Productivity and Jobs

America’s annual gain in productivity in many sectors of the economy is often overlooked as a source of saving. Productivity is measured by output per work hour and the gain in productivity is measured by the percentage increase in output per work hour.

If productivity in appliance manufacturing goes up 3 percent, then a 3 percent increase in appliance manufacturing takes place at the same cost, or the same output can be produced with a 3 percent cost savings, or a combination. The manufacturing firm is the first beneficiary of the savings from a productivity increase because it lowers costs and the savings translates into profits.

Selling extra output puts downward pressure on prices because it is almost always necessary to lower price to sell more output, including appliances. In this way a productivity increase can generate savings for consumers from lower prices.

Productivity also affects employment. If a price decrease leads to a 3 percent increase in appliance sales following a 3 percent increase in productivity, then employment will remain the same.

However, there could be more than, or less than, a 3 percent increase in appliance sales. If it’s more than 3 percent, then more jobs will be needed and employment will go up, but if it’s less, then layoffs result. The newly unemployed will have to look for work at other firms or other industries.

Whenever productivity goes up there are savings with potential benefits for business owners as higher profits, consumers as lower prices, and job holders as more jobs and higher wages. In the 1980’s advances in computer technologies raised productivity so much that business earned new profits, consumers saved with falling prices, and new jobs opened up as business competition for workers with computer skills raised wages and employment.

National productivity continues to go up across many industries, but lately at modest rates. How the savings from productivity are distributed varies, but working Americans are in the worst position to benefit. For nearly 20 years manufacturing productivity and sales have been going up but jobs in manufacturing have been going down. As people leave manufacturing for other jobs they flood service sector job markets.

With a growing percentage of Americans looking for work in service industries, it gets harder and harder for labor to share in productivity gains with better wages. For industries like health care and education where productivity gains generally lag behind, continued growth of these services helps to increase jobs. The skills needed for these jobs limit applicants and make it necessary to pay better wages.

For other service industry though wages are not going up and productivity gains go to business. Productivity gains amount to national savings, which can benefit everyone. Lately though they are contributing to America’s inequality of income.

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Depression Economics

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Paul Krugman, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 191 pages, no index or bibliography, $24.95.

The first sentence in The Return of Depression Economics reads “Most economists, to the extent that they think about the subject at all, regard the Great Depression of the 1930’s as a gratuitous, unnecessary tragedy.” That is economists agree on the causes of depressions and the policies that end them.

Since the economics profession agrees the Great Depression was caused by inadequate aggregate demand, or inadequate total spending, made worse by a folly of bad policy, depressions are a problem solved, and a thing of the past.

But not so fast, says Krugman, who argues through the remainder of the book that recent global crises have similarities to each other and the Great Depression, especially similarities in banking and credit.

Banks are essential, but troublesome institutions that keep checking accounts for depositors, but only hold a fraction of deposit liabilities in reserve to pay for checks. In practice they hold around 15 cents on the dollar in reserve and make loans with the other 85 cents.

In the normal course of business 15 cents will be adequate because those writing checks will about equal those making deposits. In the normal course of business borrowers will be paying monthly principal and interest to further assure that banks have reserves to pay on their checking accounts.

Banks direct savings back into the spending stream as investment spending. Loans can generate more income and employment and help the economy grow, but banks can disrupt the flow of spending when they make risky and foolish loans. Loans that default disrupt the flow of spending and can create recessions and depressions.

There in lies the trouble, or moral hazard, a term used by Krugman to characterize “any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly.”

Krugman gets right to the heart of the matter on page 63 when he writes “Borrowed money is inherently likely to produce moral hazard. Then he makes up a story of a modern moral hazard.

“Suppose that I’m a smart guy, but without any capital, and that based on my evident cleverness you decide to lend me a billion dollars to invest any way I see fit, as long as I promise to repay within a year’s time. … If the investment prospers, so will I; if it does not, I will declare personal bankruptcy, and walk away. Heads I win, tails you lose.”

Walking away from billions in loans brings a halt to billions in transactions that amount to hoarding cash and pulling money out of the spending stream. It can also lead to panic selling of financial assets.

Krugman’s story and narrative accounts of global recessions reflect his tendency to believe that people can be greedy, irrational and destructive in their economic behavior. Unlike so many in the economics profession he does not see panics, crises and recessions as just another technical matter. Narrative from the recent panics and crisis of Mexico, Japan and Asia that dominate the first four chapters reflects his views on human perversity.

Chapter 5 is the first of four more topical chapters that cover the problems of currency speculation and then “hedge funds” and their relation to crisis, panics and recessions. Krugman takes a few jabs at former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in Chapter 7 titled “Greenspan’s Bubbles.” The bubbles are the stock market bubble and housing market bubble.

Chapter 8 takes a quick tour through banking in order to define shadow banking. Because a bank’s liabilities include personal and business checking accounts, i.e. money, the larger society has a special need to regulate banks to make sure they have reserves to meet their account liabilities. Shadow bankers figured out new and innovative ways to make loans with other people’s money like banks do, but avoid regulations requiring a minimum of reserves to meet account liabilities.

Shadow bankers did the same thing as Krugman’s smart guy above so we are not surprised when he writes this simple rule: “… anything that does what a bank does, anything that has to be rescued in crises the way banks are, should be regulated like a bank.”

The first eight chapters are really a preliminary for Chapter 9 because elements of the crisis in Latin American, Japan and Asia all re-occur in the American crisis of 2008 and 2009. Krugman brings them all together in a chronology starting with America’s housing bubble, then America’s hedge fund failures and the worst of all, the collapse in monetary policy as an economic stimulant to total spending.

The last chapter makes sobering reading as its title, The Return of Depression Economics, so well implies. Krugman defines depression economics as recession brought about by inadequate aggregate demand: decline amongst plenty.

He suggests two immediate policies to get through the 2008 and 2009 recession: get credit flowing again and prop up spending. The phrase “get credit flowing again” jumps out like a jewel on the head of a toad, at least to those in economics, banking and policy. That is because monetary policy and lower interest rates should always get credit flowing again.

Instead of traditional policies Krugman breaks with the past and suggests direct action to recapitalize banks and have the Federal Reserve Bank enter commercial paper and other lending markets. Likewise he doubts monetary policies will be effective and recommends government spending as a stimulus for right now, or as long as necessary. He doubts tax cuts will be effective either; after all taxpayers can save, not spend.

Krugman is one of a small group who are well known within the academic ranks but decide to write to a larger general audience. Lester Thurow would be another but the list is short. It is hard to do because academic journals will not publish journalism, but the popular press must have something readable and saleable.

Depression Economics is relevant and current events journalism with some elements of a textbook. It has some enduring economic analysis and historical material but remains readable and avoids the strident tone of a crusader. He does criticize his opposition and Alan Greenspan. There is nothing about income inequality or its contribution to inadequate demand.

Unlike so many in economics who will not acknowledge that free enterprise breaks down or fails, Krugman sees a break from the past and argues for what works and whatever is necessary. Depression Economics reflects that approach.

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Risk and Health Insurance

With a new President, America has a new pledge to expand health insurance coverage to everyone. It is a complicated subject but all types of insurance are supposed to let people pay premiums into a risk pool that generates a reserve fund to pay losses. Insurance companies employ mathematicians to analyze actuarial data on mortality: accidents, sickness, disability, retirement and other risks. Actuarial data are necessary to construct probability tables that will determine the premium payments to charge that will generate cash reserves to pay future losses.

The risk pool has to be defined and the probability tables have to be calculated as random risk. Life insurance actuaries use data accumulated from many years to know the random risk that someone age 50 will die during their 51st year. They don’t know who will die but they know the probability, which lets them determine the premiums necessary to build an adequate reserve fund. Life insurance policies typically exclude death caused to soldiers in warfare because it is not random risk and prevents actuaries from building a reserve fund.

In home owners insurance, the premiums go to cover only those homes, and those risks, that occur in a random fashion. Insurance companies exclude flooding from homeowner’s policies because flooding is not random. The home in the valley or next to the stream always gets flooded while the home on the hill never gets flooded.

Risks and losses from flooding along rivers, flood plains or hurricane zones are high enough that excluded home owners acted through the political system to pressure Congress. To insure against the single peril, flooding, means defining a risk pool of homes and property with risk of flooding. With a risk pool of potential flood victims, premiums create a reserve fund to pay losses from random flooding to those in the risk pool. However, homeowners and property owners subject to flooding are widely scattered and geographically spread out in a way that has prevented private sector insurance companies from creating a large and random risk pool for flood victims.

The answer turns out to be a government sponsored National Flood Insurance Program(NFIP) administered through FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On their website they explain that communities participate in the program by adopting and enforcing floodplain management ordinances to reduce flood damage in exchange for federally backed flood insurance available to homeowners, renters and business owners in these communities.

The NFIP identifies and maps the Nation's floodplains to provide the data needed for floodplain management programs and to actuarially rate new construction for flood insurance. In other words, Congress turned to the government for a solution to a problem that the private sector could not solve.

Similar problems with risk have plagued the health care system for many years. President Truman advocated and proposed national health insurance 60 years ago, which the American Medical Association opposed and defeated. During the Eisenhower administration the medical profession decided to build and expand the private health care insurance system as a way to reduce the pressure for national health insurance.

From the beginning of the expansion of private health insurance in the 1950’s, there were problems with random risk. Someone who already has heart disease or diabetes when they apply for insurance has a health problem, but they are not insurable in a private health plan because they are not a risk, they are a certainty. To use insurance jargon they have a pre-existing condition. In effect, their probability of loss is one and their premium would have to equal the cost of treatment to avoid draining a reserve fund.

In the early 1950’s insurance companies started marketing group policies in large numbers and defined a risk pool through the work place. People started buying health insurance and hence joining a risk pool through their employer.

One trouble with a health care risk pool that depends on jobs comes at retirement, when people lose their employer sponsored health insurance. Age and the likelihood of pre-existing conditions assure it will be difficult or impossible for retirees to re-enter a risk pool and buy insurance. Pressure to cover retirees increased when the United Auto Workers convinced the auto companies to cover retiree’s health care in the 1950’s. Pressure continued until the passage of Medicare health insurance for retirees in the Johnson Administration.

The second trouble with a health care risk pool that depends on jobs is that not everyone has one, or has one they can keep until age 65 when they become eligible for Medicare. Employers without health care amount to an exclusion from a health insurance risk pool. Layoffs and unemployment are not just loss of income, but removal from health insurance.

Before a layoff someone is in a risk pool they may have entered long ago when they were young and healthy. In the mean time they may have developed heart disease or some medical condition that is not a risk for a private insurance company, but a certainty or pre-existing condition, which cannot be covered when someone has to reapply for health insurance in mid-life.

In this way defining a risk pool for health care is a problem of timing. If everyone entered a common risk pool at birth and stayed in the same national risk pool until death then all Americans would share in the risks of all our injury and illness. The pre-existing condition for someone age fifty would be a random risk to share by all if the risk pool started after birth and continued to death.

Private health insurance companies do not have the ability to define a national risk pool. They have to process applications when they receive them, or go out and propose and sell group policies to employers. Other private insurance companies do the same thing and each of them has an incentive to assemble risk pools with the healthiest people they can find, and avoid the sick and all those with pre-existing conditions.

There is nothing in an economic system of private contracts and market competition that will move private health insurance to a national risk pool, or provide health care insurance that includes everyone. Private health insurance creates an expectation that cannot be served. Only the Federal government has the ability to maintain a national risk pool. Private health insurance cannot solve America’s health care failures, but will leave people without health insurance, exactly as it has been doing for more than 60 years.

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The Health of Social Security

first published on Automaticfinances.com

A committee of Social Security trustees has published another report on the financial health of the Social Security System. The new report tells us what social security reports always tell us; the social security system is failing, or headed for collapse “Alarm Sounded, on Social Security” the caption reads on the Washington Post article of May 13th.

New Social Security reports allow politicians to reassure retirees of their commitment to shore up the system and make sure it remains solvent. It also allows these same politicians to recite the status quo by telling us they have only two choices: cut benefits or add another percent on to the steeply regressive payroll tax.

This time is the same as always. The article quotes unnamed administration sources who say Congress can save the system by raising payroll taxes from 12.4 to 14.4 percent, or it can cut benefits 13 percent or a combination.

As of 2009 the payroll tax for Social Security, the OASDI(Old Age Survivors and Dependents Insurance) deduction on pay stubs, continues to be 6.2 percent with an additional Medicare tax of 1.45 percent for employees. The OASDI tax is actually 12.4 because the employer has to match the employee contribution. The same matching occurs with the Medicare portion of the payroll tax, but there is a difference because OASDI has a wage cap, which stops the tax for wages over the cap.

In 2009 the cap is $106,800; in 2008 the cap was $102,000; in 2007 it was $97,500. Beginning in 1991 Congress doubled the cap on the Medicare part of the tax. In 1994 the rising cost of health care convinced a majority of Congress to lift the cap for the Medicare portion of the tax, but they did not do so for the 6.2 percent of payroll taxes going to OASDI.

The Social Security Administration reports data for the distribution of workers by compensation. The year 2007 is the most recent year reported, which shows 146.7 million workers with wages of $99,999.99 or less. It shows 8,869,798 with wages above $100,000 including 151 who earned wages of $50 million or more. In other words, 146.7 million pay a 6.2 percent payroll tax on all of their wages while 8.9 million get a special privilege and pay nothing on wages over the cap.

Someone earning a salary of $25,000 already pays $1,912.50 of payroll tax for Social Security. Raising the tax as proposed would bring it to $2,162.50, before any other taxes are paid.

If the Congress adds another percent to the employee half of the payroll tax, making it 7.2 percent, then the extra revenue will be $51.3 billion, using the same data as above.

If the Congress treated America’s wage earners equally and applied the 6.2 percent tax to all of America’s wages reported by the Social Security administration, then the additional OASDI revenue from the employee half of the tax comes to $103.9 billion dollars. Dropping the wage cap would end a lucrative privilege for the well to do and the very rich and raise lots of money for the allegedly failing Social Security system, but as always that is a topic the politicians refuse to talk about.

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Computer Billing in Health Care

First published on Automaticfinances.com

The Obama Administration is described as computer savvy. They apparently made excellent use of computer technology during the election campaign and continue to apply computer technologies in their White House duties. They have suggested over hauling America’s health care records system by computerizing records and billing, and reducing or eliminating paper billing and records. America’s health care system has lots of paper to save, but there is reason to worry about jobs.

Monthly employment in health care establishments averaged 14.6 million jobs in 2008 for health care sectors in ambulatory care, hospital care, nursing and residential care. The jobs in these sectors can be divided among three groups of occupations. The first is health care practitioners who are mostly doctor, dentist, pharmacist, nurse, therapy and technology jobs. Health care practitioners actually deliver health care to patients and the jobs tend to have college and professional degree requirements. Few can be performed without a license.

Health care practitioners are the biggest segment of health care with 5.7 million jobs, 2.2 million of them nurses. Next are health care support occupations. All of them have aide, assistant or attendant in their job title: nurses aide, therapy assistant and so on. Jobs in support occupations are 3.1 million of the 14.6 million of the health care total. The third segment might be called administration and overhead, which are jobs in managing, record keeping and billing. These are 5.8 million jobs.

In other sectors of the economy, bills tend to be a two party transaction between a customer and a vender, but seldom so in health care. One illness or injury starts a billing shuffle through separate bureaucracies at hospitals, laboratories, clinics, HMO’s, PPO’s, IPO’s, but also private insurance companies, independent billing agencies and bureaucracies at Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, workmen’s compensation or the Veterans Administration. Medicare, Medicaid and workmen’s compensation are federal programs with federal bureaucracy, but also administered by the states through 50 separate bureaucracies.

More health care in a paper world brings growth to jobs as financial clerks and information and records clerks, which are bill and account collectors, billing and posting clerks, bookkeepers, office clerks, receptionists, and secretaries. Those jobs exceed 2.6 million for those who work within the health care industry sending out the bills. It doesn’t count the insurance company or government bureaucracy jobs for the people who take them in.

Computerized billing would lead to standardization and cost saving efficiency and better and more detailed records. It should be done, but like many good things it will have noticeable side effects. At the Obama administration jobs will be a bigger problem than they may realize.

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Parkinson's Law

Parkinson’s Law and America’s Labor Markets

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
-C. Northcote Parkinson

Back in the 1950’s Mr. Parkinson published a book that started with Parkinson’s Law cited above. It was a thin book with big fonts and bigger margins. He had some stories with anecdotal material to support the law. I cannot remember a single one of the stories but they were unnecessary. No one contradicted Parkinson’s Law.

Notice if you reverse the first two words Parkinson’s Law becomes a policy. Expand work so as to fill the time available for its completion. Now we have a directive not a prediction. A slight variation might be, expand expenditures so as to fill your whole life with work.

Writing Parkinson’s Law as Parkinson’s Policy is important because a law usually feels like something natural and inevitable and not a decision. Policy is a decision and people make decisions. The federal government is in the best position to expand work so as to fill the time available for completion because it can tax and spend, and controls money and credit, both of which allow increasing the country’s total spending as necessary to create jobs.

Back on August 11, 2005 the Associated Press reported President Bush’s comments on a transportation-spending bill. “President Bush calls the massive $286.4 billion transportation spending bill he signed into law Wednesday a job creator.” The article goes on to describe the bill that pays for 6,000 favored projects in the districts of nearly every member of Congress. Even though the legislation is $30 billion more than the President recommended he is quoted as “proud to sign it.”

Imagine my surprise at the candor of Mr. Bush with his reputation as a devotee of free enterprise. Free enterprisers expect jobs to be part of free markets where supply and demand determine output, prices and wages as if guided by an “invisible hand” and with the Adam Smith condition that society’s bread will not be due to the benevolence of the baker, but to his self-interest.

It is easier for those outside elected office to favor free markets and its policy of waiting since they do not have to take responsibility for the unemployed. It is different for politicians like Mr. Bush who apparently understand that a job in America is a requirement.

Over the last twenty years America’s total spending and Gross Domestic Product(GDP) are up, which helps meet that job requirement, and helps counter the mordant, mournful decline of 4.3 million manufacturing jobs since 1990.

The economist's way of looking at this reality is to say "Wow, this is terrific because the economy has growth with more goods and less hours of work and now 4.3 million people can be released to produce more products and services in other industries." Economists like to talk about alternative uses and labor released for alternative employment can help raise economic growth.

Economists see a natural flow of reallocation as inevitable, but the Obama administration is not prepared to wait for the economist’s reallocation. They have adopted the Parkinson policy of filling the time available for work.

The new stimulus package is loaded up with job creating building projects: roads, rail, solar panels, windmills and plenty more. Adopting building projects as a Parkinson Policy will create jobs, as it did for Mr. Bush, and it has the advantage that Americans will have something to use when the projects are finished.

When Mr. Parkinson published his book he was more concerned about the growth of rigmarole in bureaucracies, especially government. He saw bureaucracies growing with the growth in transactions, which are recorded, counted, and taxed through many bureaucracies.

America administers dedicated taxes and charges through multiple bureaucracies for federal, state and local taxes on income, sales, property, utilities, alcohol, tobacco and charges for workmen’s compensation, unemployment insurance, social security, Medicare and a few more. Every new job in America brings action at tax bureaucracies of work and jobs in recording, filing, collecting and dispersing. There is no natural law that requires each little tax to go with each little service, but it sure is good for jobs.

Filling bureaucracies with Parkinson’s policy helps moderate the relentless tide of jobs lost to labor saving technologies and computer use in the economist’s reallocation. Ominous trends for jobs in information services, especially publishing and telecommunications, finance, even retail and wholesale trade add trouble to the jobs disappearing in manufacturing, natural resources, and agriculture.

From 2000 through 2008 publishing jobs dropped over 150 thousand while broadcasting jobs went down 27 thousand. Telecommunications jobs are off 375 thousand where jobs lost in landline service are not replaced by the trickle of new jobs in cell phones. In today’s digital world landline, cell, and cable companies offer phone services as well as Internet and cable TV services using the same or similar technologies. Their low cost to the incremental customer and the ability of individual companies to offer multiple services through one network pressures firms to consolidate, cut costs, and eliminate jobs.

It is much the same story in finance where jobs have dropped back to 2000 totals. Bank mergers and consolidations typically go with layoffs, but money and finance are nothing but computer code, which can be managed by ever fewer people. On-line banking wipes out jobs even though not everybody likes the efficient digital world. Some still want to drive to the bank and exchange paper with a teller. America now employs 600 thousand tellers. If Americans decide to go digital, America will have fewer tellers, a lot fewer.

Retail jobs are down 633 thousand for the twelve months ending April 2009, but retail job growth has been sluggish for years. Computers raise productivity especially with barcodes and inventory management, raising sales volumes per employee and reducing employment opportunities. Growth in on-line sales will reduce jobs further.

Economists continue to tell anyone who listens that jobs lost to reallocation will be replaced as more Americans resolve to “get some training” for the new high tech jobs of their future. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes industry and occupational data that tell a different story. Count 370 thousand new jobs in landscaping services, 300 thousand new jobs in security guard companies and investigation services, 242 thousand new jobs in janitorial services, 471 thousand new jobs in child day care, 151 thousand new jobs at telephone call centers, all since 1990. Include 90 thousand new jobs at parking lots and car washes, 92 thousand new jobs at collection agencies. No one should forget 1.187 million more jobs for those employed through temporary help agencies.

Restaurant jobs are up 3.1 million also since 1990 along with 172 thousand new jobs in gambling and casino hotels, 273 thousand new jobs at amusement parks, arcades, golf courses, country clubs, ski hills, and marinas. Include fitness centers with more jobs than all of gambling and 236 thousand new jobs since 1990. Count 255 thousand more jobs in pet supply stores, and pet care services, including veterinarian services.

These are the industries where America works when technology saves labor and we create jobs with the Parkinson policy. More jobs in computing technologies relieve the decline, but not much. If we look at all the job growth in the multiple of computing industries, by adding new jobs since 1990 in software publishers, data processing, Internet service providers, web search portals, custom computer programming, computer system design, computer services management and related services, computer and office machinery rental and leasing and computer and office machinery repair, the gain comes to 1.334 million new jobs; less than half of jobs lost in manufacturing or jobs gained in restaurants in the same period.

Engineers are high tech, but the majority of them need work in manufacturing. The just published Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data for 2008 shows 1.516 million engineering jobs just 65 thousand more than 2000. Education jobs are up with 4.1 million more jobs since 1990, but those are mostly public jobs. As such they are part of the Parkinson Policy, hardly the economist’s solution.

The Obama administration will have nightmares trying to replace the jobs already lost, just since taking office. Economists have faith in reallocation, but America needs jobs. The Parkinson Policy will create jobs. Long live Parkinson, only he is not the solution, but solutions are topics for other articles.

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Banks and Nationalization

First published on Automaticfinances.com

In the current banking crisis there continue to be people in banking and business calling for nationalizing banks. One recent example was an article in the Atlantic Magazine titled “The Quiet Coup.” It turns out the author is from the International Monetary Fund with experience from international financial crises. He writes nationalization would not mean permanent state ownership. “It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to a private sector.”

Nationalization does not solve one problem that could not be solved without it. America has to have a banking system and wiping out one to replace it with another does nothing to address the political causes of the banking crisis. America’s bankers played the central role in creating America’s banking crisis, but their influence continues to prevent the reforms that are needed.

Bankers and the financial community gained extra political power beginning in the Reagan administration, but continuing through the Clinton years and to the present. Congress slowly changed or abandoned regulatory protections that began as far back as 1933 with the Glass-Steagall Banking Act.

America’s banking regulations previously recognized the unique and paramount responsibility of commercial banks. That is to provide customers with checking account services and guarantee reserves are available to pay on customer checks. Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to prohibit commercial banks from diversification into other financial services such as using loanable funds to underwrite corporate security offerings.

In 1933 Congress feared a bank’s security offerings department would pressure the bank’s lending department to take risks that could lead to bank failure. They feared banks could manipulate stock prices or pressure their loan customers to buy stock offerings, or take control of other non-financial corporations.

By the 1980’s and 1990’s, the relentless pressure of financial groups and plenty of campaign contributions turned caution into compliance; Congress allowed banks to diversify and consolidate into giant risk takers too big to fail.

Million bought bank stocks because banks will never be obsolete and they had the reputation of being steady, safe and conservative investments paying steady but modest dividends. Even without nationalization those millions have lost dividend income that will never be recovered and 50 to 90 percent of stock value. Those same millions had nothing to do with the gambling and risk taking of the banks they supposedly own but do not control.

Wiping them out with no further chance to recover some of their losses is unfair but also unnecessary. The so-called toxic assets will have to be written off with or without nationalization. Reserves will have to be restored to the banking system with or without nationalization. Nationalization does not reform the banking laws but just starts the whole thing over. Nationalization does nothing to encourage anyone to invest in banks, ever.

We can be thankful the Obama Administration has been resisting these calls. We hope they continue and we hope they will get around to proposing the necessary return to cautious banking practices. Perhaps the time is not right in their political judgment. We will wait, but in the mean time nationalizing banks is a loser.

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