THE .5% ECONOMY

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Posted on 7th May 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

You are a serf. The Lords of the manor on the NYC mountaintop penthouse suites are feasting on the carcass of the people formerly known as the middle class. This didn’t happen by accident. It’s been done with malice and forethought. Mel Brooks captured the essence of our current situation in History of the World Part I:

Count DeMonet: “Sire, the peasants are revolting!”
King Louis: “You’re right; they stink on ice!”

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The Fed has directly created a neofeudal rentier economy and society.

 
Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke is a Reverse Robin Hood, robbing from the lower 95% and giving to the financier class. The Real Reverse Robin Hood: Ben Bernanke and his Merry Band of Thieves (August 31, 2012).
 
It’s worth understanding the mechanisms of this wealth transfer: in essence, the Fed extends low-cost credit (i.e. “free money”) to the financier class which then uses this free money to buy rentier assets, that is, assets that generate economic rents for the owners, who add no value and create no wealth.
 
This is of course the neofeudal model: the financial aristocracy in the manor house own the rentier assets and the debt-serfs toil away to pay the rents and taxes. The financier class (i.e. those that benefit from the financialization of the economy) are as unproductive as feudal lords; they skim the profits generated by the debt-serfs while adding no productive value to the economy.
 
 
 
(I separate the bottom 95% from the top 4.5% and the .5% financier class for several reasons: 1) most of the stocks and bonds are owned by the top 5%; 2) the top 4.5% is shedding debt while the bottom 95% are adding debt; 3) the income of the top 4.5% is rising while household income of the bottom 95% is declining, and 4)the top 4.5% have access to lower-cost credit than the bottom 95%, but they do not have access to billions of dollars in nearly-free credit from the Fed or the shadow banking system like the financier class.)
 
 
Let’s take rental housing as an example of this Fed-driven rentier economy. The financiers borrow $1 billion in nearly-free money and use these funds to buy thousands of houses for cash. Since they can offer cash, they beat out households with approved mortgage applications.
This is the story one hears anecdotally: potential home buyers have a mortgage application approved, all they need is to have their offer for a house accepted. But the house is sold to an investor with cash.
 
So while the Federal housing agencies are offering low-interest, low-down payment mortgages to marginally qualified (or flat-out unqualified) buyers, the Fed is enabling the financier class to outbid conventional homebuyers.
 
Here’s the key dynamic: cash earns no return, thanks to the Fed’s zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP). This means the interest rate paid by the financier class is also near-zero. So the trick is to take all those billions of nearly-free dollars and use them to buy assets returning 3+% annually.
 
These include rental housing, stocks that pay hefty dividends (for example utility companies), municipal bonds, long-term Treasuries, dividends based on patents and royalties, and everyone’s favorite low-risk investment, state-sanctioned monopolies and cartels. (no wonder Big Pharma stocks have skyrocketed.)
 
Zero interest rates rob from the bottom 95% who do not have equal access to low-cost credit and transfer that wealth to the rentier-financier class. The bottom 95% provide the capital (pension funds, 401K accounts, checking and savings accounts, etc.) for zero return, but their access to near-zero cost credit is restricted.
 
The financier class then borrows money from the Fed (or the “shadow banking” non-bank credit system that is ultimately backstopped by the Fed) at near-zero rates, which it then uses to buy rentier assets that yield 3+%. The financier class then skims the rents from the debt-serfs, who have been effectively robbed of trillions of dollars in lost interest by the Federal Reserve.
 
The Fed has directly created a neofeudal rentier economy and society. Giving the financier class unlimited access to free credit with which to buy rentier assets serves two purposes: 1) it drives the valuations of rentier assets ever higher, creating the useful (in terms of propaganda and perception management) illusion of economic vitality, and 2) it greatly enriches the financier class at the expense of the bottom 95%.
 
Goebbels would approve of the Fed’s masterful propaganda campaign: rob the bottom 95% to benefit the financier class, all the while piously proclaiming that its policies were aimed at increasing employment for the bottom 95%.
 
In terms of propagandistic chutzpah, it doesn’t get any better than this. Congratulations, Bernanke, Yellen, et al.

WALL STREET LANDLORDS – THIS WILL SURELY END WELL

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Posted on 3rd April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Zero interest rates. Wall Street shysters. Government support. Million of foreclosures. Gullible dupes. What could possibly go wrong?

The Crowded Trade: Buy-To-Rent Housing

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Demographically, it appears there is a generational glut of single-family suburban homes on the horizon.

 
A trade is officially deemed “crowded” when everyone is rushing into the market with eyes only on the upside and little concern for the downside–for example, buying homes as rentals. Here’s a typical headline:
 
 
Any market that gets crowded quickly experiences a corresponding rise in price and risk. Rational minds then start looking at the potential downside–for example:
 
 
Why could the buy-to-rent housing party be running out of air? The basic reason is the difference between buying real estate as rental housing, which is a speculative market, and the rental property market itself, which is grounded in real-world supply and demand.
 
Simply put, if the supply of rental housing exceeds demand, rents (the cost of renting shelter) decline. That jeopardizes the fat returns the speculative buyer was counting on: Is There a Rental Supply Glut? (The Big Picture)
 

A key piece of the story is being left out of all the sell side research and financial press “housing recovery” stories. In the case of Phoenix — and most likely most other heavily distressed regions turned ‘investor havens’ throughout the nation — it looks like the missing piece of the story is the lackluster demand for the mega-supply and nowhere remotely close to the rental returns investors had hoped for unless you bought the right property in a relatively small window that slammed shut in early 2012.I have also believed for a long time that the lack of foreclosures — and the mortgage modification/workout bubble — would ultimately be a killer for those hoping to rent houses to distressed borrowers. Of course, that’s because the banks and gov’t let all these potential borrowers rent their own houses from them at 2% interest only for 5 years. And this is exactly how it’s playing out.

This is only one dynamic of many in the buy-to-rent stampede. Let’s quickly review the other main dynamics.
 
1. Housing is clearly experiencing an echo bubble. No wonder, given the Federal agency and Federal Reserve subsidies: 3% down payments, super-low interest rates and a dearth of other investment opportunities:
 
 
2. The Federal Housing agencies are openly transferring ownership of what are quasi-public assets (defaulted private homes owned by Fannie Mae) to the usual financier predators and parasites: private equity funds, hedge funds, investment funds organized by investment banks, etc.
 
Structured Sales Transactions (i.e. the bundling and transfer of Fannie Mae owned properties to private capital)
 
In their desperate search for higher yields, these concentrations of private capital are buying thousands of houses and placing them in sprawling portfolios of rentals:
 
 
3. The demand for rentals ultimately depends on jobs, income and demographics.Demand for rental housing depends on household formation rates: people moving out of their parents’ homes or the dorms creates demand for rentals. But they need jobs that pay enough to support the often-hefty rent for an apartment or house.
 
I have reprinted this chart from Doug Short many times because the foundation of the real-world economy is real wages, and an 8% decline in real wages does not reflect an economy with strong household formation:
 
 
As a percentage of the workforce, the number of fulltime employees is at multi-decade lows. Yes, it’s possible for three or four part-time workers to rent a house together, but how much demand does this doubling-up create?
 
 
4. The basic premise of buy-to-rent–that people who lost their homes in foreclosure will need to rent a house–may be overstated. The number of homes in foreclosure–currently 1.5 million, according to RealtyTrac–may sound big, but compared to the entire U.S. housing market, it is marginal.
 
There are about 75 million owner-occupied homes, roughly 25 million owned free-and-clear (no mortgage); 130 million dwellings, of which around 111 million are occupied and 19 million are vacant. Of these, perhaps 4.5 million are second homes or vacation rentals. What We Know (and Don’t Want to Know) About Housing (June 16, 2010)
 
How many households leave their foreclosed home and move into a converted garage, the family home, or an apartment? There are no reliable statistics (that I can locate), but if the Phoenix market described above is typical, the demand for rental homes may be more a figment of echo-bubble imagination than reality, at least in typical markets. (New York City and San Francisco are not typical.)
 
5. Demographics do not support robust household formation. Older folks are jettisoning the family home and moving into retirement communities, often in cities that offer amenities and nearby healthcare. If anything, it appears there is a generational glut of single-family suburban homes on the horizon: Housing and demographics (Acting Man blog).
 
6. A house is not a financial instrument: it is a real object in the real world, and it falls apart without constant maintenance and attention. The tenants are real, too, and they don’t just spin off a 6% yield like a machine. They make demands for repairs, they get behind in the rent, they move out and create a vacancy, and so on. Real life has a very strong tendency to erode profit margins and net income in unexpected ways.
 
Crowded trades are often described as boats with everyone on one side. Boats loaded in this fashion tend to capsize once exposed to the slightest volatility (wave action). A crowded room is also a common analogy for a crowded trade: once the herd realizes the trade is no longer a guaranteed winner, the herd rushes for the exits, dumping their assets onto the market. This sudden rise in supply (inventory) causes prices to plummet.
 
The buy-to-rent boat is looking rather overloaded, and the bullish side’s gunwales are only a few inches above the water.A MARKET CLEARING EVENT: The Global End Game – Part II: CHS and Gordon T. Long discuss the cycle of deflation and the endgame of leverage, credit and phantom collateral:

 

WHO NEEDS A JOB? – WE’VE GOT THE GOVERNMENT & THE STOCK MARKET

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Posted on 11th March 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds

The Erosion Of The U.S. Economy In Two Words: Jobs And Wages

The current de facto policy of inflating asset bubbles to spark a “wealth effect” is no substitute for policies that make it less burdensome to start new enterprises and hire employees.

The Status Quo is shameless when it comes to hyping the recovery by whatever metric is most positive. Recently, that has been the stock market, but if GDP rises significantly (and recall GDP increases if the government borrows and blows money), then that number is duly trotted out by politicos and Mainstream Media toadies.

If we scrape away this ceaseless perception management, we find that legitimate broadbased prosperity is always based on rising employment and increased purchasing power of wages. The phantom wealth that is conjured by asset bubbles vanishes when the bubbles inevitably pop, leaving all those who borrowed against their ephemeral bubble wealth hapless debt-serfs.

Since very few households own enough productive assets (i.e. financial assets above and beyond the family home equity) to replace earned income (i.e. a job) with unearned income, rising asset yields and prices do little to improve household wealth or income.

Those with investable assets of more than $1 million are labeled “high-net-worth individuals” or HNWIs. There are about 3 million Americans who qualify as HNWIs; roughly 1.8 million Americans own $2 million or more in investable assets. Number of Rich Americans Fell in 2011.

For context, the U.S. has about 307 million residents and about 110 million households. Roughly 112 million people have full-time jobs and about 38 million are self-employed or have part-time jobs.

Recall that thanks to the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP), $1 million invested in short-term Treasury bonds earns around $10,000 a year in interest–less than a job paying minimum wage. Owning $1 million in stocks that pay a 2.5% dividend yields $25,000 a year in income, considerably less than the median wage of around $35,000. So even $1 million isn’t necessarily generating enough income to replace earned income (wages).

If prosperity ultimately depends on employment and earned income (wages), how are we doing as a nation? Unfortunately, the answer is “terrible.” As a percentage of the population, full-time employment is down. Only 36% of the population has a full-time job.(Charts 1 & 3 were reprinted by permission from mdbriefing.com; charts 2,4 & 5 are courtesy of frequent contributor B.C.):

It is also down on a per capita (per person) basis:

Meanwhile, an increasing percentage of jobs are part-time. When the media reports that the number of those employed has gone up, note they never break down how many of those new jobs were full-time and part-time.

Total civilian employment is also down:

If we adjust GDP for the growth of M2 money supply and population, we find the broadest measure of the U.S. economy is tanking.

As for wages, I have often reprinted this chart by Doug Short: adjusted for official inflation, real wages are down by 7% – 8%.

(Doug recently reported on net worth, which has nominally matched previous levels but adjusted for official inflation is down 12% from its peak: Household Net Worth: The “Real” Story.)

Adjusted for inflation, the median income for the lower 90% of wage earners (138 million people) has been flat since 1970–forty years. Only the top 10% (14 million people) actually gained income, and only the top 5% gained significantly (+90%).

Clearly, current policies are not very employment-positive. We could start by noting that the only way 90% of the populace can buy more goods and services is if the cost of living declines, i.e. deflation.

We might also concede that saddling employers with skyrocketing healthcare costs is a tremendous drag on hiring. There is nothing sacrosanct about employer-paid health coverage; it was more an historical accident than a well-planned policy. It may be time to scrap employer-paid healthcare and set up a prevention-only national system and open the healthcare field to true competition. A Sustainable National Healthcare System: Prevention Only (August 20, 2012).

Perhaps corporate taxes could be radically lowered for companies that invest in domestic human capital. Were the nominal corporate tax rate 0% for companies that produce goods and services in the U.S. with U.S. workers, we might find such incentives yield significant employment dividends even as corporate tax revenues decline. (If more enterprises are launched and more people are employed, taxes will rise without needing to boost tax rates.)

The current de facto policy of inflating asset bubbles to spark a “wealth effect” is no substitute for policies that make it less burdensome to start new enterprises and hire employees.

The Unsafe Foundation of Our Housing ‘Recovery’

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Posted on 26th February 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

CHS emailed me today to let me know he liked my housing article. It seems we’re on the same page.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via Peak Prosperity,

What could go wrong with the housing ‘recovery’ in 2013?

To answer this question, we need to understand that housing is the key component in household wealth. And, that Central Planning policies are aimed at creating a resurgent “wealth effect,” as follows: When people perceive their wealth as rising, they tend to borrow and spend more freely. This is a major goal of U.S. Central Planning.

Another key goal of Central Planning is to strengthen the balance sheets of banks and households. And the broadest way to accomplish this is to boost the value of housing. This adds then collateral to banks holding mortgages and increases the equity of homeowners.

Some analysts have noted that housing construction and renovation has declined to a modest percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP). This perspective understates the importance of the family house as the largest asset for most households and housing’s critical role as collateral in the banking system.

The family home remains the core asset for all but the poorest and wealthiest Americans. Roughly two thirds of all households “own” a home, and primary residences comprised roughly 65% of household assets of the middle 60% of households – those between the bottom 20% and the top 20%, as measured by income. (The U.S. Census Bureau typically divides all households into five quintiles; i.e., 20% each.)

Since housing is the largest component of most households’ net worth, it is also the primary basis of their assessment of rising (or falling) wealth (i.e., the “wealth effect.”) No wonder Central Planners are so anxious to reflate housing prices. With real incomes stagnant and stock ownership concentrated in the top 10%, there is no other lever for a broad-based wealth effect other than housing.

Extreme Measures

Given the preponderance of housing in bank assets, household wealth, and the perception of wealth, the key policies of Central Planning largely revolve around housing: keeping interest rates (and thus mortgage rates) low, flooding the banking sector with liquidity to ease lending, guaranteeing low-down-payment mortgages via FHA, and numerous other subsidies of homeownership.

At least three aspects of this broad-based support are historically unprecedented:

1) The purchase of $1.9 trillion of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) by the Federal Reserve.

The Fed purchased $1.1 trillion in mortgages in 2009-10 and it recently launched an open-ended program of buying $40+ billion in mortgages every month. Recent analysis by Ramsey Su found that Fed purchases have substantially exceeded the announced target sums; the Fed is on track to buy another $800 billion within the next year or so. This extraordinary program is, in effect, buying 100% of all newly-issued mortgages and a majority of refinancing mortgages.

Never before has the nation’s central bank directly bought almost 20% of all outstanding mortgages this raises the question: Why has the Fed intervened so aggressively in the mortgage market? There is no other plausible reason other than to take impaired mortgages off the books of insolvent lenders, freeing them to repair their balance sheets.

Regardless of the policy’s goal, the Fed now essentially controls a tremendous percentage of the mortgage market.

2) After the insolvency of the two agencies that backed many of the mortgages originated in the bubble years (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), the minor-league backer of mortgages (FHA) suddenly expanded to fill the void left by Fannie and Freddie.

Many of these mortgages require only 3% down in cash, just the sort of risky “no skin in the game” mortgages that melted down in 2008.

Given this mass issuance of low-collateral loans to marginal buyers, it is no surprise that the FHA will soon require a taxpayer bailout to cover its crushing losses from rising defaults.

In 2010, 97% (!!) of all mortgages were backed by government agencies, an unprecedented socialization of the mortgage market. (Source)

This raises two questions: Where would the mortgage and housing markets be if Central Planning hadn’t effectively socialized the entire mortgage market? What will happen to the market when Central Planning support is reduced?

3) Official measures of inflation are viewed by many with a healthy skepticism, but even this likely-understated rate has recently exceeded 2.5% annually.

In this context, it is unprecedented that one-year Treasury bonds have near-zero yields, effectively costing owners a 2%+ annual fee for the privilege of owning short-term Treasurys.

Even more astonishing, rates for conventional 15-year mortgages are comparable to official inflation (the Consumer Price Index, or “CPI”). Lenders are earning near-zero premiums on these mortgages. How sustainable is this imbalance of risk and return?

The enabler of these extremes is, once again, the Federal Reserve, which has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars in Treasury bonds and flooded the banking sector with zero-interest “free money.”

This formidable Central Planning support of housing has placed a bid (i.e., a floor) under housing, resulting in two bounces since the housing bubble popped in 2007-9.

The first heavily subsidized rise faltered. Will the latest pop also reverse? Or is the much-desired “housing bottom” in, from which prices will continue their ascent?

In the macro context, what housing bulls are counting on is the emergence of an “organic,” self-sustaining recovery in housing, based not on Central Planning subsidies but on private demand and non-agency mortgages.

Housing skeptics are looking for signs of what will happen when unprecedented support and intervention in the mortgage and housing markets is reduced or withdrawn.

The Foundation of Housing: Debt and Federal Subsidies

About two-thirds of all homeowners have mortgages. As I noted in The Rise and Fall of Phantom Housing Collateral, mortgage debt doubled from about $5 trillion in 1997, before the housing bubble, to $10.5 trillion in 2007, at the top of the bubble.

This reliance on debt informs the Central Planning policies of lowering interest rates and guaranteeing mortgages via Federal agencies such as the FHA. The only way debt can increase is if incomes rise or the costs and qualification standards of borrowing decline. Since income for 90% of households has been stagnant for decades, the only way debt can expand is by lowering interest rates and reducing the risk exposure of debt issuers via Federal guarantees.

These policies have been pushed to the maximum. As a result, the policy tool bag to further boost housing is now empty.

Now there is only one direction left for interest rates (up) and for housing subsidies and guarantees (down).

Another support of housing recovery is the restriction of homes on the market. Lenders are limiting the inventory of homes for sale by keeping many distressed/foreclosed homes in the off-market shadow inventory. This artificial restriction, coupled with low rates and government subsidies, has supported the modest recovery shown on this chart (courtesy of Lance Roberts) of total housing activity:

While housing has recovered to 2010 levels, what is not visible is the collapse in housing’s share of net worth displayed in this chart:

Housing equity as a percentage of total net worth declines when the stock market rises strongly while housing gains at a much lower rate (for example, during the Bull markets of 1952-1968 and 1982-2000) and rises as stock equity falls (for example, 1969-1981) while housing rose. In the 2001-2008 era, both equities and housing both climbed sharply, but since housing is the larger share of most households’ net assets, housing’s rise overshadowed the expansion of stock net worth, causing home equity to rise as a percentage of total net worth.

The collapse of the housing bubble and the stock market pushed home equity as a percentage of net worth to new lows. The subsequent doubling in the stock market has had little effect on the bottom 90% of households, as the top 10% of households own 85% to 90% of all stocks. (Source)

In broad brush, the wealth of middle class of homeowners has been influenced by four trends:

  1. The stagnation of real income
  2. A rapid rise in mortgage and other debt
  3. The use of debt to fund consumption
  4. The collapse of housing equity as the basis of debt-based consumption

In other words, Federal subsidies and Federal Reserve policies enabled a vast expansion of debt that masked the stagnation of income. Now that the housing bubble has burst, this substitution of housing-equity debt for income has ground to a halt.

This created a reverse wealth effect: The 70% between the bottom 20% and the top 10% have seen their net worth plummet while their debt load remains stubbornly elevated. 

 
 

Americans saw wealth plummet 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve says. (Source)

This chart is nominal rather than real (adjusted), but the relative expansion of debt is clearly visible:

While charts like this lump all household debt and income together, this masks the reality that there is a clear divide between the top 10% and the bottom 90% in terms of income and debt. The debt load of the top 10% is considerably lighter than that of the bottom 90%, while income and wealth gains have flowed almost exclusively to the top 20%.

The top quintile accrued 89% of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11%. (Source)

Unsustainable Pricing Will Introduce the “Poverty Effect”

If we put all this together, we get a picture of a middle class squeezed by historically high debt loads, stagnant incomes, and a net worth largely dependent on housing.

In response, Central Planners have pulled out all the stops to reflate housing as the only available means to spark a broad-based “wealth effect” that would support higher spending and an expansion of household debt.

This returns us to the key question: Are all these Central Planning interventions sustainable, or might they falter in 2013?  

Once markets become dependent on intervention and support to price risk and assets, they are intrinsically vulnerable to any reduction in that support.

Should these supports diminish or lose their effectiveness, it will be sink-or-swim for housing. Either organic demand rises without subsidies and lenders originate mortgages without agency guarantees, or the market could resume the fall in valuations Central Planning halted in 2009.

In Part II: The Forces That Will Reverse Housing’s Recent Gains, we examine the statistical, historical, and demographic trends that suggest the market recovery is now dangerously vulnerable to a relapse, regardless of Central Planning intervention.

 
 

Should housing prices resume a protracted march downwards, as we’ve detailed here is quite possible, get ready for the “poverty effect” to drain the financial markets of their current euphoria. As the middle 60% of households begin losing a substantial percentage of their net worth, expect consumer spending to dry up and recessionary forces to return in force.  (Source: Part II)

Click here to read Part II of this report

OBAMACARE IS A NEUTRON BOMB FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

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Posted on 22nd February 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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ObamaCare: The Neutron Bomb That Will Decimate Employment

February 22, 2013

ObamaCare will act as a neutron bomb on employment in the U.S. for two basic reasons.

Longtime readers know I have repeatedly explained why healthcare, i.e. sickcare, will bankrupt the nation. Here are two of the dozens of entries I’ve written on sickcare:
America’s Hidden 8% VAT: Sickcare (May 10, 2012)
Can Chronic Ill-Health Bring Down Great Nations? Yes It Can, Yes It Will (November 23, 2011)

I have also explained why ObamaCare’s “fixes” are simulacra reforms that don’t even address the systemic costs arising from the cartel-fiefdom structure of sickcare:
Why “Healthcare Reform” Is Not Reform, Part I (December 28, 2009)
Why “Healthcare Reform” Is Not Reform, Part II (December 29, 2009)


Sickcare is unsustainable for a number of interlocking reasons: defensive medicine in response to a broken malpractice system; opaque pricing; quasi-monopolies/cartels; systemic disconnect of health from food, diet and fitness; fraud and paperwork consume at least 40% of all sickcare funds; fee-for-service in a cartel system; employers being responsible for healthcare, and a fundamental absence of competition and transparency.

Please glance at these charts to see how the U.S. healthcare costs are double those of competing nations on a per capita basis. Japan provides care for a mere 36% per person of what the U.S. spends–yet millions of Americans remain uninsured or underinsured.

If you set out to design a corrupt, inefficient, wasteful, unfair, deranged and unreformable system, you would arrive at U.S. healthcare.

Sickcare ignores the structural causes of our ill-health:

86% of Workers Are Obese or Have Other Health Issue Just 1 in 7 U.S. workers is of normal weight without a chronic health problem.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), i.e. ObamaCare, is a neutron bomb for employment. A neutron bomb is an enhanced-radiation thermonuclear weapon that famously leaves buildings, autos, etc. intact but kills all the people, even those inside buildings. vehicles, etc.

ObamaCare will act as a neutron bomb on employment in the U.S. for two basic reasons:

1. It is immensely complex, and already-marginalized small business owners will shed employees or simply close rather than have to figure out what all those thousands of pages of regulations and statutes mean to the survival of their business.

2. ObamaCare’s primary mechanisms of lowering costs, insurance exchanges and technocratic selection of “best care practices,” do nothing to change the systemic flaws of sickcare.

Many other commentators have already outlined how ObamaCare is driving employers to replace fulltime workers with part-time workers to avoid having to pay outrageously expensive monthly healthcare insurance premiums. In this sense, the ObamaCare neutron bomb is already decimating fulltime employment.

I see this response as a Corporate-America strategy. Corporate America has the human resources infrastructure and financial heft to figure out compliance and exploit loopholes in the insanely complex law. Small business has neither the infrastructure nor the financial resources. Small business owners will rely on the same cartels that are currently providing insurance for guidance, and of course the ObamaCare offerings will suit the financial needs of sickcare cartels.

Once small business owners see the costs of their options, some may opt to pay the penalties and others may follow the corporate strategy of turning each fulltime job into two part-time jobs to avoid paying for coverage or penalties, but many will choose instead to call it quits: either downsize to a one-person/one-household business with no employees at all, or sell/close the enterprise and escape the burdens.

What the lobbyists and attorneys who wrote the Obamacare monstrosity do not understand (because they have no exposure to or experience in the real economy) is the fragility of most small businesses: costs keep rising but revenues are stagnant. The mental and financial stresses keep rising, and ObamaCare does nothing to mitigate either source of stress.

The inside-the-Beltway types who crafted this mess have no idea of the pressures facing legitimate (non-black-market) business in America, corporate and small business alike.

ObamaCare offers even more incentives for Corporate America to offshore operations, and it provides powerful incentives to millions of marginal small businesses to shut down or shed all employees.

I am not alone in simply not wanting to waste the time, money and energy required to understand the new law and its various impacts on my business. We will cling to our already insanely expensive private healthcare insurance, which by the way has been grandfathered in: new self-employed entrepreneurs won’t be able to buy the absurdly costly policy we have–they will be offered a range of even worse deals, with higher costs and less coverage.

 

The neutron bomb has gone off, unseen by politicos and the Elites who wrote the bill. It is already decimating fulltime employment, and it will soon add momentum to the free-fall erosion of small business growth and employment.

The strip malls and office parks will still be standing; there just won’t be many employees in them.

Things are falling apart–that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand. We will cover the five core reasons why things are falling apart:

go to print edition 1. Debt and financialization
2. Crony capitalism and the elimination of accountability
3. Diminishing returns
4. Centralization
5. Technological, financial and demographic changes in our economyComplex systems weakened by diminishing returns collapse under their own weight and are replaced by systems that are simpler, faster and affordable. If we cling to the old ways, our system will disintegrate. If we want sustainable prosperity rather than collapse, we must embrace a new model that is Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable (DATA).

We are not powerless. Not accepting responsibility and being powerless are two sides of the same coin: once we accept responsibility, we become powerful.

Kindle edition: $9.95       print edition: $24 on Amazon.com

To receive a 20% discount on the print edition: $19.20 (retail $24), follow the link, open a Createspace account and enter discount code SJRGPLAB. (This is the only way I can offer a discount.)

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