Interview with Charles Hugh Smith: Why Local Enterprise Is the Solution

From Chris Martenson:

A growing number of individuals believe our economic and societal status quo is defined by unsustainable addiction to cheap oil and ever increasing debt. With that viewpoint, it's hard not to see a hard takedown of our national standard of living in the future. Even harder to answer is: what do you do about it?

Charles Hugh Smith, proprietor of the esteemed weblog OfTwoMinds.com, sees the path to future prosperity in removing capital from the Wall Street machine and investing it into local enterprise within the community in which you live.

"Enterprise is completely possible in an era of declining resource consumption. In other words, just because we have to use less, doesn’t mean that there is no opportunity for investing in enterprise. I think enterprise and investing in fact, are the solution. And if we withdraw our money from Wall Street and put it to use in our own communities, to the benefit of our own income streams, then I think that things happen."

"We have to solve our own problems. The savior state and these institutions are not going to reform themselves and they are not reformable in any way that is meaningful. And so, I think what we’re talking about is taking your capital, which is your human capital, your skills and your experience; your social capital, the people you know and trust that you’ve created in life; and your financial capital and investing them in local solutions. Things that people need, like energy and food and shelter and a low energy lifestyle."

"There is opportunity for technological innovation in greatly increasing the efficiency of our appliances and the rest of our lifestyle, as well as tremendous technological improvements in productions and so on. But there’s also what we might call social and behavioral innovations, which the United States is really poor in recognizing. The simplest way to cut your energy is to live close to the things that you need to get to. And if you have your own enterprise, then we might benefit on a household and a social scale of just living close to your job. So being dependent on corporate America and a job a hundred miles away - that’s a really fragile, vulnerable lifestyle. So if you can relocalize your income streams and your enterprises and live close to work and school, you’re already tremendously more resilient and have a much more sustainable household regardless of what happens."

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/charles-hugh-smith-why-local-enterprise-solution/61547

Political Science Professor Tom Ferguson: Massive Job Programs Are the Only Way Out

From the Real News:

Only a 1930s New Deal style jobs program can deal with the crisis.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7144

Big Business and the U.S. economy

Yves Smith (pseudonym) at Naked Capitalism was interviewed on CSPANS re big corporations and the U.S. economy. She has degrees from Harvard and work experiences at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. She is critical of large investment banks’ practices along with the U.S. economic policies and published a book titled “Econned” this year.

I like people who have intellectual integrity (They seem rare these days).

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/08/we-speak-on-cspans-washington-journal-about-big-corporations-and-the-economy.html

Whitney’s Bearish View on Housing and Financials

Whitney’s latest interview on CNBC

From Zero Hedge:

Meredith Whitney appeared on CNBC earlier and was about as bearish as ever, not only on financials, but on housing as well. In addition to saying that she expects the housing market to get worse in Q3 and Q4, the maven again reiterated the blatantly obvious, namely that all the recent earnings beats by financials have been an accounting sham driven by:

-Provisioning for less future losses, by reducing NPLs in the current quarter, thus generating profits out of manipulated air (particularly relevant for HSBC's results yesterday, which were the main factor in pushing the market 25 points higher)

-Increasingly more difficult for consumers to get loans. Not much of an issue - Obama will simply blame this on the previous regime.

-And the glaringly obvious, i.e., that all European banks sit on bloated amounts of largely overvalued sovereign debt. Should another sovereign risk flaring appear (and it is Zero Hedge's belief that this will occur promptly, as soon as the European vacation season is over), it will be time to dig up the old skeletons of financial insolvency once again, only this time with EUR LIBOR and Euribor about 100% higher than where they were in May.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/meredith-whitney-even-more-bearish-housing-and-financials

Marc Faber on Bernanke and Economic Armageddon of the U.S.

"Mr. Bernanke, an academic who has never worked a single day in his life. He will take anything off a cliff: a business, a McDonald's stand, the Federal Reserve. And I have to say I have a certain sympathy for him as a character. He's ok, but completely useless. I would not even hire him as my butler...Mr Bernanke is a madman, a destroyer of the value of money. And he is a wealth destroyer and an economic criminal. It is the duty of a central bank to keep the value of money. I believe today for ninety percent of Americans life is harder than it was in 1999. Basically I think they are a bunch of crooks." Marc Faber on King World News

"The Future will be a total disaster with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it today, wars, massive government debt defaults and the impoverishment of large segments of Western society."

I heard him say this on numerous occasions. He resides in Thailand.

http://video.aol.co.uk/video-detail/marc-faber-nwo-series-economic-armageddon-in-the-us/2053056119

Meredith Whitney’s Latest Calls

I respect her macro calls by and large. She has been bearish on the fundamentals like consumer credit collapsing and lack of industrial growth.

The video of Whiney is below:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&brand=money&vid=d3a2502e-3e9a-45f1-97dc-3c7321dff45d

Meredith Whitney Expects a Double Dip Recession

I posted up her interview about a year ago on another blog before I started this blog.

She sounds more bearish than a year ago.

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=289004&cl=16675795&src=finance&ch=4043681

Has Wall Street Really Changed?: Bill Moyers' Interview

Bill Moyers on PBS interviewed former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson and US Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) on the state of the economy.

From the Transcript:

MARCY KAPTUR: And you know, looking at it from the heartland, when I look at Wall Street and all their connections into Washington, and I've been at it a while now, it's very disheartening to me, because I know they don't care about us out there. We're flyover country for them. And they're just out to make money...


BILL MOYERS: So, Simon, what happens now? If we're going to avert a depression and the next calamity, what needs to be done?

SIMON JOHNSON: Well, I think you have to keep at it, Bill. I mean, that's the lesson from previous generations of Americans, who have really confronted entrenched power like this. You have to keep at it. And you mustn't be satisfied. When the Administration says, 'Okay, we fixed it. Don't worry. We did some technical tweaking on capital requirements, for example, in the banks.' You have to say, 'No, that's not true. Let's look at what's happening, let's follow it through.'

The muckrakers of today are absolutely essential, I think, to really pushing these banks. And revealing what they're doing. And by the way, Bill, it's going to I think it's going to be a long haul. I think that the economy will start to recover. We'll get some jobs back. It's going to be very painful for a lot of people. But other people's attention is going to drift. It's a three, five, seven, maybe twelve year cycle. But when it comes back, it will come back with a vengeance. And it will be even, I think, even more devastating, in all likelihood, than what we just saw...


SIMON JOHNSON: Louis the Fourteenth of France, a very powerful monarch, was famous for having many bad things, you know, happen under his rule. And people would always say, 'If only Louis the Fourteenth knew. I'm sure he doesn't know. If we could just tell him, he'd sort it out.' You know. I'm skeptical.

www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/watch.html


On a personal note, I lived and worked for a manufacturing firm in a small town of the Midwest. I remember that manufacturing plant jobs were supporting the local economy. Now many are losing their jobs and homes. I concur with Marcy Kaptur’s view on American towns suffering.

I visit Simon Johnson’s blog on a daily basis and hope he is wrong with being skeptical.

On another note, journalism is close to my heart and I commend Bill Moyers for his journalistic integrity (I posted another link of his interview before).

Black emphasizes morals/ethics on current predicament

Excellent! It's a must see video.

The financial industry brought the economy to its knees, but how did they get away with it? With the nation wondering how to hold the bankers accountable, Bill Moyers sits down with William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Black offers his analysis of what went wrong and his critique of the bailout.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, and this week in New York, at this conference, you described this as more than a financial crisis. You called it a moral crisis.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because it is a fundamental lack of integrity...

"Our current predicament really does boil down to a failure of morals/ethics in the highest echelons of those charged with the stewardship of our financial well-being."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html