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How I helped Alan Greenspan to Become Famous

12/31/2020

How I helped Alan Greenspan, second longest serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the man who stopped the panic of 1987 singlehandedly, become famous is a long, drawn out story about hubris that likely we need reminding about today. Prior to Ronald Reagan the idea of running huge and growing budget deficits was something that Republicans just didn't do. Deficits are inflationary, but then Reagan came in and everything changed.

Carter Out, Reagan In -- Star Wars, Tax Cuts, Supply Side Economics, and Growing Budget Deficits

In 1982 Ronald Reagan became 40th President of the United States. I had been the Senior and for most my seven years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, only economist since returning from Switzerland and the UN in 1978. During the Carter Administration I had been working on a plan to introduce Nato Bonds, debt issued by individual governments within the alliance to fund purchases of weapon systems in order to quickly and rapidly beef up the defense of our allies in face of the growing, on paper at least, Soviet threat. Funding bonds in individual currencies under the NATO umbrella would have presented the Soviets with an economic challenge that might bring down the failing government in the East. I had even hired a researcher to write a paper and the conclusions were the same -- challenge the Russians to a financial race and you will destroy the Soviet Union economically. When Carter lost the election and Reagan won, promising a massive increase in defense spending and "supply-side" tax cuts, it was like the United States was going on a spree of unfunded debt on the US borrowers tab rather than jointly with the other countries of NATO.

McNamara's Whiz Kids Out, Program Analysts In

As part of the reorganization of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and to meet the letter, if not the spirit of the Republican platform that Reagan had run on, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis, the McNamara era whiz kids who had managed to get the United States embroiled in Vietnam, the "best and the brightest" as they were characterized (and people I had worked with when I was just a Summer intern during the halcyon days of the Johnson build-up, 1966-69) were to be disbanded. Of course you couldn't run an organization spending 1/3rd of the US budget without smart people, so they did what governments do, our office was renamed and the Assistant Secretary position disbanded, turned into a Director, reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense, and given a new name Program Analysis and Evaluation. But within my little fiefdom, until the new office was established, there was fear. We went so far to hire a company that had good political connections to do a special study in hopes remaining in our plum status jobs (everyone was either SES or GS-15). My office was responsible for putting together the DoD budget that Carter had presented and was DOA as Reagan planned to spend more money than we had on Star Wars and other efforts to as they put it -- drive the Soviets into the tank.

Carter's Three Percent Defense Growth Out, Reagan's Magic 10% In

The DoD budget is a massive document, thousands of lines of requests, covering everything from paying the troops, operations and maintenance, and new equipment. We gathered in my boss's office and we had a copy of the budget and everyone got a few pages of printed text and we started to cut them into strips, one strip for each appropriation category, and then we had to reassemble them to that the original Carter budget was now going to be the completely redesigned Reagan budget ready for the new requests -- huge increases. When I had had in October my seminar, reported elsewhere, where I had had six major economic forecasting firms and their Chief Economists, including Larry Klein (who had just won the Nobel Prize, so it turned into a bigger deal than it originally was to be), Otto Eckstein, and Michael Evans, to name three of the six, the only economist who had turned down the request, was Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was mad that I had not spent the $ 10K he charged to buy his services), I had proposed two budget levels -- the standard 3% growth that we had been doing under Carter, and what I had billed as a wartime budget of 10% increase each year. So when Reagan came in, he bumped the 3% Carter budget up to 10%. So our exercise with the slicked printed budget and the new urgency to spend the Soviets into oblivion.

Who's Afraid of the Deficit --Reagan took the Deficit from $ 70 billion to $ 170 billion, Bush to $300 billion, Clinton to $0, Bush to $ 1.2 trillion, Obama to $600 billion, and Trump to a Trillion and Counting, So Who Says Republicans are anything but Keynesian's at heart

The only problem, aside from the fact that David Stockman and his supply side thinking, didn't fit with the earlier exercise that I had run showing a 10% increase in spending with taxes unchanged (not cut deeply) led to a growing budget deficit that Reagan had also promised, like Donald Trump, to eliminate through his magical manipulation of the economy, i.e. Voodoo economics, In all, but one case, the higher defense spending, no changes in tax rates, showed bigger deficits (only one of my six was able to get the 10% figure to balance, i.e. spend more on defense and you get a few more dollars in revenues enough to cover the higher spending, only Merrill-Lynch's model managed to get this result). Aside from the Reagan increase in defense, there were the Reagan supply side deep cuts in taxes. The net result was a growing budget deficit and a growing trade deficit. Much of the new money flowing into American peoples paychecks went overseas as foreign goods flooded in and the US dollar appreciated in value. Of course we were in a deep recession in 1982 and I as the Pentagon's economist was dispatched to talk to companies about what the Pentagon's growing budget would do for them to help out Congress men. I had the right stuff to do this having build the Defense Economic Impact Modelling System (DEIMS, still being used today but with a new name) at the end of the Carter Administration. But honestly I knew from all the work I had been doing on measuring how defense spending affected the industrial economy that spending more money in a collapsed (and it was collapsed in 1982) US industrial base was not inflationary, it didn't cause higher rates, it didn't crowd out, in fact it was rather benign, less than 6% of the US GDP in total.

Enter the Story -- Dr. Murray Weidenbaum of Washington University in St. Louis, distinguished Professor, and long time critique of defense spending. How he became Reagan's first Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors I will never know. He had written extensively on how damaging to the economy spending on national defense was and how it caused inflation. A nicer man you couldn't find, but not one easily convinced by anyone such as myself, so Reagan brought in someone who might just convince Dr. Weidenbaum that spending billions more on defense and cutting taxes n the rich and the poor didn't cause inflation or that government deficits just only matter when there is a Democrat in the White House.

It was 1982, I was scheduled to speak before a group of in New York City of Defense contractors and their wives, a kind of keynote speech on the great things coming their way from the newly enlarged and rapidly expanding DoD budget. I could bring my wife, we were to stay at the Hemsley Hotel, newly renovated, and they had tickets for everyone to a hit Broadway show with dinner after that at midnight. Unlike spending hours on a plane to give a speech before people who just wanted to know how they could get their checks, and why was there so much paperwork with government procurement, this one perk was the best I had in seven years in the Pentagon. I had flown up to New York with my wife, we were in the hotel, when I received an urgent call, it was Friday, the speech was on later that evening, and the conference on Saturday with the show later. My boss, David Chu (President of IDA now and a great friend and colleague) called and asked if I could fly back to DC and then go to the Old Executive Office building to brief Dr. Weidenbaum as to why DoD's spending was super inflationary. Alan Greenspan had suggested that I was the best one to do this. And so I flew back to DC, and for the first and last time in my life, entered the august space that the Chairman in that grand old building on 17th Street, the East Wing of the White House complex.
Ushered into the office, I was alone with Alan Greenspan, who I had only spoken to on the phone and Murray.

th There was was seated between perhaps the best known critique of why defense spending was somehow more inflationary than any other spending, a now so well known, outside of New York financial circles economist, Alan Greenspan (better known for playing his clarinet and saxophone in the Woody Herman band in the 1940's) who had his own economic consulting firm offering advice for a subscription of $10 K), and myself, best known for absolutely nothing but a bit of self promotion when I managed to restart doing economic analysis on issues related to defense spending when I was desperate for a job after four years in Geneva at the UNCTAD. But at thirty-five or so I was absolutely sure that I was right about one thing -- inflation didn't come because supply of defense equipment and demand for toilet paper didn't match. Spend a dollar on defense or give it a Social Security recipient, it was the same dollar going out into the economy. Murray, bless his heart, had made his spurs on the idea that defense spending, because you didn't use the stuff, was more inflationary precisely because the product produced never saw the light of day supplying necessities. I had been batting that argument down for years usually with reporters and commentators who seemed to thing that spending on their writing was more useful than on a new F-15.

To make a long story shorter, I failed. Murray was unconvinced. Alan tried his best, i tried my best, but he was determined to tell Ronald Reagan he could not have his cake and eat it too -- no big bump in defense, no Star Wars, no driving the Soviets into the tank, no tax cuts, no extra desert, just deficits, Republican deficits, but dangerous waters all the same, and so I went back to New York, saw Dream Girls on Broadway with my wife, had a nice meal, and a few months or days, not sure later, Alan Greenspan became famous -- first at Reagans next Chairman of the CEA, and later the second longest serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

I've been working this problem for many, many years and the longer I think about things, the more I'm convinced that budget deficits really don't matter so long as there is excess supply. The complexity of the economy and the tendency for most products to have more people welling than buying, makes the idea of inflation being caused by sudden demand for hoopla hoops or F-15 parts as causing inflation is nonsensical. We are in a point where people are crying out for help, where helping people to spend money is more important than some number with lots of zeros on the page after it. My best guess for 2030 in nominal dollars is that the world economy measured in gross output or production will be over 400 trillion dollars but in 1995 dollars just half this amount. Its just numbers, less meaningful than if I said its food in Sudan and diamonds in New York. So when Republicans talk about deficits and the dangers I think of my grand effort to convince Dr. Weidenbaum that spending on defense wasn't more inflationary than giving a tax cut to Warran Buffett or Jeff Bezos -- as I used to say all the time -- its just a bit of aggregate demand. So what, in the worlds of the immortal Alfred E Neumann "What Me Worry!!!"

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Leaving Afghanistan -- Charlie Wilson's War Revisited

12/21/2020

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In 1985 I was leaving my job as Senior Economist at the Pentagon where I had been for seven years. During this time I had rebuilt the economic analysis capabilities of the Department that had been missing. It was a good time to come and I had free reign to do interesting and important things. During the Carter administration I had proposed and was in the process of starting a program of multi-national cooperation to issue NATO Bonds to rebuild defense capabilities and to allow multi-national sharing of the costs and benefits of procurement. When Reagan came in he did what I was going to do with jointly financed spending through NATO bonds by deficit spending. The goal was the same -- to drive the Soviet Union into the tank after their losses in Afghanistan had seriously damaged the government there. I was planning to demonstrate massive financial stength of the alliance to the Soviets through the Nato bonds program and Reagan did it with deficit finance.

Anyway in 1985 I was leaving to go to work for DRI/McGraw-Hill then part of S&P (see previous blog post), but just before I left I saw the Department try to change the way they calculated inflation on DoD outlays for equipment. My office was the budget affairs shop for the DoD budget. We set the inflation rate to apply to the projected costs of new and existing weapons systems in the yearly budget. Since an aircraft carrier spent over 7 years, setting the right figure for future inflation was critical. All weapons when budgeted for are based on a kind of hypothetical cost based on the point in the buy where the fixed development and tooling costs are relative to the fixed price, i.e. if we expected to buy 500 aircraft then the price at this point is some price well above the cost of the 500th aircraft after all the fixed costs were finished. But the DoD comptroller, either out of ignorance or on purpose, had decided that inflation rates for DoD equipment must be different than for the general economy. They had sent over money to the BLS to develop defense specific inflation rates for the categories of equipment that we purchased -- missiles, ships, fighters, tanks. The BLS had used a kind of heuristic method where they captured the higher prices of the new equipment coming into the inventory after the end of the Vietnam war, more expensive ships and aircraft, and call all that early equpment with higher fixed costs inflation and then projected it would grow over time. The result was a set of inflation indices that were higher than they should be since the higher costs were double counted -- once in the fixed costs by the point in the buy cycle and once in the BLS inflation indices. When my boss was informed to use these alternatives, I protested, but the DoD Comptroller won the war. Higher amounts were built into the 1984-85 budget -- about $ 50 billion. Eventually I was able to secretly get the Congress to remove much of this excess.

When I lost the battle for the soul of truth, I knew I had to exit, but before I did, I wrote a novel about what that slush fund might just finance. Years later, many years, I revised that plantive story into what is now available on Amazon in print and electronic formats called The Rings of Armageddon. I made the first revisions after I saw the Towers falls and after we had entered the war in Afghanistan.

Last night I revisited Charlie Wilson's War, the story of how the US increased the spending on the secret war after the Soviets. In my story, revised as it is, it begins with when the US decided to get real about the Soviet-Afghan war.

The following is an excerpt from the Rings of Armageddon available on Amazon in print or electronic form.

Pakistani No rthwest Territories, March, 1982

The Arab gritted his teeth in the bone numbing cold. It had been a long, slow ride up from Peshawar. He was exhausted from the jostling as the truck bounced over the rock strewn road not much wider than a goat trail. It was far removed from his native Qatar with its flat, dusty, desert or the towers of Doha.   Opposite him sat the American officer who seemed impervious to the biting cold or the rough ride. His coming a month ago had shaken his world more than had the Imam who dared him to come to this God forsaken land in a mission of holy Jihad.   Before the American had come with his attitude and his airs, he and Omar had led a comfortable life in a heavily guarded villa in Peshawar. Ibrahim had been content setting up religious schools for displaced Afghan boys in the refugee camps that dotted the Pakistani border with Afghanistan, and doling out money to the many different groups fighting the Soviets to free Afghanistan. Ibrahim was the Saudi representative to the Afghan rebels, a sinecure offered by the Royal family to his own, very influential family, in part to get him out of Saudi Arabia where he was known as a troublemaker. In Peshawar he coordinated with the Pakistani’s to arrange travel and visas for Moslems willing to die for the cause of freeing Afghanistan from the godless Russians. Hassan had come to help out six months before, but had rarely left the villa until now. He was from a rich banking family in Qatar, but had become enamored with the cause of the Afghani freedom fighters. He was hardly the most observant Muslim and during his wild, American college years, had dated and partied frequently.

The American officer had just recently arrived to coordinate supplies. The comfortable life in Peshawar wasn’t for him, and he had challenged both Omar and him to do more to fight the Russians pulling them both into the eternal struggle between the money worshiping Americans and the godless Russian Communists. And now, cold and hungry, and angry, he was in a truck on his way to seeing firsthand the unequal fight between the Mujahidin and the Russian imperialists. The Americans wanted to develop new supply routes into these difficult to reach mountains for new weapons and equipment to make the battle less one sided. The Americans would take care of gathering these weapons and training the foreign jihadists and local Afghans in training bases just inside the border in Pakistan, while the Saudi’s and other Gulf oil nations, including his native Qatar, raised the funds to pay for this new equipment.

The truck stopped suddenly sending him pitching forward. He listened while the driver spoke to the American in Pashtun, a language he barely understood. The American stood up and reaching down helped him to stand.

“Come,” he said in Arabic, “we’re here.”

The driver helped them down from the truck and pointed to the mud brick building with a dirt-encrusted sign in English with the word Café barely visible in the moonlight. The American now took the two packs and rifles from the truck. Without waiting, he lifted one on each shoulder and walked towards the light, leaving the Arab standing in the cold. Reluctantly, the Qatari followed. He was enough of a mystic, despite his Western education, to realize that from this point on their lives would be intertwined, like vines on a tree, so that even if they went in different directions, at some point their lives would intertwine again.

The driver pointed towards the back of the smoky room. The table was set back, away from the others, and there was one man seated, the face hidden by a hood so that only the eyes could be seen in the shadows. The building was old, the thick adobe brick walls holding in the heat from the open fire at one end providing what little there was.   The air was thick with tobacco smoke and the smoke form the three oil lamps that hung from chains anchored to the ceiling. On one wall was a torn poster for an Indian movie complete with a half clothed young woman.

The face was hidden under the patu, the warm blanket that Afghan men used to keep warm in the mountains. The voice that greeted them, however, was that of a woman.   The Arab startled. The American pushed the hood back to see the face more clearly in the dim light of the kerosene lamps. Her eyes were gray-green, deeply set, and penetrating.

“A girl?” the Arab said surprised.

“I’m mujahedeen!” She corrected.

Before any more could be said, three grizzled men walked to where they were seated. The girl rose motioning them to sit, but the men continued to stand speaking quickly in Pashto.      They left and then she sat down again watching as they withdrew to a table closer to the door.

“They’re to take us into the Khost region tomorrow, just over the mountain from here.”

“How long to the first village?” the American asked in English.

“Depending on the Russians, a few hours, or days, or never,” she said in English, her accent lilting, but her words clear. She was thinking about the road ahead. She stared at the American. He was ruggedly built; there was the look of a man who could not be stopped by high arid mountains and cold winds.   Then she stared at the other man, the Qatari. He looked too frail to survive the mountains and the Russians.


“Will he make it?” she asked in Pashtun, looking directly at the American officer.

The American looked at the Arab.   There was something in his eyes that told him the truth. He translated the girl’s words into Arabic and the answer was quick in coming.

“He says if a girl can make it, then he can too.”

A thick stew of lamb, with warm Afghan bread, and richly brewed black tea laced with cardamom, was brought to the table.    The woman ate sparingly; with wary eyes she watched the two men wondering which would crack under the strain.     It would be a long journey through a dangerous land from the Panjahir valley, where the Tajik’s fought the Soviets in the north to the plains of Kandahar in the south.

They finished their meal and were about to follow their Pashtun guides out to into the night when an old Sufi hobbled over to their table. He spoke in a whisper in a dialect neither man could understand. The girl listened carefully, and then she smiled. She translated into English.

“He’s Iranian, a Sufi holy man. He reads fortunes. He asks if you would like to have your fortune told?”

“Why not?” the American answered intrigued. So far his life had been more than interesting, but what might come now was more of a gamble than when he had flown deep into Vietcong territory as a forward air controller during the last years of the Vietnam War.

“Only Allah knows the future,” the Arab answered looking towards the door.

The old man sat down at the table as the girl laid a few coins in his cup.

With his gnarled, arthritic hand, he took her palm first. He studied it for a long time and then closed his eyes; his face turned dark, as he let go of her hand. As the old man spoke, the girl’s smile disappeared

“What did he say?” the Saudi asked anxiously.

“Some futures are best not told,” was all she could say through tears.

Next, he reached for the American’s hand, studying it.     When he finished, he motioned to the Arab.    The Qatari pulled away, but the American reached for his wrist and pulled it forward placing it in the old man’s hand. The old man gripped it tightly and for a long time he stood very still mumbling words that only he understood.   Finally, he spoke, his voice almost a whisper. The girl listened carefully, and then translated from Farsi.

“Brothers in blood, owing a life, separate paths to the same end at the place where it all began. Death will find both in a blinding flash of fire as bright as the noon-day sun.”

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S&P Global buys IHSMarkit -- Full Circle in a Half a Century

12/9/2020

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Commercial economic forecasting started with two companies that were formed out of research that began in the United States just after the end of World War II. Wharton Economic Forecasting founded by Larry Klein out of the University of Pennsylvania and DRI (Data Resources, Inc.) founded by Otto Eckstein out of Harvard. Rumors have it that both Otto and Larry were investors in each others companies, but they were less rivals and more friends. At about the same time as they were building models of the US economy using the brilliant help of their best students, Mike Evans claims to have built the Wharton model and Alan Sinai the detailed monetary relationships in the DRI model, others were studying the post-war World Economy including Hollis Chenery at the World Bank and of course the links between industries Wassily Leontief out of Harvard with his IO models.

What made DRI special came from the integration of the release of government data in a form that could be modeled and the availability of the EPS software to link company activity to the broad based forecasts that DRI's model was making available. An army of Harvard MBAs went forth to the business community to sell this new service and to teach economists in the large, Fortune 500 companies, to integrate their own company sales information with the detailed forecasts coming from the DRI model. Otto's great innovation might have been to produce not none economic forecast but four each month -- Control, Optimistic, Pessimistic, and the one that I thought was most innovative, cyclical. This insured that DRI's money making computer could earn more money as the Army of users had to run and print out alternative sales forecasts for their companies. Otto also allowed users to interact with their model.

I first encountered DRI when I went to work one summer at the Treasury in 1971. The United States was running a large deficit on its BOP. Gold was flowing out and Nixon and his Secretary of the Treasury, Connolly, wanted to have an excuse to take the US off the gold standard (The Smithsonian Agreement). So they broght in a few graduate students, loaded up data on US imports and exports (about 100 categories), added a teletype machine, and divided the products 20 to each of us, and said, here's data on the US and its partners and make equations on trade to show what the deficit will be next year and five years.

Later, I was reintroduced to DRI in 1977-78 when I was trying to leave Switzerland and the UN. I was recruited to interview for positions in the company when I was still in Switzerland. Returning on home leave, I interviewed with a number of groups only to learn, years later, that I was too much a threat and didn't get a job. But for the company, it is fortunate, I just didn't hold a grudge for when I did move back to America, to the Pentagon, to reestablish economic analysis after in the Office of the Secretry of Defense, I hired DRI and WEFA.

So in 1978, just before DRI was being sold to its new master, McGraw Hill and later to be merged into the growing portfolio of companies under S&P, I ended up as the Pentagon's Senior and only Economist with a mandate to do whatever the hell I wanted. Joe Kasputy's engineered McGraw-Hills purchase of DRI for $ 100 million dollars and moved from the Washington office to Lexington. Before he left he had installed George Brown as my contact for the large, and growing contract I had with the company. Brown moved into Kasputy's spot as head of the Washington office, and when Kasputy's moved up at McGraw-Hill/S&P, Brown moved to Lexington.

In 1985 I finally made it to DRI to build the World Sea Trade Service that led to the current set of models that I still control and build on. By this time DRI was a large, money losing part o the S&P franchise due to its own success. As the company added more and more data and services, it needed more disc space and the computer system they had was unable to host more storage. So just as the PC was entering the business community, the company was still invested in time share computing. The steady decline in revenues coming from simple operations meant that ultimately the business model that had started so well was into the terminal phase of the decline. DRI waited too long to move to the PC, to port the EPS software to the smaller machines. At one time in order to do an update of the World Sea Trade Service bilateral trade models it took up 40% of the main frame capacity.

Just as DRI was floundering as it tried to manage the transition, the other competitor WEFA was also having problems. It had transitioned to the PC earlier, but the competitive space for DRI and WEFA was the same set of Fortune 500 companies. George Brown left, taking with him the Trade Group, but the writing on the wall was that both WEFA and DRI needed to merge. DRI's new leader had proposed to buy WEFA and close it down, to this end he had acquired the WEFA client list. But as he was waiting for the answer to the McGraw-Hill offer, or at least this is the story I was told, the news came over the wire that Bain had sold WEFA to Primark, the company that Joe Kasputy's now ran. And so, after all that it was Primark that combined DRI with WEFA to produce Global Insight. This leads us directly to the sale of Global Insight to IHS, then IHS merges with Markit, and finally IHS Markit merges with S&P, so Otto's creation, the company that changed the way we use data (electronically) and how how we interact with economic data through models and multiple forecasts of the future is once again, safely, within the S&P family of companies.

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Phoenix Agenda Trilogy -- capitalism under siege

12/3/2020

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“Who is John Galt?”

The tag line from Ayn Rand’s master work about the disintegration of economies. Her experience growing up in in Russia going through a revolution and its aftermath made her think carefully about how societies turn on themselves. In a way my novel was formed from reading and rereading Atlas Shrugged when I was a teenager. I think I missed the philosophy of selfishness that Rand espoused. But it is a compelling narrative despite its obvious flaws.   Even when I loved the story, I think I hated the philosophy. So few people are in the .1%. I think it’s a bit of luck of the genetic lottery and a bit of family money to help out, and not growing up in the ghetto, or having the connections to get into the right college. Rand mixes up the Roosevelt New Deal with Soviet Russia.        I probably never read the last 50 pages of the story when John Galt speaks to the nation about how useful greed and selfishness is to motivate capitalists and how socialism and idealism destroy self-interest. Libertarianism with its limits on government activities can trace its intellectual roots to Rand’s philosophy, but libertarians may find that building their dream houses on the shores of the rising oceans will not save them when the waters rise.

The story I’m telling in three parts in the Phoenix Agenda Trilogy (will be available on Kindle in 2021 unless I find a real agent for the story and try to do this the right way) is a different story with a different message about capitalism and free markets than the one that Rand told. The world we live in is far more complex than the one that Rand described. Liberal ideals are not always bad and while sometimes Bernie Sanders seems more like Leslie Mooch of the National Economic Planning Board in Rand’s story, he’s not a socialist nor is the world likely to be socialist in the future. Which system of exchange and development is better at meeting goals of clean drinking water, health, food, shelter, and happiness depends upon your philosophy. Each has its benefits and its costs. Which is better -- American capitalism with its independence and self-interest, European social democracy which is somewhere mid-way between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism, but is over regulated and far too rule based (a by-product of the rule based Napoleonic system of laws introduced during the 19th century in Europe). Unlikely to emerge is the Communist planned economy of Soviet Russia with its Commissars and secret stores, or the new Hybrid Capitalist-Socialism of China that can only exist so long as excess production is wholesaled to the world. Equally unable to fulfil the needs of the world we are moving towards is the free wheeling, mostly underground economies that exist at the fringes of the established systems.

The multi-billionaires who are at the heart of this story are like the Bezos, Gates, and Buffets of the world, are so rich that they see their purpose in making things better or at least believe they can make it better by destroying American style, managerial capitalism with its short-term interests in next quarters profits and the stock price rather than long-term results based on innovation and growth.     While Larry Fink can, as the introduction suggests, argue that public and private companies must look to growth as much as profits in measuring success, in social obligation to communities and the world as to shareholders and pension funds, his investment firm often as not rejects proposals that don’t return 40% returns in three years. They have good intentions, but often the best laid plans for utopia (from various American utopias created in the 19th century to the present day notion of classless, moneyless societies) fail because of human greed to get more than a fair share or contribute less than you take, i.e. freeloaders or for companies, free riders who pollute leaving the clean-up to others).   By book three the protagonists have the hard task of reconciling their ownership positions to the needs of society without losing the power that markets and self-interest to drive progress.

The Revisions from the Earlier Version – The Phoenix Year, published 2014

The Phoenix Year, an earlier version of this story, has been updated to include Trump’s Presidency in this version. It was published in 2014 both in print and electronic versions with good reviews and little real success. The publisher was distracted and honestly unless you get a major publisher you don’t usually make much from it. Under terms of the original contract I had to deliver the remaining two volumes to finish the story. I wrote both within about 18 months, but they were never published. In that version of the story, the engineered financial and stock market collapse started in 2016.

With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 a fait accompli and with time on my hands, I decided to revise the first book now that I had all the rights back in hand, with the disaster moved to 2020 and to deal with President King’s (Trump) election consequences. Much of the storyline with respect to placing tariffs on American imports by an American President, in this case President Toure (Obama) , to try to stop the loss of American manufacturing jobs, has actually taken place. So in some ways, at least, part of the original storyline has come true. How the Trump tariffs ultimately turn out for the US, China and the World economy remains to be seen.

My goal is to get at least the three full volumes of the story published – The Society of the Phoenix, The Phoenix Storm, and Phoenix Rising and afterword. In the last volume, the solution to how to reform modern managerially focused capitalism is suggested.   Managerial style, stock market fueled, capitalism may be harmful to the planet and to future life here. To solve the problems of today and the known problems of tomorrow, then the time frame of cure must be in decades and centuries, not in weeks and months. Cooperative capitalism with all stakeholders – workers, shareholders, managers, and governments – working towards the same goals may be a better approach to dealing with the issues we face -- from rising seas to virulent viruses. If this means companies must cooperate with other companies, even competitors, then this is a better outcome than seeing one company drive the other out of business.

The Ancient and Honourable Society of the Phoenix is the first book in a three book trilogy to be available on Amazon Kindle electronically and in print tracing the effort to reform capitalism into a new model reversing three hundred years of competitive capitalism to a new form of cooperative capitalism where companies work together for the great good. In the second volume, The Phoenix Storm, the fall-out of the sudden collapse of the market and the loss of trillions of dollars in wealth on the global economy leads to a worldwide depression. While Michael and Natalya fight for control of the Phoenix Trust assets in order to complete the Von Kleise vision of a cooperative capitalism organized to work together to solve global problems, other members of the Society try to force the dissolution of the Trust and the dilution of the assets.   As members of the Society are being killed one-by-one by Michele, one of Von Kleise’s former assistants angry at his decision to place the final execution of the plan in Michael and Natalya’s hands, a meeting is arrange, high in the Swiss alps at a closed ski lodge to vote shares and decide the next moves of the Society. Lacking enough votes to keep control without the share her father holds, Natalya flies into a war torn Russia to rescue her father from a Russian prison. With the world economy nearly at a standstill, regaining control of the massive assets owned by the Trust and using these to restart the economy, the fate of the world comes down to if she can fight her way up the mountain, face down and kill Michele, and regain control of the Society and the Trust so that Von Kleise vision of a global business alliance organized around social principles of fairness and growth can restart the global economy damaged by the collapse of confidence and markets that the Society engineered last October.

In book three of the trilogy, Phoenix Rising, the Ross’s face a new enemy, The One Hundred Club, a secret group of executives of the largest companies who realize that control of their Boards could be lost once the shares sold during the panic are voted. While the Ross’s work to develop a plan for a rapid changeover in the make-up of the Boards of the companies they now are majority owners, they don’t control the current Boards of Directors. Fearing poison pills and golden parachutes, the work of transfer shares and readying legal documents is going on in secret.   When Michael is kidnapped and held in a remote Caribbean Island estate, Natalya is forced to rescue him so that they can be in New York in time to execute their plan for the consolidation of ownership before the One Hundred Club’s members realize the peril their control of these world spanning companies is in jeopardy.   With a late October hurricane making its way, slowly, up the East coast and air travel limited, Natalya and Michael are forced to make the long sail from Turks and Caicos to New York in the one sailboat and with the one crazy skipper who just might make it in time to file the papers late on Friday with the courts. Once in New York, the One Hundred Club and one member of the Society make a last ditch effort to assassinate the Ross’s before they can sign the legal documents needed to start the process of gaining control.   With the transfer of the ownership and the change-over in management and Boards completed, they are left with the huge task of rebuilding confidence in the future and restarting the world economy using a new economic paradigm replacing self-interest, market driven capitalism of Adam Smith with a new model built on cooperative relationships, partnerships, designed to solve the pressing problems of the world facing the ravages of climate change and wealth inequality.

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Dr. David L Blond is a well known economists with experience in government and the private sector. Published in 2014, The Phoenix Year, an economic thriller about the events leading up to the global market collapse New novel available on Kindle --The Rings of Armageddon based on insights learned during his 7 years as the Senior and only economist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.

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Phoenix Agenda Trilogy -- capitalism under siege

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