Hold On to Your Seat: America and Its Debt Based Economy by John Kelley / July 31st, 2007
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Virtually unreported over at the Washington Post, Michael J. de la Merced was citing a significant crack in the debt dike preventing a flood of defaults on leveraged buyout deals. Most of the run-up on Wall Street has been based on the idea that there is an unlimited amount of debt that can be piled up to buy and flip companies, kind of like the housing market speculators. ...
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What the general public doesn’t understand is that the wealthy have been taking their extra money from tax breaks and investing it in speculation. The theory of trickle down economics is that the rich will invest it in increased production capacity, hire more people and generally lift everyone (“a rising tide lifts all boats”). But, true to human behavior, that’s not what happens. Instead, when people have extra money over their needs they tend to invest it in more speculative investments because the potential loss won’t affect their lifestyle while the potential gains are higher than from a more stable but slow-growing investment. ...
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Private Equity and Hedge Funds have been the chief investment vehicles used by the wealthy to speculate on these long shots. Wealthy investors, institutional funds (pension) and other money pools have been joyously jumping on the bandwagon. As more and more people and funds (up to 9,000 hedge funds now) scout for undervalued companies to buy, the competition has grown fierce, driving up prices. In fact, many of the companies bought don’t justify the price, but what the heck? Neither did that $100,000 house you bought for $150,000 because it was going to be worth $175,000 next week. Right?
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Several indicators say that the end of this bubble is near. One of the first is when Hedge and Private Equity Funds go public as several have attempted to do recently. What this means is they believe the best times are over ...
Another is that debt buyers are getting a belly full and beginning to question the value of the debt whether in the form of loans or bonds. Merced reports that 20 recent debt offerings, including debt to finance the Chrysler Group buyout, have joined $235 billion dollars in loans sales that have been have been postponed. Bond sales are also suffering with billions in offerings being put off by First Data, Alliance Boots, U.S. Foodservice, Service Master International and Dollar General.
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Cheap financing advanced to consumers in the middle and working classes, who have had declining real income since the ’70s, has been purposeful public policy that forces consumers to borrow more and more to maintain their lifestyle. Incomes have not kept up with inflation, off shored manufacturing jobs have been replaced with service jobs that pay an average of 20% less, federal and state governments have shifted more cost to local entities, increasing property taxes, and the costs to participate in the legal economy for everything from daycare, to college, to medical insurance have been shifted to the worker. The result is a massive transfer of wealth over time from the general population to a very small percentage of super wealthy.
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As we learned in 1929, great disparity of wealth (which this process has increased tremendously) leads to a disproportionate investment in speculation, driving up prices to unsustainable amounts that then crash back to their real worth. Eventually the transfer of wealth from the working and middle class through increased debt deprives them of both purchasing power and the ability to borrow more, triggering deflation. Of course the devastation occurs mostly to the middle and working class who were already deprived of sharing the wealth of the speculative bubble, but now pay the consequences with layoffs and pension losses.
Our whole economy is built on consumer spending and as we produce less, ship good paying jobs overseas, increase our national and trade deficits, we have become a nation mired in debt. It’s no accident; we long ago passed the point were we “needed” more stuff, so we used advertising and planned obsolescence to create need and cheap financing to acquire it. Debt itself became the primary product. Whether it is the working poor at the window of the payday loan outlet, the Hedge fund manager at the conference table of Goldman Sachs or George W. Bush racking up $10 million an hour in Iraq, debt is the major creative enterprise in America today. ...
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At some point this must come unraveled in a rather nasty way. Whether it happens tomorrow or not is not the question, the answer is, it will happen and when it does it will be catastrophic for individuals, businesses, and government entities at all levels. ...
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The private equity and hedge funds are not regulated by the SEC and most are registered offshore for tax and liability purposes. When it all falls apart most will be able to retire to their homes in the Mediterranean and live off their money in the Caymans, while the rest of us pick up the pieces.
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