was to indoctrinate employees of federal regulatory agencies to see the companies they regulated not as "partners" but as "customers" to be served. This theme is repeated again and again in Bush era agency reports. Elizabeth Warren was viciously attacked early in the Obama Administration for calling for a new "watchdog" agency to protect consumers. The idea that a federal agency would dedicate itself to protecting citizens first was portrayed as dangerously radical by industry. ..."
"... Models on Clinton and Bush. What's not to like? Why isn't msm and dem elites showing him the love when he's following their long term policies? And we might assume these would be hills policies if she had been pushed over the line. A little thought realizes that in spite of the pearl clutching they far prefer him to Bernie. ..."
Dec 14, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives

The Wall Street Journal published an article on December 12, 2018 that should warn us of coming disaster: "Banks Get Kinder, Gentler Treatment Under Trump." The last time a regulatory head lamented that regulators were not "kinder and gentler" promptly ushered in the Enron-era fraud epidemic. President Bush made Harvey Pitt his Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair in August 2001 and, in one of his early major addresses, he spoke on October 22, 2001 to a group of accounting leaders.

Pitt, as a private counsel, represented all the top tier audit firms, and they had successfully pushed Bush to appoint him to run the SEC. The second sentence of Pitt's speech bemoaned the fact that the SEC had not been "a kinder and gentler place for accountants." He concluded his first paragraph with the statement that the SEC and the auditors needed to work "in partnership." He soon reiterated that point: "We view the accounting profession as our partner" and amped it up by calling accountants the SEC's "critical partner."

Pitt expanded on that point: "I am committed to the principle that government is and must be a service industry." That, of course, would not be controversial if he meant a service agency (not "industry") for the public. Pitt, however, meant that the SEC should be a "service industry" for the auditors and corporations.

Pitt then turned to pronouncing the SEC to be the guilty party in the "partnership." He claimed that the SEC had terrorized accountants. He then stated that he had ordered the SEC to end this fictional terror campaign.

[A]ccountants became afraid to talk to the SEC, and the SEC appeared to be unwilling to listen to the profession. Those days are ended.

This prompted Pitt to ratchet even higher his "partnership" language.

I speak for the entire Commission when I say that we want to have a continuing dialogue, and partnership, with the accounting profession,

Recall that Pitt spoke on October 22, 2001. Here are the relevant excerpts from the NY Times' Enron timeline :

Oct. 16 – Enron announces $638 million in third-quarter losses and a $1.2 billion reduction in shareholder equity stemming from writeoffs related to failed broadband and water trading ventures as well as unwinding of so-called Raptors, or fragile entities backed by falling Enron stock created to hedge inflated asset values and keep hundreds of millions of dollars in debt off the energy company's books.

Oct. 19 – Securities and Exchange Commission launches inquiry into Enron finances.

Oct. 22 – Enron acknowledges SEC inquiry into a possible conflict of interest related to the company's dealings with Fastow's partnerships.

Oct. 23 – Lay professes confidence in Fastow to analysts.

Oct. 24 – Fastow ousted.

The key fact is that even as Enron was obviously spiraling toward imminent collapse (it filed for bankruptcy on December 2) – and the SEC knew it – Pitt offered no warning in his speech. The auditors and the corporate CEOs and CFOs were not the SEC's 'partners.' Thousands of CEOs and CFOs were filing false financial statements – with 'clean' opinions from the then 'Big 5' auditors. Pitt was blind to the 'accounting control fraud' epidemic that was raging at the time he spoke to the accountants. Thousands of his putative auditor 'partners' were getting rich by blessing fraudulent financial statements and harming the investors that the SEC is actually supposed to serve.

Tom Frank aptly characterized the Bush appointees that completed the destruction of effective financial regulation as "The Wrecking Crew." It is important, however, to understand that Bush largely adopted and intensified Clinton's war against effective regulation. Clinton and Bush led the unremitting bipartisan assault on regulation for 16 years. That produced the criminogenic environment that produced the three largest financial fraud epidemics in history that hyper-inflated the real estate bubble and drove the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). President Trump has renewed the Clinton/Bush war on regulation and he has appointed banking regulatory leaders that have consciously modeled their assault on regulation on Bush and Clinton's 'Wrecking Crews.'

Bill Clinton's euphemism for his war on effective regulation was "Reinventing Government." Clinton appointed VP Al Gore to lead the assault. (Clinton and Gore are "New Democrat" leaders – the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.) Gore decided he needed to choose an anti-regulator to conduct the day-to-day leadership. We know from Bob Stone's memoir the sole substantive advice he gave Gore in their first meeting that caused Gore to appoint him as that leader. "Do not 'waste one second going after waste, fraud, and abuse.'" Elite insider fraud is, historically, the leading cause of bank losses and failures, so Stone's advice was sure to lead to devastating financial crises. It is telling that it was the fact that Stone gave obviously idiotic advice to Gore that led him to select Stone as the field commander of Clinton and Gore's war on effective regulation.

Stone convinced the Clinton-Gore administration to embrace the defining element of crony capitalism as its signature mantra for its war on effective regulation. Stone and his troops ordered us to refer to the banks, not the American people, as our "customers." Peters' foreword to Stone's book admits the action, but is clueless about the impact.

Bob Stone's insistence on using the word "customer" was mocked by some -- but made an enormous difference over the course of time. In general, he changed the vocabulary of public service from 'procedure first' to 'service first.'"

That is a lie. We did not 'mock' the demand that we treat the banks rather than the American people as our "customer" – we openly protested the outrageous order that we embrace and encourage crony capitalism. Crony capitalism's core principle – which is unprincipled – is that the government should treat elite CEOs as their 'customers' or 'partners.' A number of us publicly expressed our rage at the corrupt order to treat CEOs as our customers. The corrupt order caused me to leave the government.

Our purpose as regulators is to serve the people of the United States – not bank CEOs. It was disgusting and dishonest for Peters to claim that our objection to crony capitalism represented our (fictional) disdain for serving the public. Many S&L regulators risked their careers by taking on elite S&L frauds and their powerful political fixers. Many of us paid a heavy personal price because we acted to protect the public from these elite frauds. Our efforts prevented the S&L debacle from causing a GFC – precisely because we recognized the critical need to spend most of our time preventing and prosecuting the elite frauds that Stone wanted us to ignore..

Trump's wrecking crew is devoted to recreating Clinton and Bush's disastrous crony capitalism war on regulation that produced the GFC. In a June 8, 2018 article , the Wall Street Journal mocked Trump's appointment of Joseph Otting as Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The illustration that introduces the article bears the motto: "IN BANKS WE TRUST."

Otting, channeling his inner Pitt, declared his employees guilty of systematic misconduct and embraced crony capitalism through Pitt's favorite phrase – "partnership."

I think it is more of a partnership with the banks as opposed to a dictatorial perspective under the prior administration.

Otting, while he was in the industry, compared the OCC under President Obama to a fictional interstellar terrorist. Obama appointed federal banking regulators that were pale imitation of Ed Gray, Joe Selby, and Mike Patriarca – the leaders of the S&L reregulation. The idea that Obama's banking regulators were akin to 'terrorists' is farcical.

The WSJ's December 12, 2018 article reported that Otting had also used Bob Stone's favorite term to embrace crony capitalism.

Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting has also changed the tone from the top at his agency, calling banks his "customers."

There are many terrible role models Trump could copy as his model of how to destroy banking regulation and produce the next GFC, but Otting descended into unintentional self-parody when he channeled word-for-word the most incompetent and dishonest members of Clinton and Bush's wrecking crews.

The same article reported a trade association's statement that demonstrates the type of outrageous reaction that crony capitalism inevitably breeds within industry.

Banks are suffering from "examiner criticisms that do not deal with any violation of law," said Greg Baer, CEO of the Bank Policy Institute ."

The article presented no response to this statement so I will explain why it is absurd. First, "banks" do not "suffer" from "examiner criticism." Banks gain from examiner criticism. Effective regulators (and whistleblowers) are the only people who routinely 'speak truth to power.' Auditors, credit rating agencies, and attorneys routinely 'bless' the worst CEO abuses that harm banks while enriching the CEO. The bank CEO cannot fire the examiner, so the examiners' expert advice is the only truly "independent" advice the bank's board of directors receives. That makes the examiners' criticisms invaluable to the bank. CEOs hate our advice because we are the only 'control' (other than the episodic whistleblower) that is willing and competent to criticize the CEO.

The idea that examiners should not criticize any bank misconduct, predation, or 'unsafe and unsound practice' that does not constitute a felony is obviously insane. While "violations of law" (felonies) are obviously of importance to us in almost all cases, our greatest expertise is in identifying – and stopping – "unsafe and unsound practices" because such practices, like fraud, are leading causes of bank losses and failures.

Third, repeated "unsafe and unsound practices" are a leading indicator of likely elite insider bank fraud and other "violations of law."

The trade association complaint that examiners dare to criticize non-felonious bank conduct – and the WSJ reporters' failure to point out the absurdity of that complaint – demonstrate that the banking industry's goal remains the destruction of effective banking regulation. Trump's wrecking crew is using the Clinton and Bush playbook to restore fully crony capitalism. He has greatly accelerated the onset of the next GFC.


Chauncey Gardiner , December 14, 2018 at 2:01 pm

Thank you for this, Bill Black. IMO the long-term de-regulatory policies under successive administrations cited here, together with their neutering the rule of law by overturning the Glass-Steagall Act; de-funding and failing to enforce antitrust, fraud and securities laws; financial repression of the majority; hidden financial markets subsidies; and other policies are just part of an organized, long-term systemic effort to enable, organize and subsidize massive control and securities fraud; theft of and disinvestment in publicly owned resources and services; environmental damage; and transfers of social costs that enable the organizers to in turn gain a hugely disproportionate share of the nation's wealth and nearly absolute political control under their "Citizens United" political framework.

Not to diminish, but among other things the current president provides nearly daily entertainment, diversion and spectacle in our Brave New World that serves to obfuscate what has occurred and is happening.

RBHoughton , December 14, 2018 at 9:41 pm

I'm with you Chauncey. I believe the rot really got started with creative accounting in early 1970s. That's when accountants of every flavor lost themselves and were soon followed by the lawyers. Sauce for the goose.

Banks and Insurers and many industrial concerns have become too big. We could avoid all the regulatory problems by placing a maximum size on commercial endeavour.

chuck roast , December 14, 2018 at 4:28 pm

Sameo-sameo

A number of years ago I did both the primary capital program and environmental (NEPA) review for major capital projects in a Federal Region. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. A local agency wanted us (the Feds) to approve pushing up many of their projects using a so-called Public Private Partnership (PPP). This required the local agency to borrow many millions from Wall Street while at the same time privatizing many of their here-to-fore public operations. And of course there was an added benefit of instituting a non-union shop.

To this end I was required to sit down with the local agency head (he actually wore white shoes), his staff and several representatives of Goldman-Sachs. After the meeting ended, I opined to the agency staff that Goldman-Sachs was "bullshit" and so were their projects.

Shortly thereafter I was removed to a less high-profile Region with projects that were not all that griftable, and there was no danger of me having to review a PPP.

Oh, and I denied, denied, denied saying "bullshit."

flora , December 14, 2018 at 10:08 pm

Thank you, NC, for featuring these posts by Bill Black.

I have more than a passing acquaintance with banking, banking regulation, and banking's rectitude (such an old fashioned word) in the importance for Main Street's survival, and for the country's as a whole survival as a trusted pivot point in world finance , or for the survival of the whole American project. I know this sounds like an over-the-top assertion on my part, however I believe it true.

Main Street also knows the importance of sound banking. Sound banking is not a 'poker chip' to be used for games. Sound banking is key to the American experiment in self-determination, as it has been called.

Politicians who 'don't get this" have lost touch with the entire American enterprise, imo. And, no, the neoliberal promise that nation-states no longer matter doesn't make this point moot.

flora , December 14, 2018 at 10:47 pm

adding: US founding father Alexander Hambleton did understand the importance of sound banking, and so Obama et al confusing "banking" with sound banking is too ironic, imo.

Tim , December 15, 2018 at 8:29 am

It was actually worse than this. The very deliberate strategy was to indoctrinate employees of federal regulatory agencies to see the companies they regulated not as "partners" but as "customers" to be served. This theme is repeated again and again in Bush era agency reports. Elizabeth Warren was viciously attacked early in the Obama Administration for calling for a new "watchdog" agency to protect consumers. The idea that a federal agency would dedicate itself to protecting citizens first was portrayed as dangerously radical by industry.

John k , December 15, 2018 at 12:14 pm

Models on Clinton and Bush. What's not to like? Why isn't msm and dem elites showing him the love when he's following their long term policies?
And we might assume these would be hills policies if she had been pushed over the line. A little thought realizes that in spite of the pearl clutching they far prefer him to Bernie.

[Aug 07, 2018] Bill Black Pre-Crisis 4506-T Studies Showed Massive Fraud in Liar's Loans; Fed Ignored Warning, DoJ Refused to Target Implic

Notable quotes:
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives ..."
"... New Economic Perspectives ..."
"... The Pentagon Wars ..."
"... The Generals ..."
"... The Chickenshit Club ..."
Aug 07, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Bill Black: Pre-Crisis "4506-T Studies" Showed Massive Fraud in Liar's Loans; Fed Ignored Warning, DoJ Refused to Target Implicated Banksters Posted on August 7, 2018 by Yves Smith Yves here. With the tsunami of "ten years after the crisis" stories that are already starting to hit the beach, I am endeavoring to focus on ones that contain new or significantly under-reported information or give particularly insightful overviews. Here Black gives a telling example of both how the authorities were warned of massive mortgage fraud and ignored it, and then later failed to use the same evidence to pursue the perps.

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives

Steven Krystofiak formed the Mortgage Brokers Association for Responsible Lending, a professional association dedicated to fighting mortgage fraud and predation. On August 1, 2006. He tried to save our Nation by issuing one of the most prescient warnings about the epidemic of mortgage fraud and predation and the crisis it would so cause.

The context was Congress' effort to empower and convince the Federal Reserve to take action against what the mortgage lending industry called, behind closed doors, "liar's" loans. A liar's loan is a loan in which the lender does not verify (at least) the borrower's actual income. The industry knew that the failure to verify inherently led to endemic fraud. George Akerlof and Paul Romer's 1993 article on "Looting" by financial CEOs explicitly cited the failure to verify the borrower's income as an example of a lending practice that only fraudulent lenders would use on a widespread basis.

Congress gave the Fed the unique authority to ban all liar's loans in 1994, by passing the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA). HOEPA gave the Fed the authority to ban liar's loans even by "shadow" sector financial firms that had no federal deposit insurance.

Liar's loans began to become material around 1989 during the savings and loan debacle where all good U.S. financial frauds are born – Orange County, California. In that era, they were called "low documentation" ('low doc') loans. We (the West Region of the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), were the federal regulator for these S&Ls, and we were overwhelmed dealing with the "control frauds" driving the debacle, who overwhelmingly used commercial real estate (CRE) as their accounting "weapon" of choice. Our examiners, however, made two critical points. No honest lender would make widespread loans without verifying the borrower's income because it was certain to produce severe "adverse selection" and produce serious losses. The examiners' second warning was that such loans were growing rapidly in Orange County and multiple lenders were involved.

We listened and responded well to our examiners' timely and sound warnings and made it a moderate priority to drive liar's loans out of the industry we regulated. The last of the major fraudulent S&L liar's loan lenders was Long Beach Savings. Long Beach set a common pattern for fraudulent lenders by also engaging in predation primarily against Latinos and blacks. In 1994, the same year HOEPA became law; Long Beach voluntarily gave up federal deposit insurance and its charger as a savings and loan. Long Beach's controlling owner, Roland Arnall, did this for the sole purpose of escaping our regulatory jurisdiction and our ability to examine, sue, and sanction the S&L and its officers. Arnall changed its name to Ameriquest, and converted it to a mortgage bank. Mortgage banks were essentially unregulated. Arnall successfully sought sanctuary in what we now call the "shadow" financial sector. The S&L debacle did not end. It found sanctuary in the Shadow and grew 50% annually for 13 years.

Ameriquest and its leading mortgage bank competitor, run by former S&L officers we (OTS) had "removed and prohibited" from working in any federally insured lender, became the leading "vectors" spreading the epidemic of fraudulent liar's loans through (initially) the shadow sector and later back into federally insured lenders. Many of Arnall's lieutenants eventually left Ameriquest to lead other fraudulent and predatory lenders making predatory liar's loans. Michael W. Hudson's book, The Monster , is a great read that presents this history. Ameriquest and its fraudulent and predatory peers grew at extraordinary rates for over a decade. They hyper-inflated the bubble and drove the financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernake refused to use HOEPA to stop this surging epidemic of fraudulent and predatory liar's loans. This was the setting when Krystofiak, on his own dime and initiative took advantage of a Fed hearing on predatory lending near his home to warn us all of the coming disaster. Krystofiak was not the first warning. His written testimony cited the appraisers' and the FBI's prior warnings. The appraisers' 2000 petition explaining how lenders and their agents were extorting appraisers to inflate appraisals was superb. Chris Swecker's 2004 warning on behalf of the FBI that the developing "epidemic" of mortgage fraud would cause a financial "crisis" if not stopped was superb.

Krystofiak was also superb. The Fed did not want to conduct hearings on fraudulent and predatory liar's loans – Congress forced it to do so. The Fed's Board members were not interested in stopping fraudulent and predatory liar's loans. The Fed did not invite Krystofiak to testify. The Fed offered only a brief "cattle call" at the end of the hearing allowing (after a top Fed official had left to fly back to DC) the public to make a very brief statement.

The Fed's treatment of Krysofiak stood in sharp contrast to its fawning treatment of the Mortgage Bankers Associations' chosen witness. The MBA chose the leading originator of fraudulent liar's loans in California – IndyMac – to present the MBA's position. The MBA's position was that the Fed should not use its HOEPA authority to ban fraudulent and predatory liar's loans. The Fed officials cracked jokes with and treated the IndyMac officer like an old pal. They treated Krytofiak with cold indifference. The MBA witness presented utter BS. Krystofiak spoke truth to power. Power loved the BS. The truth discomfited the Fed officials.

Krytofiak's written testimony made many vital points, but I refer to only two related points here. First, he warned the Fed that the twin mortgage fraud origination epidemics – appraisal fraud and liar's loans – were so large that they were inflating the housing bubble. Second, his means of quantifying the incidence of liar's loan fraud showed the regulators and the prosecutors that they could use the same method to document reliably, cheaply, and quickly the incidence of liar's loan fraud at every relevant financial firm.

Data Collected by the Mortgage Brokers Association for Responsible Lending

A recent sample of 100 stated income loans which were compared to IRS records (which is allowed through IRS forms 4506, but hardly done) found that 90 % of the income was exaggerated by 5 % or more. MORE DISTURBINGLY, ALMOST 60 % OF THE STATED AMOUNTS WERE EXAGGERATED BY MORE THAN 50%. These results suggest that the stated income loans deserves the nickname used by many in the industry, the "liar's loan" (emphasis in original).

The MBA's anti-fraud experts, MARI, appears to have conducted the study for Krystofiak. They featured the 4506-T (the "T" stands for "transcript") study and its finding of a 90% fraud incidence in liar's loans. In 2006, MARI presented its fraud study at the MBA's annual meeting. The MBA sent MARI's report to every member, which included all the major mortgage players.

Any honest originator, purchaser, or packager of liar's loans was on notice no later than mid-2006 that they could determine quickly, cheaply, and reliably the fraud incidence in those liar's loans by using the 4506-T forms to test a sample of those loans. Krystofiak aptly noted that while lenders typically required borrowers to sign the IRS 4506-T form allowing the lender to access their tax information, it was actually "hardly done." Lenders supposedly require the 4506-T because taxpayers have an obvious interest in not inflating their income to the IRS. The self-employed have to report their income accurately or face potential tax fraud sanctions.

The reason liar's loan mortgage lenders, purchasers, the packagers of toxic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs ) that typically were composed of large amounts of liar's loans, and credit rating agencies, "hardly [ever] used" or required the sellers to use their 4506-T authority is also clear if you understand "accounting control fraud." Any 4506-T study of liar's loans will document their pervasive frauds. Virtually all liar's loan and CDO sales required "reps and warranties" that they were not fraudulent. If a firm making or selling liar's loans conducted a 4506-T study and documented that it knew its reps and warranties were false, and it continued t make, sell, package, or rate those fraudulent loans under false reps and warranties it would be handling its counterparty a dream civil fraud suit. They would be handing DOJ the ability to prosecute them successfully for felonies that caused hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. The fraudulent mortgage money machine relied on the major players following a financial "don't ask; don't tell" policy.

The exceptions prove the rule. I have found public evidence of only two cases in which mortgage players (other than Krystofiak) conducted 4506-T audits of liar's loans. I have never found public evidence that any federal regulator or prosecutor conducted or mandated a 4506-T study. The two known cases of 4506-T audits were Wells Fargo (just disclosed by DOJ) and Countrywide (disclosed by the SEC investigation and complaint). Both audits found massive fraud incidence in the liar's loans. The risk officers presented these audit results to the banks' senior managers.

Bank Whistleblowers United's 4506-T Proposal

Two and-a-half years ago, Bank Whistleblowers United (BWU) discussed the senior officers of Countrywide's response to its 4506-T audit. We noted that BWU co-founder Michael Winston blew the whistle on Countrywide's frauds to the bank's most senior officers to try to prevent these frauds. Mr. Winston eagerly aided potential prosecutors – who failed to prosecute Countrywide's senior officers leading the frauds. BWU then explained the analogous response of Citigroup's senior officers to a different but equally reliable audit conducted by BWU co-founder Richard Bowen. We did so in a January 30, 2016 New Economic Perspectives blog urging presidential candidates in the 2016 election to pledge to implement the 60-day BWU plan to restore the rule of law to Wall Street.

As documented in the SEC complaint, Countrywide's managers conducted a secret internal study of Countrywide's liar's loans that, on June 2, 2006, confirmed Krystofiak's findings of endemic fraud in liar's loans. Fraud was the norm in Countrywide's liar's loans, a fact that it failed to disclose to its stockholders and secondary market purchasers. Instead of stopping such loans, Countrywide's senior officers caused it to adopt what they termed "Extreme Alt-A" loans offered by Bear and Lehman that "layered" this fraud risk on top of a half dozen additional massive risks to create what Countrywide's controlling officer described as loans that were "toxic" and "inherently unsound." "Alt-A" was the euphemism for liar's loans. Countrywide made massive amounts of "Extreme Alt-A" and acted as a vector spreading these "toxic" loans throughout the financial system. A member of our group, Dr. Michael Winston, tried to stop these kinds of abuses, which enriched top management but bankrupted Countrywide.

Similarly, a member of our group, Richard Bowen and his team of expert underwriters, documented that Citigroup knew that it was purchasing tens of billions of dollars of loans annually on the basis of fraudulent "reps and warranties" – and then reselling them to Fannie and Freddie on the basis of fraudulent reps and warranties. Bowen put the highest levels of Citigroup (including Bob Rubin) on personal notice in writing as the incidence of fraud climbed from 40% to 60%. (It eventually reached an astonishing 80% fraud incidence.) Citigroup's leadership's response was to remove his staff. Senior Citigroup officers also responded to the surging fraud by causing Citigroup to become a major purchaser of fraudulently originated liar's loans.

We can now add the senior leaders that determined Wells Fargo's response to its 4506-T audit. We draw on the Department of Justice (DOJ) disclosures in conjunction with its indefensible settlement of civil fraud claims against Wells Fargo's massive mortgage fraud. The DOJ press release revealed that "in 2005, Wells Fargo began an initiative to double its production of subprime and Alt-A loans." DOJ did not explain that this was after the FBI warned there was an emerging "epidemic" of mortgage "fraud" that would cause a financial "crisis" if it were not stopped. The settlement discloses that Wells' risk officers alerted senior managers that the plan to increase greatly the number of liar's loans would greatly increase fraud in 2005 before Wells implemented the plan.

The press release had other bombshells (unintentionally) demonstrating the strength of the criminal cases that DOJ refused to bring against Wells' senior officers. Wells Fargo's 4506-T audit found that its liar's loans were endemically fraudulent, and the amount of inflated income was extraordinary.

The results of Wells Fargo's 4506-T testing were disclosed in internal monthly reports, which were widely distributed among Wells Fargo employees. One Wells Fargo employee in risk management observed that the "4506-T results are astounding" yet "instead of reacting in a way consistent with what is being reported WF [Wells Fargo] is expanding stated [income loan] programs in all business lines."

The press release note some other actions by Wells' senior managers that show what prosecutors term "consciousness of guilt." Such actions make (real) prosecutors salivate. The press release's final substantive revelation is the unbelievable rate of loan defaults on Wells Fargo's fraudulent loans and the exceptional damages those loans and sales caused.

Wells Fargo sold at least 73,539 stated income loans that were included in RMBS between 2005 to 2007, and nearly half of those loans have defaulted, resulting in billions of dollars in losses to investors.

Typical default rates on conventional mortgages averaged, for decades, around 1.5 percent. The Wells Fargo liar's loans defaulted at a rate 30 times greater.

How Corrupt is Wells? Cheating Customers is "Courageous"

The press release does not contain the Wells Fargo gem that proves our family rule that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody. Paragraph H of the settlement reveals that Wells' term for doubling its number of fraudulent liar's loans in 2005 was "Courageous Underwriting." Wells' senior managers changed its compensation system to induce its employees to approve even worse loans. Calling defrauding your customers "courageous" epitomizes Wells Fargo's corrupt culture built on lies and lies about lies.

DOJ's pathetic settlement with Wells Fargo has no admissions by the bank. It does not require a penny in damages from any bank officer. It does not require a bank officer to return a penny of bonuses received through these fraudulent loans. The settlement contains DOJ's statement that its investigation found that Wells' violated four federal criminal statutes. DOJ will continue to grant de facto immunity from prosecution to elite banksters. The Trump administration has again flunked a major test dealing with the swamp banksters.

Section H (b) of the settlement is factually inaccurate in a manner that makes it highly favorable to fraudulent lenders making liar's loans. There is no indication that DOJ ever investigated Wells' fraudulent loan origination practices. It was overwhelmingly lenders and their loan brokers that put the lies in liar's loans. DOJ's settlement documents do not refer to Wells whistleblowers, even though and competent investigation would have identified dozens of whistleblowers. Throughout its Wells documents, DOJ implies that borrowers overstated their income rather than Wells and its loan brokers.

The Jig is Up on DOJ's Pathetic Excuses for Refusing to Jail Elite Bank Frauds

We now know with certainty from the whistleblowers and the internal audits that the response of Citigroup, Countrywide, and Wells Fargo's senior leaders to knowing that most of their liar's loans and the reps and warranties they made about those loans were fraudulent. We know with certainty that Michael Winston and Richard Bowen's disclosures were correct. We know with certainty that each served up to DOJ on a platinum platter dream cases for prosecuting Citigroup and Countrywide's top managers. The senior managers' response to proof that their banks were engaged in endemic fraud makes sense only if the senior managers were leading an "accounting control fraud," which enriches the managers by harming the lender.

When the appraisers' warned of extensive extortion by lenders and their agents to inflate appraisals, when the FBI warned that mortgage fraud was becoming "epidemic" and would cause a financial "crisis" if not halted, and when the MBA publicized Krystofiak and MARI's warnings that liar's loans were endemically fraudulent, the fraudulent CEOs' response was always the same. In each case, they expanded what they knew were endemically fraudulent liar's loans and increased the extortion of appraisers.

Back to BWU's 4506-T Proposal

This brings us back to reminding the public what BWU proposed 32 months ago about 4506-T audits. Point 17 of our 60-day plan began:

Within 60 days, each federal financial regulatory agency directs any bank that it regulates to conduct and publicly report a "Krystofiak" study on a sample of "liar's" loans that they continue to hold. Krystofiak devised a clever study that he presented to the Federal Reserve in an unsuccessful attempt to try to get the Fed to stop the epidemic of fraudulent liar's loans. Lenders and secondary market purchasers routinely required borrowers to authorize the lender and any subsequent purchaser of the loan to obtain a "transcript" (4506-T) of the borrower's tax returns from the IRS to allow the lender to quickly and inexpensively verify the borrower's reported income.

Other parts of our 60-day plan called for DOJ appointees with the courage, integrity, and skills to restore the rule of law to Wall Street. We also explained the needs (and means) for the banking regulators to conduct the investigations (such as 4506-T audits), activate a legion of whistleblowers, and make the criminal referrals to DOJ essential to bring successful prosecutions.

Conclusion

Had the regulators (particularly the Fed through its HOEPA power) required each bank making liar's loans to conduct a 4506-T audit, the senior managers would have faced a dilemma. They could stop the fraudulent lending or provide DOJ with a great opportunity to prosecute them. The bank CEOs' response to the internal audits showing endemic fraud and the retaliation against the whistleblowers combine to offer superb proof of senior managers' 'specific intent' to defraud. The reasons for the failure to prosecute were some combination of cowardice and politics. If Democrats win control of the House they can use their investigative powers to force each bank regulator to cause every relevant financial institution to conduct a 4506-T audit.

Of course, the Republican Senate and House chairs could order those steps today . We are not holding our breath, but BWU's co-founders are eager to aid either, or both, parties restore the rule of law to Wall Street. Instead, we are rapidly creating an intensely criminogenic environment on Wall Street that will eventually cause a severe financial crisis.


Hayek's Heelbiter , August 7, 2018 at 5:35 am

Did John Stumpf (President of Wells Fargo 2007-2016) really say, "If one family loses their home, it is a tragedy. If ten million people lose their homes, it is a statistic?"

Tinky , August 7, 2018 at 6:33 am

Even by Black's lofty standards, this is an outstanding article. The fact that it won't be published in the mainstream media, and that the vast majority of regulators and politicians will ignore it, underscores once again just how broken and corrupted the American political and economic systems are.

Colonel Smithers , August 7, 2018 at 7:54 am

Thank you, Tinky.

It's the same in the UK with regard to mortgage fraud and reporting.

A colleague, brought in from the regulator to clean up our German basket case TBTF's brief and late in the day foray into the mortgage market, said the UK mortgage market was as corrupt / fraudulent. The same US firms were involved in many, if not most, cases. Lehman had an outpost, Ascendant, in my home county, Buckinghamshire, for such activity. Lehman, Merrill and Citi carved out the UK on geographical lines. One (US) firm was given the name of the Germanic tribe that settled in the area 1500 years before.

readerOfTeaLeaves , August 7, 2018 at 11:34 am

Agree about the excellence of this post.

FWIW, the kinds of government errors, cowardice, and confusions that Black relates – on top of having taxpayers foot the bill for it all – was a key factor IMVHO in people voting Trump as a kind of protest vote. He talks about 'fake news' to a huge number of Americans who faked income, or approved fake income.

The rest of us, I assume, continue to seethe and are supporting 'honest money, fair wages/salary' candidates like Warren and Sanders.

flora , August 7, 2018 at 11:54 am

+1

Tom Stone , August 7, 2018 at 7:49 am

In early 2005 I was working as a loan Broker when I met the World Savings rep or the first time.
The first words out of his mouth were a warning not to take more than 3 pints on the back end because it was greedy, the second sentence was "If there's a problem with the income the underwriter will drop the file on my desk, I'll call you and we'll fix it".
He's still in the business, a few rungs further up the corporate ladder, I got out of the business the following week.

Peter Pan , August 7, 2018 at 10:31 am

If Democrats win control of the House they can use their investigative powers to force each bank regulator to cause every relevant financial institution to conduct a 4506-T audit.

The establishment democrats that receive donor dollars from Wall Street banks? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to even investigate much less do anything else to stop this criminal activity.

Otherwise another excellent post by Bill Black.

Tomonthebeach , August 7, 2018 at 3:31 pm

Also, is there a statute of limitations on this fraud? If so, both parties might just be running out the clock.

crittermom , August 7, 2018 at 7:43 pm

+1

Bewildered , August 7, 2018 at 10:41 am

Fabulous piece as usual from Mr. Black. Just makes the tenure of the previous administration all the more complicit in the current state of affairs. As Mr. Black details there was an obvious solution to uncover the fraud and go after senior execs, something that also could have also been done when the 'democrat' party held the House and at least a leverage position in the Senate. What the American public received instead was a giant con job/cover-up advertised as restitution and Obama goes on national TV to pathetically claim that grossly fraudulent behavior was simply unethical. Obviously that maneuver had a higher ROI for post-tenure legacy building and fundraising.

georgieboy , August 7, 2018 at 10:50 am

Wells Fargo -- doing it the Warren Buffet way! For that matter, Goldman Sachs -- doing it the Warren Buffet way!

Superb summary by Mr. Black, thanks Yves.

Bottom Gun , August 7, 2018 at 11:10 am

There is really a simple solution: fire everyone at DOJ and replace them with Air Force officers.

An Air Force officer is brave. He will fly through enemy fire if he has to in order to do his job. He gives no thought to the Taliban career opportunities that he might be forgoing by bombing them.

An Air Force officer is competent. He can fly through thunderstorms in the dead of night and get his bombs when and where the forward air controller down with the infantry needs them. Compare that to the experience of an honest IG official trying to get an indictment from DOJ for anyone at a mega-bank.

An Air Force officer knows how to get funding for his priorities. The Air Force annual budget, at $156 billion, is about 5 times that of DOJ. Enough said.

When you know these facts, the solution is obvious.

Kevbot5000 , August 7, 2018 at 4:36 pm

Go read The Pentagon Wars or Coram's Boyd . Air Force (or other service) officers have no particular claim to virtue. If you pulled mostly captains maybe it'd work, but the bravery and competence needed on the front line is vastly different from that needed from say a Colonel or General running programs/units which is likely the officers you'd be bringing in. Remember you're advocating bringing in people responsible for the boondoggle that is the F35 to shape up an organization. (which is not an isolated instance but emblematic of the upper tiers of the service)

Bottom Gun , August 7, 2018 at 8:00 pm

Thanks for the referrals; let me take a look. (I have read Thomas Ricks' The Generals , which I suspect makes a similar point to those.) The point is acknowledged, although I have not only read The Chickenshit Club but lived through it. There were many DOJ people I had to deal with whom I can only describe using Bundy's pungent phrase for the South Vietnamese political leadership: "the absolute bottom of the barrel." They contrasted starkly with the fellow junior officers I knew in my youth, but as you noted, those were junior officers.

Susan the other , August 7, 2018 at 12:08 pm

The simplicity of the 4506-T audits is as profound as the physics comparison of the diversity of the economy to GDP. These things don't work when all the chaos comes home to roost. In 1989 our economy was on the rocks and our corporations were offshoring as fast as they could; the USSR collapsed and we landed like a murder of crows to pick their bones and loot Russia. OPEC was naming their price; China was exporting massive deflation; our banks were already on the brink. But how to bring home all the loot from not just Russia but all the other illegal sources connected with our once and future imperialism? We were no longer a country of laws; we were looters, thieves and launderers. We were trying to salvage our "investments" or we were hoovering up flight capital or some other thing that had nothing to do with law and order and democracy. You name it. How else did all the banks, all of them, agree to forego their own standards and make all those conveyor belt loans? They prolly all had to become industrial laundromats and get rid of the stuff asap. Which was perhaps only one aspect to the ongoing collapse of "capitalism" as we once knew it – but were unable to protect it. I love Bill Black because he makes me come to uncomfortable explanations who knows how it all fell apart? Somebody does.

templar555510 , August 7, 2018 at 2:34 pm

Superb comment Susan. I make know how ' it all fell apart ' other than recognising that the early capitalists worked with stuff that had to be produced, and so despite vile excesses produced something useful to many , whereas these financial capitalists produce nothing of value to anyone except themselves and take away something from everybody else ( liar's loans being a key example ) . The question is , is there any here beyond here ? Clearly not with ANY of the present political incumbents ( I am in the UK it's the same for you and us ) . So that in two sentences is my answer to your question . My question is ' how on earth do we get beyond here ?'

Chauncey Gardiner , August 7, 2018 at 12:18 pm

Re Bill Black: " Instead, we are rapidly creating an intensely criminogenic environment on Wall Street that will eventually cause a severe financial crisis."

By design and intent with no fear of criminal prosecution for fraud, imprisonment, or even surrender of ill-gotten personal financial gains. All brought to us courtesy of the political donor class and large corporations, those they have corrupted, and the Supreme Court's Orwellian-named Citizens United decision and expanded executive branch powers that make it possible.

Look at any set of issues: Failure to pass and implement policies to address climate change, endless wars, defunding public education and infrastructure, the opioid crisis, manipulation of financial markets, federal government austerity, transfers of public lands and resources into private hands, privatization of public services, healthcare, stagnant real wages, loss of any semblance of economic equality, debt burdens placed on our young people seeking economic opportunity or family formation, lack of legal separation of bank depository and payments system functions from their market speculations, failure to enforce corporate antitrust laws, erosion of privacy and civil liberties, repeated bubbles, concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few, secret international tax havens, etc. and what do you see?

Tim , August 7, 2018 at 12:22 pm

In case you need comedy – George Carlin The Death Penalty from 1996

https://youtu.be/qDO6HV6xTmI

crittermom , August 7, 2018 at 8:02 pm

Thanks, Tim. Comedy was exactly what I needed after Bill Black's excellent article. (One of his best, IMHO)

I saw George Carlin in person at a small theater in Denver long ago. He was great, & still cracks me up.

shinola , August 7, 2018 at 12:49 pm

With the latest disclosures about WF stealing directly from their banking customers on top of their previous frauds, I'm just sure the regulators will come down hard on them this time (NOT!)

I wonder if Mr. Trump, with his involvement in commercial RE, ever "mis-stated" his his income, assets and/or liabilities when obtaining a loan. Nah, couldn't happen.

Tomonthebeach , August 7, 2018 at 3:37 pm

I wonder why anybody still banks with WF. My late mom had about 30K in a WF account under a trust that I could not close out for 24 months (Florida laws – WF had a branch in their eldercare facility.) I was delighted that my closeout check did not bounce.

Karma Fubar , August 7, 2018 at 1:22 pm

A while back I worked at a medical device startup operating within a formal (i.e. written and comprehensive) quality system. A quality system is required for any commercial sales of medical products; previously I had been involved in early stage R+D and had not been bound by such systems. So a lot of it was new to me.

Something that stuck out at the time, and probably ties in to the article above, was the sanctity of corporate internal audit files. The FDA could demand access to almost any company quality system document, except for internal audit files. They could be provided with summaries of these internal audits indicating something like "6 minor deficiencies found, 1 major deficiency found, 0 extreme deficiencies found" , but were not permitted access to the raw internal audits.

I suspect that financial firms have the same level of protection for their internal audits. Had they hired a consulting firm to investigate the accuracy of stated income in the loans they originated, the results of that outside investigation would probably be a document reviewable by government regulators (assuming they were interested in doing their job). But by pursuing this as an internal audit, executives knew that the results would never be reviewable, and give them plausible deniability that they knew of the systemic level of fraud.

There certainly must be other ways of investigating efficiency or compliance within a company, but by pursuing it as an internal audit they could easily bury the results.

Oregoncharles , August 7, 2018 at 1:52 pm

A quibble: comparing stated income to income tax forms may be misleading, although it is the standard. People have an interest in understating their income to the IRS, and in overstating it when seeking a loan. The logic is that they risk prosecution if they understate to the IRS, but there are plenty of situations where they're very unlikely to get caught. It's conceivable the loan application is more honest than the tax return.

perpetualWAR , August 7, 2018 at 7:57 pm

Neither is correct.

Enquiring Mind , August 7, 2018 at 3:09 pm

Loan officers I knew over the decades have changed their views. Asking them if they would lend their own money to the proposed borrower used to be more likely to elicit a Yes. When standards loosened (again) earlier this millennium, some answered No until realizing that they shouldn't care since the money wasn't theirs. What really mattered was getting that commission endorsed and deposited, given the rise of IBGYBG (I'll be gone, you'll be gone) thinking.

Another question I asked was about tracking borrower performance relative to loan officer compensation. Relationship building and longer term interactions declined with the rise of neo-liberalish (the -ish suffix indicates a primitive reaction to immediate perceived incentives without further investigation) mindsets. Portfolio lenders had more at risk but still laid off some of that on the deposit insurance funds. Loan buyers did not fully appreciate that they had to trust everyone preceding them in the value (destruction) cycle, from brokers and investment bankers through ratings agencies.

Internal audits, compliance functions and regulatory exams were often the only temporary inconveniences or obstacles to transactions and related income distribution.

Ron Con Coma , August 7, 2018 at 3:20 pm

Eric Holder for President – NOT!

steelhead23 , August 7, 2018 at 4:02 pm

If Democrats win control of the House they can use their investigative powers to force each bank regulator to cause every relevant financial institution to conduct a 4506-T audit.

Let us, for a moment, imagine this happens. Then what? The results would show widespread fraud and a pathetic lack of adequate vetting by the issuer. Then those fraudulent loans were aggregated into various RMBS and sold to others. I hope you can see that just this disclosure is likely to cause a substantial hiccup in the financial system, perhaps another full-blown crisis. And who would the public blame? The criminals – or the cops? I could see Dems, even Dems with little or no connection to the Street, deciding not to open Pandora's box.

That is one of the problems with the American political system. From defense appropriations to banking regulation, the pols live in fear of being tarred for doing the right thing, if the outcome is temporarily bad or unpopular. Yes, it would obviously be best to cleanse the wound, but doing so would hurt, so the pols decide that it would be best for their popularity to let the wound fester until it becomes too big to ignore or financial Armageddon occurs. Isn't that precisely the thinking of the Obama Administration?

Murgatroy , August 7, 2018 at 6:25 pm

All major Wall St banks and brokerages including Wachovia, Wells, BofA and even Citadel and a few foreign banks (ABN Amro, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, etc) set up an offshore sub called CDS Indexco. This was used as a defacto cartel to control the prices of both Sub-Prime CDO issues and their respective Credit Default Swaps. They created the Markit BBB- index which was used by Paulsen, Ackman and a few other chosen ones to short the MBS sub-prime market. This is the truth.. CDS Indexco dropped that name in Nov. 2008 when the accounting rules forced Marked to Market accounting and also the Consolidation of VIE's (Special Purpose Financial Subs that got an exception to the Enron Rule). So in other words: if banks had been made to follow the "Enron Rule" the financial crisis wouldn't have happened. Goldman's own employee was the Chairman of CDS Indexco, I couldn't make this shit up. And Yves knows it too. Gramm Leach Bliley made it all possible – so banks could hold both the debt and the equity of an entity that they took no responsibility for. This was the precise reason for Glass-Steagall banks were manhandling the ownership of business due to inherent conflicts of interest between debt and equity holders.

steelhead23 , August 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm

My dear Murgatory, Wow. This is the first I have heard of CDS Indexco. You are suggesting that it was much more than a mere market clearinghouse. Where could I read more on this?

perpetualWAR , August 7, 2018 at 7:51 pm

Google it. I just did.
I. Am. Stunned.
Just when I think the shiitake can't get any deeper, it does.

perpetualWAR , August 7, 2018 at 7:34 pm

A former bank/trustee foreclosure attorney is running for a District Court judge position in Seattle. Remember Trott, the Foreclosure King, who Michigan sent to Congress? Yeah, this dude is trying to get on the bench.

crittermom , August 7, 2018 at 8:19 pm

Of course no bankers went to jail.

But does anyone remember this news from 2011, about the homeowner who did?
The lengths they went to 'catch him' once he was in their sites, says it all.
https://www.businessinsider.com/charlie-engle-2011-3

[Feb 11, 2018] Justice department's No 3 official to take Walmart's top legal job

Feb 11, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Revolving door in action

Brand attracted interest because of her potential to assume a key role in the Trump-Russia investigation. The official overseeing the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, has been repeatedly criticized by Trump. If Rosenstein had been fired or quit, oversight would have fallen to Brand. That job would now fall to the solicitor general, Noel Francisco.

"She felt this was an opportunity she couldn't turn down," her friend and former colleague Jamie Gorelick said. Walmart sought Brand to be head of global corporate governance at the retail giant, a position Gorelick said has legal and policy responsibilities that will cater to her strengths.
"It really seems to have her name on it," Gorelick said.

[Dec 05, 2017] House Members Tee Up Bipartisan Bill to Kill CFPB Payday Lending Rule

Notable quotes:
"... By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends much of her time in Asia and is currently working on a book about textile artisans. ..."
"... The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives ..."
Dec 05, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Posted on December 4, 2017 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends much of her time in Asia and is currently working on a book about textile artisans.

Three Democrats and three Republicans have co-sponsored a resolution, under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to scuttle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's payday lending rule.

CRA's procedures to overturn regulations had been invoked, successfully, only once before Trump became president. Congressional Republicans and Trump have used CRA procedures multiple times to kill regulations (as I've previously discussed (see here , here , here and here ). Not only does CRA provide expedited procedures to overturn regulations, but once it's used to kill a regulation, the agency that promulgated the rule is prevented from revisiting the issue unless and until Congress provides new statutory authority to do so.

Payday Lending

As I wrote in an extended October post, CFPB Issues Payday Lending Rule: Will it Hold, as the Empire Will Strike Back, payday lending is an especially sleazy part of the finance sewer, in which private equity swamp creatures, among others, operate. The industry is huge, according to this New York Times report I quoted in my October post, and it preys on the poorest, most financially-stressed Americans:

The payday-lending industry is vast. There are now more payday loan stores in the United States than there are McDonald's restaurants. The operators of those stores make around $46 billion a year in loans, collecting $7 billion in fees. Some 12 million people, many of whom lack other access to credit, take out the short-term loans each year, researchers estimate.

The CFPB's payday lending rule attempted to shut down this area of lucrative lending– where effective interest rates can spike to hundreds of points per annum, including fees (I refer interested readers to my October post, cited above, which discusses at greater length how sleazy this industry is, and also links to the rule; see also this CFPB fact sheet and press release .)

Tactically, as with the ban on mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer financial contracts– an issue I discussed further in RIP, Mandatory Arbitration Ban , (and in previous posts referenced therein), the CFPB under director Richard Cordray made a major tactical mistake in not completing rule-making sufficiently before the change of power to a new administration- 60 "session days" of Congress, thus making these two rules subject to the CRA.

The House Financial Services Committee press release lauding introduction of CRA resolution to overturn the payday lending rule is a classic of its type, so permit me to quote from it at length:

These short-term, small-dollar loans are already regulated by all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Native American tribes. The CFPB's rule would mark the first time the federal government has gotten involved in the regulation of these loans.

.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), a supporter of the bipartisan effort, said the CFPB's rule is an example of how "unelected, unaccountable government bureaucracy hurts working people."

"Once again we see powerful Washington elites using the guise of 'consumer protection' to actually harm consumers and make life harder for lower and moderate income Americans who may need a short-term loan to keep their utilities from being cut off or to keep their car on the road so they can get to work," he said. "Americans should be able to choose the checking account they want, the mortgage they want and the short-term loan they want and no unelected Washington bureaucrat should be able to take that away from them."

[Rep Dennis Ross, a Florida Republican House co-sponsor]. said, "More than 1.2 million Floridians per year rely on Florida's carefully regulated small-dollar lending industry to make ends meet. The CFPB's small dollar lending rule isn't reasonable regulation -- it's a de facto ban on what these Floridians need. I and my colleagues in Congress cannot stand by while an unaccountable federal agency deprives our constituents of a lifeline in times of need, all while usurping state authority. Today, we are taking bipartisan action to stop this harmful bureaucratic overreach dead in its tracks."

As CNBC reports in New House bill would kill consumer watchdog payday loan rule , industry representatives continue to denounce the rule, with a straight face:

"The rule would leave millions of Americans in a real bind at exactly the time need a fast loan to cover an urgent expense," said Daniel Press, a policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a statement after the bill's introduction.

Consumer advocates think otherwise (also from CNBC):

"Payday lenders put cash-strapped Americans in a crippling cycle of 300 percent-interest loan debt," Yana Miles, senior legislative counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a statement.

Prospects Under CRA

When I wrote about this topic in October, much commentary assumed that prospects for CRA overturn were weak. I emphasized instead the tactical error of failing to insulate the rule from CRA, which could have been done if the CFPB had pushed the rule through well before Trump took office:

If the payday rule had been promulgated in a timely manner during the previous administration it would not have been as vulnerable to a CRA challenge as it is now. Even if Republicans had then passed a CRA resolution of disapproval, a presidential veto would have stymied that. Trump is an enthusiastic proponent of deregulation, who has happily embraced the CRA– a procedure only used once before he became president to roll back a rule.

Now, the Equifax hack may have changed the political dynamics here and made it more difficult for Congressional Republicans– and finance-friendly Democratic fellow travellers– to use CRA procedures to overturn the payday lending rule.

The New York Times certainly seems to think prospects for a CRA challenge remote:

The odds of reversal are "very low," said Isaac Boltansky, the director of policy research at Compass Point Research & Trading.

"There is already C.R.A. fatigue on the Hill," Mr. Boltansky said, using an acronymn for the act, "and moderate Republicans are hesitant to be painted as anti-consumer.

I'm not so sure I would take either side of that bet. [Jerri-Lynn here: my subsequent emphasis.]

A more telling element than CRA-fatigue in my assessment of the rule's survival prospects was my judgment that Democrats wouldn't muster to defend the payday lending industry– although that assumption has not fully held, as this recent American Banker account makes clear:

After the payday rule was finalized in October , it was widely expected that Republicans would attempt to overturn it. It's notable, though, that the effort has attracted bipartisan support in the House.

.

Passage in the Senate, however, may be a much heavier lift. The chamber's vote to overturn the arbitration rule in late October came down to the wire, forcing Republicans to call in Vice President Mike Pence to cast the tie-breaking vote.

Bottom Line

I continue to think that this rule will survive– as the payday lending industry cannot count on a full court press lobbying effort by financial services interests. Yet as I wrote in October, I still hesitate to take either side of the bet on this issue.

Dpfaef , December 4, 2017 at 10:53 am

I think this whole article is totally disingenuous. There is a serious need for many Americans to have access to small amount, short term loans. While, these lenders may appear predatory, they do serve a large sector of society.

Maybe you need to read: The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon . It might be worth the read.

GF , December 4, 2017 at 11:02 am

Where's the Post Office Bank when you need it. This overturning of the rule is just an effort to stop the Post Office Bank from gaining traction as the alternative non-predatory source of small loans to the people. Most pay day lender companies are owned by large financial players.

Jerri-Lynn Scofield Post author , December 4, 2017 at 11:11 am

I agree that's a far better approach and indeed, I discussed the Post Office bank in my October post– which is linked to in today's post. Permit me to quote from my earlier post:

The payday lending industry preys on the poorest financial consumers. One factor that has allowed it to flourish is current banking system's inability to provide access to basic financial services to a shocking number of Americans. Approximately 38 million households are un or underbanked– roughly 28% of the population.

Now, a sane and humane political system would long ago have responded with direct measures to address that core problem, such as a Post Office Bank (which Yves previously discussed in this post, Mirabile Dictu! Post Office Bank Concept Gets Big Boost and which have long existed in other countries.)

Regular readers are well aware of who benefits from the current US system, and why the lack of institutions that cater to the basic needs of financial consumers rather than focusing on extracting their pound(s) of flesh is not a bug, but a feature.

So, instead, the United States has a wide-ranging payday lending system. Which charges borrowers up to 400% interest rates for short-term loans, many of which are rolled over so that the borrower becomes a prisoner of the debt incurred.

Wisdom Seeker , December 4, 2017 at 3:23 pm

With phrasing like "unbanked" or "underbanked", I worry that you've bought into the banking-industry framing of this issue, which I'm sure is not your intent.

Ordinary people should not need any bank (not even a government or post office bank) for everyday life, with the possible exception of mortgages. De-financialization of the medium of exchange, and basic payments, is something the public should be fighting for.

lyman alpha blob , December 4, 2017 at 3:30 pm

I would consider myself an ordinary person and I pay in cash when purchasing day to day items the vast majority of the time and yet I'd still prefer to deposit my money in a bank rather than hiding it in my mattress for any number of good reasons.

Banks aren't the problem – their predatory executives are.

Wisdom Seeker , December 4, 2017 at 3:44 pm

But there are, or at least ought to be, safe and secure ways to store money other than by lending it to banks or stuffing it into mattresses. Or carrying wads of cash.

For instance, a debit card (or possibly cell phone) with a secure identity / password can already act as a cashless wallet. The digital cash could be stored directly on the device, and accounted for through something similar to TreasuryDirect, without any intermediaries. But this would require the Federal Government to get serious about having a modern Digital Dollar of some kind (not bitcoin, shudder)

Cary D Berkelhamer , December 4, 2017 at 4:32 pm

Even better would be State Banks. Every state should have one. I believe the State Bank of North Dakota made money in 2008. While the TBTF Banks came hat in hand to our Reps. Of course OUR Reps handed them a blank check and told them to "Make it go Away". However Post Office Banks would be GREAT!!

diptherio , December 4, 2017 at 11:08 am

This is the boilerplate argument that always gets brought up by payday loan defenders, and there is a good bit of truth to it. However, what you are not mentioning is that there are already far superior options available to pretty much any person who needs a small, short term loan. That solution is your friendly neighborhood Credit Union, most of which offer very low interest lines of overdraft coverage. I don't mind saying that it has saved my heiny on more than one occasion. Pay check a little late in arriving? No problem, transfer $200 from your overdraft account into your checking account on-line and you're good to go. Pay it back at your convenience, also on-line, at 7% APR.

Payday lenders are legal loansharks. The problems with their predatory lending model and the damage it does to low-income people are well documented. Simply pointing out that there is a reason that people end up at payday lenders is not a valid justification for the business practices of those lenders, especially when there are much better alternatives readily available.

Vatch , December 4, 2017 at 11:19 am

Payday lenders are legal loansharks.

Very true! There are several web sites that point out how the fees associated with payday loans raise the effective annual percentage rate into the stratosphere, ranging from 300% to over 600%. Here's one:

http://paydayloansonlineresource.org/average-interest-rates-for-payday-loans/

Off The Street , December 4, 2017 at 12:10 pm

One frustration that I have with legislation in general, and finance legislation in particular, is that it does not tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

In my Panglossian world, I envision a financial services bill that lays out the following:

Define the problem
Unserviced people: X percent( for discussion, say 10% to make the math easy) of people are un-serviced (or under-, or rapaciously-serviced) by conventional financial companies, whether banks, credit unions or other, whatever other is conventionally.
Unserviced and don't want: Y percent of that X percent (say, 50% of 10%, so 5%) doesn't want services.
Unserviced and want: 1-Y percent of that X percent (say, 50% of 10%, so 5%) wants services but can not get them. That could be due to various factors, ranging from bad credit (how defined?, say FICO < 600?) to geographic remoteness (no branches within miles, no internet, precious little slow mail service, whatever).

Within that deemed unserved 5% of the population, what are the costs to serve and what are the alternatives?

What would an honest service provider need to provide service, accounting for credit risks and the like, and still make a profit sufficient to induce investment?

If I knew how to make and add a nice graphic, I'd include a waterfall chart here to show the costs and components of the interest and fees paid in regular and default mode. Sorry, please bear with me as I make up numbers.

Regular costs
Interest at 30%
Less: cost of funds at, say, 10%
Less: personnel, overhead, everything else at, say, 5%
Pre-tax profit: 15%

Default mode costs:
Interest at 275%
Plus: Fees at 25%
Less: cost of funds 20%
Less: personnel, overhead, etc 5%
Less: added default cost not in personnel etc line, say 25%
Pre-tax profit: 250%

In that little example, who couldn't make money at those rates?

Extending the notion of APR and Truth-In-Lending to include payday lenders and anyone else without a brick-and-mortar branch who wants to do business in the US, how about mandating some type of honest waterfall chart as dreamt of above?

Then cross-reference and publicize the voting on finance legislation with the campaign contributions from payday people and their ilk, and layer in the borrower costs and credit scores and other metrics in those Congressional districts and zip+4 codes and census tracts and whatever other level of granularity will help provide any amount of disinfecting sunlight to help see the scattering cockroaches.

a different chris , December 4, 2017 at 12:57 pm

The problem I suspect is that your "friendly neighborhood credit union" is actually rarely anywhere near the neighborhoods where people who need these kind of loans live.

They don't have cars and mass transit is non-existent or so slow they couldn't get to the Credit Union during business hours, and back again, anyway. That's the problem with expecting Private Enterprise to be a solution for people at the bottom. They don't set up shop where those people live, or the ones that do are not exactly do-gooders.

lyle , December 4, 2017 at 7:33 pm

I just checked and a lot of credit unions let you apply for a loan online, (earlier you can set up membership online). So the issue of transport and time is lessened assuming folks have some form of net access.

JTMcPhee , December 4, 2017 at 1:04 pm

One might ask why there are millions of people reduced to having to get ripped off by payday and auto-title lenders, to somehow survive from week to week. Maybe because people can't make a living wage? Can't save any money, however prudent and abstemious they may be? Because inter-citizen cruelty and Calvinism are so very strong a force in this rump of an Empire?

Some of the comments here seem to build on the baseline assumption that's part of the liberal-neoliberal mantra, "You get what's coming to you (or the pittance we can't quite squeeze out of you yet)".

diptherio, I am guessing you may mean that there are models of better alternatives readily available, like paying a living wage, a social safety net for the worst off, a postal bank, national health care, stuff like that. I don't see that there are any alternatives actually available to most real people "on the ground."

Wukchumni , December 4, 2017 at 1:08 pm

There is an alternative to excessive payday loans, but only if you're in the military, where it's capped @ 36%.

Why not 36% for everybody?

diptherio , December 4, 2017 at 1:27 pm

You are, of course, correct in that the underlying problem is that so many people are forced to live on so little that they need payday loans in the first place. Thanks for pointing that out.

My point is simply that in the short-term, as a matter of practicality for those of us who don't always make it until payday before running out of money, a CU overdraft account is a very good option.

mpalomar , December 4, 2017 at 1:36 pm

Agree. The AB article from October deadpans a description of the ins and outs governing the hellishness of the company town we're living in.

lyman alpha blob , December 4, 2017 at 1:32 pm

This is a far superior option and thank you for bringing it up. The only problem is most banks and credit unions will not tell you it exists because they make a lot more money if you just keep bouncing checks.

I only learned about it when I worked for WAMU. We were tasked by management with promoting various new products to customers as a condition of being paid a monthly bonus which was the only thing that made the job pay enough to live on. Funny, they never asked us to promote the overdraft line of credit (aka an ODLOC), ever. I do remember one of my managers tell me that circa 2000 or so, WAMUs operating costs for the entire company for the entire year were offset just by the fees they collected off of bounced checks etc.

The fees or interest you pay for using an ODLOC are a small fraction of what you'd pay for bouncing just one check. IIRC, if I overdrew by $200 or so and paid it back on my next payday, the interest was generally less than $1. My local credit union has since added a $5 fee for accessing the ODLOC on top of the interest, but it's still much less than a bounced check fee or interest on a payday loan. I believe that depending on your credit history, you can get an ODLOC of up to $2500 or so which pretty much negates the need for any payday loans.

sd , December 4, 2017 at 11:14 am

A friend of mine was evicted from her apartment because of a payday loan. She failed to pay it off in full quick enough and it spiraled out of control tripling in a very short time. I really fail to see how usury is beneficial to society.

RepubAnon , December 4, 2017 at 11:55 am

Yes, there's a need for high-interest loans that bankrupt borrowers:

Mom-and-Pop Loan Sharks Being Driven Out by Big Credit Card Companies

Frank Pistone is part of the dying breed known as the American Loan Shark. Not so long ago, the loan shark flourished, offering short-term, high-interest loans to desperate people with nowhere else to turn. Today, however, Pistone and countless others like him are being squeezed out by the major credit-card companies, which can offer money to the down-and-out at lower rates of interest and without the threat of bodily harm

FluffytheObeseCat , December 4, 2017 at 12:25 pm

I read Servon's book. It is not a brief on behalf of the payday loan industry. She worked at a couple of payday lenders and explains how they serve the communities they're in, but a few things need to be noted:

The business she was most sympathetic with was a small, local one with only a couple of storefronts, in an east coast inner city. The owner and his help knew the customer base, often by name. Much of her sympathy came from her respect for the women who were dishing out the loans at the windows, not the owners and not the business model. This local joint operated like the most benign of old time pawnbroker/loansharking operation from the early part of the last century.

Most "Cash America" storefront shops (on shabby, midcentury shopping strips in inner ring scuburbs across the US) aren't this decent. They aren't "part of a community" in any sense. And the rates are usurious any way, for all of them.

Thank you to Ms. Scofield for continuing to cover this and related businesses. The upper, cleaner part of our finance industry derives more filthy lucre from these kinds of loan shops than they ever want you to know (sub-prime lending shops, title loans shops . there are a lot of modalities for fleecing the poor and the near-poor nowadays).

JTMcPhee , December 4, 2017 at 12:35 pm

The NC staff must be pleased that it seems like so many subtle apologists for the looters, predators, "intelligence community," and so forth, appear to be turning up here early in the opening of new site posts. I'm guessing the Elite are not exactly quaking in fear that NC's reporting will catalyze some change that might sweep the political economy in the direction of what the mopery would categorize as "fairness," but still

ger , December 4, 2017 at 12:42 pm

Raised the dollar definition of middle class and declared a 'new middle class' or could it be 'new middle class' is actually referring to the 'new middle poor'. The former middle class is desperately trying to avoid a plunge into the pits of the 'poor poor'. Payday Loan predators are greasing the handrails.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook , December 4, 2017 at 3:15 pm

"Where will the money-changers change money if not in the Holy Temple? Aren't we starving the priests of much-needed revenue? This Jesus guy is totally disingenuous."

John , December 4, 2017 at 9:32 pm

In good neo liberal fashion that Jesus dude got exactly what he deserved. The effrontry of that guy to chase those hard working money lenders out of the temple square. Got exactly what was coming to him.

sd , December 4, 2017 at 11:11 am

H.J.Res.122 – Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection relating to "Payday, Vehicle Title, and Certain High-Cost Installment Loans".

December 1, 2017

Sponsor Rep. Ross, Dennis A. [R-FL-15] (Introduced 12/01/2017)
Rep. Hastings, Alcee L. [D-FL-20]
Rep. Graves, Tom [R-GA-14]
Rep. Cuellar, Henry [D-TX-28]
Rep. Stivers, Steve [R-OH-15]
Rep. Peterson, Collin C. [D-MN-7]

perpetualWAR , December 4, 2017 at 12:21 pm

Ahhh ..look at this list. TWO Florida lawbreakers introducing this banker bill. And one from Minnesota. Y'all know that Jacksonville, FL and St. Paul, MN are the two places where the forgeries continue to be provided to the financial crooks? So, it goes to figure that the lawbreakers are attempting to protect the financial crooks committing forgery in their prospective states! How appro.

jawbone , December 4, 2017 at 1:44 pm

If any of these House critters are "representing" you, time for lots of calls to them.

And thanks, SD, for listing them. I always wonder why our vaunted free press so seldom lists the sponsors of legislation when it's reported on . Hhmm .
m .

Mike R. , December 4, 2017 at 1:19 pm

I have mixed feelings about this specific issue.
The larger issue of a grossly skewed economic system is what needs to be fixed.
There will always be people that lack common sense and brains regarding money. There will always be people that will take advantage of that.
I don't know how or why you would try and legislate that away.
We need to move in the direction of solving the biggest problems and not get wrapped up in the little problems.
The numbers above sound horrendous, but 7 billion in profit on 46 billion loaned is 14% return. Credit card companies are worse. 7 billion in profit off of 12 million people is $600 per person. Alot for poor folks I recognize, but not necessarily life shattering for all.

The "system" loves to wrangle around with issues like this (trivial in my mind) so the handful of big ones go unattended.

nonclassical , December 4, 2017 at 1:46 pm

some have apparently not felt it necessary to bail out family members for aggressive, egregious and immediate interest rates and escalations charged by these scammers

but there certainly appears concerted effort by (likely) shills to perpetuate scams (and to discredit Consumer Financial Protection Agency and Liz Warren )

Warren-Sanders 2020

Wisdom Seeker , December 4, 2017 at 3:37 pm

I think there's an error in the original article, where it says:

CRA's procedures to overturn legislation had been invoked, successfully, only once before Trump became president. Congressional Republicans and Trump have used CRA procedures multiple times to kill regulations (emphasis added)

My understanding is that CRA gives Congress the power to overturn executive branch regulations , not legislation (which Congress already can overturn anyway). Is that incorrect?

P.S. It's sad that it might not even matter. Nowadays the public can't tell the difference between regulations (written by unaccountable, unelected officials who take the revolving door back to working at the firms they regulated) and legislation (written by unaccountable, only notionally elected politicians who get paid off in various ways by lobbyists for the same firms)

Jerri-Lynn Scofield Post author , December 4, 2017 at 8:07 pm

You're correct– fixed it! Slip of the fingers there that I didn't catch when I proofread the post. As the rest of the paragraph makes clear, CRA procedures are used to overturn regulations.

Thanks for reading my work so carefully and drawing the error to my attention.

John k , December 4, 2017 at 8:26 pm

Finally bipartisan!
Trump loves it
Obomber woulda loved it
She who cannot be named woulda loved it, too.
Time for them all to get over that little spat she did it before trump should appoint her to something useful I bet she'd love secdef

Taras 77 , December 4, 2017 at 10:40 pm

Where is the lovely Debbie Wasserman schultz in all of this? She has not surprisingly been a leading cheerleader for these pay day lender sharks. but hey, what the hey, the lobby money is good!

[Dec 05, 2017] Inside Casino Capitalism by Max Holland

Notable quotes:
"... Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco ..."
"... The Wall Street Journal ..."
"... The triumph of gossip over substance is manifest in many other ways. Wall Street's deft manipulation of the business press is barely touched upon, and the laissez-faire ..."
"... Fulminations about the socially corrosive effects of greed aside, the buyout phenomenon may represent one of the biggest changes in the way American business is conducted since the rise of the public corporation, nothing less than a transformation of managerial into financial capitalism. The ferocious market for corporate control that emerged during the 1980s has few parallels in business history, but there are two: the trusts that formed early in this century and the conglomerate mania that swept corporate America during the 1960s. Both waves resulted in large social and economic costs, and there is little assurance that the corporate infatuation with debt will not exact a similarly heavy toll. ..."
"... the high levels of debt associated with buyouts and other forms of corporate restructuring create fragility in business structures and vulnerability to economic cycles ..."
"... Germany and Japan incur higher levels of debt for expansion and investment, whereas equivalent American indebtedness is linked to the recent market for corporate control. That creates a brittle structure, one that threatens to turn the U.S. government into something of an ultimate guarantor if and when things do fall about. It is too easy to construct a scenario in which corporate indebtedness forces the federal government into the business of business. The savings-and-loan bailout is a painfully obvious harbinger of such a development. ..."
"... The many ramifications of the buyout mania deserve thoughtful treatment. Basic issues of corporate governance and accountability ought to be openly debated and resolved if the American economy is to deliver the maximum benefit to society and not just unconscionable rewards to a handful of bankers, all out of proportion to their social productivity. It is disappointing, but a sign of the times, that the best book about the deal of deals fails to educate as well as it entertains. ..."
Washington DeCoded

Inside Casino Capitalism Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
By Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Harper & Row. 528 pp. $22.95

In 1898, Adolphus Green, chairman of the National Biscuit Company, found himself faced with the task of choosing a trademark for his newly formed baking concern. Green was a progressive businessman. He refused to employ child labor, even though it was then a common practice, and he offered his bakery employees the option to buy stock at a discount. Green therefore thought that his trademark should symbolize Nabisco's fundamental business values, "not merely to make dividends for the stockholders of his company, but to enhance the general prosperity and the moral sentiment of the United States." Eventually he decided that a cross with two bars and an oval – a medieval symbol representing the triumph of the moral and spiritual over the base and material – should grace the package of every Nabisco product.

If they had wracked their brains for months, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar could not have come up with a more ironic metaphor for their book. The fall of Nabisco, and its corporate partner R.J. Reynolds, is nothing less than the exact opposite of Green's business credo, a compelling tale of corporate and Wall Street greed featuring RJR Nabisco officers who first steal shareholders blind and then justify their epic displays of avarice by claiming to maximize shareholder value.

The event which made the RJR Nabisco story worth telling was the 1988 leveraged buyout (LBO) of the mammoth tobacco and food conglomerate, then the 19th-largest industrial corporation in America. Battles for corporate control were common during the loosely regulated 1980s, and the LBO was just one method for capturing the equity of a corporation. (In a typical LBO, a small group of top management and investment bankers put 10 percent down and finance the rest of their purchase through high-interest loans or bonds. If the leveraged, privately-owned corporation survives, the investors, which they can re-sell public shares, reach the so-called "pot of gold"; but if the corporation cannot service its debt, everything is at risk, because the collateral is the corporation itself.

The sheer size of RJR Nabisco and the furious bidding war that erupted guaranteed unusual public scrutiny of this particular piece of financial engineering. F. Ross Johnson, the conglomerate's flamboyant, free-spending CEO (RJR had its own corporate airline), put his own company into play with a $75-a-share bid in October. Experienced buyout artists on Wall Street, however, immediately realized that Johnson was trying to play two incompatible games. LBOs typically put corporations such as RJR Nabisco through a ringer in order to pay the mammoth debt incurred after a buyout. But Johnson, desiring to keep corporate perquisites intact, "low-balled" his offer. Other buyout investors stepped forward with competing bids, and after a six-week-long auction the buyout boutique of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company (KKR) emerged on top with a $109-a-share bid. The $25-billion buyout took its place as one of the defining business events of the 1980s

Burrough and Helyar, who covered the story for The Wall Street Journal, supply a breezy, colorful, blow-by-blow account of the "deal from hell" (as one businessman characterized a leveraged buyout). The language of Wall Street, full of incongruous "Rambo" jargon from the Vietnam War, is itself arresting. Buyout artists, who presumably never came within 10,000 miles of wartime Saigon, talk about "napalming" corporate perquisites or liken their strategy to "charging through the rice paddies, not stopping for anything and taking no prisoners."

At the time, F. Ross Johnson was widely pilloried in the press as the embodiment of excess; his conflict of interest was obvious. Yet Burrough and Helyar show that Johnson, for all his free-spending ways, was way over his head in the major leagues of greed, otherwise known as Wall Street in the 1980s. What, after all, is more rapacious: the roughly $100 million Johnson stood to gain if his deal worked out over five years, or the $45 million in expenses KKR demanded for waiting 60 minutes while Ross Johnson prepared a final competing bid?

Barbarians is, in the parlance of the publishing world, a good read. At the same time, unfortunately, a disclaimer issued by the authors proves only too true. Anyone looking for a definitive judgment of LBOs will be disappointed. Burrough and Helyar do at least ask the pertinent question: What does all this activity have to do with building and sustaining a business? But authors should not only pose questions; they should answer them, or at least try.

Admittedly, the single most important answer to the RJR puzzle could not be provided by Burrough and Helyar because it is not yet known. The major test of any financial engineering is its effect on the long-term vitality of the leveraged corporation, as measured by such key indicators as market share (and not just whether the corporation survives its debt, as the authors imply). However, a highly-leveraged RJR Nabisco is already selling off numerous profitable parts of its business because they are no longer a "strategic fit": Wall Street code signifying a need for cash in order to service debts and avoid bankruptcy.

If the authors were unable to predict the ultimate outcome, they still had a rare opportunity to explain how and why an LBO is engineered. Unfortunately, their fixation on re-creating events and dialogue – which admittedly produces a fast-moving book – forced them to accept the issues as defined by the participants themselves. There is no other way to explain the book's uncritical stance. When, for example, the RJR Nabisco board of directors tried to decide which bid to accept, Burrough and Helyar report that several directors sided with KKR's offer because the LBO boutique "knew the value of keeping [employees] happy." It is impossible to tell from the book whether the directors knew this to be true or took KKR's word. Even a cursory investigation would have revealed that KKR is notorious for showing no concern for employees below senior management after a leveraged buyout.

The triumph of gossip over substance is manifest in many other ways. Wall Street's deft manipulation of the business press is barely touched upon, and the laissez-faire environment procured by buyout artists via their political contributions is scarcely mentioned, crucial though it is. Nowhere are the authors' priorities more obvious than in the number of words devoted to Henry Kravis's conspicuous consumption compared to those devoted to the details of the RJR deal. In testimony before Congress last year, no less an authority than Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady – himself an old Wall Street hand – noted that the substitution of tax-deductible debt for taxable income is "the mill in which the grist of takeover premiums is ground."

In the case of RJR Nabisco, 81 percent of the $9.9 billion premium paid to shareholders was derived from tax breaks achievable after the buyout. This singularly important fact cannot be found in the book, however; nor will a reader learn that after the buyout the U.S. Treasury was obligated to refund RJR as much as $1 billion because of its post-buyout debt burden. In Barbarians, more time is spent describing Kravis's ostentatious gifts to his fashion-designer wife than to the tax considerations that make or break these deals.

Fulminations about the socially corrosive effects of greed aside, the buyout phenomenon may represent one of the biggest changes in the way American business is conducted since the rise of the public corporation, nothing less than a transformation of managerial into financial capitalism. The ferocious market for corporate control that emerged during the 1980s has few parallels in business history, but there are two: the trusts that formed early in this century and the conglomerate mania that swept corporate America during the 1960s. Both waves resulted in large social and economic costs, and there is little assurance that the corporate infatuation with debt will not exact a similarly heavy toll.

As the economist Henry Kaufman has written, the high levels of debt associated with buyouts and other forms of corporate restructuring create fragility in business structures and vulnerability to economic cycles. Inexorably, the shift away from equity invites the close, even intrusive involvement of institutional investors (banks, pension funds, and insurance companies) that provide the financing. Superficially, this moves America closer to the system that prevails in Germany and Japan, where historically the relationship between the suppliers and users of capital is close. But Germany and Japan incur higher levels of debt for expansion and investment, whereas equivalent American indebtedness is linked to the recent market for corporate control. That creates a brittle structure, one that threatens to turn the U.S. government into something of an ultimate guarantor if and when things do fall about. It is too easy to construct a scenario in which corporate indebtedness forces the federal government into the business of business. The savings-and-loan bailout is a painfully obvious harbinger of such a development.

The many ramifications of the buyout mania deserve thoughtful treatment. Basic issues of corporate governance and accountability ought to be openly debated and resolved if the American economy is to deliver the maximum benefit to society and not just unconscionable rewards to a handful of bankers, all out of proportion to their social productivity. It is disappointing, but a sign of the times, that the best book about the deal of deals fails to educate as well as it entertains.

[Dec 03, 2017] Brood of Vipers

May 07, 2015 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com
"The power and influence of the financial sector threatens a continuation of the regulatory capture that contributed to the financial crisis. Financial firms, too often, have significant say in the appointment of high regulatory officials.

The tendency of some former government officials to obtain highly lucrative positions in the financial sector after leaving government may well act as an inducement to those remaining in government to serve the interest of the financial sector rather than those of the public."

Brooksley Born, Finance & Society Conference, May 5, 2015


The Western Banks are all over these markets, from commodities to equities. They are creating huge amounts of money debt, and providing it to the financial industry as top down stimulus. What results is little aggregate or 'organic' growth and a series of paper asset bubbles. They should be ashamed but they are too busy plundering to feel any twinge of conscience. They are like a herd of swine, racing for the abyss.

I had to chuckle when the pampered princesses and giggling jackals were talking about the jobs report tomorrow, and said that the ideal situation would be 'a strong jobs number with no wage growth,' a true 'goldilocks' scenario.

I have given up any expectation of reform from within. There will have to be some eye-opening incidents to shake the complacency of the fortunate few.

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

[Nov 15, 2017] Alex Azar Can There Be Uglier Scenarios than the Revolving Door naked capitalism

Notable quotes:
"... By Lambert Strether ..."
"... So should Mr Azar be confirmed as Secretary of DHHS, the fox guarding the hen house appears to be a reasonable analogy. ..."
"... In this post, I'd like to add two additional factors to our consideration of Azar. The first: Democrat credentialism makes it hard for them to oppose Azar. The second: The real ..."
Nov 15, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Alex Azar: Can There Be Uglier Scenarios than the Revolving Door? Posted on November 15, 2017 by Lambert Strether By Lambert Strether

Clearly, Alex Azar, nominated yesterday for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services by the Trump Administration, exemplifies the case of the "revolving door," through which Flexians slither on their way to (or from) positions of public trust. Roy Poses ( cross-posted at NC ) wrote, when Azar was only Acting Secretary:

Last week we noted that Mr Trump famously promised to &#8220;drain the swamp&#8221; in Washington. Last week, despite his previous pledges to not appoint lobbyists to powerful positions, he appointed a lobbyist to be acting DHHS Secretary. This week he is apparently strongly considering Mr Alex Azar, a pharmaceutical executive to be permanent DHHS Secretary, even though the FDA, part of DHHS, has direct regulatory authority over the pharmaceutical industry, and many other DHHS policies strongly affect the pharmaceutical industry. (By the way, Mr Azar was also in charge of one lobbying effort.)

So should Mr Azar be confirmed as Secretary of DHHS, the fox guarding the hen house appears to be a reasonable analogy.

Moreover, several serious legal cases involving bad behavior by his company, and multiple other instances of apparently unethical behavior occurred on Mr Azar&#8217;s watch at Eli Lilly. So the fox might be not the most reputable member of the species.

So you know the drill&#8230;. The revolving door is a species of conflict of interest . Worse, some experts have suggested that the revolving door is in fact corruption. As we noted here , the experts from the distinguished European anti-corruption group U4 wrote ,

The literature makes clear that the revolving door process is a source of valuable political connections for private firms. But it generates corruption risks and has strong distortionary effects on the economy , especially when this power is concentrated within a few firms.

The ongoing parade of people transiting the revolving door from industry to the Trump administration once again suggests how the revolving door may enable certain of those with private vested interests to have excess influence, way beyond that of ordinary citizens, on how the government works, and that the country is still increasingly being run by a cozy group of insiders with ties to both government and industry. This has been termed crony capitalism.

Poses is, of course, correct. (Personally, I've contained my aghastitude on Azar, because I remember quite well how Liz Fowler transitioned from Wellpoint to being Max Baucus's chief of staff when ObamaCare was being drafted to a job in Big Pharma , and I remember quite well the deal with Big Pharma Obama cut, which eliminated the public option , not that the public option was anything other than a decreasingly gaudy "progressive" bauble in the first place.)

In this post, I'd like to add two additional factors to our consideration of Azar. The first: Democrat credentialism makes it hard for them to oppose Azar. The second: The real damage Azar could do is on the regulatory side.[1]

First, Democrat credentialism. Here is one effusive encomium on Azar. From USA Today, "Who is Alex Azar? Former drugmaker CEO and HHS official nominated to head agency" :

"I am glad to hear that you have worked hard, and brought fair-minded legal analysis to the department," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said at Azar's last confirmation hearing.

And:

Andy Slavitt, who ran the Affordable Care Act and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the Obama administration, said he has reason to hope Azar would be a good secretary.

"He is familiar with the high quality of the HHS staff, has real-world experience enough to be pragmatic, and will hopefully avoid repeating the mistakes of his predecessor," Slavitt said.

So, if Democrats are saying Azar is "fair-minded" and "pragmatic" -- and heaven forfend that the word "corruption"[2] even be mentioned -- how do they oppose him, even he's viscerally opposed to everything Democrats supposedly stand for? (Democrats do this with judicial nominations, too.) Azar may be a fox, alright, but the chickens he's supposedly guarding are all clucking about how impeccable his qualifications are!

Second, let's briefly look at Azar's bio. Let me excerpt salient detail from USA Today :

1. Azar clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia .

2. Azar went to work for his mentor, Ken Starr , who was heading the independent counsel investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton's Whitewater land deal.

3. Azar had a significant role in another major political controversy when the outcome of the 2000 presidential election hinged on a recount in Florida . Azar was on the Bush team of lawyers whose side ultimately prevailed [3]

For any Democrat with a memory, that bio provokes one of those "You shall know them by the trail of the dead" moments. And then there's this:

When Leavitt replaced Thompson in 2005 and Azar became his deputy, Leavitt delegated a lot of the rule-making process to Azar.

So, a liberal Democrat might classify Azar as a smooth-talking reactionary thug with a terrible record and the most vile mentors imaginable, and on top of it all, he's an effective bureaucratic fixer. What could the Trump Administration possibly see in such a person? Former (Republican) HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt explains:

"Understanding the administrative rule process in the circumstance we're in today could be extraordinarily important because a lot of the change in the health care system, given the fact that they've not succeeded legislatively, could come administratively."

We outlined the administration strategy on health care in "Trump Adminstration Doubles Down on Efforts to Crapify the Entire Health Care System (Unless You're Rich, of Course)" . There are three prongs:

1) Administratively, send ObamaCare into a death spiral by sabotaging it

2) Legislatively, gut Medicaid as part of the "tax refom" package in Congress

3) Through executive order, eliminate "essential health benefits" through "association health plans"

As a sidebar, it's interesting to see that although this do-list is strategically and ideologically coherent -- basically, your ability to access health care will be directly dependent on your ability to pay -- it's institutionally incoherent, a bizarre contraption screwed together out of legislation, regulations, and an Executive order. Of course, this incoherence mirrors to Rube Goldberg structure of ObamaCare itself, itself a bizarre contraption, especially when compared to the simple, rugged, and proven single payer system. ( Everything Obama did with regulations and executive orders, Trump can undo, with new regulations and new executive orders . We might compare ObamaCare to a child born with no immune system, that could only have survived within the liberal bubble within which it was created; in the real world, it's not surprising that it's succumbing to opportunistic infections.[2])

On #1, The administration has, despite its best efforts, not achieved a controlled flight into terrain with ObamaCare; enrollment is up. On #2, the administration and its Congressional allies are still dickering with tax reform. And on #3 . That looks looks like a job for Alex Azar, since both essential health benefits and association health plans are significantly affected by regulation.

So, yes, there are worse scenarios than the revolving door; it's what you leave behind you as the door revolves that matters. It would be lovely if there were a good old-fashioned confirmation battle over Azar, but, as I've pointed out, the Democrats have tied their own hands. Ideally, the Democrats would junk the Rube Goldberg device that is ObamaCare, rendering all of Azar's regulatory expertise null and void, but that doesn't seem likely, given that they seem to be doing everything possible to avoid serious discussion of policy in 2018 and 2020.

NOTES

[1] I'm leaving aside what will no doubt be the 2018 or even 2020 issue of drug prices, since for me that's subsumed under the issue of single payer. If we look only at Azar's history in business, real price decreases seem unlikely. Business Insider :

Over the 10-year period when Azar was at Lilly, the price of insulin notched a three-fold increase. It wasn't just Lilly's insulin product, called Humalog. The price of a rival made by Novo Nordisk has also climbed, with the two rising in such lockstep that you can barely see both trend lines below.

The gains came despite the fact that the insulin, which as a medication has an almost-century-long history, hasn't really changed since it was first approved.

Nice business to be in, eh? Here's that chart:

It's almost like Lilly (Azar's firm) and Novo Nordisk are working together, isn't it?

[2] Anyhow, as of the 2016 Clinton campaign , the Democrat standard -- not that of Poses, nor mine -- is that if there's no quid pro quo, there's no corruption.

[3] And, curiously, "[HHS head Tommy] Thompson said HHS was in the eye of the storm after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and Azar had an important role in responding to the resulting public health challenges, as well as the subsequent anthrax attacks "

MedicalQuack , November 15, 2017 at 10:31 am

Oh please, stop quoting Andy Slavitt, the United Healthcare Ingenix algo man. That guy is the biggest crook that made his money early on with RX discounts with his company that he and Senator Warren's daughter, Amelia sold to United Healthcare. He's out there trying to do his own reputation restore routine. Go back to 2009 and read about the short paying of MDs by Ingenix, which is now Optum Insights, he was the CEO and remember it was just around 3 years ago or so he sat there quarterly with United CEO Hemsley at those quarterly meetings. Look him up, wants 40k to speak and he puts the perception out there he does this for free, not so.

diptherio , November 15, 2017 at 11:25 am

I think you're missing the context. Lambert is quoting him by way of showing that the sleazy establishment types are just fine with him. Thanks for the extra background on that particular swamp-dweller, though.

a different chris , November 15, 2017 at 2:01 pm

Not just the context, it's a quote in a quote. Does make me think Slavitt must be a real piece of work to send MQ so far off his rails

petal , November 15, 2017 at 12:52 pm

Alex Azar is a Dartmouth grad (Gov't & Economics '88) just like Jeff Immelt (Applied Math & Economics '78). So much damage to society from such a small department!

sgt_doom , November 15, 2017 at 1:21 pm

Nice one, petal !!!

Really, all I need to know about the Trumpster Administration:

From Rothschild to . . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Ross

Since 2014, Ross has been the vice-chairman of the board of Bank of Cyprus PCL, the largest bank in Cyprus.

He served under U.S. President Bill Clinton on the board of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund. Later, under New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ross served as the Mayor's privatization advisor.

Jen , November 15, 2017 at 7:56 pm

Or from a "small liberal arts college" (which is a university in all but name, because alumni).

Tim Geitner ('82 – Goverment)
Hank Paulson ('68 – English)

jo6pac , November 15, 2017 at 2:13 pm

Well it's never ending game in the beltway and we serfs aren't in it.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/15/trump-adds-to-washingtons-swamp/

Alfred , November 15, 2017 at 2:53 pm

I don't believe that the President's "swamp" ever consisted of crooked officials, lobbyists, and cronies I think it has always consisted of those regulators who tried sincerely to defend public interests.

It was in the sticky work of those good bureaucrats that the projects of capitalists and speculators bogged down. It is against their efforts that the pickup-driving cohort of Trump_vs_deep_state (with their Gadsden flag decals) relentlessly rails.

Trump has made much progress in draining the regulatory swamp (if indeed that is the right way to identify it), and no doubt will make considerably more as time wears on, leaving America high and dry. The kind of prevaricator Trump is may simply be the one who fails to define his terms.

Henry Moon Pie , November 15, 2017 at 4:13 pm

I think we've moved past the revolving door. We hear members of the United States Senate publicly voice their concerns about what will happen if they fail to do their employers' bidding (and I'm not talking about "the public" here). In the bureaucracy, political appointees keep accruing more and more power even as they make it clearer and clearer that they work for "the donors" and not the people. Nowhere is this more true than the locus through which passes most of the money: the Pentagon. The fact that these beribboned heroes are, in fact, setting war policy on their own makes the knowledge that they serve Raytheon and Exxon rather than Americans very, very troubling.

I suspect Azar's perception is that he is just moving from one post to another within the same company.

Watt4Bob , November 15, 2017 at 5:28 pm

Perfect cartoon over at Truthout

I'm amazed there is enough private security available on this planet to keep these guys safe.

Larry , November 15, 2017 at 8:01 pm

Big pharma indeed has so much defense from the supposed left. It combines their faith in technological progress, elite institutions, and tugs on the heart strings with technology that can save people from a fate of ill health or premature death. Of course, the aspect of the laws being written to line the pockets of corrupt executives is glossed over. While drug prices and medical costs spiral ever higher, our overall longevity and national health in the US declines. That speaks volumes about what Democrats really care about.

[Apr 27, 2017] Elizabeth Warren on Big Banks and Their (Cozy Bedmate) Regulators

Notable quotes:
"... "Regulatory failure has been built into the system," Ms. Warren said in our interview. "The regulators routinely hear from the banks. They hear from those who have billions of dollars at stake. But they don't hear from the millions of people across this country who will be deeply affected by the decisions they make." ..."
"... There was a time when everything that went through Washington got measured by whether it created more opportunities for the middle class," Ms. Warren said. "Now, the people with money and power have figured out how to invest millions of dollars in Washington and get rules that yield billions of dollars for themselves. ..."
"... "Government," she added, "increasingly works for those at the top." ..."
Apr 27, 2017 | www.nytimes.com

Wells Fargo's board and management are scheduled to meet shareholders at the company's annual meeting Tuesday in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. With the phony account-opening scandal still making headlines, and the company's stock underperforming its peers, it's a good bet the bank's brass will have some explaining to do.

How could such pernicious practices at the bank be allowed for so long? Why didn't the board do more to stop the scheme or the incentive programs that encouraged it? And where, oh where, were the regulators?

Wells Fargo's management has conceded making multiple mistakes over many years; it also says it has learned from them. In a meeting this week with reporters at The New York Times, Timothy J. Sloan, Wells Fargo's chief executive, said the bank had made substantive changes to its structure and culture to ensure that dubious practices won't take hold again.

But there's a deeper explanation for why Wells Fargo's corrosive sales practices came about and continued for years. And it has everything to do with the bank-friendly regulatory regime in Washington and the immense sway that institutions like Wells Fargo have there. This poisonous combination contributes to a sense among giant banking institutions that they answer to no one.

  • "This Fight Is Our Fight" contains juicy but depressing anecdotes about how our most trusted institutions have let us down. It also shows why, years after the financial crisis, big banks are still large, in charge and, basically, unaccountable for their actions.

    "In too many of these organizations, there are rewards for cheating and punishments for calling out the cheaters," Ms. Warren said in an interview Wednesday. "As long as that's the case, the biggest financial institutions will continue to put their customers and the economy at risk."

    Ms. Warren's no-nonsense views are bracing. But they are also informed by a thorough understanding of how dysfunctional Washington now is. This failure has cost Main Street dearly, she said, but has benefited the powerful.

    Wells Fargo got a lot of criticism from Ms. Warren, both in her book and in my interview - and on live television during the Senate Banking Committee hearing on the account-opening mess in September. She was among the harshest cross-examiners encountered by John G. Stumpf, who was Wells Fargo's chief executive at the time. "You should resign," she told him, "and you should be criminally investigated." (Mr. Stumpf retired the next month.)

    This week, Ms. Warren called for the ouster of the company's directors and a criminal inquiry into the bank.

    "Yes, the board should be removed, but that's not enough," she told me. "There still needs to be a criminal investigation. The expertise is in the regulatory agencies, but the power to prosecute lies mostly with the Justice Department, and if they don't have either the energy or the talent - or the backbone - to go after the big banks, then there will never be any real accountability."

    Banks are not the only targets in Ms. Warren's book. Others include Wal-Mart, for its treatment of employees; for-profit education companies, for the way they pile debt on unsuspecting students; the Chamber of Commerce, for battling Main Street; and prestigious think tanks, for their undisclosed conflicts of interest.

    My favorite moments in the book involve the phenomenon of regulatory capture: the pernicious condition in which institutions that are supposed to police the nation's financial behemoths actually come to view them as clients or pals.

    One telling moment took place in 2005, when Ms. Warren, then a Harvard law professor, was invited to address the staff at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a top regulator charged with monitoring the activities of big banks.

    She was thrilled by the invitation, she recalled in the book. After years of tracking various problems consumers experienced with their banks - predatory lending, sky-high interest rates and dubious fees - Ms. Warren felt that, finally, she'd be able to persuade the regulators to crack down.

    Her host for the meeting was Julie L. Williams, then the acting comptroller of the currency. In a conference room filled with economists and bank supervisors, Ms. Warren presented her findings: Banks were tricking and cheating their consumers.

    After the meeting ended and Ms. Williams was escorting her guest to the elevator, she told Ms. Warren that she had made a "compelling case," Ms. Warren writes. When she pushed Ms. Williams to have her agency do something about the dubious practices, the regulator balked.

    "No, we just can't do that," Ms. Williams said, according to the book. "The banks wouldn't like it."

    Ms. Warren was not invited back.

    Ms. Williams left the agency in 2012 and is a managing director at Promontory, a regulatory-compliance consulting firm specializing in the financial services industry. When I asked about her conversation with Ms. Warren, she said she had a different recollection.

    "I told her I agreed with her concerns," Ms. Williams wrote in an email, "but when I said, 'We just can't do that,' I explained that was because the Comptroller's office did not have jurisdiction to adopt rules to ban the practice. I told her this was the Federal Reserve Board's purview."
    Interestingly, though, Ms. Warren's take on regulatory capture at the agency was substantiated in a damning report on its supervision of Wells Fargo, published by a unit of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Wednesday.

    The report cited a raft of agency oversight breakdowns regarding Wells Fargo. Among them was its failure to follow up on a slew of consumer and employee complaints beginning in early 2010. There was no evidence, the report said, that agency examiners "required the bank to provide an analysis of the risks and controls, or investigated these issues further to identify the root cause and the appropriate supervisory actions needed."

    Neither did the agency document the bank's resolution of whistle-blower complaints, the report said, or conduct in-depth reviews and tests of the bank's controls in this area "at least from 2011 through 2014." (The agency recently removed its top Wells Fargo examiner, Bradley Linskens, from his job running a staff of 60 overseeing the bank.)

    "Regulatory failure has been built into the system," Ms. Warren said in our interview. "The regulators routinely hear from the banks. They hear from those who have billions of dollars at stake. But they don't hear from the millions of people across this country who will be deeply affected by the decisions they make."

    This is why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plays such a crucial role, she said. The agency allows consumers to sound off about their financial experiences, and their complaints provide a heat map for regulators to identify and pursue wrongdoing.

    But this setup has also made the bureau a target for evisceration by bank-centric politicians.

    "There was a time when everything that went through Washington got measured by whether it created more opportunities for the middle class," Ms. Warren said. "Now, the people with money and power have figured out how to invest millions of dollars in Washington and get rules that yield billions of dollars for themselves."

    "Government," she added, "increasingly works for those at the top."

  • [Apr 21, 2017] Elizabeth Warren on Big Banks and Their (Cozy Bedmate) Regulators - The New York Times

    Apr 21, 2017 | www.nytimes.com

    Wells Fargo 's board and management are scheduled to meet shareholders at the company's annual meeting Tuesday in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. With the phony account-opening scandal still making headlines , and the company's stock underperforming its peers, it's a good bet the bank's brass will have some explaining to do.

    How could such pernicious practices at the bank be allowed for so long? Why didn't the board do more to stop the scheme or the incentive programs that encouraged it? And where, oh where, were the regulators?

    Wells Fargo's management has conceded making multiple mistakes over many years; it also says it has learned from them. In a meeting this week with reporters at The New York Times, Timothy J. Sloan, Wells Fargo's chief executive, said the bank had made substantive changes to its structure and culture to ensure that dubious practices won't take hold again.

    But there's a deeper explanation for why Wells Fargo's corrosive sales practices came about and continued for years. And it has everything to do with the bank-friendly regulatory regime in Washington and the immense sway that institutions like Wells Fargo have there. This poisonous combination contributes to a sense among giant banking institutions that they answer to no one.

    Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story

    The capture of our regulatory and political system by big and powerful corporations is real. And it is a central and disturbing theme in the new book by Senator Elizabeth Warren , Democrat of Massachusetts.

    Advertisement Continue reading the main story

    "This Fight Is Our Fight" contains juicy but depressing anecdotes about how our most trusted institutions have let us down. It also shows why, years after the financial crisis, big banks are still large, in charge and, basically, unaccountable for their actions.

    "In too many of these organizations, there are rewards for cheating and punishments for calling out the cheaters," Ms. Warren said in an interview Wednesday. "As long as that's the case, the biggest financial institutions will continue to put their customers and the economy at risk."

    Ms. Warren's no-nonsense views are bracing. But they are also informed by a thorough understanding of how dysfunctional Washington now is. This failure has cost Main Street dearly, she said, but has benefited the powerful.

    Wells Fargo got a lot of criticism from Ms. Warren, both in her book and in my interview - and on live television during the Senate Banking Committee hearing on the account-opening mess in September. She was among the harshest cross-examiners encountered by John G. Stumpf, who was Wells Fargo's chief executive at the time. "You should resign," she told him , "and you should be criminally investigated." (Mr. Stumpf retired the next month.)

    This week, Ms. Warren called for the ouster of the company's directors and a criminal inquiry into the bank.

    "Yes, the board should be removed, but that's not enough," she told me. "There still needs to be a criminal investigation. The expertise is in the regulatory agencies, but the power to prosecute lies mostly with the Justice Department, and if they don't have either the energy or the talent - or the backbone - to go after the big banks, then there will never be any real accountability."

    Banks are not the only targets in Ms. Warren's book. Others include Wal-Mart, for its treatment of employees; for-profit education companies, for the way they pile debt on unsuspecting students; the Chamber of Commerce, for battling Main Street; and prestigious think tanks, for their undisclosed conflicts of interest.

    My favorite moments in the book involve the phenomenon of regulatory capture: the pernicious condition in which institutions that are supposed to police the nation's financial behemoths actually come to view them as clients or pals.

    Photo

    One telling moment took place in 2005, when Ms. Warren, then a Harvard law professor, was invited to address the staff at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a top regulator charged with monitoring the activities of big banks.

    Advertisement Continue reading the main story

    She was thrilled by the invitation, she recalled in the book. After years of tracking various problems consumers experienced with their banks - predatory lending, sky-high interest rates and dubious fees - Ms. Warren felt that, finally, she'd be able to persuade the regulators to crack down.

    Her host for the meeting was Julie L. Williams, then the acting comptroller of the currency. In a conference room filled with economists and bank supervisors, Ms. Warren presented her findings: Banks were tricking and cheating their consumers.

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    After the meeting ended and Ms. Williams was escorting her guest to the elevator, she told Ms. Warren that she had made a "compelling case," Ms. Warren writes. When she pushed Ms. Williams to have her agency do something about the dubious practices, the regulator balked.

    "No, we just can't do that," Ms. Williams said, according to the book. "The banks wouldn't like it."

    Ms. Warren was not invited back.

    Ms. Williams left the agency in 2012 and is a managing director at Promontory , a regulatory-compliance consulting firm specializing in the financial services industry. When I asked about her conversation with Ms. Warren, she said she had a different recollection.

    "I told her I agreed with her concerns," Ms. Williams wrote in an email, "but when I said, 'We just can't do that,' I explained that was because the Comptroller's office did not have jurisdiction to adopt rules to ban the practice. I told her this was the Federal Reserve Board's purview."

    Interestingly, though, Ms. Warren's take on regulatory capture at the agency was substantiated in a damning report on its supervision of Wells Fargo, published by a unit of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Wednesday.

    The report cited a raft of agency oversight breakdowns regarding Wells Fargo. Among them was its failure to follow up on a slew of consumer and employee complaints beginning in early 2010. There was no evidence, the report said, that agency examiners "required the bank to provide an analysis of the risks and controls, or investigated these issues further to identify the root cause and the appropriate supervisory actions needed."

    Advertisement Continue reading the main story

    Neither did the agency document the bank's resolution of whistle-blower complaints, the report said, or conduct in-depth reviews and tests of the bank's controls in this area "at least from 2011 through 2014." ( The agency recently removed its top Wells Fargo examiner, Bradley Linskens, from his job running a staff of 60 overseeing the bank.)

    "Regulatory failure has been built into the system," Ms. Warren said in our interview. "The regulators routinely hear from the banks. They hear from those who have billions of dollars at stake. But they don't hear from the millions of people across this country who will be deeply affected by the decisions they make."

    This is why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plays such a crucial role, she said. The agency allows consumers to sound off about their financial experiences, and their complaints provide a heat map for regulators to identify and pursue wrongdoing.

    But this setup has also made the bureau a target for evisceration by bank-centric politicians.

    "There was a time when everything that went through Washington got measured by whether it created more opportunities for the middle class," Ms. Warren said. "Now, the people with money and power have figured out how to invest millions of dollars in Washington and get rules that yield billions of dollars for themselves."

    "Government," she added, "increasingly works for those at the top."

    [Apr 06, 2017] Richmond Fed's Jeffrey Lacker Departs Due to Leak Defenestration as Coverup

    Apr 06, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
    From a trading perspective, the big news was at the top: "The minutes will show it will be unlikely that the labor market improvement will be substantial enough to stave off new Treasury purchases into 2013." And in the sixth paragraph it describes how the Fed was likely to vote as early as December to stop the part of its MBS buying designed to counter the bonds being paid off (due to foreclosures, home sales, refis) and buy roughly $45 billion a month of Treasuries instead.

    The amount of granular detail was stunning. For instance:

    The committee will attach a predictive timetable outlining the duration of these purchases The monthly MBS purchases of around $40 billion will continue along side the new program Tomorrow's minutes will reference a staff paper The minutes will show the dovish majority was ready .[to make] open ended MBS and Treasury purchases as early as last month.

    This is so specific that it comes of as if Medley either got its hands on an advance draft of the FOMC minutes or someone read it to her.

    The report also describes, again in depth, how the decision process prior to the September meeting departed from established norms as well as voyeristic tidbits, such as that finalizing the text of the policy recommendations kept staffers up until after midnight.

    Given how extraordinarily revealing this note was, Lacker's departure is unsatisfactory. Specifically:

    Either Lacker lied or the investigators aren't even close to getting to the bottom of this . Lacker has admitted only to taking a call from the Medley analyst, supposedly having her run insider detail by him, and indirectly confirming it by not getting off the phone. From his resignation letter, which was released by law firm McGuireWoods, not the Richmond Fed:

    During that October 2, 2012 discussion, the [Medley] Analyst introduced into the conversation an important non-public detail about one of the policy options considered by participants prior to the meeting. Due to the highly confidential and sensitive nature of this information, I should have declined to comment and perhaps have ended the phone call. Instead, I did not refuse or express my inability to comment and the interview continued. Additionally, after that phone call, I did not, as required by the Information Security Policy, report to any FOMC personnel that the Analyst was in possession of confidential FOMC information. When Medley published a report by the Analyst the following day, October 3, 2012, it contained this important detail about one of the policy options and I realized that my failure to decline comment on the information could have been taken by the Analyst, in the context of the conversation, as an acknowledgment or confirmation of the information.

    This reads like the equivalent of a plea bargain, that Lacker and his lawyers negotiated him to 'fess up to the most minimal breach possible provided he resign.

    Alternatively, if Lacker is being truthful, it means that one or more additional people provided the information to the Medley analyst, Regina Schleiger.

    [Apr 04, 2017] Lack Hawk Down

    Apr 04, 2017 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    The Richmond Fed's noted rate hawk and serial dissenter Jeffrey Lacker resigned today as a result of an investigation into a leak in 2012 of confidential information to an analyst that sells hard to get information to wealthy subscribers.

    The guest commentators, talking heads, and spokesmodels were attributing this resignation, or faux pas if you will, to an inadvertent slip by one of their own who is burdened with managing the finances of the US.

    They kept mentioning that they do not wish this incident to diminish the public's confidence in the FED. I guess fomenting serial asset bubbles and enabling historic financial inequality through hare-brained policies is not enough. LOL

    [Apr 04, 2017] Richmond Fed president, Jeff Lacker Quits Today After Improper Disclosure of QE to analyst at firm selling research to hedge funds

    Apr 04, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
    BenIsNotYoda April 04, 2017 at 10:25 AM
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-04/fed-s-lacker-quits-today-after-improper-disclosure-ny-times

    Fed's Lacker Quits Today After Improper Disclosure: NY Times
    Richmond Fed president, Jeff Lacker, says he is resigning effective today after improperly disclosing confidential Fed information, NY Times said in tweet.

    Fed President involved in disclosing future QE to analyst at firm selling research to hedge funds.

    In other places, this is called insider information. At the Fed? I am shocked there is gambling at this establishment.

    We need to clean house at the Fed. Starting at the top.

    BenIsNotYoda , April 04, 2017 at 10:41 AM
    Statement Of Dr. Jeffrey Lacker

    During the past 13 years it has been my privilege to serve as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. It has also been an honor to contribute to the development of our nation's monetary policy as a member of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee ("FOMC").

    While transparency of the monetary policy process is important, equally important are the confidentiality policies that protect the internal deliberations of the FOMC and ensure the integrity of our financial markets. The Federal Reserve's confidentiality policies seek to guide participants in maintaining the balance between transparency and confidentiality. The FOMC has had in place for many years two specific policies relating to confidentiality. the FOMC Policy on External Communications of Committee Participants (the "External Communications Policy-) and the Program for Security of FOMC Information (the "Information Security Policy").

    In 2012, my conduct was inconsistent with those important confidentiality policies. Specifically, on October 2, 2012, I spoke by phone with an analyst ("the Analyst") concerning the September 2012 meeting of the FOMC. The Analyst authors reports on Federal Reserve matters on behalf of Medley Global Advisors ("Medley'). Medley publishes macro-economic policy intelligence for institutions such as hedge funds and asset managers and is owned by the Financial Times Limited.

    During that October 2, 2012 discussion, the Analyst introduced into the conversation an important non-public detail about one of the policy options considered by participants prior to the meeting. Due to the highly confidential and sensitive nature of this information, I should have declined to comment and perhaps have ended the phone call. Instead, I did not refuse or express my inability to comment and the interview continued. Additionally, after that phone call I did not, as required by the Information Security Policy, report to any FOMC personnel that the Analyst was in possession of confidential FOMC information. When Medley published a report by the Analyst the following day, October 3, 2012, it contained this important detail about one of the policy options and I realized that my failure to decline comment on the information could have been taken by the Analyst, in the context of the conversation, as an acknowledgment or confirmation of the information.

    I deeply regret the role I may have played in confirming this confidential information and in its dissemination to Medley's subscribers. In this episode, as in all of my communications with analysts, journalists and the public, it was never my intention to reveal confidential information. I further acknowledge that through this and other conversations with the Analyst, I may have contravened the External Communications Policy, which prohibits providing any profit-making person or organization with a prestige advantage over its competitors.

    Following these events, I was interviewed on December 10, 2012, as part of an internal review conducted by the General Counsel of the FOMC. In advance of that interview, on December 6, 2012, I provided written responses to a questionnaire issued by the General Counsel seeking, among other things, all relevant information regarding my communications with the Analyst. Althoug it was my intention to cooperate fully with the internal review, I regret that I did not disclose to the General Counsel, either in my December 6, 2012 questionnaire or the December 10, 2012 interview, that the Analyst was in possession of confidential information during my conversation with her on October 2,2012.

    In 2015, I was interviewed again as part of a separate investigation conducted by the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the Office of the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In this subsequent 2015 interview with law enforcement officials, I did disclose that the Analyst was in possession of confidential information during my October 2. 2012 conversation with her.

    I apologize to my colleagues and to the public I have been privileged to serve. I have always strived to maintain the appropriate balance between transparency and confidentiality, but I regret that in this instance I crossed the line to confirming information that should have remained confidential. I previously announced my intention to retire as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in October 2017, and in light of these matters I have decided to make my departure from the Federal Reserve effective today.

    libezkova , April 04, 2017 at 11:26 AM
    "Fed President involved in disclosing future QE to analyst at firm selling research to hedge funds."

    "I am shocked there is gambling at this establishment."

    That's good -- Thank you --

    Now let me wear Anne hat :-). The proper quote is "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! "

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/quotes?ref_=tt_ql_trv_4

    == quote ==
    Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

    Captain Renault:
    I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
    [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

    Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

    Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.

    [aloud]

    Captain Renault: Everybody out at once!

    [Mar 09, 2017] DrDick

    Mar 09, 2017 | profile.typepad.com
    said... The ProMarket piece is interesting, but really misses the point. "Regulation" in itself is not what matters, but rather what kinds of regulations and how they work. Some regulations, favored by the industries themselves (like taxi licensing in most metropolitan areas) tend to act to reduce competition and enhance company profits. Others, like the background checks mentioned in the article, serve to protect the public interest. Reply Thursday, March 09, 2017 at 07:42 AM Youarecorrect said in reply to DrDick ... You are correct to point out that a catchall phrase like regulation disguises many intentions. But there is a tension between motivations of regulation. A regulation that is supposed to increase reliability (e.g. vetting of entrants), can be essentially a rent seeking tool in disguise. That's the point of the ProMarket article. Reply Thursday, March 09, 2017 at 11:27 AM DrDick said in reply to Youarecorrect... This is really a question of looking at who is proposing or favoring the regulation and how it is structured and thus whose interests are being protected. If it is coming from established businesses, it is about rent seeking. Reply Thursday, March 09, 2017 at 01:53 PM

    [Feb 20, 2017] Problems of asymmetry in regulation: People who especially benefit from a particular regulation will be inclined to lobby or bribe government officials for it

    Feb 20, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com

    Richard H. Serlin : February 18, 2017 at 07:51 PM

    "Mr. Friedman underscored problems of asymmetry in regulation: People who especially benefit from a particular regulation will be inclined to lobby or bribe government officials for it. On the other hand, members of the general public, who might suffer from such regulations, will not be attentive to the many rules that affect them, each in a small way." -- Shiller article

    This is the same Milton Friedman who assumed people had perfect information and expertise on everything in the market. They were all electrical engineers who knew the exact schematics of every toaster and refrigerator to know if it would burn down their house, but they had no idea what any government regulations or policies were -- Hey, it's ok, and so scientific, to just assume anything you want about human beings, as long as there's lots of math and internal consistency and microfoundations -- And, of course, it makes libertarianism look better.

    [Dec 27, 2016] Class Struggle In The USA

    Notable quotes:
    "... Rich individuals (who are willing to be interviewed) also express concern about inequality but generally oppose using higher taxes on the rich to fight it. Scheiber is very willing to bluntly state his guess (and everyone's) that candidates are eager to please the rich, because they spend much of their time begging the rich for contributions. ..."
    "... Of course another way to reduce inequality is to raise wages. Buried way down around paragraph 9 I found this gem: "Forty percent of the wealthy, versus 78 percent of the public, said the government should make the minimum wage "high enough so that no family with a full-time worker falls below the official poverty line." ..."
    "... The current foundational rules embedded in tax law, intellectual property law, corporate construction law, and other elements of our legal and regulatory system result in distributions that favor those with capital or in a position to seek rents. This isn't a situation that calls for a Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. It is more a question of how elites have rigged the system to work primarily for them. ..."
    "... the problem is incomes and demand, and the first and best answer for creating demand for workers and higher wages to compete for those workers is full employment. ..."
    "... if you are proposing raising taxes on the rich SO THAT you can cut taxes on the non rich you are simply proposing theft. ..."
    "... what we are looking at here is simple old fashioned greed just as stupid and ugly among the "non rich" as it is among the rich. ..."
    "... you play into the hands of the Petersons who want to "cut taxes" and leave the poor elderly to die on the streets, and the poor non-elderly to spend their lives in anxiety and fear-driven greed trying to provide against desperate poverty in old age absent any reliable security for their savings.) ..."
    "... made by the ayn rand faithful. it is wearisome. ..."
    "... The only cure for organized greed is organized labor. ..."
    "... A typical voice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues" ..."
    Mar 29, 2015 | Angry Bear

    Noam Scheiber has a hard hitting article on the front page of www.nytimes.com "2016 Candidates and Wealthy Are Aligned on Inequality"

    The content should be familiar to AngryBear readers. A majority of Americans are alarmed by high and increasing inequality and support government action to reduce inequality. However, none of the important 2016 candidates has expressed any willingness to raise taxes on the rich. The Republicans want to cut them and Clinton (and a spokesperson) dodge the question.

    Rich individuals (who are willing to be interviewed) also express concern about inequality but generally oppose using higher taxes on the rich to fight it. Scheiber is very willing to bluntly state his guess (and everyone's) that candidates are eager to please the rich, because they spend much of their time begging the rich for contributions.

    No suprise to anyone who has been paying attention except for the fact that it is on the front page of www.nytimes.com and the article is printed in the business section not the opinion section. Do click the link - it is brief, to the point, solid, alarming and a must read.

    I clicked one of the links and found weaker evidence than I expected for Scheiber's view (which of course I share

    "By contrast, more than half of Americans and three-quarters of Democrats believe the "government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich," according to a Gallup poll of about 1,000 adults in April 2013."

    It is a small majority 52% favor and 47% oppose. This 52 % is noticeably smaller than the solid majorities who have been telling Gallup that high income individuals pay less than their fair share of taxes (click and search for Gallup on the page).

    I guess this isn't really surprising - the word "heavy" is heavy maaaan and "redistribute" evokes the dreaded welfare (and conservatives have devoted gigantic effort to giving it pejorative connotations). The 52% majority is remarkable given the phrasing of the question. But it isn't enough to win elections, since it is 52% of adults which corresponds to well under 52% of actual voters.

    My reading is that it is important for egalitarians to stress the tax cuts for the non rich and that higher taxes on the rich are, unfortunately, necessary if we are to have lower taxes on the non rich without huge budget deficits. This is exactly Obama's approach.

    Comments (87)

    Jerry Critter

    March 29, 2015 10:40 pm

    Get rid of tax breaks that only the wealthy can take advantage of and perhaps everyone will pay their fair share. The same goes for corporations.

    amateur socialist

    March 30, 2015 11:42 am

    Of course another way to reduce inequality is to raise wages. Buried way down around paragraph 9 I found this gem: "Forty percent of the wealthy, versus 78 percent of the public, said the government should make the minimum wage "high enough so that no family with a full-time worker falls below the official poverty line."

    I'm fine with raising people's taxes by increasing their wages. A story I heard on NPR recently indicated that a single person needs to make about $17-19 an hour to cover most basic necessities nowadays (the story went on to say that most people in that situation are working 2 or more jobs to get enough income, a "solution" that creates more problems with health/stress etc.). A full time worker supporting kids needs more than $20.

    You double the minimum wage and strengthen people's rights to organize union representation. Tax revenues go up (including SS contributions btw) and we add significant growth to the economy with the increased purchasing power of workers. People can go back to working 40-50 hours a week and cut back on moonlighting which creates new job opportunities for the younger folks decimated by this so called recovery.

    Win Win Win Win. And the poor overburdened millionaires don't have to have their poor tax fee fees hurt.

    Mark Jamison, March 30, 2015 8:09 pm

    How about if we get rid of the "re" and call it what it is "distribution". The current foundational rules embedded in tax law, intellectual property law, corporate construction law, and other elements of our legal and regulatory system result in distributions that favor those with capital or in a position to seek rents.

    This isn't a situation that calls for a Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. It is more a question of how elites have rigged the system to work primarily for them. Democrats cede the rhetoric to the Right when they allow the discussion to be about redistribution. Even talk of inequality without reference to the basic legal constructs that are rigged to create slanted outcomes tend to accepted premises that are in and of themselves false.

    The issue shouldn't be rejiggering things after the the initial distribution but creating a system with basic rules that level the opportunity playing field.

    coberly, March 30, 2015 11:03 pm

    Thank You Mark Jamison!

    An elegant, informed writer who says it better than I can.

    But here is how I would say it:

    Addressing "inequality" by "tax the rich" is the wrong answer and a political loser.

    Address inequality by re-criminalizing the criminal practices of the criminal rich. Address inequality by creating well paying jobs with government jobs if necessary (and there is necessary work to be done by the government), with government protection for unions, with government policies that make it less profitable to off shore

    etc. the direction to take is to make the economy more fair . actually more "free" though you'll never get the free enterprise fundamentalists to admit that's what it is. You WILL get the honest rich on your side. They don't like being robbed any more than you do.

    But you will not, in America, get even poor people to vote to "take from the rich to give to the poor." It has something to do with the "story" Americans have been telling themselves since 1776. A story heard round the world.

    That said, there is nothing wrong with raising taxes on the rich to pay for the government THEY need as well as you. But don't raise taxes to give the money to the poor. They won't do it, and even the poor don't want it except as a last resort, which we hope we are not at yet.

    urban legend, March 31, 2015 2:07 am

    Coberly, you are dead-on. Right now, taxation is the least issue. Listen to Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker: the problem is incomes and demand, and the first and best answer for creating demand for workers and higher wages to compete for those workers is full employment. Minimum wage will help at the margins to push incomes up, and it's the easiest initial legislative sell, but the public will support policies - mainly big-big infrastructure modernization in a country that has neglected its infrastructure for a generation - that signal a firm commitment to full employment.

    It's laying right there for the Democrats to pick it up. Will they? Having policies that are traditional Democratic policies will not do the job. For believability - for convincing voters they actually have a handle on what has been wrong and how to fix it - they need to have a story for why we have seem unable to generate enough jobs for over a decade. The neglect of infrastructure - the unfilled millions of jobs that should have gone to keeping it up to date and up to major-country standards - should be a big part of that story. Trade and manufacturing, to be sure, is the other big element that will connect with voters. Many Democrats (including you know who) are severely compromised on trade, but they need to find a way to come own on the right side with the voters.

    coberly, March 31, 2015 10:52 am

    Robert

    i wish you'd give some thought to the other comments on this post.

    if you are proposing raising taxes on the rich SO THAT you can cut taxes on the non rich you are simply proposing theft. if you were proposing raising taxes on the rich to provide reasonable welfare to those who need it you would be asking the rich to contribute to the strength of their own country and ultimately their own wealth.

    i hope you can see the difference.

    it is especially irritating to me because many of the "non rich" who want their taxes cut make more than twice as much as i do. what we are looking at here is simple old fashioned greed just as stupid and ugly among the "non rich" as it is among the rich.

    "the poor" in this country do not pay a significant amount of taxes (Social Security and Medicare are not "taxes," merely an efficient way for us to pay for our own direct needs . as long as you call them taxes you play into the hands of the Petersons who want to "cut taxes" and leave the poor elderly to die on the streets, and the poor non-elderly to spend their lives in anxiety and fear-driven greed trying to provide against desperate poverty in old age absent any reliable security for their savings.)

    Kai-HK, April 4, 2015 12:23 am

    coberly,

    Thanks for your well-reasoned response.

    You state, 'i personally am not much interested in the "poor capitalist will flee the country if you tax him too much." in fact i'd say good riddance, and by the way watch out for that tarriff when you try to sell your stuff here.'

    (a) What happens after thy leave? Sure you can get one-time 'exit tax' but you lose all the intellectual capital (think of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or Steve Jobs leaving and taking their intellectual property and human capital with them). These guys are great jobs creators it will not only be the 'bad capitalists' that leave but also many of the 'job creating' good ones.

    (b) I am less worried about existing job creating capitalists in America; what about the future ones? The ones that either flee overseas and make their wealth there or are already overseas and then have a plethora of places they can invest but why bother investing in the US if all they are going to do is call me a predator and then seize my assets and or penalise me for investing there? Right? It is the future investment that gets impacted not current wealth per se.

    You also make a great point, 'the poor are in the worst position with respect to shifting their tax burden on to others. the rich do it as a matter of course. it would be simpler just to tax the rich there are fewer of them, and they know what is at stake, and they can afford accountants. the rest of us would pay our "taxes" in the form of higher prices for what we buy.'

    Investment capital will go where it is best treated and to attract investment capital a market must provide a competitive return (profit margin or return on investment). Those companies and investment that stay will do so because they are able to maintain that margin .and they will do so by either reducing wages or increasing prices. Where they can do neither, their will exit the market.

    That is why, according to research, a bulk of the corporate taxation falls on workers and consumers as a pass-on effect. The optimum corporate tax is 0. This will be the case as taxation increases on the owners of businesses and capital .workers, the middle class, and the poor pay it. The margins stay competitive for the owners of capital since capital is highly mobile and fungible.Workers and the poor less so.

    But thanks again for the tone and content of your response. I often get attacked personally for my views instead of people focusing on the issue. I appreciate the respite.

    K

    coberly, April 4, 2015 12:34 pm

    kai

    yes, but you missed the point.

    i am sick of the whining about taxes. it takes so much money to run the country (including the kind of pernicious poverty that will turn the US into sub-saharan africa. and then who will buy their products.

    i can't do much about the poor whining about taxes. they are just people with limited understanding, except for their own pressing needs. the rich know what the taxes are needed for, they are just stupid about paying them. of course they would pass the taxes through to their customers. the customers would still buy what they need/want at the new price. leaving everyone pretty much where they are today financially. but the rich would be forced to be grownup about "paying" the taxes, and maybe the politics of "don't tax me tax the other guy" would go away.

    as for the sainted bill gates. there are plenty of other people in this country as smart as he is and would be happy to sell us computer operating systems and pay the taxes on their billion dollars a year profits.

    nothing breaks my heart more than a whining millionaire.

    Kai-HK

    April 4, 2015 11:32 pm

    Sure I got YOUR point, it just didn't address MY points as put forth in MY original post. And it still doesn't.

    More importantly, you have failed to defend YOUR point against even a rudimentary challenge.

    K

    coberly, April 5, 2015 12:45 pm

    kai,

    rudimentary is right.

    i have read your "points" about sixteen hundred times in the last year alone. made by the ayn rand faithful. it is wearisome.

    and i have learned there is no point in trying to talk to true believers.

    William Ryan, May 13, 2015 4:43 pm

    Thanks again Coberly for your and K's very thoughtful insight. You guys really made me think hard today and I do see your points about perverted capitalism being a big problem in US. I still do like the progressive tax structure and balanced trade agenda better.

    I realize as you say that we cannot compare US to Hong Kong just on size and scale alone. Without all the obfuscation going Lean by building cultures that makes people want to take ownership and sharing learning and growing together is a big part of the solution Ford once said "you cannot learn in school what the world is going to do next".

    Also never argue with an idiot. They will bring you down to their level then beat you with experience. The only cure for organized greed is organized labor. It's because no matter what they do nothing get done about it. With all this manure around there must be a pony somewhere! "

    Last one.

    coberly , May 16, 2015 9:57 pm

    kai

    as a matter of fact i disagree with the current "equality" fad at least insofar as it implies taking from the rich and giving to the poor directly.

    i don't believe people are "equal" in terms of their economic potential. i do beleive they are equal in terms of being due the respect of human beings.

    i also believe your simple view of "equality" is a closet way of guarantee that the rich can prey upon the poor without interruption.

    humans made their first big step in evolution when they learned to cooperate with each other against the big predators.

    Jerry Critter, May 17, 2015 12:10 am

    it is mildly progressive up to about $75,000 per year where the rate hits 30%. But from there up to $1.542 million the rate only increases to 33.3%.

    I call that very flat!

    Jerry Critter, May 17, 2015 11:20 am

    "i assume there are people in this country who are truly poor. as far as i know they don't pay taxes."

    Read my reference and you will see that the "poor" indeed pay taxes, just not much income tax because they don't have much income. You are fixated on income when we should be considering all forms of taxation.

    Jerry Critter, May 17, 2015 9:25 pm

    Oh Kai, cut the crap. Paying taxes Is nothing like slavery. My oh my, how did we ever survive with a top tax rate of around 90%, nearly 3 times the current rate? Some people would even say that the economy then was pretty great and the middle class was doing terrific. So stop the deflection and redirection. I think you just like to see how many words you can write. Sorry, but history is not on your side.

    [Dec 22, 2016] Regulatory Capture 101

    It's not regulation per se is deficient, it is regulation under neoliberal regime, were government is captured by financial oligarchy ;-). But that understanding is foreign to WSJ with its neoliberal agenda :-(.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Impressionable journalists finally meet George Stigler. ..."
    "... The secret recordings were made by Carmen Segarra, who went to work as an examiner at the New York Fed in 2011 but was fired less than seven months later in 2012. She has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the regulator and says Fed officials sought to bury her claim that Goldman had no firm-wide policy on conflicts-of-interest. Goldman says it has had such policies for years, though on the same day Ms. Segarra's revelations were broadcast, the firm added new restrictions on employees trading for their own accounts. ..."
    "... On the recordings, regulators can be heard doing what regulators do-revealing the limits of their knowledge and demonstrating their reluctance to challenge the firms they regulate. At one point Fed officials suspect a Goldman deal with Banco Santander may have been "legal but shady" in the words of one regulator, and should have required Fed approval. But the regulators basically accept Goldman's explanations without a fight. ..."
    "... The journalists have also found evidence in Ms. Segarra's recordings that even after the financial crisis and the supposed reforms of the Dodd-Frank law, the New York Fed remained a bureaucratic agency resistant to new ideas and hostile to strong-willed, independent-minded employees. In government? ..."
    "... "as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit." ..."
    "... Once one understands the inevitability of regulatory capture, the logical policy response is to enact simple laws that can't be gamed by the biggest firms and their captive bureaucrats. ..."
    "... And it means considering economist Charles Calomiris's plan to automatically convert a portion of a bank's debt into equity if the bank's market value falls below a healthy level. ..."
    Oct 05, 2014 | Casino Capitalism and Crapshoot Politics
    Regulatory Capture 101

    Impressionable journalists finally meet George Stigler.

    The financial scandal du jour involves leaked audio recordings that purport to show that regulators at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were soft on Goldman Sachs . Say it ain't so.

    ... ... ...

    The secret recordings were made by Carmen Segarra, who went to work as an examiner at the New York Fed in 2011 but was fired less than seven months later in 2012. She has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the regulator and says Fed officials sought to bury her claim that Goldman had no firm-wide policy on conflicts-of-interest. Goldman says it has had such policies for years, though on the same day Ms. Segarra's revelations were broadcast, the firm added new restrictions on employees trading for their own accounts.

    The New York Fed won against Ms. Segarra in district court, though the case is on appeal. The regulator also notes that Ms. Segarra "demanded $7 million to settle her complaint." And last week New York Fed President William Dudley said, "We are going to keep striving to improve, but I don't think anyone should question our motives or what we are trying to accomplish."

    On the recordings, regulators can be heard doing what regulators do-revealing the limits of their knowledge and demonstrating their reluctance to challenge the firms they regulate. At one point Fed officials suspect a Goldman deal with Banco Santander may have been "legal but shady" in the words of one regulator, and should have required Fed approval. But the regulators basically accept Goldman's explanations without a fight.

    The sleuths at the ProPublica website, working with a crack team of investigators from public radio, also seem to think they have another smoking gun in one of Ms. Segarra's conversations that was not recorded but was confirmed by another regulator. Ms. Seest means. For example, a company offering securities is exempt from some registration requirements if it is only selling to accredited investors, such as people with more than $1 million in net worth, excluding the value of primary residences.

    The journalists have also found evidence in Ms. Segarra's recordings that even after the financial crisis and the supposed reforms of the Dodd-Frank law, the New York Fed remained a bureaucratic agency resistant to new ideas and hostile to strong-willed, independent-minded employees. In government?

    ***

    Enter George Stigler, who published his famous essay "The Theory of Economic Regulation" in the spring 1971 issue of the Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science. The University of Chicago economist reported empirical data from various markets and concluded that "as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit."

    Stigler knew he was fighting an uphill battle trying to persuade his fellow academics. "The idealistic view of public regulation is deeply imbedded in professional economic thought," he wrote. But thanks to Stigler, who would go on to win a Nobel prize, many economists have studied the operation and effects of regulation and found similar results.

    A classic example was the New York Fed's decision to let Citigroup stash $1.2 trillion of assets-including more than $600 billion of mortgage-related securities-in off-balance-sheet vehicles before the financial crisis. That's when Tim Geithner ran the New York Fed and Jack Lew was at Citigroup.

    Once one understands the inevitability of regulatory capture, the logical policy response is to enact simple laws that can't be gamed by the biggest firms and their captive bureaucrats. This means repealing most of Dodd-Frank and the so-called Basel rules and replacing them with a simple requirement for more bank capital-an equity-to-asset ratio of perhaps 15%. It means bringing back bankruptcy for giant firms instead of resolution at the discretion of political appointees. And it means considering economist Charles Calomiris's plan to automatically convert a portion of a bank's debt into equity if the bank's market value falls below a healthy level.

    GS4

    [Nov 19, 2016] What Did Draghi Know About Potential Loss And Abuses At Italys Largest Bank

    Notable quotes:
    "... Apparently lax and/or incompetent regulation of systemically important banks by bureaucrats, central bankers, and politicians may not be just a recent American phenomenon. ..."
    "... He related how he was not only ignored by his bank, the Irish regulator but also all the major political parties. He then pointed out that the Irish regulator claims that it always – and it is the law after all – informs the regulator of the home country of banks which have subsidiaries in Ireland, about any serious problems. ..."
    "... Mr Sugarman suggested Mr Draghi should be asked point-blank of he did or if he did not know . If he did not then the Irish regulator was at least incompetent, and may have lied, misled and perhaps even broken Irish laws. If he was told and did know, then Mr Draghi has serious questions to answer regarding his own dereliction of duty. ..."
    Nov 19, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com
    Via Jesse's Cafe Americain blog,

    Apparently lax and/or incompetent regulation of systemically important banks by bureaucrats, central bankers, and politicians may not be just a recent American phenomenon.

    As we read this, it could imperil the soundness of the financial system in Europe as well, as is still apparently the case with The Banks in the states, despite assurances to the contrary.

    Golem XIV asks some very good questions in the article below, recently posted on his blog here.

    Whistleblowers Testify in EU Parliament

    Yesterday a very high-powered panel of international banking whistleblowers met and told their stories in the European parliament . The questions raised were important. Among them was the Irish Whistleblower, Jonathan Sugarman, who when UniCredit Ireland was breaking the law in very serious ways reported it to the Irish regulator.

    He related how he was not only ignored by his bank, the Irish regulator but also all the major political parties. He then pointed out that the Irish regulator claims that it always – and it is the law after all – informs the regulator of the home country of banks which have subsidiaries in Ireland, about any serious problems.

    In the case of UniCredit that would mean the Italian Central bank would have been told that Italy's largest Bank was in serious breach of Irish law in ways that could endanger the whole banking system. The head of the Italian Central Bank at the time was a certain Mr Mario Draghi.

    Mr Sugarman suggested Mr Draghi should be asked point-blank of he did or if he did not know . If he did not then the Irish regulator was at least incompetent, and may have lied, misled and perhaps even broken Irish laws. If he was told and did know, then Mr Draghi has serious questions to answer regarding his own dereliction of duty.

    Surely not I hear you say. Well perhaps someone might ask him? Or is he above the law?

    http://www.guengl.eu/news/article/whistleblower-protection-what-must-be-done

    [Nov 15, 2016] Suspected 5th Column blogger Streetwise Professor Defends Elites

    Notable quotes:
    "... Earning your living in finance or the related co-dependent fields such as economics, business management, certain areas of law and, most especially, information technology, you quickly pick up on the cult mentality that pervades it. ..."
    "... When, like so many of us, you're desperate to try to cling onto some semblance of middle class status, you're an easy and, although I'd strongly qualify this statement, understandable, target for buying into the group-think. ..."
    "... " Markets " do not " demand " anything. ..."
    "... But a "market" can - at the very most, through the use of pricing signals - induce actors to consider entering into a transaction. ..."
    "... They provided credit to low income customers because it was insanely profitable. The reason it was insanely profitable was that the loans to the low income customers could be securitised and the commissions the banks earned on the sale of those securities paid for massive bonus pools which directly benefitted bank employees. ..."
    "... Yes, I'd always be the first to agree with the proverb "In Heaven you get justice, here on Earth we have the law". The law and our legal systems are not perfect. But they are not that shabby either. ..."
    "... If it is regulatory interventions, rather than criminal indictments, that the Streetwise Professor is referring to, the banks can and do leave no political stone unturned in their efforts to water down, delay and neuter regulatory bodies. Look , if you can do so without wincing, at what has happened to the SEC. ..."
    "... It wasn't a " pre-crisis political bargain " that caused the Global Financial Crisis. It was financial innovation that was supposed to "free" the financial services industry to allow it to soar to ever greater heights, heights that couldn't be reached with cumbersome "legacy" thinking. If that sounds a lot like Mike Hearn's Blockchain justifications, it's because it is exactly the same thing. ..."
    "... Innovation must never be viewed only through separate, disconnected lenses of "technology", "politics", "ethics", "economics", "power relationships" and "morality". Each specific innovation is subject to and either lives or dies by the interplay between these forces." ..."
    "... I agree - however, "I don't mind people doing dangerous things" should require a little elucidation. What you likely meant to say was you don't mind people doing dangerous things, WITHIN REASON. ..."
    "... Also, there is the rank unwillingness on the part of regulators to, you know, actually do their jobs. I can no longer count the number of times Yellen has sat in front of the Senate banking committee like a deer in headlights ..."
    "... Excellent points, I thought that the Bush Wars were initiated to alleviate an oncoming recession as well as ensure W's reelection ..."
    "... It did take them a while to get the pieces in place, the Banksters Real Estate Fraud Appraisals were identified as early as 2000, then the Banksters Fraudulent Loans peaked in 2006, and then we had the Banksters Fraudulent Reps and Warranties . ..."
    "... Ah, the neo-liberals and the libertarians make their arguments by redefining terms and eliding facts. Once the audience agrees that up is down, why then their arguments are reasonable, dispassionate, and offered in dulcet tones of humble sincerity and objectivity. ..."
    "... What a pleasure, then, to read your cold water smack-down of their confidence game. Perhaps they believed their own nonsense. Who knows. ..."
    "... A third consequence of modern-day liberals' unquestioning, reflexive respect for expertise is their blindness to predatory behavior if it comes cloaked in the signifiers of professionalism. ..."
    "... The difference in interpretation carries enormous consequences: Did Wall Street commit epic fraud, or are they highly advanced professionals who fell victim to epic misfortune? modern day liberals pretty much insist on the later view . Wall Street's veneer of professionalism is further buttressed by its technical jargon, which the financial industry uses to protect itself from the scrutiny of the public ..."
    Nov 15, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
    Posted on November 14, 2016 by Clive

    Earning your living in finance or the related co-dependent fields such as economics, business management, certain areas of law and, most especially, information technology, you quickly pick up on the cult mentality that pervades it.

    When, like so many of us, you're desperate to try to cling onto some semblance of middle class status, you're an easy and, although I'd strongly qualify this statement, understandable, target for buying into the group-think. Or at least going along with it on the promise of continued employment. While I'm letting myself off the hook in the process, I think that's forgivable. I and others like me need the money. Besides, in our spare time, we might try to atone for our misdeeds by using whatever means we have available, such as contributing to Naked Capitalism in whatever way we can, to try to set the record straight.

    Not quite so easily forgivable, though, are the members of an altogether different cadre who don't give the impression of having to live paycheck to paycheck. What is it that motivates them? Why do they willingly devise clever - and, I have to say it, some are exceptionally adept - ruses to defend and further the causes of our élites?

    ... ... ...

    As readers with not-so-long memories will recall, in the run-up to the Global Financial Crisis, the TBTFs did indeed exercise the " FU Option ". As asset prices for the securities they held fell precipitously, they held more and more of those assets on their balance sheets, refusing to - or unable to - off-load them into a market that was shunning them. Eventually their capital cushions were so depleted because of this, they became insolvent. Staring catastrophe in the face, governments were put into a double-bind by the TBTFs: Rescue us through bail-outs or stand by and see our societies suffer major collateral damage (bank runs, a collapse of world trade, ruining of perfectly good and solvent businesses with the likelihood of mass unemployment and civil unrest).

    In that situation, who was the " U " who was being " F "'ed? It was governments and the public.

    Faced with an asymmetry of power, in a reverse of the scenario painted by the Streetwise Professor for OTC trading (where a notional seller tells a theoretical buyer they can go to Hell if they don't want to pay the price the seller is asking), governments - and us - found themselves on the buy-side of an " FU Option ". "F the-rest-of-us By Necessity" was a better description as we were turned into forced buyers of what no other "market participant" would touch.

    My dear Professor, allow me to give you , if I may risk the label of being impudent, a lesson. If I am selling my prized Diana, Princess of Wales tea cups in a yard sale and you make me a offer for them, that - I'm sure we'd agree on this point - is an OTC transaction. There's no exchange (mercifully) for Diana, Princess of Wales tea cups. I put a price sticker on them. If you want them, you pay the price I'm asking. Or else, you make me a different offer. If you don't pay the price I want, or I don't accept the price you're offering, we do, indeed, have a genuine " FU Option " scenario. But if instead my mother-in-law threatens to saw your face off with her cheese grater if you don't buy my Diana, Princess of Wales tea cups at the price shown on the sticker, then we no longer have an OTC transaction. We have extortion. See the difference?

    That's not all. The piece discusses the differences between a proposed smart-contract based settlement compared with a centralised counterparty which brings up some very valid points. But then it makes a serious blunder which is introduced with some subtly but is all the more dangerous because of it. I'll highlight the problem:

    So the proposal does some of the same things as a CCP, but not all of them, and in fact omits the most important bits that make central clearing central clearing. To the extent that these other CCP services add value–or regulation compels market participants to utilize a CCP that offers these services–market participants will choose to use a CCP, rather than this service. It is not a perfect substitute for central clearing, and will not disintermediate central clearing in cases where the services it does not offer and the functions it does not perform are demanded by market participants , or by regulators.

    Did you catch what is the most troubling thing in that paragraph? The technicalities of it are fine, but the bigger framing is perilous. "Market participants" is given agency. And put on the same level as actions taken by regulators. This is at best unintentionally misleading and at worse an entirely deliberate falsehood.

    The fallacious thinking which caused it is due to a traditional economist's mind-set. But this mind-set is hopelessly wrong and every time we encounter it, we must challenge it. Regardless of what other progressive goodies it is being bundled up with.

    " Markets " do not " demand " anything.

    A regulator or central bank can demand that a bank hold more capital and open its books to check the underlying asset quality. The CFPB can demand that Wells Fargo stops opening fake accounts. Even I can demand a pony. The power structures, laws, enforcement and levels of trust (to name the main constraints) governing who is demanding what from whom determine how likely they will be to have their demands met.

    But a "market" can - at the very most, through the use of pricing signals - induce actors to consider entering into a transaction. The pricing signal cannot make any potential actor participate in that transaction. Not, probably, that it would have helped her much, but Hillary Clinton could have created a market for left-wing bloggers to shill for Obamacare by offering Lambert $1million to start churning out pro-ACA posts on his blog. But that market which Hillary could create could not "demand" Lambert accept her offer. Lambert would not take that, or any other monetary amount, and would never enter such a transaction. Markets have limits.

    Whether unintentionally or by design, we have a nice example of bait and switch in the Streetwise Professor's Blockchain article. If you run a critique of Blockchain, you'll likely attract an anti-libertarian audience. It's a classic example of nudge theory . If you can lure readers in with the promise of taking a swipe at disruptive innovation nonsense but then lead them to being suckered into a reinforcement of failed conventional free-market hogwash, that can be a powerful propaganda tool.

    But perhaps the Blockchain feature was an aberration, just a one-off? No.

    Take, for example, this feature on Deutsche Bank from earlier this month which I'll enter as Exhibit B - It's not the TBTFs Fault, the Regulators / Governments / Some Guy / Made Us Do It

    I'll leave the worst 'til last, but for now let's start with this little treasure:

    the pre-crisis political bargain was that banks would facilitate income redistribution policy by provide credit to low income individuals. This seeded the crisis (though like any complex event, there were myriad other contributing causal factors), the political aftershocks of which are being felt to this day. Banking became a pariah industry, as the very large legal settlements extracted by governments indicate.

    No, Streetwise Professor, banks did not provide credit to low income individuals as part of some "political bargain". They provided credit to low income customers because it was insanely profitable. The reason it was insanely profitable was that the loans to the low income customers could be securitised and the commissions the banks earned on the sale of those securities paid for massive bonus pools which directly benefitted bank employees.

    Almost unimaginable wealth could be generated by individuals (the Naked Capitalism archive details the full sordid story of the likes of Magnetar). The fact that this would all blow up eventually was certainly predicable and even known by many actors in the prevailing milieu but they didn't care. They knew they'd have already set themselves up for life financially even after just a few years in that "game". Politics, for once, had nothing to do with it, save perhaps that regulators, which are the politicians' responsibility, should have been better able to spot what was going on.

    But the Streetwise Professor is only just getting started with the counterfactual misinformation:

    It is definitely desirable to have mechanisms to hold financial malfeasors accountable, but the Deutsche episode illustrates several difficulties. The first is that even the biggest entities can be judgment proof, and imposing judgments on them can have disastrous economic externalities. Another is that there is a considerable degree of arbitrariness in the process, and the results of the process. There is little due process here, and the risks and costs of litigation mean that the outcome of attempts to hold bankers accountable is the result of a negotiation between the state and large financial institutions that is carried out in a highly politicized environment in which emotions and narratives are likely to trump facts. There is room for serious doubt about the quality of justice that results from this process.

    A casual skim could leave the reader with the impression that the Streetwise Professor is lamenting, rightly, the persistency of the TBTF model. But there's something really dastardly being concocted here - the notion that in our societies, the rule of law is always and inevitably fallible and not fit for the purpose of bringing errant TBTFs to justice. And that, if a case is brought against a TBTF like Deutsche, then it can't help but become a political football.

    Yes, I'd always be the first to agree with the proverb "In Heaven you get justice, here on Earth we have the law". The law and our legal systems are not perfect. But they are not that shabby either. Any quick parse through the judgments which the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.K. Supreme Court or the European Court of Justice (to name only a few) hand down on complex cases - often running to hundreds or even a thousand pages - demonstrates that courts can and do consider fairly and justly the evidence that prosecutors present and make balanced rulings. And banks can utilize the same legal safeguards that the law provides - they're not likely to be short of good legal advice options. Trying, as the Steetwise Professor does, to claim that the TBTFs can't get justice is an insult to our judicial systems and acceptance of this notion followed by any routine repetition serves to undermine faith in the rule of law.

    If it is regulatory interventions, rather than criminal indictments, that the Streetwise Professor is referring to, the banks can and do leave no political stone unturned in their efforts to water down, delay and neuter regulatory bodies. Look , if you can do so without wincing, at what has happened to the SEC.

    It wasn't a " pre-crisis political bargain " that caused the Global Financial Crisis. It was financial innovation that was supposed to "free" the financial services industry to allow it to soar to ever greater heights, heights that couldn't be reached with cumbersome "legacy" thinking. If that sounds a lot like Mike Hearn's Blockchain justifications, it's because it is exactly the same thing.

    In summary, when you throw brickbats at a fellow blogger, it seems to me that you have a moral obligation to put your cards on the table, to explain your motivations. I don't have to write for a living ("just as well", I hear forbearing readers shout back). I don't take a penny from Naked Capitalism's hard-wrung fundraisers, although Yves has generously offered a very modest stipend in line with other contributors, I cannot conscientiously take anything for what I submit. I write in the hope that I have some small insights that would help to undo some of the damage which big finance has done to our cultures, our shared values and our aspirations for what we hope the future will be for us and others.

    That's what motivates me, anyway. After reading his output, I'm really still not at all sure what is motivating the Streetwise Professor. Certainly there is nothing at all to suggest that he is interested in rebuking or revising any of the traditional thought-forms which pass for the so-called science of economics. Conventional economic theory is the ultimate in betrayal of the use of rational methodology to provide air-cover for élite power grabs. It'll take more than a refutation of Blockchain spin to convince me that the Streetwise Professor is ready to kick away the more odious ladders - like being a professional economist - that have given him the leg-ups to the lofty perch he enjoys occupying.

    About Clive

    Survivor of nearly 30 years in a TBTF bank. Also had the privilege of working in Japan, which was great, selling real estate, which was an experience bordering on the psychedelic. View all posts by Clive →

    vlade November 14, 2016 at 7:15 am

    I disagree on the first bit. Even at this blog, Yves mentiones not quite rarely the dangers of tight coupling. The central exchanges create exactly that. Yes, the FU option of OTC is dangerous. But then, everything is dangerous, and if I have to choose between tight coupling dangerous option and loose coupling one, I'll chose the lose coupling one.

    The problem is that the regulators refused to recognise that the institutions gamed the regulations – moving stuff from trading to banking books. It is recognised now, under the new regulation, although I still have some doubts about its effectivness.

    To me all the para says is: markets demand services, and CCP don't offer them – and don't have to. Regulators demand services (to be offered by CCP), and CCP deliver.

    And sorry, I also disagree with your "markets participants demand". The text says "services [ ] are demanded [by potential clients and by regulators]". I can't honestly see what's the problem with that. Of course, regulatory demand, and a client demand are two different things – the former you ignore at your peril, the second you can ignore to your heart's content.

    But markets (or, I'd say agents that want to purchase – or sell) _always_ demand something, and always offer something – otherwise there would not be any market or exchange of services (it doesn't have to be there even with offer and demand, but in the absence of one it definitely won't be there).

    You could happily change the word to "require" "want" etc. and the meaning of the para would remain unchanged.

    Clive Post author November 14, 2016 at 8:20 am

    The problem I had with the notion that OTC reduces tight coupling is that it gives the appearance of reducing tight couple but doesn't actually do this. While "the market" is functioning within its expected parameters, OTC is less tightly coupled than an Exchange. But as we saw first-hand in the GFC, those markets function, right up until the point where they don't. By continuing to function, or certainly giving the appearances of continuing to be functioning, they hide the stresses which are building up within them but no-one can see. Unless you are deeply plumbed in to the day-to-day operational activities of the OTC market and can spot signs - and that's all they are, signs, you don't get to take a view of the whole edifice - you simply don't have a clue. There were, at most, only a couple of dozen people in the organisation itself and outside it who knew that my TBTF was a day away from being unable to open for business. That was entirely down to information asymmetry and that asymmetry was 100% down to OTC prevalence.

    And all the while TBTF isn't fixed, then as soon as the OTC market(s) fall off a cliff, the public provision backstops can be forced to kick in. Yes, everything is dangerous. I don't mind people doing dangerous things. But I do mind an awful lot being asked to pick up the pieces when their dangerous things blow up in their faces and they expect me to sort the mess out. If that is the dynamic, and to me, it most definitely is, then I want the actors who are engaged in the dangerous things to be highly visible, I want them right where I can see them. Not hiding their high-risk activities in an OTC venue that I'm not privy to.

    And I stick by my objection to the - what I can't see how it isn't being deliberate - fuzziness or obfuscation about who gets to "demand" and who is merely allowed "invite" parties to a transaction to either perform or not perform of their own volition. This isn't an incidental semantic about vocabulary. It goes to the heart of what's wrong with the Streetwise Professor's assessment of innovation.

    Innovation must never be viewed only through separate, disconnected lenses of "technology", "politics", "ethics", "economics", "power relationships" and "morality". Each specific innovation is subject to and either lives or dies by the interplay between these forces. My biggest lambaste of the Streetwise Professor's commentaries is that he examines them only in terms of "technology" and "economics". In doing so, he reaches partial and inaccurate conclusions.

    A 10 year old child might "demand", "require", "ask for", "insist", "claim a right to have" (use whatever word or phrase you like there) a gun and live ammunition. But they are not, and should not be, permitted to enter into a transaction to obtain the said gun and ammo based only on the availability of the technology and the economics that would allow them to satisfy the seller's market clearing sale price if they saved their pocket money for a sufficient amount of time. The other forces I listed in my above paragraph are also involved, and just as well.

    Ulysses November 14, 2016 at 9:30 am

    "Innovation must never be viewed only through separate, disconnected lenses of "technology", "politics", "ethics", "economics", "power relationships" and "morality". Each specific innovation is subject to and either lives or dies by the interplay between these forces."

    Very well said. I would argue further that "power relationships" structure how all the other lenses actually operate. In the early sixteenth century the power relationship between the Church, and Martin Luther, was such that the latter had an opening to redefine "morality"– in such a way that the Pope's moral opinion was eventually no longer dispositive for Protestants.

    In other words, the French invasion of Italy, late in the fifteenth century, weakened the papal states enough to allow for defiance.

    Ulysses November 14, 2016 at 10:02 am

    That last sentence, is of course a gross over-simplification! Anyone wishing to know the nitty-gritty details of how foreign domination over the Italian peninsula was established by the middle of the sixteenth century should read Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

    The latter author's appeal to skepticism, when interpreting the actions and motivations of powerful people, rings very true five centuries later:

    " perché di accidenti tanto memorabili si intendino i consigli e i fondamenti; i quali spesso sono occulti, e divulgati il più delle volte in modo molto lontano da quell che è vero."

    ( Storia d'Italia , XVI, vi)

    animalogic November 15, 2016 at 5:12 am

    "Yes, everything is dangerous. I don't mind people doing dangerous things. But I do mind an awful lot being asked to pick up the pieces when their dangerous things blow up in their faces".

    I agree - however, "I don't mind people doing dangerous things" should require a little elucidation. What you likely meant to say was you don't mind people doing dangerous things, WITHIN REASON.

    And let's face it, much of the prior GFC behaviour was unreasonably dangerous. As it turned out, not that dangerous to its perpetrators .

    Danger, like risk, is a cost-benefit calculation. When that calculation ONLY includes benefits for its originator & suppresses any (real & calculatable) cost for the community it's already looking suspiciously like an unreasonable danger .

    Uahsenaa November 14, 2016 at 9:04 am

    The problem is that the regulators refused to recognise that the institutions gamed the regulations – moving stuff from trading to banking books. It is recognised now, under the new regulation, although I still have some doubts about its effectivness.

    Also, there is the rank unwillingness on the part of regulators to, you know, actually do their jobs. I can no longer count the number of times Yellen has sat in front of the Senate banking committee like a deer in headlights as Warren tries to get her to give anything like a straight answer as to why, to this day, many if not most TBTFs have no rapid selloff/solvency plan (which is required by the Dodd-Frank law) or why those banks that fail their stress tests (again and again) suffer no consequences as a result.

    How is any of this supposed to work when so many are clearly acting in bad faith?

    bmeisen November 14, 2016 at 9:06 am

    Bravo bravo encore encore! Especially the characterization of Sorkin and the account of the crisis at the start of exhibit B. Clive for President!

    Synoia November 14, 2016 at 9:44 am

    Earning your living in finance or the related co-dependent fields such as economics, business management, certain areas of law and, most especially, information technology, you quickly pick up on the cult mentality that pervades it.

    If you do not subscribe to the "cult mentality," although I'd prefer to call it a dogma, because it is a unswerving belief in an unproven fact in the face of evidence the fact is not only unproven, but wrong, one is "not a team player" and then penalized.

    If these libertarian want "open markets" and innovation they have to shed the human response to proof. In their behavior they are no better than the medieval pope, and his court, who did not want to believe a the earth travels around the sun.

    WJ November 14, 2016 at 8:32 pm

    Medieval popes were probably more open to Pythagorean/Copernican cosmologies than early 17th century Jesuits (i.e. Bellarmine); the opposition of the latter to Galileo had nothing to do with science and everything to do with Protestantism and Protestant biblical interpretation. Bellarmine was wrong and what happened to Galileo was shameful. But many of the best astronomers of the time were in fact Jesuits, and the traditional way the story is told is inaccurate on almost every level (and a product of late 19th century Italian nationalism).

    susan the other November 14, 2016 at 12:02 pm

    this was very interesting stuff. Since a lot of things were coming together in the 90s and 2000s that were all connected in a mess too big to understand simply as immoral banking (freeing up capital like that was crazy but there must have been a reason to try it besides windfall profiteering and flat-out gambling), I imagine the following: Greenspan and the TBTFs knew returns were diminishing and set out to do something about it. Because growth and expanding markets were the only thing that could keep up with a demand by pension funds (and then little Bush's idiotic war) for a minimum 8% return. But growth was slowing down so the situation required clever manipulations and incomprehensible things like financial derivatives. Makes sense to me. And if this is even partially true then there was a political mandate all mixed up with the GFC. The banks really did crazy stuff, but with the blessing of the Fed. Later when Bernanke said about QE and nirp: "now we are in uncharted territory" he was fibbing – the Fed had been in uncharted territory, trying to make things work, for almost 20 years. And failing.

    madame de farge November 14, 2016 at 12:47 pm

    Excellent points, I thought that the Bush Wars were initiated to alleviate an oncoming recession as well as ensure W's reelection

    It did take them a while to get the pieces in place, the Banksters Real Estate Fraud Appraisals were identified as early as 2000, then the Banksters Fraudulent Loans peaked in 2006, and then we had the Banksters Fraudulent Reps and Warranties .

    WORSE then a bunch of Used Car Salesman, but what else would you expect from people who KEEP the State Income taxes withheld from their employees checks

    Lambert Strether November 15, 2016 at 12:00 am

    > "how long does that take" and he said "minimum of ten years, 15 is better"

    Via Extra, Extra – Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken Google Research, 2006:

    This bug can manifest itself for arrays whose length (in elements) is 230 or greater (roughly a billion elements). This was inconceivable back in the '80s, when Programming Pearls was written, but it is common these days at Google and other places. In Programming Pearls, Bentley says "While the first binary search was published in 1946, the first binary search that works correctly for all values of n did not appear until 1962." The truth is, very few correct versions have ever been published, at least in mainstream programming languages.

    Sorting is, or ought to be, basic blocking and tackling. Very smart, not corrupt people worked on this. And yet, 2006 – 1946 = 60 years later, bugs are still being discovered.

    The nice thing about putting your cash in a coffee can in the back yard is that it won't evaporate because some hacker gets clever about big numbers.

    flora November 14, 2016 at 7:30 pm

    Ah, the neo-liberals and the libertarians make their arguments by redefining terms and eliding facts. Once the audience agrees that up is down, why then their arguments are reasonable, dispassionate, and offered in dulcet tones of humble sincerity and objectivity.

    What a pleasure, then, to read your cold water smack-down of their confidence game. Perhaps they believed their own nonsense. Who knows.

    flora November 14, 2016 at 8:28 pm

    What is the Streetwise Professor's (note the word "professor") real view? Has he thought much about it or simply imbibed his "owners'" views, making him a useful tool. I don't know.

    From the book "Listen, Liberal."

    " A third consequence of modern-day liberals' unquestioning, reflexive respect for expertise is their blindness to predatory behavior if it comes cloaked in the signifiers of professionalism. Take the sort of complexity we saw in the financial instruments that drove the last financial crisis. For old-school regulators, I am told, undue financial complexity was an indication of likely fraud. But for the liberal class, it is the opposite: an indicator of sophistication. Complexity is admirable in its own right. The difference in interpretation carries enormous consequences: Did Wall Street commit epic fraud, or are they highly advanced professionals who fell victim to epic misfortune? modern day liberals pretty much insist on the later view . Wall Street's veneer of professionalism is further buttressed by its technical jargon, which the financial industry uses to protect itself from the scrutiny of the public. "
    -Thomas Frank

    [Oct 25, 2016] Mergers Raise Prices, Not Efficiency

    Oct 25, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron : October 25, 2016 at 04:56 AM RE: Mergers Raise Prices, Not Efficiency

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-24/mergers-raise-prices-not-efficiency

    [IMO, Noah muddles the message, but it is a important topic that gets muddled by everyone else too. Economists with a financial bent had no problem apparently with the bank mergers that started in the seventies and everyone loved the auto maker mergers of the first half of the 2oth century.

    Efficiency itself is an amorphous term. Mergers can be an efficient use of capital since they deliver lower competition and higher profits. JP Morgan did not want to be in a industry that he could not dominate. Efficiency is different for a fish than a capital owner. Mergers are good for regulatory capture and ineffishient for fish. Mergers are inefficient for workers that want higher wages or the unemployed that want jobs. Market power and regulatory capture can be efficient vehicles for taking advantage of trade agreements to offshore production and increase returns to capital all while lowering both prices and quality as well as reducing domestic wages. Efficiency is in the eyeballs of the beholder especially if they make good soup.] Reply Tuesday, reason -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... , October 25, 2016 at 06:58 AM

    But Keynes was saying something quite different - he wasn't actually talking about policy but about economics (the task of economists). He was saying that understanding short term fluctuations was as important as predicting the long term. Still relevant in this age of irrelevant general equilibrium models.
    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> reason ... , October 25, 2016 at 09:56 AM
    Sorry, I thought that the whole purpose of the study of macroeconomics was to guide policy decisions. I stand corrected.
    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... , October 25, 2016 at 10:02 AM
    I always looked at Keynes as a fellow traveler, one who wrote obtusely at times for the express purpose of couching his meaning in sweetened platitudes that at a second glance were drenched in cynicism and sarcasm, at least when it came to his opinions of economists and politicians and the capital owning class that they both served.
    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... , October 25, 2016 at 10:39 AM
    OK, "obtusely" was a poor choice of words, at least with regards to Keynes. Keynes realized WWI was a big mistake, the Treaty at Versailles was an abomination with regards to German restitution, and he was accused of anti-Semitism just for being honest about Jewish elites in the Weimar Republic. It was not that Keynes was insensitive, unpatriotic, or anti-Semitic, but that Keynes was just correct on all counts.
    JohnH -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... , -1
    This is a good example of economists working in lock step with investors: "Economists with a financial bent had no problem apparently with the bank mergers that started in the seventies and everyone loved the auto maker mergers of the first half of the 2oth century."

    I think it has been questioned for decades whether increased efficiency in banking actually materialized in the wake of industry consolidation. Local market oligopolies may well have generated higher profits and the appearance of more efficiency. And concentration certainly facilitated collusion as we have seen in many markets, including LIBOR.

    What concentration indisputably caused was a dramatic increase in the political power of the Wall Street banking cartel, which owns not only the Federal Reserve but also a lot of powerful politicians...a subject on which 'liberal' economists are generally agnostic, since politics is outside their silo.

    point -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... , October 25, 2016 at 10:26 AM
    The article ignored the effect of mergers on supplier relationships, often one of near monopsony (oligopsony?). DOJ seems to be focused on unit pricing to consumers(though perhaps not with cable) to the point that most managements understand that they have free rein to squeeze suppliers. And so they merge to do so.

    It may be that more contribution to increasing margins is from purchase prices than selling prices.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> point... , October 25, 2016 at 10:41 AM
    Doubly so with global supply chaining.

    [Oct 20, 2016] This is the smoking gun behind the corruption of the Fed during the 2008 crisis

    Oct 20, 2016 | www.moonofalabama.org

    psychohistorian | Oct 19, 2016 8:29:29 PM | 99

    I just read this posting at ZH and believe that this information when fully grokked will take the market down.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-19/never-seen-secret-memo-aig-bailout-feds-tarullo-obama-revealed-podesta-emails

    This is the smoking gun behind the corruption of the Fed during the 2008 crisis. I want to see how they tell the world that this was all legal.

    END PRIVATE FINANCE! The folks that own private finance also own the US and many other governments.....with or without vote rigging as one of their tools.

    [Sep 15, 2016] Elizabeth Warren on Thursday requested a formal investigation into why the Obama administration did not bring criminal charges individuals and corporation involved in the 2008 financial crisis

    www.nakedcapitalism.com
    L

    "Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday requested a formal investigation into why the Obama administration did not bring criminal charges individuals and corporation involved in the 2007-2008 financial crisis" [International Business Times]. Why now? Liz edging her hat toward the ring if Clinton comes up lame?

    I can see two possible interpretations for this.

    First, as much as I hate to draw the analogy, she could be positioning herself to take the reigns after a loss in the way that Richard Nixon, Paul Ryan, and later Bill Clinton did. Richard Nixon sat back and concentrated on building up credibility as Barry Goldwater melted down and then quietly stepped in to take over the party after the loss to set up his eventual run. Paul Ryan quietly permitted or perhaps aided the coup against Boehner. And Bill Clinton, through the DLC teed up his control of the party after Dukakis lost.

    Second, with Wells-Fargo and bank fraud once again in the news she could be working to keep prior decisions current both to force better action this time or to nudge the Clinton and Trump into making promises of stronger action in the future.

    Lambert Strether Post author

    It seems to me that both those objectives would be served by continuing to hammer on Wells Fargo, so the question "Why now?" isn't really answered in your comment.

    But if you wanted to take out an option on running a full-throated populist campaign - and throwing bankers in jail would be wildly popular across the entire political spectrum (except Clinton's 10%-ers on up) - in the unhappy event that the party's candidate came up lame, then calling for an account of regulatory decision making in 2009 would be one way to signal that. Note also that would call Obama's "legacy" into question, too; the whole "stand between you and the pitchforks" thing. This is a big deal.

    [Sep 15, 2016] American Antitrust Is Having a Moment: Some Reactions to Commissioner Ohlhausen's Recent Views

    Sep 14, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
    Chris Sagers at ProMarket:
    American Antitrust Is Having a Moment: Some Reactions to Commissioner Ohlhausen's Recent Views : Over the summer, Federal Trade Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen took me and several others to task in a speech , subsequently published as a journal article ... The theme we'd all written about is whether we in the United States have a "monopoly problem," and whether federal policy should try to do something about it. ...

    Commissioner Ohlhausen had some pretty strong words. ... Specifically, she implies a very strong presumption against public interference in private markets, as indicated by her argument that there is not yet sufficient evidence that we have a monopoly problem. The argument seems to be that we must wait until we are very, very sure, beyond any reasonable econometric doubt, apparently, that there's something wrong before we step in. ...

    She is mistaken, and she ignores roughly a library-full of well-known..., sophisticated empirical work. ...

    In the end, the irony of these remarks is captured in this point: Commissioner Ohlhausen is pretty witheringly dismissive of a certain kind of evidence of market power, and implies that it would not support increased enforcement unless it can overcome a high methodological bar. But for her own countervailing evidence that in fact American markets are "fierce[ly] competiti[ve]," she says this: "Consider the new economy, which is a hotbed of technological innovation. That environment does not strike me as one lacking competition."

    In other words, the presumption against antitrust is so strong that evidence of harm must meet the most exacting standards of social science. To prove that markets are in fact competitive, however, needs nothing more than seat-of-the-pants anecdotes. Again, I mean no disrespect, and I think we have an honest difference of opinion. But this stance is not social science, and it is not good, empirically founded public policy. It is just ideology. ...

    It's definitely true that the agencies have brought a bunch of challenges to a bunch of nasty mergers, and perhaps total enforcement numbers have gone up a bit. But that is because we are in the midst of a merger wave in which parties have been proposing breathtakingly massive, overwhelmingly consolidating horizontal deals. While there is a track record to be proud of in the administration's enforcement, especially, as the commissioner observes, in the Commission's campaign against hospital mergers, reverse-payment deals, SEP problems, and patent trolls, and who knows how many other matters, the fact remains that by and large the administration has mostly not taken action that any administration would not have taken, including the Reagan and both Bush administrations. ...

    DrDick : , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 11:13 AM

    If we were actually serious about antitrust, which we very much should be, we would not only block most of these mergers, but break up many of existing behemoths (like the big banks, the media giants, Comcast, and many others).
    pgl -> DrDick... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 11:18 AM
    I'm all for breaking up the behemoths when they are indeed stifling competition. The Reagan Revolution to anti-trust was based on a contention that some mergers were about efficiency effects. I think this argument is sometimes overblown but it is not per se false. I do object (see below) to the weak evidence that goes like this. Collective shareholder value rose so ergo the merger is about efficiency effects. Anyone who argues that (see Don Luskin and the premium ice cream proposed merger) is not very bright.
    DeDude -> pgl... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 11:49 AM
    Exactly. Corporations being able to suck more profit out of the costumers (and as a result share prices rising) is the proof that anti-trust has failed. In a fully functional competitive market companies do not make much profit.
    pgl -> DeDude... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:07 PM
    Accounting profits? Maybe you should read that paper by the commissioner as she makes a very clear statement about what accounting profit would look like in a competitive market. And it is not zero. Return to capital? Hello?
    DeDude -> pgl... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:30 PM
    No if it was zero the whole thing breaks down. However, a small return on capital is an indication that companies are forced to cut prices because of competition- and that is a healthy market. So yes there is (some but) not much profit in a fully functional competitive market.
    pgl -> DeDude... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:36 PM
    Let's define "small return". Standard financial economics puts this at the risk-free rate plus a premium for bearing systematic risk. OK - the risk-free return now is quite small. Say 2%. But if the risk premium is say 4%, then we are talking about a 6% expected return to assets. If that is what you mean by small - cool.

    Of course I have seen a lot of "professionals" argue for much higher returns. Of course these professionals would flunk a Finance 101 class.

    DeDude -> pgl... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:49 PM
    I don't think the risk premium needs to be more than about 2% unless/until the economy enter a phase where demand outstrips supply (and more investment money needs to be attracted). If there is a glut of investment money then the price of it (=risk free returns) should go down.
    pgl -> DeDude... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 02:05 PM
    This is the kind of thinking that got Hassett and Glassman to tell us about DOW 36000. Some people overestimate the risk premium but 2% is what a regulated utility or a leasing company gets. And neither bears commercial risk. Dude - you can make up whatever number your heart desires but there is market evidence on these things.
    DeDude -> pgl... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 06:25 PM
    Exactly - even those are hugely overcompensated for this supposed risk.
    Gibbon1 -> DeDude... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 04:14 PM
    Ability to better suck profit out of a captive base of customers is an efficiency of a sort. Instead of investing in risky new business processes or technologies one merely has to buy out your competitors. This is practically risk free.
    pgl : , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 11:15 AM
    A comment about this:

    "Though she says that "[e]fficiencies are real"-citing no evidence for it in a speech critical of everyone else for failure to supply evidence-there is in fact no meaningful proof that consolidation generates social benefits. Especially in the case of mergers, a large and sophisticated empirical literature has been hunting for decades for evidence that mergers produce "efficiencies" or other benefits. The evidence has not been found. At least with respect to deals among publicly traded firms, the evidence tends to suggest that mergers do no good on average for shareholders of either acquiring or target firms, and if there were some efficiencies or larger social benefits, they should be measurable as benefits to shareholders. The empirical evidence has therefore confirmed the popular wisdom shared on Wall Street for years-that all this activity is not serving any good social purpose, though it might be helping executives and their bankers quite a lot."

    The conservative (Reagan) approach to anti-trust did indeed ask DOJ and FTC to consider whether the merger was about beneficial efficiency effects v. anti-competitive effects. But let's suppose two firms merged and their collective value did rise benefiting shareholders. That does not prove the efficiency effects dominate. No – mergers that lead to less competition will often raise shareholder value even if there are no efficiency effects. Those mergers should be disallowed.

    kurt : , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 11:21 AM
    Proof of Monopoly Power - Verizon and ATT's pricing and apparent lack of any interest in maintaining or even knowing where their physical plant is installed. Also - see directTV's recent price increases.
    pgl -> kurt... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:07 PM
    Can you hear me now? Oh wait - the Verizon dude now works for Sprint.
    El Epicúreo Del Taco : , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 11:26 AM
    American markets are "fierce[ly] competiti[ve]," she says this: "Consider the new economy, which is a hotbed of technological innovation. That environment does not strike me as one lacking competition."

    In other words, the presumption against antitrust is so strong
    "

    You are assumed properly competing until proved monopoly-based. The burden of proof is on the victims. Tell me something!

    Does the government always appear as crystal clear as the mirror of Alice? When we look at local, county, state, and federal rulers, do we always see ourselves? Our own bias? Our own agenda? The government apes its voters.

    Do you see how today's polity is begging for less competition? Less free trade from our trading partners? Do you see how we want to make a monopoly out of America? Build a fence around it so that nobody is allowed to buy anything from anyone other than our monopoly?

    " We have identified the enemy, ourselves. " ~~Pogo~

    DeDude : , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 11:46 AM
    Yes you need at least a dozen independent businesses delivering the same (substitutable) products to ensure that there is indeed a competitive market that will not be gamed against the consumers. This is not just needed to ensure that consumers will be offered a fair price, but also to ensure that companies will be forced to continue to innovate and offer better and better products. The oversight of mergers has been a scandal and needs to be tightened by new laws. Obviously we have to make the "dozen rule" a law rather than just common sense guidance.
    pgl -> DeDude... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:10 PM
    The dozen rule? Where did that come from? Depends on the market but I would hope we have more than 12 suppliers of beer. BTW - it would be nice to have 12 health insurance companies but we could break up this oligopoly with such one more - the government aka the public option.
    DeDude -> pgl... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:34 PM
    Yes some products can benefit from more variation, but at least with 12 suppliers you would not have anybody able to corner the market. The dozen rule is mine, that is how I get my eggs. If Ohlhausen can just make it up - so can I.
    pgl -> DeDude... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:37 PM
    Do you remember the 1970's? Something called OPEC? But yea - I buy my eggs by the dozen too.
    pgl -> DeDude... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:39 PM
    Speaking of breakfast, consider the maple syrup cartel:

    http://fortune.com/2016/02/26/maple-syrup-cartel

    DeDude -> pgl... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:52 PM
    Yes cartels (regardless of number of members) also have to be broken up - for markets and capitalism to work properly.
    Tom aka Rusty : , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 12:59 PM
    The FTC has ignored a many major health care mergers but has gone litigation guns a blazin' into small mergers in such less-than-major metro centers as Moscow Idaho and Toledo Ohio.

    Is there a "too big to litigate" standard?

    pgl -> Tom aka Rusty... , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 02:06 PM
    Rusty calling for rational regulation as in the FTC doing its job. Stop the presses!
    Tom aka Rusty said in reply to pgl... , Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 04:53 AM
    I'm just asking for coherent policy, something often missing from the Obama administration.
    Anon : , Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 08:30 PM
    The sad fact is that the right-wing Law and Economics scholars have literally been trained to believe that the only correct null hypothesis is "free markets are good". When the null is not rejected with a 95% confidence interval, they actually think they've won the argument, while you're sitting there scratching your head saying, but when the null hypothesis is "free markets are bad", we can't reject that either. I've never seen logic get much traction with this crowd, because they are literally willing to tell you that economics demonstrates that "free markets are good", so that's the correct null.

    It's very sad, but also very common when talking to lawyers. In fact, I often wonder whether the right-wing didn't create the "Law and Economics" movement in order to slow the exposure of the legal profession to the actual tools of modern economic analysis.

    reason : , -1
    It would be a start if we would simply stop seeing hostile takeovers as something positive (you know ex-ante efficiency improvements) and start seeing them for the interference in natural selection that they actually are (no 40-40 foresight exists).

    [Aug 26, 2016] Lots of Smoke Here, Hillary

    Notable quotes:
    "... If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. ..."
    "... Of 154 outsiders whom Clinton phoned or met with in her first two years at State, 85 had made contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and their contributions, taken together, totaled $156 million. ..."
    "... Conclusion: access to Secretary of State Clinton could be bought, but it was not cheap. Forty of the 85 donors gave $100,000 or more. Twenty of those whom Clinton met with or phoned dumped in $1 million or more. ..."
    "... On his last day in office, January 20, 2001, Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon to financier-crook and fugitive from justice Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, had contributed $450,000 to the Clinton Library. ..."
    Aug 26, 2016 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition.

    ... ... ...

    Of 154 outsiders whom Clinton phoned or met with in her first two years at State, 85 had made contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and their contributions, taken together, totaled $156 million.

    Conclusion: access to Secretary of State Clinton could be bought, but it was not cheap. Forty of the 85 donors gave $100,000 or more. Twenty of those whom Clinton met with or phoned dumped in $1 million or more.

    To get to the seventh floor of the Clinton State Department for a hearing for one's plea, the cover charge was high. Among those who got face time with Hillary Clinton were a Ukrainian oligarch and steel magnate who shipped oil pipe to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions and a Bangladeshi economist who was under investigation by his government and was eventually pressured to leave his own bank.

    The stench is familiar, and all too Clintonian in character.

    Recall. On his last day in office, January 20, 2001, Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon to financier-crook and fugitive from justice Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, had contributed $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

    The Clintons appear belatedly to have recognized their political peril.

    Bill has promised that, if Hillary is elected, he will end his big-dog days at the foundation and stop taking checks from foreign regimes and entities, and corporate donors. Cash contributions from wealthy Americans will still be gratefully accepted.

    One wonders: will Bill be writing thank-you notes for the millions that will roll in to the family foundation-on White House stationery?

    [Jul 03, 2016] Thank you, Elizabeth Warren, for picking up untitrust mantle by Beverly Mann

    Notable quotes:
    "... I didn't just mean Walmart and the like, I explained. I also meant the monopolistic powers that aren't obvious to the general public. Such as wholesale suppliers and shippers. And such as Visa and Mastercard, which impacts very substantially the profitability of small retailers and franchisers. ..."
    "... Which brought me then, and brings me again, to one of my favorite examples of how the Dems forfeit the political advantage on government regulation by never actually discussing government regulation, in this instance, what's known as the Durbin Amendment. It limits the amount that Visa and Mastercard-clearly critical players in commerce now-can charge businesses for processing their customers' credit card and ATM card transactions. ..."
    "... Talk to any owner of a small retail business-a gas station franchise owner, an independent fast food business owner, an independent discount store, for example-about this issue, as I did back when the Durbin Amendment was being debated in Congress. See what they say. ..."
    "... The Durbin Amendment was one of the (very) precious few legislative restrictions on monopolies, on anticompetitive business practices, to manage to become law despite intense lobbying of the finance industry or whatever monopolistic industry would be hurt by its enactment. To my knowledge, though, it was never mentioned in congressional races in 2010 or 2014, or in the presidential or congressional races in 2012. Antitrust issues have been considered too complicated for discussion among the populace. ..."
    "... And also presumably, it's why the news media ignored Elizabeth Warren's speech on Wednesday entirely about the decisive, dramatic effects of the federal government's aggressive reversal over the last four decades of antirust regulation and the concerted failures of one after another White House administration (including the current one) to enforce the regulation that remains. ..."
    "... Washington Monthly ..."
    "... What amazed me yesterday was how Warren synthesized the main points of virtually everything we've published into a single speech that, while long and wonky, was Bill Clintonesque in its vernacular exposition. You can imagine average Americans all over the country listening, nodding, understanding . ..."
    "... Though many in the press didn't notice the speech, you can best believe Hillary Clinton's campaign operatives were paying attention (Trump's too, I'll bet). That's why I think the speech has the possibility of changing the course of the campaign. The candidate who can successfully incorporate the consolidation message into their campaign rhetoric will an huge, perhaps decisive advantage. Hillary has already signaled, in an op-ed she published last fall, that she gets the larger argument. Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren showed her how to run on it. You can read the full prepared text below. ..."
    "... I'm thrilled. Except for that parenthetical that says "even the "populist" candidates running president have shied away from it, which is inaccurate regarding Bernie Sanders. The link is to an article by Glastris in the November/December 2015 edition of Washington Monthly titled " America's Forgotten Formula for Economic Equality ," which regarding Sanders concludes based upon an answer to a question by Anderson Cooper at a then-recent televised debate in which Sanders asked the question about how he expected to win the presidency as a democratic socialist failed to mention the issue of antitrust, that Sanders did not campaign on the issue of the demise of antitrust law and enforcement. ..."
    "... We already know from the DNC's public description of the latest draft of the platform that it includes things such as a general commitment to the idea of a $15-per-hour minimum wage; to expanding Social Security; to making universal health care available as a right through expanding Medicare or a public option; and to breaking up too-big-to-fail institutions. ..."
    "... Eliminating conflict of interest at the Federal Reserve by making sure that executives at financial institutions cannot serve on the board of regional Federal Reserve banks or handpick their members. ..."
    "... Banning golden parachutes for taking government jobs and cracking down on the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. ..."
    "... Prohibiting Wall Street from picking and choosing which credit agency will rate their product. ..."
    "... Empowering the Postal Service to offer basic banking services, which makes such services available to more people throughout the country, including low-income people who lack access to checking accounts. ..."
    "... Ending the loophole that allows large profitable corporations to defer taxes on income stashed in offshore tax havens to avoid paying less taxes. ..."
    "... Using the revenue from ending that deferral loophole to rebuild infrastructure and create jobs. ..."
    "... Okay, folks. While being credited to Sanders, this far more likely is a blunt-force impact of Warren, since every one of these points concerns Warren's particular area of interest: financial industry regulation. ..."
    "... In other words, Warren is the intermediary between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. And in exchange for her unbridled campaigning for and with Clinton has combined her own top priorities-precise legislative ones that Warren has the deep expertise to demand and to draft, e.g., items 1 and 3-with one very specific one of Sanders and with more generic ones of his as well, e.g., items 2 and 5. ..."
    July 1, 2016 | angrybearblog.com
    A detailed update follows the original post.

    Is the window closing on Bernie Sanders's moment? A number of folks, your humble blogger included , have suggested as much. We've argued that with Democrats seeming to unite behind Hillary Clinton, it's possible that the longer Sanders withholds his endorsement for her in the quest to make the party platform more progressive, the less leverage he'll end up having.

    But a new battleground state poll from Dem pollster Stan Greenberg's Democracy Corps suggests Sanders' endorsement could, in fact, still have a real impact, meaning he may still have some genuine leverage to try to win more concessions designed to continue pushing the party's agenda in a more progressive direction.

    A Sanders endorsement of Clinton could still make a big difference , Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, Washington Post, yesterday at 3:24 p.m.

    Paul Glastris reports that a speech Elizabeth Warren gave that was virtually ignored by the news media could provide a template for an argument about the economy that changes the course of the presidential election . - gs

    – Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, Washington Post, yesterday at 6:21 p.m.

    Just about exactly a year ago-early last summer-as Clinton was picking up the pace of her campaign appearances and formulating her substantive arguments, she said something that the news media caught onto immediately as really strange. In an attempt to woo aspiring and current small-business owners, she did her default thing: She adopted a Republican slogan and cliché, this one that government regulation and bureaucracy are the main impediments to starting and expanding small businesses, and are, well, just making the lives of small business owners miserable.

    Federal regulations and bureaucracy, see.

    It shouldn't take longer to start a business in America than it does to start one in France, she said, correctly. And it shouldn't take longer for a small-business owner to fill out the business's federal tax forms than it takes Fortune 500 corporations to do so. Also, correctly. And as president she will … something.

    There were, the news media quickly noted, though, a few problems with this tack. One was that regulations that apply varyingly to other than a few types of small businesses-those that sell firearms and ammunition, for example-small-business regulations are entirely state and local ones and are not of the sort that the federal government even could address.

    Another was that Clinton was relying upon a survey report that provided average times to obtain business licenses in various cities around the world, for companies that would employ a certain number of employees within a numerical, midsize range (or some such), and that cited Paris as the only French cities; showed that the differences in the time it took on average to obtain a business license there and in several American cities was a matter of two or three days, and that only Los Angeles (if I remember correctly) among the American cities had a longer average time than did Paris; and that the all the cities listed had an average of less than two weeks.

    Some folks (including me, here at AB) also noted that the actual time it takes to open a small business depends mostly on the type of business, often the ease of obtaining a business loan, purchasing equipment such as that needed to open a restaurant, leasing space, obtaining insurance, and ensuring compliance with, say, local health department and fire ordinances.

    And one folk (me, here at AB) pointed out that the relative times it takes to fill out a federal tax form for a business depends far more on whether your business retains Price Waterhouse Coopers to do that, or has in-house CPAs using the latest software for taxes and accounting, or relies upon the sole proprietor to perform that task.

    But here's what I also said: Far, far more important to the ease of starting a business and making a profit in it than regulatory bureaucracy-state and local, much less and federal ones-is overcoming monopolistic practices of, well, monopolies.*

    I didn't just mean Walmart and the like, I explained. I also meant the monopolistic powers that aren't obvious to the general public. Such as wholesale suppliers and shippers. And such as Visa and Mastercard, which impacts very substantially the profitability of small retailers and franchisers.

    Which brought me then, and brings me again, to one of my favorite examples of how the Dems forfeit the political advantage on government regulation by never actually discussing government regulation, in this instance, what's known as the Durbin Amendment. It limits the amount that Visa and Mastercard-clearly critical players in commerce now-can charge businesses for processing their customers' credit card and ATM card transactions.

    Talk to any owner of a small retail business-a gas station franchise owner, an independent fast food business owner, an independent discount store, for example-about this issue, as I did back when the Durbin Amendment was being debated in Congress. See what they say.

    The Durbin Amendment was one of the (very) precious few legislative restrictions on monopolies, on anticompetitive business practices, to manage to become law despite intense lobbying of the finance industry or whatever monopolistic industry would be hurt by its enactment. To my knowledge, though, it was never mentioned in congressional races in 2010 or 2014, or in the presidential or congressional races in 2012. Antitrust issues have been considered too complicated for discussion among the populace.

    Which presumably is why the news media never focused on the fact that Bernie Sanders discussed it regularly in his campaign. And that it resonated with millennials.

    And also presumably, it's why the news media ignored Elizabeth Warren's speech on Wednesday entirely about the decisive, dramatic effects of the federal government's aggressive reversal over the last four decades of antirust regulation and the concerted failures of one after another White House administration (including the current one) to enforce the regulation that remains.

    Here's what Glastris wrote in preface to his republishing of the full Warren speech:

    Yesterday, straight off her high-profile campaign appearance Monday with Hillary Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren gave a keynote address about industry consolidation in the American economy at a conference at the Capitol put on by New America's Open Markets program. Though the speech has so far gotten only a modicum of attention-the press being more interested in litigating Donald Trump's Pocahontas taunts-it has the potential to change the course of the presidential contest. Her speech begins at minute 56:45 in the video below.

    Warren is, of course, famous for her attacks on too-big-to-fail banks. But in her address yesterday, entitled "Reigniting Competition in the American Economy," she extended her critique to the entire economy, noting that, as a result of three decades of weakened federal antitrust regulation, virtually every industrial sector today-from airlines to telecom to agriculture to retail to social media-is under the control of a handful of oligopolistic corporations. This widespread consolidation is "hiding in plain sight all across the American economy," she said, and "threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy."

    As our readers know, economic consolidation is a subject the Washington Monthly has long been obsessed with-see here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , and here . In our current cover story , Barry Lynn (impresario of yesterday's event) and Phil Longman argue that antitrust was the true legacy of the original American Populists and a vital, under-appreciated reason for the mass prosperity of mid-20 th Century America. But this legacy, and the new Gilded Age economy that has resulted from its abandonment, is not a narrative most Americans have been told (one reason why even the "populist" candidates running president have shied away from it).

    What amazed me yesterday was how Warren synthesized the main points of virtually everything we've published into a single speech that, while long and wonky, was Bill Clintonesque in its vernacular exposition. You can imagine average Americans all over the country listening, nodding, understanding .

    Though many in the press didn't notice the speech, you can best believe Hillary Clinton's campaign operatives were paying attention (Trump's too, I'll bet). That's why I think the speech has the possibility of changing the course of the campaign. The candidate who can successfully incorporate the consolidation message into their campaign rhetoric will an huge, perhaps decisive advantage. Hillary has already signaled, in an op-ed she published last fall, that she gets the larger argument. Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren showed her how to run on it. You can read the full prepared text below.

    I'm thrilled. Except for that parenthetical that says "even the "populist" candidates running president have shied away from it, which is inaccurate regarding Bernie Sanders. The link is to an article by Glastris in the November/December 2015 edition of Washington Monthly titled " America's Forgotten Formula for Economic Equality ," which regarding Sanders concludes based upon an answer to a question by Anderson Cooper at a then-recent televised debate in which Sanders asked the question about how he expected to win the presidency as a democratic socialist failed to mention the issue of antitrust, that Sanders did not campaign on the issue of the demise of antitrust law and enforcement.

    But as it happens, I knew that was incorrect. One of my fondest memories of the Sanders campaign dates back to a detailed first-person report by a journalist covering the Sanders campaign in Iowa last summer, who attended a rally not as journalist but instead from the cheap seats in the midst of the attendees. I can't remember the journalist or the publication, and was unable to find it just now in a search. But I remember this: He sat next to a young woman, blond, cheerleadery-looking, who whenever Sanders said a word or phrase referencing one of his favorite topics, would stand up, thrust her arm up in a punch-the-air motion, and shout the word or phrase. Cheerleader-like, the reporter said.

    One of the words? Antitrust. Or, as the young woman said it, "ANTITRUSSSTTT!"

    In searching for that article, which as I said I couldn't find, I did find a slew of references by Sanders to antitrust-the economic and political power of unchecked and ever-growing monopolies-in reports about his rallies. One, about a rally in Iowa, for example, quoted Sanders as saying that Agribusiness monopoly has reduced the prices human farmers receive for their products well below their market value in a competitive economy.

    Other statements made clear the critical reason that Sanders has so focused on the call to break up the big banks: their huge economic and political power. Including the resultant demise of community banks of the sort that made America great when America was great-for obtaining small-business loans and mortgages, anyway.

    So here's my point: If you click on the link to that Democracy Corps poll, you'll see what so many people whose heads are buried in the sands of the pre-2015 political era (including the ones who constantly trash me in the comments threads to my posts like my last one ) don't recognize. All that the Democrats need do in order to win a White House and down-ballot landslide is to campaign on genuinely progressive issues, and genuinely explain them.

    Which is why Warren is so valuable to the Dems up and down the ballot. And why Sanders is, too.

    Warren endorsed Clinton last week, and on Tuesday campaigned with her in a speech introducing her, singing her praises, and trashing Donald Trump. Headline-making stuff. But not the stuff that will matter most. When she goes on the road and repeats her Wednesday speech, not her Tuesday one, and then asks that people vote Democratic for the White House on down, it will matter far more.

    And that is true also for Sanders. But I don't expect many politicos over the age of 40 to recognize that.

    Glastris's piece yesterday in titled " Elizabeth Warren's Consolidation speech Could Change the Election. " Yes. Exactly. Consolidation . As in, monopolies . And monopolistic economic practices and political power .

    Antitrusssttt!

    Surprisingly, apparently in response to the release of the Democracy Corp poll yesterday, hours after suggesting that Clinton was about to begin campaigning as a triangulator because Sanders was refusing to endorse her, and anyway that's what some Clinton partisans have been urging, someone in the Clinton campaign rescinded that , indirectly. Presumably, it was someone under the age of 40.

    Or someone who reads Angry Bear . Probably someone who's under 40 and reads Angry Bear.

    Rah-rah! Sis-boom-bah!

    * Sentence edited slightly or clarity. 7/2 at 10:43 a.m.

    UPDATE: Greg Sargent is reporting now:

    The latest draft of the Democratic Party platform, which is set to be released as early as this afternoon, will show that Bernie Sanders won far more victories on his signature issues than has been previously thought, according to details provided by a senior Sanders adviser.

    The latest version of the platform, which was signed off on recently by a committee made up of representatives for the Sanders and Clinton campaigns and the DNC, has been generally summarized by the DNC and characterized in news reports. Sanders has hailed some of the compromises reached in it, but he has vowed to continue to fight for more of what he wants when the current draft goes to a larger Democratic convention platform committee in Orlando coming weeks, and when it goes to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia in late July.

    But the actual language of the latest draft has not yet been released, and it will be released as early as today. It will show a number of new provisions on Wall Street reform, infrastructure spending, and job creation that go beyond the victories that Sanders has already talked about. They suggest Sanders did far better out of this process thus far than has been previously thought. Many of these new provisions are things that Sanders has been fighting for for years.

    We already know from the DNC's public description of the latest draft of the platform that it includes things such as a general commitment to the idea of a $15-per-hour minimum wage; to expanding Social Security; to making universal health care available as a right through expanding Medicare or a public option; and to breaking up too-big-to-fail institutions.

    Warren Gunnels, the chief policy adviser to the Sanders campaign, is Sargent's source. Gunnels listed six additions to the platform draft:

    1. Eliminating conflict of interest at the Federal Reserve by making sure that executives at financial institutions cannot serve on the board of regional Federal Reserve banks or handpick their members.
    2. Banning golden parachutes for taking government jobs and cracking down on the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.
    3. Prohibiting Wall Street from picking and choosing which credit agency will rate their product.
    4. Empowering the Postal Service to offer basic banking services, which makes such services available to more people throughout the country, including low-income people who lack access to checking accounts.
    5. Ending the loophole that allows large profitable corporations to defer taxes on income stashed in offshore tax havens to avoid paying less taxes.
    6. Using the revenue from ending that deferral loophole to rebuild infrastructure and create jobs.

    Okay, folks. While being credited to Sanders, this far more likely is a blunt-force impact of Warren, since every one of these points concerns Warren's particular area of interest: financial industry regulation.

    But there are, I believe, clear Sanders hallmarks in there, too: particularly item 4, empowering the Postal Service to offer basic banking services, which makes such services available to more people throughout the country, including low-income people who lack access to checking accounts.

    In other words, Warren is the intermediary between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. And in exchange for her unbridled campaigning for and with Clinton has combined her own top priorities-precise legislative ones that Warren has the deep expertise to demand and to draft, e.g., items 1 and 3-with one very specific one of Sanders and with more generic ones of his as well, e.g., items 2 and 5.

    This will be an unbeatable platform and team. During the campaign, and in the four years that follow.

    Game on.

    [Jun 18, 2016] Greenspan Shocked Disbelief by Robert Borosage

    Greenspan phony "Shocked disbelief" reminds classic "...I am shocked - shocked, there is gambling going on in this establishment...." "...here are your winnings..." exchange between Humphrey Bogart & Claude Rains in Casablanca. Compare with "... "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he said. ..."
    Notable quotes:
    "... "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," ..."
    "... Greenspan spurned the Republican acolytes trying desperately to defend the faith and blame the crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act and the powerful lobby of poor people who forced powerless banks to do reckless things. ..."
    "... Private greed, not public good, caused this catastrophe: "The evidence now suggests, but only in retrospect, that this market evolved in a manner which if there were no securitization, it would have been a much smaller problem and, indeed, very unlikely to have taken on the dimensions that it did. It wasn't until the securitization became a significant factor, which doesn't occur until 2005, that you got this huge increase in demand for subprime loans, because remember that without securitization, there would not have been a single subprime mortgage held outside of the United States, that it's the opening up of this market which created a huge demand from abroad for subprime mortgages as embodied in mortgage-backed securities. ..."
    "... But having admitted the failure of his faith, Greenspan could not abandon it. Credit default swaps had to be "restrained," he admitted. Those who create mortgages should be mandated to retain a piece of them to insure responsible lending. Otherwise, the old faith still applied. No new regulations were needed, because the markets "for the indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime." ..."
    "... The only Guantanamo that the United States has any business running is a concentration camp for the hundreds of wall street executives and their cronies in Bushland that conspired to defraud the American people from their hard earned dollar. ..."
    "... There are no free markets in America, any more than there is free lunch. ..."
    "... So it wasn't the military-industrial complex that did us in after all . . . ..."
    "... It's clear from comments on this contribution that few readers of Truthout believe Alan Greenspan's sorry testimony before Congress. What has faith in something to do with enforcing the policies of fiduciary responsibility already on the books? All these so-called "experts" on capitalism are now coming out to say "I'm sorry." Well, I won't be sorry for them until they are held monetarily and criminally responsible for their actions, inept or not. ..."
    "... If it looks like class warfare, as David Harvey, author of Neoliberalism, has stated, call it class warfare and act accordingly. ..."
    "... it doesn't take a genius to understand that when financial instruments are created based on crap (subprime mortgages), that eventually problems will occur with those instruments. In fact, Greenspan and his cronies knew that, which is why they resisted these instruments being regulated by the SEC or even the CFTC. ..."
    "... Sounds like the "maestro" hit a flat note in his orchestra of greed and deregulation. ..."
    "... Did anybody even bother to consult the Math PhDs who created these instruments to run possible scenarios -- just in case? why bother when you know you can scare congress, the president and the treasury and ultimately the people into bailing your ass out of worldwide collapse? ..."
    "... Shocked Disbelief is a ploy. When they were all riding high, they didn't give a crap. They were going to come out richer than hell anyway. ..."
    "... Where's Ayn Rand when you need her? Give me a break Mr Greenspan. Never let history and reality get in the way of the big unregulated celebration of greed like we have had since "Saint Ronald Wilson Reagan", and the other "Free Market" "government is the problem" ideologues ..."
    "... What about the 1994 Act of Congress that required the Fed to monitor and regulate derivatives? The Act Greenspan ignored? ..."
    "... "...I am shocked - shocked, there is gambling going on in this establishment...." "...here are your winnings..." exchange between Humphrey Bogart & Claude Rains in Casablanca ..."
    Oct 24, 2008 | truthout.org

    by: Robert Borosage, The Campaign for America's Future

    On October 23, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the role of federal regulators in the current financial crisis.

    It marks the end of an era. Alan Greenspan, the maestro, defender of the market fundamentalist faith, champion of deregulation, celebrator of exotic banking inventions, admitted Thursday in a hearing before Rep. Henry Waxman's House Committee and Oversight and Government Reform that he got it wrong.

    "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he said.

    As to the fantasy that banks could regulate themselves, that markets self-correct, that modern risk management enforced prudence: "The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year."

    Greenspan spurned the Republican acolytes trying desperately to defend the faith and blame the crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act and the powerful lobby of poor people who forced powerless banks to do reckless things. Greenspan dismissed that goofiness in response to a question from one of its right-wing purveyors, Rep. Todd Platts, R-Pa., noting that subprime loans grew to a crisis only as the unregulated shadow financial system securitized mortgages, marketed them across the world, and pressured brokers to lower standards to generate a larger supply to meet the demand. Private greed, not public good, caused this catastrophe:

    "The evidence now suggests, but only in retrospect, that this market evolved in a manner which if there were no securitization, it would have been a much smaller problem and, indeed, very unlikely to have taken on the dimensions that it did. It wasn't until the securitization became a significant factor, which doesn't occur until 2005, that you got this huge increase in demand for subprime loans, because remember that without securitization, there would not have been a single subprime mortgage held outside of the United States, that it's the opening up of this market which created a huge demand from abroad for subprime mortgages as embodied in mortgage-backed securities.

    But having admitted the failure of his faith, Greenspan could not abandon it. Credit default swaps had to be "restrained," he admitted. Those who create mortgages should be mandated to retain a piece of them to insure responsible lending. Otherwise, the old faith still applied. No new regulations were needed, because the markets "for the indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime."

    Now hung over from their bender, the banks could be depended upon to remain sober "for the indefinite future." Or until taxpayers' money relieves their headaches, and they are free to party once more.


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    Comments

    This is a moderated forum. It may take a little while for comments to go live.

    The only Guantanamo that the

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 23:37 - Captain America (not verified)

    The only Guantanamo that the United States has any business running is a concentration camp for the hundreds of wall street executives and their cronies in Bushland that conspired to defraud the American people from their hard earned dollar.

    What they did dwarfs the damage caused to this country by 911, (no disrespect for the many innocents who died). However, here, every single citizen is a victim of fraud and corruption on a scale that was heretofore inconceivable. Greenspan, Bush and now Paulson have done more than Bin Laden and his hordes could do in a 100 years.

    By the way, if you protest YOU wind up locked up for being un-American. What happened America ?

    There are no free markets in

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 19:27 - pink elephant (not verified)

    There are no free markets in America, any more than there is free lunch. The game was always fixed and Greenspan was the ultimate shill for the fixers. The past thirty years have been an orgy of greed with common sense shoved aside for the sake of uncommon expediency. Americans became infatuated by arcane formulas and dense incomprehensible mathematics to the point that they forget simple arithmetic. America wake up it was only a dream, and a bad one at that.

    So it wasn't the

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 19:07 - Anonymous (not verified)

    So it wasn't the military-industrial complex that did us in after all . . .

    It's clear from comments on

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 15:40 - afrothethics (not verified)

    It's clear from comments on this contribution that few readers of Truthout believe Alan Greenspan's sorry testimony before Congress. What has faith in something to do with enforcing the policies of fiduciary responsibility already on the books? All these so-called "experts" on capitalism are now coming out to say "I'm sorry." Well, I won't be sorry for them until they are held monetarily and criminally responsible for their actions, inept or not. The truth is as plain as the nose on your face: Greenspan, the Federal Reserve, the investment banks, the Bush administration and several members of Congress unobtrusively acted to consciously and knowingly to rob the national treasury for the sake of capitalism's sacred cow: capital accumulation on behalf of the nation's political and economic elite. If it looks like class warfare, as David Harvey, author of Neoliberalism, has stated, call it class warfare and act accordingly.

    We have heard statements

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 10:11 - DJK (not verified)

    We have heard statements like "the mathematical models used for knowing the behavior of derivatives based on subprime mortgages were too difficult to understand", etc. But it doesn't take a genius to understand that when financial instruments are created based on crap (subprime mortgages), that eventually problems will occur with those instruments. In fact, Greenspan and his cronies knew that, which is why they resisted these instruments being regulated by the SEC or even the CFTC. And this is why they turned a blind eye to many of the rating agencies giving many of these instruments AAA ratings. I am sure that a real investigation will reveal numerous instances of fraudulent activity in conjunction with this debacle. Those perpetrators must be identified and brought to justice. While this will not fix our current problem, it hopefully should serve as a deterrent to those who would in the future attempt to again engage in such activities.

    Well here you have it a

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 08:13 - Robert Iserbyt (not verified)

    Well here you have it a confessional lie from the biggest fraud perpetrator in the history of American finance Why the markets ever listened to this criminal in the first place is evidence that our entire nation should be required to take a full year of real unfettered economics just in case they don't understand what is going on now. All the pundits on MSNBC and all the talking heads should be removed from the airwaves. The Bailout what will that do? the answer lies before you.

    Sounds like the "maestro"

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 02:02 - Anonymous (not verified)

    Sounds like the "maestro" hit a flat note in his orchestra of greed and deregulation. Come on, do you really think we are all so stupid to buy into the story that you couldn't predict a melt down knowing that those writing the subprimes held no responsibility for their actions? That's like giving a "get out of jail card" to someone who just created a felony! Did anybody even bother to consult the Math PhDs who created these instruments to run possible scenarios -- just in case? why bother when you know you can scare congress, the president and the treasury and ultimately the people into bailing your ass out of worldwide collapse?

    I'm a former real estate

    Sun, 10/26/2008 - 00:24 - two7five7one (not verified)

    I'm a former real estate broker and my son is a mortgage broker. From about 2004 through the beginning of this "greatest financial crisis since '29", we frequently talked on the phone about the disaster which would ensue when the real estate value appreciation stopped, and people were no longer fueling the economy with money borrowed against their equity, and the sub-prime loan fiasco would end. We knew it would be disastrous, and both of us were astonished that neither the FED nor congress was willing to say or do anything about it. Anyone who has witnessed over the years the cycle of boom/bust/boom/bust in the real estate market knew that after eleven years of unprecedented "boom" -- '96 through '2007 -- the "bust" would be like an earthquake. Paulson and Greenspan and their ilk now denying that they suspected this is just is just their lying to protect the GOP which was benefitting from the booming economy. They should both end up in prison, with all of the GOP members of congress who have had their hands in the cash register.

    Dance clown, dance. First

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 23:48 - mysterioso (not verified)

    Dance clown, dance. First you were against the FED until you became head of the FED. Then you were for trickle down economics and letting the "system" regulate itself until you saw the inevitable destruction it caused. Dance clown, dance. You should be the first one sent to prison under the "Un-American activities act". The arrogance of your testimony before the committee was appalling. You honestly couldn't believe you were wrong !!!

    Shocked disbelief, my foot.

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 23:35 - slw (not verified)

    Shocked disbelief, my foot. Many of us predicted EXACTLY this outcome.

    This is like telling the Fox

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 22:43 - topview (not verified)

    This is like telling the Fox to watch the Hens and then walking away and trusting him to do the right thing. Government has to return to regulation and see that there is no hanky, Banky going on anymore. Monopolies have to be busted up, like the Communication industry's, the Drug industries and any other Corporations that control to much of the way the Country operates. No more Outsourcing any Government duties.

    Shocked Disbelief is a ploy.

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 22:00 - radline9 (not verified)

    Shocked Disbelief is a ploy. When they were all riding high, they didn't give a crap. They were going to come out richer than hell anyway.

    Where's Ayn Rand when you

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 20:53 - anglohistorian (not verified)

    Where's Ayn Rand when you need her? Give me a break Mr Greenspan. Never let history and reality get in the way of the big unregulated celebration of greed like we have had since "Saint Ronald Wilson Reagan", and the other "Free Market" "government is the problem" ideologues. We can spend trillions on war and corporate bailouts, but we can't have a single payer health system? We can't rebuild our infrastructure? Say it again- give me a break!

    What about the 1994 Act of

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 20:41 - Jtmonrow (not verified)

    What about the 1994 Act of Congress that required the Fed to monitor and regulate derivatives? The Act Greenspan ignored?

    "...I am shocked - shocked,

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 20:29 - Anonymous (not verified)

    "...I am shocked - shocked, there is gambling going on in this establishment...." "...here are your winnings..." exchange between Humphrey Bogart & Claude Rains in Casablanca

    This would be the same

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 19:50 - dtroutma (not verified)

    This would be the same "shocked disbelief" expressed by Willie Sutton's mother?

    shouldn't Greenspan give his

    Sat, 10/25/2008 - 18:06 - Anonymous (not verified)

    shouldn't Greenspan give his salary and bonus back to taxpayers?

    [May 01, 2016] Why I (Belatedly) Blew the Whistle on the SECs Failure to Properly Investigate Goldman Sachs

    Notable quotes:
    "... By James A. Kidney, former SEC attorney. Originally published at Watch the Circus ..."
    "... Pro Publica ..."
    "... Pro Publica's ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Dodd-Frank at best imposes generalized rules about bank size and other generic issues, rather than addressing the kinds of fraudulent actions that actually occurred. It is appropriate for the SEC or Federal Reserve to impose narrower changes in corporate practice to address specific kinds of fraud. They are called "undertakings" and are often imposed by civil settlements with the SEC or in litigated relief. It did not happen with the Big Bank frauds. ..."
    "... The only reason to keep the information secret is to prevent embarrassment to the SEC or to those people who made decisions for the agency. Most of them left the SEC years ago. For public consumption, I have tried to redact all names of the non-supervisory personnel in the Division of Enforcement who worked on Goldman. I also must add that, as the emails show, for a period of time those dedicated investigators were excited about the notion of bringing at least a slightly broader action than their supervisors wanted. As is the case with much of the Division of Enforcement, the worker bees try hard and usually are fearless. It is their bosses who frequently suppress their enthusiasm for policy, political, or personal reasons. ..."
    "... The author is trying very hard to be nice to the point of being delusional. This is criminality and corruption through and through, and it didn't end in '08. Don't be sad… get mad. ..."
    "... This man has risked a lot to do what he did. He's lost more than many of you will realize. If he can't just crap on the old life and the old profession, please, cut the man a little slack. You don't want to be him. ..."
    "... James A. Kidney, former trial attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission, retired from the SEC in 2014 at the age of 66 after 24 years working there. Looks like he had a full career, although had to put up with a lot of bullshit, and possibly soured some relationships on his way out. ..."
    "... Very similar situation here. Going on 50, unemployed in my chosen field, etc. And yes, its hard to just walk away sometimes… I have to keep my mind focused ahead instead of looking back. ..."
    "... I know other whistleblowers and internal dissenters who wound up losing their jobs who initially blame themselves, than come to accept that the system in which they operated was fundamentally corrupt, that even if some people locally really were trying to do the right thing, it was bound to either 1. go nowhere, 2. be allowed to proceed to a more meaningful level if it was cosmetic or served some larger political purpose or 3. got elevated because the organization was suddenly in trouble and they needed to burnish their cred in a big way (a variant of 2, except with 3, you might have a something serious take place by happenstance of timing). ..."
    "... (other whistleblowers) ..."
    "... (other whistleblowers) ..."
    "... (other whistleblowers) ..."
    "... (other whistleblowers) ..."
    "... the system in which they operated ..."
    "... (some employees) ..."
    "... 'investigating fraud' ..."
    April 24, 2016

    Yves here. Two things struck me about Jim Kidney's article below. One is that he still wants to think well of his former SEC colleagues. I know other whistleblowers and internal dissenters who wound up losing their jobs who initially blame themselves, than come to accept that the system in which they operated was fundamentally corrupt, that even if some people locally really were trying to do the right thing, it was bound to either 1. go nowhere, 2. be allowed to proceed to a more meaningful level if it was cosmetic or served some larger political purpose or 3. got elevated because the organization was suddenly in trouble and they needed to burnish their cred in a big way (a variant of 2, except with 3, you might have a something serious take place by happenstance of timing). Kidney does criticize corrosive practices, particularly the SEC stopping developing its own lawyers and becoming dependent on the revolving door, but his criticisms seem muted relative to the severity of the problems.

    Number two, and related, are the class assumptions at work. The SEC does not want to see securities professionals at anything other than bucket shops as bad people. At SEC conferences, agency officials are virtually apologetic and regularly say, "We know you are honest people who want to do the right thing." Please tell me where else in law enforcement is that the underlying belief.

    By James A. Kidney, former SEC attorney. Originally published at Watch the Circus

    The New Yorker and Pro Publica websites today posted an article by Pro Publica's Jesse Eisinger about the de minimis investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into the conduct of Goldman Sachs in the sale of derivatives based on mortgage-backed securities during the run-up to the Great Recession of 2008. The details of the SEC's failure to aggressively pursue Goldman in the particular investigation, Abacus, and its refusal to investigate fully misconduct by Goldman and other "Too Big to Fail" banks, stands not only as a historic misstep by the SEC and its Division of Enforcement, but undermines the claim that the Obama Administration has been "tough on Wall Street." The Pro Publica version contains links to a few of the documents I provided.

    No one in authority who was involved in the Goldman investigation ever gave me an explanation for why the effort was so slight. Mr. Eisinger's article doesn't offer any explanation from the one investigation participant brave enough to comment. The details of the investigation into Abacus at my level as trial counsel, which I provided to Pro Publica earlier this year, compels the conclusion that the SEC, its chairman at the time, Mary Schapiro, and the leadership of the Division of Enforcement were more interested in a quick public relations hit than in pursuing a thorough investigation of Goldman, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan and other large Wall Street firms.

    Although the emails and documents I produced to Pro Publica stemming from my role as the designated (later replaced) trial attorney for the Division of Enforcement are excruciatingly boring to all but the most dedicated securities lawyer, even a lay person can observe that the Division of Enforcement was more anxious to publicize a quick lawsuit than to follow the trail of clues as far up the chain-of-command at Goldman as the evidence warranted. Serious consideration also never was given to fraud theories in any of the Big Bank cases stemming from the Great Recession that would better tell the story of how investors were defrauded and who was responsible, due either to dereliction or design.

    Instead, the SEC restricted its investigation to the narrowest theory of liability, had to be pressed (by me) to go even one short rung above the lowest level Goldman supervisor in its investigation (which took months to push through, though investigative subpoenas are frequently issued on far less in far smaller cases) and finally dropped other investigations of Goldman in return for a $550 million settlement announced July 15, 2010. To my knowledge (I retired in March 2014), the SEC never again pursued Goldman for its mortgage securities fraud or other major fraud. There is no evidence on the SEC website that it did so.

    Nearly six years later, long after the statute of limitations for securities fraud expired and individuals, pension funds and corporate entities are no longer able to bring private actions against the Big Banks, the Department of Justice announced another settlement with Goldman for its deceptive conduct in the sale of mortgage-backed securities. In this one, Goldman agreed to pay more than $5 billion "in connection with its sale of residential mortgage-backed securities."

    At a minimum, it can be said that the SEC left 90 percent of the money on the table at a time when a more aggressive investigation of the company, as well as others, could have counted for something by disclosing, in a detailed court complaint, Wall Street wrongs that might have helped policy makers better address the subject and allow damaged individuals and entities to bring their own lawsuits.

    It is very important to emphasize emphatically several points. First, I have zero evidence, and would be very surprised, if any of the individuals at the Division of Enforcement, including senior supervisors or the SEC chairman or associate commissioners, acted unlawfully or were motivated principally to protect Goldman and other big banks. All of these people appeared well-intentioned from their point of view, even they never really explained, to me, or to many others at the Commission, their motives in limiting investigations. The most senior level supervisors left more lucrative jobs in the private sector to head the Division of Enforcement, taking plum jobs but at significant personal sacrifice. (They then returned to even more lucrative employment or even more high-profile public positions.) All of them were gentlemen. These factors make it all the more surprising that I never got a clear answer as to why the investigation was so constipated, as it obviously was. Its range was clearly limited from the outset: we will sue the bank and not look hard for evidence of individual participation beyond the lowest levels.

    By the same token, it is unfair to assume as a fact that any of the individuals at Goldman not sued, or anyone at Paulson & Co., violated the securities laws, civilly or criminally. Like any citizen, they are entitled to a day in court. Absent such opportunity, they are innocent of any wrongdoing. Arguments in my internal correspondence that evidence was sufficient to sue should be viewed only as that - arguments.

    So my point in releasing these documents to Pro Publica is not to chastise or hold up to public criticism those involved at the SEC, Paulson & Co. or Goldman, though criticism of the process and of the underlying financial conduct certainly is inevitable. All of these institutions have substantial influence in the investment industry. Rather, it is to bring to light the actual conduct of one of several SEC investigations into Big Bank fraud leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

    As I told Mr. Eisinger when I met him, I hoped he would go to the individuals in charge of the SEC investigation at the time and find out why the investigation was so limited. I have spent six years wondering what is the true answer to that question. Perhaps there were sound reasons, other than the urge to get out a quick press release, which led experienced criminal prosecutors with histories in Wall Street to smother a major investigation by limiting it to the lowest level employee possible, to express total resistance to even investigating further up the chain of command, and ignoring without serious explanation and analysis what I and others, including my own immediate supervisors, viewed as the more appropriate theory for civil prosecution. I hope there are such reasons. As a trial attorney at the SEC for over 20 years, I bled SEC blue. I believed that the agency usually tried to do the best it could, using analog era procedures and processes to combat fraud in a digital age. I am saddened to release this information. But the notion that "the Administration was tough on Wall Street" must be addressed by facts, not press releases and self-serving interviews, else the system's problems cannot be adequately addressed and repaired to deal with the next financial crisis.

    Not only is the issue of how the financial sector enforcement agencies handled the wrongs of the Great Recession an important political issue, but it is important to history. It is important that the facts not be shielded from the public so that we can all learn for the future. And it is a melancholy thought that, presented with the opportunity for a rigorous investigation and airing of facts in civil or criminal proceedings gone, history will be denied a fairer story of both the financial crisis itself and how the government responded.

    As many news organizations have noted , the taxpayer and Goldman shareholders will pay the combination of penalties and repayments in the DOJ settlement. No individual was named as liable in the civil settlement with Goldman nor in any of the other similar, and even larger, financial settlements entered into with the Department of Justice, all of which are vastly greater than what the SEC obtained in its "quick hit, one and done" enforcement actions. DOJ must be credited with what appears to have been a far more thorough investigation of wrongdoing than the SEC performed, but the public is properly mystified that no individuals were charged, criminally or civilly, although the DOJ press releases contains the usual caveat that "the investigation continues."

    The settlements with Goldman and other Big Banks were resolved under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA), which allows the Feds to ignore the normal five-year statute of limitations for fraud, but does not permit suit by private party victims. As has been the practice with DOJ when dealing with Wall Street, no criminal charge was brought. In fact, no complaint was filed in any of these cases. Instead, DOJ entered into contractual arrangements with the banks. Failing to fulfill their obligations under the contract would subject them to civil enforcement as a breach of contract matter, not a contempt charge in federal District Court.

    Contrary to claims by politicians, it is clear that the Obama Administration has not been hard-hitting on Wall Street fraudsters. The large fines obtained by the Department of Justice, while a short-term pinch, are simply a cost of doing business. Relying on fines to penalize rich Wall Street banks, which, after all, specialize in making money and do it well, if not always honestly, is like fining Campbell Soup in chicken broth. It costs something, but doesn't change anything in the way of operations or personnel.

    Despite billions in fines representing many more billions in fraud, the enforcement agencies of the United States have been unable to find anyone responsible criminally or civilly for this huge business misconduct other than a janitor or two at the lowest rung of the companies. Nor have they sought to impose systemic changes to these banks to prevent similar frauds from happening again.

    Yessir, according to the Obama administration, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank and other institutions made their contributions to tearing down the economy, but no one was responsible. They are ghost companies. And nothing needs to be done to prevent such intent or dereliction in the future.

    Law enforcement by contract? Clearly, the banks made it a condition of settlement that no complaint, civil or criminal, be filed. That might gum up the works by requiring state regulators to take action under their own rules, or cause other collateral consequences.

    Ah, say the defenders of the status quo, don't forget about Dodd-Frank, the unwieldy legislation passed by feckless Democrats influenced by big money contributors and their own fear of appearing too aggressive (a particular Democratic Party contagion). Dodd-Frank was and is a virtual chum pool for Wall Street lawyers and lobbyists, leaving most of the substance to regulatory agencies such as the SEC and the Federal Reserve, who for years have been significantly captured by those they are supposed to regulate. The private sector lawyers and lobbyists have open doors to these places to "help" write the rules and add complexity, which they later complain about in court, challenging those same rules as too complex.

    Dear citizen, just remember this: complexity favors fraud, and certainly favors Wall Street and corporate America. You can't understand the rules and neither can Congress or all but the most dedicated experts. That's a lot of room to disguise misdeeds. To take a current example, which came to my attention just before completing this post, Congress is trying to use sentencing reform, generally thought of as intending to remove inequities from the criminal justice system, to also make it even tougher to prosecute and punish white-collar crime. Is this why the Koch Brothers suddenly show such public attention to the poor and needy by favoring such legislation? See this discussion of adding the "mens rea" requirement to such legislation. Burying an important but legalistic issue in otherwise liberal leaning legislation is a current example of disguising lax enforcement of white-collar crime in a complicated package. As one Democratic congressman suggested, how can a liberal vote against sentencing reform? The explanation of the badger buried in the woodpile is too complicated for the average voter.

    Not coincidentally, adding a requirement to the law that it is a defense to either the crime itself or to sentencing that "I didn't know my acts were against the law" is a get out of jail free card as the complexity of laws addressed to ever more sophisticated business misconduct grows. Wall Street clearly has shown no shame in using the defense that "no one knew". Can't blame them. It has worked so far. Maybe they don't even need new legislation.

    I was told repeatedly when I entered the Goldman investigation that synthetic CDOs were just too complex for me to understand. Of course, it appeared to be plain vanilla fraud selling a product designed to fail but nicely packaged for chumps to buy. Claims of complexity hide many easily understood sins.

    At least for the major sins, we don't need even more complex regulations. Instead, put leadership in place who will aggressively enforce the laws we have already. That would raise plenty of eyebrows and put some bums in prison, or at least make them pay civil and criminal penalties personally. As many have noted, prison or, at least, personal financial liability, beats corporate concessions every time and pays back in future reluctance to break the law. The country should try it sometime.

    So back to little me, a small and ineffective cog in the larger system. Why is this release of documents so long after the investigation?

    My friends know that I have been upset since 2010 about the way the SEC handled the Goldman case and, in my view (confirmed by other trial lawyers), that it became a template for other SEC civil suits against the Big Banks. In 2011 I wrote an anonymous letter to The New York Times complaining about the lack of investigative effort by the Division of Enforcement and the impact of the "revolving door" bringing Wall Street defense lawyers into the highest reaches of the SEC. This is a practice that Obama has continued at most departments and agencies having to do with the financial system, following in Bill Clinton's footsteps. The New York Times letter was based entirely on publicly available information.

    I was dismayed to not find any follow-up to my letter in The New York Times . I gave up trying to bring attention to the investigative lassitude of the agency. Interest appeared to be over.

    A year after I retired, I sent a copy of the letter to The Times , under a cover letter identifying myself. One of the addressees on the original letter called and told me the original letter never was received. The caller suggested that was because I misaddressed it to the old location of The New York Times . I felt foolish, of course, but I guess that in 2014, when the letter was finally received, The Times didn't see fit to follow-up the information even knowing its source. This was another indication to me that the time for debate over the law enforcement treatment of wrong doers on Wall Street had passed.

    Once, years earlier and only for a brief time, the SEC was an agency that was at least sometimes fearless of Wall Street institutions. In those days, the directors of the Division of Enforcement were home-grown, not imported from Wall Street law firms. After 1996, that ended. Every director since has been nurtured as a Wall Street defense lawyer. The decline in performance has followed an expected arc. No one has seemed bothered by this. It seems the phrase "lawyers represent client interests" is sufficient explanation to insulate this practice from critics. In this view (pushed by lawyers), lawyers are the only people in America who are not influenced by their work experience, including friendships and defense of client practices. They are SO exceptional! So give it up, Jim, I finally told myself. It's the nature of Washington to put foxes in hen houses and claim they are protecting the fowl.

    But in April 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced his presidential candidacy, based principally on anger over how Wall Street has escaped being held seriously responsible for its misdeeds. If you credit Sanders with nothing else, praise him for not letting go of the notion of justice for those who suffered and those who caused pain and anger for millions. Yes, the banks are not solely responsible for the Great Recession, but they contributed more than their fair share and leveraged immensely the damage initially caused by others.

    Sanders was not treated seriously. The publications I read made it clear that Sanders was, like Donald Trump, a flash in the pan. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton would be nominated. Anger against Wall Street and inequality were issues, but not worthy vehicles for a political campaign. Nothing here. Move on.

    It turns out that the ravages caused by Wall Street are the gift that keeps on giving. As Sanders campaigned with far more success than predicted, and Secretary of State Clinton defended President Obama as "tough on Wall Street," it was evident that my small contribution to correcting the record might be timely.

    So here it is.

    Do I think Obama is responsible for the ineffective and embarrassing lay downs at the SEC and DOJ? Yes, I do. I have no idea if the President communicated to his law enforcement appointees that they should "go easy on Wall Street." Rarely is such overt instruction necessary in Washington. But it is not hard to believe that in some fashion he did send such signals, since he came into office with a mantra of letting bygones be bygones, including in the far more important arena of the false narratives for invading Iraq.

    In any event, the chairman of the SEC and the attorney general are appointed by the President. At a minimum, we can say with certainty that Obama was satisfied with their performance. It is difficult to conceive that, as a Harvard educated lawyer who also taught law at the University of Chicago, it never crossed his mind how massive civil or criminal misconduct could go on without the supervision or knowledge of at least mid-level executives. Certainly, the public criticism was brought to his attention. His response was to create a joint task force on the subject of fraud in general. Its main visible public function is to collect all the press releases on fraud prosecutions, including small-time fraud, on one website . It also offers advice to "elders" on how to avoid fraudulent scams. The pro forma mention of the task force in DOJ's announcement of the Goldman settlement signals that the Task Force doesn't do much. Again, law enforcement by press release.

    The alternative possibility, never mentioned because it is preposterous, is that big Wall Street firms so lack supervision of their lower level employees that fraud on a huge scale can be conducted without the knowledge of even mid-level executives. At the SEC, at least, such a conclusion should call for application of its "regulatory" function to impose supervisory conditions on the banks. No such action was ever undertaken. Instead, it was "pay up some money and nevermind."

    Dodd-Frank at best imposes generalized rules about bank size and other generic issues, rather than addressing the kinds of fraudulent actions that actually occurred. It is appropriate for the SEC or Federal Reserve to impose narrower changes in corporate practice to address specific kinds of fraud. They are called "undertakings" and are often imposed by civil settlements with the SEC or in litigated relief. It did not happen with the Big Bank frauds.

    I believe that the American public is entitled to accurate information about how their government works, including the important regulatory agencies. One way to do this is to fully disclose how the sausage is made, especially when the process is defective. Self-promoting press releases swallowed by a fawning business press is not sufficient. I knew I would not disclose any non-public information about the Goldman investigation while the lawsuit against Fabrice Tourre was pending. He was the one guy at Goldman the SEC sued personally. In fact, I think he was the only guy employed by any of the big banks sued personally. (Another fellow who worked with the banks - not for the banks - was sued in another case. He was found not liable, with the jury asking how come higher-ups were not in the dock and urging the investigation to continue. It wasn't.) The Tourre case concluded a few years ago with a verdict against the defendant. All appeals are exhausted. The statute of limitations has expired for private actions. Disclosure of the information I had can do no harm to the public or to pending litigation.

    The only reason to keep the information secret is to prevent embarrassment to the SEC or to those people who made decisions for the agency. Most of them left the SEC years ago. For public consumption, I have tried to redact all names of the non-supervisory personnel in the Division of Enforcement who worked on Goldman. I also must add that, as the emails show, for a period of time those dedicated investigators were excited about the notion of bringing at least a slightly broader action than their supervisors wanted. As is the case with much of the Division of Enforcement, the worker bees try hard and usually are fearless. It is their bosses who frequently suppress their enthusiasm for policy, political, or personal reasons.

    As final egotistical end note, I must say that, despite all of my personal reservations about his dedication to effective law enforcement in the financial sector, I voted for the President twice. I will vote for whoever is the Democratic nominee. But I ask myself: Is this the best that two political parties given de facto monopoly over selection of presidential candidates can do?

    Whoever is nominated and elected, Republican or Democrat, I hope that he or she will recognize the need to end the practice of hiring Wall Street personnel to run our financial enforcement agencies. They should begin by looking to home-trained personnel to lead the major departments and agencies, such as Treasury, the SEC and the Department of Justice, including the chief of the Antitrust Division. These are the people who are responsible for these institutions on a daily basis and also understand the nature and importance of their mission. They have a career stake in doing an effective job. Outsiders are, in general, more interested in resume polishing for the next private job. Additionally, much great talent leaves these agencies for their own more lucrative private careers when they see their own chances for advancement blocked by outsiders or their energies trying to fairly but aggressively enforce the law sapped by timid leadership.

    One party has chastised our government on every occasion for nearly 40 years and shows no intention of reining in Big Business or Wall Street. Directly or by implication, these attacks tarnish government employees in general, making a public service career less attractive to our most talented citizens. The other party has been indifferent or ineffective in its defense of civil service and has addressed financial sector wrongs by adding to the complexity of the system rather than cutting through it. As a result, some of our businesses are above the law.

    Something has got to change. It will. The question is, will it be for the better?

    Gaylord , April 24, 2016 at 4:40 am

    The author is trying very hard to be nice to the point of being delusional. This is criminality and corruption through and through, and it didn't end in '08. Don't be sad… get mad.

    James Levy , April 24, 2016 at 6:24 am

    When it's your career, you get sad.

    A little history: I was hired, first as an adjunct, then a tenure-track professor, by the interdisciplinary Freshman teaching unit at my old university. Two years before I would have come up for tenure (and gotten it) they axed the program and switched me, against its will, to the History Department. And they reset my tenure clock to zero. Long story short, they were never going to tenure me. So I slogged on and earned my pay and got my two kids through high school. By then, my wife wanted out of the suburbs and said she was leaving, preferably with me, but leaving. So we moved to the country. This cut me off from the academic life (and nice $72,000 a year paycheck) that I had struggled for years to enter and excel in.

    So what? So, It's gone. I'm cut off. My intended life's work is ruined. At 51 I'm an unemployed naval historian with two books and seven refereed journal articles and I can't get an interview for a full-time job at a community college. How painful is this? It's murder. Hurts all the time. No more exciting lectures to give. No more university library at my beck and call. No more access to journals. No more conferences. It's an occasional one-off course and driving a delivery van.

    This man has risked a lot to do what he did. He's lost more than many of you will realize. If he can't just crap on the old life and the old profession, please, cut the man a little slack. You don't want to be him.

    H. Alexander Ivey , April 24, 2016 at 6:58 am

    Mr Levy, I am very sympathetic to your situation – long story short, I was in the forefront of the late 70s to the present, layoffs in various industries where I found myself game-fully employed. I too, no longer believe I will ever be employed full time at any job.

    But I argue that it is not that the gods do not favour us; it is that we are the outcome of bad gov't policies and unregulated (regulated for the consumer) businesses practices. Hence, my lack of sympathy or willingness to tolerate breast beating (see my April 24, 2016 at 6:44 am posting) by those who put us here.

    ahimsa , April 24, 2016 at 7:48 am

    @James Leavy

    Not sure I follow you?

    James A. Kidney, former trial attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission, retired from the SEC in 2014 at the age of 66 after 24 years working there. Looks like he had a full career, although had to put up with a lot of bullshit, and possibly soured some relationships on his way out.

    From Bloomberg: SEC Goldman Lawyer Says Agency Too Timid on Wall Street Misdeeds

    inode_buddha , April 24, 2016 at 7:57 am

    Very similar situation here. Going on 50, unemployed in my chosen field, etc. And yes, its hard to just walk away sometimes… I have to keep my mind focused ahead instead of looking back.

    Are there any yacht clubs nearby you? There is like 4 of them within 10 minutes of me (I'm on the Great Lakes) You could teach sailing and rigging no doubt. Bonus: Union crane operators are required to know their rigging – they may need teachers too.

    Norb , April 24, 2016 at 10:54 am

    More than ever, I am convinced the capitalist system needs to be rejected as the means determining how goods and services are delivered. The injustice and inequality generated are too great. Finding a positive expressive outlet for this dissatisfaction will require leadership- and a new vision for the future.

    The amount of social damage being inflicted by the elite is almost beyond comprehension. Since they have successfully insulated themselves form the consequences of their actions, they remain aloof and uncaring for the plight of ordinary people, not to mention the health of the planet. This system will continue to cut more and more people off from the benefits of collective social action and effort. The work of the many, supporting the desires of the few cannot stand.

    We all have to decide the level of inequality we are willing to live with. How people answer this question will naturally sort them into common communities. Leave the isolated gated communities to the elite. Careerism, like capitalism, is a dead end if your position cannot be guaranteed. The amount of talent and passion for work wasted under the current system is another undercounted fact. Sustainability and democracy are not compatible with capitalism.

    Getting mad is only the beginning. The anger must be directed in some productive fashion. Any resistance to the current order must have broad social support and that support only has strength if self-reliant. Building these self-reliant structures is what the future will hold. If the plutocrats can build a world for themselves, why can't the common man. It only takes work,discipline, and control over the means of production.

    Workers without power, influence, and the means to obtain life necessities are slaves. Is the best the human mind can conceive a life of benevolent serfdom?

    By the way, I believe I would enjoy sitting in on one of your lectures. I'm sure I would learn much- and be a better man for it.

    local to oakland , April 24, 2016 at 11:43 am

    @James Levy … sorry to hear. I know a few who have been chewed up by the academic meat grinder. I hope you can find a productive outlet for your scholarship. Exile is hard.

    I have been helped by the stoics, and Dante.

    Ben , April 24, 2016 at 10:01 am

    And now GS is caught in the middle of 1MDB bond issue scandal using fraudulent and information.

    H. Alexander Ivey , April 24, 2016 at 6:44 am

    "The explanation of the badger buried in the woodpile is too complicated for the average voter."

    That's it! Stop right there! I will not let you (speaking to the author) BS your guilty conscience over my internet link. The average voter clearly knows they are getting screwed, that Wall Street and the voter's own bank is ripping the voter off, and most clearly, that the justice department, from state and local to federal, is enabling this injustice.

    You sir, are swimming with sharks. Your morality is "is it legal?", your justification is "for the shareholder". Therefore, you refuse to see the mendacity and instead excuse it for ignorance.

    JACK SKWAT , April 24, 2016 at 7:39 am

    I know other whistleblowers and internal dissenters who wound up losing their jobs who initially blame themselves, than come to accept that the system in which they operated was fundamentally corrupt, that even if some people locally really were trying to do the right thing, it was bound to either 1. go nowhere, 2. be allowed to proceed to a more meaningful level if it was cosmetic or served some larger political purpose or 3. got elevated because the organization was suddenly in trouble and they needed to burnish their cred in a big way (a variant of 2, except with 3, you might have a something serious take place by happenstance of timing).

    Wow, that's a mouthful – and it's only one sentence. Whilst I love your pieces, I've noticed that many of the articles – at least the run up summation to the articles – tend to be written in a stream-of-consciousness style that, frankly, is hard to digest. This seems to be the case more now than in the past. I don't know if you're harried or on an impossible schedule, but could you please make your syntax easier to read? Thanks from a long-time reader and donator.

    readerOfTeaLeaves , April 24, 2016 at 3:18 pm

    Because it's a Sunday and I have time to goof off, one potential revision - b/c I believe what Mr Kidney has to say is important enough for me to spend a few minutes on one potential suggestion. I've amended and added what I hope are accurate meanings:

    ----
    Focusing on these as the key subject /verb pairs:
    I know (other whistleblowers)
    (other whistleblowers) [lost their jobs]
    (other whistleblowers) [blamed themselves – initially]

    (other whistleblowers) [finally… accept]
    the system in which they operated … [was corrupt]
    … even if… (some employees) tried to [be competent]

    (It - there's a problem with 'it' as the subject, because we are unclear what 'it' refers back to - I'll interpret 'it' as 'investigating fraud' ) was bound to…
    -------------–

    I know other whistleblowers and internal dissenters. They wound up losing their jobs.
    Initially, they blamed themselves, until they finally came to accept that the system in which they operated was so fundamentally corrupt that they could not retain a sense of their own integrity while working within the organization.

    Despite the fact that some people really were trying to do the right thing, for reasons that I will explain, investigating fraud was bound to go in one of only three directions:
    1. fraud would not be investigated at all,
    2. fraud investigation would serve the agency's need for better public relations - in other words, the appearance of fraud investigation would be allowed to proceed, but only if it was merely cosmetic (or served some larger political purpose), or else
    3. fraud investigation became temporarily elevated, but only because the organization* was suddenly in trouble – and consequently, needed to burnish its credibility by actually investigating fraud.

    (Although 3 is a variant of 2, in the third option, credible fraud investigation could occur if, and only if, political necessity enabled competent SEC employees to actually investigate fraud in order to maintain the reputation of the SEC).

    [NOTE: *It's not entirely clear here whether 'the organization' is the target business, or whether it is the SEC (which would need to burnish it's cred in the face of bad publicity)]
    ------------

    Not sure how close I came to the author's intended meanings, but I thought that I'd give it a shot.

    Yves Smith Post author , April 24, 2016 at 4:25 pm

    The sentence parses correctly even though it is long. Stream of consciousness often does not parse correctly, plus another characteristic is the jumbling of ideas or observations. The point is to try to recreate the internal state of the character.

    For instance, from David Lodge's novel "The British Museum Is Falling Down":

    It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring 'Philip', 'Tony', 'Margaret', 'Prince Andrew'.

    More generally:

    The Stream of Consciousness style of writing is marked by the sudden rise of thoughts and lack of punctuations.

    The sentence may be longer than you like but this is not stream of consciousness. A clear logical structure ("first, second, third") is the antithesis of stream of consciousness.

    fiscalliberal , April 24, 2016 at 8:13 am

    I fail to see why fraud is not prosecuted. We can get cute with fancy words but fraud is clear and simple. Also – Enron results in SARBOX which seems to be clearly ignored. Yves – do we know of any SARBOX prosecutions? Clinton started deregulation, Bush implemented deregulation and Obama maintains it. No wonder the kids are mad. The financial industry makes the Koch brothers look like pikers.

    Yves Smith Post author , April 24, 2016 at 4:30 pm

    There is actually a high legal bar to prosecuting fraud.

    I have written at length re Sarbox and the answer is no. And under Sarbox, you don't need to prosecute, you can start with a civil case and flip it to criminal if you get strong enough evidence in discovery. There was only one case (IIRC, with Angelo Mozilo) where the SEC filed Sarbox claims, one in which it also filed securities law claims. The judge threw out the Sarbox claims with no explanation. I assume it was because the judge regarded that as doubling up: you can do Sarbox or securities law (the claims to have some similarity) but not both. But the SEC as it so often does seems to have lost its nerve after that one.

    afisher , April 24, 2016 at 9:22 am

    Interestingly, the SEC has been warned about more of the same type of fraud: https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-16-15/s71615-60.pdf

    I don't know if an election would have consequences and if a new administration headed by Sanders would make it the SEC more responsible to the taxpayers and not the investors / banks.

    It only took a decade for Markopolos to have his ponzi scheme information read by SEC.

    diptherio , April 24, 2016 at 9:48 am

    I want to like this guy, I really do. But then he goes and says stuff like this:

    The most senior level supervisors left more lucrative jobs in the private sector to head the Division of Enforcement, taking plum jobs but at significant personal sacrifice. (They then returned to even more lucrative employment or even more high-profile public positions.) All of them were gentlemen. These factors make it all the more surprising that I never got a clear answer as to why the investigation was so constipated, as it obviously was.

    So he doesn't understand how the revolving door works…or he does but he's being purposefully obtuse about it. Sacrifice my ass! Gentleman my heiny! And claiming that there's no proof of criminality when, as is pointed out above, Sarbanes-Oxley was obviously violated isn't helping things either.

    Listen dude, pick a side. It's either the American people or Wall Street crooks and their abettors in government. You don't get to have it both ways. This kind of minimization and wishy-washyness is only helping the crooks. More disappointing than I exepected.

    diptherio , April 24, 2016 at 9:59 am

    I mean, at least he lays blame at Obama's feet, and calls the fraud what it is: fraud. Good on him!

    …But then he pulls out the "vote for Dems no matter what they do!" line and I just shake my head….

    polecat , April 24, 2016 at 1:37 pm

    diptherio……. excuse me for a momen--BARFFFF!!!!!!-- Whew ……… that felt better !! ……….

    yes …I agree….these kinds of articles are nothing more than defensive measures against a growing public rage !!!

    bu…bu…but Just Us !!

    diptherio , April 24, 2016 at 5:18 pm

    these kinds of articles are nothing more than defensive measures against a growing public rage !!!

    I don't actually agree. I think the guy feels a little guilty for not doing more, now he's trying to salve his conscience. Still, he can't quite bring himself to admit that the people he was working for may well have been criminals. They were just so nice!

    Self-reflection is not comfortable, and most people don't have much tolerance for it. I think this guy's legitimately trying to do the right thing (not cover up for criminality) it's just that it's really psychologically difficult to admit certain aspects of reality. It's not like he's the only one.

    polecat , April 24, 2016 at 6:07 pm

    I find it telling that suddenly now (within the last year or so) that all these people ( people in high finance, their underlings, traders, hedge funders, and other assorted enablers of massive fraud upon the general public, are suddenly having a 'come to hayzeus' epiphany! I'm not buying whatever faux sincerity they're trying to project…….

    They've screwed millions of trusting people with their fraudulent grifting!

    reslez , April 24, 2016 at 7:09 pm

    > I find it telling that suddenly now (within the last year or so) that all these people […], are suddenly having a 'come to hayzeus' epiphany!

    Especially when it comes after a fat retirement and a lengthy career of going along. I have much more respect for people who really did put their daily bread on the line, and there are plenty of those people, a lot of whom Obama sent to jail. So, yeah, great, you finally told the truth… but where were you when the country needed you to speak out?

    perpetualWAR , April 24, 2016 at 11:32 am

    How about where the guy said "until proven guilty, they are innocent." Hahahahahahaha

    Crooks, the lot of them.

    diptherio , April 24, 2016 at 12:59 pm

    Couldn't we use civil forfeiture to go after them regardless of whether we can prove any actual crime? What's good for the average citizen is surely good for the elite banker…

    polecat , April 24, 2016 at 1:42 pm

    …but you just might need some of those 'Yehadis' to back you up ;-)

    reslez , April 24, 2016 at 7:06 pm

    It's a good thing they're gentlemen. I don't know if I could handle all the looting and self-dealing if it came from common ruffians. Truly we are fortunate to be in such hands, my fellow countrymen!

    ChrisPacific , April 26, 2016 at 12:36 am

    Yes, I had trouble getting past that line as well. Either he is being ironic or he has a massive blind spot on that point.

    Lars Jorgensen , April 24, 2016 at 10:00 am

    According to Bill Black in a ted talk 2014. After the Savings and loans debacle, where the regulators went after the worst of the worst criminals, they made 30.000 criminal referrals and 1000 procecutions with a 90% succes rate.

    Now after the 2008 crisis, which was 70 times bigger causing 10 million job losses and costing 11 trillion dolllars, the Obama administration has not made one single criminal referral. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JBYPcgtnGE

    Today I fell over some information about the IMF, that the organization is exempt from legal prosecutions and taxes. Can this be true?

    From the article: "The employees who bare the IMF badge are pretty much exempt from all forms of government intervention. And, according to LisaHavenNews, the IMF "law book," the Articles of Agreement lists the reasons and requirements for exclusion from government mandate."

    http://www.truthandaction.org/revealed-imf-granted-complete-immunity-form-legal-prosecution-taxation/

    polecat , April 24, 2016 at 1:45 pm

    …..criminals are, as criminals do, as criminals take…..

    Steve in Dallas , April 24, 2016 at 2:35 pm

    Thank you, I was hoping someone would mention Bill Black.

    I'm a software/hardware product/business development engineer. In 2008, after 20 years of reading the WSJ and stunned by the sellout to Murdoch, I went to the internet independent media (IM) to follow the 'economic crisis'. Within a few months it was clear to me 1) I had learned nothing of substance reading the WSJ, 2) the U.S. MSM, education system, and government are thoroughly captured/corrupt.

    Being a 'reader' (note: I don't know anyone who reads non-fiction) for me this 'worldview transition' was quite natural, nothing really surprised me, and it was a big relief to discover such good information/analysis so easily available on the internet. However, eight years later, I have yet to meet a single person who has rejected the MSM or tuned in to what's happening, via the IM or otherwise. In fact, after leaving the university in 1990, I have yet to meet a single person with any basic understanding of (or the slightest interest in, or concern about) the extreme institutional criminality of the the Savings & Loan Crisis, Asian Economic Crisis, Technology Bubble, the 2008 crisis, or the many economic/military wars-of-aggression methodically destroying one government/economy/country after another.

    To me, nothing made the global/economic/organized/mafia criminality more clear than the 2008/2009 articles by Bill Black. Back then I again foolishly assumed people would rally behind Dr. Black to reestablish basic law enforcement against yet another obvious largest-ever "epidemic" of organized crime. Looking back, the highly organized (and very successful) criminality of the Paulson/Obama/Geithner/Bernanke/etc. cabal was truly an amazing operation to behold. Perhaps the most shocking news came in 2010 when numerous studies confirmed that the top 7% of Americans had already "profited" from the economic crisis, that the criminally organized upper class had not only increased their net wealth but, more importantly, had increased their rate of wealth accumulation relative to the bottom 93%. Still, to me, infinitely more amazing, the bottom 93% didn't, and still don't, seem to care, or if they do, they've done absolutely nothing to even start to fight back.

    Today, when reading these articles, I'm astounded how completely meek and 'unorganized' the bottom 93% are compared to the extremely vicious and organized top 7%. Year after year the wealthy elite, who's core organizing philosophy is "take or be taken, kill or be killed", increasingly wallow in dangerously high and unprecedented levels of wealth accumulated by blatant/purposeful/methodical/criminal/vicious looting while their victims, the bottom 93% 'working class', do absolutely nothing (what are they doing?…. other than playing with their phone-toys, facebook, video games, movies?). At this point, the main (only?) reason I continue to 'read' is to perhaps someday 'behold' the working class 93% attempting to educate themselves and consequently 'organize' to defend themselves.

    lightningclap , April 24, 2016 at 4:48 pm

    +1

    diptherio , April 24, 2016 at 5:21 pm

    Dude, you need to move to Austin, stat!

    lyman alpha blob , April 24, 2016 at 10:11 am

    I sympathize with Mr. Kidney and applaud him for doing what he can to try to rectify this abhorrent situation. I also applaud him for placing the blame squarely on Obama and his reasons for doing so are solid.

    What I find much harder to understand is why he would vote for Obama even in 2012 after it became apparent that Obama was ultimately responsible for stonewalling his investigation, and his complete willingness to vote for the corrupt Democrat party no matter what going forward.

    As long as enough people continue to have that attitude things will never change until the whole system comes crashing down. I'd much rather see an FDR-type overhaul of the system rather than a complete collapse as I'm rather fond of civilization. But I've come to expect the latter rather than the former so I'll be reading my weekly Archdruid report for the foreseeable future.

    Carolinian , April 24, 2016 at 10:25 am

    The most senior level supervisors left more lucrative jobs in the private sector to head the Division of Enforcement, taking plum jobs but at significant personal sacrifice. (They then returned to even more lucrative employment or even more high-profile public positions.) All of them were gentlemen. These factors make it all the more surprising that I never got a clear answer as to why the investigation was so constipated, as it obviously was.

    Yes poor babies for that "significant personal sacrifice" that resulted in "even more lucrative" private employment. The author explains the problem then scratches his head over what it might be.

    In a rational world there would be a strict separation between the regulated and the regulators. The government would hire professional experts at decent salaries and they never ever would be allowed to then move on to jobs with the regulated. Clearly the assumption underlying our current–irrational–system is that these high status technocrats are "gentlemen" with a code of honor. Welcome to the 19th century. Those long ago plutocrats in their stately English mansions were all gentlemen and therefore entitled to their privileges by their superior breeding. They were the better sort.

    Meanwhile for lesser mortals it seems totally unsurprising when laws are ignored because you hire your police from the ranks of the criminal gangs. No head scratching needed.

    Alex morfesis , April 24, 2016 at 12:31 pm

    Reid Muoio (boss of kidney @ $EC) has a brother at a major tall bldg law firm whose job is to help fortune 500 companies deal with D & O insurance issues…so when in the article Muoio says "He" did not go thru the revolving door…it was fraud by omission…his brother sits on the opposite side of these private settlement agreements…

    so is Kidney unaware…leaving us to maybe accept he was never much of an investigator…or just forgot to point it out for us…

    The world is full of govt types who tell us TINA…

    The wealthy Elliott Spitzer told us he would have loved to help "the little people" but the OCC and then scotus with waters v wachovia…except scotus ruled only direct subsidiaries get protection and the OCC specifically said the trustee operations of OCC regulated entities are also not covered/protected…

    A really big shoe
    as Ed used to remind us….

    susan the other , April 24, 2016 at 1:25 pm

    Does anyone else think this was insider demolition – not just the failure to prosecute, but the whole financial implosion in the first place? Who writes up nothing but "shitty deals" – all the while saying to each other: IBGYBG and survives to slink away? They must have had a heads up that the financial system as we had known it in the 20th c. was done. They had a heads up and then they got free passes. My only question is, Wasn't there a better way to bring down the system, an honest way that protected us all? By the end of the cold war money itself had become an inconvenience because of diminishing returns. And now the stuff is just plain dangerous because everyone who got screwed (99%) wants their fair share still. It is paralyzing our thinking. Obama maintains he personally "prevented another depression". I honestly think he might be insane. What we need is a recognition that the old system was completely irrational and it isn't coming back. And most of us are SOL. Somebody is going to figure out how to maintain both the value and usefulness of money very soon, because we've got work to do.

    cnchal , April 24, 2016 at 2:03 pm

    The GFC was the first great financial crime of this millenium, and Goldman Sachs was at the epicenter. A heist of gargantuan proportions, they didn't even need a safecracker after Bernanke spun the dials and opened the door wide.

    Imagine if the FBI and the Mafia exchanged their top leaders every few months. That's what we have here with the SEC and Wall Street.

    Bernie Sanders: The business of Wall Street is fraud and greed.
    We can add to that. The business of the SEC is to provide cover.

    polecat , April 24, 2016 at 2:10 pm

    It's all about 'their protection'….not ours!

    and Obama………..

    He's a f#cking psychopathic peacock!

    KYrocky , April 24, 2016 at 2:17 pm

    In Yves intro she shares her views, first, that Kidney still wants to think well of his former SEC colleagues and his criticisms seem muted relative to the severity of the problems, and second, that there are class assumptions at work.

    The first is obvious, as the SEC is an utter failure in its responsibility to investigate and prosecute financial criminals. While Mr. Kidney devotes a fair amount of his passages pondering how it can be that no individuals within these financial institutions bear personal responsibility, Mr. Kidney fails to see the SEC through that same lens. To say Kidney's criticism of his coworkers is muted is an understatement. The individuals at the SEC are corrupt. The individuals at the Justice Department are corrupt. Probably all nice people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, friends, etc. Just like those folks at the financial institutions. Mr. Kidney cuts them slack because of his personal relationships with them. Mr. Kidney chooses to give them the benefit of doubt when the totality of their professional performance at the SEC make clear this cannot be true.

    With respect to class assumptions at work, Yves illustrates with the deference shown by SEC officials and investigators toward these financial criminals and their presumption that these individuals are honest. Mr. Kidney does share some of his disappointment in President Obama and Obama's administration but fails to properly connect the dots. In short, the lack of financial crime prosecutions is the result of a deliberate, planned and orchestrated effort.

    Mr. Kindney's investigations were prevented in going forward by his superiors. He was never given an explanation for this despite his asking. But Kidney believes his superiors are all good people.

    No, they are not. They are compromised people who have placed their career employment above their sworn duty. The fact that their bosses have done the same, as have those in the Justice Department as well as President Obama, should not diminish this fact. The phrase "class assumptions" is too euphemistic when describing a system where there is no justice for the victims of financial crimes, a system where the Justice Department and Administration coordinate to shield financial criminals based on where they work.

    This is America. In today's America the fact is certain individuals are above the law because our elected officials at all levels accept that this is okay. Victims of these individuals will be prevented access to their legal recourse, and that these criminals are protected from the highest level of our government down. This goes way, way beyond class assumptions.

    readerOfTeaLeaves , April 24, 2016 at 3:31 pm

    Yves has written extensively about how corporate interests have funded academic sinecures, as well as continuing legal education seminars attended by attorneys and judges. This is part of the fallout; if you want more, check out her section of ECONned where she explains how legal thinking was perverted by business interests.

    flora , April 24, 2016 at 2:37 pm

    Thanks for this post. Glad to see the SEC story is still alive. I'm sure the SEC and Obama would prefer it quietly go away.

    dk , April 24, 2016 at 2:55 pm

    As someone who has fallen on their sword more than once (and again recently), I just want to say that "placed their career employment above their sworn duty" is accurate but also oversimplifies the situation.

    People with families tell themselves that they balance performance of most (some?) of those duties, while shirking the balance in order to protect their families (a "good" (as in, expensive) college for the kids)… this actually comes down to sustaining their social status, in a culture (political as well as corporate) where loyalty is valued equal to and above performance, and honorable action is diminished, trivialized, even ridiculed; and not just within the context of the financial industry.

    This is not at all a defense of the choice, but the choice is made in a very class-stratified social context, and arises in that general context. People take out loans to buy cars and houses, they squirrel earnings away into investments (to avoid taxes) which they are reluctant to draw from… they feel less ready to abandon their addictive income streams for honor, and fudge their responsibilities. It's not isolated to regulators, or government, or even finance. It occurs so constantly and on so many fronts that addressing specific cases doesn't make a dent in the compromise of the entire culture. And that compromise is fueled and maintained by a very twisted set of ideas about money, and career, and social status (not to mention compromises in journalism, education, science, you name it).

    Synoia , April 24, 2016 at 3:37 pm

    I read Mr kidney as being very sarcastic. I could not write this with a serious sarcastic (Lawsuit Avoiding) view:

    The most senior level supervisors left more lucrative jobs in the private sector to head the Division of Enforcement, taking plum jobs but at significant personal sacrifice. (They then returned to even more lucrative employment or even more high-profile public positions.)

    taking plum jobs but at significant personal sacrifice

    Oh really? Must have hurt. And from a legal point of view does not appear libelous.

    polecat , April 24, 2016 at 6:12 pm

    Yeah…stubbed toes only…….

    [Mar 23, 2016] Cruz Seeks Economic Wisdom in the Wrong Place

    Notable quotes:
    "... Gramm seems pretty firmly in free market ideologue territory. Cruz deciding to bring him in as an economic advisor is certainly noteworthy. ..."
    "... The short version: the Glass Steagall repeal allowed the banks to become "Too Big To Fail" and gave them enormous political leverage. It's the political leverage - the ability to count on Uncle Sam to come to the rescue, and provide easy terms for rent-seeking - that GLB provided. If they were separated, and only the investment banks could make risky investments, we would let the investment banks fail while protecting the boring old payments system. You won't get an argument on CFMA, however: it was worse. And that has Gramm's fingerprints all over it. And it might not have passed if the SIFIs were smaller. ..."
    "... When I think of the villains of the Great Recession, Phil Gramm is always Public Enemy #1. ..."
    "... The Glass Steagall repeal was not my biggest problem with Phil Gramm. My big problem is he wanted to have a completely deregulated financial sector. Sort of like when Newt Gingrich talked about "rational regulation" which was code for no regulation. But anyone who understands financial economics and our financial system knows that no regulations whatsoever is a recipe for a complete melt down. Which is what happened. ..."
    economistsview.typepad.com
    Barry Ritholtz:

    Cruz Seeks Economic Wisdom in the Wrong Place :

    Some people look at subprime lending and see evil. I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action. -- former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, Nov. 16, 2008

    ...Gramm has been brought on as a senior economic adviser to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. This isn't a promising development for Cruz... Not to put too fine a point on it, but I believe -- as do many others -- that Gramm was one of the major figures who helped set the stage for the crisis. ...

    Gramm was a key sponsor of the ... Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act , which effectively repealed the piece of the Glass-Steagall Act... The damage caused by rolling back Glass-Steagall pales compared with ... the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 . Gramm was a co-sponsor of the legislation, which exempted many derivatives and swaps from regulation. Not only was the law problematic, but it veered into potential conflict-of-interest territory. ...

    We got a chance to see those consequences a few years later when American International Group failed, thanks in part to swaps ... on $441 billion of securities that turned out to be junk. AIG wasn't required to put up much in the way of collateral, set aside capital or hedge its risk on the swaps. Why would it, when the law said it didn't have to? The taxpayers were then called upon to bailout AIG to the tune of more than $180 billion.

    Maybe it isn't too surprising that Cruz would seek advice from Gramm. Cruz, after all, seems to want to hobble modern economic policy by returning to the gold standard. ... We have seen these movies before, and they end in tragedy and tears.

    He also talks about Gramm's sad performance in his brief appearance as one of McCain's advisors in 2008.

    pgl :

    Phil Gramm says he got his economic degree from the University of Georgia. Well - it was from the Terry College of Business which is a business school. Not the graduate program of economics of the University of Georgia. I guess this makes Gramm one notch above Stephen Moore, Donald Luskin, and Lawrence Kudlow (aka the three stooges).

    pgl :

    The LA Times on Gramm's record on economics:

    http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-cruz-gramm-20160321-snap-htmlstory.html

    "Gramm's most notable moment in that position came on July 10, 2008, when he dismissed the developing economic crisis as "a mental recession" in an interview -- and video -- released by the conservative Washington Times. "We've never been more dominant," he said. "We've never had more natural advantages than we have today. We've sort of become a nation of whiners." McCain immediately disavowed the remarks, and a few days later Gramm stepped down as his campaign co-chairman."

    OK that was July. Menzie Chinn always notes that Luskin was saying the same thing as late as September 2008.

    sanjait :
    Gramm seems pretty firmly in free market ideologue territory. Cruz deciding to bring him in as an economic advisor is certainly noteworthy.

    Though I'm still struck by how determined some people seem to lump Graham Leach Bliley in as a cause/major contributor to the crisis.

    The CFMA very plausibly serves that purpose. If we want to mark Gramm as a villain, his sponsorship of that bill should be sufficient, as well as his abject refusal to acknowledge the crisis in real time.

    But for whatever reason people have picked up Glass Steagall as a Very Important rule, and seem to be pushing to rationalize that by claiming it is a big part of the crisis story.

    Ritholtz, to his credit, is qualified and nuanced about this. He notes that CFMA is the big story, and says GLB wasn't didn't "cause" the crisis.

    But following through the links to his WaPo piece, he still looks like he is reaching for a reason to label it a major contributor to the crisis.

    He claims that removing G-S restrictions caused the major banks to in turn cause the shadow banking entities like AIG, Bear, etc. to "bulk up" their holdings of subprime, based on ... nothing that I can see.

    Sure, the major banks were customers and counterparties for those shadow banks, but Ritholtz seems to assume that if G-S weren't in place that demand would somehow have been less. Why?

    Take a major bank with mixed commercial and investment banking activity and split the parts. Would that have changed their activities? Not much. The commercial banking side still would have held MBS (and purchase insurance on them) and the I-banks would still make speculative investments of various types.

    No one, as far as I've seen, ever bothers to tell a complete story where the structural incentives in the financial sector changed as a result of Glass Steagall in a way that materially impacted the depth or serverity of the housing crisis. How would splitting megabanks into separate big C- and I-banks have changed anything? Bueller?

    Instead I see a great many people, including well credentialed economists, just assume or hand waive the claim that it made a big impact without bothering to model or specify it. I'm not saying such an explanation couldn't exist that I'm not aware of ... but at this point I do see the absence of explanation as evidence of absence.

    pgl -> sanjait...
    Gramm dismissing the concern over a recession in the summer of 2008 is the kicker for me!
    Charlie Baker -> sanjait...
    sanjait:

    "But for whatever reason people have picked up Glass Steagall..."

    No need to speculate: Simon Johnson and James Kwak wrote a whole book about it. It's called 13 Bankers:

    https://13bankers.com/

    The short version: the Glass Steagall repeal allowed the banks to become "Too Big To Fail" and gave them enormous political leverage. It's the political leverage - the ability to count on Uncle Sam to come to the rescue, and provide easy terms for rent-seeking - that GLB provided. If they were separated, and only the investment banks could make risky investments, we would let the investment banks fail while protecting the boring old payments system. You won't get an argument on CFMA, however: it was worse. And that has Gramm's fingerprints all over it. And it might not have passed if the SIFIs were smaller.

    When I think of the villains of the Great Recession, Phil Gramm is always Public Enemy #1.

    pgl -> Charlie Baker ...
    The Glass Steagall repeal was not my biggest problem with Phil Gramm. My big problem is he wanted to have a completely deregulated financial sector. Sort of like when Newt Gingrich talked about "rational regulation" which was code for no regulation. But anyone who understands financial economics and our financial system knows that no regulations whatsoever is a recipe for a complete melt down. Which is what happened.
    The Rage :
    Cruz just wants to make money for his buddies while waving the bible. JDR was there 100+ years before that "Ted".

    [Dec 13, 2015] Deregulation of exotic financial instruments like derivatives and credit-default swaps and corruption of Congress and government

    Notable quotes:
    "... Can you list all of the pro- or anti- Wall Street reforms and actions Bill Clinton performed as President including nominating Alan Greenspan as head regulator? Cutting the capital gains tax? Are you aware of Greenspans record? ..."
    "... Its actually pro-neoliberalism crowd vs anti-neoliberalism crowd. In no way anti-neoliberalism commenters here view this is a character melodrama, although psychologically Hillary probably does has certain problems as her reaction to the death of Gadhafi attests. The key problem with anti-neoliberalism crowd is the question What is a realistic alternative? Thats where differences and policy debate starts. ..."
    "... Events do not occur in isolation. GLBA increased TBTF in AIG and Citi. TBTF forced TARP. GLBA greased the skids for CFMA. Democrats gained majority, but not filibuster proof, caught between Iraq and a hard place following their votes for TARP and a broader understanding of their participation in the unanimous consent passage of the CFMA, over objection by Senators James Inhofe (R-OK) and Paul Wellstone (D-MN). ..."
    "... It certainly fits the kind of herd mentality that I always saw in corporate Amerika until I retired. The William Greider article posted by RGC was very consistent in its account by John Reed with the details of one or two books written about AIG back in 2009 or so. I dont have time to hunt them up now. Besides, no one would read them anyway. ..."
    "... GS was one of several actions taken by the New Deal. That it wasnt sufficient by itself doesnt equate to it wasnt beneficial. ..."
    "... "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," said then-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. "This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." ..."
    "... The repeal of Glass Steagal was a landmark victory in deregulation that greased the skids for the passage of CFMA once Democrats had been further demoralized by the SCOTUS decision on Bush-v-Gore. The first vote on GLBA was split along party lines, but passed because Republicans had majority and Clinton was willing to sign which was clear from the waiver that had been granted to illegal Citi merger with Travelers. Both Citi and AIG mergers contributed to too big to fail. The CFMA was the nail in the coffin that probably would have never gotten off the ground if Democrats had held the line on the GLBA. Glass-Steagal was insufficient as a regulatory system to prevent the 2008 mortgage crisis, but it was giant as an icon of New Deal financial system reform. Its loss institutionalized too big to fail ..."
    "... Gramm Leach Biley was a mistake. But it was not the only failure of US regulatory policies towards financial institutions nor the most important. ..."
    "... It was more symbolic caving in on financial regulation than a specific technical failure except for making too big to fail worse at Citi and AIG. It marked a sea change of thinking about financial regulation. Nothing mattered any more, including the CFMA just a little over one year later. Deregulation of derivatives trading mandated by the CFMA was a colossal failure and it is not bizarre to believe that GLBA precipitated the consensus on financial deregulation enough that after the demoralizing defeat of Democrats in Bush-v-Gore then there was no New Deal spirit of financial regulation left. Social development is not just a series of unconnected events. It is carried on a tide of change. A falling tide grounds all boats. ..."
    "... We had a financial dereg craze back in the late 1970s and early 1980s which led to the S L disaster. One would have thought we would have learned from that. But then came the dereg craziness 20 years later. And this disaster was much worse. ..."
    "... This brings us to Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary of the United States and at the time right hand man to then Treasury Security Robert Rubin. Mr. Summers was widely credited with implementation of the aggressive tactics used to remove Ms. Born from her office, tactics that multiple sources describe as showing an old world bias against women piercing the glass ceiling. ..."
    "... According to numerous published reports, Mr. Summers was involved in. silencing those who questioned the opaque derivative product's design. ..."
    "... The Tax Policy Center estimated that a 0.1 percent tax on stock trades, scaled with lower taxes on other assets, would raise $50 billion a year in tax revenue. The implied reduction in trading revenue was even larger. Senator Sanders has proposed a tax of 0.5 percent on equities (also with a scaled tax on other assets). This would lead to an even larger reduction in revenue for the financial industry. ..."
    "... Great to see Bakers acknowledgement that an updated Glass-Steagall is just one component of the progressive wings plan to rein in Wall Street, not the sum total of it. Besides, if Wall Street types dont think restoring Glass-Steagall will have any meaningful effects, why do they expend so much energy to disparage it? Methinks they doth protest too much. ..."
    "... Yes thats a good way to look it. Wall Street gave the Democrats and Clinton a lot of campaign cash so that they would dismantle Glass-Steagall. ..."
    "... Slippery slope. Ya gotta find me a business of any type that does not protest any kind of regulation on their business. ..."
    "... Yeah, but usually because of all the bad things they say will happen because of the regulation. The question is, what do they think of Clintons plan? Ive heard surprisingly little about that, and what I have heard is along these lines: http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/08/investing/hillary-clinton-wall-street-plan/ ..."
    "... Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Streets excesses on Thursday. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug, if not relief. ..."
    "... Iceland's government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal – removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank. The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled "A better monetary system for Iceland". ..."
    economistsview.typepad.com

    RGC said...

    Hillary Clinton Is Whitewashing the Financial Catastrophe

    She has a plan that she claims will reform Wall Street-but she's deflecting responsibility from old friends and donors in the industry.

    By William Greider
    Yesterday 3:11 pm

    Hillary Clinton's recent op-ed in The New York Times, "How I'd Rein In Wall Street," was intended to reassure nervous Democrats who fear she is still in thrall to those mega-bankers of New York who crashed the American economy. Clinton's brisk recital of plausible reform ideas might convince wishful thinkers who are not familiar with the complexities of banking. But informed skeptics, myself included, see a disturbing message in her argument that ought to alarm innocent supporters.

    Candidate Clinton is essentially whitewashing the financial catastrophe. She has produced a clumsy rewrite of what caused the 2008 collapse, one that conveniently leaves her husband out of the story. He was the president who legislated the predicate for Wall Street's meltdown. Hillary Clinton's redefinition of the reform problem deflects the blame from Wall Street's most powerful institutions, like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, and instead fingers less celebrated players that failed. In roundabout fashion, Hillary Clinton sounds like she is assuring old friends and donors in the financial sector that, if she becomes president, she will not come after them.

    The seminal event that sowed financial disaster was the repeal of the New Deal's Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated banking into different realms: investment banks, which organize capital investors for risk-taking ventures; and deposit-holding banks, which serve people as borrowers and lenders. That law's repeal, a great victory for Wall Street, was delivered by Bill Clinton in 1999, assisted by the Federal Reserve and the financial sector's armies of lobbyists. The "universal banking model" was saluted as a modernizing reform that liberated traditional banks to participate directly and indirectly in long-prohibited and vastly more profitable risk-taking.

    Exotic financial instruments like derivatives and credit-default swaps flourished, enabling old-line bankers to share in the fun and profit on an awesome scale. The banks invented "guarantees" against loss and sold them to both companies and market players. The fast-expanding financial sector claimed a larger and larger share of the economy (and still does) at the expense of the real economy of producers and consumers. The interconnectedness across market sectors created the illusion of safety. When illusions failed, these connected guarantees became the dragnet that drove panic in every direction. Ultimately, the federal government had to rescue everyone, foreign and domestic, to stop the bleeding.

    Yet Hillary Clinton asserts in her Times op-ed that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with it. She claims that Glass-Steagall would not have limited the reckless behavior of institutions like Lehman Brothers or insurance giant AIG, which were not traditional banks. Her argument amounts to facile evasion that ignores the interconnected exposures. The Federal Reserve spent $180 billion bailing out AIG so AIG could pay back Goldman Sachs and other banks. If the Fed hadn't acted and had allowed AIG to fail, the banks would have gone down too.

    These sound like esoteric questions of bank regulation (and they are), but the consequences of pretending they do not matter are enormous. The federal government and Federal Reserve would remain on the hook for rescuing losers in a future crisis. The largest and most adventurous banks would remain free to experiment, inventing fictitious guarantees and selling them to eager suckers. If things go wrong, Uncle Sam cleans up the mess.

    Senator Elizabeth Warren and other reformers are pushing a simpler remedy-restore the Glass-Steagall principles and give citizens a safe, government-insured place to store their money. "Banking should be boring," Warren explains (her co-sponsor is GOP Senator John McCain).
    That's a hard sell in politics, given the banking sector's bear hug of Congress and the White House, its callous manipulation of both political parties. Of course, it is more complicated than that. But recreating a safe, stable banking system-a place where ordinary people can keep their money-ought to be the first benchmark for Democrats who claim to be reformers.

    Actually, the most compelling witnesses for Senator Warren's argument are the two bankers who introduced this adventure in "universal banking" back in the 1990s. They used their political savvy and relentless muscle to seduce Bill Clinton and his so-called New Democrats. John Reed was CEO of Citicorp and led the charge. He has since apologized to the nation. Sandy Weill was chairman of the board and a brilliant financier who envisioned the possibilities of a single, all-purpose financial house, freed of government's narrow-minded regulations. They won politically, but at staggering cost to the country.

    Weill confessed error back in 2012: "What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking. Have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not going to be too big to fail."

    John Reed's confession explained explicitly why their modernizing crusade failed for two fundamental business reasons. "One was the belief that combining all types of finance into one institution would drive costs down-and the larger institution the more efficient it would be," Reed wrote in the Financial Times in November. Reed said, "We now know that there are very few cost efficiencies that come from the merger of functions-indeed, there may be none at all. It is possible that combining so much in a single bank makes services more expensive than if they were instead offered by smaller, specialised players."

    The second grave error, Reed said, was trying to mix the two conflicting cultures in banking-bankers who are pulling in opposite directions. That tension helps explain the competitive greed displayed by the modernized banking system. This disorder speaks to the current political crisis in ways that neither Dems nor Republicans wish to confront. It would require the politicians to critique the bankers (often their funders) in terms of human failure.

    "Mixing incompatible cultures is a problem all by itself," Reed wrote. "It makes the entire finance industry more fragile…. As is now clear, traditional banking attracts one kind of talent, which is entirely different from the kinds drawn towards investment banking and trading. Traditional bankers tend to be extroverts, sociable people who are focused on longer term relationships. They are, in many important respects, risk averse. Investment bankers and their traders are more short termist. They are comfortable with, and many even seek out, risk and are more focused on immediate reward."

    Reed concludes, "As I have reflected about the years since 1999, I think the lessons of Glass-Steagall and its repeal suggest that the universal banking model is inherently unstable and unworkable. No amount of restructuring, management change or regulation is ever likely to change that."

    This might sound hopelessly naive, but the Democratic Party might do better in politics if it told more of the truth more often: what they tried do and why it failed, and what they think they may have gotten wrong. People already know they haven't gotten a straight story from politicians. They might be favorably impressed by a little more candor in the plain-spoken manner of John Reed.

    Of course it's unfair to pick on the Dems. Republicans have been lying about their big stuff for so long and so relentlessly that their voters are now staging a wrathful rebellion. Who knows, maybe a little honest talk might lead to honest debate. Think about it. Do the people want to hear the truth about our national condition? Could they stand it?

    http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-is-whitewashing-the-financial-catastrophe/

    EMichael -> RGC...
    "She claims that Glass-Steagall would not have limited the reckless behavior of institutions like Lehman Brothers or insurance giant AIG, which were not traditional banks."

    Of course this claim is absolutely true. Just like GS would not have affected the other investment banks, whatever their name was. And just like we would have had to bail out those other banks whatever their name was.

    Peter K. -> EMichael...
    Can you list all of the pro- or anti- Wall Street "reforms" and actions Bill Clinton performed as President including nominating Alan Greenspan as head regulator? Cutting the capital gains tax? Are you aware of Greenspan's record?

    Yes Hillary isn't Bill but she hasn't criticized her husband specifically about his record and seems to want to have her cake and eat it too.

    Of course Hillary is much better than the Republicans, pace Rustbucket and the Green Lantern Lefty club. Still, critics have a point.

    I won't be surprised if she doesn't do much to rein in Wall Street besides some window dressing.

    sanjait -> Peter K....
    "Can you list all of the pro- or anti- Wall Street "reforms" and actions Bill Clinton performed..."

    That, right there, is what's wrong with Bernie and his fans. They measure everything by whether it is "pro- or anti- Wall Street". Glass Steagall is anti-Wall Street. A financial transactions tax is anti-Wall Street. But neither has any hope of controlling systemic financial risk in this country. None.

    You guys want to punish Wall Street but not even bother trying to think of how to achieve useful policy goals. Some people, like Paine here, are actually open about this vacuity, as if the only thing that were important were winning a power struggle.

    Hillary's plan is flat out better. It's more comprehensive and more effective at reining in the financial system to limit systemic risk. Period.

    You guys want to make this a character melodrama rather than a policy debate, and I fear the result of that will be that the candidate who actually has the best plan won't get to enact it.

    likbez -> sanjait...

    "You guys want to make this a character melodrama rather than a policy debate, and I fear the result of that will be that the candidate who actually has the best plan won't get to enact it."

    You are misrepresenting the positions. It's actually pro-neoliberalism crowd vs anti-neoliberalism crowd. In no way anti-neoliberalism commenters here view this is a character melodrama, although psychologically Hillary probably does has certain problems as her reaction to the death of Gadhafi attests. The key problem with anti-neoliberalism crowd is the question "What is a realistic alternative?" That's where differences and policy debate starts.

    RGC -> EMichael...
    "Her argument amounts to facile evasion"

    Fred C. Dobbs -> RGC...

    'The majority favors policies to the left of Hillary.'

    Nah. I don't think so.

    No, Liberals Don't Control the Democratic Party http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/no-liberals-dont-control-the-democratic-party/283653/
    The Atlantic - Feb 7, 2014

    ... The Democrats' liberal faction has been greatly overestimated by pundits who mistake noisiness for clout or assume that the left functions like the right. In fact, liberals hold nowhere near the power in the Democratic Party that conservatives hold in the Republican Party. And while they may well be gaining, they're still far from being in charge. ...

    Paine -> RGC...

    What's not confronted ? Suggest what a System like the pre repeal system would have done in the 00's. My guess we'd have ended in a crisis anyway. Yes we can segregate the depository system. But credit is elastic enough to build bubbles without the depository system involved

    EMichael -> Paine ...

    Exactly.

    Most people think of lending like the Bailey Brothers Savings and Loan still exists.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> EMichael...

    Don't be such a whistle dick. Just because you cannot figure out why GLBA made such an impact that in no way means that people that do understand are stupid. See my posted comment to RGC on GLBA just down thread for an more detailed explanation including a linked web article. No, GS alone would not have prevented the mortgage bubble, but it would have lessened TBTF and GS stood as icon, a symbol of financial regulation. Hell, if we don't need GS then why don't we just allow unregulated derivatives trading? Who cares, right? Senators Byron Dorgan, Barbara Boxer, Barbara Mikulski, Richard Shelby, Tom Harkin, Richard Bryan, Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders all voted against GLBA to repeal GS for some strange reason and Dorgan made a really big deal out of it at the time. I doubt everyone on that list of Senators was just stupid because they did not see it your way.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> EMichael...
    I ran all out of ceteris paribus quite some time ago. Events do not occur in isolation. GLBA increased TBTF in AIG and Citi. TBTF forced TARP. GLBA greased the skids for CFMA. Democrats gained majority, but not filibuster proof, caught between Iraq and a hard place following their votes for TARP and a broader understanding of their participation in the unanimous consent passage of the CFMA, over "objection" by Senators James Inhofe (R-OK) and Paul Wellstone (D-MN). We have had a Republican majority in the House since the 2010 election and now they have the Senate as well. If you are that sure that voters just choose divided government, then aren't we better off to have a Republican POTUS and Democratic Congress?

    sanjait -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...

    "I ran all out of ceteris paribus quite some time ago. Events do not occur in isolation. GLBA increased TBTF in AIG and Citi. TBTF forced TARP. GLBA greased the skids for CFMA. "

    I know you think this is a really meaningful string that evidences causation, but it just looks like you are reaching, reaching, reaching ...

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> sanjait...

    Maybe. No way to say for sure. It certainly fits the kind of herd mentality that I always saw in corporate Amerika until I retired. The William Greider article posted by RGC was very consistent in its account by John Reed with the details of one or two books written about AIG back in 2009 or so. I don't have time to hunt them up now. Besides, no one would read them anyway.

    I am voting for whoever wins the Democratic nomination for POTUS. Bernie without a like-minded Congress would not do much good. But when we shoot each other down here at EV without offering any agreement or consideration that we might not be 100% correct, then that goes against Doc Thoma's idea of an open forum. Granted, with my great big pair then I am willing to state my opinion with no consideration for validation or acceptance, but not everyone has that degree of a comfort zone. Besides, I am so old an cynical that shooting down the overdogs that go after the underdogs is one of the few things that I still care about.

    RGC -> Paine ...

    GS was one of several actions taken by the New Deal. That it wasn't sufficient by itself doesn't equate to it wasn't beneficial.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> RGC...

    [Lock and load.]

    http://www.occasionalplanet.org/2015/05/13/glass-steagall-one-democratic-senator-who-got-it-right/

    Glass-Steagall: Warren and Sanders bring it back into focus

    Madonna Gauding / May 13, 2015

    Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are putting a new focus on the Glass-Steagall Act, which was, unfortunately, repealed in 1999 and led directly to the financial crises we have faced ever since. Here's a bit of history of this legislative debacle from an older post on Occasional Planet published several years ago :

    On November 4, 1999, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) took to the floor of the senate to make an impassioned speech against the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, (alternately known as Gramm Leach Biley, or the "Financial Modernization Act") Repeal of Glass-Steagall would allow banks to merge with insurance companies and investments houses. He said "I want to sound a warning call today about this legislation, I think this legislation is just fundamentally terrible."

    According to Sam Stein, writing in 2009 in the Huffington Post, only eight senators voted against the repeal. Senior staff in the Clinton administration and many now in the Obama administration praised the repeal as the "most important breakthrough in the world of finance and politics in decades"

    According to Stein, Dorgan warned that banks would become "too big to fail" and claimed that Congress would "look back in a decade and say we should not have done this." The repeal of Glass Steagall, of course, was one of several bad policies that helped lead to the current economic crisis we are in now.

    Dorgan wasn't entirely alone. Sens. Barbara Boxer, Barbara Mikulski, Richard Shelby, Tom Harkin, Richard Bryan, Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders also cast nay votes. The late Sen. Paul Wellstone opposed the bill, and warned at the time that Congress was "about to repeal the economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place."

    Democratic Senators had sufficient knowledge about the dangers of the repeal of Glass Steagall, but chose to ignore it. Plenty of experts warned that it would be impossible to "discipline" banks once the legislation was passed, and that they would get too big and complex to regulate. Editorials against repeal appeared in the New York Times and other mainstream venues, suggesting that if the new megabanks were to falter, they could take down the entire global economy, which is exactly what happened. Stein quotes Ralph Nader who said at the time, "We will look back at this and wonder how the country was so asleep. It's just a nightmare."

    According to Stein:

    "The Senate voted to pass Gramm-Leach-Bliley by a vote of 90-8 and reversed what was, for more than six decades, a framework that had governed the functions and reach of the nation's largest banks. No longer limited by laws and regulations commercial and investment banks could now merge. Many had already begun the process, including, among others, J.P. Morgan and Citicorp. The new law allowed it to be permanent. The updated ground rules were low on oversight and heavy on risky ventures. Historically in the business of mortgages and credit cards, banks now would sell insurance and stock.

    Nevertheless, the bill did not lack champions, many of whom declared that the original legislation - forged during the Great Depression - was both antiquated and cumbersome for the banking industry. Congress had tried 11 times to repeal Glass-Steagall. The twelfth was the charm.

    "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," said then-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. "This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy."

    "I welcome this day as a day of success and triumph," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, (D-Conn.).

    "The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown," said Sen. Bob Kerrey, (D-Neb.).

    "If we don't pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt or years down the road Shanghai becoming the financial capital of the world," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. "There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive."

    Unfortunately, the statement by Chuck Schumer sounds very much like it was prepared by a lobbyist. This vote underscores the way in which our elected officials are so heavily swayed by corporate and banking money that our voices and needs become irrelevant. It is why we need publicly funded elections. Democratic senators, the so-called representatives of the people, fell over themselves to please their Wall Street donors knowing full well there were dangers for the country at large, for ordinary Americans, in repealing Glass-Steagall.

    It is important to hold Democratic senators (along with current members of the Obama administration) accountable for the significant role they have played in the current economic crisis that has caused so much suffering for ordinary Americans. In case you were wondering, the current Democratic Senators who voted yes to repeal the Glass-Steagall act are the following:

    Daniel Akaka – Max Baucus – Evan Bayh – Jeff Bingaman – Kent Conrad – Chris Dodd – Dick Durbin – Dianne Feinstein – Daniel Inouye – Tim Johnson – John Kerry – Herb Kohl – Mary Landrieu – Frank Lautenberg – Patrick Leahy – Carl Levin – Joseph Lieberman – Blanche Lincoln – Patty Murray – Jack Reed – Harry Reid – Jay Rockefeller – Chuck Schumer – Ron Wyden

    Former House members who voted for repeal who are current Senators.

    Mark Udall [as of 2010] – Debbie Stabenow – Bob Menendez – Tom Udall -Sherrod Brown

    No longer in the Senate, or passed away, but who voted for repeal:

    Joe Biden -Ted Kennedy -Robert Byrd

    These Democratic senators would like to forget or make excuses for their enthusiastic vote on the repeal of Glass Steagall, but it is important to hold them accountable for helping their bank donors realize obscene profits while their constituents lost jobs, savings and homes. And it is important to demand that they serve the interests of the American people.

    *

    [The repeal of Glass Steagal was a landmark victory in deregulation that greased the skids for the passage of CFMA once Democrats had been further demoralized by the SCOTUS decision on Bush-v-Gore. The first vote on GLBA was split along party lines, but passed because Republicans had majority and Clinton was willing to sign which was clear from the waiver that had been granted to illegal Citi merger with Travelers. Both Citi and AIG mergers contributed to too big to fail. The CFMA was the nail in the coffin that probably would have never gotten off the ground if Democrats had held the line on the GLBA. Glass-Steagal was insufficient as a regulatory system to prevent the 2008 mortgage crisis, but it was giant as an icon of New Deal financial system reform. Its loss institutionalized too big to fail.]

    pgl -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...

    Gramm Leach Biley was a mistake. But it was not the only failure of US regulatory policies towards financial institutions nor the most important. I think that is what Hillary Clinton is saying.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> pgl...

    It was more symbolic caving in on financial regulation than a specific technical failure except for making too big to fail worse at Citi and AIG. It marked a sea change of thinking about financial regulation. Nothing mattered any more, including the CFMA just a little over one year later. Deregulation of derivatives trading mandated by the CFMA was a colossal failure and it is not bizarre to believe that GLBA precipitated the consensus on financial deregulation enough that after the demoralizing defeat of Democrats in Bush-v-Gore then there was no New Deal spirit of financial regulation left. Social development is not just a series of unconnected events. It is carried on a tide of change. A falling tide grounds all boats.

    pgl -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...

    We had a financial dereg craze back in the late 1970's and early 1980's which led to the S&L disaster. One would have thought we would have learned from that. But then came the dereg craziness 20 years later. And this disaster was much worse.

    I don't care whether Hillary says 1999 was a mistake or not. I do care what the regulations of financial institutions will be like going forward.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> pgl...

    I cannot disagree with any of that.

    sanjait -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...

    "Deregulation of derivatives trading mandated by the CFMA was a colossal failure and it is not bizarre to believe that GLBA precipitated the consensus"

    Yeah, it is kind of bizarre to blame one bill for a crisis that occurred largely because another bill was passed, based on some some vague assertion about how the first bill made everyone think crazy.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> sanjait...
    Democrats did not vote for GLBA until after reconciliation between the House and Senate bills. Democrats were tossed a bone in the Community Reinvestment Act financing provisions and given that Bill Clinton was going to sign anyway and that Republicans were able to pass the bill without a single vote from Democrats then all but a few Democrats bought in. They could not stop it, so they just bought into it. I thought there was supposed to be an understanding of behaviorism devoted to understanding the political economy. For that matter Republicans did not need Democrats to vote for the CFMA either, but they did. That gave Republicans political cover for whatever went wrong later on. No one with a clue believed things would go well from the passage of either of these bills. It was pure Wall Street driven kleptocracy.
    likbez -> sanjait...
    It was not one bill or another. It was a government policy to get traders what they want.

    See

    Bruce E. Woych | August 6, 2013 at 5:45 pm |

    http://www.imackgroup.com/mathematics/989981-the-untold-story-brooksley-born-larry-summers-the-truth-about-unlimited-risk-potential/

    The Untold Story: Brooksley Born, Larry Summers & the Truth …
    http://www.imackgroup.com/mathematics/989981-the-untold-story-brooksley-born-larry...
    Oct 5, 2012 … Larry Summers is attempting to re-write history at the expense of … and they might just find one critical point revealed in Mr. Cohan's article.
    [PERTINENT EXCERPT]: Oct 5, 2012

    "As the western world wakes to the fact it is in the middle of a debt crisis spiral, intelligent voices are wondering how this manifested itself? As we speak, those close to the situation could be engaging in historical revisionism to obfuscate their role in the design of faulty leverage structures that were identified in the derivatives markets in 1998 and 2008. These same design flaws, first identified in 1998, are persistent today and could become graphically evident in the very near future under the weight of a European debt crisis.

    Author and Bloomberg columnist William Cohan chronicles the fascinating start of this historic leverage implosion in his recent article Rethinking Robert Rubin. Readers may recall it was Mr. Cohan who, in 2004, noted leverage issues that ultimately imploded in 2007-08.

    At some point, market watchers will realize the debt crisis story will literally change the world. They will look to the root cause of the problem, and they might just find one critical point revealed in Mr. Cohan's article.

    This point occurs in 1998 when then Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) ChairwomanBrooksley Born identified what now might be recognized as core design flaws in leverage structure used in Over the Counter (OTC) transactions. Ms. Born brought her concerns public, by first asking just to study the issue, as appropriate action was not being taken. She issued a concept release paper that simply asked for more information. "The Commission is not entering into this process with preconceived results in mind," the document reads.

    Ms. Born later noted in, the PBS Frontline documentary on the topic speculation at the CFTC was the unregulated OTC derivatives were opaque, the risk to the global economy could not be determined and the risk was potentially catastrophic. As a result of this inquiry, Ms. Born was ultimately forced from office.

    This brings us to Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary of the United States and at the time right hand man to then Treasury Security Robert Rubin. Mr. Summers was widely credited with implementation of the aggressive tactics used to remove Ms. Born from her office, tactics that multiple sources describe as showing an old world bias against women piercing the glass ceiling.

    According to numerous published reports, Mr. Summers was involved in. silencing those who questioned the opaque derivative product's design. "

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> Paine ...

    TBTF on steroids, might as well CFMA - why not?

    Bubbles with less TBTF and a lot less credit default swaps would have been a lot less messy going in. Without TARP, then Congress might have still had the guts for making a lesser New Deal.

    EMichael -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...

    TARP was window dressing. The curtain that covered up the FED's actions.

    pgl -> RGC...

    Where have I heard about William Greider? Oh yea - this critique of something stupid he wrote about a Supreme Court decision:

    www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/06/how-many-errors-can-william-greider-make-in-two-sentences-describing-lochner-v-new-york/

    pgl -> RGC...

    "Exotic financial instruments like derivatives and credit-default swaps flourished, enabling old-line bankers to share in the fun and profit on an awesome scale."

    These would have flourished even if Glass-Steagall remained on the books. Leave it to RGC to find some critic of HRC who knows nothing about financial markets.

    RGC -> pgl...

    Derivatives flourished because of the other deregulation under Clinton, the CFMA. The repeal of GS helped commercial banks participate.

    RGC -> pgl...

    The repeal of GS helped commercial banks participate.

    Fred C. Dobbs -> pgl...

    Warren Buffet used to rail about how risky derivative investing is, until he realized they are *extremely* important in the re-insurance biz, which is a
    big part of Berkshire Hathaway.

    Peter K. said...

    http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-and-cracking-down-on-wall-street

    Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Cracking Down on Wall Street
    by Dean Baker

    Published: 12 December 2015

    The New Yorker ran a rather confused piece on Gary Sernovitz, a managing director at the investment firm Lime Rock Partners, on whether Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton would be more effective in reining in Wall Street. The piece assures us that Secretary Clinton has a better understanding of Wall Street and that her plan would be more effective in cracking down on the industry. The piece is bizarre both because it essentially dismisses the concern with too big to fail banks and completely ignores Sanders' proposal for a financial transactions tax which is by far the most important mechanism for reining in the financial industry.

    The piece assures us that too big to fail banks are no longer a problem, noting their drop in profitability from bubble peaks and telling readers:

    "not only are Sanders's bogeybanks just one part of Wall Street but they are getting less powerful and less problematic by the year."

    This argument is strange for a couple of reasons. First, the peak of the subprime bubble frenzy is hardly a good base of comparison. The real question is should we anticipate declining profits going forward. That hardly seems clear. For example, Citigroup recently reported surging profits, while Wells Fargo's third quarter profits were up 8 percent from 2014 levels.

    If Sernovitz is predicting that the big banks are about to shrivel up to nothingness, the market does not agree with him. Citigroup has a market capitalization of $152 billion, JPMorgan has a market cap of $236 billion, and Bank of America has a market cap of $174 billion. Clearly investors agree with Sanders in thinking that these huge banks will have sizable profits for some time to come.

    The real question on too big to fail is whether the government would sit by and let a Goldman Sachs or Citigroup go bankrupt. Perhaps some people think that it is now the case, but I've never met anyone in that group.

    Sernovitz is also dismissive on Sanders call for bringing back the Glass-Steagall separation between commercial banking and investment banking. He makes the comparison to the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline, which is actually quite appropriate. The Keystone battle did take on exaggerated importance in the climate debate. There was never a zero/one proposition in which no tar sands oil would be pumped without the pipeline, while all of it would be pumped if the pipeline was constructed. Nonetheless, if the Obama administration was committed to restricting greenhouse gas emissions, it is difficult to see why it would support the building of a pipeline that would facilitate bringing some of the world's dirtiest oil to market.

    In the same vein, Sernovitz is right that it is difficult to see how anything about the growth of the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse would have been very different if Glass-Steagall were still in place. And, it is possible in principle to regulate bank's risky practices without Glass-Steagall, as the Volcker rule is doing. However, enforcement tends to weaken over time under industry pressure, which is a reason why the clear lines of Glass-Steagall can be beneficial. Furthermore, as with Keystone, if we want to restrict banks' power, what is the advantage of letting them get bigger and more complex?

    The repeal of Glass-Steagall was sold in large part by boasting of the potential synergies from combining investment and commercial banking under one roof. But if the operations are kept completely separate, as is supposed to be the case, where are the synergies?

    But the strangest part of Sernovitz's story is that he leaves out Sanders' financial transactions tax (FTT) altogether. This is bizarre, because the FTT is essentially a hatchet blow to the waste and exorbitant salaries in the industry.

    Most research shows that trading volume is very responsive to the cost of trading, with most estimates putting the elasticity close to one. This means that if trading costs rise by 50 percent, then trading volume declines by 50 percent. (In its recent analysis of FTTs, the Tax Policy Center assumed that the elasticity was 1.5, meaning that trading volume decline by 150 percent of the increase in trading costs.) The implication of this finding is that the financial industry would pay the full cost of a financial transactions tax in the form of reduced trading revenue.

    The Tax Policy Center estimated that a 0.1 percent tax on stock trades, scaled with lower taxes on other assets, would raise $50 billion a year in tax revenue. The implied reduction in trading revenue was even larger. Senator Sanders has proposed a tax of 0.5 percent on equities (also with a scaled tax on other assets). This would lead to an even larger reduction in revenue for the financial industry.

    It is incredible that Sernovitz would ignore a policy with such enormous consequences for the financial sector in his assessment of which candidate would be tougher on Wall Street. Sanders FTT would almost certainly do more to change behavior on Wall Street then everything that Clinton has proposed taken together by a rather large margin. It's sort of like evaluating the New England Patriots' Super Bowl prospects without discussing their quarterback.

    Syaloch -> Peter K....

    Great to see Baker's acknowledgement that an updated Glass-Steagall is just one component of the progressive wing's plan to rein in Wall Street, not the sum total of it. Besides, if Wall Street types don't think restoring Glass-Steagall will have any meaningful effects, why do they expend so much energy to disparage it? Methinks they doth protest too much.

    Peter K. -> Syaloch...

    Yes that's a good way to look it. Wall Street gave the Democrats and Clinton a lot of campaign cash so that they would dismantle Glass-Steagall. If they want it done, it's probably not a good idea.

    EMichael -> Syaloch...

    Slippery slope. Ya' gotta find me a business of any type that does not protest any kind of regulation on their business.

    Syaloch -> EMichael...

    Yeah, but usually because of all the bad things they say will happen because of the regulation. The question is, what do they think of Clinton's plan? I've heard surprisingly little about that, and what I have heard is along these lines: http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/08/investing/hillary-clinton-wall-street-plan/

    "Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street's excesses on Thursday. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug, if not relief."

    pgl -> Syaloch...

    Two excellent points!!!

    sanjait -> Syaloch...

    "Besides, if Wall Street types don't think restoring Glass-Steagall will have any meaningful effects, why do they expend so much energy to disparage it? Methinks they doth protest too much."

    It has an effect of shrinking the size of a few firms, and that has a detrimental effect on the top managers of those firms, who get paid more money if they have larger firms to manage. But it has little to no meaningful effect on systemic risk.

    So if your main policy goal is to shrink the compensation for a small number of powerful Wall Street managers, G-S is great. But if you actually want to accomplish something useful to the American people, like limiting systemic risk in the financial sector, then a plan like Hillary's is much much better. She explained this fairly well in her recent NYT piece.

    Paine -> Peter K....

    There is absolutely NO question Bernie is for real. Wall Street does not want Bernie. So they'll let Hillary talk as big as she needs to . Why should we believe her when an honest guy like Barry caved once in power

    Paine -> Paine ...

    Bernie has been anti Wall Street his whole career . He's on a crusade. Hillary is pulling a sham bola

    Paine -> Paine ...

    Perhaps too often we look at Wall Street as monolithic whether consciously or not. Obviously we know it's no monolithic: there are serious differences

    When the street is riding high especially. Right now the street is probably not united but too cautious to display profound differences in public. They're sitting on their hands waiting to see how high the anti Wall Street tide runs this election cycle. Trump gives them cover and I really fear secretly Hillary gives them comfort

    This all coiled change if Bernie surges. How that happens depends crucially on New Hampshire. Not Iowa

    EMichael -> Paine ...

    If Bernie surges and wins the nomination, we will all get to watch the death of the Progressive movement for a decade or two. Congress will become more GOP dominated, and we will have a President in office who will make Hoover look like a Socialist.

    Syaloch -> EMichael...

    Of course. In politics, as they say in the service, one must always choose the lesser of two evils. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4PzpxOj5Cc

    pgl -> EMichael...

    You should like the moderate Democrats after George McGovern ran in 1972. I'm hoping we have another 1964 with Bernie leading a united Democratic Congress.

    EMichael -> pgl...

    Not a chance in the world. And I like Sanders much more than anyone else. It just simply cannot, and will not, happen. He is a communist. Not to me, not to you, but to the vast majority of American voters.

    pgl -> EMichael...

    He is not a communist. But I agree - Hillary is winning the Democratic nomination. I have only one vote and in New York, I'm badly outnumbered.

    ilsm -> Paine ...

    I believe Hillary will be to liberal causes after she is elected as LBJ was to peace in Vietnam. Like Bill and Obomber.

    pgl -> ilsm...

    By 1968, LBJ finally realized it was time to end that stupid war. But it seems certain members in the State Department undermined his efforts in a cynical ploy to get Nixon to be President. The Republican Party has had more slime than substance of most of my life time.

    pgl -> Peter K....

    Gary Sernovitz, a managing director at the investment firm Lime Rock Partners? Why are we listening to this guy too. It's like letting the fox guard the hen house.

    sanjait -> Peter K....

    "The piece is bizarre both because it essentially dismisses the concern with too big to fail banks and completely ignores Sanders' proposal for a financial transactions tax which is by far the most important mechanism for reining in the financial industry."

    This is just wrong. Is financial system risk in any way correlated with the frequency of transactions? Except for market volatility from HFT ... no. The financial crisis wasn't caused by a high volume of trades. It was caused by bad investments into highly illiquid assets. Again, great example of wanting to punish Wall Street but not bothering to think about what actually works.

    Peter K. said...

    Robert Reich to the Fed: this is not the time to raise rates.

    https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1116088268403768

    RGC said...

    Iceland's Radical Money Plan

    Iceland, too, is looking at a radical transformation of its money system, after suffering the crushing boom/bust cycle of the private banking model that bankrupted its largest banks in 2008. According to a March 2015 article in the UK Telegraph:

    Iceland's government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal – removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank. The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled "A better monetary system for Iceland".

    "The findings will be an important contribution to the upcoming discussion, here and elsewhere, on money creation and monetary policy," Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson said. The report, commissioned by the premier, is aimed at putting an end to a monetary system in place through a slew of financial crises, including the latest one in 2008.

    Under this "Sovereign Money" proposal, the country's central bank would become the only creator of money. Banks would continue to manage accounts and payments and would serve as intermediaries between savers and lenders. The proposal is a variant of the Chicago Plan promoted by Kumhof and Benes of the IMF and the Positive Money group in the UK.

    Public Banking Initiatives in Iceland, Ireland and the UK

    A major concern with stripping private banks of the power to create money as deposits when they make loans is that it will seriously reduce the availability of credit in an already sluggish economy. One solution is to make the banks, or some of them, public institutions. They would still be creating money when they made loans, but it would be as agents of the government; and the profits would be available for public use, on the model of the US Bank of North Dakota and the German Sparkassen (public savings banks).

    In Ireland, three political parties – Sinn Fein, the Green Party and Renua Ireland (a new party) - are now supporting initiatives for a network of local publicly-owned banks on the Sparkassen model. In the UK, the New Economy Foundation (NEF) is proposing that the failed Royal Bank of Scotland be transformed into a network of public interest banks on that model. And in Iceland, public banking is part of the platform of a new political party called the Dawn Party.

    December 11, 2015
    Reinventing Banking: From Russia to Iceland to Ecuador

    by Ellen Brown

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/11/reinventing-banking-from-russia-to-iceland-to-ecuador/

    pgl -> RGC...

    "Banks would continue to manage accounts and payments and would serve as intermediaries between savers and lenders."

    OK but that means they issue bank accounts which of course we call deposits. So is this just semantics? People want checking accounts. People want savings accounts. Otherwise they would not exist. Iceland plans to do what to stop the private sector from getting what it wants?

    I like the idea of public banks. Let's nationalize JPMorganChase so we don't have to listen to Jamie Dimon anymore!

    sanjait -> pgl...

    I don't know for sure (not bothering to search and read the referenced proposals), but I assumed the described proposal was for an end to fractional reserve banking. Banks would have to have full reserves to make loans. Or something. I could be wrong about that.

    Syaloch said...

    Sorry, but Your Favorite Company Can't Be Your Friend

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/upshot/sorry-but-your-favorite-company-cant-be-your-friend.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

    To think that an artificial person, whether corporeal or corporate, can ever be your friend requires a remarkable level of self-delusion.

    A commenter on the Times site aptly quotes Marx in response:

    "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

    "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers."

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

    [Dec 07, 2015] The key prerequisite of casino capitalism is corruption of regulators

    Economist's View

    likbez said...

    When capital became unable of reaping large and fairly secure profits from manufacturing it like water tries to find other ways. It starts with semi-criminalizing finance -- that's the origin of the term "casino capitalism" (aka neoliberalism). I see casino capitalism as a set of semi-criminal ways of maintaining the rate of profits.

    The key prerequisite here is corruption of regulators. So laws on the book does not matter much if regulators do not enforce them.

    As Joseph Schumpeter noted, capitalism is not a steady-state system. It is unstable system in which population constantly experience and then try to overcome one crisis after another. Joseph Schumpeter naively assumed that the net result is reimaging itself via so called "creative destruction". But what we observe now it "uncreative destruction". In other words casino capitalism is devouring the host, the US society.

    So all those Hillary statements are for plebs consumption only (another attempt to play "change we can believe in" trick). Just a hot air designed to get elected. Both Clintons are in the pocket of financial oligarchy and will never be able to get out of it alive.

    GeorgeK said...

    I believe I'm the only one on this blog that has actually traded bonds, done swaps and hedged bank portfolios with futures contracts. Sooo I kinda know something about this topic.

    Hilary is a fraud; her daughter worked at a Hedge fund where she met her husband Marc Mezvinsky, who is now a money manager at the Eaglevale fund. Oddly many of the Eaglevale investors are investors in the Clinton Foundation and have also given money to Hilary's campaign. The Clinton Foundation gets boat loads of money from Hedge funds and will not raise taxes on such a rich source of funding.

    The grooms mother is Marjory Margolies (ex)Mezvinsky, she cast the final vote giving Clinton the winning vote to raise taxes. She subsequently lost her run for reelection to congress, then her husband was convicted of fraud and they divorced.

    This speech is an attempt to pry people away from Bernie, it won't work with primary voters but might with what's left of rational Republicans in the general election.

    [Dec 07, 2015] Hillary Clinton How I'd Rein In Wall Street

    Economist's View

    likbez said...

    When capital became unable of reaping large and fairly secure profits from manufacturing it like water tries to find other ways. It starts with semi-criminalizing finance -- that's the origin of the term "casino capitalism" (aka neoliberalism). I see casino capitalism as a set of semi-criminal ways of maintaining the rate of profits.

    The key prerequisite here is corruption of regulators. So laws on the book does not matter much if regulators do not enforce them.

    As Joseph Schumpeter noted, capitalism is not a steady-state system. It is unstable system in which population constantly experience and then try to overcome one crisis after another. Joseph Schumpeter naively assumed that the net result is reimaging itself via so called "creative destruction". But what we observe now it "uncreative destruction". In other words casino capitalism is devouring the host, the US society.

    So all those Hillary statements are for plebs consumption only (another attempt to play "change we can believe in" trick). Just a hot air designed to get elected. Both Clintons are in the pocket of financial oligarchy and will never be able to get out of it alive.

    GeorgeK said...

    I believe I'm the only one on this blog that has actually traded bonds, done swaps and hedged bank portfolios with futures contracts. Sooo I kinda know something about this topic.

    Hilary is a fraud; her daughter worked at a Hedge fund where she met her husband Marc Mezvinsky, who is now a money manager at the Eaglevale fund. Oddly many of the Eaglevale investors are investors in the Clinton Foundation and have also given money to Hilary's campaign. The Clinton Foundation gets boat loads of money from Hedge funds and will not raise taxes on such a rich source of funding.

    The grooms mother is Marjory Margolies (ex)Mezvinsky, she cast the final vote giving Clinton the winning vote to raise taxes. She subsequently lost her run for reelection to congress, then her husband was convicted of fraud and they divorced.

    This speech is an attempt to pry people away from Bernie, it won't work with primary voters but might with what's left of rational Republicans in the general election.

    [Dec 04, 2015] Congressional Aid to Multinationals Avoiding Taxes

    EconoSpeak

    The OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative is an effort by the G20 to curb the abuse of transfer pricing by multinationals. Senator Hatch is not a fan:

    Throughout this process we have heard concerns from large sectors of the business community that the BEPS project could be used to further undermine our nation's competitiveness and to unfairly subject U.S. companies to greater tax liabilities abroad. Companies have also been concerned about various reporting requirements that could impose significant compliance costs on American businesses and force them to share highly sensitive proprietary information with foreign governments. I expect that we'll hear about these concerns from the business community and others during today's hearing.
    Indeed we heard from some lawyer representing The Software Coalition who was there to mansplain to us how BEPS is evil. I learned two startling things. First – Bermuda must be part of the US tax base. Secondly, if Google is expected to pay taxes in the UK, it will take all those 53,600 jobs which are mainly in California and move them to Bermuda:
    in particular how the changes to the international tax rules as developed under BEPS will significantly reduce the U.S. tax base and create disincentives for U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) to create R&D jobs in the United States
    Yes – I find his testimony absurd at so many levels. Let's take Google as an example. When they say foreign subsidiaries – think Bermuda. Over the past three year, Google's income has average $15.876 billion per year but its income taxes have only average $2.933 billion for an effective tax rate of only 18.5%. How did that happen? Well – 55% of its income is sourced to these foreign subsidiaries and the average tax rate on this income is only 6.5%. Nice deal! Google's tax model is not only easy to explain but is also a very common one for those in the Software Coalition. While all of the R&D is done in the U.S. and 45% of its sales are in the U.S. – U.S. source income is only 45% of worldwide income. Very little of the foreign sourced income ends up in places like the UK even 11% of Google's sales are to UK customers. Only problem is that income ends up on Ireland's books with the UK getting a very modest amount of the profits. Now you might be wondering how Google got to the foreign taxes to be only 6.5% of foreign sourced income since Ireland's tax rate is 12.5%. But think Double Irish Dutch Sandwich and you'll get how the profits ended up in Bermuda as well as perhaps a good lunch! But what about that repatriation tax you ask. Google's most recent 10-K proudly notes:
    "We have not provided U.S. income taxes and foreign withholding taxes on the undistributed earnings of foreign subsidiaries".
    In other words, they are not paying that repatriation tax. Besides the Republicans want to eliminate. Let's be honest – Congress has hamstringed the IRS efforts to enforce transfer pricing. The BEPS initiative arose out of this failure. And now the Republicans in Congress are objecting to even these efforts. And if Europe has the temerity of expecting its fair share of taxes, U.S. multinationals will leave California and relocate in Bermuda? Who is this lawyer kidding? Myrtle Blackwood
    The development model in nation after nation is dependent upon global corporations. What is happening is simply a byproduct of this.
    Jack
    Would the problem of transfer mythical corporate location and the resulting lost taxes be resolved if taxes were based on point of revenue? Tax gross income where it is earned instead of taxing profits where they are not earned.

    [Nov 21, 2015] Hillary Clinton Appeal to 9-11 to Defend Wall Street Donations Was Bad, But This Was Worse

    Notable quotes:
    "... Come on people, what is the point of wasting energy and time talking about the two political parties participating in the charade that is called Democracy in the US? In reality there is only one political party ..."
    "... Hellary or Chump- do you really believe the choice of figurehead will change the machinery of permanent warfare or diversion of wealth to the favored few? ..."
    "... IMO she "put the last nail in her coffin", so to speak, when she brought up AIG Lehman, showing her ignorance to what really happened. (Or was she just "playing dumb" in an attempt to distance herself from her big contributors on Wall St?) ..."
    "... Yeah, that 9/11 rift was bad, but the "60% of my contributors are women" was worse. I'd love to see this claim fact checked. What a tidy number. Not too big to make her campaign a women's movement, but big enough to throw the guys off their game and make her nomination a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, corporations make up probably 90% of her actual contributions. ..."
    "... WaPo fact checked Hillary Clinton's claim that most of her donors are small donors. Only 17% donated less than $200 ..."
    "... So corporations have genders now? ..."
    "... We had one neoliberal Trojan horse get elected twice and if you questioned his policies you were at best a "bad Democrat" and at worst some version of racist…why not try it again? Anyone who questions her bought-and-paid for corruption will be painted as a card-carrying member of the he-man woman-haters club. ..."
    "... Some of us, however, just dislike her since she's an enemy of the working class: http://mattbruenig.com/2015/11/06/my-beef-with-hillary-is-mainly-that-she-is-an-enemy-of-the-poor/ ..."
    "... I agree that the remark was cynical and false and typical of Clinton's disdain for both facts and the intelligence of the voters. ..."
    "... I loved that Bernie Sanders was willing to drop the "F-bomb" (fraud) on Wall Street but he needs to swing much harder at Clinton. Clinton was quick to zing O'Malley as a hypocrite by noting he appointed a former hedge-fund manager to some state regulatory position when given the chance, but yet neither Sanders or O'Malley hit back with the fact that her only child and Clinton Foundation board member, Chelsea Clinton, worked for the hedge fund of a Clinton family pal and mega-donor in 2006. ..."
    "... I thought O'Malley had one of the best lines of the night when he said "I think it may be time for us to quit taking advice from economists" but it seemed to go mostly unnoticed and unappreciated. ..."
    "... Sanders did a relatively good job of deflecting and not getting zinged by the 'gotcha' question but a full-frontal assault would have been much better. Stronger, more Presidential and with the added bonus of giving neo-liberal economists under the pay of plutocrats a black eye. Another missed opportunity. The questioner set it up perfectly for him. I would have loved to see the expression on her corn-fed face when Bernie turned her 'gotcha' question that she had spent so much time and thought crafting into the home-run answer of the evening. Perhaps it could happen in a debate in the near future. ..."
    "... The GOP engages in phony baloney food fights much to the tingling excitement of their base. I'd like to see some REAL debate from the Dems. Not just make nice phony baloney bullshit. ..."
    "... Again, I've never expected Sanders to be anything more than someone who'll sound populist and then tell his followers to vote for Clinton… as he's already SAID anyway. ..."
    "... Yeah maybe, but I believe that was the price of admission to the Clinton / Wasserman-Shultz ball for a life-long socialist who sometimes caucuses with Democrats. The more damage Sanders inflicts on Clinton in the primaries the less sincere and effective any possible Sanders endorsement of Clinton will be later. ..."
    "... Sanders has the right message, the right record and popular support on his side in a year when people are fed-up with the entire Washington establishment and sick of pedigreed, legacy politicians like Clinton. ..."
    "... If there's ever been a moment when Bernie Sanders could win the nomination this is it. If you really think Sanders is the "pick of liter" as you say perhaps you could stop calling him things like "window dressing" and "a distraction". While it may protect your feelings from future disappointment to speak confidently of Clinton as the inevitable nominee it clearly helps her campaign objectives, so…. maybe just try tempering your cynicism just a wee bit unless you are out to help Hillary win the nomination. ..."
    "... Bernie's campaign never in a million years thought he would get this far. In the beginning, it was calculated to draw attention to income inequality, big money in politics, and other issues that likely would get ignored if the coronation went ahead unopposed. ..."
    "... As you point out, Sanders is a senator. He never expected to get this far. He won't win the nomination. He has to think of his post-2016 career. If he goes after Clinton hammer and tongs, he will be (more of) a pariah in the Senate, effectively ruining any chance for him to accomplish anything. ..."
    "... Honestly I can see the Democrats collapsing before the Republicans. The South and Midwest are just batshit crazy and they'll stick with the Republicans as long as the evangelicals dominate their culture. Does anyone here know anything about previous "great awakenings" in American culture? ..."
    "... For all her vomit-inducing disingenuousness about how she would be the toughest on the financial industry as a whole (really, how does she say that with a straight face?), and her basically sounding like a smarter, saner business as usual neocon on the middle east, I thought her worst moment by far was when she tried to describe single payer as "dismantling" Medicare, Medicaid, etc ..."
    "... I'm at a complete loss to understand why Dems, the media, and in fact anyone with two brain cells to rub together, can fail to see or acknowledge that HRC is a liar, a crook, and a generally mean-spirited individual who's only in it for herself and will do and say anything and accept money from anyone as long as it helps her to win. ..."
    "... Sadly, the only difference between Hillary and Obama, is that Barack is a better shape-shifter and, when he lies, he can do so with greater eloquence and charm. Hillary can never manage to completely hide her forked tongue and her poisonous lizard personality. ..."
    "... After Obama's behavior, and the documentation of Gilens Page, can anyone believe that campaign speeches have anything to do with post-electoral policies? The nomination process is beyond dysfunctional: everyone knows Hillarity's positions are synthetic, yet she successfully campaigns with the grossest political impunity and she is taken seriously enough for analysis. I don't understand why. The only political power remaining to democracy is resistance, either by voting for a third party, or else by total abstinence. I personally prefer the former, as it's a bit harder to sweep under the media carpet. This keeps me outside the grasp of helplessness. ..."
    "... Family Guy *exactly* predicted Hillary's 9/11 tragedy-distraction strategy way back in 2008: Life imitating art: http://youtu.be/Rm3d43HLyTI ..."
    November 16, 2015 | naked capitalism
    RedHope November 16, 2015 at 3:20 am

    She will say anything to win and not care about meaning bc she knows the Democratic base will accept anything.

    If you read, at least anecdotally, about the responses of base voters, it seems to be similar to what the GOP does: brush off the discussion as boring, irrelevant, a conspiracy or some combo.

    The Democratic base is solely focused on Denial, delusion and hating the Republicans. She will survive this and will likely win with people defending her bat shit extremism.

    crittermom November 16, 2015 at 6:34 am

    I completely agree with you in that she will say anything to win. Like a pinball, she will take to whatever side necessary to keep from falling into that hole of defeat.

    But please, please let's not give any energy toward thoughts of her winning!

    She showed her true colors during the debate, & I still wanna believe–despite being continuously proven wrong, that most folks are smarter than that & were able to see through her. (Probably the only transparency in this current govt?)

    oho, November 16, 2015 at 8:53 am

    she knows the Democratic base will accept anything.

    If you read, at least anecdotally, about the responses of base voters, it seems to be similar to what the GOP does: brush off the discussion as boring, irrelevant, a conspiracy or some combo.

    just because the GOP 'accept anything' doesn't make it right if the 'good guys' are dogmatic too.

    and my hunch is that right now everyone on in the Democratic Beltway is feeling smug cuz of the GOP clown car. But my gut is that in 2016 if HRC wins the nomination, HRC's load of manure is gonna stink a lot more than the GOP clown car's.

    on election night I'll be sitting at home cheering on the makers of humble pie.

    Crazy Horse, November 16, 2015 at 11:40 am

    Come on people, what is the point of wasting energy and time talking about the two political parties participating in the charade that is called Democracy in the US? In reality there is only one political party - the Oligarch Fascist Party - and the National Election Circus is played out to keep people who mistake it for democracy divided and confused.

    Hellary or Chump- do you really believe the choice of figurehead will change the machinery of permanent warfare or diversion of wealth to the favored few?

    Malcolm MacLeod, MD , November 16, 2015 at 7:21 pm

    Crazy Horse: You speak the unvarnished truth, which is always rather confusing in this day and age.

    jgordon , November 16, 2015 at 4:29 am

    Any serious analysis of the central drivers of the crisis necessarily lead you to the largest banks as the focal point for the interconnection and risk buildup.

    Well if we're concerned about serious analysis it seems a bit odd that we aren't starting with the largest bank of all: the Federal Reserve. If not for the deliberate policy of the Fed to inflate the housing bubble in the early 2000s after the dotcom crash, certainly 2007/2008 wouldn't have been such a mess. Though admittedly government corruption (and for all intents and purposes the Fed is a government appendage) certainly played a part.

    The main problem is that there are just way too many zombies and criminals infesting the financial system right now, and they are all being lovingly coddled by the Fed with ZIRP and QE. The only way to slay these undead legions is to end the ceaseless Fed-facilitated blood transfusions from the exhausted living to the dead parasites.

    Well I suppose one could claim that its thanks to the zombies that our economy is able to function at all. But come on, is it really a good idea to live in a world ruled by zombies? They eat brains you know.

    crittermom, November 16, 2015 at 6:01 am

    Excellent article. I watched the debate. I found it very telling that when Wall St was mentioned, the only thing she could seem to equate to it was 9/11.
    I found it disgusting that she even brought up 9/11 in an obvious attempt to steer the debate away from the corruption by 'her friends' on Wall St while trying to encourage the voters to give her a pat on the back for 'all she did' after 9/11. Pathetic, cheap, transparent tactic IMO.

    I found it sad, however, as mentioned in the article "Only when mentioned by a Twitter user later in the debate did the full recognition of the strangeness of that comment shine through." Far too many "trained seals" outside the convention center, as well?

    IMO she "put the last nail in her coffin", so to speak, when she brought up AIG & Lehman, showing her ignorance to what really happened. (Or was she just "playing dumb" in an attempt to distance herself from her big contributors on Wall St?)

    fresno dan, November 16, 2015 at 8:42 am

    I agree. The tendentious quibbling about the definition of "banks" when everyone uses that as shorthand for "excessively large under regulated, corrupt, and stupid financial institutions who have completed co-opted the regulators and politicians who are suppose to oversee them and enforce the rules, regulations and laws" is just deflection from the real issue.

    As Bernie said in response: NOT GOOD ENOUGH

    dk, November 16, 2015 at 9:05 am

    I think you underestimate "most" voters. Don't mistake them for the political media echo chamber that pretends to articulate their subconscious (via absurd polling). Except for the extremes, voters tend to be a taciturn bunch, it's true. One ends up having to pick from an imperfect selection, that's representative democracy; a fact of the circumstance, and voters know it. They play along, don't kid yourself that they actually like it that much.

    Comforting stories play well for the comfortable, and when no other stories are being told. The wage disparity issue was almost non-existent in 2008 and got small play in 2012. The BLM narrative is in part a counter-shock to the (granted, naive) assumption that having a black president would have (or indicated) a significant impact on day-to-day racism. The street-level economy has kept sputtering for too many years for that to be passed off as "normal". Too many cats got out of the bag this time around.

    Take a look here:
    http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2015-october-fec-filings/charts/

    In the last quarter, Hillary collected 5.19 mil from under-$200 donors, Bernie collected 20.19 mil. That's just shy of four times as much money, and arguably on the order of four times as many people. Whether Hillary is changing these people's minds at any appreciable rate remains to be seen, but this many people backing a Dem candidate in this way is a new thing (not so new for the Tea Party brand).

    Not saying Bernie is a slam dunk by any means, but numerically, in dollars and voters, he can't be dismissed as an impossibility (see also, Corbyn). Political media hacks hate voters, they still can't predict them (and they know it too). Sometimes elections occur in a near vacuum of clear indicators and issues (2012), sometimes the indicators and issues are bigger than even a "big" candidate (2008, Obama would not have won without the financial collapse, which suppressed and fractured Rep voting).

    Voters aren't smarter than anybody else, but they're not dumber either. What they are is shy (especially the Dems). But think of Bernie's small donor base as a bunch of wallflowers reacting to something they haven't seen before. That wasn't in anybody's narrative.

    Ulysses, November 16, 2015 at 9:09 am

    You provide a very astute description, of how the MSM Wurlitzer works to concoct narratives that disempower people. Yet I think that Chris Hedges is also on to something when he observes:

    "The frustration, mounting across the country, is bringing with it a new radicalism."

    http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/pray_with_your_feet_20151115

    We teeter on a knife's edge, close to societal collapse. My hope is that we will shake off our chains and begin to replace systematic oppression and exploitation with a more humane society. My fear is that the people, who currently benefit from the status quo, will go full-bore totalitarian/repressive in a desperate attempt to cling to their ill-gotten wealth and power.

    RUKidding, November 16, 2015 at 12:00 pm

    I'm afraid that the impetus is more towards the latter than the former. The PTB haven't spent decades/centuries brainwashing the masses to be good little authoritarians wanting Big Daddy/Momma to "take care" of them for nothing.

    Dino Reno, November 16, 2015 at 8:18 am

    Yeah, that 9/11 rift was bad, but the "60% of my contributors are women" was worse. I'd love to see this claim fact checked. What a tidy number. Not too big to make her campaign a women's movement, but big enough to throw the guys off their game and make her nomination a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, corporations make up probably 90% of her actual contributions.

    JaaaaayCeeeee, November 16, 2015 at 11:52 am

    WaPo fact checked Hillary Clinton's claim that most of her donors are small donors. Only 17% donated less than $200 (she did donation drives asking for a dollar even to get to 17% and most of her donations from women were big donations, too):

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/15/fact-checking-the-second-democratic-debate/

    Code Name D, November 16, 2015 at 12:41 pm

    So corporations have genders now?

    nigelk, November 16, 2015 at 1:49 pm

    We had one neoliberal Trojan horse get elected twice and if you questioned his policies you were at best a "bad Democrat" and at worst some version of racist…why not try it again? Anyone who questions her bought-and-paid for corruption will be painted as a card-carrying member of the he-man woman-haters club.

    Some of us, however, just dislike her since she's an enemy of the working class: http://mattbruenig.com/2015/11/06/my-beef-with-hillary-is-mainly-that-she-is-an-enemy-of-the-poor/

    Pat, November 16, 2015 at 9:47 am

    I agree that the remark was cynical and false and typical of Clinton's disdain for both facts and the intelligence of the voters. (And knowledgable in that she knew she would not get fact checked on this in any manner that would make her look like Ben Carson talking about pyramids.) I truly do not think it is as important as you do, as she had already lost that battle.

    The people know the great never ending bank bailout of 2008 did not translate to bailing out the economy. There are still foreclosed homes in neighborhoods across America rotting. If they didn't lose a job and are still looking for a decent one they have a parent, a kid, another family member, or multiple friends who are still un or underemployed. They know their bills are going up but their paychecks aren't. And they get to hear about Jamie Dimon becoming a billionaire. They may not know which bank he heads, but they know a whole lot of those billions came from their taxes while they are still struggling. None of this may get into the details of what happened or what went wrong, but they know they got taken. And her response tells them she would take them again. The only people who don't hear that, are the ones who think 60% of my donations are from women makes Clinton a feminist and tribal loyalists. You know the Democratic equivalent of the Bush supporters who never wavered.

    Trying to understand the ins and outs of the financial industry shenanigans is deep, dense, and takes way too much time for most folk. I happened to be out on workmen's comp when it went down. This is not my area, I read and read and read and got deeply angry. I still don't understand it all, and I have more facts at my fingertips then probably at least 75% of the population. My point on this, is that sometimes you don't need to know the details to smell the bullshit. And it reeked of manure.

    Vatch November 16, 2015 at 10:10 am

    Today is November 16, which is a deadline for the Clinton Foundation to refile some documents, according to this article to which Water Cooler linked on Oct. 28:

    https://100r.org/2015/10/clinton-foundation-faces-revisions-and-possible-reckoning/

    Here's an article published today about this, although nothing has been resolved yet:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2015/11/16/tracking-hillarys-speech-fees-clinton-foundation-or-pocket/

    Still, the Clintons have not defined how they decide to designate their speaking fees as income versus charity work. Earlier this year, the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation admitted collecting $26.4 million in previously unreported speaking fees from foreign governments and foreign and U.S. corporations. For tax purposes, who should be treated as the recipient of that money? It is not a silly question.

    Jerry Denim, November 16, 2015 at 11:46 am

    I couldn't believe my eyes and ears during the debate when Sanders impugned Clinton's integrity for taking Wall Street super PAC money and she seemed to successfully deflect the accusation by going full-bore star-spangled sparkle eagle. She played the vagina card then quickly blurted out "9/11 New York" for applause while attempting conflate aiding and abetting Wall Street with the 9/11 attacks and patriotism. I couldn't believe people were clapping and I couldn't believe Clinton had the audacity to pull such a illogical and juvenile stunt on live television, but yet CBS reported her highest approval scores of the debate were registered during her confusing but emotionally rousing (for some people apparently) "vagina, 9/11" defense.

    I loved that Bernie Sanders was willing to drop the "F-bomb" (fraud) on Wall Street but he needs to swing much harder at Clinton. Clinton was quick to zing O'Malley as a hypocrite by noting he appointed a former hedge-fund manager to some state regulatory position when given the chance, but yet neither Sanders or O'Malley hit back with the fact that her only child and Clinton Foundation board member, Chelsea Clinton, worked for the hedge fund of a Clinton family pal and mega-donor in 2006. Neither candidate mentioned that her son-in-law and the father of her grandchild who she is so fond of mentioning, just so happens to be an extremely rich hedge fund manager who benefits handsomely from the Clinton's political connections and prestige. This isn't mud, this is extremely germane, factual material already on the public record. It gets to the core of who Hillary is and where her loyalties lie. Hillary herself chose to identify unregulated derivatives and the repeal of Glass-Steagall as the primary causes of the financial crisis. She either claimed directly or insinuated that she would address these issues as President, but surprisingly no one pointed out that it was her husband's administration that blocked Brooksley Born from regulating derivatives in the 1990's and it was her husband's administration that effectively repealed Glass-Steagal with the signing of Gramm-Leach-Billey act in 1999. It's not a stretch to say the Clinton's deregulation of Wall Street paved the way for the crisis of 2008 and the extreme income inequality of today. Wall Street is deeply unpopular and Bernie Sanders has built a candidacy on two main issues: attacking Wall Street and addressing income inequality. These are punches he can't afford not to throw at his rival when she holds a commanding lead in the polls plus the support of the DNC and media establishment. Clinton is deeply corrupt and beholden to Wall Street. She needs to be beaten with this stick hard and often. Attempting to deflect this very accurate, very damaging criticism by wrapping herself in the flag and invoking feminism is a cheap stunt that will only work so many times before people notice what she is doing. Bernie needs to swing harder and keep at it, he already has the right message and Clinton is highly vulnerable on his pet topics.

    I thought O'Malley had one of the best lines of the night when he said "I think it may be time for us to quit taking advice from economists" but it seemed to go mostly unnoticed and unappreciated. I would have loved a frontal assault on the validity and integrity of economists when the bespectacled lady in blue attempted to nail down Sanders with a 'gotcha' question implying raising the minimum wage would be catastrophic for the economy because "such-and-such economist" said so. There is so much disdain for science and academic credentials in the heartland right now, it seems crazy not to harness this anti-academic populist energy and redirect it to a deserving target like neo-liberal economists instead of climate scientists. " How's that Laffer curve working out for ya Iowa? Are you feeling the prosperity 'trickle down' yet?" Sanders did a relatively good job of deflecting and not getting zinged by the 'gotcha' question but a full-frontal assault would have been much better. Stronger, more Presidential and with the added bonus of giving neo-liberal economists under the pay of plutocrats a black eye. Another missed opportunity. The questioner set it up perfectly for him. I would have loved to see the expression on her corn-fed face when Bernie turned her 'gotcha' question that she had spent so much time and thought crafting into the home-run answer of the evening. Perhaps it could happen in a debate in the near future.

    RUKidding, November 16, 2015 at 11:58 am

    I think what happened there is that Bernie is showing his true colors, unfortunately. While I'm more than OK with Bernie's attitude towards Benghazi & the emails, he really does not confront HRC on her egregious attitudes towards unfettered War, Inc, and most esp not on Wall St and the Banks.

    I have no serious expectations of Sanders, however, and never did.

    Jerry Denim, November 16, 2015 at 12:15 pm

    Perhaps you are correct but Sanders did say Wall Street's business model is greed and fraud. Strong language for a Presidential candidate and unmistakably clear terms. When it comes to attacking Clinton I feel like something is holding Sanders back. Maybe it's his campaign advisors because he's been told his anger scares voters and people don't like negative attacks. Maybe the DNC and Clinton are holding some threat over his head regarding ballot access, debate cancellation or some other punishment if he doesn't play by certain rules. Perhaps he's been warned certain topics are off limits during debates. Seems fishy to me, but maybe it's just as simple as you say.

    RUKidding, November 16, 2015 at 1:27 pm

    Yes, Sanders has been outspoken about Wall St, greed, fraud and tightening up regulations, etc. That's why it's disappointing and beyond annoying when he clams up vis Clinton and her relationship with and money from Wall St.

    The GOP engages in phony baloney food fights much to the tingling excitement of their base. I'd like to see some REAL debate from the Dems. Not just make nice phony baloney bullshit.

    Again, I've never expected Sanders to be anything more than someone who'll sound populist and then tell his followers to vote for Clinton… as he's already SAID anyway.

    We're told allegedly that "poll after poll" shows Clinton in a double digit lead. I really question that, as well, but clearly no one's showing me the factual data. It is what is. HRC is the anointed one, so get used to it.

    To me, Sanders is just window dressing & a distraction, even though, clearly, he's the pick of "both" (or the combined, if you will) litters. Whatever…

    JerryDenim, November 16, 2015 at 2:51 pm

    "Again, I've never expected Sanders to be anything more than someone who'll sound populist and then tell his followers to vote for Clinton… as he's already SAID anyway"

    Yeah maybe, but I believe that was the price of admission to the Clinton / Wasserman-Shultz ball for a life-long socialist who sometimes caucuses with Democrats. The more damage Sanders inflicts on Clinton in the primaries the less sincere and effective any possible Sanders endorsement of Clinton will be later. I too share your distrust of polls and given that distrust it's hard for me to write off a guy who has had every disadvantage in his Presidential bid but is still polling pretty darn well against a extremely well-known political juggernaut early in the primary season.

    Sanders has the right message, the right record and popular support on his side in a year when people are fed-up with the entire Washington establishment and sick of pedigreed, legacy politicians like Clinton. Look at how poorly Bush has fared so far against outsider, blow-hard Donald Trump and unknown-nobody Ben Carson. Even conservatives are sick of dynasties.

    If there's ever been a moment when Bernie Sanders could win the nomination this is it. If you really think Sanders is the "pick of liter" as you say perhaps you could stop calling him things like "window dressing" and "a distraction". While it may protect your feelings from future disappointment to speak confidently of Clinton as the inevitable nominee it clearly helps her campaign objectives, so…. maybe just try tempering your cynicism just a wee bit unless you are out to help Hillary win the nomination. If you are out to help Hillary then carry on, you're doing a fine job of tarring and feathering Sanders as a loser on behalf of her campaign.

    3.14e-9, November 16, 2015 at 2:53 pm

    Bernie's campaign never in a million years thought he would get this far. In the beginning, it was calculated to draw attention to income inequality, big money in politics, and other issues that likely would get ignored if the coronation went ahead unopposed. Within that context, it would have been very easy for him to promise the few votes he thought he would get to Clinton.

    I have a feeling that his campaign is regretting he ever said that as much as we are. He has a huge number of supporters who, like jgordon above, would write in "Dog Turd" before voting for Hillary (although I don't know why we couldn't write in Bernie). These people are going to be extremely angry if he throws his support behind her, and they have demonstrated well already that they are very vocal. I've commented on NC before that I think there will be hell to pay if and when that happens.

    I also suspect that the DNC didn't make a big fuss about his running as a Democrat because no one there thought he'd get this far, either, and they probably thought he would be useful. For all we know, he agreed to that. And then, suddenly, all the unexpected crowds.

    Sanders is the ranking minority member on the Senate Budget Committee, which means he definitely could challenge Clinton on economic issues, and competently. So I agree that something has to be holding him back. Yet another consideration is that he might be keeping the most damaging counts against her until later in the campaign. If he showed his hand now, the Clinton machine would kick into gear overtime, get her off the hook, and drag him down into the mud.

    Cassandra, November 16, 2015 at 4:10 pm

    No need to think of conspiracies, etc. As you point out, Sanders is a senator. He never expected to get this far. He won't win the nomination. He has to think of his post-2016 career. If he goes after Clinton hammer and tongs, he will be (more of) a pariah in the Senate, effectively ruining any chance for him to accomplish anything. As he said in the debate, the VA bill wasn't all he wanted, but it was something. Many think incrementalism is a fool's game, but I believe Sanders is willing to fight for crumbs.

    Lambert Strether, November 16, 2015 at 4:14 pm

    I think Sanders did pretty well, especially considering the primaries haven't started. He pushed Clinton into two horrible responses, at least: (1) 9/11 and Wall Street and (2) Sanders single payer vs. ObamaCare. Both will be gifts that keep on giving. My thought would is that the opportunity cost of spending a lot of time reverse engineering whatever number of dimensions of chess Sanders is playing failing to use the very powerful ammo he gave - both of which are about policy.

    RUKidding, November 16, 2015 at 4:17 pm

    I'm willing to be wrong about Sanders, and in fact, hope I am. Time will tell. I agree that he's done better than the odds called for. Willing to listen to him but wish he'd speak up more about HRC's bs. But he is a politician after all and is playing a long game.

    3.14e-9, November 16, 2015 at 6:14 pm

    Well, he has to be very careful about that. Clinton's people immediately jump on the least bit of truth from Sanders as "negative campaigning" and then call up their friends in the MSM to back them up:

    http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/11/05/clinton-campaign-fires-back-at-bernie-/bernie_sanders.

    Anyway, thanks for being open.

    Jim Haygood, November 16, 2015 at 12:10 pm

    'AIG's largest counter-party was Goldman Sachs.'

    Thus, the Federal Reserve's "Sunday night special" waiver of the 30-day application period for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to become bank holding companies, and to get their sticky mitts (or tentacles, as the case may be) into "free money" at the discount window. News story from 22 Sep 2008:

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/26828495

    Having essentially zero consumer deposit-taking business, then or now, these two investment banks resemble ordinary commercial banks like mangy wolves dressed in ill-fitting sheep costumes.

    Investment banking is a high-risk, high-reward business with some of the most highly compensated employees in the country. Subsidizing GS and MS with Federal Reserve free money is a rank disgrace. It vexeth me greatly, comrades. But changing it is not even on the menu.

    TimmyB, November 16, 2015 at 12:35 pm

    What really hasn't been discussed is Sander's motivation for breaking up too big to fail financial institutions. Sanders on his website states he wants to break them up because they have too much economic and political power. Sanders says that breaking them up, in and by itself, will provide a benefit.

    So when Clinton starts discussing how her plan will be more effective in preventing another financial collapse, she has changed the subject from how breaking up our banks will benefit our democratcy to whether or not breaking them up will prevent another 2008 crisis.

    What Sanders needs to do is bring the discussion on breaking up TBTF banks back around to their having too much economic and political power. For example, he could say he wants to break them up because they have too much power and that Clinton want them to continue to hold that power. Clinton has no real response to that claim.

    Michael, November 17, 2015 at 11:44 am

    Bernie is not running to win. I'm not sure why he is running. If he does not start to hit Hillary then I think it is primarily to keep the left wing of the Democratic Party inside the party instead of seeking a new home elsewhere. The Justice Party is interesting but a third party has no chance unless the Democrats implode.

    Honestly I can see the Democrats collapsing before the Republicans. The South and Midwest are just batshit crazy and they'll stick with the Republicans as long as the evangelicals dominate their culture. Does anyone here know anything about previous "great awakenings" in American culture?

    MojaveWolf , November 16, 2015 at 1:01 pm

    For all her vomit-inducing disingenuousness about how she would be the toughest on the financial industry as a whole (really, how does she say that with a straight face?), and her basically sounding like a smarter, saner business as usual neocon on the middle east, I thought her worst moment by far was when she tried to describe single payer as "dismantling" Medicare, Medicaid, etc and letting Republican administrations decide who gets health care, and playing up that the ACA as better and more comprehensive. She is not stupid. She is one of the smartest people in politics from a pure short term IQ standpoint. And she has studied and once advocated for single payer so she KNOWS what it does. Think about this for a minute.

    Hillary KNOWS single payer EXPANDS on what Medicaid and Medicare provide.

    Hillary KNOWS Bernie's single payer plan would not allow states to opt out, unlike the ACA she is touting, while she was claiming the exact opposite. She knowingly bald-faced lied on national TV & radio (I was driving and listening, not watching) in a way to equal anything Dick Cheney or Mitch McConnell or Newt Gingrich ever did, and she lied about a matter she KNOWS will result in millions of people NOT getting adequate medical care with ripple effects ranging from constant illness and misery to job performance to not seeking treatment until emergency to actual death. People can't pay 3k or 5k deductibles. We already have news reports of people not going for this reason. We paid the penalty on our taxes last year because the only affordable plans that were actually usable required us to make a 2 hr one way drive (over 90% hwy, this is a long way) to the closest hospital/doctor that was included in it. One of my acquaintances who is covered took a taxi to what was supposedly the only local doctor who took her plan (after calling everyone in town), waited over an hr, and was told that whoever she spoke to on the phone made a mistake and she is not covered, and they have no idea where she should go, plus she's out the time and a r/t taxi ride. You think Hillary hasn't studied this and doesn't know things like this happen? You think she doesn't know Bernie's single payer plan (and probably all single payer plans) wouldn't prevent these sorts of situations?

    She KNOWS we could cut out the insurance companies, have free single payer, pay for it by taxing the most well off, and people on the whole would get much better service, with much better outcomes, and without having to freak out if the ambulance took them to a hospital outside of their plan or a visiting specialist at the hospital their plan said go to was outside the plan and billed them five or six figures or what have.

    But she clearly doesn't care. She just cares about people donating money to her campaign and getting elected as a resume stuffer. She doesn't want to change how things are done more than minor tinkering, even when she KNOWS the changes will make everything better off. She will be the same on climate change, even tho she isn't stupid and knows both what we are doing now and what she is recommending are leading us to a planet of the jellyfish in the long run and a state of neverending crises and mass extinction in the short and medium run.

    (I am not saying she knows the misery her foreign policy position has and will cause because I actually fear she might believe in what she's saying there; tho whether she believes it or not she clearly intends to continue the same policies that have led us to destabilize the middle east and are starting to destabilize the entire world; the only reason I'm not thinking this is her worst moment is because she was more hinting at than saying things, and I'm less sure of her actual positions)

    She is willing to sacrifice millions of lives to get herself elected and continue enriching her already rich family who doesn't need any more money. She is, basically, a Republican on everything but social issues (yes, these matter, and good for her, tho past cowardly statements on abortion and votes on marriage equality should not be disregarded when compared with her opponents).

    i guess people think nothing of this, just as they think nothing of her lies on regulating the financial industry, because they think that sort of flat out lie and distortion is just politics as usual, and more important to be good at lying than good on substance?

    And that is why really do need a political revolution. Almost all of the current political class, including the political media, really need to go.

    RUKidding, November 16, 2015 at 1:37 pm

    AKA, there's very little difference bet HRC and whomever barking lunatic the GOP coughs up… other than HRC isn't such a barking lunatic. She's just mired in pure unfettered greed and imperialistic hubris.

    Actually the GOP should be kissing the ground that HRC walks on bc she's probably the biggest War Hawk in the whole amalgamated group, and she's way more for BigIns getting their hugely giant sucking cut out of "health" insurance scams than almost any other candidate.

    The GOP puts on a dog 'n pony show constantly wasting time and all taxpayer money on voting against ACA. They do that bc they know their phony baloney bills will never ever pass. The GOP doesn't want ACA to ever go away bc the politicians are getting rich rich rich off of it as much as the Dems are. They just have to play a Kabuki show to appease their utterly stupid base.

    Such a waste of time all of this is. Such a monumental waste of money. ugh.

    nothing will change. authoritarian USians like Big Daddy/Mommy too much to let ever let go of this system.

    Vatch, November 16, 2015 at 3:33 pm

    There are at least two advantages to breaking up the giant banks:

    1. If one of the fragments gets into financial trouble, we won't have to fear a complete economic collapse.

    2. Sure, the owners of the banks will continue to own as much as before (and some of their stock might even rise in value). But the CEOs of the big banks will lose influence, because they will suddenly be the bosses of much smaller corporations. Currently, people like Jamie Dimon have far too much power.

    Bob Stapp, November 16, 2015 at 2:17 pm

    I'm at a complete loss to understand why Dems, the media, and in fact anyone with two brain cells to rub together, can fail to see or acknowledge that HRC is a liar, a crook, and a generally mean-spirited individual who's only in it for herself and will do and say anything and accept money from anyone as long as it helps her to win.

    Sadly, the only difference between Hillary and Obama, is that Barack is a better shape-shifter and, when he lies, he can do so with greater eloquence and charm. Hillary can never manage to completely hide her forked tongue and her poisonous lizard personality.

    Our country and, in fact, the entire world is at a crossroads and yet there has never been such a lack of selfless, skilled leadership stepping up to help us get to some version of the common good. Meanwhile, Bernie Saunders and Jeremy Corbyn get pilloried daily for even suggesting that we are all in this together and had better get to fixing things right quick. I guess it's the fate of truth-tellers.

    I plan to attend my state's caucus and when I say that if we insist on pursuing the political process as we have always done, we are condemning ourselves to disaster. Going out and working for a person, a personality, or a hoped-for savior, is merely repeating the same kind of insanity that has produced the rotten system we have today. Bernie's right. It's going to take all of us standing up together, not to get Bernie or anybody else elected, but for what we know is right. And we'd better do it soon. Then, when I'm shut down by the party operatives, I'll go home and continue to watch the slow-motion train-wreck.

    Lambert Strether, November 16, 2015 at 3:21 pm

    "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'bank' is."

    cassandra, November 16, 2015 at 7:11 pm

    After Obama's behavior, and the documentation of Gilens & Page, can anyone believe that campaign speeches have anything to do with post-electoral policies? The nomination process is beyond dysfunctional: everyone knows Hillarity's positions are synthetic, yet she successfully campaigns with the grossest political impunity and she is taken seriously enough for analysis. I don't understand why. The only political power remaining to democracy is resistance, either by voting for a third party, or else by total abstinence. I personally prefer the former, as it's a bit harder to sweep under the media carpet. This keeps me outside the grasp of helplessness.

    Telee, November 16, 2015 at 7:38 pm

    The refusal of HRC to be for reinstating Glass-Steagall to separate investment banks and commercial banks is a sure sign that she will be a lap dog for the fraudsters on Wall Street. More of the same or worse.

    Another point. My readings has lead me to believe that she played a large role in the destabilization o Libya. In her 11 hours before the Benghazi committee she was never asked why she was so hell-bent for a military solution when there were negotiations which would have led to a more peaceful solution.

    1 kings, November 16, 2015 at 9:39 pm

    "We came, we saw, he died". HRC

    aliteralmind, November 16, 2015 at 10:21 pm

    Family Guy *exactly* predicted Hillary's 9/11 tragedy-distraction strategy way back in 2008: Life imitating art: http://youtu.be/Rm3d43HLyTI

    [Nov 21, 2015] On the Lack of Courage in Regulators

    Notable quotes:
    "... Can courage trump careerism? I believe that for the forseeable future the answer is "No". People are highly incentivized to take the path of least resistance and simply go along to get along. ..."
    "... It would be wrong to excuse the inaction of the Obama DOJ and SEC crews as being the result of some larger "corrosion of our collective values." The capos in those crews are the people doing the corroding, and not one of them was forced to (not) do what they did. Notice that every last one of the initial bunch is presently being paid, by Wall Street, to the tune of millions of dollars per year. They opted to cover up crimes and take a pay-off in exchange. And they are owed punishment. ..."
    Nov 21, 2015 | naked capitalism
    I'm embedding the text of a short but must-read speech by Robert Jenkins, a former banker, hedge fund manager, and regulator (Bank of England) who is now a Senior Fellow at Better Markets. If nothing else, be sure to look at the partial list of bank misconduct and activities currently under investigation.

    Jenkins points out that regulatory reform has fallen short on multiple fronts, and perhaps the most important is courage. Readers may understandably object to him giving lip service to the idea that Bernanke acted courageously during the crisis (serving the needs of banks via unconventional means is not tantamount to courage), but he is a Serious Person, and making a case against Bernanke would detract from his bigger message about the lack of guts post-crisis.

    Now there have been exceptions, like Benjamin Lawsky, Sheila Bair, Gary Gensler, Kara Stein, and in a more insider capacity, Danny Tarullo. Contrast their examples with the typical cronyism and lame rationalizations for inaction, particularly by the Department of Justice and the SEC. It's not obvious how to reverse the corrosion of our collective values. But it is important to remember than norms can shift much faster than most people think possible, with, for instance, the 1950s followed by the radicalism and shifts in social values of the 1960s, which conservative elements are still fighting to roll back.

    Michael G

    A link to a text version of the speech for those with uncooperative computers
    http://www.ianfraser.org/why-well-all-end-up-paying-for-the-feeble-response-to-the-banking-crisis/
    Worth reading

    James Levy

    We do not live in an economy or a polity that breeds or rewards the kind of public-mindedness and civic virtue that gives you courage. The author thinks the system needs courageous people, but posits no conception of where they would come from and how they would thrive in the current system (news flash: they won't). So this is a classic "I see the problem clearly but can't see that the solution is impossible under the current system" piece.

    TMock

    Agreed.

    For those who desire real solutions, try this…

    The Universal Principles of Sustainable Development

    http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/02/universal-principles-sustainable-development/

    Norb

    In Tavis Smiley's book, My Journey with Maya Angelou, he recounts an ongoing discussion the two of them entertained throughout the years concerning which trait, Love or Courage, was more important in realizing a full life. Angelou argued that acting courageously was the most important. Smiley saw love as the moving force. While important and moving, the discussion has the dead-end quality of not being able to move past the current system of injustice. I say this because in the end, both support incremental change to the existing system as the means to bring about social justice. The powerful elite have perfected the manipulation of incremental change to render it powerless.

    When trying to change a social system, courage is needed. Courage to form a vision of the future that is based on public-mindedness and civic virtues that bring justice into the world. Our current leaders are delivering the exact opposite of civic justice. Its time to call them out on their duplicity, and ignore their vision of the future.

    The courage that is needed today is not the courage to stand up to the criminals running things and somehow make them change. It is the courage to make them irrelevant. Change will come from the bottom up, one person at a time.

    cnchal

    And when one shows up, look what happens.

    The disturbing fact is that laws have been broken but law breaking has not touched senior management.

    If they knew, then they were complicit. If they did not, then they were incompetent. Alternatively, if the deserving dozens have indeed been banned from the field let the list be known – that we might see some of that "professional ostracism" of which Governor Carney speaks. One person who did lose his position and quite publicly at that was Martin Wheatley, the UK's courageous conduct enforcer.

    Meanwhile the chairman of Europe's largest bank, Douglas Flint at HSBC, remains in situ – despite having been on the board since 1995; despite having signed off on the acquisition of Household Finance; and despite having had oversight of tax entangled subsidiaries in Switzerland and money laundering units in Mexico. Oh, and you'll love this: the recently retired CEO of Standard Chartered is reportedly an advisor to Her Majesty's Government. Standard Chartered was among the first to be investigated for violations of rogue regime sanctions. The bank was fined heavily and may be so again.

    Courageous people get fired, which leads to no courageous people left.

    GlassHammer

    Can courage trump careerism? I believe that for the forseeable future the answer is "No". People are highly incentivized to take the path of least resistance and simply go along to get along.

    susan the other

    By extreme necessity (created by total dysfunction) we will probably wind up with planned and coordinated economies that do not rely on speculation & credit to come up with the next great idea. Those ideas will be forced to come from the top down. And the problems of unregulated capitalism frantically chumming for inspiration and extreme profits will shrink back down from a world-eating monster to just a fox or two.

    Oliver Budde

    It would be wrong to excuse the inaction of the Obama DOJ and SEC crews as being the result of some larger "corrosion of our collective values." The capos in those crews are the people doing the corroding, and not one of them was forced to (not) do what they did. Notice that every last one of the initial bunch is presently being paid, by Wall Street, to the tune of millions of dollars per year. They opted to cover up crimes and take a pay-off in exchange. And they are owed punishment.

    Malcolm MacLeod, MD

    Oliver: I believe that you hit the nail on the head, and
    I wholeheartedly agree.

    [Oct 17, 2015] Tobin Project Book on Regulatory Capture By James Kwak

    The basic idea was that you can observe the same outcomes that you get with traditional regulatory capture without there being any actual corruption.
    January 25, 2013 | baselinescenario.com | 70 Comments

    One of the last things I did in law school was write a paper about the concept of "cultural capture," which Simon and I discussed briefly in 13 Bankers as one of the elements of the "Wall Street takeover." The basic idea was that you can observe the same outcomes that you get with traditional regulatory capture without there being any actual corruption. The hard part in writing the paper was distinguishing cultural capture from plain old ideology-regulators making decisions because of their views about the world.

    Anyway, the result is being included in a collection of papers on regulatory capture organized by the Tobin Project. It will be published by Cambridge sometime this year, but for now you can download the various chapters here. It features a lineup including many authors far more distinguished than I, including Richard Posner, Luigi Zingales, Tino Cuéllar, Richard Revesz, David Moss, Dan Carpenter, Nolan McCarty, and others. Enjoy.

    [Sep 26, 2015] The City Of London Has Turned Britain Into A Civilized Mafia State

    "... Property in this country is a haven for the proceeds of international crime. The head of the National Crime Agency, Donald Toon, notes that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK." ..."
    "... The City is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain's financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons. ..."
    "... Yep. Socialism for us. Feudalism for the people. Because.....we're too big to fail. "They gotcha by the balls -- " - George Carlin ..."
    "... London is an independent city-state, with mafia owners going back 1000+ years. Website admits it's a corporation http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Pages/default.aspx ..."
    "... assassination politics: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassinat... ..."
    "... I'm not sure that author actually knows what he is talking about. "The City" has nothing do with domestic UK money laundering in real estate, because no one with money actually lives in "the City." They generally live in the West End or on country estates- that's the real estate that is being used to launder money. And the City is hardly the UK's only tax haven for corporations -- Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man are all short puddle jumper flights from LCY, and if you want to use long haul flights out of Heathrow- the list of Crown dependencies and overseas territories serving as tax havens is almost endless... the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands and the Bermuda Triangle being the most familiar to Americans trying to lose fiat in boating accidents. ..."
    "... "What Do You Think of Western Civilization?" "I Think It Would Be a Good Idea" -- Gandhi
    "...London is now the global money-laundering centre for the drug trade, says crime expert ..."
    "... It's a big club and we ain't in it...... R.I.P. George Carlin ..."
    "... "The City" = croupier and enforcer of the global casino. ..."
    "... The lesson - a financial sector without a commensurate sized industrial base will rapidly evolve into organised crime. ..."
    Sep 10, 2015 | Zero Hedge
    Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    While an earlier post related to the likely bursting of the London real estate bubble, this one highlights a blistering critique of the role the City of London has played in transforming Great Britain into what George Monbiot calls a "civilized mafia state." But that's just an appetizer. This extremely well written and information article is a must read for anyone still in the dark regarding London's central role within the global financial crime syndicate.

    Here are a few excerpts from the Guardian:

    To an extent unknown since before the first world war, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. It is not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It's that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bailouts, quantitative easing and delays in interest-rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that – as the Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott, puts it – financial markets are "one of the last bastions of socialism left on Earth".

    Public services, infrastructure, the very fabric of the nation: these too are being converted into risk-free investments. Social cleansing is transforming central London into an exclusive economic zone for property speculation. From a dozen directions, government policy converges on this objective.

    Property in this country is a haven for the proceeds of international crime. The head of the National Crime Agency, Donald Toon, notes that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK."

    It's hardly surprising, given the degree of oversight. Private Eye has produced a map of British land owned by companies registered in offshore tax havens. The holdings amount to 1.2m acres, including much of the country's prime real estate. Among those it names as beneficiaries are a cast of Russian oligarchs, oil sheikhs, British aristocrats and newspaper proprietors. These are the people for whom government policy works – and the less regulated the system that enriches them, the happier they are.

    The speculative property market is just one current in the great flow of cash that sluices through Britain while scarcely touching the sides. The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. In fact, the relationship seems to work the other way. Behind the Speaker's chair in the House of Commons sits the Remembrancer, whose job is to ensure that the interests of the City of London are recognised by the elected members. (A campaign to rescind this privilege – Don't Forget the Remembrancer – will be launched very soon.)

    The City is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain's financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.

    Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging. A former minister in the last government, Lord Green, ran HSBC while it engaged in money laundering for drug gangs, systematic tax evasion and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Sometimes the UK looks to me like an ever so civilised mafia state.

    The government also insists that there is no link between political donations and seats in the House of Lords. But a study by researchersat Oxford University found that the probability of so many major donors arriving there by chance is 1.36 x 10-38: roughly "equivalent to entering the National Lottery and winning the jackpot 5 times in a row". Why does the Lords remain unreformed? Because it permits plutocratic power to override democracy. Both rich and poor are kept in their place.

    Governed either by or on behalf of the people who fleece us, we cannot be surprised to discover that all public services are being re-engineered for the benefit of private capital. Nor should we be surprised when governments help to negotiate, without public consent, treaties such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which undermine the sovereignty of both parliament and the law. Aesop's observation, that "we hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office", remains true in spirit, though hanging has been replaced by community payback.

    Wherever you sniff in British public life, something stinks: I could fill this site with examples. But, while every pore oozes corruption, our task, we are told, is merely to trim the nails of the body politic.

    To fail to confront this system is to collaborate with it.

    Most people don't want to face this, but it's undeniably true.

    umbotron

    Yep. Socialism for us. Feudalism for the people. Because.....we're too big to fail. "They gotcha by the balls -- " - George Carlin

    JoeSexPack

    London is an independent city-state, with mafia owners going back 1000+ years. Website admits it's a corporation http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Pages/default.aspx

    Short vid explains.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc

    Why matters? The square mile is home to Bank of England (private corp), HQ of Freemasons & branch offices of all major banks on Earth. It is center of world finance, & has been for centuries. Privately-owned Bank of E was model later replicated with FED, ECB, WB, IMF & most others.

    US revolutionary War was fought to fee US from having to use Bank of E's debt notes. Sound familiar? We're back there now. Same struggle against same institutions.

    KnuckleDragger-X

    If you read about the history of London, you'll notice it has always been a very bizarre and screwed up place. They are now reaching their Nirvana of fucked uppedness.....

    two hoots

    What they can no longer do with their Dutch East India Company and with the by-gone reach of the Empire they do in the M A Rothschild tradition with their global financial tenacles

    Chuck Knoblauch

    Civilized assassins needed.

    sleigher

    assassination politics: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassinat...

    lawyer4anarchists

    Of course the author is right. And of course this has always been the case, it is not new. The problem we have in this country is that the people have the laughable notion that there is some magical time to "go back to" where the "constitution and it's rights" were the law. lol. The people are so lost. The constitution is not what people think. It is there to enslave you. It was never a source of freedom. Until they wake up and realize this fact, well... they will keep getting what they are getting. http://www.thetruthaboutthelaw.com/the-peoples-case-for-what-happened-at...

    Urban Redneck

    I'm not sure that author actually knows what he is talking about. "The City" has nothing do with domestic UK money laundering in real estate, because no one with money actually lives in "the City." They generally live in the West End or on country estates -- that's the real estate that is being used to launder money. And the City is hardly the UK's only tax haven for corporations -- Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man are all short puddle jumper flights from LCY, and if you want to use long haul flights out of Heathrow -- the list of Crown dependencies and overseas territories serving as tax havens is almost endless... the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands and the Bermuda Triangle being the most familiar to Americans trying to lose fiat in boating accidents.

    Peribanu

    Unlike the Yanks, we Brits don't have a constitution written down from first principles. Our "constitution" is the body of laws of the country, but it goes back so far that any contemporary changes are minor, superficial, and irrelevant. Many of the formal institutional powers in the country are the unfortunate but necessary result of a compromise between landowning aristocrats of old and the bourgeoisie who wanted a slice of the cake. The workers are merely tolerated. The internal mafia are the oh-so-very-refined aristocracy, whose heads were never cut off unlike in France, together with the rather uncouth capitalists and self-made money men, who are also tolerated, since someone has to provide one with an income, ideally by devising ways to get the workers to pay 90%-100% of their income back to us as rent. The other mafia are the rich foreigners -- Russian oligarchs, and the "persecuted" rich of the world, who are allowed to reside in Britain on condition that: a) they bring in lots of lovely "investments"; and b) don't get involved, at least publicly, in any of that unnecessary "politics" that goes on overseas. In Britain we long ago abolished politics. The commoners come and go with their naive belief that they can actually change things, while the core institutions of the country are unchanging and eternal: Eton, Oxford, Cambridge, the Civil Service, MI5, MI6, the BBC, and, of course, the Monarchy. God Save the Queen! (Or should I call her the Godmother?)

    q99x2

    The scum of the world all located in one place. How convenient is that. Won't be long before they start going after one another. Then poof.

    JustObserving

    Re: The City Of London Has Turned Britain Into A "Civilized Mafia State"

    Civilized?

    "What Do You Think of Western Civilization?" "I Think It Would Be a Good Idea" -- Gandhi

    London is now the global money-laundering centre for the drug trade, says crime expert

    The City of London is the money-laundering centre of the world's drug trade, according to an internationally acclaimed crime expert.

    UK banks and financial services have ignored so-called "know your customer" rules designed to curb criminals' abilities to launder the proceeds of crime, Roberto Saviano warned. Mr Saviano, author of the international bestseller Gomorrah, which exposed the workings of the Neapolitan crime organisation Camorra, said: "The British treat it as not their problem because there aren't corpses on the street."

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/london-is-now-the-global-mone...

    London: A giant washing machine for the filthy cash of a corrupt elite: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/london-giant-washing-machine-filthy-cash-corrup...
    Calculus99

    London: The money laundering capital of the world.

    Fear not though because Prime Minister Cameron has said he's going to stamp down on it especially the offshore companies that are buying up all the property. BWHAHAHAHAHA.

    ThroxxOfVron

    ...& Obama's new Affirmative Action figurehead at the DOJ has agreed with her underlings that since it is now well past the Statute Of Limitations for prosecuting anything even vaguely related to the fraud-induced economic disaster which culminated in the interbank and equities markets implosions that it is time 'to get touch on White Collar Crime.'

    Dr. Engali

    It's a big club and we ain't in it...... R.I.P. George Carlin

    Salah

    Been that way since their founders escaped from the Pope & the King of France, 10/13/1307

    https://lordmayorsshow.london/history/gog-and-magog

    Jonathan Living...

    I'm fascinated by The City - so much of British law seems so weird ~ even just the status of Wales, which is in some ways its own country within the UK, some ways just part of England, but they have their own Parliament.

    Anyway there's always google, but if anyone has come across any particularly good articles or books on the subject of the City's history and status, please share the wealth.

    I wonder if, like our Electoral college, most people would agree it should be abolished but most people simply dont know about it.

    22winmag

    Let's dismantle Miami and sell it off in order to fund the criminal prosecution and incarceration of the CIA scum and drug runners who built that city thanks to decades of drug smuggling and money laundering. Then we move on to D.C.

    Salah

    No, make NYC & Long Island a US "City-State", but with no US Congressional representation, or taxation, or US financial insurance guarantees or citizenship.

    1 crash later, they'll clean-up mightily and be a little Dubai.

    jcdenton

    We do have $100 BILLION for that on the way ..

    http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/11/another-thwarted-attempt-to-hija...

    Another major disbursement scheduled is 100 Billion USD to set up an ongoing special Task Force to investigate and prosecute organized crime and government and corporate corruption at any level.

    ... Funds were disbursed on December 15, 2014 ...

    https://app.box.com/s/hfgvcqg7gqh7i27at6sv53ywu87lwarp (see file with interview dated Dec. 3, 2014)

    youngman

    Well they still have a Royal Family...go figure......and remember any news or numbers that come out of London are probably wrong... Faked...or just fixed....they cheat well there

    rufus66

    Meanwhile in the news today, Revenue Canada uncovers something fishy regarding between kpmg's Great Britain connection and rich clients ......

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/kpmg-offshore-sham-deceived-tax-authorit...

    Solio

    "So it just means that more of the tax burden is borne by the middle class."

    What middle class?!!

    Calculus99

    The difference between Miami and London is Miami knows it's bent. London likes to hide/forget and think/preach it's honest.

    homebody

    This will be fixed by adding 800,000 economic refugees from Syria and Africa

    XRAYD

    London has always been thus ... from the age of Dickens, and the Colonial Empire Head Office - now masquerading as the "Commonwealth"!

    NotApplicable

    Indeed.

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

    Salah

    "The City" = croupier and enforcer of the global casino.

    1. Look for things to "break apart", i.e. Ottoman Empire, Hapsburg Empire, Russian Empire, Spanish Empire, USSR, et al

    2. Look for things to "put together", i.e. USA, Chile (sans Bolivia on the Pacific), South Africa, Rhodesia, Oz, NZ, Hong Kong, Singapore, et al

    They've been working this biz-model since the North Sea Knights Templars escaped the big deception in 1307

    JessieSharpton

    Ah the knights templar, the prototypical pre Rothschild banking mafia incarnation.

    SillySalesmanQu...

    Just my own personal observation here, but what do these three things have in common, why and who created them in the first place?

    Most bad shit that happens to average people seem to emanate from:

    1. Vatican City

    2. City of London

    3. Washington D.C.

    Chosenpeople

    Britain has become a classic dystopian state. They have cameras everywhere, and I mean everywhere. The state runs and controls everything. The place is swarming with foreigners, it is difficult to find a white Englishman in London. Britain is dead.

    ajax

    London became the mega-city in "Blade Runner" instead of L.A.

    umblemore

    Before the banking mafia looted Britain's industrial base and shipped it offshore industry was the dominant power and although the City was part crooked it was also kept part functional as a utility for industry.

    Over the last 30 years or so since they offshored all the industry the financial power has become completely dominant and completely criminal. To a certain extent the London branches of the Wall St banks are where they do their dirtiest deeds because it's easier to get away with in London.

    The lesson - a financial sector without a commensurate sized industrial base will rapidly evolve into organised crime.

    MSimon

    For several Centuries Brit banks have been running the dope racket.

    You might recall "Opium Wars" or if you want to be modern - NATO in Afghanistan.

    jcdenton

    Next, we will have the courage to write about Dachau?

    http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/04/neo-so-much-more-than-nukes/

    MSimon

    Since 1840 - at least

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-07/bed-despotic-house-saud#comment...

    MSimon

    The Brits have been at it for a long time: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-07/bed-despotic-house-saud#comment...

    [Sep 25, 2015] Paul Krugman Dewey, Cheatem Howe

    The point is we should be trying to make our regulation more intelligent (making it encourage not discourage innovation - cheaper and easier to police - less subject to regulatory capture etc.
    "... So what has been happening lately is an attempt to redress that imbalance, to replace knee-jerk opposition to regulation with the judicious use of regulation where there is good reason to believe that businesses might act in destructive ways. Will we see this effort continue? Next year's election will tell. ..."
    "... That is brilliant - so Turing Pharmaceuticals is a classical - wait for it - parasitic infection! ..."
    "... The point is we should be trying to make our regulation more intelligent (making it encourage not discourage innovation - cheaper and easier to police - less subject to regulatory capture etc.). ..."
    "... The reality is that, in the absence of effective regulation with substantial penalties, all of the incentives are to lie, cheat, and steal. In consequence, it really is the norm, if only in more minor ways than the ones that make the headlines. Wage theft, fraud, knowingly selling defective merchandise, and many other abuses are clearly rampant. This is exactly why markets cannot exist in the absence of effective government regulation to provide trust. ..."
    "... Economic idealists have popularized the notion that the world can work without much regulations because their models tell them so. Unless they are behavioral economists, they often fail to include fraud, scams & information asymmetry into their models. This produces garbage like efficient markets that only exist in an idealistic dream world. The real world markets are filled with fraud, scams and disreputable agents. Failure to account for bad behavior is the bane of many a model. ..."
    "... But I love Obama because he has created a wonderland of money for lawyers and consultants, a river of chocolate and honey to make Willy Wonka jealous. Go Barry go! ..."
    "...


    ..."

    Sep 25, 2015 | Economist's View
    Republicans can't help but side with business, but there are very good reasons for the recent increase in regulatory oversight:
    Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Item: The C.E.O. of Volkswagen has resigned after revelations that his company committed fraud on an epic scale, installing software on its diesel cars that detected when their emissions were being tested, and produced deceptively low results.

    Item: The former president of a peanut company has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowingly shipping tainted products that later killed nine people and sickened 700.

    Item: Rights to a drug used to treat parasitic infections were acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals, which specializes not in developing new drugs but in buying existing drugs and jacking up their prices. In this case, the price went from $13.50 a tablet to $750. ...

    There are, it turns out, people in the corporate world who will do whatever it takes, including fraud that kills people, in order to make a buck. And we need effective regulation to police that kind of bad behavior... But we knew that, right?

    Well, we used to know it... But ... an important part of America's political class has declared war on even the most obviously necessary regulations. ...

    A case in point: This week Jeb Bush, who has an uncanny talent for bad timing, chose to publish an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal denouncing the Obama administration for issuing "a flood of creativity-crushing and job-killing rules." Never mind his misuse of cherry-picked statistics, or the fact that private-sector employment has grown much faster under President Obama's "job killing" policies than it did under Mr. Bush's brother's administration. ...

    The thing is, Mr. Bush isn't wrong to suggest that there has been a move back toward more regulation under Mr. Obama, a move that will probably continue if a Democrat wins next year. After all, Hillary Clinton released a plan to limit drug prices at the same time Mr. Bush was unleashing his anti-regulation diatribe.

    But the regulatory rebound is taking place for a reason. Maybe we had too much regulation in the 1970s, but we've now spent 35 years trusting business to do the right thing with minimal oversight - and it hasn't worked.

    So what has been happening lately is an attempt to redress that imbalance, to replace knee-jerk opposition to regulation with the judicious use of regulation where there is good reason to believe that businesses might act in destructive ways. Will we see this effort continue? Next year's election will tell.

    reason

    "Item: Rights to a drug used to treat parasitic infections were acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals, which specializes not in developing new drugs but in buying existing drugs and jacking up their prices. In this case, the price went from $13.50 a tablet to $750. ..."

    That is brilliant - so Turing Pharmaceuticals is a classical - wait for it - parasitic infection!

    reason

    "So what has been happening lately is an attempt to redress that imbalance, to replace knee-jerk opposition to regulation with the judicious use of regulation where there is good reason to believe that businesses might act in destructive ways. Will we see this effort continue? Next year's election will tell."

    Personally, I don't think this is really addressing the key point. You can't actually avoid regulation (the alternative to public regulation - as pushed by say Milton Friedman - ends up being private regulation - which is just as subject to regulatory capture). The point is we should be trying to make our regulation more intelligent (making it encourage not discourage innovation - cheaper and easier to police - less subject to regulatory capture etc.). The policy discussions about this a difficult enough with good faith - but bad faith politics makes this impossible. We need to throw the Gingrich revolution in the dustbin as soon as possible.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to reason...

    YEP!

    What politicians can get away with is an artifact of the limited toolset that the electorate has to express its informed will. We need a well educated democracy and the democratic part of that requires Constitutional electoral reforms (e.g., gerrymandering, campaign finance). A bit of the educational aspect of a voting actually democratic republic would naturally work itself out with a more engaged and empowered electorate participating ACTIVELY.

    With the system as it is then it takes a shock wave through the electorate for them to throw the bums out, but there is no follow through. There is a failsafe reaction function, but no more than that except on specific social issues that get overwhelming support where politicians can move with the electoral majority at zero cost while reactionary politicians can triangulate and pander some votes from the minority opinion of those too old or set in their ways to participate in the social sea change.

    ilsm said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...

    The threat is "faith voters", dogma developed by billionaires' propaganda to plunder the world.

    DrDick said in reply to reason...

    Krugman is far too kind to the businessmen. The reality is that, in the absence of effective regulation with substantial penalties, all of the incentives are to lie, cheat, and steal. In consequence, it really is the norm, if only in more minor ways than the ones that make the headlines. Wage theft, fraud, knowingly selling defective merchandise, and many other abuses are clearly rampant. This is exactly why markets cannot exist in the absence of effective government regulation to provide trust.

    DeDude said in reply to reason...

    Exactly; what we need is a detailed debate on each specific regulation. What it intends to accomplish, whether that could be accomplished in a less burdensome way, and whether the accomplishment is sufficient to justify the burden. However, that is not something that can happen in the 15 second soundbite that appears to be the attention span of the average voter.

    Lee A. Arnold said in reply to Second Best...

    Second Best: "Markets work if allowed to self regulate."

    No. Never happened, except in local instances. For self-regulation you need proper prices, and for proper prices you need proper supply and demand.

    For proper supply you need perfect competition, so there must be numerous competitors entering the same market, and this requires, among other things, almost no intellectual protection.

    For proper demand, you need perfectly informed consumers, and this is not only impossible, but it is getting far far worse, because the complexity of the world is increasing.

    The problem with state regulation is that it also falls prey to the same objections, although at a slower rate. We use votes not prices, but the same imperfection of information and lack of flexibility causes problems with the voting system.

    When you combine this problem with the increase in inequality (which was masked temporarily by World War II and the subsequent spurt of blue-collar jobs productivity), we are headed into an accelerated amelioration of the market system by greater public ownership.


    RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to Lee A. Arnold...

    "Peanut butter does not kill people, people kill people."

    [If you can read a opening sentence like that and not recognize it as satirical parody, then you might want to look around to find the sense of humor that you lost. When the will of the people is no more than a euphemism for dollar democracy then parody, satire, sarcasm, and a healthy dose of cynicism are called for.]

    JF said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron..

    Lee A Arnold - Think Jonathan Swift and his piece about the way to reduce subsidies for the orphaned poor infants, it is to reduce their number so we feel good about the fact that we help the few poor infants left alive.

    I reacted a few times to Second Best's comments before I recognized the satire.

    But I also have used his comments as a way to bring out the more logical, real-world of facts and rationality - so commentary helps either way. I suppose that serves 2nd Best's interests too.

    JF said in reply to JF...

    I believe the Jonathan Swift recommendations are the preferred republican-party approach to Social Security too. Really need fewer claimants, that will solve the accounting problems.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to Second Best...

    "Peanut butter does not kill people, people kill people. Car emissions do not kill people ... high drug prices do not kill people ... people do."

    [This is an economics blog. You cannot be that "subtle (???)" and expect people to recognize your satire. Maybe there is a humorous math equation that economists can understand. I guess economics graduate school is so boring that most people lose all sense of humor. I am glad that Krugman has kept his.]

    Richard H. Serlin said...

    "Then there's for-profit education, an industry wracked by fraud - because it's very hard for students to assess what they're getting - that leaves all too many young Americans with heavy debt burdens and no real prospect of better jobs. But Mr. Bush denounces attempts at a cleanup."

    And worse, wasting their incredibly valuable and rare young years, quite possibly their only chance before age and children make it extremely hard, not getting an education. Such a big thing. You don't do it when you're young, with the power and freedom and lack of dependents of youth, the opportunity may easily be gone forever. Such a brutal cost these predators and their Republican allies extract.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to Richard H. Serlin...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_States

    Cost shifting and privatization

    One cause of increased tuition is the reduction of state and federal appropriations to state colleges, causing the institutions to shift the cost over to students in the form of higher tuition. State support for public colleges and universities has fallen by about 26 percent per full-time student since the early 1990s.[10] In 2011, for the first time, American public universities took in more revenue from tuition than state funding.[9][11] Critics say the shift from state support to tuition represents an effective privatization of public higher education.[11][12] About 80 percent of American college students attend public institutions...

    bakho said...

    Economics Professors of the "free market" bent for years have indoctrinated youth with the misguided notion that "regulations are bad" and market methods, no matter how RubeGoldberg, are always better. " You don't need to regulate pollution, just put a tax on it," as an example. Even cap and trade would not work without stiff emissions regulations.

    Economic idealists have popularized the notion that the world can work without much regulations because their models tell them so. Unless they are behavioral economists, they often fail to include fraud, scams & information asymmetry into their models. This produces garbage like efficient markets that only exist in an idealistic dream world. The real world markets are filled with fraud, scams and disreputable agents. Failure to account for bad behavior is the bane of many a model.

    ilsm said in reply to bakho...

    Sanctity of the "market"......

    I got a jar of this snake oil here too!

    The market they sell is the one that runs in Honduras

    Tom aka Rusty said...

    A couple of random observations:

    Last time I looked about 150 Dodd-Frank regs had not been written yet, some of the key ACA regs are three years late.

    Obama-ites have written some of the most complex, convoluted regs of the past 40 years, the health EMR regs have practically guaranteed a windfall for IT companies and a failure for EMR/EHR.

    No mention of the Obama-Holder "too big to prosecute doctrine."

    The new overtime regs will likely be in the "driving thumb tacks with a sledge hammer" mode.

    But I love Obama because he has created a wonderland of money for lawyers and consultants, a river of chocolate and honey to make Willy Wonka jealous. Go Barry go!

    pgl said in reply to kthomas...

    Rusty wants us to believe he is the only one who understands health care so he is a persistent critic of ObamaCare. But now he wants to pretend he's the expert on financial markets too? Seriously? Dodd-Frank is complicated only because the Jamie Dimons of the world milk every opportunity to game financial markets. If Rusty thinks letting Jamie Dimon evade any financial market regulation is a good idea - he is the most clue person ever.

    DrDick said in reply to pgl...

    He was just trying to do us a favor and demonstrate exactly what is meant by "knee-jerk opposition to regulation ."

    JF said in reply to Tom aka Rusty...

    Have you ever looked at the multi-party derived hedging instruments in play now - they can hardly get more complex, and indeed most didn't understand them when they were made, and these are still complex now.

    So I have to say, that the 'marketplace' makes Krugman's point about complexity. It comes from humans cunningly doing stuff that serves their interests at the time as they see it. Not always wisdom at work here.

    But it is complex, and so regulation of such complexity, if the generally applicable rules seek some fairness (classes of people are usually affected differently) and stands a test of due process too - the regulations will also need to be complex. The complexity came first, the regulations come afterwards (after society learns of the stupidity the hard way).

    Railing about this is a form of misleading sophistry, a rhetorical device to reverse the causality.

    We can think with more foresight and regulate before the stupid complexity arises, but it does take a rational policy making environment for this exploration, discussion and policy-making to occur with good foresight - I am waiting for the new Congress in 2017.

    If the Warren-Sanders people have any influence then, we may see a whole lot less complex financial system (it's a riot when you think how the Efficient Market Hypothesis, a theoretical justification for the marketplace's range of instruments in fact led to more complexity, less real efficiency and effectiveness, and ossification of the system when it needed to be resilient but stable as a well-behaved system can be).

    We will probably be better off after the 2017 debates. After all, this community of actors are only intermediaries on behalf of real productive outcomes truly needed by society - right, they are just intermediaries? How much inter-mediation does the economy need?

    david s said...

    The Obama Administration has been friendlier to corporate America than W's was.

    http://theweek.com/speedreads/454963/matt-taibbi-bush-far-tougher-than-obama-corporate-america

    im1dc said...

    While it was Ronald Reagan and his Republican Party that called for deregulation not much was done until Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave federal deregulation his blessing in speeches from NY to Aspen to California in which he said "the market" will reign in excesses and regulate itself b/c of competition acting egregiously would create.

    Oopsie, Old Alan got it ALL WRONG again!

    I thought a little history would help in this thread.

    likbez said...

    My impression is that regulation always reflects the needs of who is in power today. One the key ingredients of political power is the ability to push the laws that benefit particular constituent. And to block laws that don't.

    If we assume that financial oligarchy is in power today, then it is clear that there can be no effective regulation of financial services and by extension regulation of derivatives. And if on the wave of public indignation such regulation is adopted, it will be gradually watered down and then eliminated down the road.

    And you can always hire people who will justify your point of view.

    In this sense neither Milton Friedman nor Greenspan were independent players. They sold themselves for money and were promoted into positions they have for specific purpose. I am not sure the either of them believed the crap they speak or wrote.


    [Jul 24, 2015] Though the Heavens May Fall

    "...As we have seen, in the latter part of the 20th century, people had forgotten, or more properly had been persuaded to disregard, the lessons of history and the reforms put in place in the 1930's. And to our regret the conmen and their enablers were able to get their hands in our pockets, and grab hold of our wallets. And we have not been able to get their slimy hands out of pockets yet. "
    Jul 24, 2015 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    There was intraday commentary titled The Epicenter of the Next Financial Crisis and overnight commentary on the precious metals, Free Markets at Work.

    I get the feeling sometimes that we have become a nation of conmen and their servants, who plague the great mass of people who are preoccupied with raising families and just getting by.

    As we have seen, in the latter part of the 20th century, people had forgotten, or more properly had been persuaded to disregard, the lessons of history and the reforms put in place in the 1930's. And to our regret the conmen and their enablers were able to get their hands in our pockets, and grab hold of our wallets. And we have not been able to get their slimy hands out of pockets yet.

    How fitting that in the next election we can once again consider voting for a Bush or a Clinton. Some choice.

    [Jul 22, 2015] Financial Regulation Which Reform Strategy is Best

    Economist's View

    ...in the WSJ two days ago, there was an opinion piece with the title "After Five Years, Dodd-Frank Is a Failure," and the sub-header "The law has crushed small banks, restricted access to credit, and planted the seeds of financial instability."

    There is a problem with small banks. Here's an email I received earlier this year (last March, in response to an article of mine at CBS MoneyWatch on the decline in the number of small banks and how that could harm smaller buinesses):

    Mr. Thoma,
    I am a regular reader of your columns, and lean more to the left than virtually any banker I know, but I have to tell you that you are on to something with the decline in the number of small banks, and regulations. As the Chairman of a small bank in [state omitted], the shear amount of regulations that have come out since the banking crisis started are incredible. I know of banks in the area which have simply had to hire a full time staff person to help with compliance. Our bank has had to hire the CPA firm [omitted] to have them come in once a quarter to help us keep up with the compliance. Obviously, this crimps our profits, as does the ZLB which we have had to deal with for six years now, through no fault, at all, of our own.
    Don't get me wrong, I understand why all these regulations have been put in place, but unfortunately for us, most of these have little to do with our small bank. They seem to be designed to keep the behemoths out of trouble, and we got dragged along. There needs to be a different set of rules for banks under a certain size. Banks like ours, who keep all our loans in house, and aren't a threat to the economy as a whole, have never been ones to "screw" our customers, or write "bogus" loans, and sell them. Our loan losses since 2008 have been minimal to say the least, because we try very hard to make loans that are going to be repaid. Our total losses over the last six or seven years are not any worse than, and probably, better than they were before the banking crisis arrived.
    We, as a board of the bank, have talked on numerous occasions in the last few years on what to do about this problem, and have brought it up with the federal regulators at our last two exams, but have really gotten no where as far as coming up with any ideas on what to do to try and alleviate these burdens on small banks. Any suggestions, or publicity regarding the issue, would be greatly appreciated.

    The point I'm trying to make is this. There are two choices when trying to fix a financial system after a crisis. The first is to move fast while the politics are supportive, and put as many of the needed rules and regulations in place as possible. Then, over time, *carefully* adjust the rules to overcome unforeseen problems (while resisting attempts to rollback needed legislation, a delicate balance). The second is to proceed slowly and deliberately and "consider the regulatory moves carefully" before implementing legislation. But by the time this deliberate procedure has been completed, it may very well be that the politics have changed and nothing will be done at all. So I'd rather move fast, if imperfectly, and then fix problems later instead of waiting in an attempt to put near perfect legislation in place and risk doing very little, or nothing at all.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron said...

    For starters, Glass-Steagall.

    Then put a high tax on capital gains and an even higher tax on short term capital gains partially offset by lower taxes on interest and dividends. Rather than regulate corporate buyouts and derivatives then just tax them to death. Fire sale buyouts are done at a capital loss so would continue unaffected to rescue the good wood left in insolvent firms.

    RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to pgl...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United_States

    ...From 1934 to 1941, taxpayers could exclude percentages of gains that varied with the holding period: 20, 40, 60, and 70 percent of gains were excluded on assets held 1, 2, 5, and 10 years, respectively...

    *

    [Starting with a high tax rate then I kind of like that. Make the tax rate on capital gains so that either the 5 year exclusion is on parity with current long term capital gains rates or even parity with the 10 year effective tax rate if we give them inflation adjustment to the basis. SSA annual COLA inflation index works fine for me. If the rich want chained CPI then let them share in the losses benefits :) ]

    pgl

    The thing that gets me is that the issues with lax regulation of financial institutions were basically clear 80 years ago and were crystal clear 30 years ago. And fixing them would not require complex regulations. Real capital adequacy rules, avoiding conflicts of interest, addressing the issue of adverse selection even as we give deposit insurance, and avoiding too big to fail are all things any good economist knows about and how to address. And with Dodd and Frank being center stage after the financial crisis - this could have gotten done. Ah but the political interests of the megabanks did not want this done so they undermined the efforts. Of course we also see some stupid taxi service known as Uber playing this game too. But that is more of a personal rant as I'm really beginning to get sick of their dishonest attacks on my mayor.
    bakho
    That is what happened. As much as was done happened right away.
    Now it is being rolled back.
    DeDude said...
    Yes we need to loosen up on the small banks. There is naturally less concern for banks below a certain size. It should be possible to say that banks below size X who does not do any of risky transactions Y,Z and W do not need to comply with certain regulations. We give regulatory relief to other small businesses; fair enough to also do it with the banks. However, this is a difficult process since the regulators are likely to resist "deregulation" as much as the big banks are resisting regulations.

    [Jul 10, 2015]200PM Water Cooler 7-9-15

    Jul 09, 2015 | naked capitalism
    Anon July 9, 2015 at 2:18 pm

    Maybe there's some formatting goodness still going on behind the scenes, but shouldn't that be New Hampshire? Reading the tweets from the bettermarkets account, brought me to this article by Taibbi:

    Eric Holder: Double Agent.

    What I especially love about this is that it really makes you realize how milquetoast Holder was during his stint as AG, with moments like this:

    One is that he failed to win a single conviction in court for any crimes related to the financial crisis. The only trial of any consequence brought by his Justice Department for crimes related to the crisis involved a pair of Bear Stearns nimrods named Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who confided in each other via email that the subprime markets were "toast" but told their clients something very different to keep them invested.

    After a jury acquitted both in early 2009, the Holder Justice Department turtled. Sources inside the DOJ told me over the years that both Holder and his deputy, fellow Covington & Burling alum Lanny Breuer, were obsessed with winning and refused to chance any case where they felt a jury might go sideways on them. Thus the Cioffi-Tannin case was the last financial crisis case they dared to bring into to a criminal courtroom – virtually every other case ended in settlements.

    It sure must be nice to be rich – I can utterly fail at the main responsibility of my job AND land a cushy job with no real effort on my part! Going on that tangent reminds me of that PBS parody video with Lanny Bruce.

    [Jun 29, 2015] Top Private Equity Reporter CalPERS is Either Lying or Has a Massive Breakdown in Financial Controls

    Jun 29, 2015 | naked capitalism
    Tom Stone June 29, 2015 at 7:12 am

    These are not mutually exclusive categories, dishonesty and incompetence are frequent companions.

    Demeter June 29, 2015 at 7:44 am

    plus, it's California. What more does one expect?

    Rhondda June 29, 2015 at 7:37 am

    "The general partners have managed to convince even powerful investors like CalPERS that they must play nicely with the general partners or they'll be late on the list to be solicited for investment, which in theory could mean they'd miss being in a hot fund (in practice, this theory is absurd since private equity fund outperformance does not persist)."

    To my eyes it seems that "play nicely" really just means looks the other way while we skim off your participants' money.

    diptherio June 29, 2015 at 8:48 am

    Can't you be sued for dereliction of fiduciary duty? Can't someone be held personally accountable for being so willfully stupid? Most of the CalPERS board, for instance, seems liable…

    flora June 29, 2015 at 9:15 am

    If Yves earlier case is any indication, the CA courts seem CalPERS friendly. So a suit by pensioners would have an extra hill to climb. my opinion. But, yes, this situation does call for remedial action.

    Sluggeaux June 29, 2015 at 11:47 am

    The California Judicial Retirement System, JRS, is wholly administered by CalPERS. The state judiciary has a powerful incentive to keep CalPERS solvent, and I can assure you that the scores of California judges with whom I am personally acquainted are very aware of where their retirement contributions are going.

    TheCatSaid June 29, 2015 at 9:39 am

    Yves, the quote from Phalippou in the endnote seems very important. I don't have enough familiarity to understand what the impact would be of the various scenarios he mentions.

    Please consider posting a table with worked out simple examples for the sample scenarios, showing how the different fine-print calculation methods impact fees and/or the billed cost & return paid out to investors such as CalPERS. (And also a table showing how the various calculation methods might impact the financials of the PE firm. So we can understand what terms are in their best interest.)

    Without understanding the implications of the various fee methods, it's hard to ask questions or read a contract with sharp enough eyes to spot crucial terminology and understand what is or isn't in a pensioner's or investor's best interest.

    Such a table could be of immeasurable value to NC readers, allowing people to ask smarter questions and apply pressure more effectively on PE firms, pension fund board members, etc.

    Sluggeaux June 29, 2015 at 10:01 am

    I just love the phrase so often used here at NC: "It's a feature, not a bug."

    I've been a CalPERS contributor for over 30 years, and hope to become an annuitant in a couple of years hence. I also have colleagues who have left government employment to work with firms that place or invest CalPERS money. A dozen years ago I came to the realization that campaign contributions from placement agents and PE firms to the various Governors, Senators, and Assembly-members is the grease that lubricates the wheels at CalPERS. Staff have no intention of answering JJ Jelincic's questions - obscuring the over-paying of fees is how the graft works here in California. Investments always just happen to go to the "friends" of those in political power in Sacramento.

    Unfortunately, in the Age of ZIRP there is no more "slop" left in the system like there was during the various bubbles blown by Wall Street's looting of the economy over the past 40 years. Historic rates of return can no longer be realized. I just hope that I can draw my pension for a while before graft gets turned off and those politicians who have been living off of the corruption turn into looters themselves.

    [Jun 19, 2015] United States of Amnesia

    May 19, 2015 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com
    "We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing." -- Gore Vidal
    Stocks backed off their exuberant rally high from last Friday after that 'goldilocks' job number.

    The 'global bond rout' has investors nervous, and well they might be.

    We are led by narcissists and sociopaths, in a most unwholesome partnership between the public and private sector.

    And the most feral, counterproductive response of self-proclaimed 'reformers' is to eliminate government, to nullify it, so that in their very deluded and romantic imaginations the monied interests can refrain from acting as lawbreakers, since at their core these most selfish and cunning of predators and sociopaths are really yearning to be, think, and act like angels.

    And what will we do, having deregulated our markets, freed them from restraint, and eliminated the laws so that none may be lawbreakers. What will we do when the very heart of darkness has a freer reign to blow the winds of plunder and power over the lands, with nothing to provide us a foothold or an anchor, the laws which are the pillars of justice having been all overturned?

    Have a pleasant evening.

    [Jun 07, 2015] I'm so, so tired of political journalists by Beverly Mann

    June 2, 2015 | Angry Bear

    Politico's top article today is titled "Did Elizabeth Warren go too far this time?" But it's subtitled "The Massachusetts senator's attack on Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White causes backlash on Wall Street." The article, which is lengthy, discusses a 13-page letter Warren sent this morning to SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White, absolutely ripping White for … well, you should read the article, all the way to the end.

    By the end of the article, you'll wonder why somewhere in the middle of it, it says that Warren's influence seems to be on the wane and that the letter probably will hasten the waning. The article has two co-authors, and the headline would not have been written by either of them. So that might be why the article is part details and background, and part what Wall Street and the White House want as the media's take on the letter's contents and fallout. I did a double-take when I read this sentence: "The backlash against Warren was the latest indication that populist firebrand's efforts to push for tougher financial regulation may be losing some momentum."

    The backlash against Warren is from Wall Street, the SEC, Mary Jo White's office, and the CEOs and lobbyists who want the TPP treaty ratified and are selling it as a trade agreement even though, mostly, it's not. Warren (and others) object not to the actual trade provisions but to parts of it that do not concern trade as such. And the SEC rules under Dodd-Frank that Warren angrily says the SEC keeps delaying concern transparency of corporations concerning the CEO's pay as compared to that of the company's ordinary employees, and concern disclosure of the identities of the tax-exempt organizations that receive corporate donations, and the amounts of the donations.

    The public backlash against this has begun, the Politico article says. Just call JPMorgan's corporate offices and lobbying firms. They'll tell ya!

    As for Wall Street's public relations offering on it, the part of it that the article discusses with specificity sounds to me ridiculous:

    "I don't understand Sen. Warren's criticism of White for recusing herself where there is a conflict of interest," said Wayne Abernathy, a top lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, referring to Warren's criticism that White isn't involved in SEC actions when her husband's law firm represents the companies involved. "Is it that she would prefer that the chairman go forward and participate in enforcement cases despite the conflict of interest?"

    No, actually, it's that because her husband is a partner in one of the premier New York law firms that represent the biggest financial institutions against the SEC and Justice Department during investigations and in civil and criminal litigation. And that her recusal means that the SEC is routinely deadlocked about whether to bring charges in such cases because the remaining SEC commissioners are equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. How convenient.

    Relatedly, Roger Cohen has a terrific column today in the New York Times. But you have to read to the end to get the relation.

    [Jun 01, 2015] Fischer Says Bankers Should Be Punished for Financial Crimes

    Jun 01, 2015 | finance.yahoo.com/ Bloomberg

    Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said bankers who have engaged in wrongdoing should be punished, and he chided the industry for pushing back against financial regulations adopted to prevent another conflagration.

    "Individuals should be punished for any misconduct they personally engaged in," Fischer said in a speech to bankers Monday in Toronto. While massive fines are being imposed on banks, "one does not see the individuals who were responsible for some of the worst aspects of bank behavior, for example in the Libor and foreign-exchange scandals, being punished severely."

    Some of the world's biggest banks, including Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Barclays Plc, have agreed to pay more than $10 billion to U.S., U.K. and Swiss authorities to settle probes into rigging of foreign-exchange rates.

    Financial firms have also paid about $9 billion to settle allegations they were involved in rigging the London interbank offered rate, a benchmark used in more than an estimated $300 trillion of securities, from interest-rate swaps to mortgages and student loans.

    Fischer, who leads a committee to avoid the emergence of asset-price bubbles, also said central bankers shouldn't rule out using interest rates to maintain financial stability. Policy makers want to ensure that six years of near-zero rates don't lead to a repeat of the U.S. housing boom and subsequent financial crisis.

    "I don't at present see a major financial crisis on the horizon, but whenever you say that you know you're looking for trouble," Fischer said in response to an audience question after his speech.

    With the costs of the crisis still being felt in the form of persistently slow growth, Fischer warned central bankers against complacency about the risks of another crisis.

    "There is now growing evidence that recessions lead not only to a lower level of future output, but also to a persistently lower growth rate," Fischer, 71, said in a speech that surveyed the lessons of financial crises over the past 20 years.

    He cited a "lively discussion" led by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who has argued the U.S. could face a period of "secular stagnation." Others, including economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, say the U.S. and other economies are slow to recover from crises fueled by debt.

    "It may take many years until we know the answer to the question of whether we are in a situation of secular stagnation or a debt supercycle," Fischer said to the International Monetary Conference.

    Fischer criticized efforts to roll back financial regulation.

    Banker Complaints

    "Often when bankers complain about regulations, they give the impression that financial crises are now a thing of the past, and furthermore in many cases, that they played no role in the previous crisis."

    Fischer joined the Fed a year ago. He led the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. He was the International Monetary Fund's No. 2 official from 1994 to 2001, years that encompassed the Asian crisis, and the World Bank's chief economist from 1988 to 1990.

    Fischer didn't comment on the outlook for monetary policy. Fed officials led by Chair Janet Yellen are considering when to raise their benchmark lending rate, with the next meeting scheduled for June 16-17.

    Yellen said on May 22 that the central bank plans to raise interest rates at some point this year, even though the economy contracted in the first quarter. She said that "the pace of normalization is likely to be gradual."

    Growth Potential

    A slowdown in the long-run potential growth rate of the economy has lowered the bar that gross domestic product must clear for the central bank to increase rates, according to Fed watchers including Michael Feroli of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Feroli estimated the long-term growth rate at 1.75 percent, which is lower than Fed estimates.

    Gross domestic product shrank at a 0.7 percent annualized rate in the first quarter. Since the recession ended in June 2009, GDP has grown at an average annual pace of 2.2 percent.

    [May 31, 2015] This Is How Little It Cost Goldman To Bribe America's Senators To Fast Track Obama's TPP Bill

    Notable quotes: "...Concerning TPP...this filthy whoring could be called a perverted form of collective bargaining. These big corporations seem to have formed a union against the sheep."
    May 31, 2015 | Zero Hedge
    It took just a few days after the stunning defeat of Obama's attempt to fast-track the Trans Pacific Partnership bill in the Senate at the hands of his own Democratic party, before everything returned back to normal and the TPP fast-track was promptly passed. Why? The simple answer: money. Or rather, even more money.

    Because while the actual contents of the TPP may be highly confidential, and their public dissemination may lead to prison time for the "perpetrator" of such illegal transparency, we now know just how much it cost corporations to bribe the Senate to do the bidding of the "people." In the Supreme Court sense, of course, in which corporations are "people."

    According to an analysis by the Guardian, fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments, was only possible after lots of corporate money exchanged hands with senators. The US Senate passed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) – the fast-tracking bill – by a 65-33 margin on 14 May. Last Thursday, the Senate voted 62-38 to bring the debate on TPA to a close.

    Those impressive majorities follow months of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by the world's most well-heeled multinational corporations with just a handful of holdouts.

    Using data from the Federal Election Commission, the chart below (based on data from the following spreadsheet) shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate.

    The result: it took a paltry $1.15 million in bribes to get everyone in the Senate on the same page. And the biggest shocker: with a total of $195,550 in "donations", or more than double the second largest donor UPS, was none other than Goldman Sachs.

    The summary findings:

    The amounts given rise dramatically when looking at how much each senator running for re-election received.

    Two days before the fast-track vote, Obama was a few votes shy of having the filibuster-proof majority he needed. Ron Wyden and seven other Senate Democrats announced they were on the fence on 12 May, distinguishing themselves from the Senate's 54 Republicans and handful of Democrats as the votes to sway.

    "It's a rare thing for members of Congress to go against the money these days," said Mansur Gidfar, spokesman for the anti-corruption group Represent.Us. "They know exactly which special interests they need to keep happy if they want to fund their reelection campaigns or secure a future job as a lobbyist.

    "How can we expect politicians who routinely receive campaign money, lucrative job offers, and lavish gifts from special interests to make impartial decisions that directly affect those same special interests?" Gidfar said. "As long as this kind of transparently corrupt behavior remains legal, we won't have a government that truly represents the people."

    In other news, following last week's DOJ crackdown on now openly criminal FX market manipulation and rigging by the big banks, in which precisely zero bankers have been arrested, we are happy to announce that "transparently corrupt behavior" in the Senate, and everywhere else, will remain not only legal, but very well funded.

    But what is truly scariest, is just how little it costs corporations to bribe America's "elected" politicians, and make them serve the best interests of a few billionaire shareholders over the grave of what once used to be America's middle class.

    chunga

    ORI you're quite a musician. Give this a try, simple chords but you must bring attitude (funk) with the right hand.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGCFhW_M6Vo

    Concering TPP...this filthy whoring could be called a perverted form of collective bargaining. These big corporations seem to have formed a union agaisnt the sheep. They usually hate that.

    Tell me Walmart...do you fucking assholes have an internal video about this? Before TPP is over, plebs are going to be issued a temporary federal license to possess cash.

    [May 23, 2015] Former Fed Governor Says Fed Lost Credibility To Stay On Top Of Ticking Monetary Bomb

    05/21/2015 | Zero Hedge

    Submitted by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

    Lawrence Lindsey, a Governor of the Federal Reserve from 1991 to 1997, was right before. And got fired for it. Reality was too inconvenient.

    In December 2002, as George W. Bush's economic adviser and Director of the National Economic Council at the White House, he fretted out loud that the invasion of Iraq would be a lot more expensive than supporters of it were claiming. Clearly he'd failed to drink the Kool-Aid. Instead of peanuts, it would cost as much as $200 billion, he said. It shook the White House at its foundations, the fact that he had the temerity to say this.

    The Atlantic explains:

    Bush instead stood by such advisers as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely "self-financing" via Iraq's oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

    As it turns out, Lawrence Lindsey's estimate was indeed off - by a factor of 10 or more, on the low side.

    So maybe people should listen to him. And maybe, if his record repeats itself, the disaster he warns about is going to be a lot more costly in the end than the worst-case scenario he is now predicting.

    Lindsey was speaking during a panel discussion on Fed policy at an event sponsored by the Peterson Foundation, MarketWatch reported. And once again, he dared to say what everyone already knew, but what the financial establishment on Wall Street fights tooth and nail:

    The Fed has dragged out the normalization of interest rates "way beyond what is prudent."

    He explained that in graduate school, if you suggested that the federal funds rate should be kept at zero while the unemployment rate is 5.4%, which is exactly what the Fed has been doing, "you would have been laughed out of the classroom."

    "At some point we're going to get a series of bad numbers, showing a little higher inflation, and the market is going to say 'on my god, we're so far behind the curve' and force an adjustment that is going to be wrenching," he said.

    According to his calculus, when this "wrenching" adjustment kicks in, it would turn into a market disruption at a level "seven or eight" on a scale of 10, with 10 being the worst.

    But that's the guy that warned that the total cost of the Iraq invasion would be $200 billion, instead of peanuts, and later it turns out to amount to $2 trillion. So by how much is he underestimating the ultimate debacle with his prediction of a "wrenching" adjustment of "seven or eight" on a scale of 10? Maybe we're better off not knowing the answer.

    So what should the Fed do to mitigate the risk of this sort of bone-chilling bond market? Start hiking rates. Start with modest hikes. But start in June.

    But it may already be too late.

    He said the Fed "has almost no credibility" with his clients about its ability to "stay on top of ticking monetary bomb."

    Stocks are at all-time highs. The party is just too fun to walk away from. Money is once again flooding into even distressed energy-related junk-rated companies that are once again able to sell bonds on a wing and a prayer because yield-starved investors, brainwashed by the Fed's interest-rate repression, are chasing yield wherever they can find it, no matter what the risks.

    Times are good, and everyone is having fun now. But it won't last: "the market is going to take the Fed and the Treasury curve to task in a very painful way," he warned.

    Rate hikes would have a long way to go: If the Fed raised rates by a quarter percentage point at every other meeting starting this June – oh my, can you see the tantrum already? – monetary policy would not actually be restrictive until December 2016, he said.

    Going that far, ever, though it would only mean going back to "normal," would be plain unthinkable for Wall Street hype mongers that have conniptions every time the Fed contemplates raising rates just once, and just a quarter point, just to show that it's still there, even if it has no intention whatsoever of staying on "top of the ticking monetary bomb."

    A disturbing scenario is already playing out for folks fretting about "financial instability," as it's called in central-bank jargon. Read… "Buyers beware": Capital Markets "Completely Backwards"

    [May 23, 2015] The Children of the Abyss

    May 20, 2015 | Jesse's Café Américain
    "He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

    J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist

    People do not wake up one day and suddenly decide to become monsters, giving birth to unspeakable horrors.

    And yet throughout history, different peoples have done truly monstrous things. The Americans were pioneers in forced sterilization and state propaganda. The British invented concentration camps, and were masters of predatory colonization. They even turned a large portion of the capital of their Empire into a festering ghetto through the Darwinian economics of neglect. None have clean hands. No one is exceptional.

    What do they have in common? They all take a walk down a long and twisted path, one cold-hearted and 'expedient' decision at a time, shifting responsibility by deflecting the choice for their actions on their leaders.

    There is always some crackpot theory. some law of nature, from scientists or economists to support it. What else could they do? It is always difficult, but necessary.

    They cope with their actions by making their victims the other, objectified, different, marginalized. And what they marginalize they cannot see. What they cannot see, by choice, is easily ignored.

    And so they destroy and they kill, first by neglect and then by more efficient and decisive actions.

    They walk slowly, but almost determinedly, into an abyss of their own creation.

    But they all seem to have one thing in common. First they come for the old, the weak, the disabled, and the different, in a widening circle of scapegoats for their plunder.

    "There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.

    I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and rags.

    But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with all the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on.

    The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.

    As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in brief:-

    "Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme . . . that condition which the French call la misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."

    In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be imagined."

    Jack London, The People of the Abyss

    [May 21, 2015]Consistent With

    May 21, 2015 | Economist's View
    Chris Dillow:
    "Consistent with": ...Peter Dorman criticizes economists' habit of declaring a theory successful merely because it is "consistent with" the evidence. His point deserves emphasis. ...
    This is a point which some defenders of inequality miss. Of course, you can devise theories which are "consistent with" inequality arising from reasonable differences in choices and marginal products. Such theories, though, beg the question: is that how inequality really emerged?... And the answer, to put it mildly, is: only partially. It also arose from luck, inefficient selection, rigged markets, rent-seeking and outright theft. ...
    Quite often, the facts are consistent with either theory. For example, the well-attested momentum anomaly - the tendency for assets that have risen in price recently to continue rising - is "consistent with" both a cognitive bias (under-reaction) and with rational behaviour; fund managers' desire to avoid benchmark risk.
    My point here should be well-known. The Duhem-Quine thesis warns us that facts under-determine theory: they are "consistent with" multiple theories. ...
    So, how can we guard against the "consistent with" error? One thing we need is history: this helps tell us how things actually happened. And - horrific as it might seem to some economists - we also need sociology: we need to know how people actually behave and not merely that their behaviour is "consistent with" some theory. Economics, then, cannot be a stand-alone discipline but part of the social sciences and humanities...

    [May 19, 2015]How To Spot Groupthink Among Economists

    May 19, 2015 | Zero Hedge

    As GMO's James Montier says in his latest white paper today "it seems one can hardly open a financial newspaper or read a blog these days without tripping over some academic-cum-central banker talking about the once arcane notion of the equilibrium real interest rate."

    Sure enough, it is the laughable concept of the equilibrium real interest rate (laugable because if it can be quantified and put into an equation, it becomes tangible and central banks are convinced they can recreate it, perfect it and implement it to "fix the economy"... usually with disastrous results) that is the topic of his latest must read piece "The Idolatry of Interest Rates Part I: Chasing Will-o'-the-Wisp", which not only makes a mockery of central planners but also the intellectual conceits they all hold so dear, and which they will all hold dear all the way until the now inevitable collapse of "New Keynesian" economics.

    And while there is much to discuss in his full 13 page paper, the following excerpt discussing how to spot groupthink in crowds (of economists) is what we found most relevant and amusing, perhaps because the entire world is now caught in a groupthink mode, and what's worse, a groupthink that is peddling the wrong solution to the worldwide problem that can be summarized as simply as "$200 trillion in debt."

    From Jim Montier:

    Wisdom of crowds or groupthink extraordinaire?

    One could take the view that so many bright individuals all coalescing around a single framework was evidence of the wisdom of crowds. However, rather than representing the power of consensus, it appears to me to be evidence of extreme groupthink – it is very telling that not one of the aforementioned luminaries has questioned the framework itself.

    One of the preconditions for the wisdom of crowds to hold is that people must be independent. This clearly isn't the case with the above coterie of economists, many of whom trained at the same university under the same teacher. As Steve Keen pointed out, "If I were describing a group of thoroughbred horses, alarm bells would already be ringing about a dangerous level of in-breeding."

    The term "groupthink" was coined by Irving Janis in 1972. In his original work, Janis cited the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion as prime examples of the groupthink mentality. However, modern examples are all too prevalent.

    Groupthink is often characterised by:

    Perhaps it is just me, but these traits seem to pretty much capture the nature of mainstream economics these days.

    SMG

    Groupthink among economists only? Heck most of Western Civilization is in groupthink. Everything is Awesome! TM Remember.

    NoDebt

    Guys, again, let's think a little deeper here. It's not so much that they all believe it to be true, it's because they all NEED it to be true.

    First off, the alternative to the current "low interest rates will stimulate the economy" (i.e. throw money at anything that moves) is what, exactly? Either it doesn't stimulate the economy or has no effect. Leaving them in a heluva lurch.

    But this is small beans. Here's what really matters: their own self-interest.

    If this argument (fairy tale) is shown not to be true or correct, their little ivory tower crashes down, their plum positions get vacated for another, their friends experience similar catastrophe and their self-supporting power network will be swept away and replaced with another, including their buddies in "academia" from which they sprang.

    Given that even the slowest-witted among them must by now realize this fantasy of money printing stimulating the economy didn't work and is NEVER going to work, they have no choice but to either circle the wagons and close ranks or start getting picked off one by one. They are a union, a cabal, a society and, as such, must provide a united front, unassailable by mere facts.

    The word has already been spread: hang together or hang separately. For this and other reasons they MUST have groupthink.

    [May 13, 2015] What is neoliberalism

    "...Neoliberalism is a small-state economic ideology based on promoting "rational self-interest" through policies such as privatisation, deregulation, globalisation and tax cuts."
    "...Neoliberalism is certainly a form of free-market neoclassical economic theory, but it quite difficult to pin down further than that, especially since neoliberal governments and economists carefully avoid referring to themselves as neoliberals and the mainstream media seem to avoid using the word at all costs (think about the last time you saw a BBC or CNN news reporter use the word "neoliberal" to describe the IMF or a particularly right-wing government policy)."
    "...The economic model that the word "neoliberalism" was coined to describe was developed by Chicago school economists in the 1960s and 1970s based upon Austrian neoclassical economic theories, but heavily influenced by Ayn Rand's barmy pseudo-philosophy of Übermenschen and greed-worship. "
    "...One of the most transparent of these neoliberal justification narratives is the one that I describe as the Great Neoliberal Lie: The fallacious and utterly misleading argument that the global economic crisis (credit crunch) was caused by excessive state spending, rather than by the reckless gambling of the deregulated, neoliberalised financial sector. "
    "...one of the main problems with the concept of "neoliberalism" is the nebulousness of the definition. It is like a form of libertarianism, however it completely neglects the fundamental libertarian idea of non-aggression. In fact, it is so closely related to that other (highly aggressive) US born political ideology of Neo-Conservatism that many people get the two concepts muddled up. A true libertarian would never approve of vast taxpayer funded military budgets, the waging of imperialist wars of aggression nor the wanton destruction of the environment in pursuit of profit. "
    anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com

    Neoliberalism is a very important, yet often misunderstood concept. To give a short, oversimplified definition: Neoliberalism is a small-state economic ideology based on promoting "rational self-interest" through policies such as privatisation, deregulation, globalisation and tax cuts.

    People often boggle at the use of the word "neoliberal" as if the utterer were some kind of crazed tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist raving about insane lizard-man conspiracies, rather than someone attempting to concisely define the global economic orthodoxy of the last three decades or so.

    One of the main problems we encounter when discussing neoliberalism is the haziness of the definition. Neoliberalism is certainly a form of free-market neoclassical economic theory, but it quite difficult to pin down further than that, especially since neoliberal governments and economists carefully avoid referring to themselves as neoliberals and the mainstream media seem to avoid using the word at all costs (think about the last time you saw a BBC or CNN news reporter use the word "neoliberal" to describe the IMF or a particularly right-wing government policy).

    The economic model that the word "neoliberalism" was coined to describe was developed by Chicago school economists in the 1960s and 1970s based upon Austrian neoclassical economic theories, but heavily influenced by Ayn Rand's barmy pseudo-philosophy of Übermenschen and greed-worship.

    The first experiment in applied neoliberal theory began on September 11th 1973 in Chile, when a US backed military coup resulted in the death of social-democratic leader Salvador Allende and his replacement with the brutal military dictator General Pinochet (Margaret Thatcher's friend and idol).

    Thousands of people were murdered by the Pinochet regime for political reasons and tens of thousands more were tortured as Pinochet and the "Chicago boys" set about implementing neoliberal economic reforms and brutally suppressing anyone that stood in their way. The US financially doped the Chilean economy in order to create the impression that these rabid-right wing reforms were successful. After the "success" of the Chilean neoliberal experiment, the instillation and economic support of right-wing military dictatorships to impose neoliberal economic reforms became unofficial US foreign policy.

    The first of the democratically elected neoliberals were Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. They both set about introducing ideologically driven neoliberal reforms, such as the complete withdrawal of capital controls by Tory Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and the deregulation of the US financial markets that led to vast corruption scandals like Enron and the global financial sector insolvency crisis of 2007-08.

    By 1989 the ideology of neoliberalism was enshrined as the economic orthodoxy of the world as undemocratic Washington based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the US Treasury Department signed up to a ten point economic plan which was riddled with neoliberal ideology such as trade liberalisation, privatisation, financial sector deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. This agreement between anti-democratic organisations is misleadingly referred to as "The Washington Consensus".

    These days, the IMF is the most high profile pusher of neoliberal economic policies. Their strategy involves applying strict "structural adjustment" conditions on their loans. These conditions are invariably neoliberal reforms such as privatisation of utilities, services and government owned industries, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the abandonment of capital controls, the removal of democratic controls over central banks and monetary policy and the deregulation of financial industries.

    Neoliberal economic policies have created economic disaster after economic disaster, virtually wherever they have been tried out. Some of the most high profile examples include:

    South Africa: When the racist Apartheid system was finally overthrown in 1994, the new ANC government embraced neoliberal economic theory and set about privatising virtually everything, cutting taxes for the wealthy, destroying capital controls and deregulating their financial sector. After 18 years of neoliberal government, more black South Africans are living in extreme poverty, more people are unemployed and South Africa is an even more unequal society than it was under the racist Apartheid regime. Between 1994 and 2006 the number of South Africans living on less than $1 a day doubled from 2 million to 4 million, by 2002, eight years after the end of Apartheid 2002 the unemployment rate for black South Africans had risen to 48%.*
    Russia: After the fall of communism, neoliberal economists flooded into Russia to create their free-market utopia, however all they managed to do was massively increase levels of absolute poverty, reduce productivity and create a few dozen absurdly wealthy oligarchs who siphoned their $trillions out of Russia to "invest" in vanity projects such as Chelsea FC. Within less than a decade of being one of the world's two great super-powers, the neoliberal revolution resulted in Russia defaulting on their debts in 1998.

    Argentina: Praised as the poster-boys of neoliberalism by the IMF in the 1990s for the speed and scale of their neoliberal reforms, the Argentine economy collapsed into chaos between 1999-2002, only recovering after Argentina defaulted on their debts and prioritised repayment of their IMF loans, which allowed them to tear up the IMF book of neoliberal dogma and begin implementing an investment based growth strategy which boosted the Argentine economy out of their prolonged recession. The late Argentine President Néstor Kirchner famously stated that the IMF had "transformed itself from being a lender for development to a creditor demanding privileges".

    The Eurozone: The right-wing love to drivel on about how the EU is a "leftie" organisation, but the unelected technocrats that run the EU (the European commission and the European Central Bank) are fully signed up to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy, where economic interests are separated from democratic control. Take the economic crisis in Greece: The EC and the ECB lined up with the neoliberal pushing IMF to force hard line neoliberal reforms onto the Greek economy in return for vast multi-billion "bailouts" that flowed directly out of Greece to "bail out" their reckless creditors (mainly German and French banks). When the neoliberalisation reforms resulted in further economic contraction, rising unemployment and worsening economic conditions the ECB, EC, IMF troika simply removed the democratic Greek government and appointed their own stooge, an economic coup trick they also carried out in Italy. Spain and Ireland are other cracking examples of neoliberal failure in the Eurozone. These two nations were more fiscally responsible than Germany, France or the UK in terms of government borrowing before the neoliberal economic meltdown, however their deregulated financial sectors inflated absurd property bubbles, leaving the Irish and Spanish economies in ruins once the bubbles burst around 2007-08.

    The United Kingdom: Here is a short article summarising how three decades of neoliberal policy have undone many of the gains made during the mixed-economy era.
    Despite this litany of economic failures, neoliberalism remains the global economic orthodoxy. Just like any good pseudo-scientific or religious orthodoxy the supporters of neoliberal theory always manage to come up with a load of post-hoc rationalisations for the failure of their theories and the solutions they present for the crises their own theories induced are always based upon the implementation of even more fundamentalist neoliberal policies.

    One of the most transparent of these neoliberal justification narratives is the one that I describe as the Great Neoliberal Lie: The fallacious and utterly misleading argument that the global economic crisis (credit crunch) was caused by excessive state spending, rather than by the reckless gambling of the deregulated, neoliberalised financial sector.

    Just as with other pseudo-scientific theories and fundamentalist ideologies, the excuse that "we just weren't fundamentalist enough last time" is always there. The neoliberal pushers of the establishment know that pure free-market economies are as much of an absurd fairytale as 100% pure communist economies, however they keep pushing for further privatisations, tax cuts for the rich, wage repression for the ordinary, and reckless financial sector deregulations precicely because they are the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Take the constantly widening wealth gap in the UK throughout three decades of neoliberal policy. The minority of beneficiaries from this ever widening wealth gap are the business classes, financial sector workers, the mainstream media elite and the political classes. It is no wonder at all that these people think neoliberalism is a successful ideology. Within their bubbles of wealth and privilege it has been. To everyone else it has been an absolute disaster.

    Returning to a point I raised earlier in the article; one of the main problems with the concept of "neoliberalism" is the nebulousness of the definition. It is like a form of libertarianism, however it completely neglects the fundamental libertarian idea of non-aggression. In fact, it is so closely related to that other (highly aggressive) US born political ideology of Neo-Conservatism that many people get the two concepts muddled up. A true libertarian would never approve of vast taxpayer funded military budgets, the waging of imperialist wars of aggression nor the wanton destruction of the environment in pursuit of profit.

    Another concept that is closely related to neoliberalism is the ideology of minarchism (small stateism), however the neoliberal brigade seem perfectly happy to ignore the small-state ideology when it suits their personal interests. Take the vast banker bailouts (the biggest state subsidies in human history) that were needed to save the neoliberalised global financial sector from the consequences of their own reckless gambling, the exponential growth of the parasitic corporate outsourcing sector (corporations that make virtually 100% of their turnover from the state) and the ludicrous housing subsidies (such as "Help to Buy and Housing Benefits) that have fueled the reinflation of yet another property Ponzi bubble.

    The Godfather of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman. He made the case that illegal drugs should be legalised in order to create a free-market drug trade, which is one of the very few things I agreed with him about. However this is politically inconvenient (because the illegal drug market is a vital source of financial sector liquidity) so unlike so many of his neoliberal ideas that have consistently failed, yet remain incredibly popular with the wealthy elite, Friedman's libertarian drug legalisation proposals have never even been tried out.

    The fact that neoliberals are so often prepared to ignore the fundamental principles of libertarianism (the non-aggression principle, drug legalisation, individual freedoms, the right to peaceful protest ...) and abuse the fundamental principles of small state minarchism (vast taxpayer funded bailouts for their financial sector friends, £billions in taxpayer funded outsourcing contracts, alcohol price fixing schemes) demonstrate that neoliberalism is actually more like Ayn Rand's barmy (greed is the only virtue, all other "virtues" are aberrations) pseudo-philosophical ideology of objectivism than a set of formal economic theories.

    The result of neoliberal economic theories has been proven time and again. Countries that embrace the neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology end up with "crony capitalism", where the poor and ordinary suffer "austerity", wage repression, revocation of labour rights and the right to protest, whilst a tiny cabal of corporate interests and establishment insiders enrich themselves via anti-competitive practices, outright criminality and corruption and vast socialism-for-the-rich schemes.

    Neoliberal fanatics in powerful positions have demonstrated time and again that they will willingly ditch their right-wing libertarian and minarchist "principles" if those principles happen to conflict with their own personal self-interest. Neoliberalism is less of a formal set of economic theories than an error strewn obfuscation narrative to promote the economic interests, and justify the personal greed of the wealthy, self-serving establishment elite.

    Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

    [May 09, 2015] Ten questions that Ben Bernanke needs to learn how to not answer

    Medium

    When I heard that Ben Bernanke was taking a second advisory role, at PIMCO, as well as his first job out of the Fed, at Citadel, I kind of nearly dropped my morning latte in surprise. If I was PIMCO, I would not be wanting an advisor to Citadel to be coming within a hundred yards of my trading floor.

    Why not? Well, the way that PIMCO works, as Felix Salmon explained a few years ago, is very dependent on their ability to execute changes in their view in a very, very efficient manner - quickly, and without too much impact on the market price. Given that, if I was PIMCO, I would be super super paranoid about allowing anyone near me who was also going to be talking to one of the world's sharpest and most aggressive hedge funds.

    Obviously, Bernanke is a) a man of pretty unquestioned integrity, b) aware of the clear potential for conflict of interest and c) neither a spring chicken nor a pushover. He will be aware of the danger of having one of his two clients out-traded by the other. So, although I doubt that will stop the Citadel traders trying, he will already be pretty resistant to questions of the following kind:

    "So, what do they think up in Newport?"

    "What's Andrew Balls saying?"

    "Do your other guys like the ten year linked?"

    "What's PIMCO holding? Come on, tell me, what have they got? What are we f**king paying you for anyway? Come, you bearded f**k, tell me? No, f**k your Chinese Wall, I've got Ken on my ass here. What are they holding? What are they holding? What are they f**king …" (repeat ad infinitum, some of them can be very persistent and/or aggressive).

    In any case, it's unlikely that Bernanke, as an outside consultant, will be reviewing portfolios or directly advising on trades. It's more likely that he'll be a sounding board for general discussions, and/or a brand ambassador, meeting clients of PIMCO for pitch or review meetings. That sounds like less of a problem of conflict of interest, except …

    Except that if anything, information about client attitudes to PIMCO is more valuable to a competitor than information about PIMCO's attitude to the market. After all, PIMCO's positions are generally well-known - they're too big and too public for it to be otherwise. But if you ever got a hint that they had received a big redemption or gained a big mandate - well, that would be very useful information indeed because you would know them to be potentially forced buyers or sellers.

    At a lower level, traders are always sniffing for information about possible changes of view - whether the holders of a security are confident in their decision and happy to add more, or whether they're doubting themselves and thinking about changing their minds. A fly on the wall at a general sounding board for PIMCO PMs could learn all sorts of useful information simply by being aware of what they were thinking about.

    And furthermore, hedge fund traders are in the business of extracting "soft" information and understanding its implications. Being a human antenna for other people's sentiment toward the market is what they do. The best ones - and Citadel doesn't employ many lemons - can make a guess about your positioning and recent performance from the way you say "Good morning". That's why so many of them are poker players, and particularly why they often do well in the big face-to-face tournaments. So the questions that Bernanke really needs to look out for are things like:

    "How's California, my man? Still sunny?"

    "Jeez, another tour of Asia? Working you pretty hard aren't they?"

    "What do you mean you can't do the 15th? Frankfurt *again*?"

    "Lighten up, Ben! Looks like someone's been giving you a hard time?"

    "Tell me, if we wanted to shift a big block trade in[security] who do we call at PIMCO?"

    "Seen the Journal? Brutal. Rather have my performance numbers than PIMCO's huh?"

    Even with the best will (and the best poker face) in the world, this dual role looks to me like a possible conduit of information. Bernanke is experienced in keeping his mouth shut, but he's going into a whole new world now, and he's doing so without the benefit of a staff and a press office to protect him. If I was PIMCO, I wouldn't have taken this risk.

    Dan Davies is Senior Research Advisor at Frontline Analysts

    [May 08, 2015] Capitalizing on Crisis The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance by Greta R. Krippner

    August 31, 2014 | Amazon.com
    Stephen Thompson on August 31, 2014

    an attempt to understand financialization without applying class analysis

    Krippner defines financialization as "the growing importance of financial activities as a source of profits in the economy." The excellent second chapter of Capitalizing on Crisis makes clear that a process of significant financialization has indeed occurred in the United States. The share of total corporate profits made by financial corporations rose from around 15% in the 1950s to about 45% (!) in 2000. At the same time, for nonfinancial corporations, the ratio of portfolio income to total cash flow increased sharply. These changes mark a structural change in the US economy, with corporations apparently channeling more of their retained earnings toward the finance of consumer credit and other unproductive activities, rather than fixed capital investment. It is also worth noting that by driving up rentier incomes, financialization has played a major role in making the distribution of income more regressive. Obviously there are a number of questions one could ask about all this. Krippner focusses on one of the most fundamental: why did financialization occur?

    Krippner's answer goes essentially as follows. Starting in the late 1960s, various social movements (especially groups of women, African Americans, and unionized workers) in the United States became more powerful and demanded a larger share of national income for their members. The government responded by offering a bunch of expensive new public programs. At the same time, the government was ramping up military spending for the Vietnam war. This "guns and butter" policy, when coupled with the declining growth rate of the US economy, was highly inflationary. At the same time, since, under the New Deal regulatory system, the *nominal* interest rates on both bank deposits and mortgages were essentially fixed, the high rate of inflation drove the corresponding *real* rates of interest to low or negative levels, leading to a massive reallocation of credit in the economy. On the one hand, money flowed out of mortgage financing, so many middle-income people suddenly could not buy homes; on the other hand, banks lost deposits and were at risk of becoming insolvent. All of this set off a wave of financial innovation and political lobbying that undermined, and eventually destroyed, the policy of fixed interest rates that was at the heart of the New Deal bank-regulation system; this set off the process of financialization.

    I think several aspects of the above account are correct; it explains why *some* powerful social groups would be willing to support and agitate for financial deregulation. The problem comes when Krippner tries to explain why policy makers ultimately supported the interests of these particular social groups over the others, which had strong reasons to oppose deregulation. For example, Krippner describes in the book how early experiments (during the mid-1970s) with adjustable-rate mortgages were met with fierce public opposition, and quickly fell apart as a result. But then this opposition seems to simply disappear by the end of the 1970s, when interest rates were completely deregulated. What happened? And why did policy makers ultimately deregulate interest rates?

    The answer, according the Krippner, is that the deregulation of interest rates was part of a larger package of reforms, which allowed policy makers to avoid dealing with the conflict over income distribution that boiled over in the 1970s. It is argued that the expanded supply of credit in the US economy after the 1970s – which would not have been forthcoming without the deregulation of interest rates – made it possible to appease the various social groups that were demanding a better standard of living, and to do so without squeezing profits, increasing taxes or feeding inflation. The argument is that, by borrowing the money from abroad to finance social programs, and by increasing the amount of credit available to consumers, policy makers did not have to choose between different social priorities. Thus Krippner writes in the concluding chapter that financialization deferred "questions that first confronted U.S. society in the late 1960s and 1970s regarding which social actors should bear the burden of a fading prosperity."

    I see two major problems with that argument.

    The first problem is that the questions about "which social actors should bear the burden of a fading prosperity" were NOT deferred. In a process that started in the late 1970s (under Carter!) and accelerated in the 1980s, politicians and wealthy people initiated an onslaught of new policies that were clearly intended to both redistribute income upward and also crush the social movements which had been working to redistribute income downward in the 1960s and 1970s. Various forms of aid to the poor were cut, the tax system became much more regressive, huge sums of money flowed to right-wing advocacy groups and think tanks, the Fed implemented a tight-money policy which drove the unemployment rate sharply upward, there was an all-out assault on unions, government and foundation support for community activist groups was cut, etc. (For a detailed account of all this, I recommend the book Right Turn by Ferguson and Rogers). The success of this project is evidenced by the sharp change in the income distribution trends after the 1970s. In fact, far from *deferring* the conflict over income distribution, the financialization of the US economy seems to have actually been one of the biggest factors which helped to *settle* the conflict in favor of the upper socio-economic strata (see the paper "Financialization and US Income Inequality, 1970-2008" by Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey, published March 2013 in the American Journal of Sociology).

    Second, it is far from clear that the increased availability of consumer credit did much of anything to compensate for the stagnating incomes received by the poor and working-class people after the 1970s. I have read, for example, that the consumption-fueled boom during the 1990s was financed entirely by loans taken out by *upper-income households* – the people who saw their share of income RISE during the era of financialization. And even if consumer credit did become significantly more available to the poor and working people in the 1980s (and I am not convinced this is true), why would they passively accept this as an alternative to the rising incomes they were demanding in the 1970s? I think the obvious explanation is that increased flows of credit were not what resolved the crisis of the 1970s; policy makers resolved the crisis of the 1970s by curtailing the political power of poor and working people, and by crushing progressive social movements.

    Thus Krippner's argument that financialization, rather than being a class project, was simply an inadvertent result of policy makers' attempts to make voters happy, seems unconvincing to me. And I could go on much longer; I think Krippner's refusal to apply class analysis creates unnecessary problems throughout the book. Nevertheless, Capitalizing on Crisis is interesting and informative, and should be read by anyone who wants to better understand financialization. I found the chapter on Fed policy, in particular, to be illuminating. And like I said above, chapter 2 is excellent. But there are better books on financialization. I particularly recommend the work of Dumenil and Levy.

    [May 05, 2015] Ben Bernanke's Bad Example

    It's a pay off for doing what Big Finance wants. It's ironic that Bernanke, who didn't recognize the biggest bubble in financial history until it popped is being paid millions of dollars for uncovering economic trends.
    Economist's View

    At MoneyWatch:

    Ben Bernanke's bad example, by Mark Thoma: The recent announcements that former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has accepted a position as a senior adviser at Pimco and a similar position at hedge fund Citadel have raised questions about whether the "revolving door" between government and private sector jobs ought to be restricted.

    Perhaps, for example, Federal Reserve officials should be subject to a five-year waiting period before they can take jobs in the financial sector. The idea would be to reduce the chance that bank regulators could be influenced through formal and informal ties to previous Fed officials.

    My concern is somewhat different: The incentive for Federal Reserve Board members to step down before their terms are up and accept lucrative private sector positions has the potential to damage the Fed as an independent institution...

    Syaloch -> pgl...

    "For 2014, the Chairman's annual salary is $201,700. The annual salary of the other Board members (including the Vice Chairman) is $181,500."

    http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_12591.htm

    $201,700 isn't a good salary? Sure, maybe it's peanuts to someone working on Wall Street, but doesn't that kinda go to the point that Thoma was making?

    "[Bernanke's] stepping down isn't the main problem. It's the idea that it's OK for a former Fed member -- and its chair, no less -- to take these kinds of jobs once you leave. If Bernanke had returned to academia or limited himself to his position at the Brookings Institution, that wouldn't be a problem.

    "However, if the chair can cash out, then other board members will also have an incentive to resign their positions as Fed governors after a few years to pursue financial interests in the private sector. Bernanke's acceptance of positions at Citadel and Pimco sets a bad precedent because it encourages other board members to do the same."

    pgl -> Syaloch...

    Where on earth did I say he made minimum wages? I said he did a good job and $200,000 a year was a bargain even if it was not slave wages.

    DrDick -> pgl...

    It is much more than most academic economists make. It is, in fact, a very good salary by any reasonable standard. The fact that people on Wall Street are paid obscene amounts for no useful product is beside the point.

    am -> Syaloch...

    US$200,000 is about GBP133,333.

    Now here is the salary for the BOE equivalent.

    http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/06/17/mark-carneys-salary-at-the-bank-of-england-is-four-times-what-janet-yellen-is-paid-at-the-fed/

    Kind of puts U$200,000 in perspective. Anyone who takes the FED job sure ain't doing it for the money. Must be for prestige or future earnings when they retire or resign.

    Bit of a shock to a European to see how poorly paid some US civil servants are.

    Ellis

    It's a pay off for doing what Big Finance wants.

    It's ironic that Bernanke, who didn't recognize the biggest bubble in financial history until it popped is being paid millions of dollars for uncovering economic trends.

    pgl -> Ellis...

    Pray tell - who did foresee this bubble and its busting? Robert Lucas even in 2009 was arguing no one could have foreseen it as he was supposed to be the Dean of Macroeconomics back then.

    supersaurus -> pgl...

    uhhh...http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html . that's "dr. nobody", right?

    Ellis -> pgl...

    Dean Baker and Nouriel Roubini, off the top of my head.

    You could see it coming a mile away, especially given the worsening financialization and boom-bust pattern over the last four decades.

    Of course, Bernanke said the exact opposite, that we were in the middle of the Great Moderation. Like most politicians, he's a liar, covering for the banks that made a fortune off the bubble, and then insulated from the catastrophe by the government and Fed.

    Ellis -> pgl...

    Dean Baker and Nouriel Roubini, off the top of my head.

    You could see it coming a mile away, especially given the worsening financialization and boom-bust pattern over the last four decades.

    Of course, Bernanke said the exact opposite, that we were in the middle of the Great Moderation. Like most politicians, he's a liar, covering for the banks that made a fortune off the bubble, and then insulated from the catastrophe by the government and Fed.

    pgl -> Ellis...

    The trio was also mocked by many at the time. Yes - they got it right and they deserve credit for doing so. But none of them have ever attacked Bernanke for not being as fore sighted.

    But hey - I guess it is beat up on Ben day so have at it!

    DrDick -> pgl...

    While I think he could have done better at the Fed, I think he was decent in that position. He should not be allowed to take this job, however.

    Ellis -> pgl...

    Yes, they were mocked -- which is not surprising, given the financial and career advancement incentives -- which is exactly the point. Have you seen the documentary "Inside Job"? It has a good section on corruption among top economists.

    Your wrong on your second point: Check out the post by Dean Baker in Beat the Press, April 30, "The Man Who Completely Missed the Housing Bubble and Was Convinced Financial Disruption Would be Restricted to the Subprime Market Deserves Two Seven-Figure Sinecures?"

    Sorry for being so "mean and nasty" about Bernanke. But compare that to all those who lost everything, as a result of the crisis that he oversaw? His big salaries, of course, are little more than a tip from the big boys, who made out so well.

    Roger Gathmann -> pgl...

    You really see no difference between economic journalists and the head of the FED? Uh, that is pretty incredible.

    How could Bernanke have found out more? Well, maybe he could have operated a bit more like Steve Eisman at frontpoint who did the math, as reported by Michael Lewis in The Big Short.
    Really, to pretend that the FED has the same capacities as a newspaper columnist or economics professor, that the voices, and there were more than two or three, in the financial industry warning that there was something deeply wrong, is to apologize for Bernanke by saying, hey, he was a complete doofus, but he did all right after he sank the ship.
    Greenspan and Bernanke were the worst FED chairmen in the Fed's history. The record, which should be read in terms of the health of the general economy, bears this out. Granted, after three crashes that seemed not to result in Depressions, Greenspan might not seem as bad, but it was his spirit and ideas that created the de-regulatory box and the market can do no wrong ethos at the Fed, which Bernanke continued. Bernanke even got a second chance after Bear Stearns fell. But no, between May and September, 2008, the Fed pretty much sat on its hands.

    Roger Gathmann

    Bernanke served the hedge fund sector well during his reign of terror at the Fed. Who can forget the loans to even a semi-criminal hedge fund like Yorkville from the ever understanding Fed, once the roof fell in? Or to all the other moneyed interests?
    And who can forget the prophet Bernanke? The one who, in 2005, looked about and said yeah, there is no housing bubble, and anyway, housing prices don't decline:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102602255.html

    "U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years, noted Bernanke, currently chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, "largely reflect strong economic fundamentals," such as strong growth in jobs, incomes and the number of new households."
    I like the strong increase in incomes remark particularly. No wonder Bush, who had shown an eye for characters like Bernanke - Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney shared a similar bogus confidence in their "facts" - appointed him. And he didn't disappoint. This is the guy who said that the Fed shouldn't be second guessing on the price of assets - free market, don't you know? - whose response to Stock market declines in 2006 and 2007 with a series of cuts was all about - keeping up the price of assets. But these were special assets, the kind of assets mainly held by the upper 20 percent income group. Not the tawdry assets held by the lower 80 with their homes.

    Here he is, in his speech on the state of the economy in March, 2007, giving us more prophetic Ben:

    http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/testimony/bernanke20070328a.htm

    Although the turmoil in the subprime mortgage market has created severe financial problems for many individuals and families, the implications of these developments for the housing market as a whole are less clear. The ongoing tightening of lending standards, although an appropriate market response, will reduce somewhat the effective demand for housing, and foreclosed properties will add to the inventories of unsold homes. At this juncture, however, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained. In particular, mortgages to prime borrowers and fixed-rate mortgages to all classes of borrowers continue to perform well, with low rates of delinquency."

    Bear Stearns collapsed two months after everything was contained, in May. Now, did Mr Bernanke think maybe there needed to be some urgent work done to make sure other big banks weren't at risk? Were he and his friend in Treasury in firefighing mode? Of course not. That would not be serving the hedge fund community well.

    Not that he was without ideas. Obviously, you wouldn't want to regulate a market in CDOs - it would be irresponsible to suggest such things! - but you could recommend that the bottom 80 percent be better informed about the risks they were taking.

    Ace idea. Maybe even the top 1 percent should have been informed about the risks they were running? oh, but they have the computers and the smarts, of course. No need to rush right in. Of course, I'm just a crazy leftist with these views. And the crazy leftists who issued the Financial Crisis Inquiry report in 2011 echoed them.

    "The majority report finds fault with two Fed chairmen: Alan Greenspan, who led the central bank as the housing bubble expanded, and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, who did not foresee the crisis but played a crucial role in the response. It criticizes Mr. Greenspan for advocating deregulation and cites a "pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages" under his leadership as a "prime example" of negligence.

    It also criticizes the Bush administration's "inconsistent response" to the crisis - allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse in September 2008 after earlier bailing out another bank, Bear Stearns, with Fed help - as having "added to the uncertainty and panic in the financial markets."

    Like Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Bush's Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., predicted in 2007 - wrongly, it turned out - that the subprime collapse would be contained, the report notes."

    Bernanke like his companeros in the Bush administration was smug, incompetent, and a key player in a disaster that impacted negatively on most Americans and the world at large. The result of his continuation of Greenspan's policies and his reaction to the onset of the crisis contributed to the reduction of the median net worth of American households by a third:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/business/the-typical-household-now-worth-a-third-less.html

    Salut, Ben! You deserve every penny.

    Roger Gathmann

    I mentioned rather cryptically the Yorkville hedge fund that was helped out by the ever hedge friendly Ben Bernanke. In the dark winter of 2008 - 2009, some people thought of the retirement funds that were evaporating, the foreclosures, the unemployment. But the Fed was thinking in larger terms about who should get premium loans at Uncle Ben's We loan for less window. Yorkville was one of them.

    "A Jersey City, N.J., hedge fund under Securities and Exchange Commission investigation received more than $230 million in federal loans as part of a government bailout program.

    Yorkville Advisors has been part of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility Program since last year. Under TALF, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has up to $1 billion to lend as part of an effort to inject liquidity into the ABS market.
    Yorkville received some $233 million of that financing, using it to buy $253 million in securities last year for its flagship, YA Global Investments. The TALF deals were made via a subsidiary of the fund, New Earthshell Corp., and placed with a special-purpose entity called YA TALF Holdings, Forbes reports. The hedge fund still owes the Fed $162 million."

    http://www.finalternatives.com/node/13981

    This is of course a pennyante amount. You, my friend, may not be able to get one cent from the Fed even if you write them and ask pretty please and include pics of your starving kids, but to other of the higher players in the Wallfare world, that loan is pocket change.

    Since it isn't pocket change to me, though (if I and one thousand of my clones worked one thousand years at the rate in which I make money, we would not have collected anything near 230 million dollars), I figure that it might be a good idea to poke around Yorkville Associates, and see what they are about.

    So what does Yorkville do, and why would we want to loan it money?

    Here's a good summary of one of Yorkville's big money makers:

    "Yorkville Advisors, founded by 38-year-old Mark Angelo in 2001, is one of the largest hedge fund firms specializing in investing in thinly-traded and often illiquid outfits by making private investments in public equities, also known as PIPEs. The hedge fund firm reported nearly $1 billion in assets as recently as 2008. Angelo's variation on PIPEs is a structured product called a standby equity distribution agreement, which like most PIPEs often causes the stock of the company receiving the investment to drop because it results in Yorkville's funds collecting discounted shares.

    A report prepared by Sagient Research's PlacementTracker shows that Yorkville has entered into $762 million in PIPE deals since 2001, causing the underlying stocks to drop 38% on average in the first year. Most of those investments were made by Yorkville's Cornell Capital Partners, which later changed its name to YA Global Investments.
    YA Global Investments reported a total return of 6.04% in 2009 and 6.22% in 2008, its financial statements say. It reported a net investment loss of 0.09% in 2009 and net investment income of 5.43% in 2008.

    According to the one-page independent auditor's report prepared on August 13 by McGladrey & Pullen, YA Global Investments' consolidated financial statements include investments valued at $804 million, representing 94% of its partners' capital plus the amounts due to certain Yorkville special purpose vehicles, "whose fair values have been estimated" by Yorkville Advisors "in the absence of readily ascertainable fair values."

    Now, that seems a bit curious. We gave this outfit money so that it could use the money to mount a play to make selected stock prices drop, which made it money.

    Hmm, how is this possible? Well, here's an explanation of PIPE action as it pertains to another fund, the NIR group, written by Matthew Goldstein at Reuters:

    "But what's surprising to me is why the SEC is just looking into the NIR funds now, given that it has been a dominant player in so-called "death spiral" convertible market. These securities have gotten a bad rap over the years because they include a trigger that permits bonds to be converted into common shares whenever there is a precipitous drop in the prices of a company's stock.

    Roger Gathmann -> pete...

    The accusation is that the loose set up of Talf was Bernanke's baby, not that he was personally on the phone to Yorkville associates.

    The Bureau of Mine head wasn't personally in contact with BP when Deep Horizon blew, he had simply helped produced the regulatory environment that made it possible.

    Carola Binder said...

    A few weeks ago I blogged about Bernanke's decision to join Citadel, hoping the move will catalyze a change in Fed governance: http://carolabinder.blogspot.com/2015/04/on-bernanke-and-citadel.html

    Interesting WSJ article on Fed's links to Citadel and Pimco: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/29/ben-bernanke-signs-on-with-pimco-another-firm-not-regulated-by-the-fed-but-with-deep-ties/

    Roger Gathmann

    Checking out Citadel's history of tax avoidance and taking advantage of loopholes in regulation, Bernanke obviously saw a corporate culture he could admire. As early as 2007, the NYT featured an article about their innovative program of helping employees avoid tax through a system of off shore accounts.

    One of the flagship funds at Citadel, a $13.5 billion hedge fund, for example, has deferred at least $1.7 billion since it was founded at the end of 1990. And that does not count what might have been taken out already. Citadel declined to comment.

    "We pile advantage on advantage for these managers and there doesn't seem to be any economically logical basis for it," said John C. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group. "It's a very well-gilded lily to allow these tax deferrals."

    This tax advantage is now coming under scrutiny in Washington, where Congress is looking for ways to reduce the budget deficit, to pay for the Iraq war and to help cover the exploding retirement and health care costs of aging baby boomers.

    For now, many hedge fund managers are enjoying not only extraordinary profits but the extra benefit of a system almost encouraging them to set up offshore accounts.

    Most hedge funds are private partnerships; managers are usually paid 2 percent of the money they manage plus 20 percent of the profits the partnership earns. If the fund operates in the United States, any deferral of the pay of the managers means investors lose the tax deduction associated with the compensation expense. As a result, deferred compensation in domestic funds is very uncommon.

    By setting up an offshore fund, though, hedge fund managers avoid socking their investors with extra taxes. At the same time, it serves to attract tax-exempt investors like pension funds and endowments, as well as foreign investors, two of the most active groups investing in hedge funds today."

    At the end of 2008, things did look bad for Citadel. But they got some help at least from the Government, as did any household who had experienced a bad year - NOT! Just joking. That is when Citadel got a 200 million dollars from the payout of AIG with money loaned from the Fed. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/17/aig-bailout-chicago-based_n_175748.html?

    Life is sweet. True, what's 200 million between friends? after all, citadel's ceo made 900 million dollars in 2009. That's how they roll.

    Roger Gathmann

    After the senate report on the financial meltdown, Bernanke, in a country where the elite were more vulnerable to shame, would have stepped down. Actually, if a cashier at a grocery store had a record that was comparably as bad as Bernanke's at the Fed, that cashier would have been fired, with no reference.

    But cashiers are peons and proles - they have to take responsibility for what they do. Sweetly enough, our elite has liquidated that notion as far as it refers to themselves. America is such a lovely place to live in like that - if you have an income of above 500 thou a year.

    For the rest, well, in an ownership society you gotta take your risks, suckers.

    [Apr 20, 2015] Stop The Presses Nobel-Prize Winning Economist Slams QE

    Apr 20, 2015 | Zero Hedge
    Whether it is due to pervasive groupthink, a chronic lack of vision, the perpetuation of failed ideas, or just because the alternative casts grave doubts about the value of their very existence, conventional economists and their media lackeys have almost without exception been supportive of the Fed's "recovery" efforts, be it ZIRP or QE. After all, neoclassical economics demands it, and if the Fed is wrong about its response to the second great depression, then the value of every single economist likewise goes out the window.

    ... ... ...

    ... Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Merton (of expanded Black-Scholes fame) with Arun Muralidhar as co-author, released an Op-Ed in Pensions and Investments magazine titled "Monetary policy: It's all relative", in which they slammed not only the current monetary policy response to economic ills (as observed through the prism of pension math and the adverse impact of low rates), but question if instead of leading to an improvement, QE isn't in fact making the situation even worse.

    Here are the key excerpts from the op-ed:

    ... while QE has increased absolute wealth, it has simultaneously lowered relative wealth for a large class of investors. This could lead to the opposite of the desired effect for this group of investors. Lower relative wealth means investors need to save more to improve their funded status, especially where regulations are strict, and it results in less consumption and investment, and may not remove the deflationary overhang.

    ...

    An alternate, more sophisticated approach to explaining why QE may not work to stimulate aggregate consumption is, perhaps, because the demographic mix of the U.S. (and most parts of the developed world) has shifted toward older people. Unlike 30 or 40 years ago, the enormous baby boomer generation, and even retirees, are much wealthier (including human capital) than in the past, and they are wealthier than current generations earlier in their life cycle. So the wealth effect does not lead to an increase in consumption and, potentially, has the opposite outcome.

    When baby boomers were in the sweet spot for housing needs, expenditures on children and cars, etc. 30 to 40 years ago, the effect the central banks were expecting from QE might have worked better, as they expected it would, but that need not be a reliable prediction under the changed current demographic and wealth distribution.

    ...

    We believe it is imperative for central banks and academia to examine this perspective immediately and develop a new monetary policy toolkit, because it would be tragic if the central banks' attempts to improve economic security with the current orthodoxy leads, instead, to less consumption, less investment and greater retirement insecurity.

    And the punchline:

    A recent study by the Center for American Progress shows that millions of Americans (as high as 50% of households) are in danger of retiring with insufficient money to maintain the standard of living to which they are accustomed, and the problem is getting progressively worse. Your previous editorial argues that QE by the central bank may impose unintended costs on pensions, at both the institutional and retail level. This suggests more research needs to be conducted to examine how monetary policy affects relative wealth, not just absolute wealth, and whether traditional approaches are outdated given the current retirement landscape. This may call for central banks to use a different set of policy tools than manipulating long-term rates, and may even argue for the Fed to actually raise long-term rates faster than what is recommended by traditional monetary policy.

    Alas, with central banks now proudly owning $22 trillion in "assets", it is far too late. The best one can hope for is that the social collapse the results after QE's failure is finally accepted by all, and that includes all other economists, will be somewhat contained.

    Needless to say, all it would take for the Fed to "lose credibility" (if only among its "very serious" peers; it has long since lost all credibility across the broader population) is for a few more economists to have a comparable epiphany and declare that the money-printing emperor is naked, and then all bets - at least for the current failed economic and monetary regime - are off.

    NoDebt

    Yes, I have a nail gun. You can borrow it at any time. Just wash the blood off before you give it back.

    And, just FYI, I am an economist by training (but I'm feeling much better now). I never throught QE was a good idea and have stated bluntly many times why I always thought QE was a bad idea, sounding somewhat similar to the points made in this article. But, sadly, with no PhD, nobody gives a crap what I think. Fortunately, I never ran a well known financial company up on the rocks 20 years ago, either.

    NOT ALL ECONOMISTS THINK ENDLESS MONEY PRINTING IS GOING TO SOLVE ANYTHING OR EVEN "WORK" IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY. Dissenting opinions are regularly filtered out of the discussion by the media, much like climate change 'deniers' opinions are filtered out in discussions of the environment, or the way no 'environmentalist' ever mentions anything bad about radiation leaking from Fukushima. I could go on and on, but the basic point is, not every economist is a clueless moron worshipping at the altar of stimulating aggregate demand.

    Ham-bone

    Somebody should write a book about this stuff...oh, er...somebody did and all major publishers rejected it??? Shocker...

    http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/02/fundamentally-flawed-chapter-1-advanced.html

    http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/02/fundamentally-flawed-outline-how-us-eu.html

    williambanzai7

    Yes the same Long Term Capital Management Merton

    Blankenstein

    Why is anyone listening to this guy? He blew his credibility back in the 90s.

    "Members of LTCM's board of directors included Myron S. Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a "new method to determine the value of derivatives".[3] Initially successful with annualized return of over 21% (after fees) in its first year, 43% in the second year and 41% in the third year, in 1998 it lost $4.6 billion in less than four months following the 1997 Asian financial crisis and 1998 Russian financial crisis requiring financial intervention by the Federal Reserve, with the fund liquidating and dissolving in early 2000."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

    kchrisc

    "They lie even when they are telling the truth." Hence this scumbag's statement.


    My belief is that they are preparing to kill off the dollar, which is why it is "up." As part of the setup they need to prepare a fall-guy, and that is to be the FedRes.

    Of course, part of the plan is to not allow their fiat-dollar debts to evaporate, but be converted to SDRs--"Pay us now in gold or euros." (Remember, they own the courts.)

    Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission.

    Is the dollar up on "exit," or "strength?"

    kchrisc

    I personally think that instead of another QE, which they may still do, the goal is to assure those so connected and the Amongst be permitted a golden exit to the euro, shekel, or other. They will then "pull it" and lay it all at the feet of the FedRes so as to prepare the sheeple for their worldwide central bank and SDRs.

    Fits in with the Saudis price war collaboration as well. As a reward for their cooperation, they can be permitted the ability to reapportion their assets while their Zionist friends prop the "markets" up and the "exit" open, and be spared when they "pull it."

    We shall see. At any rate, the dollar is doomed.

    Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission.

    "When did daylight get a train whistle?"

    economessed

    We don't need more mathematical models. We need to embrace common sense.

    It was excessive borrowing and casual accounting standards that caused the problem. QE didn't counter-act those situations -- it embraced them. The only question left to ask is "when will this experiment arrive at the inflection point of impact?"

    divedivedive

    QE (and ZIRP) really pushed this retirement couple out of the US. Gosh - I remember years(as savers) when we were making more money on the interest from our savings than our actual earnings. Personally - I think monetary policy in the US today is all about trying to maximize the tax base. The longer ZIRP continues the fewer retiree aged people can walk away from their jobs, the more tax revenues coming in.

    MEFOBILLS

    Keen had forecast debt deflation prior to 2008. Hudson also knew it was coming.

    http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/#PIX&kdntuid=1&p=52041&s=undefined&a=undefined

    MMT theorists have analyzed the problem ad-infinitum.

    It takes a Nobel prize winner, when others have been yelling the answers from the rooftops for 7 years?

    It is simple, those that are in the back pocket of banking will always promulgate banker solutions. For example, QE swapping fresh FED keyboard money for debt instruments. All this does is change composition of the money supply from less debt to more money, and the money in turn channels into finance or gets caught up in banker reserve loops. If in finance, it finances yet more debt. This particular type of financialized debt has no connection to the real economy other than being extractive. QE money in banker reserve channels gets stuck because cash reserves now get FED interest, to then prevent rate collapse to zero on overnight market. You heard right, cash - which is not a debt instrument - gets paid interest and thus it gets stuck, with banks enjoying being fully capitalized.

    But, bankers don't really own monetary policy, even though as a parasite they have usurped money creation, to then loan their credit into existence, Bankers certainly don't own fiscal (taxation) policy. For them to give up their pretender control over monetary policy, they will have to admit that money is actually law, and not private credit.

    To admit that, their entire market theory of credit money will have to be shoved into history's trash bin, and they will also lose their easy rentier lifestyles. Better to keep peddling lies and keep humanity hypnotized.

    Like Tyler's often say, 12T of QE money already spent, would have paid off all mortgages in U.S. If 12T had been SPENT into existence and channeled into mortgages, debt depression most certainly would be over. Effectively, mortgage debt instruments would have been erased, especially as the new money would have vanished into ledger as it bought down principle.

    People's future labor (which is now) would then have had extra wallet money to buy from their producing neighbors, rather than having their output vector to credit destruction on banker ledger. This action would have created a wealth cycle as people work with each other to create and produce. Debt depression also pays banker usury, thus further draining credit money supply. Finance has an upper loop where they trade debt instruments and do financial games, and real economy has a lower loop that is in constant drain.

    A land tax via fiscal policy would have been required to prevent a new debt bubble against land though -so had we paid off mortgages, it would have had to come with new fiscal stipulations.

    Did Obama ever hear this from Geithner, Bernanke or any other members of the tribe and their sayanim fraternity? Its highly doubtful; parasitism runs deep when money creation power is so lucrative and ordained by God. It is especially good to be self chosen and have operative control methods on humanity.

    Owning and holding debts on the people, to then gain usury and do Magic swaps, is the parasites control method.

    falak pema

    Having robbed the future we now rob the present which only leads to a tomorrow which will rob the past; the core baby boomer generation THAT OPTED OUT AND SURRENDERED TO EASY, SLEAZY REAGANOMICS...

    The Bushes, the Clintons, the Blairs, the Muttis the Sarkos and the Browns...They should have fought the legacy of Dear Henry and the Cold War CiA/MIC scam that had gotten us into Nam and had shown its corruption in Watergate et al. No, they just bought into it and screwed the welfare productive state!

    What a sell out of western values. Now its multiplied and this new millennium generation cannot tell an Apple from a Google big data scam.

    Its all Facebook to them --

    stilletto

    This guy is as dumb as Krugman. He's basically saying that QE should be good but might not be because of the weather - or rather that people are a bit older. He doesnt understand economics either. QE fails because the system is debt saturated. The economy is like a sponge, when debt free it quickly absorbs the extra money but as it gets soaked it becomes less effective until the economy / sponge just oozes and fails. The problem that all these brain-dead morons don't understand is that the economy is soaked with too much debt.

    Never found an economist who understood reality -- but then i trained as an Economic Historian. Economists don't read history therefore they are doomed to repeat past failures. Just like statisticians - another voodoo outfit.

    [Apr 16, 2015] Matt Taibbi Obama's Big Sellout

    Unfortunately, cognitive regulatory capture leads to crony capitalism just as outright corruption would do.
    December 11, 2009 | naked capitalism
    By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns

    Matt Taibbi is one of the few commentators in the mainstream media who is not worried about 'access' and has, therefore, been free to write much more critically about the economic crisis and reform efforts on Wall Street.

    His first piece was a polemic against Goldman Sachs, which triggered a backlash against the venerated Wall Street firm due to its incestuous relationship with Washington. Afterwards, he took on health care reform. Now, he is taking on the Obama Administration and its status quo bias. I have an excerpt below and a link to the full article. But, first, let me say a few words.

    As you probably know, I have been quite disappointed with this Administration's leadership on financial reform. While I think they 'get it,' it is plain they lack either the courage or conviction to put forward a set of ideas that gets at the heart of what caused this crisis.

    It was clear to many by this time last year that the President may not have been serious about reform when he picked Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as the leaders of his economic team. As smart and qualified as these two are, they are rightfully seen as allied with Wall Street and the anti-regulatory movement.

    At a minimum, the picks of Geithner and Summers were a signal to Wall Street that the Obama Administration would be friendly to their interests. It is sort of like Ronald Reagan going to Philadelphia, Mississippi as a first stop in the 1980 election campaign to let southerners know that he was friendly to their interests.

    I reserved judgment because one has to judge based on actions. But last November I did ask Is Obama really "Change we can believe in?" because his Administration was being stacked with Washington insiders and agents of the status quo.

    Since that time it is obvious that two things have occurred as a result of this 'Washington insider' bias. First, there has been no real reform. Insiders are likely to defend the status quo for the simple reason that they and those with whom they associate are the ones who represent the status quo in the first place. What happens when a company is nationalized or declared bankrupt is instructive; here, new management must be installed to prevent the old management from covering up past mistakes or perpetuating errors that led to the firms demise. The same is true in government.

    That no 'real' reform was coming was obvious, even by June when I wrote a brief note on the fake reform agenda. It is even more obvious with the passage of time and the lack of any substantive reform in health care.

    Second, Obama's stacking his administration with insiders has been very detrimental to his party. I imagine he did this as a way to overcome any worries about his own inexperience and to break with what was seen as a major factor in Bill Clinton's initial failings. While I am an independent, I still have enough political antennae to know that taking established politicians out of incumbent positions (Joe Biden, Janet Napolitano, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Kathleen Sebelius or Tim Kaine) jeopardizes their seat. So, the strategy of stacking his administration has not only created a status quo bias, but it has also weakened his party.

    That's it. I've said my piece. Here is the Taibbi excerpt now. I don't agree with everything Taibbi says and his tone is a lot more apoplectic than mine; but that is mostly stylistic. On the major point – that the Obama Administration is more of the same – he is right.

    Here he talks about the Citi bailout

    "Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."

    Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout - to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.

    That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar - former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett - the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize - for evil."

    But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle - and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters - chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

    Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama's economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat who happens to be Bob Rubin's son. At the time, Jamie's dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.

    Now here's where it gets really interesting. It's three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush - still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O'Doul's portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama's economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama's transition team that same month.

    So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. "If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street," former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, "your doubts should be laid to rest."

    It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin's former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary!

    Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup - Michael Froman - before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.

    Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government's bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. "Geithner assures a smooth transition between the Bush administration and that of Obama, because he's already co-managing what's happening now," observed Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management.

    Taibbi assumes intent and damns the actors as a result. He writes as if Froman and Geithner openly colluded in some way to favour Citi. But you don't need to prove intent, you only need to prove motive. I don't care if Froman or Geithner 'intended' to favour Citi over other institutions; I care whether they were mentally predisposed to helping Citi and other large institutions at the expense of others because they ascribed unwarranted and disproportionate importance to them. Unfortunately, cognitive regulatory capture leads to crony capitalism just as outright corruption would do.

    There is a lot more at the link below.

    Obama's Big Sellout – Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

    [Apr 14, 2015] The Message from the 22 Year Old Suicide at the Nation's Capitol

    Apr 14, 2015 | Jesse's Café Américain

    Suicide is a prohibited form of violence in my own belief, as are all other forms of murder. Therefore I would not hold this type of protest up as an example to anyone.

    However, an even worse offense would be to completely ignore the message which this young man delivered, as most of the mainstream media has done in the US.

    I did not even know what really happened until I read this article below from Wall Street On Parade today. The police and media referred to it as a 'social protest.'

    Before he killed himself, the young man held up a sign that said "Tax the One Percent."

    Perhaps an even more pointed message might be 'shut down the loopholes for the Top .01%.' Those who make their money from wages and ordinary income pay fairly significant taxes.

    However, the uber-rich have so many loopholes and tax avoidance schemes that they often pay much lower percentage than even those in the lowest income levels. The top .01% use the upper middle class as shields for their antics.

    You may read the entire article about this here.

    Rather than one young light be extinguished and quickly overlooked by the powerful, perhaps it would be better if a million people were to march on the Capitol, and effective shut it down in protest this Summer. That might get their attention. Alas, the apathy in the people is pervasive, at least for now.

    Wall Street On Parade

    22-Year Old Commits Suicide at Capitol to Send Congress a Message

    By Pam Martens: April 14, 2015

    At approximately 1:07 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, April 11, during the annual Cherry Blossom Festival celebrating springtime in the Nation's Capitol, a 22-year old man took his own life with a gun on the Capitol grounds with a protest sign taped to his hand. According to the Washington Post, the sign read: "Tax the one percent."

    Yesterday, the Metropolitan Police Department released the young man's name. He was Leo P. Thornton of Lincolnwood, Illinois. Based on what is currently known, the young man had traveled to Washington, D.C. for the express purpose of making a political statement with his sign and then ending his young life.

    The Chicago Tribune reported that "Thornton's parents filed a missing persons report on the morning of April 11 after he never came home from work on April 10, Lincolnwood Deputy Police Chief John Walsh said."

    Those are the tragic facts of the incident itself. But there is a broader tragedy: the vacuous handling of this story by corporate media. The Washington Post headlined the story with this: "Rhythms of Washington Return after Illinois Man's Suicide Outside Capitol." The message he delivered to his Congress – tax the one percent – has yet to be explored by any major news outlet in America in connection with this tragedy.

    Was the message of Leo P. Thornton of Lincolnwood, Illinois a critical piece of information for this Congress to hear at this moment in American history. You're damn right it was. Outside of Wall Street's wealth transfer system, provisions in the U.S. tax code are the second biggest wealth transfer system to the one percent. Together, these two systems have created the greatest income and wealth inequality since the economic collapse in the Great Depression. They threaten a repeat of the 2008 financial collapse because the majority of Americans do not have the wages or savings to support the broader economy...

    Profiles In Hypocrisy, In the Garden of Beasts

    08 April 2015 | Jesse's Café Américain

    "The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy."

    William Hazlitt

    "The U.S. went off the gold standard in August 1971. With no benchmark, central banks could print money and debase currencies. That opened the door for huge bailouts after big banks screwed up in a big way. Taxpayers-not incompetent bankers-paid the price.

    By [the late 1980's], the Federal Reserve Bank and large U.S. banks had established a pattern to control the public relations damage each time banks had a major screw-up: accountants and regulators let banks lie about the size of the problem to stall for time; the Federal Reserve blew smoke at the media; finally, the Fed would bail out the banks in a way that most taxpayers would not understand.

    Banks didn't have to get smarter or more competent. The Fed trained the banks that uninformed taxpayers would eat the losses, and fake accounting would let bank officers keep their positions and their money."

    Janet Tavakoli, Decisions: Life and Death on Wall Street

    Gold and silver were pushed back to their assigned round numbers, with gold barely holding above 1200 and silver pushed well below the 17 handle.

    Ted Butler has a rather striking piece about the rigging in the silver market which you can read here.

    Speaking of silver it appears that Turkey had record imports of silver bullion in March. You can read about that here. I am not sure how significant that is. We can certainly keep an eye on it to see if this is a one time thing or a trend.

    Thoughts of silver drachmas and dirhams come to mind, but it is most likely improbably premature. Still, this is a currency war and things seem to be building to a reckoning of sorts. Who can say what desperate people might do to end repression?

    Nothing really happened at the Bucket Shop on the Hudson. A few contracts of silver were claimed, and inventory was shoved around the plate in the warehouses. The real action is taking place in the Mideast and Asia.

    We have become a coarse and careless people, smugly confident in our 'Exceptionalism.' We are no longer shocked about lies, but instead critique the style and performance of the liars, and try to emulate them in our own professions.

    How can we not cringe at some of the more shocking abuses that pass for generally acceptable behavior in public figures these days? And we encourage it, by both our silence and our acceptance.

    Oh yes, we recoil in horror at any kind of sex, at the human form, with great puritanical umbrage, but stealing and cheating, and abusing the poor and the defenseless in even the most petty and vicious ways is looked upon with admiration, because we are in love with power.

    Power is our new golden calf. Even some so-called 'reformers' are falling all over themselves at a chance to move near the circles of power, to have influence, to be seen as connected. All we seem to want is to get paid, to get ahead, to 'win.'

    Hypocrites!

    And the example of our cultural and societal icons are certainly leading to a general corrosion of all morals and civilities. And that is a shame, which eventually will have significant repercussions and consequences for us as a people and a society.

    Where will we finally draw the line and come to our senses? How far are we willing to go? How many crimes and abuses, how much theft and torture are we willing to overlook? Why do we allow our society to be defined by sociopaths?

    When will we finally look about, and see that we too, despite all our smug superiority, have created our own garden of beasts?

    [Apr 10, 2015] 'The Floating Kilogram' The Editor of the Sun Talks About His New Book On the Dollar Crisis

    The New York Sun

    By DAWN BENNETT, Adapted From Financial Myth Busting | April 5, 2015

    http://www.nysun.com/national/the-floating-kilogram-the-editor-of-the-sun-talks/89117/

    The following is adapted from an interview by Dawn Bennett, host of the radio show "Financial Myth Busting," with the editor of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky. The broadcast aired March 8:

    * * *

    Ms. Bennett: Seth Lipsky is the author of a book titled "The Floating Kilogram and Other Editorials on Money from The New York Sun." Before the Sun, he spent 20 years at the Wall Street Journal where he served on the editorial board and helped launch the Asian Wall Street Journal as well as the Wall Street Journal Europe. Recently, Seth authored a column in the New York Post titled "Why does the Federal Reserve Fear a Real Audit," which is a question much on my mind. Seth, welcome.

    Mr. Lipsky: Thanks, Dawn. It's nice to be with you.

    Ms. Bennett: To put it charitably, Janet Yellen appears to be very alarmed that some members of Congress want to conduct a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve for the first time since it was created. If the Federal Reserve is doing everything correctly, why should Mrs. Yellen be alarmed and what does she have to hide?

    Mr. Lipsky: Well, that's a great question. The Federal Reserve is already audited, in the sense that an accountant comes in and goes over its books. But what the Congress is talking about is a much broader look by the Governmental Accountability Office of how the central bank forms our monetary policy and what its relations are with foreign banks. The Fed has been fighting this tooth and nail as an intrusion on its independence. What Congress knows is that the Constitution gave the monetary power precisely to Congress.

    Congress has a constitutional obligation and power to establish the American monetary system and regulate it, to coin money, regulate its value and that of foreign coinage. This has become a big issue where we have not taken a really systematic look at how the Fed operates in the hundred years that it's been in existence. We're starting the second century, and there is growing sentiment in the Congress to take a look at this. The audit of the Fed measure passed the House as recently as of September by a vote of 333 to 92, with 109 Democrats joining the Republicans. So the Fed is certainly growing concerned.

    Ms. Bennett: The only reason Janet Yellen has the power to coin money is because Congress delegated its own power to the Federal Reserve in 1913. Isn't congressional oversight of that power something that should be considered commonsensical by the Federal Reserve?

    Mr. Lipsky: The Fed was created in 1913. The Coinage power was first acted on in 1792, and coinage was given not to any Federal Reserve but to the United States Mint. When the second central bank came up to the Supreme Court it was really the tax and the borrowing power that the courts were looking at when they okayed the authority of the central bank.

    Ms. Bennett: We are all accountable to someone or something, so what is wrong about the Federal Reserve being accountable to Congress?

    Mr. Lipsky: Nothing whatsoever. Even Chairman Yellen acknowledges that Congress has the power. She's just pleading and warning that it not interfere. Why is Congress growing concerned about this in the first place? It's because the Great Recession has lasted six years and we still do not feel like we've recovered. What is the Fed's role in this? Could the reason that the Great Recession lasted so long be attributable to monetary policy? The value of the dollar has been allowed to collapse below one 1,100th of an ounce of gold. It was a 265th of an ounce of gold when George W. Bush was sworn in. These are huge questions, and somebody needs to ask them.

    Ms. Bennett: It is quite clear to me that the Federal Reserve doesn't want the rest of us to actually be able to see what they really up to. If we did know what they're doing, do you think most Americans would just want it shut down? To your point, since 1913, the dollar has actually lost over 97% of its purchasing power. And of course, the economy has been subjected to one painful depression and a series of what I call Fed-created recessions. Despite the poor track record, we continue to support them. At the end of the day, does it matter if we even have a Federal Reserve?

    Mr. Lipsky: I think the monetary questions do matter to every American in all positions. My favorite statistic is that between 1947 and 1971 the average unemployment rate was below 5%. From 1971 until today it was above 6%. What happened in 1971, when the unemployment rate began souring? What happened is we abandoned the Bretton Woods Gold Exchange System, under which the dollar was linked to gold, and the money began flowing not in the productive enterprises, but into the money markets and hedge funds and all these sorts of things and not so much into the kind of investment that created the great industrial base in America.

    Ms. Bennett: Let's talk about that type of investment. According to a government report I've read, the Federal Reserve made $16.1 trillion in loans to big banks during that financial crisis. In my opinion, [it once] created the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. Now, I think it has created the financial bubble that our markets are experiencing.

    Mr. Lipsky: Asset inflation. The debate over inflation is one of the most important debates in the country. The left wing likes to say there is no inflation, but the dollar is worth only a tiny amount of the constitutional specie, which is gold and silver, compared to what it used to be worth. This is what people feel when they hear the government say there's no inflation but they try to go to the grocery store and they spend $50 or $100 on a tiny plastic bag with a few items in it.

    Ms. Bennett: Yes, I know shelf inflation is huge, but I want to talk about commodities for a bit. The Department of Justice has recently said again that they're going after the big banks that have been, on an ongoing and continuous basis, manipulating gold and silver. What are your thoughts on that? Will it work this time? And, if so, is there a simple solution to stop them from doing this? They seem to get their hands slapped, apologize, and then come back and do it again, and again.

    Mr. Lipsky: The news that the Justice Department is looking at something like ten or twelve major banks for possibly rigging the price of gold broke the same week that Mrs. Yellen was up on Capitol Hill testifying against an audit of the Fed.

    Ms. Bennett: That's right.

    Mr. Lipsky: One of the questions that The New York Sun raised is what is she afraid of then? Is it the danger that the Fed has been meddling in the gold market the way the Justice Department is alleging commercial banks have been doing it? It's the Fed that regulates commercial banks after all. I don't want to carry that argument too far. I asked it then in an editorial more in the nature of a question. But there is a movement in Congress to open up what is called a Centennial Monetary Commission that after the first hundred years of the Fed, would just take a look at how the whole system is working.

    We've been in a period of fiat money, meaning dollars that have no connection in law to any gold or silver or other constitutional money. We've been in a fiat system since 1971. Previously, our dollars were always defined in terms of gold and silver, suddenly they're not. The unemployment average is much higher; the bankruptcy rate is much higher; the inequality rate has been much higher since the mid 1970's. Could this be related to the fact that we abandoned sound money in the mid 1970s?

    Ms. Bennett: De-dollarization has been going on now for the last few years, and I think it's because the dollar is continuing to get weaker. Our political system and economic system aren't what they used to be. Do you think it's possible that if China, for example, standardizes the renminbi it will start taking power away from the U.S. dollar?

    Mr. Lipsky: The abandonment of sound money by the U.S. has brought forth a whole chain of foreign governments that are alarmed and wonder whether a new system should be set up. China. There is talk of Russia going on a gold standard; the European Union is having its own catastrophe with the Euro, and it's wondering whether the dollar ought to be replaced as the international reserve. The United Nations, for crying out loud, has gotten involved in this.

    One of my favorite moments happened in 1965, when the President of France, Charles de Gaulle, called a thousand reporters into the presidential palace sat them down and addressed them on the importance of restoring gold as the international standard. His argument was that it puts all countries on the same basis: America, France, England, China, little countries, and it takes a lot of the partisanship out of the monetary question internationally, or it takes the politics out of money. It's ironic that Fed loves to talk about how we shouldn't politicize the monetary system. If one really wants to de-politicize the monetary system, restoring a gold standard or something like it is exactly the way to do it.

    Ms. Bennett: Mrs. Yellen claims that opening the Fed to an outside audit would "politicize" - her word - monetary policy.

    Mr. Lipsky: Right.

    Ms. Bennett: Isn't it political when Senator Schumer, for example, tells her to keep rates low every time she testifies before the Senate Banking Committee? Isn't it already happening?

    Mr. Lipsky: You're exactly right. Why is it always the conservatives that are doing the politicizing and not the liberals? The big politicization of monetary policy happened in 1978 with the passage of Humphrey-Hawkins, which said that the Fed has to have a second mandate of increasing the employment rate or decreasing unemployment, in addition to affecting the value of our dollar. That opened the door to an enormous political interference in monetary policy.

    Ms. Bennett: I know you're not a gold trader or silver trader...

    Mr. Lipsky: I'm a newspaperman.

    Ms. Bennett: There you go. But I'm certain you follow the markets. What do you think would be a simple solution to fix the ongoing and continuous manipulation of gold and silver so that we can get more stability? It does seem, whether it's a Federal Reserve or some other central bank, that they're interfering with it in order to make the fiat currency look stronger than it really is.

    Mr. Lipsky: I favor a definition by law, enacted by Congress under its constitutional powers to coin money and regulate its value, and fix the standards of weights and measures - a law passed by Congress defining the dollar as a fixed amount of gold or silver. Silver was the main specie used in early years of our republic. The debate over whether gold or silver was better went on through the 19th century, and we basically decided in 1900, with the passage of the Gold Standard Act, to make gold the true national money. I think that would go a long way toward solving this problem. There are a lot of questions as to exactly how to do it, whether there should be a system like Bretton Woods, which said dollars had to be redeemed in gold if they were held by foreign governments.

    Ms. Bennett: In physical gold, not paper gold. In physical gold.

    Mr. Lipsky: Right.

    Ms. Bennett: There's a big difference there.

    Mr. Lipsky: Therefore the price at which one fixes the dollar, the value, the amount of gold, has to be carefully worked out. But the gold standard is not some flaky thing. This was believed in by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and almost every president since, up until Richard Nixon. John Kennedy, Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland - they all believed in it.

    Ms. Bennett: Seth, "The Floating Kilogram and other Essays on Money from The New York Sun." For any listeners not familiar with the Sun, can you bring them up to speed?

    Mr. Lipsky: The New York Sun is an online newspaper that I edit. We published in print until several years ago. It's a leading voice in journalism for a sound dollar. It supports a sound dollar, limited government, and a restoration of constitutional dollar based on gold or silver. This is the first radio interview about the book.

    Ms. Bennett: Thank you.

    Mr. Lipsky: This book contains on this issue 130 editorials that have been issued in the Sun in recent years. Steve Forbes calls them "brilliant," "irrefutable," and "the Federalist Papers for the gold standard." James Grant calls the book both "persuasive" and "unfailingly entertaining." It's a book for every person, not just the experts, and it's available on Amazon.com, the online bookstore, and you'll have a copy in a day or two if you place your order. "Pure gold" is the way the economist Judy Shelton described this book. The title, Dawn, comes from the discovery that the kilogram, which is the last metric weight measure based on a physical object, has been losing mass - atom by atom. The Sun in one of its editorials said, "Why don't we float the kilogram just like we float the dollar?" That's from where the title of the book comes.

    Ms. Bennett: If President Obama, or our next president, were to become motivated to make reforms, what do you think the takeaway from this book would to be? Definitely a gold standard?

    Mr. Lipsky: So I think the takeaway is going to be that in our monetary system at some point, the dollar has to be defined in terms of something real rather than just another dollar. At the moment, if you take your dollar to the central bank to redeem it, they'll give you another dollar. There's no reference to anything real and no classical measure of value. We have what Jim Grant likes to call the Ph.D. standard, and I think we need to move away from that to the kind of standard that sustained our country during its periods of greatest growth and strongest employment.

    Ms. Bennett: We always seem to make changes in the United States when things break down, but not beforehand. What is going to be the instigator to standardize our currency?

    Mr. Lipsky: People say things could become a disaster. The last six years have been a disaster.

    Ms. Bennett: Exactly.

    Mr. Lipsky: Huge amounts of unemployment, not just for a short period, but for six years. It's consumed almost the entire Obama presidency. People are still trying to figure out their homes, still trying to figure out how the price of college got more than halfway to $100,000 a year - you know, all these things. We've been living through this, and I think events have energized Congress to start looking at this. The Sound Dollar Act, or Centennial Monetary Commission Act, or Audit the Fed Act, or Free Competition in Currency Act. This is why Janet Yellen - to bring it back to where we came in - is fighting so hard against the Congress doing this. We're in a constitutional moment here where Congress is going to take a look at this, I predict.

    Ms. Bennett: Do you think they're going to have the guts to do it?

    Mr. Lipsky: I think the American people have a lot of guts.

    Ms. Bennett: Me, too.

    Mr. Lipsky: And at the end of the day, the Congress has to listen to the American people.

    [Apr 10, 2015] The Government's Revolving-est Doors

    Apr 07, 2015 | Zero Hedge

    Former employees of federal agencies can often find good (and lucrative) jobs as lobbyists, capitalizing on the connections that they forged while in public service. As OpenSecrets exposes, the numbers of revolving-door-enthusiasts is reminiscent of the Ebola epidemic as this deadly-to-democracy disease spreads from department to department ripping away 'hope and change' wherever it appears. "Revolvers" include those as powerful - and well connected - as secretaries of state and as far from Washington as Peace Corps volunteers... but The Department of Commerce tops the list...

    The agencies shown here have employed the greatest number of former lobbyists - or sent the greatest number of former employees to lobbying firms and interest groups.

    Agency Number of revolving door people profiled
    Dept of Commerce 1736
    Dept of Defense 1688
    Dept of State 1452
    Dept of Health & Human Services 1225
    White House 1216
    Dept of Agriculture 1112
    Dept of Army 1080
    US House of Representatives 876
    Dept of Justice 864
    Dept of Energy 840
    Dept of Transportation 750
    Dept of Interior 700
    Dept of Labor 555
    Dept of Housing & Urban Development 530
    Dept of Homeland Security 520
    Dept of the Treasury 444
    Dept of Navy 428
    Dept of Education 412
    Dept of Air Force 312
    US Senate 256

    Source: OpenSecrets.org

    [Apr 10, 2015] Rahm Emanuel and Rick Perry Hold Public in Bipartisan Contempt by Lambert Strether

    April 7, 2015 | nakedcapitalism.com

    Lambert here: This post is short and sweet. It's worth reminding ourselves that on some axes of evaluation, Republicans and Democrats are far more alike than different.

    By PEU Report. Originally posted on their blog, Private Equity Report.

    Holding the public in contempt is a bipartisan effort. Consider the following stories. The first involves Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas:

    Information contained in a blistering state audit shows that at least five of the recipients… which got tens of millions of dollars from the fund - never actually submitted formal applications. At issue are at least five recipients of Texas Enterprise Fund money: Vought Aircraft…

    Texas Governor Rick Perry gave Vought, a Carlyle Group affiliate, $35 million for fifteen years. Ten years later it's unclear if Vought provided even one additional new job. Governor Perry's job number is fanciful and the recent audit gives no overall job number. In 2010 Carlyle sold Vought for $1.44 billion but not one penny was returned to Texas taxpayers.

    Chicago's Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel is as free with taxpayer money for his political benefactors and purposely evasive about those relationships:

    Emanuel's administration has for weeks blocked the release of correspondence between his administration and one of the Democratic mayor's top donors, Michael Sacks. The administration has also refused to release details about tens of millions of dollars in shadowy no-bid city payments to some of Emanuel's largest campaign contributors.

    Rahm's top donor is a private equity underwriter (PEU):

    The CEO of the Chicago private equity firm Grosvenor, Sacks has been described as Emanuel's closest ally in the private sector, and has been called Emanuel's "go-to guy" and his "top troubleshooter."

    PEU sponsored politicians are above the law:

    Illinois' open records law mandates that communications to and from public officials like Emanuel be made available for public inspection.

    Back to how Rahm rewards his donors:

    …firms that have received tens of millions of dollars' worth of shadowy "direct voucher payments" (DVPs) from the Emanuel administration have given more than $775,000 worth of campaign contributions to the mayor's political organizations.

    Chicago's DVP process is permitted thanks to loopholes in Illinois' procurement law that allow municipal officials to circumvent the traditional contracting process. Unlike standard government contracts, DVP payouts do not require any type of public documentation. Emanuel appointees retain substantial discretionary authority to approve DVPs. The payments are not required to go to the lowest bidder; vendors receiving the payments do not have to list their qualifications and never need to document the services they provide to the city in return for the money. The DVPs appear to have been used for everything from phone service to interest payments to financial firms, but unlike the George W. Bush administration's no-bid contracts, DVP payments do not even require a formal contract, so it is impossible to verify what the money purchased.

    No application, no contract and no accountability. It's our PEU world, where politicians Red and Blue love PEU.

    [Apr 07, 2015] Decisions Life and Death on Wall Street

    Apr 07, 2015 | Jesse's Café Américain

    I have just started reading a new book by Janet Tavakoli called Decisions: Life and Death on Wall Street.

    There is also a paperback version of it available in the US and Canada here.

    This is a non-fiction story of her travels in the world of finance that asks the question, 'What would you be willing to do for money and power?'

    As usual Janet does not pull her punches. The description on Amazon is rather intriguing.

    In New York, the Federal Reserve Bank hides damaging information about too-big-too-fail banks from the public eye. A prominent bank CEO seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

    In Washington D.C., a former Wall Street regulator checks into a hotel using the name of a hedge fund manager for an illicit meeting with a prostitute. In a D.C. suburb, the CFO of a beleaguered mortgage giant chooses a drastic personal end to "relentless pressure".

    In a picturesque suburb of Zug, Switzerland, the CFO of a major insurance company decides to end his life. In London, a financier kills himself in a way he once said he never would.

    In her new memoir, Janet Tavakoli shines a bright light on the money-driven culture of Wall Street and Washington, and the life and death consequences of our decisions that put profit above all.

    "The U.S. went off the gold standard in August 1971. With no benchmark, central banks could print money and debase currencies. That opened the door for huge bailouts after big banks screwed up in a big way. Taxpayers-not incompetent bankers-paid the price.

    By [the late 1980's], the Federal Reserve Bank and large U.S. banks had established a pattern to control the public relations damage each time banks had a major screw-up: accountants and regulators let banks lie about the size of the problem to stall for time; the Federal Reserve blew smoke at the media; finally, the Fed would bail out the banks in a way that most taxpayers would not understand.

    Banks didn't have to get smarter or more competent. The Fed trained the banks that uninformed taxpayers would eat the losses, and fake accounting would let bank officers keep their positions and their money."

    If 'rule under law' were more than just a slogan in the United States, men who occupied the senior-most positions in too-big-to-fail banks would have been disgraced, prosecuted, and jailed. But no bank executive was held accountable."

    [Mar 31, 2015] Generous Welfare Benefits Make People More Likely To Want to Work, Not Less

    Mar 31, 2015 | Economist's View

    Not so sure this is conclusive -- it seems like the survey question could have been sharpened:

    Generous welfare benefits make people more likely to want to work, not less: Survey responses from 19,000 people in 18 European countries, including the UK, showed that "the notion that big welfare states are associated with widespread cultures of dependency, or other adverse consequences of poor short term incentives to work, receives little support."

    Sociologists Dr Kjetil van der Wel and Dr Knut Halvorsen examined responses to the statement 'I would enjoy having a paid job even if I did not need the money' put to the interviewees for the European Social Survey in 2010.

    In a paper published in the journal Work, employment and society they compare this response with the amount the country spent on welfare benefits and employment schemes, while taking into account the population differences between states.

    The researchers, of Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway, found that the more a country paid to the unemployed or sick, and invested in employment schemes, the more its likely people were likely to agree with the statement, whether employed or not. ...

    The researchers also found that government programmes that intervene in the labour market to help the unemployed find work made people in general more likely to agree that they wanted work even if they didn't need the money. In the more active countries around 80% agreed with the statement and in the least around 45%. ...

    "This article concludes that there are few signs that groups with traditionally weaker bonds to the labour market are less motivated to work if they live in generous and activating welfare states.

    "The notion that big welfare states are associated with widespread cultures of dependency, or other adverse consequences of poor short term incentives to work, receives little support.

    "On the contrary, employment commitment was much higher in all the studied groups in bigger welfare states. ..."

    Darryl FKA Ron said...

    When surveyed Bill Clinton responded "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people."

    Bill's statement established strong precedents for both the validity of survey information and the work ethic :<)

    Personally I would stick with correlations of prime working age LFPR to employment insurance and re-employment benefits among nations with various levels of support for unemployment.

    Support can be either too weak or too strong perhaps, but too weak would be the obvious mistake. Unemployment has high costs for individuals and prolonged unemployment makes re-employment more difficult for several social reasons as well as possible skills erosion. Employers generally avoid hiring the long term unemployed. The long term unemployed may lack the living conditions to present themselves at their best for job interviews (clothes and appearance) or to even show up (transporation or childcare). Necessity may place them into the grey or black markets for employment that become increasingly difficult to separate from.

    I am unable to find anywhere support for the unemployed is too strong; i.e., where high levels of support correlate to high levels of unemployment. The unemployment rate in Qatar was 0.30% in 2013. The maximum unemployment rate in Qatar during this century to date was 3.9% in 2012. You can hardly be more supportive than Qatar.

    This survey analysis is an example of discrediting the obvious truth of the veracity of support for unemployment and re-employment with a ridiculous and unconvincing approach. It is more about how to provide employment for inadequate social scientists than how to prove that the general wage working population benefits greatly from support during unemployment without any overall increase in the tendency to freeload.

    Lafayette said in reply to Darryl FKA Ron...

    Confucius say: "When employing tongue-in-cheek, be careful not to bite ..." ;^)

    Darryl FKA Ron said in reply to Lafayette...

    Not exactly sure which part you were referring to, but my comments were admittedly a rushed bunch of snark. Generally I believe sociologists have a lot to add to the economics discussion, but in this case the economists already had it covered and did not need their "help."

    Lafayette said in reply to Darryl FKA Ron...

    {Generally I believe sociologists have a lot to add to the economics discussion, but in this case the economists already had it covered and did not need their "help."}

    Which is what I have been trying to get across in this forum as well for a long, long time.

    The numbers help formulate policy decision making, towards helping us understand where we are going. But the end-results depend upon implementing those policies towards specific goals.

    That aint happinin.

    cm said...

    The doubt comes from people apparently assuming that in the European "welfare states", somebody who doesn't want to work can just apply for no questions asked welfare and then hang out on their hammock.

    The reality is that the amount and duration of UE benefits is based on one's history of (UE insured) employment and past benefits receipt - more or less, so much UE for that much work; and there are very stringent income and asset hurdles to qualifying for welfare, depending on circumstances you may not be allowed to keep a car or live in larger square footage than deemed necessary.

    And anybody on benefits not of advanced and "unemployable" age will be strongly "encouraged" with an array of "measures" to take work or "job market integration" programs. But in the end there are still too few jobs.

    Darryl FKA Ron said in reply to cm...

    Yep. And also the benefits really are not all that great for someone that might have been working and paying their mortgage each month before the 2008 crises. The benefit maximums here in the US are such that a lot of people would lose their homes if they lost their jobs.

    anne said in reply to anne...

    The employment-population ratios for men and women 25 to 54 in the Nordic countries and the United States were 86.1, 84.1, 82.1 80.6 and 76.8 at the close of 2014.

    Guess which ratio belongs to the US.

    Richard H. Serlin said in reply to 400 ppm...

    Welfare payments are very poor. There's still a huge incentive to get a job, when any job will be a huge increase in income. You're saying that if someone gets $10,000/year there's no incentive to get a job paying $25,000 or 50. And besides, job search, and going to training classes, etc. can just be required to still get the welfare.

    [Mar 31, 2015] Four TBTF Banks Threaten To Withhold Funds To Democrats Over Elizabeth Warren's Wall Street Rants

    Mar 31, 2015 | zeroh edge.com

    Having already proven that their institutions are above the law in the aftermath of the financial crisis, executives at the "Too Big to Fail and Jail" banks have decided it's time to teach Senate Democrats a lesson.

    Not being content with trillions in taxpayer backed bailouts to protect and further consolidate virtually all wealth within their oligarch fiefdoms, these bankers are irate at the notion that a commoner would dare criticize their unassailable crony privilege.

    What Wall Street wants is one hundred Chucky Schumers in the Senate.

    [Mar 30, 2015] Elizabeth Warren Strikes Back as Citigroup Tries to Blackmail the Democratic Party by Yves Smith

    March 29, 2015 | naked capitalism

    An unusual move by a thin-skinned too big to fail bank, Citigroup, to slap down the finance-skeptic faction of the Democratic party appears to be backfiring.

    Reuters reported on Friday that Citigroup was making clear its displeasure with the way Elizabeth Warren had been calling to its overly-cozy relationship with the Administration by threatening to withhold its customary bribe, um, donation to the Democratic party:


    Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, sources familiar with the discussions said.

    Representatives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party's tone toward Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said this week.

    The story noted that the amount at issue was only $15,000 per bank, so this scheme is more a warning shot that a serious move, particularly since it is aimed at the Senate, and thus pointedly steers clear of the Big Finance stalwarts, the Clintons. But if you widen the frame a bit, there is more at stake here than you might think. Warren has declared war on the Wall Street wing of the Democratic party, including the powerful network of proteges and fundraisers affiliated with former Treasury secretary, former Goldman partner, and more recently, vice chairman of Citigroup Bob Rubin. One politically-savvy financial analyst calls this cadre "the Rubino crime syndicate".

    Warren fingered Citigroup's extensive connections to the Executive branch when she fought the addition of a rider to a must-pass spending bill that would eliminate a Dodd Frank provisions to force banks to stop trading certain derivatives in taxpayer-backstopped entities (the so-called swaps pushout rule). As you'll see below, not only did Warren have the bad taste to point out that the current Treasury secretary is a Citigroup alum, and that Sandy Weill, Citigroup chairman, had offered Timothy Geithner the opportunity to run the bank, she also said that Dodd Frank had come up short by not forcing Citigroup's breakup. If you've not seen this speech, you need to watch it. You'll understand why Citigroup is desperate to find a way to leash and collar Warren.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJpTxONxvoo

    participant-observer-observed, March 29, 2015 at 3:55 am

    I wonder how many of the American public know the Citigroup shareholder status of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal?

    Keep interfering in legislative affairs, Citigroup, and lets get more and more daylight exposing all the dark alley ways you have over there!

    How many DoD checks get processed through Citi to pay for the new Saudi front end to the US war economy? I bet that balance sheet is interesting, and may show that Citi has already moved its wares from the Dems into the Cheney/Halliburton/Xe (or whatever it is they call themselves now) camp. Must make the billions of HSBC cartel drug money look like monopoly game money! In that case, making a public show of crying over spilled milk is just hankering after more legislative give – aways and is more a call to GOP than dems.

    Aren't we well into the oligarchy titan demigod wars? Prince bin Talal vs Rubin ? We have Ted Cruz's wife on leave from Goldman. Where's JR (Dallas fans)?

    nat scientist, March 29, 2015 at 8:54 am

    Not to mention the "sanctions" which pump up the jam for the "blessed" alternate route AKA economic warfare and Holy smoke.

    John, March 29, 2015 at 9:40 am

    Remember how the American taxpayer saved the majority of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal 's fortune that was invested in Citigroup when we bailed out Wall Stree ? About 11 billion at the time.

    Then he went on the Charlie Rose Show about a year later after trillions of taxpayer money was extorted from us and given to Wall Street and said that America's debt and deficit were unacceptable and "entitlements" needed to be cut.

    Every time he tours America since then he feels free to tell us that our debt and deficit are unacceptable and demand that the government do something about cutting "entitlements"

    Jim Haygood, March 29, 2015 at 10:51 am

    Citibank was a dynamic, rapidly-growing financial innovator … half a century ago. Lord, don't we miss ol' Wally Wriston.

    Now Citi and its peers resemble the U.S. steel industry in its latter days, when its only edge was government handouts and using political influence to crassly bend the rules in its favor.

    It didn't work for Big Steel. It wouldn't work for Big Banking, except that now the political corruption goes far deeper, and a banking cartel called the Federal Reserve has gotten itself installed as a quasi-governmental agency.

    Abolish the freaking Fed.

    Yves Smith, March 29, 2015 at 1:50 pm

    Um, that innovation under Wriston brought us the Latin American debt crisis. It was Wriston who said countries don't go bankrupt.

    flora, March 29, 2015 at 6:38 pm

    Wally Wriston? Why not Charlie Mitchell, "Sunshine Charley" from the 1920's at National City Bank (later Citi)? Sen. Carter Glass – of Glass-Steagall regulation – said, "Mitchell more than any fifty men is responsible for this stock crash." (1929 crash).
    Pretty devastating article about Citi in the April 2015 issue of Harper's Magazine by Andrew Cockburn. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Especially at Citi, aka National City Bank. Mr. Clinton, eliminating Glass-Steagall banking regulations, helped create the the current Citi monster.

    cnchal, March 29, 2015 at 6:00 am

    The story noted that the amount at issue was only $15,000 per bank . . .

    The banks would like to bribe Democratic senators, and are only offering $15K each? That's on a similar scale as Apple or Walmart paying it's Chinese slaves $2.00 per day. The senators will need a much bigger bribe for the banks to be successful. The greed and the gall of the banks. They won't share their stolen money with anyone.

    Ned Ludd, March 29, 2015 at 9:41 am

    While in office, corporations give a taste to hook politicians. The luxurious lifestyle comes after a politician leaves office.

    After leaving (or being thrown) from office, politicians who were loyal to the wealthy get to fulfill all of their desires; which entices the next generation of political opportunists to put themselves up for sale. They become advisers or lobbyists, earning six figures per speech, while traveling around the world and vacationing at resorts under the guise of "ideas" conferences, which are simply venues to discuss new ways to fleece the rest of us.

    For the most talented, most ambitious, or most connected politicians; the media then works to erase their past misdeeds; giving them (or members of their family) the ability to enter elected office again, for a new cycle of deceive-betray-and-profit.

    bh2, March 29, 2015 at 10:31 am

    Huey Long once commented that an honest politician is one who, once bought, stays bought.

    Most do, regardless of party.

    The banksters fund all sides and could care less which side "wins". Hence they always come out on the "winning" side.

    OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL, March 29, 2015 at 6:03 am

    The pathetic idea that Elizabeth Warren's softball questioning of the BankerState's absolute right to absolute rule is somehow seen as a glimmer of hope is…pathetic.

    Read your history books for real opposition that has been mounted in the past, Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan.

    These are criminal enterprises and must continually be brought down by a (non-somnolent) population. Yes yes blah blah "oh oh but they perform a critical function in credit creation etc etc and if they failed it would be really disruptive" blah blah blah. It has become blatantly obvious to all but the infested presstitutes that their game of ever-expanding credit and new ways to steal from the poor is teetering as badly today as it was 7 years ago when they first began gifting money from taxpayers and savers to pay off their gambling debts.

    I know we'd like to have at least a little hope with someone like Warren but I think we all need to grow a pair (girls too), get mad, and start screaming and educating people about much much more radical solutions than just a kindly lady being a little impolite.

    Yves Smith, March 29, 2015 at 6:40 am

    It's spurious to compare what a President can to do what a Senator can accomplish; we were against Warren running for the Senate for that very reason. But she has made remarkably effective use of the very constrained bully pulpit a modern Senator commands.

    Rhetoric was more heated in the 19th century than now. And pray tell, what did William Jennings Bryan actually accomplish? Remarkably little. And unlike Warren, he spent his entire career in politics and had effective control of the Democratic party. It was Roosevelt, and not failed three time presidential candidate Byran, who broke up the trusts.

    Warren has repeatedly called for prosecutions of bankers. You can criticize her on other fronts, but you are really off base here.

    Code Name D, March 29, 2015 at 12:12 pm

    I am not so sure.

    Politics, like war, has a lot of angels in operation. One may think they are taking the enemy on and holding their own, only to discover the real force has snuck past you and cut off your supply line.

    Today the political strategy is to not fall for the appearance of victory. I am not sure Warren has figured that out. Her speech here still makes it appear she thinks that Republicans and Democrats can still be reasoned with, hence her conciliatory tone.

    Where dose she think she can go with this? If she gets the provision pulled out… what has she actually won? It's not like there aren't already plenty of other provisions insure the banks won't get bailed out already enshrined in policy. The very term "too big to fail" is predicated on the idea that we can not afford to let Citi Bank fail. So even if Warren is able to get all of these provisions removed, once City gets into trouble again, panic will rain in Congress and they will pass an emergency act granting just such power.

    The reason why reformers were firebrands in the 30s was because they understood the balance of power. When politicians are bought off, you can't reason with them – but you can turn his political base against them for their decisions and cause them to lose re-election. And you don't do that from the congressional podium, but by going directly to the people. You don't so that by being calm and consolatory, but by pounding the podium and expressing the outrage that the events deserve.

    Sorry, but Warren is going after small fry and working for tiny victories. Her heart is in the right place, but her strategy is still too little, too late.


    hunkerdown, March 29, 2015 at 6:06 pm

    The balance of power has shifted. Now that a Senator never really *needs* to see or set foot in their state again for any reason, they have six whole years to complete their grifting project and decamp. The act of voting cannot discipline a system, especially not one that depends on it for its legitimacy. Maybe the peasants get off on the whole fantasy of judgment day and the arrogance to believe their childish electoral games are actually an exercise of meaningful power, not just giving them a father without which most Americans are too scared to think independently, let alone venture out at night.

    Also, now that the political class has equated cheap pathos with deliberation and cheap ethos with common interest, the whole stupid, half-assed performance of caring on the part of the upper class depends on the willingness of the populace to suspend disbelief every time they venture out-of-doors and see something incongruous with their personal Matrix that they "earned" by "paying their dues", which is only a gross euphemism for systematic hazing and, like any other scheme of deferred compensation you can't enforce, religious nuttery.

    participant-observer-observed, March 29, 2015 at 8:56 pm

    I believe that you are correct that we need to be skeptical of another Hopium-for-change delerium pipe smoke and mirrors show putting the electorate back to sleep, and that the populace must be engaged to make real change. Something must be learned from the Obama presidency on that front (Clinton 2.0 'used-car salesman,' 'go back to bed, kids, everything will be fine' talk)

    But given an engaged populace (for the sake of argument, since we don't have one), why not have Warren as bankster watch-dog too?

    Having a skeptical, watch-dog voting public and a senator both together is not to be discounted! (And throw in Alan Grayson too, for fearless watch dog track record)

    We cannot afford to wait around for 1-size fits all. Coalitions (L-R alliances in Nader-speak) have to be found to fight issue by issue, AND where they converge (War economy + Wall St together). Perhaps YOU can show E Warren where the Israeli+Saudi war economy implicates US banking and enlighten her!

    Code Name D, March 29, 2015 at 10:05 pm

    I love this place because of questions like these.

    Let me go over these one at a time for both hunkerdown and participate-observer-observed.

    1) The balance of power has shifted?

    Has it? I am curious how you might present an argument for this assertion. I certainly do not see it. (As is my point, I must admit.)

    2) The act of voting cannot discipline a system.

    I completely agree with one caveat. The act of voting ALONE can not discipline a system. Voting can only place or remove certain people from power. But the system we have now is either random (where voters can not make informed decision on who or what they are voting for) or pointless (where the all of the options presented will produce the same outcome.)

    But I suspect you would agree that a substantive political sea-change can not be legitimate if it takes place without the consent of the governed. And voting is the only formal way of registering the will of the people. At some point, you must go to the polls.

    But an election is actually one of the later stages in the process. Delegitimizing the current system is among the first steps.

    3) Why not have Warren as backster watch-dog too?

    I actually agree with you. Why not have her as a watch-dog? Now show me how she is an effective watch-dog?

    I am not calling into question the quality of Warren's intentions or even her competence. I am calling into question the soundness of her strategy, assuming that it can be argued that she actually has one.

    4) We cannot around to wait around for 1-sice fits all.

    I am going to assume you meant that we can not wait around for a singular savior. (Do correct me if I am reading that wrong.) I would agree actually. But then I wonder why it is that this seems to be our strategy most of the time, because right now there are plenty of people who are latching onto Warren for precisely this reason.

    But I have also come to suspect that change won't come from grass-roots activism either. That strategy has had more than sufficient time to show results and thus far we have very little success we can point to.

    A real push for reform will likely require something between the two, involving the participation of singular leadership as well as an active popular movement to skeptically review such ideas and act on them. It is often said that the mark of a great leader is one who inspires, calls upon, and depends on the leadership of those he pretends to lead,

    I have great difficulty imagining Warren as being that kind of leader.

    Adam Eran, March 29, 2015 at 12:54 pm

    While I'll second the notion that Warren's "victory" is pretty weak tea, I'd suggest admiring someone besides Andrew Jackson. He's the fellow responsible for the Trail of Tears genocidal Indian relocation (*after* the Georgia supreme court validated the Cherokees' title to their land in Georgia).

    For bonus points, he paid off the entire national "debt" in 1835, for which the U.S. was rewarded with the panic of 1837, the worst of its seven Great Depressions. Such Depressions follow major "debt" reductions, so the praise for the "fiscally responsible" Clintons, who ended welfare as we know it, is at least misplaced too.

    susan the other, March 29, 2015 at 1:46 pm
    The Saudis are the key. Together with the right wing Israelis, they are determined to create a war, however chronic it is, and luke-warm, to maintain control over the energy resources in the Middle East. The Gulf War has long since become an oxymoron because in siphoning off the money to perpetuate the war, the USA was impoverished. Just like the Cherokee had to be stripped of their land, the middle class became the goat. So busting up City is a red herring. Since our nation has been hollowed out by this modern imperialism, the only thing that will fix the mess is to assert national superiority over the clowns who can't quite ever end a war. Nationalize the banks. And take control of the military as if we were a democracy.
    Ulysses, March 29, 2015 at 7:57 pm

    "Nationalize the banks. And take control of the military as if we were a democracy."

    If I thought someone could actually accomplish that simple 2 step program, he or she would have my vote for POTUS in a heartbeat!!

    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 1:52 pm
    Straw man. I never said Warren scored a major victory. I said she was creating the perception that the banks were vulnerable, which is an important shift given the power they wield in DC.

    And fer Chrissakes, she's been a Senator for all of two years. Readers are comparing her to people who have had much longer careers in politics.

    susan the other, March 29, 2015 at 3:50 pm
    You are right. I confess I want her to barnstorm the whole political scene. Because I see her as a very inspired person with an understanding of the whole situation which is beyond most of us.

    And because I fear that letting it go on with small fixes, is dangerous. But then it is a dangerous world.

    Code Name D, March29, 2015 at 5:39 pm
    What point are baby-steps when you are trying to compete with corporations that have a stride that spans the globe itself? Go big, or go home.
    Code Name D, March 29, 2015 at 5:38 pm
    That is what is bothering me. She is showing the banks are venerable – when we have the argument that they are indispensable and can't fail left in tact, or worse, may actually be true at this point.

    And the "venerability" of the banks is an elusion, a honey pot that they want her to go after. It makes her waster her time while they find a way to outflank her politically. I don't think the banks are vulnerable in this way.

    She needs to undermine the authority of the banks to have power in congress before she can point out that the banks have too much power within congress.

    The average American knows intuitively that the banks are corrupt and have too much influence on congress. But they have few facts to support that intuition. When cooler heads prevail, the rational argument will currently side with the banks every time.

    Meanwhile, congress operates under the concusses that the bank's power within congress is proper and justified. The banks are what create the money supply and jobs. They are responsible for growing the economy, a task that government is ill-suited to manage even with the best of intentions. I have seen nothing from Warrant to lead me to think she is skeptical of this dynamic, let alone critical.

    The secret to propaganda resides in the truth that remains undisclosed – not in the lies that they would have you believe. The fact that we have a revolving door between the administration and the banking industry is hardly undisclosed and is actually outside the point. Even if she did manage to lock down the revolving door, ideas and "economic theory" that favor the banks is already in place and well established in academic curricula.

    What she needs to go after are the consequences of the decisions that are made and the reasoning behind those decisions. Even the deliberative process for those decisions is a proper target. Who makes those decisions is and will continue to be a red haring.

    Comparing her with more established politicians is fair game when she is repeating their mistakes and repeating their narratives.

    GuyFawkesLives, March29, 2015 at 8:44 pm
    Where were you when we were getting beaten up and maced in the streets? People successfully laughed like the banks wanted you to at Occupy Wall Street. And then once again the populace remains obedient.

    I think I need to begin building that guillotine in my front yard.

    Ulysses, March29, 2015 at 7:08 am

    "Warren has repeatedly called for prosecutions of bankers."

    I do agree that Elizabeth Warren is to be commended for her pushing back against the power of the banksters. Yet she could go much further than her vague calls for accountability of the "too big to jail" fraudsters.

    She could use her "bully pulpit" to outline specific crimes committed, by specific criminal banksters, and insist that there will be no business as usual until these named individuals are hauled into criminal court by the DOJ.

    Holding up legislation, appointments etc., is all well and good -- but we have an intensely criminogenic atmosphere today on Wall Street, and we desperately need an Elliot Ness to start putting these fraudsters behind bars!!

    DanB, March29, 2015 at 8:25 am
    Where Warren will go from here, if she's not engaging in a Machiavellian veal pen ruse, is to openly challenge and expose Obama, the Clintons and the entire DLC corrupt enterprise.

    She's my senator and when some friends and I met her in August 2011 we told her she'd one day have to face the contradiction between the real interests the Democratic Party serves -- the 1% -- and her commitment to average Americans.

    And I wish she'd knock off that "Middle class Americans" rhetoric that ignores the working poor and the dispossessed. On the other hand, maybe she's sincere and is unconsciously playing the role of "the first pancake" of -dare I still hope?- a citizens awakening to the class loyalty inspired depredations of both parties.

    Carla, March29, 2015 at 11:18 am
    "She could use her "bully pulpit" to outline specific crimes committed, by specific criminal banksters, and insist that there will be no business as usual until these named individuals are hauled into criminal court by the DOJ."

    For that matter, Senators Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders could back her up. Wouldn't kill 'em.

    Vatch, March29, 2015 at 12:07 pm
    Excellent point about Brown and Sanders, Carla. For those Naked Capitalism readers who live in Vermont or Ohio, here's their contact information:

    Brown, Sherrod – (D – OH)
    713 Hart Senate Office Building
    Washington DC 20510
    http://www.brown.senate.gov/contact/
    (202) 224-2315
    Ohio:
    Toll Free: 1-888-896-OHIO (6446) or
    Cincinnati: (513) 684-1021
    Cleveland: (216) 522-7272
    Columbus: (614) 469-2083
    Lorain: (440) 242-4100

    Sanders, Bernard – (I – VT)
    332 Dirksen Senate Office Building
    Washington DC 20510
    http://www.sanders.senate.gov/contact/
    (202) 224-5141
    (800)-339-9834 (toll-free in Vermont) or
    (802) 862-0697 (calling in the Burlington area)

    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 2:00 pm
    Are you crazy? If you want her to become irrelevant pronto and hand the banks a huge PR win, that's just the way to do it.

    Warren has no subpoena powers and all of maybe a half a dozen staffers. She'd be accused of shooting from the hip, just making stuff up to raise money and get headlines, when Federal prosecutors and regulators, who have vastly more access to what really happened at the banks investigated for years and found virtually nothing criminal (the little they have involves money laundering).

    She'd become the new Joe McCarthy, circa July 1954.

    Code Name D, March29, 2015 at 5:49 pm
    Irrelevant in what regard? To the banks and politicians that they bought off perhaps. If she tried to take these accusations to a court of law, you might be right.

    But the court of public opinion is a different theater. Here she doesn't have to bring chargers; all she really needs to do is demand answers to hard questions. It will be the justification the bank apologists that will do them in because they will completely believe the bat-crazy excuses they throw out. When they back-fire, they will change there tune with a completely new theory that will still not answer the original question yet still be crazier than the first.

    Ulysses, March29, 2015 at 8:09 pm

    "When Federal prosecutors and regulators, who have vastly more access to what really happened at the banks investigated for years and found virtually nothing criminal (the little they have involves money laundering)."

    And these prosecutors and regulators are honest??!??

    So you have just been pulling our leg all these years when you have written, again and again, that these banksters have committed all sorts of control fraud and other crimes? Now your tune has changed to "nothing to see here, move along, don't make waves??!!" Please say it ain't so!!

    jonboinAR, March29, 2015 at 8:45 pm
    Yeah, that didn't quite make sense to me either. The message I have been getting from Yves for these several years has been that the regulators and government attorneys had never found anything prosecutable because they weren't really interested in doing so. The reply above sounds like a changing of that tune to that there may be nothing illegal to find. If so, this would support Obama's statement of several years ago to the same effect, which statement was roundly jeered by frequenters of this board and many others. But the Yves' reply is probably just slightly carelessly worded, or I'm not understanding something.
    participant-observer-observed, March29, 2015 at 9:18 pm
    Go back and read Bill Black's past years' of comments comparing GFC to S&L investigations, prosecutions, and convictions.

    I recall that one significant factor is lack of prosecutor numbers. Don't you remember the White House calling all of the state AGs down to trade in their pitchforks for apple pie crumbs from the WH linens? (Go back and read Harris or Schneiderman from 5 years ago vs now)

    Warren's prospects re Wall St regulation are a matter of pragmatism and realism. Her work is a necessary but insufficient condition! She seems to understand her limitations and to make best use of what resources she has.

    JS Bach, March29, 2015 at 8:27 am
    Until we elect a President who will appoint a US Attorney General who will prosecute criminal conduct by Wall Street, nothing will change. Neither Holder nor Loretta Lynch have pursued criminal prosecutions; fines by Wall Street are simply considered a cost of doing business passed along to the shareholders in the form of a temporary "hit" to the stock price.
    roadrider, March29, 2015 at 8:56 am
    If the Dim-o-craps had any integrity they would have told the banksters to stick their campaign contributions where the sun doesn't shine a long time ago.

    But, of course, they won't.

    BudinPA, March29, 2015 at 8:56 am
    Please tell me, who could have removed the push-out amendment from the CR bill before the vote but didn't.
    craazyboy, March29, 2015 at 9:02 am
    Time is money. It's the age of ZIRP. Politicians get ZIRP for their time-money.

    We must all tighten our belts for the good of the banking system.

    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 2:03 pm
    IIRC, only five Senators voted against cloture, which was the vote that mattered. The threat was Warren filibustering a must-pass bill, so holding it up would have been a big deal.
    Henry Carraro, March 29, 2015 at 9:59 am
    Bless her heart. Elizabeth Warren makes a hell of case, but all of this is smoke and mirrors. Bailing out the banks again the next time will be impossible.

    The total U.S.A. debt is about 18 trillion dollars. But when you roll in unfunded liabilities like for example the one trillion in unfunded military retirement benefits for generals who can retire with 30% more annual income than the earned while on active duty.

    The Federal Reserve hiding trillions and trillions of fictitious bond sales to no one. Paying governments to buy worthless paper. There is over 75 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. Yeah with a capital "T".

    But wait there is more.

    Last count there is nearly 625 trillion dollars in derivatives that are totally unfunded. Say what? The biggest banks are leveraged beyond my ability to fathom what could happen in case of a default. We the tax payers are liable to clean up this mess too. My question is how? And with what?

    The question I leave you with is how can the U.S.A. be responsible for nearly 800 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. How did we allow this to happen?

    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 1:46 pm
    *Sigh*

    The derivatives number is notional, and not the economic value. And of the global banks that are major derivatives players, only about 1/3 are American. Most of that number is really plain vanilla stuff like interest rate swaps. It also includes huge markets that are exchange traded, like Treasury futures and S&P futures, which are not risks to the banks at all. If you want to worry, worry about the economic risk of credit default swaps or OTC energy derivatives.

    The US will never go bankrupt. It can create too much inflation. The banks most assuredly will be bailed out. Remember, the TARP made money!

    JEHR, March29, 2015 at 10:05 am
    The story noted that the amount at issue was only $15,000 per bank, so this scheme is more a warning shot that [sic] a serious move, particularly since it is aimed at the Senate, and thus pointedly steers clear of the Big Finance stalwarts, the Clintons.
    Expat, March29, 2015 at 11:44 am
    Warren is not a threat. She is the token populist. Obama can point to her to show how his administration and party are tough on banks. The banks can use her as their bogeyman and garner sympathy. The right can use her as a lightning rod and avoid having to address the issues.

    In short, Warren is perfect. The rest, however….

    TimmyB, March29, 2015 at 12:15 pm
    It is much too early to proclaim that Warren is "the token populist." If more populist candidates get elected, and/or more elected officials embrace populism, Warren will never be a token. If she keeps up the fight, even if she is not joined by additional elected populists, she will still retain the power of her "bully pulpit" to shine a light on Wall Street wrongdoing. To become a token populist, she will need to shut her mouth and go along with the rest of the corporate Democrats. Frankly, I don't see that happening.

    While Obama might be able to point out to the public that Warren is a fighting

    TimmyB, March29, 2015 at 12:34 pm
    While Obama might be able to point out to the public that Warren is a fighting Democrat, to the people who really rule this country, the big money doners, pointing to Warren doesn't help at all. As this article highlights, Wall Street wants Warren neutered. If she were merely a token populist, instead of a real threat, Wall Street would have no need to neuter her. Token populists come already neutered.
    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 2:08 pm
    Warren stymied the Administration on Antonio Weiss, and they pulled out all stops to try to get him, including repeated articles attacking Warren in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street journal. She won a real David v. Goliath fight. And she and two other Senators stopped the Administration privately from another bank-boosting move that would have hurt large swathes of homeowners. I'm not at liberty to say more. But if I heard of one incident where a private talking-to stopped the Administration, there may be others. And more to the point, the fact that a mere tea and cookies conversation would make the Administration back down says they fear and respect her, and want to take her on only when they are confident they will win.

    I see her as systematically taking on bigger and bigger targets, demonstrating that she can do damage and moving up to bigger and more important issues.

    OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL, March29, 2015 at 6:04 pm
    Yves I always appreciate it when you chime in. Yes Bryan didn't accomplish much. Yes A. Jackson genocided some folks (to use a current idiom). But we are very far from the point when tiny incremental wins like Antonio Weiss can make any difference at all, we are at the "hair-on-fire" stage across the board and need some true firebrands not just to speak truth to power but to inflame, enrage, inspire, and overthrow. Our Constitution says it is our right and indeed our duty to overthrow tyranny…and that's what this is by any definition of the term. The entire relationship between the citizen and the state is completely screwed up, we don't need to tinker, we need to reboot. I would call America in 1969 a reboot: we stopped a war, we threw out a crook president, and we completely changed the society. We can do it again…and boy do we need to.
    jonboinAR, March29, 2015 at 9:02 pm
    Warren doesn't appear so far to be the firebrand type. Will it be enough for her to be dogged and incorruptible? As Yves seems to be suggesting, biting off a little at a time, but ina relentless fashion?
    Felix_47, March29, 2015 at 11:56 am
    The Saudis and the Israelis figured out how cheap our politicians are long ago. I would love someone to investigate just how much mid east money was involved in the Citigroup meltdown and how much was saved for them. I suppose the bigger fees have to go to the conduits of these funds…..the Harvard/Yale lobbyist lawyers….who make money both ways. If one wants to know how the USG is going to do something simply figure out the course that would benefit Israeli and Saudi billionaires.
    DJG, March29, 2015 at 12:18 pm
    "The Administration (remember that Obama is still very much the party leader) again got too clever by half." I recall reading an article that Obama originally favored breaking up Citi, but somehow, Tim Geithner ignored his wishes. This seems to be a self-exonerating story, too clever by half indeed. Poor Obama, all tactics, no strategy. That applies to the article posted today about TPP as well.
    Blurtman, March29, 2015 at 1:34 pm
    President Obama stated on the Leno show, a few months into his first term, having conducted absolutely no investigations, that the banks had committed no crimes. He is merely a tool.
    DJG, March29, 2015 at 12:20 pm
    "Rubino crime family"? Talk about too clever by half. "Rubin crime family" will do. Rectification of names. There is no ethnic propensity toward crime. (And as always these are the sort of stray data and little Rubino lapses that make me wonder what people are talking about when they talk "identity politics.")
    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 2:12 pm
    Wow, are we being precious. The Mafia has a distinctive style of how it runs its crime operations. That's why we had a whole series of Godfather movies, and lots of other about treatments in novels and movies.
    Fool, March29, 2015 at 3:08 pm
    Yeah but let's face it: the Jewish financiers* are better than the Italian Mafia at this game. Consider this twee leverage-and-loot operation; good strategy but just a few billion short of the kind of leveraged buyout that would make it onto Dealbook. The Mafia's style isn't so distinctive - I believe Bill Moyers drew the comparison between financial advisory of IRA's' to protection rackets.

    The truth is, facetious Italian suffixes are socially acceptable. And yet, had you written the "Rubinowitz crime family", by Monday morning David Brooks would place you on the neo-Nazi watchlist.

    *Jewish guy, so acceptable user of the term "Jewish financiers"

    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 3:48 pm
    Oh, I dunno. The scene in The Departed where Jack Nicholson crushes Leonardo DiCaprio's hand and then throws cash at him to get it fixed is memorable. And it echoes Scorsese's scene in the Godfather where Sonny smashed a photographer's camera and then throws money on the ground.
    DJG, March29, 2015 at 4:02 pm
    Ahh, it's a witticism based on the mob's management style. Maybe you should have cited "Bob 'Meyer Lansky' Rubin."
    timbers, March29, 2015 at 2:11 pm
    Milton Friedman said a shift in intellectual view from one policy mostly universally accepted as "correct" towards another policy takes decades and happens slowly, but once it takes hold it becomes powerful. He notes the Socialist Party in America was the most influential party not because it held office but because other parties in power adopted a good part of it's program, because that was the dominate view of intellectuals of the time.

    So Liz might be the early signs of that shift taking place now, and not just a Democratic Hood Ornament.

    If she is, the bad news we will all be dead in the long run before any of us derive much if any benefit from this shit. Which brings us to John Keynes.

    Chauncey Gardiner, March29, 2015 at 2:42 pm
    Thank you for the clip of Senator Warren's speech and your related article. It is outrageous that Citigroup's lobbyists slipped that provision into the Omnibus "Must Pass" spending bill at the last minute misleadingly titled "Prohibition Against Federal Government Bailouts of Swaps Entities" that once again puts the American people on the hook for bailing out the biggest banks on their speculative derivatives trades.

    Senator Warren's observations about Citigroup's grip over monetary and economic policy through their extensive network of former executives in the Executive branch of the U.S. government was enlightening to me. The amounts they have spent on lobbying, and the funds they have diverted to think tanks to influence public policy is particularly galling in light of the fact that Citigroup received over half a trillion dollars in bailout money under TARP, FDIC and the Fed. It is noteworthy that their constant lobbying pressure to pass legal loopholes has disappeared off the corporate media's radar screens along with all the other accounting, legal and regulatory forbearances, waivers, and the hidden subsidies and transfers of wealth to them over the past seven years. When does the statute of limitations expire on fraud?

    I agree with Senator Warren regarding the need to pass the Brown-Kaufman amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act. It is clear that they have too much concentrated political power. That Citi and the other TBTFs are holding the entire country hostage is simply unacceptable.

    Fool, March29, 2015 at 2:54 pm
    I don't really understand the conflation of Obama with the Democrat "base" of limousine liberals. The limousine liberals hate Obama. For all you know, he's played a part in empowering Warren's ascent.
    Yves Smith, March29, 2015 at 3:55 pm
    Huh? Obama's New York City fundraiser have all been at the homes of private equity firm partners, the epitome of limousine liberals.
    Fool, March29, 2015 at 8:05 pm
    I grew up at the very core of limousine liberalism - and, if I were to guess, among the highest concentration of private equity firm partners' homes - and in my experience the dissatisfaction with Obama is almost unanimous (among people who voted for him). It's ironic that you would use his ties to the PE industry as an example: in theory, they should love him!…given how cheap credit is - for them to buy - and how high the public market is - for them to sell. But again, my impression is otherwise…

    What I find more interesting though is the vague terms with which this sentiment among the limousine liberal class is articulated, e.g. "he does nothing," "he let me down," and so forth. So the right we know hates him, the neoliberals don't like him, and NC's linkfeed - which I arrive at daily - indicates to me that the left doesn't like him as well. It wouldn't be so strange if he wasn't doing an OK job, at least in superficial terms (buoyant stock market, reduced unemployment, etc.).

    Perhaps come 2016 -- we'll have better perspective on his legacy. In any case, the ubiquitous dissatisfaction with Obama is odd, if unprecedented (indeed, at least the Carter administration was quantifiably bad). Personally, I have no read on Obama; put differently, where his ideological motives lie. However, I do think that for the President of the United States, in 2015, a transparently leftist agenda (gov't spending, progressive tax reform, etc.) would preclude the ability to get anything done. The tragedy of politics, in my view, is the paradox in which a politician cannot genuinely serve the people's interests and achieve them while at the same time acquire the accolades for having done so. That is to say: she cannot remain a politician! For that reason, I'm not quite as ready as you are to so definitively write Obama off as a neoliberal tool.

    Ned Ludd, March29, 2015 at 7:35 pm
    Money Chooses Sides

    In a barn-burning, record-smashing fund-raising campaign season, Barack Obama tapped a new breed of Manhattan donors and won the expectations game.

    - By John Heilemann, Published Oct 24, 2007, in New York

    pelham, March29, 2015 at 3:55 pm
    The fact that a bank would come out - publicly - and threaten to refrain from bribing Democratic senators suggests that it believes (perhaps correctly) that our mainstream political culture is so far gone that it's literally safe and acceptable to make such an admission. Even worse, Citi apparently thinks that the public will go a big step further and sympathize with it. Maybe Citi believes that the absence of its contribution to a Senate campaign will raise questions in the public mind, that the broad public will think that if a big, prestigious institution like Citi is holding back on a donation, then maybe the candidate and the party are a little sketchy after all. Better to stick with Citi-approved Republicans.

    On the face of it, it appears Citi's announcement is an own goal. But it's hard to believe they didn't do some focus groups on this.

    But to respond effectively, every Dem and his or her dog should be howling WE DON'T WANT YOUR STINKIN' MONEY - not just Elizabeth Warren. Where's the indignation?

    hunkerdown, March29, 2015 at 7:03 pm
    "Your money's no good here" is the antithesis of neoliberalism, i.e. the modern Democratic Party.

    Remember, some Black people couldn't dine out over a half century ago because of the concept that everything isn't for sale to everyone, therefore, those who have money now should be able to buy their way into anything. Perfectly logical!

    thom, March29, 2015 at 4:47 pm
    Pure fascism - the merger of corporation and state (Mussolini) is not good enough for Citi and the Rubino Crime Syndicate.

    They have 96, 97 of the 100 Senators, and all but three or four House members and the Fed and Treasury and the Supreme Court but that is Just Not Enough. They gotta have it all.

    They just gotta have it all.

    Pure fascism strikes any form of dissonance let alone dissent, wipes it out, exterminates it. That is why there are no more than three or four independent-minded, critically thinking, non-ideological US senators.

    Authentic democracy would require more. Ten or 15? Maybe 34? It is too bad that Congressman Paul is no longer Congressman Paul.

    Democracy should rule capitalism but capitalism should NEVER rule democracy.

    hunkerdown, March29, 2015 at 7:41 pm
    With due respect, you're fighting about five wars ago. Authentic democracy, by definition, requires that *final* say lay in the hands of the people. If in some system the people en masse are not the final deciders, then you, sir or madam, are committing violence against democracy itself by equating Potemkin popular suffrage with the ability to produce facts on the ground. Authentic democracy requires that the three branches of government be *subordinate* to the people; mere accountability has been proven ineffective when a single six-year term, sold to the right people, more than pays for any losses or embarrassment from the plebes who no longer provide you with any utility (watch Sen. Reid on trade promotion authority to see this in action). It's such an infantilizing conceit that choosing one's sovereign master by committee is *self-rule* in any meaningful fashion that I'm surprised people still want to be seen falling for it.

    What's more, you should consider tokenism, classical conditioning and diminishing returns in your analysis. Tokenism is more or less a dishonest signal on the part of a group of approval or participation of some selected out-group. Classical conditioning finds that intermittent reward is more effective in conditioning the desired response to a stimulus than predictable reward or non-reward. In light of those, just what advantage would *being seen* owning the lot be? The engine that starts, lopes and shudders to a halt is more "fixable", and thus subjectively more worthy of time, effort and attention, than the one that won't even turn over. Thus, they are best served by a system that delivers the outcomes that suit their interests and pretends to respond to the efforts and interests of others while doing so in fact to the minimum extent possible. Hence the portrayal of a functioning representative government via distractions such as the culture war and affiliated kayfabe.

    Finally, we should be able to read our labels for meaning and not just slap Mr. Yuk on everything. Roger Griffin's three traits of fascism: "(i) the rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism and (iii) the myth of decadence". Liberalism seems to negate all three of those traits: an evangelical myth that merely uttering the (for those properly indoctrinated) "self-evidently" correct answer will unlock and coalesce stunted potentials, more flowering than rebirth; anti-populist (i.e. anti-democratic) globalism under the public-private partnership; and the broad veneration of carefully circumscribed deviance (not dissent!) from tradition for its own sake. The "managed" mob rule of the creative class might arguably count as a form of faux-populist ultranationalism, but I'm not nearly convinced yet.

    Ulysses, March29, 2015 at 8:27 pm
    "Potemkin popular suffrage"

    I think I'll have to start using that!!

    Our world is fast becoming one big Potemkin village!
    http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/06/03/uk-irish-g8-fakeshops-idUKBRE9520Z520130603

    Chris Grimley, March29, 2015 at 10:03 pm
    Actually, Bryan was worse than that. For becoming Secretary of State he sold out to the banker interests promoting Woodrow Wilson. The banker interests also provided the money for Roosevelt against Taft (who was against a Federal Reserve) to split the Republican vote. This put their puppet, Wilson, into the White House under the careful tutelage of banker Colonel House.

    I suspect the Secretary of State position was also a sop to Hillary Clinton for being gentle with Obama

    [Jan 11, 2015] Links for 01-11-15

    Economist's View

    Fred C. Dobbs

    Kicking Dodd-Frank in the Teeth http://nyti.ms/1yPrNa2
    NYT - Gretchen Morgenson - Jan 11

    The 114th Congress has been at work for less than a week, but a goal for many of its members is already evident: a further rollback of regulations put in place to keep markets and Main Street safe from reckless Wall Street practices.

    The attack began with a bill that narrowly failed in a fast-track vote on Wednesday in the House of Representatives. It is scheduled to come up again in the House this week.

    The bill, introduced by Representative Michael Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, has three troublesome elements. First, it would let large banks hold on to certain risky securities until 2019, two years longer than currently allowed. It would also prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission from regulating private equity firms that conduct some securities transactions. And, finally, the bill would make derivatives trading less transparent, allowing unseen risks to build up in the system.

    Of course, you wouldn't know any of this from the name of the bill: the Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act (#). Or from the mild claim that the bill was intended only "to make technical corrections" to the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010.

    Here's the game plan for lawmakers eager to relax the nation's already accommodating financial regulations: First, seize on complex and esoteric financial activities that few understand. Then, make supposedly minor tweaks to their governing regulations that actually wind up gutting them.

    "We're going to see repeated attempts to go in with seemingly technical changes that intimidate regulators and keep them from putting teeth in regulations," predicted Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition of more than 200 consumer and civic groups across the country. "If we return to the precrisis business as usual, where it's routine for people to accommodate Wall Street on these technical changes, they're just going to unravel the postcrisis regulation piece by piece. Then, we'll be right back where we started." ...

    #- http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20150105/MWB_600_xml.pdf

    [Jan 07, 2015] The Republican Strategy To Repeal Dodd-Frank by Simon Johnson

    January 7, 2015 | The Baseline Scenario | 32 Comments

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 12:43 am

    Russian Roulette: Taxpayers Could Be on the Hook for Trillions in Oil Derivatives

    Posted on December 19, 2014 by Ellen Brown

    [excerpt]

    "The sudden dramatic collapse in the price of oil appears to be an act of geopolitical warfare against Russia. The result could be trillions of dollars in oil derivative losses; and depositors and taxpayers could be liable, following repeal of key portions of the Dodd-Frank Act signed into law on December 16th.

    On December 11th, Senator Elizabeth Warren charged Citigroup with "holding government funding hostage to ram through its government bailout provision." At issue was a section in the omnibus budget bill repealing the Lincoln Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act, which protected depositor funds by requiring the largest banks to push out a portion of their derivatives business into non-FDIC-insured subsidiaries.

    Warren and Representative Maxine Waters came close to killing the spending bill because of this provision. But the tide turned, according to Waters, when not only Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, but President Obama himself lobbied lawmakers to vote for the bill.

    It was not only a notable about-face for the president but represented an apparent shift in position for the banks. Before Jamie Dimon intervened, it had been reported that the bailout provision was not a big deal for the banks and that they were not lobbying heavily for it, because it covered only a small portion of their derivatives. As explained in Time:"

    http://ellenbrown.com/2014/12/19/russian-roulette-taxpayers-could-be-on-the-hook-for-trillions-in-oil-derivatives/

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 12:49 am

    Jamie Dimon Got What He Wanted in the US Budget

    "It may well be that the head of JPMorgan Chase, the President's personal banker, wanted his losses covered and that's what he got when the budget was passed. Jamie Dimon got the public to pay again." http://www.w-t-w.org/en/23098/
    Posted on December 28, 2014 by Frederica Stein

    "Under Dodd Frank, FDIC-insured banks were not allowed to put depositor funds at risk for their bets on derivatives, with certain broad exceptions. At FDIC insured banks, interest rate, currency, gold/silver, credit derivatives referencing investment-grade securities, and hedges werepermissible activities within an insured depositary institution. Those not permitted included "equity, some credit and most commodity derivatives."

    A fraction, but a critical fraction, as it included the banks' bets on commodities. Five percent of $280 trillion is $14 trillion in derivatives exposure – close to the size of the existing federal debt. $3.9 trillion of this speculation is on the price of commodities.

    Among the banks' most important commodities bets are oil derivatives.

    …The drop in the price of oil by over $50 a barrel was completely unanticipated and outside the predictions covered by the banks' computer models. The drop could cost the big banks trillions of dollars in losses. And with the repeal of the Lincoln Amendment, taxpayers could be picking up the bill."

    http://www.w-t-w.org/en/23098/

    Posted on December 28, 2014 by Frederica Stein

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 12:53 am

    Presenting The $303 Trillion In Derivatives That US Taxpayers Are Now On The Hook For

    Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/13/2014 00:52 -0400

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-12/presenting-303-trillion-derivatives-us-taxpayers-are-now-hook

    "Courtesy of the Cronybus(sic) last minute passage, government was provided a quid-pro-quo $1.1 trillion spending allowance with Wall Street's blessing in exchange for assuring banks that taxpayers would be on the hook for yet another bailout, as a result of the swaps push-out provision, after incorporating explicit Citigroup language that allows financial institutions to trade certain financial derivatives from subsidiaries that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, explicitly putting taxpayers on the hook for losses caused by these contracts."

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 1:01 am

    by Karolina (courtesy of Thom Hartmann Program)
    Dec. 13, 2014 12:40 pm
    "Obama's and Wall Street's treason was brought home on Dec. 11, when JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, Barack Obama, and GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner joined hands to "whip" the omnibus spending bill (which they dubbed "cromnibus") through the Congress with its poison pill that bails out Wall Street's credit swaps derivatives by repealing the only "fig leaf" of Dodd Frank-Section 716 (which had been put in in 2010 by then Sen. Blanche Lincoln [d-ar]). The bill passed at about 9:45 PM on Dec. 11, only after Boehner had shut down the House for a 7-hour recess because he and Obama and Wall Street did not have the votes to pass the $1.1 trillion spending bill."
    --------------------------
    Thom Hartmann Program:

    http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2014/12/obama-and-jamie-dimon-team-whip-swap-derivatives-poisoned-appropriations-bill-democrat

    -------------------------–
    Also (courtesy of Thom Hartmann Program
    Quote LPAC:
    Elizabeth Warren: "The American People
    Did Not Elect Us To Stand Up for Citigroup."
    Saturday, December 13, 2014
    Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivered an eight-minute speech on the floor of the Senate on Dec. 10, urging the House, and especially its Democratic members, to refuse to vote for the budget deal until its provision guaranteeing government support for financial derivatives were repealed. She posted the video of her remarks to her Senate webpage, and urged people to share it with their friends "right now." The transcript of those remarks, slightly shortened, follows:

    Mr. President, I come to the floor today to ask a fundamental question: Who does Congress work for? Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers? Or does it work for all of us?

    …And now the House of Representatives is about to show us the worst of government for the rich and powerful. The House is about to vote on a budget deal - a deal negotiated behind closed doors that slips in a provision that would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.

    These are the same banks that nearly broke this economy in 2008 and destroyed millions of jobs. The same banks that got bailed out by taxpayers and are now raking in record profits. The same banks that are spending a whole lot of time and money trying to influence Congress to bend the rules in their favor.

    You will hear a lot of folks say that the rule that will be repealed in the Omnibus is technical and complicated, and that you shouldn't worry about it because smart people who know more than you about financial issues say that it's no big deal. Don't believe them.

    Actually, the rule is pretty simple. Here's what it's called - the rule that the House is about to repeal - and I'm quoting from the text of Dodd-Frank: "PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS OF SWAPS ENTITIES." What does it do? The provision that's about to be repealed requires banks to keep separate a key part of their risky Wall Street speculation so that there's no government insurance for that part of their business….

    We put this rule in place after the collapse of the financial system because we wanted to reduce the risk that reckless gambling on Wall Street could ever again threaten jobs and livelihoods on Main Street. We put this rule in place because people of all political persuasions were disgusted at the prospects of future bailouts. And now, no debate, no discussion, Republicans in the House of Representatives are threatening to shut down the government if they don't get a chance to repeal it.

    …Wall Street spends a lot of time and money on Congress. Public Citizen and the Center for Responsive Politics found that in the run-up to Dodd-Frank, the financial services sector employed 1,447 former federal employees to carry out their lobbying efforts - including 73 former Members of Congress. And according to a report by the Institute for America's Future, by 2010, the six biggest banks and their trade associations employed 243 lobbyists who once worked in the federal government, including 33 who had worked as chiefs of staff for members of Congress and 54 who had worked as staffers for the banking oversight committees in the Senate and the House. That's a lot of former government employees - and senators and Congressmen - pounding on Congress to make sure the big banks get heard. No surprise that the financial industry spent more than $1 million a day lobbying Congress on financial reform….

    And now we see the fruits of those investments…. According to documents reviewed by the New York Times, the original bill that is being incorporated into the House's spending legislation today was literally written by Citigroup lobbyists, who "redrafted" the legislation, "striking out certain phrases and inserting others."

    It's been opposed by current and former leaders of the FDIC, including Sheila Bair - a Republican who formerly chaired the agency, and Thomas Hoenig, the current vice-chairman of the agency. For those who are keeping score, this is the agency that will be responsible for bailing out Wall Street when their risky bets go sour….

    But this provision goes too far. Citigroup is large, and it is powerful. But it is a single, private company. It shouldn't get to hold the entire government hostage - to threaten a government shutdown - in order to roll back important protections that keep our economy safe. This is a democracy, and the American people didn't elect us to stand up for Citigroup. They elected us to stand up for all of the people.

    I urge my colleagues in the House - particularly my Democratic colleagues, whose votes are essential to moving this package forward - to withhold support from it until this risky giveaway is removed from the legislation. We all need to stand and fight this giveaway to the most powerful banks in the country.

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 1:18 am

    The Insidious persistence of conspicuous consumption…and ….megalomaniacs in action…

    --------------------------

    "After Dodd-Frank's passage, lobbyists for the big banks and industry trade groups divided themselves into eighteen working groups, each organized around a different element of the new law. "That's when the real work began," Talbott tells me. One working group focused on derivatives reform, including the requirement that these complex financial instruments now be sold on open exchanges in the fashion of stocks and bonds. Another focused on efforts to hammer out the so-called Volcker Rule, which would limit the ability of federally insured banks to wager on risky ventures. A third tackled the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created to protect ordinary consumers from Wall Street deceptions involving mortgages, credit cards and other major profit centers for the banks."

    http://www.thenation.com/article/174113/how-wall-street-defanged-dodd-frank

    How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank
    Battalions of regulatory lawyers burrowed deep in the federal bureaucracy to foil reform .
    Gary Rivlin April 30, 2013

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 1:27 am

    A Window Into Washington in an Effort to Undo a Dodd-Frank Rule
    By Jonathan Weisman
    December 15, 2014
    "The "push out" provision reversed a piece of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that prohibited banks from trading some of their most exotic financial instruments in units covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Reserve. The idea was to make sure trades in derivatives, credit-default swaps and other instruments that helped spur the financial crisis of 2008 would not be insured by taxpayers if they went bad.
    The nation's biggest banks have been trying to reverse the provision ever since. A stand-alone bill to repeal the measure was drafted nearly word for word by Citigroup."
    "….How Representative Kevin Yoder's "push out" provision survived is not, as many have suggested, a tale of dark favors done in back rooms at the last minute. Instead, it is how powerful lobbies work their will, slowly, persistently, bit by bit - in other words, how Washington works." http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/in-push-out-provision-example-of-how-congress-does-its-job/

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 1:33 am

    by Robert Lenzner

    "I'm trying to wise up 300 million people about money & finance"

    "Wall Street banks like Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase have flexed the power of their influence to pressure Congress and the White House into a key change in the law that will allow the trading of risky financial derivatives in bank operations that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

    This means the nation's largest banks used the deadline for passing the Omnibus spending bill as pressure to reverse a key section of the Dodd-Frank bill of 2010 that was meant to prohibit a federal government bailout of swaps entities."

    12/13/2014 @ 12:35PM
    A Christmas Present For The Banks From The Omnibus Bill

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2014/12/13/wall-street-reverses-ban-on-trading-derivatives-backed-by-uncle-sam/

    Bruce E. Woych | January 8, 2015 at 1:36 am

    "Warren, the prominent liberal bank critic, said on the Senate floor that House Republicans were threatening to shut down the government if they didn't get a chance to repeal part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law."

    http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/warren-tells-democrats-to-oppose-spending-bill-over-dodd-frank-change/article/2557211

    [Dec 27, 2014] Don't Repeal Swaps Push-Out Requirements (Section 716 of Dodd-Frank) by Simon Johnson

    May be this is a need to cover oil derivatives ?
    Dec 10, 2014 | baselinescenario.com
    Posted on December 10, 2014 | 12 Comments

    By Simon Johnson

    Section 716 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act requires that some derivative transactions be "pushed-out" from those part of banks that have deposit insurance (run by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and other forms of backstop (provided by the Federal Reserve). This is a sensible provision that, if properly implemented, would help keep our financial system safer, protect taxpayers and reduce the likely need for bailouts.

    Now, at the behest of the biggest Too Big To Fail banks and as part of the House's spending bill (to be voted on tomorrow or in coming days), this "push out" requirement is on the verge of being repealed. Democrats and Republicans should refuse to vote for the spending bill as long as it contains this requirement.

    This is not a left vs. right issue. It is a fundamental systemic risk issue, on which people across the political spectrum who want to lower those risks can agree – Section 716 should not be repealed. In fact, some of the sharpest voices on this issue come from the right.

    In a statement on Tuesday, Thomas Hoenig, appointed by the Republicans to be Vice Chair of the FDIC, said:

    "In 2008 we learned the economic consequences of conducting derivatives trading in taxpayer-insured banks. Section 716 of Dodd-Frank is an important step in pushing the trading activity out to where it should be conducted: in the open market, outside of taxpayer-backed commercial banks. It is illogical to repeal the 716 push out requirement."

    And on Tuesday evening, Senator David Vitter (R., Louisiana) put the issue in its proper broader context,

    "Ending too big to fail is far from over. Before Congress starts handing out Christmas presents to the megabanks and Wall Street – we need to be smart about this. Removing these risky derivatives that aren't even necessary for normal banking purposes is important, and Members of Congress need to rethink repealing this critical provision."

    The effort to repeal Section 716 comes primarily from the largest banks (and some say from Citigroup), who claim that these restrictions are somehow onerous or unreasonable. These arguments have no merit.

    Under Section 716, interest rate swaps, foreign exchange derivatives, and cleared credit derivatives can remain on the balance sheet of the insured bank. This is almost all derivatives. And hedging of risks by banks using derivatives is most definitely allowed.

    The push out applies most notably to uncleared credit default swaps (CDS), equity derivatives, and commodity derivatives. (See Tom Hoenig's statement for a succinct and precise statement of the issues.)

    The point of the push out is to get these potentially high risk swaps away from the insured part of the bank – and away from the explicit backstop provided by deposit insurance (and ultimately by the taxpayer).

    The big banks (such as JP Morgan Chase and Citi) are actually a complex collection of separate companies – only one of which is typically an insured bank. That insured bank is regarded as a better credit (i.e., lower risk) by people in the market precisely because of the federal government-run deposit insurance. Like all better credits, those banks get to borrow at lower costs.

    If these swaps are pushed out from the insured part of the bank, these speculative derivative positions will be priced by the market based on their actual risk – not mispriced due to the backing of taxpayers. Thus the derivative activities of these four banks, conducted by their uninsured subsidiaries, will become more expensive to fund.

    Really this is just taking the state out of subsidizing some of these particularly high risk derivatives. That would be no more than reintroducing the market and market pricing of credit risk.

    The four largest banks (according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, OCC) conduct more than 93% of all derivatives activities in the US. (That is using "total banking industry notional amounts"; if you prefer net current credit exposure, NCCE, the same banks are 82% of the industry.) The repeal of section 716 is for them.

    Remember when JP Morgan Chase lost more than $7 billion in its so-called "London Whale" trade? That was a high risk, highly leveraged proprietary bet involving complex Credit Default Swap indices. And JP Morgan Chase's bet, which reportedly had a notional value of more than $1 trillion, was funded in part with insured deposits. (Publicly available information indicates that JP Morgan Chase – just like Citigroup – has the vast majority of its derivatives activities run out of the insured bank.)

    So the vote this week is simple. Democrats and Republicans should vote to, at least partially, bring back the market forces – by rejecting the repeal of Section 716. End state subsidies for these megabanks' derivatives activities.

    This is not what Citigroup, JP Morgan, Bank of America, or Goldman Sachs wants, of course. They want government insurance and their derivatives dealing to be subsidized by taxpayers, on the most favorable terms possible: it lowers their costs and increases their profits. As a result, Too Big To Fail banks' executives and traders get the upside when things go well; and when things go badly, the downside is someone else's problem.

    Or, as Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets puts it,

    "If Wall Street gets the upside in big bonuses from its high-risk derivatives deals, then it should also have to pay the downside for any losses."

    Remember that Citi's lobbyists and their colleagues worked long and hard during the 1990s to relax all meaningful limits on their ability to take big risks. And the firm subsequently hired top Clinton-era officials to guide their economic and political strategy in the 2000s. This ended very badly – with the near-failure of Citigroup, multiple taxpayer bailouts, and a deep recession from which, six years later, we have not yet fully emerged. Citigroup was at the epicenter of what went wrong on Wall Street in 2007-08 and received more bailouts than any other single institution, almost $500 billion.

    In the 1990s there was a Citigroup-inspired consensus in favor of deregulation. That legislative push proved to be a mistake, but at least it was done in the open. Now similar forms of deregulation – encouraging excessive risk-taking – are being pursued through back-room deals, with no hearings, and no debate.

    To start again down the same path – and at the instigation of the same set of banks – is pure folly.

    And to do it through this underhand process shows you that the big banks have no intellectual arguments left on their side. All they have to offer now is the prospect of large campaign contributions.

    Per Kurowski | December 11, 2014 at 10:52 pm

    Anonymouse writes: "Per nothing should be rated AAA unless it can live a thousand years, where it all went bad is anyone guess"

    Forget it! It was clear what was going to happen when regulators decided that the capital (equity) requirements for banks were to be based on credit ratings.

    In January 2003, more than one year before Basel II was approved, in a letter in the Financial Times I wrote "Everyone knows that, sooner or later, the ratings issued by the credit agencies are just a new breed of systemic error to be propagated at modern speeds"

    The problem was though that although everyone knew, or should have known… few really cared.

    tonyforesta | December 12, 2014 at 2:42 am

    Sad, but predictable. Mr. Johnson's deep and well resourced admonition of this "underhanded", and blatant giveaway to the four major TBTF oligarchs, was ignored by our socalled politicians, who despicably – yet again, – acted against and contrary to the peoples best interests, and instead advanced and protected the best interests of the predatorclass and predatorclass oligarchs they obediently worship and serve.

    Unspoken in this tragic episode by the paid spaniels and parrots of the socalled MSM is the why? Why would shaitans in the gop underhandedly sneak this pernicious giveaway to the predatorclass, and predatorclass oligarchs and basically extort this perfidy into the strange and aptly named "cromnibus" appropriations bill. Words like extortion, collusion, profiteering are never mentioned. All parties are painted and pretty lights and nice language, insipidly ignoring and excusing the horror of this action, and the nefarious purposes behind it's implementation. .

    Forgive me for using this tragedy for commentary on a much larger, though perhaps off topic admonition. Amerika is the great satan. The people have no voice in the conduct of socalled government.

    Said government is owned, controlled, and obedient to the interests and individuals of the predatorclass, and predatorclass oligarchs alone, exclusively, and singularly.
    The pigs – I mean our socalled law enforcement are militarized, anti minority, anti poor, anti dissent thugs and mass murderers, unaccountable, immune, and above and beyond the socalled rule of law.

    Amerika is 17 Trillon dollars in debt! Divide that number by a population of 350+ mlllion, and get back to me on the future of Amerika's children. There has never been a wider divide between thehaves, and havenots, in any nation anywhere on earth, in the history of the world.

    1% of Amerika's fascists, the predatorclass, and predatorclass oligarchs own and control, 80% of America's wealth and resourcess.
    Fascists and shaitans have commandeered every structure of our once more perfect union and shapeshifted what was America, and American principles, and that thing we call the Constitution into a shredded, tattered, piece of worthless trash.

    These fascists glorify and defend torture. (Any creature that would argue or defend the perverted, and freakish barbarism, and psychopathic degeneracy and sexual depravity of Amerika's torture policies is below human) What kind of human being would even think of this level of depravity and sexually perverted behavior for any reason?

    Then we are all subjected to the embarrassing travesty of perverted freaks, massmurdering psychopaths, pathological warmongers and liars, warcriminals, and sexually depraved, shaitans, and freaks, like that slithering reptile, and satanic beast dick cheney, and equally criminal fascists and nazi's like hayden, brennan, bushtheidiot, and all the slithering slimy creeps, and apologists for, and defenders of torture, including the arch betrayor obama. There is no painting lipstick on the disgusting pig that is torture. Feeble attempts to prettify this evil by terming it EIT, and conjuring and bruting a putrid litany of naked lies to justify this nefarious, sexually perverted, and inhuman, depraved behavior and policy sanctioned by the highest overlords in our socalled government is futile and repulsive It's sickening.

    Amerika spends more money on defense than the next ten nations on earth combined on socalled defense, actually warmaking, and warprofiteering More a trillion dollars in defense, blackworld, and contractor taxpayers dollars are absconded yearly – and the worlds hypersuperior military must resort to depravities sexual perversions that would embarrass inquisitors, and inspire Vlad the Impaler??? This in the shady light of neverending wars that were deceptively conjured, by the office of special plans, and other warprofiteering projectforthenewamerikancentury covens, pimping and bruting, Amerikan supremacy, newworldorder, and totalspectrumdomination.

    Amerika is the great satan. We deserve, and will get, what ever fiery pit and hell we sheepishly and silently allow our perverted, fascists, and psychopathic massmurdering warmongering, warprofiteering socalled leaders hurl us into.

    Back on topic. The total exposure of the derivatives market, by my understanding is 3/4 of a quadrillion dollars? Asked numerous times for our erudite economists and financial experts to reject or validate this number, but that is my understanding. Though the numbers are nebulous due to the lack of disclosure, and any regulation, – the total exposure of the derivatives markets is around $750 Trillion. 3/4 of a quadrillion. Quadrillion is number not even imagined nor comprehended outside of the most brilliant scientists working on astronomic or particle physics.

    How is this ponzi scheme, – a ponzi scheme the shaitans in the gop, slithered, and extorted into the budget, and the rank cowards in the democratic party – just sanctioned, and advanced, – ever reconciled? The entire global GDP is less the $80 Trillion. Is no one on this wild and weird at heart earth capable of simple math? How can these gargantuan, and absurd numbers ever be reconciled? How can there be any justification for torture? How can we tolerate systemic criminality and the greatest, largest theft in the history of the world, by the den of vipers and thieves on wallstreet? How can and do we allow psychopaths, warmongers, warprofiteers, satanic beasts (dick cheney) massmurders, warcriminals, tyrants, perverts, freaks, shaitans, pathological liars, and a den of vipers and thieves to walk free, immunized, unaccountable, above and beyond the socalled ruleoflaw, untouchable – and yet exalted, criminally commandeering imponderable wealth, and untoward illicit power? How we tolerate this evil, this perversion, this thievery, this systemic lying, the slaughter wanton thievery, and this rank putrid abuse???

    We can't! Some of us won't! In a world where are no laws – there are no laws for anyone predatorclass biiiiiaaaatches!!!

    Annie | December 12, 2014 at 4:01 am

    219 to 206 – so how come it has to be 60 to 40 in the Senate?

    The protesting against this started WAY too late in the process – seriously, who snuck this in…?

    Let's face it, they all have too much dirt on each other in D.C. to operate in any other way than blackmailing and blackballing each other….

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/11/government-shutdown-avoid_n_6312078.html

    "….all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective…."

    Repeat a "meme" long enough and it will sink in…? Nope, not true – so here it is again:

    The just war doctrine of the Catholic Church – sometimes mistaken as a "just war theory"[15][16] – found in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 2309, lists four strict conditions for "legitimate defense by military force":[17]

    1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
    2. all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
    3. there must be serious prospects of success;
    4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

    2016 | December 12, 2014 at 10:05 pm

    From the desk of Thom Hartmann:

    "Last night, with only hours to go before the government shut down, the House of Representatives passed the so-called "Cromnibus" bill to keep government running. As usual, Republicans used the looming deadline to force through massive cuts and more deregulation. And, once again, far too many Democrats went along with the Republican hostage-taking."

    "The $1.1 trillion dollar spending bill passed in a 219-to-206 vote, with 57 Democrats voting to approve the budget – despite its disastrous provisions. Thanks to the new legislation, the IRS and EPA budgets have been slashed and the Pell Grant program was hit with $300 million in cuts. Pension guarantees for retired workers have been gutted, and programs like HUD and Section 8 were denied nearly a billion dollars of their requested funding."

    "In stark contrast, those cuts didn't prevent billions in new spending for military operations, or stop Wall Street from getting taxpayer-backed protections for the same high-risk derivatives that crashed our economy. And, as if that wasn't enough, a rider in the bill made it possible for billionaires to give ten-times more money to political parties, and for the rich to have even more power in our political system."

    "Despite all these facts – and the many more that are sure to be uncovered – 57 Democrats refused to stand with their Progressive colleagues and stand up to Republicans. This is what happens when lawmakers answer only to those at the top, and that's not limited to those on the Right. This legislation is a slap in the poor and the working class, and a big holiday gift to Wall Street and military contractors."

    "Every time Democrats give in to this type of legislation, they set themselves up for the next round of Republican demands. It's time to let them know that we've had enough. We've got two years to make it clear that we want lawmakers who will stand up to the hostage taking at all costs, so let's get busy making our voices heard."

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I told you so back in 2009 – never, ever should the federal government bailed out the banks.

    Lives were already ruined, the economy almost tanked (which, instead, we should have rightly plunged into a huge Depression – at least, that would have stopped most of all the academic political ivory tower b.s. about how the elite are better to be running the country instead). And if you think this is bad, wait 'til the TransPacific Partnership goes through.
    Senator Warren needs to reframe some of her talking points, starting with this: Mr. President, this bill isn't about Compromising. It's not about the bipartisan clap trap we keep hearing from both Parties and from you (the president himself). It's not about you, Mr. President. It's not about being anti-free markets, anti-innovation, anti-Wall Street, blah blah blah. Mr. President, this bill is about what our Founding Fathers warned against… Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson…. even the former president Ronald Reagan knew about unchecked powers, income inequality……..

    Senator Elizabeth Warren, where is Hillary Clinton on the issue of TBTF, Wall Street, Citizens United, Keystone Pipeline, Transpacific Partnership and other issues since the time you have endorsed her possible candidacy for president?

    Yours truly, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8XMeocLflc

    mshel | December 15, 2014 at 11:11 pm

    Thanks so much for this cogent description about last week's events. Warren's comments at the "Managing the Economy" conference were so interesting to watch in the context of what happened later in the week! I also appreciate your commentary in this post and the advocacy of your previous two posts. I voted for Senator Warren, and I think she's represented my views well.

    It will take knowledgeable, devoted, and optimistic people (like Warren, Vitter, and yourself) to keep the country informed about these specific, common-sense civic issues when we're so inundated by mass media misinformation that tries to convince us that the REAL problem (taking my cue from other comments here) is somehow related to an overarching ideology or a much broader set of issues.

    If some of the events predicted by the title and text of Ralph Nader's book from earlier this year-"Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State"-happen sooner rather than later then the event described by the title of your blog post will also happen soon.

    [Dec 26, 2014] Dodd-Frank Budget Fight Proves Democrats Are a Bunch of Stuffed Suits by wa8dzp

    Dewayne-Net Archives

    Posted by wa8dzp

    [Note: This item comes from friend David Rosenthal. DLH]

    Dodd-Frank Budget Fight Proves Democrats Are a Bunch of Stuffed Suits
    By MATT TAIBBI
    Dec 13 2014
    <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/dodd-frank-budget-fight-proves-democrats-are-a-bunch-of-stuffed-suits-20141213>

    Gosh, the Democrats are really pushing hard to save a key portion of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, aren't they? Like tigers, or Siamese fighting fish they battle! Thrilling to watch!

    Oh, wait, that's what they aren't doing. Actually what we're watching in the "Cromnibus" budget fight, is a stage-managed surrender that was inevitable pretty much from the moment the ink began to dry on the so-called sweeping reform of Wall Street the Democrats passed years ago.

    The dominant media narrative this past week has been that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, firmly saddled in her high horse, is trying to hold up the passage of the budget over a trifle. In reality, the so-called "Citigroup" provision to kill a rule designed to prevent future bailouts (so named because it was allegedly written by Citigroup lobbyists) is potentially quite an evil and destructive little thing. But the nitpicking counter-spin is already coming hot and heavy.

    "It's a marginal regulation," said Patrick Brennan of the National Review, about the Dodd-Frank rule Warren wants to keep. Brennan bro-ishly dismissed "Liz" as an "indefatigable academic" who is "picking a fight that really can't be said to help or hurt the economy," a political fight that is "hardly a hill to die on."

    Republicans like South Carolina Senator Linsey Graham derided Warren's gambit as an immature squabble and blasted Democrats in the House who followed her line of thinking. "Don't follow her lead," he said. "She's the problem."

    Making the budget fight a news story not about bailouts, but about the ambitions of Elizabeth Warren, is part of the game. And the Beltway hacks have succeeded there. Media on all sides have described last week's episode as Warren's political coming-out party. Former Obama aides sent a letter urging her to run for president, and Fox news said the rebellion showed Warren has the "clout" to "disrupt the best plans of the establishment."

    The Atlantic saw the budget fight as an episode that secretly thrilled the Republicans, who came away with a powerful new talking point: Warren's "star is rising," and she's pushing the Dems leftward, to a platform that wouldn't carry a general election.

    "Every leading Democrat," said RNC spokescreep Sean Spicer, "feels like Elizabeth Warren is looking over their shoulder to go further to the left."

    All of this is infuriating on multiple levels, but mainly because Warren's opposition to the Citi provision wasn't a left-leaning move at all. It was very much a conservative position. Ayn Rand herself, dragged from the grave and lashed to a chair on the floor of the Senate, would have argued the same thing.

    All the Dodd-Frank rule says is that if you're a federally-insured depository institution – if you're an FDIC-guaranteed bank, where real people have real bank accounts that are guaranteed by the federal government – you can't also be gambling with swaps and other dangerous derivative instruments.

    Think of it in terms of a workman's compensation law. If you're going to be insured against injury by the state, the state should get to demand that you don't engage in fire-eating or base-jumping during work hours.

    There's no logical argument against the provision. The banks only want it because they want to use your bank accounts as a human shield to protect their dangerous gambling activities.

    Thus it was no surprise when JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon started personally calling lawmakers this week to make sure the Citigroup provision passed. Dimon's bank is the poster child for this rule, since the infamous London Whale episode of a few years ago is exhibit A of what this rule is designed to prevent: a trillion-dollar federally-insured depository bank engaging in tons of unsafe financial sex with risky derivatives, leading to spiraling losses in the billions that imperiled the savings of millions of ordinary people.

    [snip]

    [Dec 24, 2014] Moyers The New Robber Barons

    [Video] Discussion of The Age of Acquiescence The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser. Steve Fraser has written a Wall Street history that explores that dilemma's impact on the American psyche. Americans remain preoccupied with the sins and virtues of the financial markets.
    Dec 24, 2014 | Jesse's Café Américain

    "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

    Jay Gould, aka the Mephistopheles of Wall Street.

    [Dec 24, 2014] Every Man a Speculator by Steve Fraser

    Amazon.com
    Michael Emmett Brady "mandmbrady" (Bellflower, California ,United States) - See all my reviews
    4.5 stars-Shows that the central problem of economics is minimizing and reducing speculation, January 15, 2009

    The author has done an excellent job showing the inevitable negative impacts that result from speculative behavior. He also shows that a fundamental error made by economists is to confuse enterprise and entrepreneurship with speculation. The idea that speculative behavior is entrepreneurial in nature is the basic error that lies at the heart of both the libertarian-Austrian school of economics(Ayn Rand,Murray Rothbard,Ludwig von Mises,etc.) and the University of Chicago economics approach(Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas,George Stigler,Gary Becker,etc.). This fallacious belief is then propounded by pseudo conservative Libertarian organizations ,like the Olin, Heritage, and Mellon Foundations ,and the American Enterprise Institute,to be an example of free enterprise.

    The foundation for these misbeliefs is called the Efficient Market Hypothesis(EMH). This hypothesis only holds when applied to consumption goods markets. There is not a shred of evidence, historical or statistical, that the EMH applies to investment markets or financial markets over time. The EMH is based on the empirically refuted claim that all of the time series data for price changes in financial markets can be modeled as being normally distributed.

    Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated in the late 1950's that the financial market time series data is not even close to being approximately normally distributed. There has not been a single goodness of fit test provided by EMH adherents (Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Arthur Laffer, Eugene Fama)over the last 120 years that demonstrates normality.

    Empirical work overwhelmingly shows that the time series data is best modeled by the Cauchy Distribution.Friedman's Ptolomaic-like belief in the EMH explains his claims that all bubbles are rational(i.e.,there is no such thing as a speculative bubble) and the following assertion, quoted on p.540 by the author: "Speculation has come of age;it can sit quite comfortably side by side with investment; and it is as legitimate and necessary as the securities markets themselves ".

    This is an excellent demonstration of the confusion one finds in the economics profession concerning investment in long run ,long lived, durable physical capital formation, aimed at producing goods/services for a possible future economic profit and short run, banker financed, debt leveraged financial speculation aimed at extracting an economic profit without the production of any good or service.

    I have deducted 1/2 of a star from this book because the author, unfortunately,has no discussion of the EMH in the book.

    The author does demonstrate that J M Keynes had correctly showed that the basic problem accounting for major downturns in economic behavior was speculation(pp.457-458). Keynes proved this on pp.304-306 of chapter 21 of his General Theory(1936). However,he overlooks the far, far more extensive demonstration made by Adam Smith, in his The Wealth of Nations(1776), that banker financed speculation will always lead to the waste and destruction of the savings of the depositors (See pp.260-340,Modern Library(Cannan) edition, Max Lerner Introduction).

    Smith demonstrated that the primary responsibility of a central bank is to control the private commercial banking system so as to prevent them from lending to speculators or engaging in speculative behavior themselves. The author shows that President Andrew Jackson never absorbed this lesson. Unfortunately, Jackson, while a major opponent of speculative behavior himself, failed to put aside his personal grudge/disagreement with Nicholas Biddle, the patrician head of the Second Bank of the United States, who was trying to stop the massive speculative behavior of the state "Wild catter" banks, and prevented the banks charter from being renewed in 1836.This lead to one episode after another of banker financed speculative behavior that was supposed to be controlled with the formation of the Federal Reserve System(FRS) in 1913.Unfortunately, the private commercial banks have dominated the FRS, except in the time period of 1938-1952.

    The author provides overwhelming historical evidence that every single speculative wave of financing in every country in history over the last 400 years ends up leading to a panic,crash,and economic collapse that leads to a recession or depression.He overlooks one individual who should have been included in his discussions of famous speculators who caused economy wide collapse-Andrew Dexter,Jr.,who, working out of Boston in the 1806-1808 time period,single handily created a depression all along the Eastern Seaboard during 1809-10.Dexter is important because he realized the best way to finance speculative behavior was through the control of banks .

    Overall, this is an excellent history of what has happened in the past,not only in the USA but worldwide, over the last 400 years, when speculators, masquerading under the false claim that they are engaging in free enterprise in free markets, are able to engage in leveraging their debt positions a 100 fold and sell many different types of very dubious 'financial services' to an unwary public that, unfortunately, periodically "buys in" to the speculator serenade that this time, it will be different and the bubble will go on expanding indefinitely into the future.

    Americans are now going to have to pay a horrible price for allowing the banker speculators and private equity firms to put their schemes across over the last 30 years.

    Curtis Chambers

    Excellent History of Wall Street Most Notable for Its Exquisite Detail, Breadth and Coverage of America's Early Years. January 17, 2009

    Mr. Fraser has written a detailed and intimately researched tomb covering the history of Wall Street back to its earliest beginnings. This book is similar in theme to Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics), Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, andExtraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

    Here is what distinguishes Mr. Fraser's book:

    - The focus on solely the American Experience, as opposed to including European.

    - The period of history covered is much greater than the others. Mr. Fraser begins with a great tale of Alexander Hamiton and Thomas Jefferson. I found this especially valuable and unique.

    - A broad focus. The author focuses not only on the financial, but on how Wall Street influenced the arts, popular culture, politics, et al.

    I recommend this book if you want a broad, in-depth history of Wall Street. It is the best I have found in covering the pre-1900 period of American finance.

    Because the book is a history, it compresses hundreds of years as you read it in a few hours. This allows one to see the boom/bust cycles of Wall Street with clinical detachment. If only we could apply this 20/20 vision to our own period of history!

    pluto

    matchless, July 12, 2005

    A person can spend a lifetime attempting to understand the world of finance. Or he can read this book. It puts into perspective all the sludge oozing out of CNBC, Greenspan, Snow and Company, Kudlow and Cramer and, of course, the Mary Meekers who have begun to surface again after, I suppose, a four year vacation on a private island. For those of boundless faith and small capital, it provides a healthy dose of sanity. If you are victimized by excessive wealth and thus forced to protect it by what is called investment but amounts to speculation, read this one along with The Death of Money, by Kurtzman.

    In the world of limitless electronic money, the price of any asset is determined solely by crowd psychology. Every time it changes those numbers on the screen go up and down, and for people buying at the asked and selling at the bid it is a tough game.

    For those worried about the country as a whole, Fraser explains in language anyone can understand how enterprise has become a bubble on a tide of speculation, returning us to a condition not experienced in America since the Twenties. The same tired arguments for Wall Street hegemony which history exploded in the Thirties have been resurrected by the financial elite and their acolytes in the media and economics profession. Will history repeat itself? Recent crashes have been reversible by massive injections of fiat money. In the absence of political will it is hard to imagine alternative solutions.

    Craig Matteson

    The story of popular perception of scandals on Wall Street, February 17, 2005

    This review is from: Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (Hardcover)

    Steve Fraser writes in clear, vivid, and energetic prose. His passion for the story he tells is easy to see on every page of this big book. It moves along and keeps the reader turning pages to see what happens next. That really is not all that easy to pull off in writing history.

    "Every Man a Speculator" is subtitled "A History of Wall Street in American Life". Some subtitles are throwaways. However, this subtitle actually tells you more about the focus of the book than the main title. This is more about the history of public perception of Wall Street. Mr. Fraser is especially strong in telling us about novels, plays, magazine series, and eventually about movies and other popular notions about Wall Street.

    The book does not provide any analysis of how Wall Street works and seems to casually dismiss academic models as simply intellectual opinions rather than providing analysis of their merits or deficiencies. The book focuses on so many scandals over the centuries and the characters that caused them that the reader would be hard pressed to understand that anything other than bad actors and suckers ever bought or sold anything in the financial markets. This is, of course, not true. But since the focus of the book is more about the perception of Wall Street in American life, well, maybe there is more merit in the approach taken here.

    However, I think the modern reader could benefit from a deeper and more considered approach. This book can certainly stand as a needed corrective for all the rah-rah boosterism that Wall Street has received for the past couple of decades. However, six hundred pages of one perp-walk after another can distort reality as well, no matter how much fun scandal and malfeasance-meeting-comeuppance can be.

    The book also suffers from the occasional lapse in accuracy as well. For example, on page 309 he recounts the old canard about James Hazen Hyde charging his sumptuous "French Ball" to the Equitable and letting the shareholders pay for it. Yet, just last year Pamela Beard's "After the Ball" (also a HarperCollins book) demonstrated clearly that this charge is false and made up by the men who were trying to wrest control of the Equitable from Hyde. The author also seems awfully focused on J P Morgan, who was supremely influential, but I am not sure he deserves the opprobrium showered on him here. Nor does J D Rockefeller deserve as little attention as he received here.

    Anyway, this was a fun read and offered some colorful anecdotes as well as some insights into the literary influence of Wall Street that I did not know anything about.

    If your politics lean to the left a bit you will almost certainly enjoy this book even more. It seems to me that if the adults I knew when I was a child were to read this book, given their devotion to the New Deal and their suspicion of all bankers and investments, that they would have agreed with everything bound between the covers of this book.

    Four stars because in my rating system I think it would be enjoyed more by those already interested in this topic than a broad general readership.

    Mr. Contrarian

    Well, as it happens, this book was obviously ahead of its time. Two years before the crash, perp-walks might have seemed passe.

    Now, in 2011, we should consider this book as a warning that went unheeded.

    [Dec 20, 2014] Regulation of the Financial Industry

    Dec 20, 2014 | economistsview.typepad.com

    Is the financial industry is winning the war over regulation?:

    Volcker lambasts Wall Street lobbying, FT: Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has lambasted the "eternal lobbying" of Wall Street after regulators granted the industry more time to comply with a rule designed to prevent them from owning hedge funds.

    In a withering statement ... Mr Volcker said:

    "It is striking, that the world's leading investment bankers, noted for their cleverness and agility in advising clients on how to restructure companies and even industries however complicated, apparently can't manage the orderly reorganization of their own activities in more than five years."

    "Or, do I understand that lobbying is eternal, and by 2017 or beyond, the expectation can be fostered that the law itself can be changed?"

    The Fed and its fellow regulators this week gave the banks until 2017 to comply... Banks had been supposed to comply by next year. The law containing the Volcker rule was passed in 2010. ...

    am

    I read about this on the BBC, earlier today. Jaw dropping.

    bakho -> am:

    What War? BigF owns the regulators.

    The name of the game is regulatory capture.
    It's spelled C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N

    pgl:

    These financial institutions know how to comply with the new regulations. The problem is they don't want to. They would rather whine, lie, and when all else fails, bribe their favorite Congressmen.

    DrDick -> pgl:

    They have already proven that they are too big to prosecute, so they are just flexing their muscles, since there will be no negative consequences for them.

    DrDick -> Lafayette:

    Actually, there is quite a bit of evidence for criminal behavior, though I cannot say whether it would be sufficient to convict anyone.

    http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/05/6-years-after-financial-crisis-big-banks-are-still-committing-big-crimes/

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PoliticsPublicPolicy+%28Politics+%26+Public+Policy%29

    Mr. Bill:

    I will walk the plank here and challenge the better minds to refute my misunderstandings.

    IMHO, the ZIRP policy is counter-productive. An honest FED would be on a tightrope, balancing the rate of return between savers and consumers. Their current policy seems to be lopsided in favor of speculators and against both savers and consumers.

    The old need to retire to make room for the young consumers but the current rate structure does not allow a sufficient risk free return on capital.

    Ergo, we have older workers crowding out younger workers.

    The shenanigans on wall street should not be the focus here. How should the reinvestment by the mercantilist China be countered ? I would care to hear some input on this one.

    likbez:

    I think that an implicit assumption of many commenters here that TBTF banks are private institutions is wrong. They are not and that means that commenters are discussing the social system that does not exists anymore.

    In corporatism (and neoliberalism is a new mutation of corporatism ) line between TBTF and government is fuzzy. In a way, they not only own the government as Senator Dick Durbin suggested, but actually are the government (as is "government of TBTF, by TBTF and for TBTF"). The question is: Why would you preserve anything in regulations that can hurt you?

    There is no any substantial countervailing force, and there is no chances of forming a broad opposition until the next crash, so as Thatcher said "there is no alternative"(TINA).

    Neoliberalism won globally is now is crushing "resource nationalists" one by one despite that as ideology it was completely discredited in 2008.

    [Dec 15, 2014] Paul Krugman: Wall Street's Revenge

    December 15, 2014 | economistsview.typepad.com

    The battle over financial reform is far from over:

    Wall Street's Revenge, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: On Wall Street, 2010 was the year of "Obama rage," in which financial tycoons went ballistic over the president's suggestion that some bankers helped cause the financial crisis. They were also, of course, angry about the Dodd-Frank financial reform, which placed some limits on their wheeling and dealing.

    The Masters of the Universe, it turns out, are a bunch of whiners. But they're whiners with war chests, and now they've bought themselves a Congress. ...

    Wall Street overwhelmingly backed Mitt Romney in 2012, and invested heavily in Republicans once again this year. And the first payoff to that investment has already been realized. Last week Congress passed a ... rollback of one provision of the 2010 financial reform.

    In itself, this rollback is significant but not a fatal blow to reform. But it's utterly indefensible. ... One of the goals of financial reform was to stop banks from taking big risks with depositors' money. ... If banks are free to gamble, they can play a game of heads we win, tails the taxpayers lose. ...

    Dodd-Frank tried to limit this kind of moral hazard in various ways, including a rule barring insured institutions from dealing in exotic securities, the kind that played such a big role in the financial crisis. And that's the rule that has just been rolled back. ...

    What just went down isn't about free-market economics; it's pure crony capitalism. And sure enough, Citigroup literally wrote the deregulation language that was inserted into the funding bill.

    Again, in itself last week's action wasn't decisive. But it was clearly the first skirmish in a war to roll back much if not all of the financial reform. And if you want to know who stands where in this coming war, follow the money: Wall Street is giving mainly to Republicans for a reason. ...

    Meanwhile, it's hard to find Republicans expressing major reservations about undoing reform. You sometimes hear claims that the Tea Party is as opposed to bailing out bankers as it is to aiding the poor, but there's no sign that this alleged hostility to Wall Street is having any influence at all on Republican priorities.

    So the people who brought the economy to its knees are seeking the chance to do it all over again. And they have powerful allies, who are doing all they can to make Wall Street's dream come true.

    [Dec 13, 2014] Citigroup Should Be Broken Up'

    Simon Johnson:

    Citigroup Will Be Broken Up: Citigroup is a very large bank that has amassed a huge amount of political power. Its current and former executives consistently push laws and regulations in the direction of allowing Citi and other megabanks to take on more risk, particularly in the form of complex highly leveraged bets. Taking these risks allows the executives and traders to get a lot of upside compensation in the form of bonuses when things go well – while the downside losses, when they materialize, become the taxpayer's problem.

    Citigroup is also, collectively, stupid on a grand scale. The supposedly smart people at the helm of Citi in the mid-2000s ran them hard around – and to the edge of bankruptcy. A series of unprecedented massive government bailouts was required in 2000-09 – and still the collateral damage to the economy has proved enormous. Give enough clever people the wrong incentives and they will destroy anything.

    Now the supposedly brilliant people who run Citigroup have, in the space of a single working week, made a series of serious political blunders with long-lasting implications. Their greed has manifestly proved Elizabeth Warren exactly right about the excessive clout of Wall Street, their arrogance has greatly strengthened a growing left-center-right coalition concerned about the power of the megabanks, and their public exercise of raw power has helped this coalition understand what it needs focus on doing – break up Citigroup. ...

    If we can't stop Citigroup from inserting changes to Dodd-Frank it desires into the "Cromnibus", then how, exactly -- with that sort of political influence -- does it get broken up?

    Richard A.

    Citigroup is not too big to fail, it's too powerful to fail.

    Fred C. Dobbs
    (Yeah, right.)

    *** SATIRE ***

    Citigroup to Move Headquarters to US Capitol Building http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/citigroup-move-headquarters-u-s-capitol-building via @newyorker

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)-The banking giant Citigroup announced on Friday that it would move its headquarters from New York to the U.S. Capitol Building, in Washington, D.C., in early 2015.

    Tracy Klugian, a spokesperson for Citi, said that the company had leased thirty thousand square feet of prime real estate on the floor of the House of Representatives and would be interviewing "world-class architects" to redesign the space to suit its needs.

    According to sources, Citi successfully outbid other firms, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, for the right to move its headquarters to the House floor. ...

    gordon :

    Here is a summary of Citi's misdeeds and shortcomings over many years:

    http://www.corp-research.org/citigroup

    Wow!

    [Dec 12, 2014] Jamie Dimon himself called to urge support for the derivatives rule in the spending bill

    I am not sure you can call JP Morgan of Citigroup private entities... Under corporate regime, they are actually partially merged with state and, for example, are engaged in implementing FED policies...
    Dec 12, 2014 | The Washington Post

    The acrimony that erupted Thursday between President Obama and members of his own party largely pivoted on a single item in a 1,600-page piece of legislation to keep the government funded: Should banks be allowed to make risky investments using taxpayer-backed money?

    The very idea was abhorrent to many Democrats on Capitol Hill. And some were stunned that the White House would support the bill with that provision intact, given that it would erase a key provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, one of Obama's signature achievements.

    But perhaps even more outrageous to Democrats was that the language in the bill appeared to come directly from the pens of lobbyists at the nation's biggest banks, aides said. The provision was so important to the profits at those companies that J.P.Morgan's chief executive Jamie Dimon himself telephoned individual lawmakers to urge them to vote for it, according to a person familiar with the effort.

    The White House, in pleading with Democrats to support the bill, explained that it got something in return: It said that it averted other amendments that would have undercut Dodd-Frank, protected the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from Republican attacks, and won double digit increases in funds for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "The president is pleased," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

    Earnest said that Democrats were upset about "a specific provision in this omnibus that would be related to watering down one provision of the Wall Street reform law. The President does not support that provision. But on balance, the President does believe that this compromise proposal is worthy of his support."

    But "that provision" isn't just any provision. It's one that goes to the heart of the Dodd Frank reform because it would let big banks undertake risky activities with funds guaranteed by the federal government and, hence taxpayers.

    The omnibus appropriations bill would do that by undoing the Dodd Frank provision that ordered banks to move their riskiest activities -- such as default swaps, trading commodities, and trading derivatives -- to new entities so that deposits guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would not be in danger.

    House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pointed to this item as the main reason she would vote against a bill backed by her own president.

    "What I am saying is: the taxpayer should not assume the risk," she said. She said the amendment went "back to the same old Republican formula: privatize the gain, nationalize the risk. You succeed, it's in your pocket. You fail, the taxpayer pays the bill. It's just not right."

    It isn't only liberal congressional Democrats up in arms about the proposed change. "It really is outrageous," said a former senior Obama Treasury official, who asked for anonymity to preserve business relationships. "This was the epicenter of the crisis. This is what brought AIG down, what brought Lehman Brothers down."

    The nation's biggest banks -- led by Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America -- have been lobbying for the change in Dodd Frank, which had given them a period of years to comply. Trade associations representing banks, the Financial Services Roundtable and the American Bankers Association, emphasized that regional banks are supportive of the change as well.

    The banks have long argued that the Dodd Frank provision will limit their ability to extend credit to clients and that setting up separate entities to engage in derivatives and commodities trading isn't practical. The ABA's top lobbyist, James Ballentine, executive vice president of congressional relations and political affairs, said in an e-mailed statement that the requirement that banks move some swaps in to separate affiliates "makes one stop shopping impossible for businesses ranging from family farms to energy companies that want to hedge against commodity price changes."

    But the regulatory change could also boost the profits of major banks, which is why they are pushing so hard for passage, said Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

    "It is because there is a lot of money at stake," Johnson said. "They want to be able to take big risks where they get the upside and the taxpayer gets the potential downside," he said.

    Johnson said the amendment of Dodd Frank only affects a small portion of derivatives. "I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill on this," he said. But he added that "on a forward looking basis this could become very big."

    The effort to enact this language has been years in the making. Language that was written and edited in part by the major banks was originally inserted in a House bill that called for relaxation of the push out rules in 2013. Citi declined to comment on the role its lobbyists played in developing the legislation, which was originally disclosed in an e-mail exchange reported on by the New York Times. However, a blog post written in 2013 by the bank's head of global public affairs, referred to the effort to modify this portion of Dodd-Frank as "a great example of how the industry and Congress can work together to find common ground."

    The banking lobby has always been a powerful force in Washington. The banks that could benefit from this change -- Citigroup and J.P. Morgan -- are among Washington's most influential corporate players. Each firm, for example, spent over $5 million a year lobbying in recent years, both of them ranking in the top 90 firms for lobbying expenditures, according to data prepared by the Center for Responsive Politics. In addition J.P. Morgan contributed over $5 million to federal candidates and parties in 2012, compared with $2.6 million in the last election cycle for Citigroup. And both firms have strong connections on Capitol Hill and the White House. Citi, for example, includes among its stable of lobbyists former House Speaker Bob Livingston (R-La.) and former Senators John Breaux (D-La.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.).

    Former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank on Wednesday also urged his former colleagues to reject the omnibus appropriations bill. He called the amendment inserted into the bill "a substantive mistake, a terrible violation of the procedure that should be followed on this complex and important subject, and a frightening precedent that provides a road map for further attacks on our protection against financial instability."

    Frank added that "ironically it was a similar unrelated rider put without debate into a larger bill that played a major role in allowing irresponsible, unregulated derivative transactions to contribute to the crisis." He said people could disagree about how best to regulate derivatives but that the way to do that was "not for a non-germane amendment inserted with no hearings, no chance for further modification, and no chance for debate into a mammoth bill in the last days of a lame-duck Congress."

    Leon Ng

    US on sale, name your price

    hummel1

    Jamie Dimon is not interested in the good of this nation. He is a smug, selfish man who thinks we are all his underlings. This bill makes me ill; if, indeed, this is "the best we could get" from the GOP, then the GOP is supporting criminal enterprise, Mr. Dimon is nothing but a thief in an expensive suit, and the Dems, as others have noted here, do not have the stomach to fight a fight that MUST be fought. Please, Senator Warren, save us!

    EagleMan12

    Obama does not have the stomach for a fight. He might as well play for the Redskins.

    newinternationale

    Yes, he tends to be spineless. (Putin knows this.) But he is also trying to avoid Dems being tagged as the 2014 party of "shutdown."

    dead reckoning

    My, my, an entire article without mentioning the two pieces of enabling legislation that almost trashed the economy!

    The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, (aka - Gramm Leach Bliley Act), repealed the last surviving rules of the Banking Act of 1935 (Glass – Steagall), and all but collapsed the firewall between commercial banking and investment banking. Scholars of every political stripe agree that it was this act of Congress that laid the foundation for the financial crisis of 2007 – 2008.

    Ninety-five senators voted for it, including most liberals and progressives.

    The main reason no one has been indicted for financial malfeasance for their actions during the financial crisis is that no one was breaking this law, which opened the doors to all sorts of new and now legal financial speculation.

    It also set in motion what will be the next crisis: bank holding company / financial holding company direct ownership of commodities.

    This relatively new danger to our economy has been the subject of two years of Senate hearings in a sub-committee chaired by retiring Senator Carl Levin and the Ranking Member, Senator John McCain, both of whom also voted for the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999.

    Here's a link to an excellent article in the New York Times (11/20/14) with links to the full hearing report and other in-depth, scholarly analysis:

    Senate Spars With Goldman Sachs Over Commodities - NYTimes.com

    Please see the post below for the rest of this comment.

    [Dec 12, 2014] 'Enough is enough' Elizabeth Warren's fiery attack comes after Congress weakens Wall Street regulations

    "It is because there is a lot of money at stake," Johnson said. "They want to be able to take big risks where they get the upside and the taxpayer gets the potential downside," he said.
    Dec 12, 2014 | The Washington Post

    With Congress set to pass a government spending bill that weakens a provision of Dodd-Frank, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took the floor of the Senate on Friday evening to lash out at her colleagues. In her remarks, she took specific aim at mega-bank Citigroup, saying it wields unusual power in government and must be reigned in. "Many Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington's corridors of power, but Citigroup has risen above the others," she said. "Its grip over economic policymaking in the executive branch is unprecedented."

    Warren, pushing her party to take a less friendly attitude toward Wall Street, called on Congress to do as much for families living paycheck to paycheck as it does for big banks. Her prepared remarks follow:

    Mr. President, I'm back on the floor to talk about a dangerous provision that was slipped into a must-pass spending bill at the last minute to benefit Wall Street. This provision would repeal a rule called, and I'm quoting the title of the rule, "PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS OF SWAPS ENTITIES."

    On Wednesday, I came to the floor to talk to Democrats, asking them to strip this provision out of the omnibus bill and protect taxpayers.

    On Thursday, I came to the floor to talk to Republicans. Republicans say they don't like bailouts either. So I asked them to vote the way they talk. If they don't like bailouts, then they could take out this provision that puts taxpayers right back on the hook for bailing out big banks.

    Today, I'm coming to the floor not to talk about Democrats or Republicans, but about a third group that also wields tremendous power in Washington: Citigroup.
    Mr. President, in recent years, many Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington's corridors of power, but Citigroup has risen above the others. Its grip over economic policymaking in the executive branch is unprecedented. Consider a few examples:

    That's a lot of powerful people, all from one bank. But they aren't Citigroup's only source of power. Over the years, the company has spent millions of dollars on lobbying Congress and funding the political campaigns of its friends in the House and the Senate.

    Citigroup has also spent millions trying to influence the political process in ways that are far more subtle-and hidden from public view. Last year, I wrote Citigroup and other big banks a letter asking them to disclose the amount of shareholder money they have been diverting to think tanks to influence public policy. Citigroup's response to my letter? Stonewalling. A year has gone by, and Citigroup didn't even acknowledge receiving the letter.

    Citigroup has a lot of money, it spends a lot of money, and it uses that money to grow and consolidate a lot of power. And it pays off. Consider a couple facts.

    The role that senior officials working in the Treasury department played in killing the amendment was not subtle: A senior Treasury official acknowledged it at the time in a background interview with New York Magazine. The official from Treasury said, and I'm quoting here, "If we'd been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren't, so it didn't." That's power.

    Mr. President, Democrats don't like Wall Street bailouts. Republicans don't like Wall Street bailouts. The American people are disgusted by Wall Street bailouts. And yet here we are -- five years after Dodd-Frank – with Congress on the verge of ramming through a provision that would do nothing for middle class, do nothing for community banks – do nothing but raise the risk that taxpayers will have to bail out the biggest banks once again.
    There's a lot of talk lately about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn't perfect. There's a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn't perfect.

    So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi: I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn't perfect.

    It should have broken you into pieces.

    [Dec 12, 2014] The Tricky Politics of Fighting Crony Capitalism

    Crony capitalism = corporatism.
    Republicans are (rightfully) in a place of very low trust with most Americans, having parroted the same set of supply-side solutions with a variety of weak attempts at rebranding.
    Dec 12, 2014 | The American Conservative
    So what is crony capitalism, politically speaking? Is it a welcome restorative for a party pegged as being in the pockets of big business? Or a worthy policy initiative albeit with little public resonance? Perhaps the best answer came a year ago at the Heritage Foundation, when Sen. Mike Lee was delivering the outline of his reform agenda. Lee said:

    The first step in a true conservative reform agenda must be to end this kind of preferential policymaking. Beyond simply being the right thing to do, it is a pre-requisite for earning the moral authority and political credibility to do anything else.

    Why should the American people trust our ideas about middle-class entitlements… when we're still propping up big banks?

    "A pre-requisite for earning the moral authority and political credibility to do anything else." In his latest post, Pete worried that

    "the crony capitalism strategy treats the perception of conservatives as being pro-rich as primarily a problem of resentment. People resent the rich for getting too much unfairly, and so conservatives must target the undeserving rich."

    He is right, of course, that an actual appeal to middle- and working-class voters will have to be founded on policies that address their needs. But voters aren't policy analysts, ready to parse a tax proposal to see how it scores. Republicans are (rightfully) in a place of very low trust with most Americans, having parroted the same set of supply-side solutions with a variety of weak attempts at rebranding.

    To put it somewhat dramatically, putting General Electric's head on a spike doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be, about slaking the perceived bloodlust of a resentful mob. Instead, it can be as simple as demonstrating loyalty to a prospective new employer by offering up the old one.

    A substantive agenda will still have to be offered to middle-class Americans, and good work on that has been freshly compiled here. But first, voters will have to have a reason to trust that this time is different, and their best interests really are at the heart of the new proposals

    [Dec 10, 2014] Links for 12-09-14

    "Reich comes a little too close to the truth, there. Both parties have been bought. It's a feature, not a bug, that a two party system is so easy to game.
    Both parties have been bought. It's a feature, not a bug, that a two party system is so easy to game.
    Dec 9, 2014 | Economist's View

    Fred C. Dobbs -> pgl...

    (Well, not new news.)

    A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits

    http://nyti.ms/TNQ0Yz
    NYT - December 13, 2008

    WASHINGTON - As the financial crisis jolted the nation in September (2008), Senator Charles E. Schumer was consumed. He traded telephone calls with bankers, then became one of the first officials to promote a Wall Street bailout. He spent hours in closed-door briefings and a weekend helping Congressional leaders nail down details of the $700 billion rescue package.

    The next day, Mr. Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry R. Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives, he warned that a bailout would be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Then he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.

    "We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals," one executive said, summarizing Mr. Schumer's remarks. "We are going to be effective, moderate advocates for sound economic policies, good responsible stewards you can trust."

    The message clearly resonated. The next week, executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations.

    Senator Schumer plays an unrivaled role in Washington as beneficiary, advocate and overseer of an industry that is his hometown's most important business. ...

    pgl -> Fred C. Dobbs...

    This is one of the problems with politics in New York. Everyone feels compelled to kiss up to Wall Street.

    pgl said...

    Congressman Issa to Dr. Gruber - "are you stupid"?

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/issa-gruber-are-you-stupid

    He didn't but I wish Gruber had answered:

    "No Congressman. But you are"!

    Peter K. said...
    First Kocherlakota and now John Cochrane. Progress!

    I remember reading things those guys would write and thinking they were nuts.

    david s said...

    Reich comes a little too close to the truth, there.

    Both parties have been bought. It's a feature, not a bug, that a two party system is so easy to game.

    [Dec 09, 2014] BOOM - North America's Explosive Oil-by-Rail Problem

    "Industry had veto power over everything."

    Industry Derails Regulations

    After the Lac-Megantic tragedy, senior Transportation Department officials vowed to prevent a similar accident from happening in the United States. Cynthia Quarterman, the Transportation official who oversaw the regulatory response until her resignation in October, and Joseph Szabo, the FRA head through the end of this year, assembled working groups for three issues: train securement, crew size and hazardous materials.

    Between September 2013 and April 2014, the three groups met, debated and thrashed out their recommendations.

    A drafting session of the hazardous materials working group was held on January 27, in a large meeting room at the headquarters of the National Association of Home Builders, five blocks from the White House. About 60 people sat most of the day facing one another around a large rectangular configuration of conference tables.

    FRA staffers occupied one line of tables, including Karl Alexy, head of the agency's Hazardous Materials Division and chair of the meeting. The other seats were occupied by representatives from industries that ship hazardous materials by rail, including the Association of American Railroads, American Petroleum Institute, Chlorine Institute, American Chemistry Council, Fertilizer Institute and the Institute of Makers of Explosives.

    Several railroads that run oil trains on their track also attended, including Canadian National Railway, Union Pacific, Watco and BNSF, the largest shipper of crude. Warren Buffett's investment firm, Berkshire Hathaway, acquired BNSF for $44 billion in 2009, just as the crude-by-rail boom was taking off. Railroad worker unions were at the session, too, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.

    Throughout the day, the FRA's Alexy floated safety recommendations drawn up by his staff. But none got past Michael J. Rush, the railroad association's watchful attorney. Rush interjected, objected and parried with Alexy, dominating the discussion and delaying or diluting the recommendations.

    The railroad association denied a request to speak with Rush, who was paid nearly $1.2 million in 2012 by the association and related organizations, according to the association's tax filing that year, the most recent filing available.

    At one point, Alexy proposed that railroads carrying large volumes of crude oil be required to have a comprehensive spill response plan, just as oil pipeline companies must have. Canada's Transportation Safety Board had made that one of its key recommendations after the Lac-Megantic derailment, and the U.S. NTSB had taken the unusual step of endorsing Canada's recommendations, simultaneously announcing them from Washington.

    But Ross was having none of it.

    Swiveling in his chair as he swung the microphone to his lips, he said, "With all due respect to the NTSB, they completely misunderstood this regulation and this topic."

    After some more back and forth, Alexy did what he would do throughout the day: He deferred to Rush.

    "I agree, unless there's any objection," Alexy said.

    There was none.

    At one point, Alexy offered a recommendation that would have required better communication between shippers and railroads, to make sure railcars carrying heavier loads don't travel over bridges that aren't strong enough to support them. A typical oil train places roughly 15,000 tons of pressure on structures that could be as much as 150 years old.

    "I'm not sure we have a problem with this in the industry," Rush said.

    Alexy cited a recent incident where it had been a big problem-a bridge had collapsed under the weight of railcars it wasn't certified to support, resulting in a derailment. But after a few minutes of discussion, the group "parked" that recommendation, too.

    An exchange between Alexy and Cynthia Hilton, executive vice president of the Institute of Makers of Explosives, reflected the tone of the meeting.

    Hilton said she believed the goal that day was to produce recommendations that would give the industry guidance, not requirements that would force them to take specific actions.

    "And now I'm reading that 'the shipper must develop and adhere to a sampling and testing program,'" she said. "That doesn't sound like a guidance document."

    "You're right and I agree," Alexy assured Hilton. "This is of course open for editing, ideas and suggestions. I circled the word 'must'…. 'Should' is probably a little more appropriate."

    In April, the hazardous materials working group produced four narrow, technical recommendations. For instance, one recommended a definition for what constitutes an oil train. Another offered a definition for what constitutes an empty rail car.

    None of the staff recommendations that Rush had objected to during the drafting session made the cut. Nor did any of the NTSB recommendations, such as the one that would have required railroads to have emergency plans.

    In July, California tried to fill part of the regulatory gap by imposing a 6.5-cent per barrel fee on oil shipped into the state by rail. The money will help communities develop emergency response plans for possible spills. BNSF, Union Pacific, and the Association of American Railroads have since filed suit against California, arguing that such matters are the province of the federal government.

    Alexy declined through the railroad agency press office to be interviewed for this article. At an NTSB hearing in April, however, he responded to a questioner who asked him to characterize the results of the working group's activities.

    "A lot of things that we took up initially were overcome by events," he explained.

    Fred Millar, an advocate for tighter hazmat rail regulations and a longtime observer of the FRA, had another explanation: "Industry had veto power over everything."

    [Dec 04, 2014] Guest Post Never Even a Whisper at Fed's Open Market Committee Meetings

    Apr 10, 2010 | naked capitalism
    Ben Bernanke, William Dudley and Donald L Kohn are on the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC).

    They are also on the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) – often called the "central banks' central bank". And Kohn is an alternate director for BIS.

    Alan Greenspan, of course, was a BIS director for many years.

    Dudley is also chairman of BIS' Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems. (Tim Geithner – previously on the FOMC – previously held that post).

    So there is clearly quite a bit of overlap between the two groups.

    In addition, BIS' chief economist – William White – and others within BIS – repeatedly warned the Federal Reserve and other central banks that they were setting the world economy up for a fall by blowing bubbles and then using "using gimmicks and palliatives" which "will only make things worse".

    As Spiegel wrote last July:

    White and his team of experts observed the real estate bubble developing in the United States. They criticized the increasingly impenetrable securitization business, vehemently pointed out the perils of risky loans and provided evidence of the lack of credibility of the rating agencies. In their view, the reason for the lack of restraint in the financial markets was that there was simply too much cheap money available on the market…

    As far back as 2003, White implored central bankers to rethink their strategies, noting that instability in the financial markets had triggered inflation, the "villain" in the global economy…

    In the restrained world of central bankers, it would have been difficult for White to express himself more clearly…

    It was probably the biggest failure of the world's central bankers since the founding of the BIS in 1930. They knew everything and did nothing. Their gigantic machinery of analysis kept spitting out new scenarios of doom, but they might as well have been transmitted directly into space…In their report, the BIS experts derisively described the techniques of rating agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's as "relatively crude" and noted that "some caution is in order in relation to the reliability of the results."…

    In January 2005, the BIS's Committee on the Global Financial System sounded the alarm once again, noting that the risks associated with structured financial products were not being "fully appreciated by market participants." Extreme market events, the experts argued, could "have unanticipated systemic consequences."

    They also cautioned against putting too much faith in the rating agencies, which suffered from a fatal flaw. Because the rating agencies were being paid by the companies they rated, the committee argued, there was a risk that they might rate some companies too highly and be reluctant to lower the ratings of others that should have been downgraded.

    These comments show that the central bankers knew exactly what was going on, a full two-and-a-half years before the big bang. All the ingredients of the looming disaster had been neatly laid out on the table in front of them: defective rating agencies, loans repackaged to the point of being unrecognizable, dubious practices of American mortgage lenders, the risks of low-interest policies. But no action was taken. Meanwhile, the Fed continued to raise interest rates in nothing more than tiny increments…

    The Fed chairman was not even impressed by a letter the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America (MICA), a trade association of US mortgage providers, sent to the Fed on Sept. 23, 2005. In the letter, MICA warned that it was "very concerned" about some of the risky lending practices being applied in the US real estate market. The experts even speculated that the Fed might be operating on the basis of incorrect data. Despite a sharp increase in mortgages being approved for low-income borrowers, most banks were reporting to the Fed that they had not lowered their lending standards. According to a study MICA cited entitled "This Powder Keg Is Going to Blow," there was no secondary market for these "nuclear mortgages."…

    William White and his Basel team were dumbstruck. The central bankers were simply ignoring their warnings. Didn't they understand what they were being told? Or was it that they simply didn't want to understand?

    Yet, White said (h/t Edward Harrison) in a short, must-see talk last week that former long-time St. Louis Fed president William Poole told him that there was never even a whisper of these basic concepts at a single FOMC meeting.

    Indeed, White says that – even today - the Federal Reserve is doing the same old thing, reading off of the same playbook that caused the Latin American crisis, the Asian meltdown, the Long Term Capital meltdown, and all of the other financial crises of the last couple of decades. And see this.

    White, of course, argues for more accurate models which take into account real-world factors such as debt stocks, and include a time-frame longer than 2-year inflation targets or 4-year election cycles.

    But as Simon Johnson has repeatedly pointed out, economics used to acknowledge that politics had an important affect on economic policy, but now the economics profession – as a whole – tries to pretend that it is strictly a mathematical and technical art form.

    And as I documented last October, economists are trained to ignore – and central bankers and regulators rewarded to the extent that they ignore – the real world.

    And we cannot improve our models and understandings of how to prevent another crisis unless the truth of what caused this crisis is openly discussed (under subpoena power); and see this).

    If the government's entire strategy remains to cover up the truth, then we won't have the chance.

    [Dec 03, 2014] American Casino–Doc Investigates Roots of the Subprime Mortgage Meltdown and Tells the Stories of Its Victims

    An excellent definition of intellectual capture from Greenspan: "Well, remember that what an ideology is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I'm saying to you is, yes, I've found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is, but I've been very distressed by that fact. "
    Democracy Now
    The subprime mortgage meltdown was at the heart of what's been called the Great Recession of 2008. It caused more than a million Americans to lose their homes and brought Wall Street to its knees. A new documentary opening today in New York takes on the subprime crisis, tracking its roots on Wall Street and Washington and profiling some of its victims, mainly African American families who lost their homes. We play highlights and speak with filmmakers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn. [includes rush transcript] Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: The economy has a long way to recover from what's been called the Great Recession of 2008. At the heart of the meltdown was the subprime mortgage crisis that caused more than a million Americans to lose their homes and brought Wall Street to its knees.

    A new documentary that's opening today in New York takes on the subprime collapse, tracking its roots on Wall Street and Washington and profiling some of its victims, mainly African American families who lost their homes.

    American Casino is directed by Leslie Cockburn, who wrote and produced the documentary with her husband, journalist and author Andrew Cockburn. They join us today in our firehouse studio.

    But we first will turn to an excerpt of the film, which begins by looking at how deregulation of the financial sector laid the groundwork for the economic meltdown. This is American Casino.

    [Dec 03, 2014] Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire By Tim Dickinson

    September 24, 2014 | Rolling Stone

    The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

    What is less clear is where all that money comes from.

    ... ... ...

    That a massive company with such a troubling record as Koch Industries remains unfettered by financial regulation should strike fear in the heart of anyone with a stake in the health of the American economy. Though Koch has cultivated a reputation as an economically conservative company, it has long flirted with danger. And that it has not suffered a catastrophic loss in the past 15 years would seem to be as much about luck as about skillful management.

    The Kochs have brushed up against some of the major debacles of the crisis years. In 2007, as the economy began to teeter, Koch was gearing up to plunge into the market for credit default swaps, even creating an affiliate, Koch Financial Products, for that express purpose. KFP secured a AAA rating from Moody's and reportedly sought to buy up toxic assets at the center of the financial crisis at up to 50-times leverage. Ultimately, Koch Industries survived the experiment without losing its shirt.

    More recently, Koch was exposed to the fiasco at MF Global, the disgraced brokerage firm run by former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine that improperly dipped into customer accounts to finance reckless bets on European debt. Koch, one of MF Global's top clients, reportedly told trading partners it was switching accounts about a month before the brokerage declared bankruptcy – then the eighth-largest in U.S. history. Koch says the decision to pull its funds from MF Global was made more than a year before. While MF's small-fry clients had to pick at the carcass of Corzine's company to recoup their assets, Koch was already swimming free and clear.

    Because it's private, no one outside of Koch Industries knows how much risk Koch is taking – or whether it could conceivably create systemic risk, a concern raised in 2013 by the head of the Futures Industry Association. But this much is for certain: Because of the loopholes in financial-regulatory reform, the next company to put the American economy at risk may not be a Wall Street bank but a trading giant like Koch. In 2012, Gary Gensler, then CFTC chair, railed against the very loopholes Koch appears to be exploiting, raising the specter of AIG. "[AIG] had this massive risk built up in its derivatives just because it called itself an insurance company rather than a bank," Gensler said. When Congress adopted Dodd-Frank, Gensler added, it never intended to exempt financial heavy hitters just because "somebody calls themselves an insurance

    [Dec 03, 2014] The $9 Billion Witness Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare by By Matt Taibbi

    It looks like Chase, like "vampire squid" is a part of government, not so much a private bank... So government protect it like its own agency.
    November 20, 2014 | Rolling Stone

    Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" in the bank's mortgage operations.

    Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then. "My closest family and friends don't know what I've been living with," she says. "Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview."

    Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it's not exactly news that the country's biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That's why the more important part of Fleischmann's story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.

    She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. "Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way," Fleischmann says.

    This past year she watched as Holder's Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called "statements of facts," which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.

    And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. "I could be sued into bankruptcy," she says. "I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don't start speaking up, then this really is all we're going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history."

    ... ... ...

    A few months earlier, President Obama, giving in to pressure from the Occupy movement and other reformers, had formed the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group. At least superficially, this was a serious show of force against banks like Chase. The group would operate like a kind of regulatory Justice League, combining the superpowers of investigators from the SEC, the FBI, the IRS, HUD and a host of other federal agencies. It included noted anti-corruption- investigator and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which gave many observers reason to hope that finally something would be done about the crimes that led to the crash. That makes the fact that the bank would skate with negligible cash fines an even more extra-ordinary accomplishment.

    By the time the working group was set up, most of the applicable statutes of limitations had either expired or were about to expire. "A conspiratorial way of looking at it would be to say the state waited far too long to look at these cases and is now taking its sweet time investigating, while the last statutes of limitations run out," says famed prosecutor and former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

    It soon became clear that the SEC wasn't so much investigating Chase's behavior as just checking boxes. Fleischmann received no follow-up phone calls, even though she told the investigator that she was willing to tell the SEC everything she knew about the systemic fraud at Chase. Instead, the SEC focused on a single transaction involving a mortgage company called WMC. "I kept trying to talk to them about GreenPoint," Fleischmann says, "but they just wanted to talk about that other deal."

    ... ... ...

    Instead, the government decided to help Chase bury the evidence. It began when Holder's office scheduled a press conference for the morning of September 24th, 2013, to announce sweeping civil-fraud charges against the bank, all laid out in a detailed complaint drafted by the U.S. attorney's Sacramento office. But that morning the presser was suddenly canceled, and no complaint was filed. According to later news reports, Dimon had personally called Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, and asked to reopen negotiations to settle the case out of court.

    It goes without saying that the ordinary citizen who is the target of a government investigation cannot simply pick up the phone, call up the prosecutor in charge of his case and have a legal proceeding canceled. But Dimon did just that. "And he didn't just call the prosecutor, he called the prosecutor's boss," Fleischmann says. According to The New York Times, after Dimon had already offered $3 billion to settle the case and was turned down, he went to Holder's office and upped the offer, but apparently not by enough.

    ... ... ....

    Fleischmann later realized that the government wasn't interested in having her testify against Chase in court or any other public forum. Instead, the Justice Department's political wing, led by Holder, appeared to be using her, and her evidence, as a bargaining chip to extract more hush money from Dimon. It worked. Within weeks, Dimon had upped his offer to roughly $9 billion.

    ... ... ...

    The average person had no way of knowing what a terrible deal the Chase settlement was for the country. The terms were even lighter than the slap-on-the-wrist formula that allowed Wall Street banks to "neither admit nor deny" wrongdoing – the deals that had helped spark the Occupy protests. Yet those notorious deals were like the Nuremberg hangings compared to the regulatory innovation that Holder's Justice Department cooked up for Dimon and Co.

    Instead of a detailed complaint naming names, Chase was allowed to sign a flimsy, 10-and-a-half-page "statement of facts" that was: (a) so short, a first-year law student could read it in the time it takes to eat a tuna sandwich, and (b) so vague, a halfway intelligent person could read it and not know anyone had done anything wrong.

    ... ... ...

    Other investors bilked by Chase also tried to speak to Fleischmann. The Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh, which had sued Chase, asked the court to force Chase to turn over a copy of the draft civil complaint that was withheld after Holder's scuttled press conference. The Pittsburgh litigants also specified that they wanted access to the name of the state's cooperating witness: namely, Fleischmann.

    In that case, the judge actually ordered Chase to turn over both the complaint and Fleischmann's name. Chase stalled. Later in the fall, the judge ordered the bank to produce the information again; it stalled some more.

    Then, in January 2014, Chase suddenly settled with the Pittsburgh bank out of court for an undisclosed amount. Months after being ordered to allow Fleischmann to talk, they once again paid a stiff price to keep her testimony out of the public eye.

    ... ... ...

    Fleischmann, for her part, had begun to find the whole situation almost funny.

    "I thought, 'I swear, Eric Holder is gas-lighting me,' " she says.

    Ask her where the crime was, and Fleischmann will point out exactly how her bosses at JPMorgan Chase committed criminal fraud: It's right there in the documents; just hand her a highlighter and some Post-it notes – "We lawyers love flags" – and you will not find a more enthusiastic tour guide through a gazillion-page prospectus than Alayne Fleischmann.

    She believes the proof is easily there for all the elements of the crime as defined by federal law – the bank made material misrepresentations, it made material omissions, and it did so willfully and with specific intent, consciously ignoring warnings from inside the firm and out.

    She'd like to see something done about it, emphasizing that there still is time. The statute of limitations for wire fraud, for instance, has not run out, and she strongly believes there's a case there, against the bank's executives. She has no financial interest in any of this, no motive other than wanting the truth out. But more than anything, she wants it to be over.

    [Dec 03, 2014] Your Turn Got a Question for Richard Wolff BillMoyers.com

    billmoyers.com

    GriffinBibliotech

    In your interview with Bill Moyers, I feel that you failed to make your points about how regulation and jail are not "The Answer." Perhaps they are not the whole answer, but I believe they must be a part of the arsenal that helps us to attain whatever "The Answer" may be.

    You claim that regulation doesn't work because the banks and corporations will either evade or remove the regulations. But this line of reasoning doesn't show me that regulation doesn't work. In fact, it seems to demonstrate that regulations do work, at least until the elite power-mongers are allowed to undo them. The wealthy capitalists' abilities to evade or do away with regulations only means that the political commitment to enforce those regulations has been compromised and weakened to where they don't work.

    Also, you say that when you jail bankers, the next crop coming up is subject to the same rewards and punishments that are in existence and will therefore keep the cycle of bad behaviour going since the system hasn't been changed. The thing is, while the threat of jail time may be a part of our system now, we have not seen the implementation of that threat. If wrongdoers are finally held accountable and face actual jail time for their bad behaviour, is this not changing the punishments by giving teeth to the threats, thus changing the system to to be more effective in discouraging the next crop from pursuing the greedy reprehensible actions that lead to criminal sentencing?

    So if regulation and jail time aren't "The Answer," it's not because they don't work. When regulations are allowed to be enforced with real consequences which may include actual jail time (and not just the mere threat of it) we might be able to have a more equitable working system. I think we both agree that it will take a strengthening of our democratic power-of-the-people political will to bring these changes and others to bear on the wealthy class that has seemingly lost sight of how they are ensconced within the society that they think they are above and separate from.

    [Dec 03, 2014] Economists aren't 'superior' just because

    Economists are well paid in the same way high level prostitutes are well paid. They are need to provide intellectual capture of regulators. Much of the assumed authority of economists is socially constructed by financial oligarchy with a very specific purpose. From comments: "All the evidence it contains is consistent with economics being a hierarchy-obsessed cargo cult. But all its evidence is also consistent with economists having better and more consistent quality criteria, better sorting, and larger grad programs at the top. "
    Dec 02, 2014 | Crooked Timber

    One especially unfortunate aspect of economics is that its penchant for just-so stories can reinforce its imperialist blindnesses.

    If you've been trained systematically to look for examples of market efficiency winning out, you'll likely be inclined to treat your own, and your discipline's success as examples of market efficiency in action.

    George Mason University law school's Moneybollocks mythology provides one cautionary tale as to how this can lead one to systematically overlook the role of politics in determining who wins and who loses.

    The underlying point of the Fourcade et al. article is that politics and power play a far larger role in determining both the success of economics and the success of economics than economists are prepared to admit in public. Or, more succinctly, sociology provides a much better account of economics' success than economics itself does. Obviously, that's a claim that's going to be uncongenial to economists, as well as one that many economists will have difficulty in absorbing (they usually aren't trained to think in that way). If they were better versed in sociology, and also somewhat paranoid, they might want to treat the piece as a meta-Bourdieuian Trojan horse, that inherently elevates sociology at the expense of economics (although these imaginary well-read paranoid economists would still somehow have to deal with Fourcade's previous work, which has tacitly rebuked economic sociology for its obsession with disproving economics). But the point would still remain – that the internal structures of economics, as well as its external influence, are very far indeed from a free market.

    Ben 12.02.14 at 9:24 pm

    In other word, economics has done a better job of cozying up to power.

    Which is not entirely the discipline's own fault, given that the powerful have always seen it as an important tool for their legitimation. (e.g. see here)

    js 12.02.14 at 10:40 pm

    It's a great paper. And man, further confirmation-if any were needed-that business schools majorly suck!

    Sasha Clarkson 12.02.14 at 11:13 pm

    "… It's probably because…drumroll…economics is the discipline that studies the economy. "

    Economics is not the discipline: it is a set of disciplines which share a name, some jargon and common ideas: not unlike, say, evolutionary biology and "intelligent" design creationism. Except that in economics there is more than one form of creationism: Marxism and Austrianism come to mind. Creationist economics studies the world(s) some people believe ought to exist. Austrianists even define "inflation" in their own unique way, but then try to coerce everyone else's reality to match their theology.

    The economics of the real world has evolved since Keynes, just as biology has changed since Darwin and cosmology since Kepler. But the key thing about non-creationist economics is that evidence matters and will lead to the model being modified accordingly. After Tycho Brahe died, in 1601, Johannes Kepler tried to develop a new cosmological theory based on circular orbits around an off-centre sun. After years of work, he rejected his beloved theory because it was incorrect about Mars' position by 8 minutes of arc: 2/15 of a degree. Kepler wrote: "Because these 8′ could not be ignored, they alone have led to a total reformation of astronomy."* He then spent several more years developing his theory of elliptical orbits which made predictions accurate enough to satisfy him.

    Some "economists" have been predicting US hyperinflation for years: it's failure to materialise is a vast error compared with Kepler's 8 minutes of arc: but there has been no urge to modify the theory.

    *Translated by Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers.

    door 12.02.14 at 11:21 pm

    The root problem is that economists, and economics, frequently make policy prescriptions - normative judgments - even though they have very little knowledge of or training in normative ethics and moral philosophical argumentation. The real normative action is instead often concealed under technical phrases and axioms and simplifications that when scrutinized lack convincing justification and tend to be biased towards right-wing policies and the status quo distribution of power and wealth.

    Rakesh 12.03.14 at 12:59 am

    Another great thing is the comfort economics gives me that amidst all the chaos of unemployment, bankruptcies, and cycles there is an equilibrium that markets are just about to achieve, perhaps with just a little expert guidance and the right human sacrifices at the right time.


    JanieM 12.03.14 at 4:38 am

    "The economy" has become like this mythical, but nonetheless terribly important and pitifully fragile, little flower, that we can't ever actually see or touch, but all have to look after and think about and be terrifically careful of, otherwise it will just suddenly die and take us all with it. It's nonsense. We should be thinking about how we, as human beings, look after each other and the earth that sustains us.

    Well said.


    John Emerson 12.03.14 at 5:11 am


    Suppose a Pol Pot came to power and all economists were liquidated. How much would the economy suffer? Would the economics profession be revived in its present form, or would something strikingly different be developed which did all the jobs economics does, but without the arrogance and the ideological and methodological dead weight?

    This is a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, not a suggestion. Like a trolley car problem. There are no actual trolley cars with fat men being pushed in front of them, and there is no actual Pol Pot in the offing. Perhaps I should have hypothesized that The Rapture carried off every economist in the world, but no one else, but that's even less realistic. Let's just assume that all economists were pensioned off at twice their present salary on the condition that they quit doing economics. That would be both humane and practical.

    Bruce Wilder 12.03.14 at 6:02 am

    Rakesh @ 19 - I admit it: I got that far before catching on.

    Tom @ 16:

    Economists have quant skills (as Smith says) and also their skills can be used in sectors where there is a lot of money. Finance, first of all. . . . That is why they make more than statisticians and that is why actuaries make more than economists. And that is why math and engineering people who study finance end up making a fair amount of money. . . . Obviously expertise is a matter of legitimation . . .

    Economists have legitimated making a lot of money in finance, even though making a lot of money in finance is pretty obviously deleterious for society, aka the vast majority of people. It is kind of circular: bad economics opens opportunities for bad economists to make a lot of money doing bad economic things.

    Commenter @ 13: All the evidence it contains is consistent with economics being a hierarchy-obsessed cargo cult. But all its evidence is also consistent with economists having better and more consistent quality criteria, better sorting, and larger grad programs at the top.

    Two mints in one! Policy macroeconomics pretty much is a cargo cult, as far as its content is concerned. This is widely acknowledged in Naked Emperor remarks and so on, but it doesn't seem to matter. Which, I suppose figures in the motivations for the research of Fourcade et alia. It is the contrast between outside political critiques and "derision" directed at economics and the arrogant confidence of its inside practitioners about which the authors are most curious.

    Tabasco @ 9

    You don't need to know anything about the economy to be a highly successful economist, in the sense of the getting papers published in the best journals. And knowing a lot about the economy not only is no guarantee of career success, it invites condescension from economists who wear the ignorance about the economy as a badge of honor and sneer openly that economists who study the economy are just journalists.

    Said as plainly and bluntly as that, it can seem like superficial sarcasm, but it is so accurate a description. The emphasis on "rigor" and the pride in irrelevant maths becomes a remarkable absence of curiosity and a doctrinal rigidity in a sizeable and highly influential minority of economists. And, all that is compounded by the rank corruption afforded by those fabled consulting opportunities.

    A H 12.03.14 at 7:05 am

    The market is for private sector PhD economists is not that large, so I don't think there is a direct outside demand pulling up econ wages. If anything, PhDs have a reputation for being awful at making money in finance.* Though it is pretty easy for a new PhD to jump into a consulting career.

    I would guess is that where wages are getting driven up is in the demand for business school teachers. As inequality increases, MBAs become a path to the 1% and B schools become profit centers. They need lots of econ profs hence wages go up in Econ.

    *Here is a fun recent example http://thereformedbroker.com/2014/05/28/brokers-liquid-alts-and-the-fund-that-never-goes-up/

    [Nov 22, 2014] Deception counts By Martin Hutchinson

    Nov 19, 2014 | Asia Times

    One of the courses I took at business school was "Analysis of Financial Reports", in which we learned to deconstruct all the scam accounts that had proliferated in the late 1960s boom. Most of these companies, undone by negative cash flow, went bust after 1970.

    We were informed by the professor that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), set up in 1973, was introducing new and more rigorous accounting principles, so that pretty soon all the accounting scams of the late 1960s would become impossible. Accounts would become readily comprehensible, with few differences in approach between those of different companies.

    Well, that didn't last long!

    Since the 1970s, not only has finance become vastly more complicated, but so has accounting. The principle of "mark to market," originally introduced only to value properly the trading portfolios of securities brokerages, has been extended again and again until it has made accounts incomprehensible to the ordinary investor.

    Combine this technique with the complexities of modern finance, in which derivatives are used to "hedge" all imaginable operations, and we saw perfectly simple, "vanilla" companies suddenly record huge profits or losses for no conceivable reason. We also witnessed banks recording large, spurious profits in 2008, as their credit quality collapsed and the "mark-to-market value" of their liabilities declined commensurately.

    More …

    Martin Hutchinson is the author of Great Conservatives (Academica Press, 2005) - details can be found on the website www.greatconservatives.com - and co-author with Professor Kevin Dowd of Alchemists of Loss (Wiley, 2010). Both are now available on Amazon.com, Great Conservatives only in a Kindle edition, Alchemists of Loss in both Kindle and print editions.

    (Republished with permission from PrudentBear.com. Copyright 2005-14 David W Tice & Associates.)

    [Nov 22, 2014] Wall Street Stunned As Iceland Dares To Jail Banker Involved In 2008 Crash

    Nov 20, 2014 | zerohedge.com

    The impossible is possible. Never say never. Wall Street bankers are staring agog at headlines coming from Europe where, in Iceland, the former chief executive of one of the largest banks in the country which was involved in crashing the economy in 2008 has been sentenced to jail time.

    As Valuewalk reports, in receiving a one year prison sentence, Sigurjon Arnason officially became the first bank executive to be convicted of manipulating the bank's stock price and deceiving investors, creditors and the authorities between Sept. 29 and Oct. 3, 2008, as the bank's fortunes unwound, crashing the economy with it.

    It appears he was as shocked by the verdict as Wall Street-ers are, "this sentence is a big surprise to me as I did nothing wrong." It was likely all for the people's own good…

    [Nov 20, 2014] The NY Fed's Attempt To Explain That It Is Not A Subsidiary Of Goldman Sachs

    Nov 20, 2014 | zerohedge.com

    The most shocking, if already completely buried, news of the day was that - in yet another confirmation that Goldman Sachs is in charge of the New York Fed - a NY Fed staffer was colluding and leaking confidential, material information to a 29-year-old Goldman vice president, himself a former Federal Reserve employee.

    This only happened because on the day Carmen Segarra disclosed her 47 hours of "secret Goldman tapes" on This American Life, Goldman executives asked the former Fed staffer where he had gotten what appeared to be confidential information from.

    To nobody's surprise the answer was: The New York Fed. So as the latter, also known as the biggest hedge fund of the western world with $2.7 trillion in AUM, is scrambling to once again prove it is shocked, shocked, that it has become merely the latest subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, Inc., it released the following statement explaining what "really" happened.

    From the NY Fed:

    As soon as we learned that Goldman Sachs suspected one of its employees may have inappropriately obtained confidential supervisory information, we alerted law enforcement authorities. We have been working with law enforcement authorities since then. Because any public statement about the investigation could be prejudicial to a potential future criminal case, we are unable to comment on the specific facts that are under investigation.

    As a general matter, we have detailed rules and controls protecting confidential information. All employees with access to confidential supervisory information need to agree to safeguard that information appropriately, and not to disclose it without the necessary approval. Employees receive training relating to the handling and protection of confidential supervisory information and other information security matters. Employees are informed that a violation of these restrictions could lead to criminal prosecution.

    Employees also receive ongoing ethics training and are required to do an annual certification that they understand and will adhere to the Bank's Code of Conduct. In addition, we use off-boarding procedures to confirm with departing employees that no confidential information may be taken. With respect to all New York Fed staff, departing Officers may have no official contact with the Federal Reserve System for a period of one year. In addition, all departing New York Fed employees may not have substantive business contacts with the New York Fed relating to any particular matter that he or she had worked on when employed by the New York Fed. Further, with respect to employees departing from the financial institution supervision group, if the departing employee had served as a senior supervisory officer or central point of contact at a large and complex banking organization, that employee may not receive compensation from the supervised organization as an employee, officer, director or consultant for a period of one year. Finally, the New York Fed has in place technology to help identify and prevent the forwarding of confidential information in violation of our rules.

    So did this technology fail? Or is Goldman simply one of the exempted parties?

    Selected Skeptical Comments

    hedgeless_horseman

    Is the NY FED trying to say that Goldman Sachs does not own shares in the New York Federal Reserve Bank?

    The 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by the
    Congress as the operating arms of the nation's central banking system,
    are organized similarly to private corporations--possibly leading to
    some confusion about "ownership." For example, the Reserve Banks issue
    shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is
    quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve
    Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of
    stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System
    . The stock may
    not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are,
    by law, 6 percent per year.

    http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm

    Because...

    Goldman Sachs Bank USA ("GS Bank") is a New York State-chartered bank and a member of the Federal Reserve System.

    http://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/investing-and-lending/banking/

    Which is why it is a complete farce and racket to have The NY Federal Reserve Bank be responsible for regulating the member banks that own it.

    The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has supervisory and regulatory authority over a wide range of financial institutions, including state-chartered banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System (state member banks), bank holding companies, thrift holding companies and foreign banking organizations that have a branch, agency, a commercial lending company subsidiary or a bank subsidiary in the United States...

    http://www.ny.frb.org/banking/supervisionregulate.html

    SoberOne
    Nice HH.

    " Finally, the New York Fed has in place technology to help identify and prevent the forwarding of confidential information in violation of our rules. "

    Fancy way of saying the NSA, eh?

    insanelysane

    insanelysane's picture

    It takes two to tango. Goldman wacked a couple of employees but the FED has kept all of theirs. Apparently law enforcement led by Mr. Holder are undertaking another extensive "investigation."

    Either that or they are waiting for a memo from Goldman detailing what their "investigation" found.

    Bay of Pigs

    They don't need to explain anything. The William Dudley's bio....

    "Prior to joining the Bank in 2007, Mr. Dudley was a partner and managing director at Goldman, Sachs & Company and was the firm's chief U.S. economist for a decade."

    http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/orgchart/dudley.html

    madbraz

    If this was a just country, by now the FBI would have an undercover operation, bug Dudley and KHenry and obtain irrefutable evidence that would be enough to end the NY FED and put them behind bars.

    As we don't, and Goldman owns the FBI, we watch and cringe at these masters of arrogance and corruption.

    JR

    To understand Goldman's ticket to monopoly, the key is the Fed's chain of command.

    Since the days of Alexander Hamilton the investment banks have made their home and impact in the Empire State. There, the concentration of big banks has made the NY Federal Reserve Bank powerful enough to outmaneuver, outvote and override all other regional interests. Its Fed ownership position, extensive size, holdings, insiders operating in the Fed and its New York contacts guarantees Goldman Sachs the leverage when needed to direct the Federal Reserve System.

    It boils down to this: when you have the kind of leverage Goldman and the TBTFs have, this Wall Street money trust can make the critical decisions. One consortium, Goldman Sachs, tells the NY Fed what to do; it tells the FOMC and it relays its decision to Janet Yellen, representing 90 percent of the banking power. It means the government of the United States is under the direction of the Wall Street money trust.

    The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the feature of how centralized, incestuous and tyrannical America's financial system has become. It is the New York Fed that literally gives the first and last word on who gets what and when in financial America. In other words, when the money trust picks its winners and losers, it's here's where the decisions are made....

    Because of the extensive holdings and connections of New York based investment banks, what influence could a St. Louis or Dallas banker possible make on Fed policy? And since the domination of the Fed by Ben Strong of J.P. Morgan Trust and Governor of the New York Fed from 1914 until his death in 1928, no Fed decision is made without the New York stamp.

    The president of the New York Fed is a permanent voting member of the FOMC and traditionally is selected as its vice chairman. The other presidents serve one-year terms on a rotating basis. All of the presidents participate in FOMC discussions, but only the five who are members of the Committee vote on policy decisions.

    The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has several unique responsibilities associated with its presence in the financial capital of the United States.

    At the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Federal Reserve's top monetary policy-making group, the New York Fed executes domestic open market operations on behalf of the System.

    Open market operations-the buying and selling of U.S. government securities in the secondary market-are the principal means through which the System implements monetary policy. Although the FOMC decides what policy to follow, the System's portfolio is directed, on a daily basis, by the Manager of the System Open Market Account at the New York Fed. The Manager, along with the rest of the Open Market Department, constantly monitors bank reserves and acts to ensure that the FOMC's directive is being fulfilled.

    In addition to its domestic trading desk responsibilities, the New York Fed, at the direction of the FOMC and U.S. Treasury, conducts all foreign exchange trading for the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System. In this role, the New York Fed intervenes in foreign exchange markets to achieve dollar exchange rate policy objectives and to counter disorderly conditions in foreign exchange markets.

    The New York Fed also is responsible for maintaining relations with, and providing financial services for, foreign central banks and international organizations. One of these services is the New York Reserve Bank's unique custodial responsibility for the gold reserves of about five dozens countries, central banks, and international organizations. The New York Fed's gold vault stores approximately one-quarter of the world's official gold supply-the largest concentration of monetary gold in the world.

    Foreign official gold reserves have been held at the New York Fed since 1924 for numerous reasons, including the stability of the U.S. political system, the concentration of international trade and finance in New York City, and the convenience of centralizing gold holdings in a place where international payments can be made quickly.

    The truth is, Goldman Sachs is one of the Fed owners, but it is so big, it is pushing everybody else around, at the moment.

    The most recent information from observers says that just eight families, four of which reside in the US, own 80 percent of the NY Federal Reserve Bank. They are, according Dean Henderson of Global Research in 2011, Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.This ownership information was provided by J.W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, writing in "The Grime Reaper," information he acquired from Saudi bankers.

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-federal-reserve-cartel-the-eight-families/25080

    [Nov 19, 2014] Matt Stoller: Lobbying Used to Be a Crime: A Review of Zephyr Teachout's New Book on the Secret History of Corruption in America by Yves Smith

    November 18, 2014 | nakedcapitalism.com

    Yves here. You can also read Zephyr Teachout answering questions about her book at last weekend's Book Salon at Firedoglake.

    By Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Originally published at Medium and Firedoglake

    If there's one way to summarize Zephyr Teachout's extraordinary book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United, it is that today we are living in Benjamin Franklin's dystopia. Her basic contention, which is not unfamiliar to most of us in sentiment if not in detail, is that the modern Supreme Court has engaged in a revolutionary reinterpretation of corruption and therefore in American political life. This outlook, written by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the famous Citizens United case, understands and celebrates America as a brutal and Hobbesian competitive struggle among self-interested actors attempting to use money to gain personal benefits in the public sphere.

    What makes the book so remarkable is its scope and ability to link current debates to our rich and forgotten history. Perhaps this has been done before, but if it has, I have never seen it. Liberals tend to think that questions about electoral and political corruption started in the 1970s, in the Watergate era. What Teachout shows is that these questions were foundational in the American Revolution itself, and every epoch since. They are in fact questions fundamental to the design of democracy.

    Teachout starts her book by telling the story of a set of debates that took place even before the Constitution was ratified - whether American officials could take gifts from foreign kings. The French King, as a matter of diplomatic process, routinely gave diamond-encrusted snuff boxes to foreign ambassadors. Americans, adopting a radical Dutch provision banning such gifts, wrestled with the question of temptation to individual public servants versus international diplomatic norms. The gifts ban, she argues, was evidence of a particular demanding notion of corruption at the heart of American legal history. These rules, 'bright-line' rules versus 'corrupt-intent' rules, govern temptation and structure. They cover innocent and illicit activity, as opposed to bribery rules which are organized solely around quid pro quo corruption.

    The Constitution is full of such bright-line rules. For instance, the residency requirement was intended to protect against 'adventurers' and the takings clause protects private property and has an anti-monopoly interpretive framework. The census, rules on representation of House members, the regular electoral cycle of two year terms, age requirements (to prevent dynasties), requirements for legislative journals, salary payments for legislators, and prohibitions on holding legislative and other offices are all anti-corruption provisions. The founders, Teachout argues, were obsessed with corruption. They had seen their beloved British system fall into the trap of corruption, with 'place men' (members of parliament dependent on the king) and rotten boroughs, and sought to prevent a recurrence in America.

    Teachout points out something fairly obvious, but not recognized today - the theoretical underpinning of the American revolution was that a corrupt government had no legitimacy to govern. This is something the founders well recognized. The debates they had - Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, and people in the culture at large - reflected a divide between political philosophers Thomas Hobbes versus Baron de Montesquieu. Hobbes's vision, echoed today among the Chicago school's law and economics scholars, was that corruption as a concept made no sense. Life was a brutal competition among selfish actors. In such a paradigm, a revolution would simply be a question of raw power, rather than any set of principles.

    The founders roundly repudiated this view, adopting Montesquieu's arguments that there is such a thing as a public interest and that people could orient themselves around it given sufficient personal virtue and adequate structural incentives to do so. Montesquieu is best-known for his promotion of the concept of different branches of government, but that concept came from his moral view of human nature. Teachout shows that questions of bribery were fairly insignificant in the dialogue over the structure of the new republic, whereas anti-corruption as a Montesquieu-influenced deliberative design principle was the key animator of the shaping of the country.

    This debate continued, in some sense, throughout the two hundred plus years of American legal and cultural history. The first significant test of the revolutionary anti-corruption doctrine was the 1795 'Yazoo' controversy, when a Georgia legislature sold a massive d process never went away.

    In her discussion of the 19th century robber baron era, she includes the critical yet forgotten law of 19th century lobbying. Lobbying today is considered a Constitutionally protected free speech activity, an unfortunate but necessarily tolerated side effect of the First Amendment. That, however, is a relatively recent legal status.

    In the 19th century, lobbying was perceived as an illegitimate and inherently corrupt activity, a betrayal of one's own citizenship. The Georgia draft Constitution in 1877 made lobbying a crime. "Throughout the country, from the early 1830s through the early 1930s, the sale of personal influence was treated as a civic wrong in the eyes of the law," she writes. "A citizen did not have a personal right to pay someone else to press his or her legislative agenda." This anti lobbying sentiment was not enforced through criminal law, but through civil law. Contracts for lobbying were unenforceable by courts, as the case Trist vs Child showed.

    In 1890, the first law requiring lobbyists to register was passed in Massachusetts. This began the legitimization of lobbying as a profession. In 1927, the Supreme Court began chipping away at the de fact prohibition on lobbying via contract law, but as late as 1941 it still upheld Trist vs. Child.

    Corruption in this era was widespread, as was the reaction against it. The Pendleton Act, which created the civil service, and the secret ballot, were both bright-line rule innovations to reduce the temptation of corruption. The country also began wrestling with the increasingly high cost of campaigns, which was a pivotal factor in the election of 1896 contest between populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republican William McKinley. Banks were assessed a .25% charge on capital to finance McKinley's run, which amounted to roughly $5 billion in today's money. This led to, among other things, Teddy Roosevelt's anti-monopoly crusades and his work to ban corporate contributions in the early 20th century.

    Corruption was more than just bribery, it was a threat to self-government and individual citizenship. It was a moral problem. Mark Twain's novel The Gilded Age, from which the era took its namesake, was a story of an innocent woman turned sophisticated amoral lobbyist. Corruption as a problem had religious overtones.

    Gradually, this ardor has cooled. It was only in the post-World War II era that courts began carving out a First Amendment right on lobbying. Lobbying in the post-war administrative state was a necessity, and the increasing expense of public campaigns suggested that restrictions were necessary. But in 1976, the Supreme Court ushered in the modern Hobbesian view of political economy with its ruling in Buckley vs. Valeo. This case invalidated restrictions on campaign spending, and began the reinterpretation of corruption to simply mean quid pro quo bribery. The court argued that spending on elections in a First Amendment right, though the government had a valid anti-corruption interest in limiting speech. Contribution limits were valid, but spending limits were not. Post Buckley, the only limits on campaign spending became corruption-based, so scholars and lawyers began defining their policy preferences in terms of corruption, twisting and warping the term.

    The book's final chapters are a discussion of Citizens United, the Supreme Court's makeup, and a legal proscription of how to restore the more appropriate conception of corruption in our national life.

    According to Teachout, Citizens United was a decision in which the Supreme Court ignored the historic record to narrow the definition of corruption to mean a simple quid pro quo transaction. It found that the First Amendment protects "political speech regardless of the identity of the speaker," and that the Court found no sufficient "government interest in limiting corporate political advertising." It equated favoratism and influence with 'democratic responsiveness'. This was, as Teachout shows earlier, what Benjamin Franklin saw to be a dystopian view of how the American republic would be organized.

    ... ... ...

    Minor Heretic, November 17, 2014 at 11:04 pm

    A fallacy at the root of the modern 1st Amendment interpretation of campaign finance is just that: money as speech. Consider that high spending candidates win congressional primaries 98% of the time. That 98% is literal – see USPIRG's work on this. That makes donating money analogous to voting, not speaking. Last I checked, we were each supposed to have an equal number of votes, namely one.

    Just throwing this out: Limit political donations (to candidates, parties, PACs, ballot initiative movements, lobbying organizations, 501(c)4…) to a day's wages at the federal minimum wage. It would also be the annual maximum. That's $58 at the present level. David Koch and the guy who mows David Koch's lawn would have equal clout.

    Going further with the idea of money-as-vote, there should be a constituency restriction. Why should a resident of Ohio be able to influence the outcome of an election or ballot initiative in California? For that matter, why should a resident of Ohio congressional District 1 influence the elections of a representative for Ohio District 2? In neither case would the donor have legal party status.

    I'm going to read Teachout's book. I should note that her sister Woden co-wrote an excellent book called "Slow Democracy," about the practice of direct deliberative democracy, including (but not limited to) town meetings.


    Sam Kanu, November 18, 2014 at 8:54 am

    "Money = free speech" is the ultimate fallacy. If money is equal to speech, then per definition, speech cannot be free or equal, as we have huge disparities in wealth. And in turn that means we dont have a democracy.

    So basically the courts have dictated that democracy is dead. But that is not news on these pages, where it has long been obvious that we live in an oligarchy….


    Paul Tioxon, November 18, 2014 at 5:53 am

    The corruption of the Gilded Age included the buying of US Senate offices. Mark Twain in particular wrote against the practice whereby state legislatures picked the US Senators for a state, without any direct election by the citizenry. One of the richest men in world, William A. Clark, The Copper King of Montana, paid off the entire legislature of that state to become its appointed Senator. Finally, the the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution provided for the direct election of US Senators. Today, another institutional barrier to democratic elective office is the Congressional District. When I vote for a Senator, we have state wide elections, not 1 of 2 Senatorial Districts. When I vote in PA for my Congressional representation, I am only voting for a tiny fraction of my full representation, due to my being forced to vote for only one candidate in my congressional district. PA has 18 districts because it has to follow the law that provides for this organization. I should get to vote for all 18 of the federal representatives, because I am a citizen of Pennsylvania, which enter the Union of the USofA.

    The districts are not hallowed institutions, because they keep changing with the growth in population of the nation. And I, get to vote for some frequently redrawn district that keep the amount of Republicans going to Washington DC in numbers greater than the total vote count for their party for each of their district races. I want a vote fore each representative, no matter how many there are for my state. Some small states with only 1 representative have a statewide election. That is what I want for all of the citizens with more than 1 representative. If I had 18 votes, I could vote 18 times for a Democratic slate of reps or maybe 12 Dems and 6 Green Party reps. As it stands now, 17 or the 18 people who represent my state get to go to DC without my consent. I am not 1/18th Pennsylvanian and I don't want 1/18th of a voice in Congress. One person, One vote, for One Candidate. How come I can't vote for the rest of my state's delegation to Congress. Oh yeah, we might take over the government mechanism of decision making.

    beene, November 18, 2014 at 7:54 am

    To me this is the most outrageous settle law that we have failed to address in over two hundred years (to the Supreme Court, where in 1810, in Fletcher v Peck, the court said that the sanctity of the contract must be upheld even in the face of corruption. In a nod to today's logic of brutal tolerance of corruption, the court argued that corruption may be problematic, but there was nothing the state could do about it. This was a highly consequential decision, and prioritized contract rights over anti-corruption.).

    cabjoe mentioned voters being able to vote on approval of any new law passed by our representatives seems like an excellent correction to a lot of corruption by law makers.

    Linda Amick, November 18, 2014 at 8:30 am

    As a post grad student of Historical Philosophy, I find it absolutely shocking that our societal first principles are Hobbesian. His view of human dynamics and behaviors is MIGHT MAKES RIGHT. Human beings are nothing more than brutes.

    If our societal viewpoint was Aristotelian with man being a rational animal and part of the living organism of the earth and solar system with a responsibility to respect all parts, maybe our society would find its basis in something more akin to the Golden Rule.


    Jim, November 18, 2014 at 5:25 pm

    Mr. Hobbes, I believe, has inappropriately been maligned by many of the posts on this particular thread when making allusions to his moral psychology.

    If you take a more careful look at his writings you might notice that Hobbes is concerned with cultivating a personality type concerned with honor. Hobbes says

    "That which gives to human actions the relish of justice is a certain nobleness or gallantness of courage, rarely found, by which a man scorns to be beholden for the contentment of his life to fraud, or breach of promise. The justice of the manners is that which is meant, where justice is called a virtue, and injustice a vice." (Leviathan, Chapter 14).

    When talking about the first steps in the transition from the state of nature to a social contract Hobbes seems to believe that at least some members of the original society have to be of a sufficiently magnanimous temperament that they are willing to take unprecedented risks for the benefit of all.

    Hobbes identifies magnanimity with the just conduct that springs from a "contempt" of injustice, and he seems to recognize that men are often prepared to risk their lives rather than suffer some sorts of shame. He also says that "magnanimity is a sign of power."(Leviathan, Chapter 10)

    JTMcPhee , November 18, 2014 at 8:31 am

    Speaking of corruption, moral hazard and all that related badness, years ago I was in the man cave of a person busy in the open-outcry activity at the CME. Up on his wall in a florid frame was the front page from a Chicago Tribune dated as I recall in august 1852. The headline story reported he criminal conviction of two fellas for engaging in "speculation" on the future price of corn, or maybe pork - back then, the stock in trade of the CBOT/CME today was totally illegal, even barred by the Illinois constitution, for a lot of reasons that reflect the pain that smartass "speculation" and derivatization have and continue to cause:

    The Struggle for Legitimacy

    Nineteenth century America was both fascinated and appalled by futures trading. This is apparent from the litigation and many public debates surrounding its legitimacy (Baer and Saxon 1949, 55; Buck 1913, 131, 271; Hoffman 1932, 29, 351; Irwin 1954, 80; Lurie 1979, 53, 106). Many agricultural producers, the lay community and, at times, legislatures and the courts, believed trading in futures was tantamount to gambling. The difference between the latter and speculating, which required the purchase or sale of a futures contract but not the shipment or delivery of the commodity, was ostensibly lost on most Americans (Baer and Saxon 1949, 56; Ferris 1988, 88; Hoffman 1932, 5; Lurie 1979, 53, 115).

    Many Americans believed that futures traders frequently manipulated prices. From the end of the Civil War until 1879 alone, corners – control of enough of the available supply of a commodity to manipulate its price – allegedly occurred with varying degrees of success in wheat (1868, 1871, 1878/9), corn (1868), oats (1868, 1871, 1874), rye (1868) and pork (1868) (Boyle 1920, 64-65). This manipulation continued throughout the century and culminated in the Three Big Corners – the Hutchinson (1888), the Leiter (1898), and the Patten (1909). The Patten corner was later debunked (Boyle 1920, 67-74), while the Leiter corner was the inspiration for Frank Norris's classic The Pit: A Story of Chicago (Norris 1903; Rothstein 1982, 60).14 In any case, reports of market corners on America's early futures exchanges were likely exaggerated (Boyle 1920, 62-74; Hieronymus 1977, 84), as were their long term effects on prices and hence consumer welfare (Rothstein 1982, 60).

    By 1892 thousands of petitions to Congress called for the prohibition of "speculative gambling in grain" (Lurie, 1979, 109). And, attacks from state legislatures were seemingly unrelenting: in 1812 a New York act made short sales illegal (the act was repealed in 1858); in 1841 a Pennsylvania law made short sales, where the position was not covered in five days, a misdemeanor (the law was repealed in 1862); in 1882 an Ohio law and a similar one in Illinois tried unsuccessfully to restrict cash settlement of futures contracts; in 1867 the Illinois constitution forbade dealing in futures contracts (this was repealed by 1869); in 1879 California's constitution invalidated futures contracts (this was effectively repealed in 1908); and, in 1882, 1883 and 1885, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, respectively, passed laws that equated futures trading with gambling, thus making the former a misdemeanor (Peterson 1933, 68-69).

    Two nineteenth century challenges to futures trading are particularly noteworthy. The first was the so-called Anti-Option movement. According to Lurie (1979), the movement was fueled by agrarians and their sympathizers in Congress who wanted to end what they perceived as wanton speculative abuses in futures trading (109). Although options were (are) not futures contracts, and were nonetheless already outlawed on most exchanges by the 1890s, the legislation did not distinguish between the two instruments and effectively sought to outlaw both (Lurie 1979, 109).

    In 1890 the Butterworth Anti-Option Bill was introduced in Congress but never came to a vote. However, in 1892 the Hatch (and Washburn) Anti-Option bills passed both houses of Congress, and failed only on technicalities during reconciliation between the two houses. Had either bill become law, it would have effectively ended options and futures trading in the United States (Lurie 1979, 110).

    A second notable challenge was the bucket shop controversy, which challenged the legitimacy of the CBT in particular. A bucket shop was essentially an association of gamblers who met outside the CBT and wagered on the direction of futures prices. These associations had legitimate-sounding names such as the Christie Grain and Stock Company and the Public Grain Exchange. To most Americans, these "exchanges" were no less legitimate than the CBT. That some CBT members were guilty of "bucket shopping" only made matters worse! http://eh.net/encyclopedia/a-history-of-futures-trading-in-the-united-states/

    The Players reported on in that Tribune article, as I recall, were convicted of multiple felonies, and sentenced to something like 15 years each in pre-privatization Illinois prison.

    And another example of the fun and games, and how libertarianism actually operates if allowed: Remember the Onion Corner scam, again centered in Chicago? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

    I'm old enough and cynical enough to know that there's an irreducible amount of corruption, some cheerful but most perverse, in any social organization. The constant problem is managing what I'd call "slack," the apparently necessary "play" in the system, that like mechanical tolerances in timepieces and transmissions, keeps friction and heat from locking up the mechanisms. I doubt we humans will ever be very successful at keeping the "sharpest" among us from fattening themselves via fraud, abuse, theft, combination and all that - there are no incorruptible mechanisms that can keep the "slack" to a level that like, our gut bacteria population does not proliferate and degenerate into a disease state that threatens to kill us, the organism of ordinary people that keep all this going with our work and our little bits of wealth…

    blucollarAl November 18, 2014 at 9:15 am

    The entire philosophical and ideological foundation of modern capitalism, the almost always unquestioned because unrecognized and assumed anthropological and moral premises of the system of organizing economic and social life, is Hobbesian in its roots and accepts a Hobbesian picture of the universe. What passes today for the "American Conservative Movement", that collection of foreign policy neo-cons and economic/social neo-liberals that deceptively calls itself "conservative", suggesting a respect for if not a reverence for the traditional and older ways, represents in fact a radical, anti-American tradition of Hobbesian political philosophy as Treachout seems to recognize in her book (I have not yet read it).

    Still the best treatment of the Hobbes and modern capitalism are Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism", Chapter 5, "The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoise", and C.B. McPherson, "The Political Philosophy of Hobbes". Read them and weep.

    So we have a radical, anti-American, anti-human philosophy based on a picture of human nature as pure passion, aggression, power-hungry greed, appealing to ordinary Americans under the guise of "conservative" respect for their cherished (what's left) customs, traditions, and respect for decency. It is as if we have all fallen into a deep trance with no one, certainly not today's Democrat Party, there to wake us up.

    JTMcPhee November 18, 2014 at 4:26 pm

    Even The Capitalist Tool, and the Economist (sic), and the OECD (and of course the keepers of order, the military and state security types) know the pot is already simmering, the flame is turned up and all that:

    Even that apologia for More Of The Same, The Economist: "For richer, for poorer: Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes," http://www.economist.com/node/21564414 (Neither are heart disease and cancer, sort of…)

    On the Big War side of things, " Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown: Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements," http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown, and unless one really enjoys depression and self-flagellation, it does not pay to research the crowd control technologies our young innovators are handing to the rich shits and their "people."

    The "elite," having lucked into the knack of creating a Black Hole to suck in all the resources and wealth of everyone else, of course need "Security" to not only hang tight to what they have grabbed, but to keep anyone else from picking off a few crumbs. More from Forbes:

    Security Concerns Of The Super-Rich

    Worried about someone hacking into your offshore bank account? Kidnapping you and holding you for ransom because of your high net worth? Breaking into your Caribbean villa while you're working from lower Manhattan?

    Those aren't concerns for most of us, but for the extremely wealthy they could be. Trite as it may seem, the rich really are different from you and me. Especially when it comes to security…." http://www.forbes.com/sites/brianwingfield/2010/10/20/security-concerns-of-the-super-rich/

    And all those ex-imperial military types, loaded for bear and needing a paycheck… "retainers", isn't that the old term?

    Katie, bar the door!

    ex-PFC Chuck November 18, 2014 at 11:43 am

    Judging from this review, Teachout's book covers much of the same ground that Larry Lessig did three years ago in Republic, Lost. In that book, Lessig drew considerably on Teachout's earlier work in this area. He used the terms "dependence corruption" and "systematic corruption," to describe features and practices that undermine the peoples' influence on government but are not illegal, and differentiates them from quid pro quo corruptions such as bribery. He describes at length how dependence corruption was a major concern of the founders. Here are some links for people interested in doing something useful in this area:

    movetoamend.org

    http://wilpf.org/CvDCmte

    http://www.wilpf.org/docs/ccp/corp/ACP/CP_article%2Btimeline.pdf >

    juliania November 18, 2014 at 12:42 pm

    Many thanks for this review, Yves!

    "…Teachout shows, through painstaking historical research, that this popular conception of corruption is actually far more consistent with the intent of the Constitutional framers than the odd and anomalous John Roberts-led Hobbesian majority…"

    In my small liberal arts college back in the early '60′s we were reading the papers of the framers of the Constitution, after having read works by the English philosophers, and what I remember of Hobbes boils down to his description of the lives of human beings as being 'nasty, brutish, and short.' (Consequently when I think of Hobbes in my mind he takes on that persona – nasty, brutish, and short.) Teachout's analysis of Citizens United is extremely interesting; I always thought the Constitution was crafted with Hobbesian realities in mind; that was what 'checks and balances' were all about. It was never 'just a piece of paper' but you had to toe the line it brightly (love that appellation) laid out.

    Always until now the better angels of our nature were not just folderol propaganda, given occasional lip service and nothing further, but also verities enshrined in our founding documents, to be treasured and protected – how far we have come away from that glorious heritage!

    Maybe we are approaching the turning point.

    Sluggeaux, November 18, 2014 at 4:18 pm

    "I believe that the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos, and murder." - Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man

    As one of the few people in this country who seems to have actually read the opinions which make up the Citizens United decision, I believe that our Constitution represents an effort to overcome a Hobbesian world by those who well understood the brutish instincts of their fellow human beings.

    Kennedy actually relies on dissents penned by William O. Douglas and Earl Warren to decisions affirming the muzzling of collective political action by organized labor under the Taft-Hartley Act passed in the wake of the Second World War at the beginning of the McCarthyite Red Scare.

    Eight of the nine Justices agreed with Kennedy that collectively spending money on political communication is protected by the First Amendment, but that the Congress may constitutionally require that the speaker(s) be transparently identified (only Thomas dissented from this view).

    It is the Congress which has corruptly failed to act on the Supreme Court's invitation to ban "Dark Money" and force political speakers to identify themselves and their agendas. Such sunshine would make their corruption far more difficult.

    Jim, November 18, 2014 at 5:55 pm

    I think you should try to keep in mind that Hobbes was also a theoretician of skepticism, something which seems in extremly short supply in 2014.

    Hobbes's has said "For the thoughts are to the desires, as scouts, and spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired (Leviathan, Chapter 8).

    As with Hume, Mr Hobbes argues for a certain type of circularity in our arguments where the reasons generated by reason are largely concerned with clarifying the ends to which are passions are driving us and in figuring out the most expeditious means for getting there.

    In other words, in contrast to, say, the political theorists of MMT (at least in their earlier versions) there is a powerful argument in both Hobbes and later Hume for the primacy of the prescriptive over the descriptive -– if we are honest with ourselves.

    Jim, November 18, 2014 at 3:44 pm

    "The founders…adopting Montesquieu's arguments that there is such a thing as a public interest and that people could orient themselves around it given sufficient personal virtue and the adequate structural incentives to do so."

    But if the general public tends to lack virtue and "double government" becomes institutionalized then what are we to do?

    The recent article/book by Michael J Glennon "National Security and the Double Government" deals directly with the profound issues of personal virtue and structural checks and balances.

    Glennon argues that we have created, especially in the area of national security, a type of double government–one part public (Congress, the President, and the courts) and the other more concealed were several hundred executive officers in the military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies are basically responsible for protecting the nation's security and have acquired unchecked power–which accounts for the same imperial foreign policy no matter who is Preseident as well as our incrementally collective moves towards totalitarianism,.

    The result of such an situation, according to Glennon, is a negative feedback loop were resuscitating the more Madisonian institutions (Congress, Presidency, Courts) requires an informed, engaged electorate (civic virtue) which is simultaneously faced with a political structure that has locked them out–thus voters have little incentive to become informed or engaged and in fact often appear to be moving toward greater unengagement

    Glennon finishes his analysis with a quote from John Adams: "The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power must adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative."

    Walter Antoniotti, November 18, 2014 at 8:04 pm

    What bothers me is how few educated people don't know this. John Hamilton, a bootlegger, paid for the Minutemen so he would not have to pay taxes for British protection. People should read Lies My Teacher Told Me and Don't Know Much about history.

    People like David Brooks really thinks now is a really bad time. Compared to 1962-1982 things are great. Lets compare US citizens killed in wars, assassinations, the misery index, the social net, income of old people, corrupt politics, riots in cities, students killed on college campuses…

    [Nov 17, 2014] Bill Black and Marshall Auerback Discuss Why Economists and Regulators Don't Use "Fraud"

    Quote: "I believe that the fraudulent nature of the GWOT (Global War on Terror) should be a key ingredient of any analysis of our political situation and it should be looked at as a part of the massive financial fraud of that period–the two are not separate. "
    November 15, 2014 | nakedcapitalism.com

    Yves here. Bill Black discusses his favorite topic, fraud, with Marshall Auerback of the Institute of New Economic Thinking. Some of this talk is familiar terrain for those who know Black's work, such as Black's well-argued criticism of the failure of financial regulators to make criminal referrals for misconduct in the runup to the financial crisis.

    Even so, many readers are likely to find new information here, such as the number of FBI agents assigned to handle white collar fraud, and how some regulators during the savings & loan crisis defied Congressional pressure to go easy on failing and defrauded banks, and the career costs they paid.

    Watt4Bob, November 15, 2014 at 9:15 am

    In retrospect it seems likely that taking the FBI off the financial crimes beat and putting them on terrorism beat was a strategic move on the part of DOJ, at the behest of Wall$t interests.

    After all, they passed the bankruptcy reform act well ahead of time because they foresaw the need to prevent our escape from the coming crisis, evidence they have some overall understanding of the likely results of their behavior.

    Why then would we doubt they plan ahead to forestall prosecution for their crimes by systematic gelding of regulators and Justice to create a backstop?

    (Not mention the missing $ trillions Rumsfeld admitted to congress on 9/10/01, and the subsequent attack on the Pentagon that managed to destroy only the offices of the guys auditing the MIC books?)

    Banger, November 15, 2014 at 10:02 am

    The way officials dealt with the massive financial fraud during the aughts, particularly the Obama Administration, was the final nail on the coffin of the U.S. government. There is no way to argue that we have a legitimate government in Washington. First 9/11 and the Global War on Terror a totally bogus and Orwellian enterprise that took FBI agents out of their jobs chasing wild geese or focusing on dissidents like Occupy protesters. I believe that the fraudulent nature of the GWOT should be a key ingredient of any analysis of our political situation and it should be looked at as a part of the massive financial fraud of that period–the two are not separate.

    The rest of the federal government will collapse into the most sordid kind of political corruption eventually though this will take some time since most bureaucrats, dispirited as many of them are, are not constitutionally corrupt or corruptible – but eventually the Washington maxim of "no good deed goes unpunished" will win out. When I say corrupt, btw, I mean structural corruption not a few people selling their services to the people they regulate – I mean the corruption we have today is sytemic and incurable. Reform cannot happen at this time–there are no political forces that have a) articulated how bad the situation actually is (if criminals suffer no consequences then criminals will flourish); and b) know how to do anything to remedy the situations. The mainstream media and even the financial press is an integral part of the system that is focused on disinformation and misdirection with, at least, the occasional article that shows a little glimpse of the ankle of this situation.

    Anyone familiar with the work of Black and many others that does not grasp that a system that rewards its worse criminals is, essentially, a criminal system. It is as if organized crime has taken over the U.S. and we haven't even noticed! Where is Batman?

    fresno dan, November 15, 2014 at 12:09 pm

    The one good line Kinsley has, "the outrage is not what's illegal, its what's legal".

    The 0.1% have 24/7 access, and no one else does. These government people cannot even fathom what is wrong, because they are never actually exposed to another viewpoint…

    susan the other, November 15, 2014 at 2:59 pm

    That Holder said it might be "fraud" but he wasn't touchin' it with a 10-ft pole, is a quote to die for. I must ask then, isn't the US financial system a classic SOE? Indeed it is.

    China eat your heart out. So it follows that MMT doesn't necessarily apply in this case because our system divvies up the money unequally by design and not equally (also by design) – ergo corporatist design. Nevermind that 90% (?) of our corporations are terminal.

    Giving the banksters (partners in crime) a lavish allotment mostly to allow them to then support the MIC and etc. God praise private banking, er, agency banking. So what's not to love about Bill Black's wonderfully graphic description about the authorities denying "fraud" as "suddenly realizing you are in an elevator with a crazy person."

    And it then almost makes me think, in my entrenched paranoia, that the S&L crisis might have merely been a dry run.

    EconCCX, November 15, 2014 at 8:39 pm

    I do not know "SOE". What does it refer to?

    State-owned enterprise, probs. "China eat your heart out."

    barbara gibbs, November 15, 2014 at 4:10 pm

    When you have CEO's like Jamie Diamon who goes before Congress wearing White House cufflinks, he pretty much gave the finger to Congress. and Obama saying they did nothing wrong, is why I lost my support for President Obama.

    Obama why did you have to suck Diamon's dick?

    TedWa, November 15, 2014 at 5:22 pm

    Even the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) was told they could never use the word "Fraud" in their investigations. Sick, isn't it – and sickening.

    I can't wait to hear how Holder is going to answer the questions about Alayne Fleischmann, the former JPMorgan Chase securities lawyer who tried to blow the whistle on "massive criminal securities fraud" by the bank and Jamie Dimon, only to have the government try to silence her with a $9 billion settlement.

    Like we've been trying to say for years, you can prosecute the TBTF's.

    [Nov 3, 2014] How Much Does It Cost To Keep JPMorgan FX-Riggers Out Of Jail?

    11/03/2014 | zerohedge.com

    More than originally estimated, apparently...

    Another day, another major bank adjust its reported data based on 'all-new' information about regulatory probes over its market manipulation. Last week was Citi, this week it's JPMorgan... with a double-whammy:

    First, The SEC sanctioned 13 firms - including JPMorgan - for violating a rule primarily designed to protect retail investors in the municipal securities market in the sale of Puerto Rico bonds earlier this year...

    All municipal bond offerings include a "minimum denomination" that establishes the smallest amount of the bonds that a dealer firm is allowed to sell an investor in a single transaction. Municipal issuers often set high minimum denomination amounts for so-called "junk bonds" that have a higher default risk that may make the investments inappropriate for retail investors. Because retail investors tend to purchase securities in smaller amounts, this minimum denomination standard helps ensure that dealer firms sell high-risk securities only to investors who are capable of making sizeable investments and more prepared to bear the higher risk.

    In its surveillance of trading in the municipal bond market, the SEC Enforcement Division's Municipal Securities and Public Pensions Unit detected improper sales below a $100,000 minimum denomination set in a $3.5 billion offering of junk bonds by the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico earlier this year. The SEC's subsequent investigation identified a total of 66 occasions when dealer firms sold the Puerto Rico bonds to investors in amounts below $100,000. The agency instituted administrative proceedings against the firms behind those improper sales: Charles Schwab & Co., Hapoalim Securities USA, Interactive Brokers LLC, Investment Professionals Inc., J.P. Morgan Securities, Lebenthal & Co., National Securities Corporation, Oppenheimer & Co., Riedl First Securities Co. of Kansas, Stifel Nicolaus & Co., TD Ameritrade, UBS Financial Services, and Wedbush Securities.

    The enforcement actions are the SEC's first under Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) Rule G-15(f), which establishes the minimum denomination requirement. Each firm agreed to settle the SEC's charges and pay penalties ranging from $54,000 to $130,000.

    "These actions demonstrate our commitment to rigorous enforcement of all types of violations in the municipal bond market," said Andrew J. Ceresney, Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement. "We will act quickly and use all available tools to protect investors in municipal securities."

    LeeAnn G. Gaunt, Chief of the SEC's Municipal Securities and Public Pensions Unit added, "These firms violated a straightforward investor protection rule that prohibits the sale of muni bonds in increments below a specified minimum. We conduct frequent surveillance of trading in the municipal bond market and will penalize abuses that threaten retail investors."

    The SEC's orders against the 13 dealers find that in addition to violating MSRB Rule G-15(f) by executing sales below the minimum denomination, they violated Section 15B(c)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which prohibits violations of any MSRB rule. Without admitting or denying the findings, each of the firms agreed to be censured. They also agreed to review their policies and procedures and make any changes that are necessary to ensure proper compliance with MSRB Rule G-15(f).

    The SEC's investigation, which is continuing, is being conducted by Joseph Chimienti, Sue Curtin, Heidi M. Mitza, and Jonathon Wilcox with assistance from Kathleen B. Shields. The case is supervised by Kevin B. Currid and Mark R. Zehner. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the MSRB.

    * * *
    • Charles Schwab & Co. – $61,800
    • Hapoalim Securities USA – $54,000
    • Interactive Brokers LLC – $56,000
    • Investment Professionals Inc. – $67,800
    J.P. Morgan Securities – $54,000
    • Lebenthal & Co. – $54,000
    • National Securities Corporation – $60,000
    • Oppenheimer & Co. – $61,200
    • Riedl First Securities Co. of Kansas – $130,000
    • Stifel Nicolaus & Co. – $60,000
    • TD Ameritrade – $100,800
    • UBS Financial Services – $56,400
    • Wedbush Securities Inc. – $67,200

    So that should teach them a lesson eh!!!

    But then, second, JPMorgan was forced to admit to some more market manipulation was beinmg investigated:

    From JPMorgan's 10-Q: Foreign Exchange Investigations and Litigation.

    DOJ is conducting a criminal investigation, and various regulatory and civil enforcement authorities, including U.S. banking regulators, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ("CFTC"), the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (the "FCA") and other foreign government authorities, are conducting civil investigations, regarding the Firm's foreign exchange ("FX") trading business.

    These investigations are focused on the Firm's spot FX trading activities as well as controls applicable to those activities. The Firm continues to cooperate with these investigations and is currently engaged in discussions with DOJ, and various regulatory and civil enforcement authorities, about resolving their respective investigations with respect to the Firm. There is no assurance that such discussions will result in settlements.

    Since November 2013, a number of class actions have been filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against a number of foreign exchange dealers, including the Firm, for alleged violations of federal and state antitrust laws and unjust enrichment based on an alleged conspiracy to manipulate foreign exchange rates reported on the WM/Reuters service. In March 2014, plaintiffs filed a consolidated amended class action complaint, which defendants moved to dismiss in May 2014.

    When the bank that has a fortress balance sheet has 7 pages of double sided tiny print Litigation in its 10-Q, something is wrong!!

    * * *

    So back to the question at the start of the post... how much does it cost to keep JPMorgan FX-riggers out of jail? The answer is - at least $24,341 per employee (243,388 employees and a $5.9 billion allocation)

    [Oct 24, 2014] Henry Giroux On the Rise of Neoliberalism As a Political Ideology

    A very important article. Should be read in full. Large quote below does not cover all the content of the article.
    Oct 19, 2014 : truth-out.org

    "There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past."

    Ryszard Kapuscinski

    Are they incapable, or merely unwilling? That is the credibility trap, the inability to address the key problems because the ruling elite must risk or even undermine their own undeserved power to do so.

    I think this interview below highlights the false dichotomy between communism and free market capitalism that was created in the 1980's largely by Thatcher's and Reagan's handlers. The dichotomy was more properly between communist government and democracy, of the primacy of the individual over the primacy of the organization and the state as embodied in fascism and the real world implementations of communism in Russia and China.

    But we never think of it that way any more, if at all. It is one of the greatest public relation coups in history. One form of organizational oppression by the Russian nomenklatura was replaced by the oppression by the oligarchs and their Corporations, in the name of freedom.

    Free market capitalism, under the banner of the efficient markets hypothesis, has taken the place of democratic ideals as the primary good as embodied in the original framing of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

    It is no accident that the individual and their concerns have become subordinated to the corporate welfare and the profits of the upper one percent. We even see this in religion with the 'gospel of prosperity.' In their delusion they make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, so that after they may be received into their everlasting habitations.

    The market as the highest good has stood on the shoulders of the 'greed is good' philosophy promulgated by the pied pipers of the me generation, and has turned the Western democracies on their heads, as a series of political leaders have capitulated to this false idol of money as the measure of all things, and all virtue.

    Policy is now crafted to maximize profits as an end to itself without regard to the overall impact on freedom and the public good. It measures 'costs' in the most narrow and biased of terms, and allocated wealth based on the subversion of good sense to false economy theories.

    Greed is a portion of the will to power. And that madness serves none but itself.

    This is a brief excerpt. You may read the entire interview here.

    Henry Giroux on the Rise of Neoliberalism
    19 October 2014
    By Michael Nevradakis, Truthout

    "...We're talking about an ideology marked by the selling off of public goods to private interests; the attack on social provisions; the rise of the corporate state organized around privatization, free trade, and deregulation; the celebration of self interests over social needs; the celebration of profit-making as the essence of democracy coupled with the utterly reductionist notion that consumption is the only applicable form of citizenship.

    But even more than that, it upholds the notion that the market serves as a model for structuring all social relations: not just the economy, but the governing of all of social life...

    That's a key issue. I mean, this is a particular political and economic and social project that not only consolidates class power in the hands of the one percent, but operates off the assumption that economics can divorce itself from social costs, that it doesn't have to deal with matters of ethical and social responsibility, that these things get in the way.

    And I think the consequences of these policies across the globe have caused massive suffering, misery, and the spread of a massive inequalities in wealth, power, and income. Moreover, increasingly, we are witnessing a number of people who are committing suicide because they have lost their pensions, jobs and dignity.

    We see the attack on the welfare state; we see the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection between private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, deregulations, an unchecked emphasis on self-interest, the refusal to tax the rich, and really the redistribution of wealth from the middle and working classes to the ruling class, the elite class, what the Occupy movement called the one percent. It really has created a very bleak emotional and economic landscape for the 99 percent of the population throughout the world."

    "This is a particular political and economic and social project that not only consolidates class power in the hands of the one percent, but operates off the assumption that economics can divorce itself from social costs, that it doesn't have to deal with matters of ethical and social responsibility."
    I think that as a mode of governance, it is really quite dreadful because it tends to produce identities, subjects and ways of life driven by a kind of "survival of the fittest" ethic, grounded in the notion of the free, possessive individual and committed to the right of individual and ruling groups to accrue wealth removed from matters of ethics and social cost.

    That's a key issue. I mean, this is a particular political and economic and social project that not only consolidates class power in the hands of the one percent, but operates off the assumption that economics can divorce itself from social costs, that it doesn't have to deal with matters of ethical and social responsibility, that these things get in the way. And I think the consequences of these policies across the globe have caused massive suffering, misery, and the spread of a massive inequalities in wealth, power, and income. Moreover, increasingly, we are witnessing a number of people who are committing suicide because they have lost their pensions, jobs and dignity. We see the attack on the welfare state; we see the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection between private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, deregulations, an unchecked emphasis on self-interest, the refusal to tax the rich, and really the redistribution of wealth from the middle and working classes to the ruling class, the elite class, what the Occupy movement called the one percent. It really has created a very bleak emotional and economic landscape for the 99 percent of the population throughout the world.

    And having mentioned this impact on the social state and the 99%, would you go as far as to say that these ideologies have been the direct cause of the economic crisis the world is presently experiencing?

    Oh, absolutely. I think when you look at the crisis in 2007, what are you looking at? You're looking at the merging of unchecked financial power and a pathological notion of greed that implemented banking policies and deregulated the financial world and allowed the financial elite, the one percent, to pursue a series of policies, particularly the selling of junk bonds and the illegality of what we call subprime mortgages to people who couldn't pay for them. This created a bubble and it exploded. This is directly related to the assumption that the market should drive all aspects of political, economic, and social life and that the ruling elite can exercise their ruthless power and financial tools in ways that defy accountability. And what we saw is that it failed, and it not only failed, but it caused an enormous amount of cruelty and hardship across the world. More importantly, it emerged from the crisis not only entirely unapologetic about what it did, but reinvented itself, particularly in the United States under the Rubin boys along with Larry Summers and others, by attempting to prevent any policies from being implemented that would have overturned this massively failed policy of deregulation.

    It gets worse. In the aftermath of this sordid crisis produced by the banks and financial elite, we have also learned that the feudal politics of the rich was legitimated by the false notion that they were too big to fail, an irrational conceit that gave way to the notion that they were too big to jail, which is a more realistic measure of the criminogenic/zombie culture that nourishes casino capitalism.

    [Oct 23, 2014] Rebuilding Trust in Finance We Can Do Better by Robert Johnson

    Quote: "That's because of the persistent belief that the financial sector is functioning less like the nerve system of the economy and more like an autoimmune disease feeding on its host. This perception is not entirely unjustified."
    September 17, 2013 | The Institute for New Economic Thinking
    Trust is an essential part of a functioning economy, yet it is often one of the least understood variables in economics. That's why the Institute for New Economic Thinking is supporting the Thomson Reuters TRust index, which provides concrete metrics for understanding the level of trust in the financial system using a benchmark of the top 50 global financial institutions as a proxy for the sector as a whole.

    While trust is difficult to understand and measure in the context of economics, this type of innovative work enables new and important conversations about trust and how it affects the economy. The Institute will be exploring this issue and the new economic thinking it facilitates In a series of essays over the next week. Stay tuned for more.

    In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, distrust in the financial sector was widespread. Even after the mess appeared to be cleaned up, the uncertainty over whether the worst was over remained real.

    But since that time, financial institutions have shored up their balance sheets as their earnings and capital cushions have improved and leverage ratios have shrunk. In short, banks today are safer than they were before the crash. So surely trust should have returned as the likelihood of systemic collapse declined.

    That, however, does not appear to be the case, as is demonstrated by the persistent negative levels of trust shown by the Thomson Reuters TRust index.

    Many people in the financial sector feel this distrust. But they aren't sure what to do about it. How can they win back the public's trust? Aren't record profits enough?

    Apparently, there are some things that money can't buy.

    Trust is an essential part of a functioning economy. It provides an antidote to the fundamental uncertainty that is part of any economic decision. Without trust, you would likely spend all of your energy and resources protecting yourself rather than working on productive activities.

    For the financial sector, trust is especially important. Finance is the nerve center of our economy, and trust is an essential component of the financial system. As we saw in 2008, without trust and a properly functioning financial system the economy breaks down. If people don't trust in financial institutions, the entire economic system can be thrown out of balance.

    This lack of trust leads to many dysfunctional symptoms. When people don't trust where to put their savings, they hoard cash, or commodities like gold, which reached its highest price in history in the aftermath the 2008 crisis. Similarly, when trust in the financial sector is low, corporations also are more likely to hoard cash and less likely to invest in expansion or hire new employees, leading to stagnant economic growth and persistent unemployment.

    Despite the financial sector's economic resurgence, we are still dealing with these economic problems today. The situation is a reflection of the distrust the public still feels for our financial institutions.

    After 2008, when so many banks were rescued the public rightly felt that it was owed systemic reform so it wouldn't be put in the position of having to rescue the financial sector again. And while there has been an increase in regulation with Dodd-Frank, none of the changes have addressed the fundamental issues underpinning the lasting distrust in the financial system. I'm talking about major obstacles such as too big to fail, derivatives regulation, and the revolving door between regulators and those they are supposed to regulate. Eric Holder's comment before the United States Senate in March of this year that some banks are simply too big to effectively prosecute suggests that the system is still very far out of balance.

    So while profits have returned, if the financial sector wants to regain the public's trust, it needs to offer something more than earnings reports.

    That's because of the persistent belief that the financial sector is functioning less like the nerve system of the economy and more like an autoimmune disease feeding on its host. This perception is not entirely unjustified. Large multinational banks have been forced to pay billions of dollars in fines for misdeeds leading up to and during the crisis. And yet fundamental change remains illusive in the industry. As Holder's comments suggest, the ungovernability of some of the most powerful entities in our society is a big barrier to reestablishing trust in our financial system.

    While some in the financial sector may profess dismay at this state of affairs, most of the leaders of behemoth banks have shown themselves more eager to coerce the process rather than agreeing to necessary reform.

    For example, consider the way underwater mortgage holders were treated when the housing market collapsed. After already being bailed out by the public, the banks preached forbearance in mortgage markets because of their still-fragile balance sheets. Yet, at the same time these same banks still were offering their employees sizeable bonuses, even though the hole in the mortgage market could have been substantially reduced by the more than $100 billion these firms handed out over the last five years.

    If our society had operated under a different set of priorities and required banks to put these funds into helping underwater borrowers instead of toward bonuses for many of the same people who helped sink the system in 2008, the hole in the mortgage market would no longer exist, there would be no need for forbearance, and our economy would be in much better shape. But that's not what happened.

    As long as this Wall Street versus Main Street dynamic persists, so too will the belief that the financial sector plays by a different set of rules, rules tilted in their favor at the expense of the rest of us.

    In order to regain the public's trust, the financial sector must show itself willing to take meaningful steps to address this concern. It must show the public that it is worthy of its trust by accepting meaningful reform for the good of our society. Until that happens, all of the profits and equity financing in the world won't win back the kind of trust that is essential for the financial sector to serve its role at the center of our economy.

    This situation isn't "heads I win, tails you lose." In this scenario, we all lose. Persistent anger and mistrust cannot be good for anyone. We can do better.

    [Oct 22, 2014] Corruption, neoliberals and their strange neoclassic economics

    October 21, 2014 | seva-riga.livejournal.com
    Neoliberal dogma is consistent only in rabid Russophobia. In all other respects they are, as in the joke: Q: How much will be 2 x 2 ? A: Well, what you want. We can make it from anywhere from 3 to 5...

    Here's an example how it looks like a dispute with normal, sane blogger, who is writing under the nick - voronkov_kirill whose position is close to the positions staunch neoliberals:

    - What is happening now with oil is called "short squeeze". And market mechanisms are not involved. Oil depreciates against the logic of the market, " says Cyril.

    But wait a minute, I replied, there are two ways of pricing:

    1. Market price inherent in democratic countries with "free market"
    2. Administrative inherent in the totalitarian countries without the latter

    Do I understand correctly that the countries that define the price of oil and the price of the ruble, are mostly totalitarian?

    "No, not right. Well, absolute market, as well as absolute democracy does not exist. The market is "free" only for small players. Big players with serious financial or political-administrative levers, can influence "free market" and even control the price....

    Here is everything you need to know about neoliberalism. And about so called "free market". Here Voltaire equality of free individuals. Here's to you and all the liberal government non-intervention in private Affairs. There is a "small players" and there are agents that can (I wonder by what right?) this element of control.

    Unfortunately neoliberal thinking is not capable of a simple two-step, otherwise it inevitably would come to the conclusion that the absence of free competition in the economy will lead to the same state as in politics, where free competition of ideas and authorities only for small players, but not for TBTF -- like top government and industrial leaders. That is all about this now fashionable word "corruption"

    In 1988 one stubborn Communist (then he is the same stubborn nationalist (Latvia-forever), and now no less staunch euro-emigrant ) promised to shoot me, because I argued that there were no socialism in the USSR and the economic system was not consistent with the fundamental principle of socialism is "from each according to his ability - to each according to his work"

    Now here's the same thing with the market, with competition, with democracy. In reality like in case with the pregnancy market is iether free or not. If the corruption rules in the "real" market but illusions are force fed like in Guantanamo, sooner or later you will get full totalitarianism and with it total corruption. This is where slowly but inexorably the West moves, and with it anyone who tries to copy the Western model of the neoliberal economy. to this stable state called total corruption.

    [Oct 9, 2014] Cultural Capture and the Financial Crisis By James Kwak

    October 9, 2014 | The Baseline Scenario | 41 comments
    A few years ago, while still in law school, I was invited to write a chapter for a Tobin Project book on regulatory capture. It was a bit intimidating, being part of a project that included luminaries like David Moss, Dan Carpenter, Luigi Zingales, Richard Posner, Tino Cuellar, and the deans of two of the best law schools in the country. I was asked to write something about an idea that I had slipped into 13 Bankers, almost in passing, about the cultural prestige of the financial industry and the political and regulatory benefits the industry derived from that prestige. My chapter turned into a discussion of the various mechanisms by which status and social networks can influence regulators, creating the equivalent of regulatory capture even without traditional materialist incentives (cash under the table, promises of future jobs, etc.).

    Two weeks ago, an investigation by ProPublica and This American Life illustrated the culture of deference, risk aversion, and general sucking-upitude among New York Fed bank examiners that effectively resulted in the capture of regulators by the banks they were supposed to be regulating. As David Beim wrote in a confidential report about the New York Fed, the core problem was "what the culture expected of people and what the culture induced people to do."

    I wrote about the story for the Atlantic and referred to my book chapter, but at the time the chapter was not available for free on the Internet (at least not legally). The good people at the Tobin Project have since put it up on the book's website, from which you can download it (legally!). Note that they are only allowed to put up one chapter at a time and they rotate them, so this is a limited-time offer.

    Anonymous | October 9, 2014 at 10:20 am

    Regulatory Capture is a very serious issue. When groups or individuals have a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory they often focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, are unable to do anything about it.

    Cladia | October 9, 2014 at 10:23 am

    When groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy they often focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, have no power to effect the outcome.

    this is a pure form of hierarchy.

    joebhed | October 9, 2014 at 9:35 pm

    Sorry, the relevant paradigm goes far beyond the natural outcome of having a regulator work within a bank, people being people and all.

    But that administrative failure and its resulting Rolex-seeking bedfellows all pale in comparison to the deeper realty present having to do with the dual mandate of the Fed to regulate the banks while being in charge of the money system that those banks operate to maintain our economic output and stability.
    Be either the regulator or the promoter of the banking industry.

    The Fed's mandate to do both, from the same room, is morally perplexing to good people, and is economically paralyzing.

    We can't have the money to put us back to work until bankers see robust creditwortiness for lending and profit opportunities , which cannot happen without more money ….. to make them more creditworthy.. Catch 22 of debt-based money.

    This is why Martin Wolf says the government should issue the money.

    One less moral hazard.

    Henry | October 11, 2014 at 5:32 pm

    It is sickening how regulators seek personal benefit, with complete disregard for the needs of the many that should outweigh the needs of the very few. The fact that the same people have to both regulate and promote banking activity is a recipe for corruption. Regardless of cultural background of regulators and examiners, they should not have the power causing them to reach a moral dilemma.

    tonyforesta | October 13, 2014 at 1:30 am

    Crimes were committed by all the financial oligarchs on an epic scale. Fraud, insidertrading, price manipulation, tax evasion, naked massive theft, bribery, collusion, market rigging, and the list is long and festering and putrid. The same crimes, by these same oligarchs, peopled with the same den of vipers and thieves continue today unabated on an even more epic, epochal scale.. There is nothing "unconscious" in the capture and conduct of the socalled regulators. Both those pursuing the capture and the socalled captured are equally guilty of the same crimes, for the same unholy pyshopathic reasons. Wealth and power.

    Either regulators regulate and enforce existing laws. or there are no laws. The laws are reduced to endless reams of meaningless words on worthless paper, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The conjuring of debt products into assets is a criminal activity, a Ponzi scheme. Derivative products amount to (and the numbers are nebulous) a $600Billion exposure. 3/4′s of a Quadrillion. How is this possible? How will this exposure ever be reconciled? The entire global GDP is only 70+ trillion. There is no fixing this rank evil, there is no balm in Gilead. How will this unholy and criminal math ever be reconciled???? I beg anyone to answer any of these inquiries.

    Part of the problem is the cognitive capture of academics, politicians, regulators, law enforcement, and the dimsheeple these shaitans rob, pillage, incarcerate, murder, and otherwise abuse. The language used itself deceptive and cloaked in the insular supremist ideologies and beliefs in wealth and subsequent power as the singular measurements of status and greatness, of socalled "masters of the universe". Terms like captilalism, market efficiency, freemarkets, jobcreators, patriotism, and christianity, freedom, democracy have been intentionally and ruthlessly mangled and dismembered and redefined by decades of wingnut propaganda covens information domination operations, and disinformation campaigns. For example. – I double dare any of you erudite experts to define capitalism or democracy or freemarkets, or market efficiency and get back to me. The definitions no longer apply to the realities or the facts. Fascists and oligarchs rule Amerika and control the wealth and resources nation and all the conduct of the socalled government, enforced by militarized mass murdering biggoted pigs, – I mean police, – excused and shielded by partisan judges, including the fascists in the supreme court, and the captured regulatory apparatus, who favor, shield, protect, advance and insulate the fascists predatorclass and their mindless thugs – so obviously – we here in the land of Oz no longer inhabit a democracy,

    Capitalism? Freemarkets? If there ever were such things, – they certainly does not exist today The markets are better defined as bandit capitalism and certainly not free, or fair, – wherein an entrenched predatorclass den of vipers and thieves are free, because of massive systemic criminality and theft, and the ensuing absurd illgotten imponderable wealth, to wantonly rob and pillage the people and manipulate markets, commodities, resources, the socalled judicial system, the socalled regulatory apparatus, the mass murdering militarized pigs, – I mean socalled law enforcement, and the socalled government, with absolute impunity and immunity, and zero accountability.

    Market efficiency? The socalled mastersoftheuniverse were and are today wildly and dangerously stupid and horribly inefficient, and are singularly responsible for the most catastrophic economic FAILURE in the sordid history of the world, – a catastrophic FAILURE that is ongoing, and metastasizing on an exponential level today.

    Christianity? Personally loath all institutional religions, as they are all awash in oceans of innocent blood, and seek only profit and power through the manipulation of religion – but also a student of comparison religion, including the bible, the apocrypha, and the Nag Hamadi texts. Any fiend or shaitan that would besmirch, bastardize, and claim the Nazarene to justify their evils promoting wealth, and biggotry, racism, sexism, and homophobia – is obviously woefully uneducated on the true teachings of christianity.

    You are all victims of "pecuniary logic" and "pecuniary – psuedo truth" beliefs, – where in lies are majikally shapeshifted into truths, and truths denounced and the babbling of conspiratorialists.

    The EPA, note the key term ENVIRONMENTAL in the name of the agency should be "captured by ENVIRONMENTAL types. That is the point the the purpose of in protection mandate in service of the people.

    The creature from Jekyll Island, or the socalled FED is a horrific FAILURE, or a CRIMINAL CARTEL, or both. Regardless of the incessant bruting of the complicit parrots in the MSM, and the spaniels in the regulatory apparatus – there is no growth, there are and never will be any meaningful jobs, and inflation (again setting aside the manipulated and intentionally deceptive conjured numbers these shaitans and fiends pimp) is rampant and brutal, for the 99%. Price bacon, or cheese, or any staple, or healthcare, or rent, or car insurance, and get to me biiiiiaaatches.

    The fact is CRIMES were committed. The economy collapsed.to the great disadvantage and disregard of the poor and middle class, while the predatorclass has absconded unfathomable wealth and protections. And the shaitans and fiends in the socalled government and regulatory apparatus chose to shield advance, protect, and immunize the den of vipers and thieves who are singularly responsible and culpable for this horrorshow.

    Insular supremists pimp and brute the fiction that if the banks were not bailed out at the taxpayer expense, – the world would have come to an end.

    Why would any intelligent free thinking individual, knowing what this den of vipers and thieves were responsible for, recognizing how much imponderable wealth these shaitans absconded believe this fiction and myth.

    We'll never know. But a resolutiontrustlikeentitiy could have commandeered the banks, dissolved their criminal enterprizes, sold what was left in the open markets, sent those responsible to court, and eventually jail, – and no of you could ever convince me – that those in my circles would not be much better off.

    Defenders of the predatorclass are pathological liars. CONSCIOUSLY, for inclusion and the grim hope someday walking the earth as predatorclass.

    This is psychopathic and sociopathic depravity, criminality and insanity, only possible when one renounces every particle of humanity, decency, morality and compassion – and any concern for their fellow man.

    The reality predatorclass shaitans and fiends and vipers and thieves will face – beyond the inevitable and certain collapse of the socalled global financial system – is that some of us in the 99% will not forget or forgive, and there will be a reckoning, and there will be blood.

    In a world where there are no laws, – there are no laws for anyone predatorclass biiiiiiaaaatches.
    Burn it all down. Reset. It's the only hope for the 99%.. .

    Annie | October 13, 2014 at 8:32 pm

    For Tony Foresta:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way

    At most, the estimate is that there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way….

    Any questions on why the price of oil is falling? LOL

    Considering that the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) has never been audited, based on what they DID is all we can go on to ascertain whether they are a criminal cabal. So there is no other answer other than "Yes, they are" based on the 4 requirements for launching a "Just War" – since we are all here repeating ourselves, I am also – you all know where to find the "list"….right?

    The FRB keeps lording it that they have ABSOLUTE control over "employment" in USA – so that clinches it that they DID conduct economic genocide when all those jobs disappeared as the Bush Cabal packed up their derivative piece on the way out of town…

    @Jeb – you wrote, "But that administrative failure and its resulting Rolex-seeking bedfellows all pale in comparison to the deeper realty present having to do with the dual mandate of the Fed to regulate the banks while being in charge of the money system that those banks operate to maintain our economic output and stability."

    You have to add their manipulation of "employment"….no?

    Totalitarian Nihilism…"cosmic insanity" - still just low life scum bag THEFT of real $$ by trillions of Fiat $$$$s…a virtual cloud game for sadists and psychos….and they DO HAVE A LEADER, btw….The Urantia Book has leveled the playing field – info in the Book approved for ALL of humanity by none other than JC :-)

    Page 759 – "….The Caligastia scheme for the immediate reconstruction of human society in accordance with his own ideas of individual freedom and group liberties, proved a swift and more or less complete failure. Society quickly sank back to its old biologic level, and the forward struggle began all over, starting not very far in advance of where it was at the Caligastia regime, this upheaval having left the world in confusion worse confounded."

    That was 250, 000 years ago – looks like "social media" is not all that….

    Sill never bending my knee to the GLOBAL War, Drug and Slave Lords stood up by the FRB's retarded shenanigans.

    Math never was and never will be the paper that covers the rock that is SCIENCE…

    400 BILLION stars from all that FIAT evergy :-)

    Anonymouse | October 20, 2014 at 7:25 am

    Frankly Annie, I have come to learn that over all, people are not KIND. Disbelief and denial follow, but do not sooth the mind. And that same non kindness includes family and friends in a tit for tat war that has no meaning or logical conclusion.

    Sure we ask how it could have happened, but i'm certain if we got the chance somehow to do it all over again, this family would top the charts, the talent was undeniable, the timing was not.

    [Oct 07, 2014] Regulatory Capture 101 - WSJ - WSJ

    It's not regulation per se is deficient, it is regulation under neoliberal regime, were government is captured by financial oligarchy ;-). But that understanding is foreign to WSJ with its neoliberal agenda :-(.
    Oct 05, 2014 | Casino Capitalism and Crapshoot Politics
    Regulatory Capture 101

    Impressionable journalists finally meet George Stigler.

    Oct. 5, 2014 5:28 p.m. ET The financial scandal du jour involves leaked audio recordings that purport to show that regulators at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were soft on Goldman Sachs . Say it ain't so.

    ... ... ...

    The secret recordings were made by Carmen Segarra, who went to work as an examiner at the New York Fed in 2011 but was fired less than seven months later in 2012. She has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the regulator and says Fed officials sought to bury her claim that Goldman had no firm-wide policy on conflicts-of-interest. Goldman says it has had such policies for years, though on the same day Ms. Segarra's revelations were broadcast, the firm added new restrictions on employees trading for their own accounts.

    The New York Fed won against Ms. Segarra in district court, though the case is on appeal. The regulator also notes that Ms. Segarra "demanded $7 million to settle her complaint." And last week New York Fed President William Dudley said, "We are going to keep striving to improve, but I don't think anyone should question our motives or what we are trying to accomplish."

    On the recordings, regulators can be heard doing what regulators do-revealing the limits of their knowledge and demonstrating their reluctance to challenge the firms they regulate. At one point Fed officials suspect a Goldman deal with Banco Santander may have been "legal but shady" in the words of one regulator, and should have required Fed approval. But the regulators basically accept Goldman's explanations without a fight.

    The sleuths at the ProPublica website, working with a crack team of investigators from public radio, also seem to think they have another smoking gun in one of Ms. Segarra's conversations that was not recorded but was confirmed by another regulator. Ms. Seest means. For example, a company offering securities is exempt from some registration requirements if it is only selling to accredited investors, such as people with more than $1 million in net worth, excluding the value of primary residences.

    The journalists have also found evidence in Ms. Segarra's recordings that even after the financial crisis and the supposed reforms of the Dodd-Frank law, the New York Fed remained a bureaucratic agency resistant to new ideas and hostile to strong-willed, independent-minded employees. In government?

    ***

    Enter George Stigler, who published his famous essay "The Theory of Economic Regulation" in the spring 1971 issue of the Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science. The University of Chicago economist reported empirical data from various markets and concluded that "as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit."

    Stigler knew he was fighting an uphill battle trying to persuade his fellow academics. "The idealistic view of public regulation is deeply imbedded in professional economic thought," he wrote. But thanks to Stigler, who would go on to win a Nobel prize, many economists have studied the operation and effects of regulation and found similar results.

    A classic example was the New York Fed's decision to let Citigroup stash $1.2 trillion of assets-including more than $600 billion of mortgage-related securities-in off-balance-sheet vehicles before the financial crisis. That's when Tim Geithner ran the New York Fed and Jack Lew was at Citigroup.

    Once one understands the inevitability of regulatory capture, the logical policy response is to enact simple laws that can't be gamed by the biggest firms and their captive bureaucrats. This means repealing most of Dodd-Frank and the so-called Basel rules and replacing them with a simple requirement for more bank capital-an equity-to-asset ratio of perhaps 15%. It means bringing back bankruptcy for giant firms instead of resolution at the discretion of political appointees. And it means considering economist Charles Calomiris's plan to automatically convert a portion of a bank's debt into equity if the bank's market value falls below a healthy level.

    GS4

    [Oct 06, 2014] Crony Capitalism Is Kryptonite To Democracy And The Real Economy

    Zero Hedge

    Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

    When the machinery of governance is ruled by the highest bidders, democracy is dead.

    Last week I described the sources of America's America's terminal political dysfunction. The engine of this terminal dysfunction is crony capitalism, the incestuous and oh-so-profitable marriage of the Central State and monied Elites.

    Gordon T. Long and I continue our discussion of the perverse incentives and consequences of crony capitalism in a 25-minute video program.

    Gordon argues that America's Crony Capitalism closely resembles the Roman Tribute System, an arrangement that skims wealth and concentrates it at the top of the power pyramid.

    Vast financial crimes are met with fines. Guilty parties do not go to jail but rather the corporation pays a fine. Billion-dollar crimes are assessed million-dollar fines-- a percentage that closely mirrors a Tribute System. The government makes money through enforcement but not prevention. Corporations make illicit fortunes with the confidence that the government will settle for a small slice of the wealth stripmined from the people.

    The fines for financial skimming operations act as a form of tribute to the Central State: the State and its corrupt elected officials and regulators turn a blind eye to the pillage of the citizenry via financialization schemes, and then skim a tribute via fines and campaign contributions.

    Everybody in the inner circle wins: the finance perps collect their millions in bonuses, the legislators collect their millions in campaign contributions, and the regulators (who managed to do nothing in the way of prevention) get to declare a toothless victory in announcing wrist-slap fines.

    I have covered this dynamic many times:

    This cozy arrangement might seem benign, but it's actually deadly to democracy and the real economy. Let's call crony capitalism what it really is: Kryptonite to democracy and the real economy.

    Concentrated wealth and State power form a self-reinforcing feedback loop that destroys democracy. The more profitable buying influence and the revolving door between corporations and regulators becomes, the more money the corporations have to spend on lobbying, which serves to further protect their profits. The more money political toadies collect, the more beholden they are to entrenched interests.

    This feedback loop rewards crony capitalism and limits classical capitalism's key features: transparent markets and competition. An economy dominated by crony capitalism stagnates as competition is suppressed and government enriches those who are "more equal than others" (to borrow a phrase from Orwell).

    Money that might have once been invested in research and development is now devoted to bribing politicos, lawsuits defending corporate turf and wrist-slap fines/Tribute to the State that enables and protects crony skimming operations.

    When the machinery of governance is ruled by the highest bidders, democracy is dead.

    Selected Skeptical Comments

    Radical Marijuana

    For sure, falcon, there is NO widely understood language to discuss what has been happening, as has been expressed by Cognitive Dissonance in these ways:

    "Control the Language and You Control the Mind! ... It is the effective manipulation of our belief systems that enslaves us to the present day insanity. ... The absolute best controlled opposition is one that doesn't know they are controlled."

    The American democratic republic was destroyed as the international bankers took control over the public "money" supply, and turned that inside-out and upside-down, so that the word "money" now means pretty well the opposite of what it used to mean! The American money supply was supposed to be backed by gold and silver, who value was set by Congress. Indeed, the word "dollar" originally meant a particular amount of silver.

    However, the banksters were able to systematically apply the methods of organized crime, through bribery, intimidation, and assassination, in order to result in enough of the politicians becoming the banksters' puppets, while enough the people could be fooled enough of the time, in order to keep on replacing their representatives with one fresh crop of professional liars and immaculate hypocrites after another.

    As usual on Zero Hedge, this article grossly underestimates and understates how serious the problems actually are!

    Jack Burton

    It is beyond doubt that citizen democracy is dead in America. The Main Stream media investigates nothing of importance and if something unfavorable to corporate interests emerges from other sources, the Main Stream Media ignores it completely. A congress and President that accept money bribes in public, as part of the political process, with Supreme Court approval, is a sign of their arrogance. I just read a long study of Fracking Industry and US Foreign Policy. You literally have corporations and the State Department as virtual departments within each other, not separate entities. Where Frackers seek to go, American tax payer money, the CIA, State Department and US Military lead the way. There is no revolving door, because corporate and government operate together with all actions "in house" as it were.

    Obama health care law, this was written by Insurance Company lobbyists and present to congress by corporate health insurance companies to be passed in the interests of profits and nothing more.

    The government and corporate contractors are one single entity when it comes to arms, war, spy agencies and the police state. Even people in America's gulag are often held by for profit guards who seek to make maximum profit by dealing with humans at the lowest level possible.

    One could go on, Universities are money machines for their owners and top executives, not to mention sports interests and television.

    [Sep 27, 2014] How Goldman Controls The New York Fed: 47.5 Hours Of "The Secret Goldman Sachs Tapes" Explain

    Sep 26, 2014 | http://www.zerohedge.com

    I don't want to spoil the revelations of "This American Life": It's far better to hear the actual sounds on the radio, as so much of the meaning of the piece is in the tones of the voices -- and, especially, in the breathtaking wussiness of the people at the Fed charged with regulating Goldman Sachs. But once you have listened to it -- as when you were faced with the newly unignorable truth of what actually happened to that NFL running back's fiancee in that elevator -- consider the following:

    1. You sort of knew that the regulators were more or less controlled by the banks. Now you know.
    2. The only reason you know is that one woman, Carmen Segarra, has been brave enough to fight the system. She has paid a great price to inform us all of the obvious. She has lost her job, undermined her career, and will no doubt also endure a lifetime of lawsuits and slander.

    So what are you going to do about it? At this moment the Fed is probably telling itself that, like the financial crisis, this, too, will blow over. It shouldn't.

    [Sep 26, 2014] Why the Fed Is So Wimpy

    Sep 26, 2014 | Economist's View

    Justin Fox:

    Why the Fed Is So Wimpy, by Justin Fox: Regulatory capture - when regulators come to act mainly in the interest of the industries they regulate - is a phenomenon that economists, political scientists, and legal scholars have been writing about for decades. Bank regulators in particular have been depicted as captives for years, and have even taken to describing themselves as such.

    Actually witnessing capture in the wild is different, though, and the new This American Life episode with secret recordings of bank examiners at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York going about their jobs is going to focus a lot more attention on the phenomenon. It's really well done, and you should listen to it, read the transcript, and/or read the story by ProPublica reporter Jake Bernstein.

    Still, there is some context that's inevitably missing, and as a former banking-regulation reporter for the American Banker, I feel called to fill some of it in. Much of it has to do with the structure of bank regulation in the U.S., which actually seems designed to encourage capture. But to start, there are a couple of revelations about Goldman Sachs in the story that are treated as smoking guns. One seems to have fired a blank, while the other may be even more explosive than it's made out to be. ...

    don:

    Probably the biggest lesson that will be taken from this is Carmen's fate - she was fired, so don't cross Goldman.

    anne -> don...

    http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/wall-street-still-needs-a-leader-on-reform/

    September 25, 2014

    Wall Street Still Needs a Leader on Reform
    By William D. Cohan

    This is also the same New York Fed that fired Carmen M. Segarra, a former bank examiner, after she questioned Goldman's conflicts in connection with its role in advising a client, the El Paso Corporation, on its merger with Kinder Morgan Inc., in which Goldman's private-equity fund had a large investment. When Ms. Segarra asked Goldman for its conflict-of-interest policy, she discovered that it did not have one. She raised her concerns with her superiors at the New York Fed but, she contended, her bosses asked her to alter her written views on the matter because they could cause Goldman "substantial financial harm," according to an article in The New York Times. * Ms. Segarra was eventually fired. She sued the New York Fed, accusing it of retaliation; a federal judge ruled against her in April....

    * http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/bank-examiner-was-told-to-back-off-goldman-suit-says/

    anne -> don:

    http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/bank-examiner-was-told-to-back-off-goldman-suit-says/

    October 10, 2013

    Suit Revives Goldman Conflict Issue
    By Susanne Craig and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

    At a March 2012 meeting, a group of examiners at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed that Goldman Sachs had inadequate procedures to guard against conflicts of interest - guidelines aimed at stopping firms from putting their pursuit of profit ahead of their clients' best interests.

    The examiners voted to downgrade a confidential rating assigned by the New York Fed that could have spurred costly enforcement actions and other regulatory penalties. It is not known whether the vote in fact led to a rating change. The former examiner who pushed for a downgrade, Carmen M. Segarra, now contends in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that just weeks after the vote, her superiors asked her to change her findings on Goldman and fired her after she refused.

    The vote to downgrade, which has not been previously reported, could have been a big blow for Goldman.

    "Goldman Sachs does not have a conflicts-of-interest policy, not firmwide, and not for any divisions," Ms. Segarra wrote to Michael F. Silva, a senior executive at the New York Fed. "I would go so far as to say they have never had a policy on conflicts."

    The lawsuit, along with a review by The New York Times of confidential government documents and internal e-mails, raises questions about the success of Goldman's efforts to police potential conflicts.

    The bank has been buffeted by accusations that it has put its own interests ahead of its clients, a contention it denies. Goldman, for instance, faced accusations that in the run-up to the financial crisis that it sold billions of dollars in souring real estate assets to unsuspecting clients. Just weeks before the examiners' vote last year, the bank was publicly excoriated by a federal judge who found that Goldman had conflicts in a huge energy deal.

    The lawsuit also provides a look into the often-opaque relationship between federal regulators and Wall Street. After the financial crisis, banking regulators faced criticism that they were too cozy with the banks that they were overseeing - a familiarity that failed to thwart some of the risky behavior precipitating the housing crisis and ensuing recession.

    Even now, banks have sway over their regulators, especially those stationed at a bank's headquarters, according to two former regulators who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The banks, for example, can work behind the scenes to avert a vote like the one to downgrade Goldman. The people said, however, that once a vote to downgrade has taken place, it is difficult to reverse.

    In the lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Ms. Segarra contends she was wrongfully terminated in violation of a federal law that affords protections to bank examiners who find wrongdoing in the course of doing their jobs. Mr. Silva, who is chief of staff for the executive group at the New York Fed, is among the defendants named in the suit....

    Richard :

    While they may be the worst offenders I doubt that the problem ends with Goldman. I have heard too many horror stories from people who worked as regulators in the government over the last thirty years to believe that this is an isolated case.

    So long as we have a money driven political process it will be very difficult to avoid regulatory capture.

    Increasingly th U.S. resembles a Latin American country where bankers are at war with democracy itself.

    bakho:

    In the RollingStone, Taiibi described GS as the Great Vampire Squid:

    "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates."

    GS makes money by manipulating the system in a quasi-legal, morally corrupt manner. They challenge all the rules and use the Revolving Door between regulator and regulated to deliver legal bribes. Society needs better regulators and regulations to protect themselves from parasites like the GS Vampire Squid.

    GS is one of the chief proponents of "Free Market" ideology.

    Free Market" is short for "Free to rip off the "Market" . The words "to rip off" are omitted when they sell the "Free Market" ideology and are reserved for the back rooms and jokes in private email. The rubes are too dim to get it or else think they are the scammers and not the scammed.

    EE -> bakho...

    "GS makes money by manipulating the system in a quasi-legal, morally corrupt manner. They challenge all the rules and use the Revolving Door between regulator and regulated to deliver legal bribes."

    Well said, but its not just GS. Your description applies to much of corporate America. We're living in a crony capitalist society.

    EE said...

    "Much of it has to do with the structure of bank regulation in the U.S., which actually seems designed to encourage capture."

    Which is a feature and not a bug.

    [Sep 26, 2014] The Biggest Lie of the New Century

    Sep 07, 2014 | Bloomberg View

    Yesterday, we looked at why bankers weren't busted for crimes committed during the financial crisis. Political corruption, prosecutorial malfeasance, rewritten legislation and cowardice on the part of government officials were among the many reasons.

    But I saved the biggest reason so many financial felons escaped justice for today: They dumped the cost of their criminal activities on you, the shareholder (never mind the taxpayer).

    Corporate executives theoretically work for the owners of the company, namely, the shareholders. But there is an agency problem in that owners can't closely manage and object to the actions of these executives. Collective owners, such as mutual funds, seem to have no interest in doing so. What we end up with is a management class that works for itself instead of on behalf of the owners of the publicly traded banks. Many of these executives committed crimes; got big bonuses for doing so; and paid huge fines using shareholder assets (i.e., company cash), helping them avoid prosecution.

    As for claims like those of white-collar crime defense attorney Mark F. Pomerantz, that "the executives running companies like Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan were not committing criminal acts," they simply are implausible if not laughable. Consider a brief survey of some of the more egregious acts of wrongdoing:

    Foreclosure fraud: Of all the crimes committed during the financial crisis and in its aftermath, this is one that should have been the easiest to identify and prosecute.

    Any bank that owns a mortgage with the debtor in default must follow a simple set of legal steps in order to foreclose. The procedure is time consuming, specific to each state's laws and involves lawyers, so foreclosures are expensive. Hey, it is the cost of issuing credit, and a simple reality of the rule of law. There are no shortcuts.

    Except the banks took many short cuts and did so on purpose and with the goal of improperly expediting the process. They failed to review the documents of the mortgages they were foreclosing on, then told courts they had. They didn't verify information, but claimed to have done so in sworn affidavits. They hired $8 an hour burger-flippers to "robosign" these documents, pretending the underlying legal work had been done. They knowingly used falsified records, some of which they bought en masse. They were aided by a company called DocX, which had a price list of fabricated documents for use in court. (DocX, by the way, was eventually indicted on charges of mortgage fraud).

    After creating phony dossiers on borrowers, the banks signed and notarized affidavits stating they had taken all of the legal steps. In many cases, even the notarizations were fakes. Submitting a falsified notarized affidavit to a court is perjury and fraud.

    Of course, the burger-flippers who did the paperwork didn't think up the whole scheme -- someone much higher did. Somewhere between these low-level workers and the chief executive officer were managers who masterminded robosigning. So far, just one midlevel executive has been convicted at Bank of America, while scores of others have gone untouched.

    Mortgage underwriting: Then there are the crimes committed in mortgage underwriting, where defects were knowingly ignored. The FBI investigated these cases early on, but investigators never moved forward with prosecutions.

    Maybe the scale of the financial penalties bank agreed to pay had something to do with this inaction. Bank of America, for instance, using shareholder money, paid $16.65 billion to settle allegations of fraudulent mortgage originations, securitizations and servicing. One can't help think that this money bought immunity from prosecution for executives.

    Money Laundering: Banks have been laundering staggering sums of money for drug dealers and terrorists. Hey, there are big bucks in high net worth narco-terrorists. Awash in cash, drug cartels relied on big banks to launder their ill-gotten money. Apparently, it was just good business to grab a slice of that pie. However, these are deeply offensive, very illegal activities, and deserve not just penalties, but jail time.

    How much of this dirty money made its way through the banks? One analysis estimates that $1.6 trillion of tainted proceeds has been laundered through major money-center banks around the world.

    A U.S. Senate report linked HSBC to drug lords and terrorists, leading to a record $1.9 billion fine. The Federal Reserve faulted Citigroup over its controls, allowing money laundering to go on. And Wells Fargo admitted to laundering money for Mexican drug gangs.

    So next time you hear the claim that "there were no crimes committed by bankers," just remember that this may be the biggest lie of the 21st century.

    To contact the author of this article: Barry Ritholtz at [email protected]. To contact the editor responsible for this article: James Greiff at [email protected].

    [Sep 26, 2014] The New Classical Clique

    Economist's View

    Paul Krugman continues the conversation on New Classical economics::

    The New Classical Clique: Simon Wren-Lewis thinks some more about macroeconomics gone astray; Robert J. Waldmann weighs in. For those new to this conversation, the question is why starting in the 1970s much of academic macroeconomics was taken over by a school of thought that began by denying any useful role for policies to raise demand in a slump, and eventually coalesced around denial that the demand side of the economy has any role in causing slumps.

    I was a grad student and then an assistant professor as this was happening, albeit doing international economics – and international macro went in a different direction, for reasons I'll get to in a bit. So I have some sense of what was really going on. And while both Wren-Lewis and Waldmann hit on most of the main points, neither I think gets at the important role of personal self-interest. New classical macro was and still is many things – an ideological bludgeon against liberals, a showcase for fancy math, a haven for people who want some kind of intellectual purity in a messy world. But it's also a self-promoting clique. ...

    MaxSpeak:

    Regarding Waldmann's remark about the ideological proclivities of, among others, Martin Feldstein, at the recent NBER meetings in D.C. he presented a paper on reducing tax expenditures to lower the deficit, wherein no tax expenditure favoring saving or investment fell to his axe. When someone in the audience mentioned that tax expenditures for saving probably reduced saving more than increased it (since the cost to the Gov exceeds the marginal effect on saving), he professed ignorance of whether or not that is true. (It is.)

    bakho said...

    In the 70s models were started in a lot of fields in addition to economics including biology, environmental science, ecology. In part it looks to have been physics envy. But the physicists made models of systems that were far more simple than economics. Modelers in the 70s went to work using computers that filled whole rooms but had less computing power than my laptop. By necessity they had to make assumptions that made the models crude predictors. But computing power was increasing and the optimists believed that eventually it would be possible to model such complex systems as economics using micro foundations, a lifetimes work.............. Not. Micro founded models make about as much sense as building a weather model based on individual atoms. Computers still are not there yet and may never be. The modelers of the 70s were overoptimistic about what they could deliver and buffaloed many people into thinking they were hot stuff. It was an exclusive club with higher math skills required as a ticket to admission. It is most difficult to cut losses on sunk costs, but that is their legacy.

    Rather than detailed models that provide insights to the minutiae of economies, models have many short cuts and assumptions that assume as givens what might be important insights. They assumed the economy of the time: Full employment and supply limited. The models of the 70s fell apart with the 80s recession but regained their footing after the recovery and great moderation when the economy was in a sweet spot that required little action for the Fed. Thus the models had several decades to coast along without major fail. We hit an economy that was demand limited and high unemployment. The things many models simply assumed away were the very problems that needed addressing.

    The 70s models belong on the dust heap of history in the company of many failed models in other disciplines that have long since been abandoned. As the Nobel Laureate Max Planck noted, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

    bakho -> bakho...

    SWL wonders why Keynes was dismissed in the 70s.

    Very wealthy special interests disliked Keynes, disliked the New Deal and spent some of their money to support academics and intellectuals that could dismiss Keynes or show that his policies were in error. They funded people to work on the project of undermining Keynes and still do. Wealthy elites were eager to support economists to work on economics projects that denounced Keynes. Researchers of all striped try to keep their patrons happy. If refutation of Keynes was the price demanded in order to build up a computer based economics from micro foundations so be it. Keynes wasn't needed for micro foundations. Keynes was an impediment to funding. It is not surprising that Keynes was jettisoned. When micro foundations sputtered, there was too much crow to be eaten. Better to double down than die of embarrassment.

    [Sep 03, 2014] The US Is In a Societal Panic: Why Our Tax and Economic Debates Are Irrational

    jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    David Cay Johnston is an excellent lecturer, who can address economics and public policy in clear and simple statements.

    This is one of most informative talks I have heard about where we are, and how we got here, what the crony kleptocracy is, and how it works.

    Johnston's concept of a societal panic corresponds to the notion of national hysteria which I have expressed on a number of occasions. But he fills out the idea more fluently and fully. It is a dangerous period of time which can yield new ideas and concepts, depending on how well we survive it.

    It is a must watch, and I rarely say that.


    [Jul 29, 2014] The Rot Within, Part III: Our Political Order Is Defined By Favoritism And Extortion

    07/24/2014 | zerohedge.com

    Corruption ceases to be corruption when it becomes the Status Quo; what was once recognized as corruption is seen as just another cost of doing business. Our political order is structurally corrupt: the key dynamic in every level of governance is favoritism and extortion.

    [Jun 14, 2014] The Big Lobotomy: How Republicans Made Congress Stupid By Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards

    June 14, 2014 | www.washingtonmonthly.com

    Last September, as they scrambled to decide on one final ultimatum before shutting down the federal government, Republican House leaders came up with what seemed like an odd demand: to strip their own staff of health care benefits.

    At the time, staffers reacted to the news with a mixture of despair and disbelief. "It was like getting sucker-punched by your boss," one aide told me. "Everyone was thinking, What's the point? How is screwing us going to help you?"

    The dubious logic behind the House Republicans' demand can be traced back to a contested provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the gutting of which was the price the Republicans were demanding for agreeing to fund the government. The provision requires employees of the U.S. Congress, including members and their staffs, to buy insurance on the new health care exchanges, while still allowing them to receive subsidies from their employer. Over the course of more than a year, ideologues at several conservative think tanks, especially the Tea Party-friendly Heritage Foundation, which was pushing for the shutdown, managed to put an imaginative spin on the provision, convincing the conservative world that members and their staff were getting a sneaky, backroom deal, a "special exemption from Obamacare."

    In fact, had the Republicans' desired language passed, congressional personnel would have become the only employees in America whose employer (in their case, the federal government) was explicitly forbidden from contributing to their health care-a blow that, in all likelihood, would have caused most of the best and brightest staffers, and perhaps some lawmakers, to simply hightail it for the door. Some quite conservative members even said as much. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, in a candid moment later, called the move "political theater" that would do nothing more than catalyze a rapid "brain drain" in Congress.

    While Sensenbrenner was right, one must appreciate the irony. A debilitating brain drain has actually been under way in Congress for the past twenty-five years, and it is Sensenbrenner and his conservative colleagues who have engineered it.

    A quick refresher: In 1995, after winning a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, one of the first things the new Republican House leadership did was gut Congress's workforce. They cut the "professional staff" (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the "legislative support staff" (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker's office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research. (The Republicans who took over the Senate in 1995 were less draconian, cutting committee staff by about 16 percent and leaving the committee system largely in place.) Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.

    Why would conservative lawmakers decimate the staff and organizational capacity of an institution they themselves control? Part of it is political optics: What better way to show the conservative voters back home that you're serious about shrinking government than by cutting your own staff? But a bigger reason is strategic. The Gingrich Revolutionaries of 1995 and the Tea Partiers of 2011 share the same basic dream: to defund and dismantle the vast complex of agencies and programs that have been created by bipartisan majorities since the New Deal. The people in Congress who knew those agencies and programs best and were most invested in making them work - the professional staffers, the CRS analysts, the veteran committee chairs-were not going to consent to seeing them swept away. So they had to be swept away.

    Of course, all of this slashing and cutting has done nothing to actually help shrink the federal government. Real federal spending has increased 50 percent since 1995, in line with the growth of the U.S. population and economy. Meanwhile, Washington has fought two major land wars, added two large new entitlement programs (Medicare's prescription drug benefit under George W. Bush, the ACA under Barack Obama), and created several new federal bureaucracies, ranging from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the gigantic Department of Homeland Security.

    At the same time, as political scientist Lee Drutman of the Sunlight Foundation has noted, both the government and the issues it has to deal with have grown more complex. There are more contractors to manage, more stakeholders to liaison with, more technologies to adapt to, more industry-funded research studies to take account of. That, in turn, has made the jobs of congressional staffers, of keeping an eye on government and sorting through the ever-growing amount of information coming at them from lobbyists and constituents, far more difficult, even as their numbers have not remotely kept pace with the growth of government and K Street. In 2010, the House spent $1.37 billion and employed between 7,000 and 8,000 staffers. That same year, corporations and special interests spent twice as much - $2.6 billion - on lobbying (which excludes billions spent on other forms of influence) and employed 12,000 federally registered lobbyists, according to Sunlight Foundation.

    Instead of helping to shrink the government, the gutting of congressional expertise and institutional capacity - what New America Foundation scholar and former congressional staffer Lorelei Kelly refers to as a "self-lobotomy" - has had two other effects, both of which have advanced conservative power, if not necessarily conservative ideals.

    The first effect is an outsourcing of policy development. Much of the research, number crunching, and legislative wordsmithing that used to be done by Capitol Hill staffers working for the government is now being done by outside experts, many of them former Hill staffers, working for lobbying firms, think tanks, consultancies, trade associations, and PR outfits. This has strengthened the already-powerful hand of corporate interests in shaping legislation, and given conservative groups an added measure of influence over Congress, as the shutdown itself illustrates.

    ... ... ...

    The second effect of the brain drain is a significant decline in Congress's institutional ability to monitor and investigate a growing and ever-more-complex federal government. This decline has been going on quietly, behind the scenes, for so many years that hardly anyone even notices anymore. But like termites eating away at the joists, there's a danger of catastrophic collapse unless regular inspections are done. While Congress continues to devote what limited investigative resources it has into the fished-out waters of the Internal Revenue Service and Benghazi "scandals" (thirteen Benghazi hearings in the House alone, with a new select committee launched in May), just in the last year we've witnessed two appalling government fiascoes that better congressional oversight might have avoided: the botched rollout of the health insurance exchanges and the uncontrolled expansion of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. (Fun fact: while annual federal spending on intelligence has roughly doubled since 1997, staff levels on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have actually declined.) Debacles like these, by undermining the public's faith in government, wind up perversely advancing the conservative antigovernment agenda-another reason why many Republicans don't worry much about the brain drain on the Hill. But the rest of us should.

    ... ... ...

    In addition to the outsourcing of policy development, the other big effect of the brain drain has been the atrophying of congressional oversight. Good oversight requires teams of educated, detail-oriented staffers who have the time to cull through documents, review thousands of line items in a budget, read budget justifications, and then follow up with federal agencies or local programs to determine what is really happening in government programs on the ground. Those teams have traditionally resided in the committees, buttressed by permanent staff and long-serving members, and in the legislative service agencies like the GAO. As we've seen, both were greatly downsized in the 1990s and remained profoundly understaffed and under-resourced.

    Of course, good oversight has always been more the exception than the rule in Congress, in part because it has never been a particularly sexy part of a Congress member's job, and in part because voters don't generally reward members who excel at it. Rare are the headlines congratulating Congress for catching disasters before they happen.

    Even today, valuable oversight still happens on occasion. In the run-up to the 2010 census, for instance, the GAO identified fatal flaws in the handheld computer devices the Census Bureau was planning to use as a cost-saving measure. Thanks to the GAO's reports, major fixes to the devices were made, the officials originally in charge of the project canned, and a possible disaster with the decennial census averted.

    Still, there has unquestionably been a massive falloff in congressional oversight. In the decade after the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, the number of Senate oversight hearings dropped by a third, and House oversight hearings fell by half, according to the Brookings Institution. And even these numbers probably understate the problem. A lot of oversight hearings today are almost strictly for show, especially in the House. And even those that are meant to be serious suffer from the ignorance and poor preparation of many lawmakers. "In the old days, the member used to know more than any witness from the outside that came before the committee," Dingell said. "Today, they don't. Members don't even understand the issues. They don't even ask questions that are relevant. Sometimes they just want to give a political speech."

    Congress's failure of oversight is perhaps least obvious but most critical on the appropriations committees and subcommittees. These entities control the purse strings for every government program and agency. It has traditionally been their job-and they once took it seriously- to ensure that dollars were being spent on programs that were doing what they said they were doing. That sort of line-item oversight takes time and a dedicated staff that is paying an inordinate amount of attention to detail. "It was never a thrilling process," said Scott Lilly, who served as a clerk and staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, "but it was vital."

    And it has all but ceased to happen in the past decade or so, as staff numbers have dwindled and the passing of sweeping, omnibus budgets have become the norm. Even when they do try to look, appropriations subcommittees are snowed under by literally thousands of pages- "multiple tomes," as one staffer put it-of oversight reports that no one has the time to read. "Agencies just fill up these budget justifications with all sorts of meaningless metrics, which is a convenient tool to overwhelm a handful of staffers, who are stretched so thin they don't have the time to find out anything that's going on," Lilly said. The result, Republican Senator Tom Coburn pointed out in a 2012 report, is wasted money, uncontrolled government programs, and a panicky sense of "fire-alarm oversight" in which members of Congress don't ask questions until a scandal breaks and there's a mad scurry to assign blame.

    [Jun 03, 2014] Wall Street Firms Using Their Dark Pools To Make Markets in Their Own Stocks

    These self-named dark pools are operating as private exchanges, with a faux type of specialist system managing the order book, with all the insight and power that it entails. The layman may not quite comprehend this, but anyone familiar with Wall Street operations and history will certainly do so.

    That they are trading for their own parent company stocks, and possibly for their own books, ought to raise more than a few eyebrows.

    We ought to have internalized the lesson by now that markets are not naturally efficient and self-regulating. But even moreso when the business of price setting and order matching is being done in darkness, and apparently with lax regulatory oversight and institutionalized conflicts of interest.

    The lack of integrity in the Western financial system must seem appalling to anyone whose ears are not firmly taped to the corporate news feeds droning out of New York and London to their jaded listeners. Another lie, another fraud, another abuse of oaths and trust. Tra la, tra la, comme ci comme ça.

    The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

    After Charges of Running a Price Fixing Cartel on Nasdaq in the 90s,
    Wall Street Banks Are Now Trading Their Own Stocks in Darkness

    By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2014

    On July 17, 1996, the U.S. Justice Department charged the biggest names on Wall Street, names like Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and predecessor firms to Citigroup, with pricing fixing on the electronic stock market known as Nasdaq...

    Yesterday we learned that the very same Wall Street firms charged with price fixing in the 90s have somehow conned their regulators into allowing them to own their own dark pools – effectively unregulated stock exchanges – and make markets in the stock of their very own Wall Street bank.

    The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) – a self-regulatory Wall Street body (which under a previous name was responsible for missing the Nasdaq price fixing for more than a decade) released trading data yesterday for the dark pools operating the week of May 12 – 16. This was the first time such data has been released. The data releases are set to continue..."

    Read the entire article with the details here.

    [Apr 14, 2014] Pay and Deregulation in the US Financial Industry

    Apr 13, 2014 | http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/
    "It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident."

    -- Charles H. Ferguson

    "Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage.

    And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

    Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

    "Call me dark, but what I see here is a toxic relationship between deregulation, underpriced risk, and exorbitant, inefficient pay scales that contribute to the growth of inequality, not to mention the shampoo economy (bubble, bust, repeat)."

    Jared Bernstein, A Striking Picture of Pay and Deregulation in Finance

    A country foolishly deregulates the safeguards created by their forefathers, trusts to the natural goodness of those most hungry for wealth and power, and increases the incentives for enormous wealth by creating loopholes and cutting tax rates, and de-penalizing even the most shocking kinds of white collar crimes. They recreate the mistakes of history with a wanton disregard for the consequences.

    And still they wonder why. Why do we persecute the poor, and idolize those who would rule us all, without pity or even normal cautions against crises ? And they say, for God and freedom.

    Financial corruption has twisted and perverted public policy, distorted the economy, and polluted the corridors of political and economic power with a flood of easy money.

    h/t Jared Bernstein

    Related:

    A Brilliant Warning On Robert Rubin's Proposal to Deregulate Banks, circa 1995
    Andrew Jackson Day Remembered

    [Apr 08, 2014] John Ralson Saul Re-evaluating the Current Approach To Trade and Globalisation

    Jesse's Café Américain

    Does globalization actually deliver what we thought it would?

    There are a range of choices between free trade and protectionism. Ideological commitments and purity may prevent a meaningful discussion of the situation.

    Is there really a surplus of goods, or is trade organized around a plutocratic economic model that is providing a scarcity of wages for labour?

    When local laws are leveled by the economic realities of globalization, can nations retain their own character and choice of government and guiding principles?

    Can there be genuine 'free trade' in a world in which only the US is a major military and monetary superpower, owner the world's reserve currency, with Russia and China alone presenting some effective counterbalance, while many other nations, among them much of Europe and Japan, have become essentially incapable of exercising enough military power to defend themselves and preserve order in their own regions except for minor police actions? Are the assumptions about the benefits of free trade founded on assumptions as unrealistic as those that drove domestic free market policies?

    Is global free trade 'lifting all boats,' or merely spawning a proliferation of oligarchs because of its inherently lawless and borderless character?

    Although the title of the video is in German, the presentation by JRS is in English.

    [Apr 08, 2014] Retiring SEC Lawyer Crucifies His Employer It's A Cancer Working On Behalf Of The Bankster Turnpike

    Zero Hedge
    Tyler Durden on 04/08/2014

    We wonder: why does the truth about the broken system, as witnessed and experienced by individual employees, always wait until said employee is about to depart their employer or just after? Obviously that is rhetorical. However, it is worth mentioning, because in the latest such revelation, a retiring SEC trail attorney veteran, James Kidney, who had been with the agency since 1986 and retired this month, just crucified his now former employer for doing precisely all those thing that outside critics - notably Zero Hedge - have accused the most co-opted, clueless, corrupt and criminal regulators of doing. Only he said it in a way that not even we could have phrased.

    From Bloomberg:

    The SEC has become "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors," Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. "On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening."

    Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency's penalties, Kidney said, have become "at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike."

    Wow: another "erudite" former cog in the systemic wheel goes off the reservation and gets all tinfoil bloggy on us. He goes on:

    In his speech, Kidney also hit the agency for using misleading statistics to showcase its enforcement efforts. The SEC should focus on the quality of its actions, rather than try to file as many as possible just to tout its record to lawmakers and the media, he said.

    "It is a cancer," Kidney said of the agency's use of numbers. "It should be changed."

    His name was James Kidney.

    Kidney said in the interview that he will always be an SEC loyalist and was trying to offer constructive criticism that could help the agency. He said he wasn't singling out any specific cases or officials in his comments.

    "I don't think we did a very aggressive job with all the major players in the crash of '08," he said, noting that as a civil enforcement agency, the commission does not need to prove its cases beyond a reasonable doubt like the Justice Department does. "The SEC has a lower burden of proof and we should be pushing the envelope a bit."

    You mean, pretending to regulate the same people where SEC staffers wish to work will no longer fool most of the people all of the time? The horror... The horror.

    A quick reminder on the Goldman wrist slap deal with the SEC, where Kidney was part of the initial, if not final team.

    Kidney, who was part of the initial team that was building the Goldman Sachs case, pressed his bosses in the enforcement division to go higher up the chain. He later took himself off the team after being given a lesser role, according to people familiar with the matter.

    In particular, the people said, Kidney argued that the commission should sue Tourre's boss, Jonathan Egol. Kidney also wanted to bring a case against Paulson & Co. or some executives at the hedge fund, which helped pick the portfolio of securities that were underlying the Abacus vehicle and then bet against it.

    The SEC ultimately decided not to sue Egol, the Paulson firm or any individuals from the hedge fund.

    Yes, it was all the not even 30 year old Tourre's fault. All of it. And the person who dared to point out this criminal disdain for justice by the SEC? He was demoted by the most corrupt of all: Mary Schapiro.

    The punchline - the SEC is a regulator only for optical purposes. It's true role is not to shake up the status quo.

    In his retirement speech, Kidney noted that he had been "involved in a high-profile case or two" and said he had gotten a message from above not to take too many risks.

    "I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses, whose names we all know, who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket," Kidney said. "They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances."

    Simply said: disgusting and pathetic - both the sad truth about the US market "regulator", which most were already aware of, and that an SEC employee has to wait until the day he quits to express it.

    Oh, and if anyone still wants to know why the perfectly legal parasitism of HFT has turned off the retail investors for the last time, and why everyone knows the market is rigged - it is not the vacuum tubes. Nope. It is the criminals at the SEC who made it legal for 25 year old math PhDs to rig stocks in the first place, and who allowed the TBTF banks to make the marketplace into their own personal no risk, all return piggy bank. Them, and of course Congress - because when the day comes that all those idiotic trades blow up and the banks have to pay the penalty, why -- they just get another taxpayer bailout, courtesy of America's democratically elected "representatives

    Continued at Regulatory Capture Bulletin, 2013

    [Jan 03, 2014] Taylor v. Summers on Secular Stagnation

    That is politics not economics and, clearly, as for Taylor, it comes down to the usual question: are Republicans more stupid of more evil.
    Jan 03, 2014 | Economist's View

    Here's the Jared Bernstein response to John Taylor that Roger Farmer is referring to:

    Taylor v. Summers on Secular Stagnation: ... In a recent speech I've featured here in numerous posts, Larry Summers raised the possibility that the economy is growing below its potential, with all the ancillary problems that engenders (e.g., weak job and income growth), and not just in recession, but in recovery. Stagnation is by definition expected in recession, but not in an expansion...

    Taylor argues, however, that secular stagnation is "hokem." His argument rest on two points, both of which seem obviously wrong.

    First, he claims that the current recovery has been weak is not due to any underlying problems in the private sector or lousy fiscal policy, but due to "policy uncertainty, increased regulation, including through the Dodd Frank and Affordable Care Act." But the recovery began in the second half of 2009, well before either of those measures took effect. And, in fact, since they've done so, if anything, growth and jobs have accelerated. Financial markets have done particularly well...

    Taylor's antipathy toward fiscal stimulus leads him to completely omit the fact of austerity in the form of fiscal drag as a factor in the weak recovery. ...

    His second argument is that if secular stagnation were a real problem, we would have seen it in the 2000s expansion, yet instead we saw "boom-like conditions, especially in residential investment." ...

    Yes, there was a lot-too much-residential investment, but employment growth was terribly weak...,the share of the population employed actually declined. Real GDP grew almost a point more slowly per year over the 2000s business cycle relative to the prior two cycles. Business investment grew less than half as fast in the 2000s than it did in the 1990s. In fact, after rising pretty steeply in the 1990s, CBO's estimate of potential GDP fell sharply in the 2000s..., a serious cost of the problem Summers is raising and Taylor is wrongly debunking.

    It's also worth noting that middle-class incomes and poverty rates did much better in the 1990s, thanks to full employment conditions in the latter half of that cycle, than in the 2000s, when slack labor markets led to a flattening trend in real median income and increasing poverty rates.

    I doubt any of this will convince Taylor and others who simply want to go after the ACA, the Fed, stimulus measures, et al. But those of us interested in blazing the path back to full employment should recognize these arguments as politically motivated distractions. ...

    This post from Brad DeLong on the same topic is also worthwhile

    pgl said...

    If one has been reading Taylor's blog - ECONOMICS ONE - none of his latest partisan garbage in this oped would have come as a surprise. In the olden days - we would have to turn to Lawrence Kudlow and those Jerry Bowyer Fuzzcharts for such insanity. I wonder if Stanford is proud of its most famous macroeconomist. Cough, cough.

    DeDude :

    The thing that holds back businesses from deploying their stash of cash, is not "policy uncertainty" or "increased regulation". It is lack of demand.

    If the demand is there then the product/service will be produced. When demand is not there then the cash will sit idle or be used non-productively for things like stock buybacks or takeover of competitors. Any individual business owner who fail to meet demand (because of policy uncertainty or regulation) will simply give up market share to those of his/her competitors that chose not to be held back by those things.

    DeDude -> Matt Young...

    I am actually not talking about GDP. The issue is why do businesses not hire more people. The explanation that right wing fools and smart business people love to give is that it's because of regulations and policies that they don't like. However, as pointed out over on "calculated risk" they always complain about regulations and there is no correlation between their complaining (or not) and their actual hire of new employees. The only thing that determine whether a business will hire more people is whether the demand for its products/services is in excess of what can be delivered by its current workforce. And they will respond to such demand regardless of cumbersome regulations - or they will lose market share to competitors that are more than happy to fill the demand.

    Fred C. Dobbs:

    (Found out on the web.)

    Definition of the term secular stagnation theory is presented. It refers to the protracted economic depression characterized by a falling population growth, low aggregate demand and a tendency to save rather than invest.

    Dictionary of Theories;2002, p478

    David:

    I don't think the right word for Taylor's erroneous claims as chiefly "political". It's moral prejudice. The absolute belief in totally unregulated markets is based on the belief that

    1. The wealthy are more virtuous than the poor.

    2. Only the strong should survive (see Abba's song "The winnner takes it all").

    So it goes from a.Moral Prejudice to b. Political ideology to c. Economic chicanery.

    Moral prejudices are the most deeply rooted in human beings because they don't only dictate how the world is, but how it should be.

    pgl -> David...

    Aren't your comments better directed towards Greg Mankiw? Oh wait - they are both toadies for Mitt Romney. Sorry about my question!

    bakho:

    Taylor isn't right or wrong. Taylor is simply irrelevant to the largest social ill of 2014- Unemployment.

    If one of the basic assumptions of your model is "Assume Full Employment" then employment doesn't become a goal but a constant.

    Under the Assumption of Full Employment, is secular stagnation even possible?

    Taylor's model does not even look at Unemployment, and reducing unemployment is not his priority.

    If as a policy maker, your goal is to reduce unemployment as quickly as possible, you should find another model that addresses unemployment directly. Once unemployment is fixed, other models may be more useful as new problems pop up.

    anne -> bakho...

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30leuchtenburg.html

    November 30, 2008

    Keep Your Distance
    By WILLIAM E. LEUCHTENBURG

    Chapel Hill, N.C.

    On Nov. 22, Hoover welcomed Roosevelt to the White House. Throughout the meeting, he treated his successor as though he were a thickheaded schoolboy who needed drilling on intransitive verbs. He sought to bully the president-elect into endorsing the administration's policies at home and abroad, especially sustaining the gold standard at whatever cost. Alert to Hoover's intent, Roosevelt smiled, nodded, smiled again, but made no commitment. A frustrated Hoover later vowed, "I'll have my way with Roosevelt yet."

    Hoover returned to the attack in February. He sent the president-elect a hectoring 10-page handwritten letter that misspelled Roosevelt's name (as "Roosvelt"). As a consequence of the flight of gold and runs on banks, Hoover wrote, there was "steadily degenerating confidence in the future." His wise policies, he claimed, had brought an upturn in the summer of 1932. Since then, though, he said, there had been a sharp decline because the country was unnerved by Roosevelt's election, for it feared that the new president would embark on radical experiments. Hoover concluded by asking Roosevelt to restore confidence by stating publicly that there would be "no tampering" with the currency and that "the budget will be unquestionably balanced, even if further taxation is necessary."

    Three days after writing this letter, Hoover told an archconservative senator that "if these declarations be made by the president-elect, he will have ratified the whole major program of the Republican administration; that is, it means the abandonment of 90 percent of the so-called new deal." To another Republican senator, he spelled out what he demanded that his successor renounce: aid to homeowners burdened with mortgages, public works projects and plans for a Tennessee Valley Authority. He also wanted Roosevelt to raise tariff barriers and impose a national sales tax.

    Roosevelt, who regarded the letter as "cheeky," let days go by without replying, fibbing that his response had miscarried. He would not let himself be trammeled by being identified with an unpopular dying administration, so he refused to issue any statement. He would not permit Hoover to rob him of the fruits of victory. On March 4, unfettered, he announced to the nation a new beginning....

    William E. Leuchtenburg is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    sherparick:

    I wonder if Tyler Cowen, James Hamilton, and Steve Williamson will take John Taylor to task for saying that Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke are just putting out a bunch of hokum to protect the Obama administration from its policy errors? No, I don't think so, civility and treating those who disagree with you with respect and deference is only something economists with liberal political leanings, who kind of care what happens to the rest of the American people, and not just the 1%, owe to their conservative, "scientific," betters.

    It should not be forgotten that Professor Taylor was the Deputy Undersecretary of Treasury for Economics and Financial Issues from 2001-2004. That economic growth was anemic during this time is well documented.

    http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/01/question-1-for-2014-how-much-will.html

    Has he ever explained his policy errors? As to hokum, I do acknowledge that Professor Taylor has a lot of experience peddling that for his political masters.

    http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/js452.aspx

    How can Mark Thoma, Noah Smith, or Brue Bartlett have an honest argument with the likes of John Taylor. I hope he finds his bubble comfortable in side the right wing machine. I am sure he finds it lucrative.

    P.S. Again, the evidence is that economic growth is picking up, just as both Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act are coming into full effect. Correlation or causation? Are more likely just co-incidence?

    kievite said...

    This is an interesting topic which sadly attracted very few comments.

    I think there are two issues not covered in comments:

    1. That is politics, not economics and, clearly, as for Taylor, it comes down to the usual question: "are Republicans more stupid or more evil" (see Robert Waldmann comment to the post from Brad DeLong ).
    2. The level of debt and the price of energy are two important variables that should probably be taken into account in any discussion of secular stagnation.

    As for Taylor personal legacy, I would suggest that the underlying assumption that there is an exogenous NIARU (non-inflation-accelerating rate of unemployment) imposing an unavoidable constraint on macroeconomic possibilities is wrong on both historical and analytical grounds. From a historical standpoint, a NIARU, if it exists at all, must be regarded as highly variable over time and place.

    To me it smells with the desire to enlist the fear of inflation to justify the maintenance of a "reserve army of the unemployed" in the society (which is a Marxist term, but probably is applicable here). In a way high level of unemployment is a precondition to the fast redistribution of wealth that we observed under the current neoliberal regime.

    Which is another way to say that Taylor is a stooge of financial oligarchy. A Trojan horse which plays the role of an academic economist.



    Etc

    Society

    Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

    Quotes

    War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

    Bulletin:

    Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

    History:

    Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

    Classic books:

    The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

    Most popular humor pages:

    Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

    The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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    Last modified: May 09, 2021