Reagan’s chickens come home to roost

had more than doubled, to $160 billions—in short, almost exactly the sum which these countries would have earned at a stable export price level.

It begins to appear that a very different process was occurring than what the average citizen in a west European or American city was reading daily in the newspapers regarding the reality of this debt. Powerful British and U.S. multinationals followed the banks during the 1980s to set up child-labor sweatshops in places such as along the Mexican border with the United States. These maquiladores, as the low-skill assembly plants were named, employed desperate Mexican children aged 14 or 15 for wages of 50 cents an hour, to produce goods for General Motors or Ford Motor Company or various U.S. electrical companies. They were allowed by the Mexican government, because they ‘earned’ dollars needed to service the debt.

REAGAN’S CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST

One of the most destructive consequences of the First World War and the Versailles war reparations aftermath, with the 1920s Dawes Plan of the London and New York banks, was the relative collapse of global long-term investment. More and more, owing to the absolute decline of world trade in the 1920s compared with prewar levels and the general economic and political instability which prevailed in Europe, money could be borrowed generally for only a short term, typically less than one year.

This produced a situation in which shortest-term speculative gains became the central criterion of all investment. This in turn fueled the great frenzy of the 1920s stock market boom in New York, a boom fueled by infl ows of foreign funds from London and the Continent, seeking to make unheard-of gains on the ever rising New York bourse. All this came crashing down in October of 1929.

The aftermath of the oil shocks and the high interest rate monetary shocks of the 1970s, sometimes referred to as the ‘great infl ation,’ was all too similar to the 1920s. In place of the Versailles reparations burden on world productive investment, the world had the onerous burden of the IMF Third World debt ‘restructuring’ process. The incredible rates of infl ation during the early part of the 1980s, typically 12–17 per cent, dictated the conditions of investment returns. A fast and huge gain was needed.

Into this situation came the Reagan administration’s bizarre collection of ‘free market’ economic conundrums, called by their

advocates ‘supply-side’ economics. The idea was a thin veil behind which were unleashed some of the highest rates of short-term personal profi teering in history, at the expense of the greater good of the country’s long-term economic health.

While the policies imposed after October 1982 to collect billions from Third World countries brought a huge windfall of fi nancial liquidity to the American banking system, the ideology of Wall Street, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan’s zeal for lifting the government ‘shackles’ off the fi nancial markets, resulted in the greatest extravaganza in world fi nancial history. When the dust settled by the end of that decade, some began to realize that Reagan’s ‘free market’ had destroyed an entire national economy. It happened to be the world’s largest economy, and the base of world monetary stability as well.

On the simple-minded and quite mistaken argument that a mere removing of the tax burden on the individual or company would allow them to release ‘stifled creative energies’ and other entrepreneurial talents, President Ronald Reagan in August 1981 signed the largest tax reduction bill in postwar history. The bill contained provisions which also gave generous tax relief for certain speculative forms of real estate investment, especially commercial real estate. Government restrictions on corporate takeovers were also removed, and Washington gave the clear signal that ‘anything goes,’ so long as it stimulated the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.

By summer 1982, as the White House secured consent from Paul Volcker and the Federal Reserve for interest rate levels to begin a steady downward turn, the speculative bonanza was ready to go. The bankruptcy that spring of a small oil and real estate bank, Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma, had combined with the Mexico crisis to convince Volcker that it was time to ease up on his strangulation of the money supply. Between summer and December, the U.S. Federal Reserve discount rate was lowered an extraordinary seven times, to a level that was 40 per cent lower. The fi nancial markets began to go wild with the low rates.

The reality of Reagan’s ‘economic recovery’ was that it did nothing to encourage investment in improving the technology and productivity of industry, with the small exception of a handful of military aerospace fi rms which got record government defense contracts. Money went instead into speculation in real estate, into

speculation in stocks, into oil wells in Texas or Colorado—all socalled ‘tax shelters.’

As Volcker’s interest rates went lower, the fever grew hotter. Debt was the new fashion. People reasoned it was ‘cheaper’ to borrow today and repay tomorrow at lower interest levels. It didn’t quite work. American cities continued their 20-year-long decline, bridges fell in, roads cracked for lack of maintenance, new glass-enclosed shopping centers grew up, often sitting empty because some real estate developer could earn enough through generous tax write-offs.

A central feature of the Reagan supply-side credo, again echoing Margaret Thatcher in Britain, was to identify trade unions as ‘part of the problem.’ A British-style class confrontation was set up, and the result was the cracking of the organized labor movement.

Deregulation of government control over transportation was a central weapon of the policy. Trucking and airline transportation were ‘set free.’ Nonunion ‘cut-rate’ airlines and trucking companies proliferated, often with low or no safety standards. Accident rates climbed, wage levels of union workers plunged. While the Reagan ‘recovery’ was turning young stock traders into multimillionaires, seemingingly at the push of a computer key, it was reducing the standard of living of the skilled blue-collar workforce. No one in Washington paid much attention. After all, the conservative Reagan Republicans argued, trade unions were ‘almost like communists.’ A nineteenth-century British-style ‘cheap labor’ policy dominated offi cial Washington as never before.

By 1982, the once-powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters was humbled into accepting a three-year contract which virtually amounted to a wage freeze, in a climate of economic gloom and trucking deregulation which encouraged nonunion trucking. The United Auto Workers union, once one of the most advanced concentrations of skilled American labor, accepted wage cuts in their negotiations with Chrysler, Ford and General Motors in 1982. Steel unions and others followed with concessions, in a desperate attempt to secure benefi ts for older workers about to be pensioned off, or to avoid job cuts. The real living standard for the majority of Americans steadily decreased, while that of a minority rose as never before. Society was becoming polarized around income differentials.

The new dogma of a ‘postindustrial society’ was being preached from Washington to New York to California. No longer was America’s economic prosperity linked to investment in the most modern industrial capacities. Steel had been declared a ‘rust-belt’ industry,

as steel plants were allowed to rust or blast furnaces were actually dynamited. Shopping centers, glittery new Atlantic City gambling casinos, and luxury resort hotels were ‘where the money’ was.

During the speculative boom of most of the Reagan years, the money also fl owed in from abroad to fi nance this wild spree. No one seemed to mind that in the process, by the mid 1980s, the United States had within fi ve short years passed from being the world’s largest creditor to becoming a net debtor nation, for the fi rst time since 1914. Debt was ‘cheap,’ and it grew geometrically. Families went into record levels of debt for buying houses, cars, video recorders. Government went into debt to fi nance the huge loss of tax revenue and the expanded Reagan defense buildup. Budget defi cits under the Reagan ‘recovery’ revealed the true underlying health of the U.S. economy. It was sick.

By 1983, annual government defi cits began to climb to an unheardof level of $200 billion. The national debt expanded, along with the defi cits, all paying Wall Street bond dealers and their clients record sums in interest income. Interest payments on the total debt by the U.S. government doubled in six years, going from $52 billion in 1980, when Reagan was elected, to more than $142 billion by 1986—a sum equal to one-fi fth of all government revenue. But despite such warning signs, money fl owed in from Germany, from Britain, from Holland, from Japan, to take advantage of the high dollar and the speculative gains in real estate and stocks.

To anyone with a sense of history or a long memory, it was all too familiar. It had all happened during the ‘Roaring ’20s’—until the 1929 market crash brought the roulette wheel to an abrupt halt.

When storm clouds began to gather on the U.S. economic horizon during 1985, threatening the future presidential ambitions of Vice President George Bush, it was once again oil which was to come to the ‘rescue’; only this time, in a very different way from the AngloAmerican oil shocks of the 1970s. Washington apparently reasoned, ‘If we can run the price up, why can’t we run it down when it’s convenient to our priorities?’ So Saudi Arabia was persuaded to run a ‘reverse oil shock’ and fl ood the depressed world oil market with its abundant oil. The price of OPEC oil dropped like a stone, to below $10 per barrel by spring of 1986, from an average of nearly $26 only some months earlier. Magically, Wall Street economists proclaimed the fi nal ‘victory’ over infl ation, while conveniently ignoring the role of oil in creating the infl ation of the 1970s or in reducing it in the 1980s.

Then, when a further fall in oil prices threatened to destabilize vital interests of the large British and American oil majors themselves, not merely the small independent rival producers, George Bush made a quiet trip to Riyadh in March 1986, where he reportedly told King Fahd that he should stop the price war. Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani was made the convenient scapegoat for a policy authored in Washington, and oil prices stabilized at a low level of around $14–16 per barrel. Texas and other oil-producing states were plunged into depression, but speculation in real estate took off elsewhere in the United States at a record pace, while the stock market began a renewed climb to record highs.

This 1986 oil-price collapse unleashed what was comparable to the 1927–29 phase in the U.S. speculative bubble. Interest rates dropped even more dramatically, as money fl owed in to make a ‘killing’ on the New York stock markets. A new fi nancial perversion became fashionable on Wall Street, the ‘leveraged buyout.’ With money costs falling and stock prices apparently ever rising, and a Reagan administration which promoted the religion of the ‘free market,’ anything was allowed. A sound 100-year-old industrial company, which had been conservatively managed, producing tires, or machines or textiles, for example, might become the target for the new corporate ‘raiders,’ as the Wall Street scavengers were called. Colorful personalities such as T. Boone Pickens, Mike Milken, and Ivan Boesky became billionaires on paper, as frontmen in the leveraged buyouts. A new corporate management philosophy was proclaimed from august institutions such as the Harvard Business School to rationalize this madness in the name of market ‘effi ciency.’

In a typical corporate leveraged buyout raid, a raider such as Boone Pickens would line up a promise of borrowed money to buy control of stock in a company many times his worth, such as Union Oil of California, or even Gulf Oil. His buying of stock in the victim company drove prices up. If he succeeded, he took over a huge company, almost entirely with borrowed money. This debt was then repaid, if all went well, by ‘below investment grade’ bonds issued by the new debt-loaded company, appropriately known as ‘junk bonds.’ If the company became bankrupt, the bonds were just so much ‘junk’ paper. But in the 1980s, stock market and real estate prices were climbing, so no one paid much attention to this risk. The Reagan tax reforms made it more ‘profi table’ for a company to be saddled with huge debts than to issue stock equity.

Interest rates paid by these ‘junk bonds’ were very high, to attract buyers. The ‘sharks,’ as these raiders were called, moved quickly to ‘strip’ the assets of the new company, sell off the pieces for a quick profi t, and run to the next victim corporation, like so many piranha fi sh. During the last half of the 1980s, such actions consumed Wall Street and pushed the Dow upwards, driving corporations into the highest levels of debt since the 1930s depression. But this debt was not undertaken to invest in modern technology or new plant and equipment. It was the cancerous result of the fi nancial speculation process permitted during the free-market years of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Over the decade of the Reagan years, almost $1 trillion fl owed into speculative real estate investment, a record sum, almost double the sums of previous years. Banks, desiring to secure their balance sheets against troubles in Latin America, for the fi rst time went directly into real estate lending rather than traditional corporate lending.

Savings and loan banks, established as separately regulated banks during the depression years to provide a secure source of longterm mortgage credit to family homebuyers, were ‘deregulated’ in the early 1980s as part of Treasury Secretary Donald Regan’s Wall Street free-market push. They were allowed to ‘bid’ for wholesale deposits, termed ‘brokered deposits,’ at a high cost. The Reagan administration removed all regulatory restraints in October 1982, with passage of the Garn–St. Germain Act. This act allowed savings and loan (S&L) banks to invest in any scheme they desired, with full U.S. government insurance of $100,000 per account guaranteeing the risk in case of failure.

Prophetically, as he signed the new Garn–St. Germain Act into law, President Reagan enthusiastically told an audience of invited S&L bankers, ‘I think we’ve hit the jackpot.’ This ‘jackpot’ was the beginning of the collapse of the $1.3 trillion savings and loan banking system.

The new law opened the doors of the S&Ls to wholesale fi nancial abuses and wild speculative risks as never before. Moreover, it made S&L banks an ideal vehicle for organized crime to launder billions of dollars from the growing narcotics business in 1980s America. Few noticed that it was the former fi rm of Donald Regan, Merrill Lynch, whose Lugano offi ce was implicated in laundering billions of dollars of Mafi a heroin profi ts in the so-called ‘pizza connection.’

The wild and woolly climate of deregulation created an ambience in which normal, well-run savings banks were surpassed by fast-

track banks which catered to dubious monies with no questions asked. Banks laundered funds for covert operations of the CIA, as well as covert operations of the Bonano or other organized crime families. The son of the vice president, Neil Bush, was a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan in Colorado, later indicted by the government for illegal practices. Son Neil had the good taste to ‘resign’ the week his father received the Republican nomination for president in 1988.9

In order to compete with the newly deregulated banks and S&Ls, the most conservative of all fi nancial sectors, life insurance companies, began to go into speculative real estate in a major way during the 1980s. But unlike banks and S&Ls, insurance companies, perhaps because they had been so conservative in the past, had never been placed under national supervision. There was no national government insurance fund to protect policy holders of insurance companies, as there was for banks. By 1989, insurance companies were holding an estimated $260 billion of real estate on their books, an increase from some $100 billion in 1980. But by then, in the worst depression since the 1930s, real estate was collapsing, forcing failures of insurance companies for the fi rst time in postwar history, as panicked policyholders demanded their money.

The simple reality was that New York fi nancial power had so overwhelmed all other national interests since the oil shocks of the 1970s that almost no other voice was heard in Washington after the Mexico crisis of 1982. Debt grew by astonishing amounts. When Reagan won the election in late 1980, total private and public debt of the United States stood at $3,873 billion. By the end of the decade, it touched $10 trillion, or $10,000 billion. This meant an increased debt burden of more than $6,000 billion during this brief span.10

With the debt burden carried by the productive economy rising, and U.S. industrial plant and the labor force deteriorating, the cumulative effects of two decades of neglect began to become manifest in wholesale collapse of the vital public infrastructure of the nation. Highways cracked for lack of regular maintenance; bridges became structurally unsound and in many cases collapsed; in depressed areas such as Pittsburgh, water systems were allowed to become contaminated; hospitals in major cities fell into disrepair; housing stock for the less wealthy decayed dramatically. By 1989, the association for the construction industry, Associated General Contractors of America, estimated that a net investment of $3.3 trillion was urgently needed merely to rebuild America’s crumbling public infrastructure

to modern standards. No one in Washington listened. By 1990, the Bush administration proposed free-market private initiative to solve the problem. Washington was in a budget crisis. The unequal distribution of the benefi ts from the Reagan ‘recovery’ was indicated by U.S. government fi gures on the number of Americans living ‘below the poverty level.’ In 1979, when Paul Volcker had begun his monetary shock in the midst of the second oil crisis, the government recorded 24 million Americans below the poverty level, defi ned as an annual income of $6,000. By 1988, the fi gure had expanded by more than 30 per cent, to 32 million Americans. Reagan–Bush tax policies had concentrated wealth into a tiny elite, as never before in U.S. history. Since 1980, according to a study carried out by the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee of Congress, real income for the top 20 per cent increased a full 32 per cent.

Costs of American health care, a reflection of the strange combination of ‘free enterprise’ and government subsidy, rose to the highest levels ever, and as a share of GNP, to double that of the United Kingdom; yet 37 million Americans had no health insurance whatever. Health levels in large American cities, with impoverished ghettoes of black and Hispanic unemployed, resembled those of a Third World country, not what was supposed to be the world’s most advanced industrial nation.

Thatcher’s eleven-year rule in Britain had produced equally disastrous results. Real estate speculation and a vastly increased fi nancial services ‘industry’ in the City of London obscured the fact that Thatcher’s economic policy severely discriminated against industrial investment, and against modernization of the nation’s deteriorating public infrastructure, such as railways and highways. The fi nancial deregulation of the City of London in 1986, appropriately termed the ‘Big Bang,’ was among Thatcher’s proudest ‘accomplishments.’ But by the end of the 1980s everything was unravelling: interest rates again climbed to double digits, industry went into a deep slump and later a depression worse than any since the war, and infl ation rose to the level it had been at when Thatcher took offi ce in 1979.

On its own terms, Thatcher economics had failed, as had its twin sister, Reagan economics. But the powerful oil and fi nance interests of London and New York were not the least deterred. Their domain in this ‘postindustrial’ imperium was global, not parochial. They demanded fi nancial deregulation everywhere—Frankfurt, Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Milan, São Paulo.