We Are All Cooked » New Jersey CFO

An Inside Look at How Goldman Sachs Lobbies the Senate, by Matt Taibbi: …Later on this week I have a story coming out in Rolling Stone that looks at the history of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapses. The story ends up being more about naked short-selling and the role it played in those incidents than I had originally planned…, but it turns out that there’s no way to talk about Bear and Lehman without going into the weeds of naked short-selling…

It’s the conspicuousness … that is the issue here, and the degree to which the SEC and the other financial regulators have proven themselves completely incapable of addressing the issue seriously, constantly giving in to the demands of the major banks to pare back (or shelf altogether) planned regulatory actions. There probably isn’t a better example of “regulatory capture” … than this issue.

In that vein, starting tomorrow, the SEC is holding a public “round table” on the naked short-selling issue. What’s interesting about this round table is that virtually none of the invited speakers represent shareholders or companies that might be targets of naked short-selling, or indeed any activists of any kind in favor of tougher rules against the practice. Instead, all of the invitees are either banks, financial firms, or companies that sell stuff to the first two groups.

In particular, there are very few panelists — in fact only one, from what I understand — who are in favor of a simple reform called “pre-borrowing.” Pre-borrowing is what it sounds like; it forces short-sellers to actually possess shares before they sell them.

It’s been proven to work, as last summer the SEC, concerned about predatory naked short-selling of big companies in the wake of the Bear Stearns wipeout, instituted a temporary pre-borrow requirement…

The lack of pre-borrow voices invited to this panel is analogous to the Max Baucus health care round table last spring, when no single-payer advocates were invited. So who will get to speak? Two guys from Goldman Sachs, plus reps from Citigroup, Citadel (a hedge fund that has done the occasional short sale, to put it gently), Credit Suisse, NYSE Euronext, and so on.

In advance of this panel and in advance of proposed changes to the financial regulatory system, these players have been stepping up their lobbying efforts… Goldman Sachs in particular has been making its presence felt.

Last Friday I got a call from a Senate staffer who said that Goldman had just been in his boss’s office, lobbying against restrictions on naked short-selling. The aide said Goldman had passed out a fact sheet about the issue that was so ridiculous that one of the other staffers immediately thought to send it to me. When I went to actually get the document, though, the aide had had a change of heart.

Which was weird, and I thought the matter had ended there. But the exact same situation then repeated itself with another congressional staffer, who then actually passed me Goldman’s fact sheet.

Now, the mere fact that two different congressional aides were so disgusted by Goldman’s performance that they both called me on the same day — and I don’t have a relationship with either of these people — tells you how nauseated they were.

I would later hear that Senate aides between themselves had discussed Goldman’s lobbying efforts and concluded that it was one of the most shameless performances they’d ever seen from any group of lobbyists, and that the “fact sheet” … was, to quote one person familiar with the situation, “disgraceful” and “hilarious.” …

The growing debt bomb – Facing a one- to three-year countdown

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Sep 222009

By Richard W. Rahn

Assume you had put much of your savings into U.S. government bonds and then you learned the following. In just the last eight months, the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the amount of additional federal debt to be held by the public grew by an astounding $4 trillion for the 2010-19 period; and that the amount of federal debt held by the public grew from $5.9 trillion to $7.5 trillion in just the last 12 months.

In addition, you learned that the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) now owns (primarily through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) or insures (through the Federal Housing Administration and other government programs) about 80 percent of the $14.6 trillion of home mortgages outstanding in the United States. Last week, Congress passed a bill requiring all student loans be made by the federal government rather than banks, which means the taxpayers will be 100 percent liable for any student loan defaults.

You also learned that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is considering tapping its Treasury credit line for up to $500 billion. It needs to do this because of the high number of bank failures and because each bank account is insured by the government (i.e., taxpayers) up to $250,000. The president and many in Congress are calling for a roughly $1 trillion health care bill – paid for by additional debt and/or more taxes, which will further slow economic growth, eventually leading to even more debt.

Finally, you also became aware of the following facts: Federal government expenditures are growing far faster than the economy, and thus the government is becoming a larger and larger share of gross domestic product. Obviously, this cannot continue forever because eventually the government would totally drive out the private sector.

The entitlement programs (i.e., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) all continue to grow faster than the economy, and they will take more than 100 percent of all federal tax revenue this year, requiring that virtually all of the other government spending programs, including defense and interest payments on the debt, be funded by more borrowing.

You are also aware that the government cannot tax its way out of the deficit situation, because increasing income tax rates on the upper income people will both slow the economy and cause them to find legal or illegal ways to avoid the tax increase, and the politicians have pledged to not increase taxes on those making less than $250,000, which includes all but a very few Americans.

Even if the politicians break their pledges not to increase taxes, they still cannot solve the deficit problem as long as they refuse to cut back on the growth in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – because any new tax revenue will be quickly absorbed by the growth in spending. The best that any tax increase could do is delay the explosion of the debt bomb by, perhaps, a couple of years while further weakening the economy and job growth.

Now suppose you are not an individual bondholder but the Chinese government official responsible for the Chinese economy, and you know your government holds about $1 trillion in U.S. government securities. You have watched Congress and the administration become less and less fiscally responsible – more spending, more taxes, and more debt.

Then suddenly the administration puts punitive tariffs on your tire manufacturers while at the same time refuses to approve the trade treaties with Colombia, Panama and South Korea that have been negotiated.

You understand that these foolish and destructive actions by U.S. government officials indicate it does not understand the importance of free trade in fostering economic growth, and seem to be intent on replicating the mistakes of the 1930s.

The Chinese are not stupid, and they have been vocal in saying they are concerned that U.S. policies will lead to a further fall in the dollar and higher rates of inflation, both of which undermine the value of their investment in U.S. government securities.

The Chinese are now trying to diversify their holdings – and their recent activity in buying large quantities of tradable commodities is probably, in part, a hedge against a falling U.S. dollar. Thus, at the same time, the U.S. government needs to sell trillions of dollars of new bonds. It is by its own actions driving away foreign purchasers of bonds, which can only result in higher interest rates in the United States, which will further slow economic growth.

What is particularly frightening is that neither political party has offered a serious plan to defuse the debt bomb. The Democrats are just piling up more debt as if there were no limit, and the Republicans, to date, are only proposing measures to reduce the increase, rather than reverse it. When the debt bomb explodes – within the next one to three years – expect to see record high real interest rates and/or inflation, coupled with a collapse of many “entitlements.” It will be like the neutron bomb, the buildings will be left standing, but the people will not.

Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

The Growing Federal Debt Bomb – Richard Rahn, Washington Times

It’s Unemployment, Stupid!

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Sep 212009

Pittsburgh protesters demand G20 do more for jobs
Forbes
“We’re not going to accept a jobless recovery,” said Larry Adams, a postal worker who came from Jersey City, New Jersey, for the protest. …

The expansion of international “supply chains” from Asian factories to American consumers has certainly created global trade imbalances and international currency flows that are not necessarily sustainable over the long run. A readjustment of the world economy, not a slackening demand for inexpensive consumer products, strikes me as the greatest threat to the Wal-Mart business model. And, for its part, the chain is already adapting to new circumstances. In recent years, Wal-Mart has expanded well beyond the borders of North America into Europe, Mexico and Asia. It imports factory goods from China and also operates its own retail stores there. But the stores look very different from their American counterparts. In Kunming, near the border with Myanmar, Wal-Mart rents space inside its store to independent vendors, who pay $1.20 per day to hawk Yunnan coffee, tobacco bongs filled with local rice wine and condiments made from eggplant, soybeans and ginger. The atmosphere is “festival-like, even chaotic,” as vendors shout out their wares, sometimes through loudspeakers or while pounding on drums, and customers crowd a stall to fish pears out of a solution of sugar, salt and licorice root–”a Wal-Mart store sans Wal-Martism,” according to sociologist Eileen Otis. Another Chinese employee explains his loyalty to the company by suggesting that Sam Walton was, in fact, a student of Chairman Mao who “adopted the revolutionary strategy of ‘the countryside encircling the city.’&nthinsp;” And so the revolution continues.

How Wal-Mart’s Ruthlessness Led to Its Undoing – Jefferson Decker, Nation

“the short period of American triumphalism, where we dominated the global scene. That period is over”.

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Sep 042009

Stiglitz Says U.S. Economic Recovery May Not Be ‘Sustainable’
By Michael McKee

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy faces a “significant chance” of contracting again after emerging from its worst recession since the 1930s, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

“It’s not clear that the U.S. is recovering in a sustainable way,” Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor, told reporters yesterday in New York.

Economists and policy makers are expressing concern about the strength of a projected economic recovery, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner saying two days ago that it’s too soon to remove government measures aimed at boosting growth.

Stiglitz said he sees two scenarios for the world’s largest economy in coming months. One is a period of “malaise,” in which consumption lags and private investment is slow to accelerate. The other is a rebound fueled by government stimulus that’s followed by an abrupt downturn — an occurrence that economists call a “W-shaped’ recovery.

“There’s a significant chance of a W, but I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he said. The economy “could just bounce along the bottom.”

Stiglitz said it’s difficult to predict the economy’s trajectory because “we really are in a different world.” He said the crisis of the past year was made worse by lax regulation that allowed some financial firms to grow so large that the system couldn’t handle a failure of any of them.

Big Banks

“These institutions are not only too big to fail, they are too big to be managed,” he said.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations meet in London Sept. 4-5 to lay the groundwork for a summit in Pittsburgh later this month, where leaders will consider measures to overhaul supervision of the financial system…

With so much excess capacity, the American economy faces a short-term threat of disinflation and possibly deflation, Stiglitz said. Wages may even decline, given recent high productivity and the likelihood of an extended period of high unemployment, he said.

Longer term, he said the Fed’s aggressive monetary policy will mean inflation becomes the greater threat. “With the magnitude of the deficits and the balance sheet of the Fed having been blown up, it’s understandable why there are anxieties about inflation,” he said.

While the Fed says it has the tools to deal with it, there are still concerns, Stiglitz said. Because monetary policy takes six to 18 months to have its full effect, the central bank will have to begin withdrawing monetary stimulus on the basis of forecasts.

The Fed’s record on its economic forecasts isn’t enough to reassure investors and, as a result, the U.S. currency may suffer, he said.

Dollar ‘Weakness’

“Whether or not they’re able to do it, the uncertainty today about whether they can do it can contribute to the weakness of the dollar,” Stiglitz said. “That’s one of the reasons there is increasing interest around the world in discussing alternatives to the dollar system.”

Stiglitz, who is a member of a United Nations commission that will study the global financial system and currency regimes, said “the logic is compelling” for a new global currency.

The current system creates instability, weakens global confidence, and is fundamentally unfair to developing countries that are in essence lending the U.S. trillions of dollars and bearing the risk, he said.

“In most quarters, there is a feeling we should move away from the dollar system. The question is do we do it in an orderly way, or a chaotic way,” Stiglitz said. “The size of the deficit and the size of the balance sheet of the Fed have just increased the anxiety and the desire that something be done.”

While some think it would hurt the U.S. to no longer be able to borrow cheaply in dollars, “that era is over,” he said. “We’re moving to a more multi-polar world.”

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Lehman Brothers was “the short period of American triumphalism, where we dominated the global scene. That period is over,” Stiglitz said.

As U.S. deficits increased, global investors edged away from the dollar into the German mark, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc, the Euro, and more recently baskets of Asian currencies.

Which brings us to today. Only goodwill (defined both as an accounting term and as political deference to military might) now supports the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, which is what allows the United States to issue dollar-denominated bonds in world money markets.

It is this borrowing capacity that allows the Obama administration to bailout the banking industry, offer to pay for universal health care, fight colonial wars in the Middle East, stimulate the economy, send billions to Egypt and Israel, buy out General Motors, and subsidize every windmill start-up company in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. (Madoff’s problem was that he failed to set himself up as a country. He otherwise understood deficit spending.) But the shell game requires full faith in the dollar.

For those riding out financial storms by “sitting on cash,” here is what’s under your seat: in recent months U.S. federal debt has grown to $11.3 trillion, almost equivalent to gross domestic production. About one quarter of this indebtedness, or $2.8 trillion, is held abroad, and China and Japan hold just under half of those assets (liabilities to Uncle Sam).

Elsewhere on the American balance sheet is another $11.4 trillion in household debt, an annual trade deficit of about $725 billion, and a federal budget deficit that is estimated in 2009 to be approaching $1.8 trillion. That’s if the economy grows at 3 percent.

Off-balance sheet risks, what accountants call contingent liabilities, include about $10 trillion in new bailout guarantees (Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and whatever the administration launches as its New Deal of the Day). None of the above includes the unfunded liabilities of Social Security ($41 trillion), which, by comparison, make the shares of Lehman Brothers and AIG look like Scottish bonds held for widows and orphans.

The geese laying the golden eggs of U.S. financial stability are the printing presses of the U.S. Treasury, and, for now, those collecting them in their Easter baskets include a number of countries and regions perhaps tiring of American arrogance, if not of the drop in the dollar’s value. Who would blame such popular targets of moral abuse as China, Russia, Switzerland, Arabia, or Latin America for dumping their dollar-denominated assets?

All that lies between the U.S. dollar and a financial Armageddon is the Faustian house of credit cards under which Asian economies invest their trade surpluses in U.S. Treasury instruments — to keep the dollar strong, their own currencies weak, and purchases brisk between the likes of Wal-Mart and the Asian Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Sooner than we think, China and Japan, like all nervous creditors, may send the United States a letter, suggesting that, henceforward, if Washington needs to borrow money, the bonds be issued in renmimbi, yen, or a basket of Asian currencies (a Pacific Euro).

Wall Street bankers did the same to the farm interests in the late nineteenth century, when they insisted that debt be based on a gold standard, as opposed to “free silver.” President Obama may be as eloquent as William Jennings Bryan. But at that point he will need to use all his oratory for the business of selling junk bonds.

The Dollar: Running On Reserve – Matthew Stevenson, newgeography

“Increasingly, the determination of when to default is not guided by the moral question: Is this the right thing to do? It is guided by the pragmatic concern: Am I too far underwater on my mortgage?”

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Jul 252009

Walking Away When You Can Pay By Kelsey VanOverloop

Homeowners are turning to the “strategic default” — walking away from a mortgage even when there are funds available to keep paying. “Increasingly, the determination of when to default is not guided by the moral question: Is this the right thing to do? It is guided by the pragmatic concern: Am I too far underwater on my mortgage?” writes Kelsey VanOverloop. Read more »

The End?

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Jul 212009

Error One was to permit a bubble in the 1980s. Error Two was to wait a decade before opting for monetary “shock and awe” through quantitative easing.

The US Federal Reserve has moved faster but already seems to think the job is done. “Quantitative tightening” has begun. Its balance sheet has contracted by almost $200bn (£122bn) from the peak. The M2 money supply has stagnated since January. The Fed is talking of “exit strategies”.

Is this a replay of mid-2008 when the Fed lost its nerve, bristling over criticism that it had cut rates too low (then 2pc)? Remember what happened. Fed hawks in Dallas, St Louis, and Atlanta talked of rate rises. That had consequences. Markets tightened in anticipation, and arguably triggered the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie and Freddie that Autumn.

The Fed’s doctrine – New Keynesian Synthesis – has let it down time and again in this long saga, and there is scant evidence that Fed officials recognise the fact. As for the European Central Bank, it has let private loan growth contract this summer.

The imperative for the debt-bloated West is to cut spending systematically for year after year, off-setting the deflationary effect with monetary stimulus. This is the only mix that can save us.

My awful fear is that we will do exactly the opposite, incubating yet another crisis this autumn, to which we will respond with yet further spending. This is the road to ruin.

Fiscal Ruin of Western World Beckons – A Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph

9 Reasons We Are Cooked

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Jul 182009

We are now looking at unemployment numbers that undermine any confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. The appropriate metaphor is not the green shoots of new growth. A better image is to look at the true total of jobless people as a prudent navigator looks at an iceberg.

What we see on the surface is disconcerting enough. The estimate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of job losses for June is 467,000. That increases by 7.2 million the number of unemployed since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the past six months have been greater than for any other half-year period since World War II, including demobilization. What’s more, the job losses are now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all employment growth from the previous business cycle.

That’s bad enough. But here are nine reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5 percent unemployment rate indicates.

One. June’s total included 185,000 people who were assumed to be at work, many of whom probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation: finance, for example. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, look to some of the 185,000 boosting the unemployment totals.

Two. More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don’t count on the unemployment roll.

Three. No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the past 12 months. They were not counted. Why? Because they hadn’t searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey. The assumption is that they had found work or don’t want it, but there are other explanations: school attendance, family responsibilities, sheer exhaustion.

Four. The number of workers taking part-time jobs because of the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about 9 million, or 5.8 percent of the workforce. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job, and the total of unemployed and underemployed rises to 16.5 percent, putting the number of involuntarily idle workers in the range of an overwhelming 25 million.

Five. The inside numbers are just as bad. The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory private-sector employees, around 80 percent of the workforce, dropped to 33 hours. That’s 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level of activity since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water and factories operate at only 65 percent of capacity. If American workers were still putting in those extra 48 minutes a week now, 3.3 million fewer employees could perform the same aggregate amount of work. With a longer workweek, the unemployment rate would reach 11.7 percent, not the official 9.5 percent (which in turn dramatically exceeds the 8 percent rate projected by the Obama administration).

Six. The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks. This is the longest term since the government started to track these data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (those out of a job for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

Seven. The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

Eight. The jobs report is even uglier when you consider that the sector producing goods is losing the most jobs–223,000 in the last report alone.

Nine. The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers to full-time status.

Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because more layoffs in this recession have been permanent and not temporary. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have closed whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct their business. For example, General Motors and Chrysler shut down hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands; Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of jobs and exited many parts of the world of finance. In other words, we could face a very low upswing in terms of the creation of new jobs, and we may be facing a much higher level of joblessness on an ongoing basis. Job losses may last well into 2010 to hit an unemployment peak close to 11 percent. And then joblessness may be sustained for an extended period.

Can we find comfort in knowing that employment has long been considered a lagging indicator? It is conventionally seen as having limited predictive power because employment reflects decisions taken earlier in the business cycle. But today is different. Unemployment has doubled from 4.8 to 9.5 percent in just 16 months, a record rate so fast it may influence future economic behaviors and outlooks. Bear in mind that the lackluster increase in inventories suggests that there’s little prospect in the pipeline of real growth in consumption, investment, and exports. So the terrible state of the labor market is likely to be a strong head wind against consumer spending for a long time as wages and overall income growth are decelerating and households, within a fairly short period, will have received their full portion of the stimulus package.

How could this happen when Washington has thrown trillions of dollars into the pot, including the famous $787 billion in spending that was supposed to yield $1.50 in growth for every dollar spent? For a start, too much of the money went to transfer payments–Medicaid, jobless benefits, and the like–that do nothing for jobs and growth. The spending that creates new jobs is new spending, particularly on infrastructure. It amounts to less than 10 percent of the stimulus package today.

Second, the stimulus package may have been well intentioned, but it was too small and too badly constructed to get money into the economy fast enough to replace lost consumer and business spending and to slow unemployment. Workers’ pessimism is justified: About 40 percent believe the recession will continue for another full year. As paychecks shrink and disappear, consumers are more hesitant to spend and won’t lead the economy out of the doldrums quickly enough.

It may have made him unpopular in parts of the Obama administration, but Vice President Joe Biden told it as it is when he said the administration misread how bad the economy was. The administration inherited the problem, but then it failed to understand how ineffective its solution would be. The program was supposed to be about jobs, jobs, and jobs. It wasn’t. The recovery act may have been a single piece of legislation, but it included thousands of funding schemes for tens of thousands of projects, and those programs are stuck in the bureaucracy as the government releases the funds with typical inefficiency.

An additional $150 billion, which was allocated to state coffers so as to continue existing programs like Medicaid, did not add new jobs. Hundreds of billions of dollars were set aside for tax cuts and for new benefits for the poor and the unemployed, and that did not add new jobs. Now state budgets are drowning in red ink as jobless claims and Medicaid bills climb.

Next year, state budgets will have depleted their initial rescue dollars. Absent another rescue plan, they will have no choice but to slash spending or raise taxes, or both. The complete state and local government sector, which makes up about 15 percent of the economy, is beginning the worst contraction in postwar history in the face of a deficit gap of $166 billion for fiscal year 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a cumulative gap of $350 billion in fiscal year 2011.

Similarly, households overburdened with historic levels of debt will be saving more. The savings rate has already jumped from zero in 2007 to almost 7 percent of after-tax income now, and it is still rising. Every dollar of saving comes out of consumption. Because consumer spending is the economy’s main driver, we are going to have a weak consumer sector, and many businesses simply won’t have the means or the need to hire employees. In the aftermath of the 1990-1991 recession, Americans bought houses, cars, and other expensive goods. This time, the combination of a weak job picture and a severe credit crunch means that people won’t be able to get the financing for big expenditures, and those who can borrow will be reluctant to do so.

In recent times, Americans found myriad ways to fuel spending, even as incomes stagnated: borrowing against the once rising price of their homes and tapping plentiful credit cards. No longer. The paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending, and pay is eroding even for those who have jobs. This process is nowhere near complete, and, until it is, the economy will barely grow, if at all, and may well oscillate between sluggish growth and modest decline for the next several years until the rebalancing of the excessive debt has been completed. Until then, the private economy will be deprived of adequate profits and cash flow, and businesses will not start to hire. Nor will they race to make capital expenditures when they have vast idle capacity.

In other words, there are many more reasons today to expect the downturn to continue than to expect a turnaround. Consumer spending and residential investment could be even weaker than most estimates, and, as the level of fiscal stimulus begins its decline in the second half of 2010, we may be facing an even more difficult future.

No wonder poll after poll shows a steady erosion of confidence in the stimulus measures. One survey even showed 45 percent believe the limited results suggest they should simply be abandoned midway. The disappointment is understandable–but that would only make things worse. So what kind of second-act stimulus program should we look for? This time, it should not be an excuse to pass a lot of programs like those in the first stimulus package that do not really have the kind of multiplier effect on job creation and on economic growth that was intended. In any event, given the trends, it is absolutely critical that the Obama administration not play politics with the issue but really begin to prepare a second stimulus program, so that if the economy does take a major downturn, it will be possible this time to provide much more rapid government support to infrastructure spending that will maximize the creation of jobs. The time to get ready is now.

Newer Entries

New Jersey CFO

Goldman’s Pre-emptive Influence

The growing debt bomb – Facing a one- to three-year countdown

Operation Rollback: Wal-Mart’s World of Business

“the short period of American triumphalism, where we dominated the global scene. That period is over”.

Sic Transit Gloria America

The End?

Analysis & Commentary