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The Light-Handed State and the Heavy-Handed State

Does the blame for our economic woes reside with a government that shirked its regulatory duties or rather one that proved too intrusive in the markets? The answer is “yes.”

My last piece, written an unforgivably long time ago, showed in detail how the downfall of a major financial institution can spark a broader unraveling of the financial system. A similar scenario occurred last fall after the failure of Lehman Brothers. And we would be deceiving ourselves to deny that a collapse of far greater magnitude remains possible, if not probable.

How did we get to this point? The question of what causes financial booms and busts splits analysts along the conventional left-right political divide. Those on the left hold that they result from too little state regulation; markets, when left to their own devices, have a tendency to run out of control and must be reined in if perennial instability is to be avoided. Those on the right make the opposite claim that it is excessive regulation that distorts markets and produces the boom-bust cycle. Who is correct?

The Light-Handed State

The factors at work in the current crisis certainly lend credence to the leftist view; the government, in a number of ways, abrogated its regulatory responsibilities through feeble oversight of financial markets. In a celebrated article published recently in The Atlantic, economist Simon Johnson details the erosion of financial regulation over the past 20-odd years. During that time, he argues, a group of powerful Wall Street firms managed to persuade lawmakers to relax a series of regulations that previously limited their growth and freedom to speculate.

Referring to the heads of these institutions as “oligarchs,” the author quite consciously evokes the image of similar crises that befell less developed countries in the 1990s such as Russia, Thailand, and Indonesia. If he does so it is because the momentous regulatory shriveling that took place in America, often at the behest of financiers, mirrored the light hand these other governments took in managing their own financial sectors. Johnson details a host of regulatory rollbacks that spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations and which now appear shocking in light of what has happened. They include:

*The promotion of free capital flows across borders;
*The repeal of regulations dating back to the Great Depression which mandated the separation of investment and commercial banking;
*A Congressional law banning the regulation of credit default swaps (for an explanation of these, see “Financial Market Chaos Explained”);
*A loosening of controls on the amount of leverage investment banks are permitted to take on (for more on leverage see, again, “Financial Market Chaos Explained” and “Anatomy of a Bank Run”);
*Lax regulatory enforcement by the Securities and Exchange Commission;
*International conventions that allow banks themselves to measure the amount of risk they are carrying; and
*An “intentional failure” by regulators to bring regulations into line with the enormous innovation in financial markets.

If Johnson’s talk of an “oligarchy” strikes some as extreme, recall that it is coming not from a foul-smelling schizophrenic on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue but rather from the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and an esteemed professor of economics at M.I.T. It is penned, in other words, by a beacon of the establishment.

And, clearly, he is correct; deliberately lax enforcement by regulators played a major part in the buildup of financial risk and its subsequent unraveling.

The Heavy-Handed State

Yet this is where most left-leaning analyses end and the rest of the story begins. For if government regulation proved too permissive in some respects, in other ways it served to distort markets and cushion risk-takers.

To begin with, the mountain of mortgage debt managed to reach the extremes it did partly because it received backing from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two quasi-governmental agencies. These institutions are charged with guaranteeing the mortgages issued by banks and other lenders; if the bank that lent you the money to buy your home wants to sell your mortgage but nobody wants to buy it, Fannie Mae will. By serving in this role, Fannie and Freddie allow banks to issue more mortgages at lower interest rates and thus increase the level and affordability of home ownership.

Over time, however, they have come to serve as state-sponsored rackets. On the one hand the government will not allow them to fail, and everybody knows this. This gives them access to cheap financing which they can then lend out at a higher rate of interest and log an easy profit. On the other hand they technically are privately-owned companies. So the profits they create by borrowing cheaply and lending dear go not to the taxpayer but to their private shareholders and executives. It is a license to print money, and print they did. In the process they facilitated the buildup of a huge amount of mortgage debt, the consequences of which have now become clear.

Yet the excesses promoted by these state-sponsored entities are dwarfed by that enabled by our own central bank, the Federal Reserve. Of the scores of books to have emerged on the current financial turmoil, The Origins of Financial Crises by George Cooper, a former fund manager and strategist on Wall Street, stands out as perhaps the best. Cooper, in elegantly lucid prose, lays down a devastating critique of the major intellectual edifice adopted in recent decades by central banks and financial economists. Termed the “efficient markets hypothesis,” it makes two claims – first that financial markets, if left alone, allocate money efficiently to where it is needed most and, second, that the markets are essentially tame and not prone to manias and panics.

If events have shown this view to be wrong enough, Cooper argues that central banks, and particularly the Federal Reserve, have made things worse by perverting it. And this is where we see the distorting effects of government intervention. The space available here is far from adequate to do justice to the nuances of Cooper’s analysis, much less his smart and original policy prescriptions. But the thrust of his argument is as follows. While asset prices are rising and a bubble is forming, monetary authorities enthusiastically follow the tenets of the efficient markets hypothesis by leaving markets alone. However, as soon as the bubble bursts, causing distress among those who borrowed too much, central banks suddenly rediscover that the markets are not efficient after all. They accordingly respond by flooding the markets with money and credit. This serves to bail out irresponsible borrowers by giving them access to cheap financing when they would otherwise be forced to pay the consequences of their frivolous risk-taking.

This pattern has been repeated numerous times over the past two decades and was manifest in a series of aggressive monetary interventions by the Federal Reserve – first following the 1987 stock market crash; again from 1990 to 1992 to mitigate a recession; again in 1998 in the wake of the Russian financial crisis and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management; and finally from 2001 to 2003 to weaken the effects of another recession.

The Light-Handed State and the Heavy-Handed State: A Combustible Combo

In each of these instances, the Wall Street banks, enjoying the benefits of scaled-back regulation, enthusiastically took the money the Fed had pumped into the markets and used it to finance more speculative activity. New mortgages, guaranteed by state-sponsored institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with other forms of debt such as corporate loans, ballooned. And whenever an economic downturn seemed possible, the Fed would come to the rescue and flood the markets with still more cheap money. This enabled irresponsible borrowers to get their hands on easy credit to repay their debts. Once relieved of their old financial obligations, they used more of the cheap Fed-provided money to take on even more debt to finance still more speculation. Over time and through repeated interventions, the mountain of debt grew bigger and bigger.

The consequence of all these bailouts was not just to delay the final reckoning but to make it worse once it arrived, as it now has. And yet the Federal Reserve under Bernanke is attempting exactly the same response it took in previous crises. Only this time the level of debt that has built up through the years has become so massive that no amount of central bank intervention can do much about it.

The unfortunate state of affairs we now face was the result neither of government policies that proved too weak nor a state that was too interventionist – but rather of both. Our political, social, and economic reality is a complex organism. It is rarely reducible to simplistic explanations from either the right or the left. The current crisis is no exception.

In future installments I will examine the potential solutions to our troubles – both short-term, for solving the immediate crisis, and long-term, for preventing future ones. As we will see, the measures that would clean things up quickly and equitably are quite the opposite of what the government is doing.

Anatomy of a Bank Run

One may be forgiven for asking what I can possibly hope to add to the voluminous commentary others have already put forth on the economic crisis. The answer, in short, is that our media – in particular the relatively few outlets whose reporters actually understand what is going on – has mostly proven inept at explaining the problem clearly to those of us who lack a background in corporate finance. Terms like “capital injection,” “credit derivatives,” “secured creditor,” and “repo market” are bandied about with little elaboration, as if the average person with a college degree has any clue of their meaning.

The sheer complexity of the problem is such that the vast majority of the educated public has an inadequate understanding of what is happening along with the costs and benefits of the alternative solutions. This, in turn, is allowing our financial and political elite to get away with highway robbery, all the while duping us into believing that the courses of action which happen to be most advantageous to themselves have no feasible alternatives.

What follows is a two-part series that gets to the heart of the matter – the paralysis of the global financial system. The first part examines in detail how a crisis of confidence around a particular financial institution can precipitate its rapid demise and take the rest of the financial system down with it. The next segment will address how we got to this point along with the possible remedies.

Other People’s Money
Let us begin with the crux of the problem: financial speculation using other people’s money. When one speculates with borrowed money, it does not necessarily have to create an existential threat to Western civilization – so long as the amounts borrowed are not excessive. Alas, our financial institutions – banks, brokerages, insurance companies, and hedge funds – have over the past twenty-odd years failed to heed this maxim.

Using borrowed money to supplement your own can be lucrative insofar as it can increase your profits over and above what they would be without the borrowed funds. Let’s say I have $500 and want to use this money to buy XYZ Corp’s stock. The stock is priced at $10 per share. Using my own money, I can buy $500 / $10 = 50 shares of XYZ stock. If the price subsequently increases by $2 per share, I stand to gain $2 * 50 shares, or $100 in profits. That’s a 20 percent return on my $500.

That may be fine for you, but I’ve got to keep my wife happy, and my son, for Christmas, is demanding the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip. Surely I can do better than 20 percent. Indeed, if I borrow another $500 and add that to my own funds, I now have $1000 to bet with. And I can buy twice the number of XYZ shares – that is, 100 shares instead of 50.

The portion of the $1000 that belongs to me is called my equity. The other, borrowed portion is called leverage. Using leverage, the same $2 rise in the stock’s price will give me double the profits than if I were only using my own $500; my profit now equals $2 * 100 shares, or $200. This represents a far more amenable 40 percent return on my $500, as compared to the meager 20 percent return I would obtain without any leverage. Sure, I still have to repay the $500 I borrowed. But I get to keep the extra profits for myself.

In this example, I am using 2 to 1 leverage; that is, the amount I borrow is twice that of my equity. The more I borrow in relation to my own personal funds, the bigger the potential return on my investment.

Like all good things, however, leverage has its downsides. If I’m using 2 to 1 leverage and the price falls, I lose twice the amount than if I were only using my own funds; a $2 fall in the stock price amounts to a 20 percent loss using no leverage and a 40 percent loss borrowing that extra $500. Using still more leverage can multiply my losses even further; not only can I lose everything I have, I can end up in the unfortunate position of owing money to my creditors.

Most traders and investors should never use more than 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 leverage. The Wall Street banks that have collapsed or been bailed out were frequently using leverage of 30 to 1 and, in some cases, 50 to 1. Employing leverage at such insane levels means the prices of the assets in which you are speculating have only to fall by a small amount before you are wiped out entirely.

One might reasonably believe that our financial institutions focus on their primary jobs and don’t get distracted by other ventures – insurance companies sell insurance, banks concentrate on lending to businesses, while investment banks stick to mergers, acquisitions, and underwriting. Yet this is not the case. Over the past several decades these financial institutions have come to believe that they can speculate as well.

The assets they speculate in are described in detail in my previous post, “Financial Market Chaos Explained.” In essence, the financial institutions make bets on various assets, such as mortgages. They don’t actually own your mortgage; they are just betting amongst themselves whether you will continue to make your mortgage payments. It is like you and I betting on the Giants vs. the Packers. Neither of us have any connection to the actual teams, but we can still place bets on the outcome of the game. The major financial institutions do the same thing with mortgages, corporate loans, credit card debts, auto-loans, and other assets.

When used prudently, these bets allow them to reduce their risk, which in turn enables them to lend more money to businesses and consumers and in doing so increase the amount of investment and jobs in the broader economy. When used excessively, however, they can be quite dangerous, as we will see.

Introducing P.J. Nagrom
Let us examine how the abuse of leverage can spark the unraveling of a fictitious bank. We will call it P.J. Nagrom. Similarly to the example of the leveraged speculator above, P.J. Nagrom obtains its operating funds through two sources. First, its owners put up their own money in the form of equity. The equity is divided into shares that represent the owners’ claim to any profits the bank makes. In the case of P.J. Nagrom, these shares are publicly traded on the stock exchange, where any owner can sell her shares at any time to a willing buyer. Secondly, the bank borrows money from others. The borrowed money represents leverage and, as in the above example, is designed to enhance the returns available to the bank’s owners, the shareholders.

Everyone – shareholders and creditors – knows at the outset that, if the bank fails, any money that is left over gets distributed among themselves. However, in the event that there does not remain enough money to satisfy everybody’s claims, the law gives some claimants priority over others.

At the top of this hierarchy are the senior bondholders; their claims are considered sacrosanct and must be made whole before those of anyone else. Below them sit the subordinated debt holders. The term “subordinated” denotes the fact that the debts the claimants are owed can be repaid only after the senior bondholders have received all of their money. The subordinated debt holders are in turn divided into senior and junior segments, with the former’s claims given priority over the latter’s.

Finally there are the shareholders. If the bank fails, the shareholders are the last to recover their money – if enough is even left over at all, which is rarely the case. But this is the price they pay in exchange for their right to the bank’s profits. The shareholders come in two forms – preferred and common. Preferred shareholders, as the name suggests, get priority over the common shareholders in the distribution of any funds that remain once the bank is wound up.

Like many other financial institutions, P.J. Nagrom made some bad bets on mortgages and now faces serious losses. It is the shareholders, who sit at the very bottom of the financing hierarchy, who are the first to take a hit whenever the bank loses money. After all, they are the last to receive any leftover funds if the bank goes belly up. Thus, by sheer logic, they are necessarily the first to absorb any losses the bank suffers. Accordingly, whenever P.J. Nagrom reports a loss for the quarter, it will announce a “writedown” in the value of the shareholders’ equity. As soon as the writedown is announced (and frequently beforehand), the stock price will drop to reflect the new, lower value of this equity.

Our bank, whose stock price reached an all-time high of $150 per share in July of 2007, suddenly reported its first ever quarterly loss from subprime mortgages in September of that year. This was followed by an unending string of further losses in every quarter since then, resulting in more writedowns and, consequently, a continuous decline in the price of the stock. In early September 2009, the stock plunged from $34 per share to $17 in the span of a week, as investors anticipated a major loss for the third quarter.

Until this one-week drop of 50 percent, debtholders had been rather complacent, assuming they would continue enjoying regular interest payments on their loans and get their money back in the end; the shareholders, after all, were there to soak up any losses the bank made. However, while the shareholders absorb the first losses, once the stock price falls to zero the debtholders begin to suffer. At that point, any further losses begain eating into the bank’s remaining assets, and there are no longer enough assets left over to satisfy all the debtholders’ claims.

Recall that the massive leverage P.J. Nagrom has taken on means that even a mild decline in the prices of the assets the bank owns takes a hefty chunk out of its equity. At these levels of leverage, the equity can disappear rather quickly, and it did, placing into jeopardy the claims of the debtholders.

P.J. Nagrom is sufficiently large that its debt is traded frequently among willing buyers and sellers, who daily agree to a price on the right to collect a given dollar of P.J. Nagrom debt. During the heady days of 2006, most market participants subscribed to the belief that P.J. Nagrom was immortal. As such the buyers were willing to pay $1.15 for the near certain prospect of collecting one dollar of P.J. Nagrom debt.

Now that the bank is looking rather like a mortal, and a frail, sickly one at that, the price of its debt has dropped to well below one dollar. The junior subordinated debt holders, who occupy the next lowest rung on the funding hierarchy after the shareholders, have taken the biggest loss; their debt is now trading at a mere 30 cents on the dollar. This reflects the market’s belief that they are not likely to receive much of the money they are due if P.J. Nagrom goes under.

The senior subordinated debt holders, who are next in line, have seen the value of their debt fall to 60 cents. Even the illustrious senior bondholders are aghast as they’ve watched the price of their bonds creep down to 95 cents on the dollar. Might the bank’s future losses be so severe as to extinguish the shareholders’ equity and burn through the debt of the subordinated holders to threaten the claims of the senior bondholders as well? Evidently, the markets believe they might.

As the losses mount, the prudent response for P.J. Nagrom’s managers would be to sell the bad assets and eliminate the problem once and for all. Alas, our esteemed chiefs, despite their Harvard degrees and untold fortunes, are human after all. And part of being human is to stick to one’s laurels when the going gets tough and hope luck intervenes in one’s favor. Did Joshua surrender to the enemy at the Battle of Jericho? Did Daniel cower before the ferocious beasts in the lions’ den? Did Gilligan ever give up hope of getting off that island?

Perhaps drawing inspiration from these heroic predecessors, the P.J. Nagrom executives resolved to hold onto the poisonous assets soon after their prices began dropping. Unfortunately, instead of giving way to a quick turnaround, the carnage only got worse; month after month, the prices kept falling.

Along with the mounting losses came the need for the bank’s leaders to justify their actions, or lack thereof. To do so they turned to the fallacious argument that the problem assets are “illiquid” – in other words, there are simply no buyers to be found. This, of course, was a myth. The truth is that there were plenty of willing buyers before, and there are plenty now. It is only that the prices the buyers are offering to pay are, in the opinion of management, unacceptably low.

At each step along the way the heads of P.J. Nagrom were holding out hope that the bloodletting's end was near. And so they chose not to recognize reality and sell the assets at their true prevailing prices. And now, it seems, the prices have sunk to such depths as to render our bank insolvent – that is, the value of P.J. Nagrom’s assets, at the new, low prices, would fall far short of the amount the bank owes to its creditors.

From Venerable to Vulnerable
If the sheer amount of leverage P.J. Nagrom employs has not endangered it enough, the structure of all this borrowed money leaves the bank even more exposed to jittery creditors. The problem is this: while the assets P.J. Nagrom owns are meant to be held over the long-term, the bank must repay its liabilities over much shorter time frames. Whenever this money comes due, the bank must renegotiate with creditors for new loans. If a creditor does not agree to roll over the old debt into a new loan, the bank must either find a new creditor to replace the old one or sell the assets the old loan had been financing.

The senior bondholders generally do not present a problem in this regard, as most of their bonds must be refinanced only every few years. But another big chunk of P.J. Nagrom’s debt consists of “commercial paper.” Purchased mostly by money market funds (which are similar to deposit-taking banks, only riskier), commercial paper is short-term debt that must be repaid in a matter of weeks, not years. As a result, every few weeks the bank must renegotiate with the commercial paper holders to roll over the old commercial paper into new paper. If this proves impossible, the bank must sell the assets the commercial paper was financing at whatever price the market can accept. As mentioned above, these prices would now be so low as to make the bank insolvent.

To make matters worse, another, very large portion of P.J. Nagrom’s assets are financed by “repo loans.” Whereas commercial paper must be repaid and renewed every few weeks, repo loans have to be renewed each day. Every morning P.J. Nagrom’s staff calls up the repo lenders and asks if they will agree to continue providing financing for one more day. Never has the answer to this question been anything but “yes.” But if the repo lenders ever responded in the negative, it would cut off the bank’s oxygen supply, and P.J. Nagrom would immediately be in danger of going under.

Another large segment of the funds P.J. Nagrom uses comes from other big financial institutions, like hedge funds, who rely on the bank as their “prime broker.” What this means is that these other institutions, speculators in their own right, use P.J. Nagrom to execute their trades for them. To do so they open accounts at the bank. Naturally, any hedge fund can close its P.J. Nagrom account at any time and demand its money back. Normally, however, new accounts are opened about as often as old accounts are closed. This leaves P.J. Nagrom sitting on a substantial, unused pool of cash. Like any bank, it puts this cash to use for profit. In P.J. Nagrom’s case, the money is used to fund the bank’s own speculative activities.

It is rather unlikely that many prime brokerage clients would demand their money back at the same time. Unlikely, but not impossible. If this ever did happen, P.J. Nagrom would have a problem; it would be forced to dump lots of assets on the market simultaneously, probably at very unfavorable prices, in order to raise enough cash to satisfy the demands of the fleeing prime brokerage customers. While this might have happened to failed rivals such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, P.J. Nagrom’s chiefs do not believe this to be a realistic possibility.

Endgame
Following its 50 percent plunge in a single week, P.J. Nagrom’s stock price appeared to be stabilizing. The respite proved short-lived. Several weeks later, it began falling again as fears about the bank’s solvency started to gain momentum. It was at this point that several large hedge funds, all prime brokerage customers, closed their accounts and withdrew their money.

News of this event, combined with the plummeting stock price, prompted a number of commercial paper holders to decide it unwise to buy new P.J. Nagrom paper once the old paper was redeemed. Instead they took the prudent decision to hold onto their money until the market uncertainty abated.

With the stock price now at $5, and rumors circulating that the bank was running out of cash, the other debt holders and prime brokerage customers took fright. During a single week in December 2009, the stock plumbed new depths, closing the week at a mere $1.25 per share. Overnight repo lenders now feared that the evaporation of P.J. Nagrom’s equity and rapidly deteriorating cash reserves might threaten their ability to get their money back the next day. They too began stampeding for the exits.

The revolt of the repo lenders starved P.J. Nagrom of its very life source, leaving the bank with three options, all rather unpalatable. The first and least disagreeable option was to find a new investor who would purchase a substantial portion – if not a majority – of the bank’s stock at a price significantly above the market price of $1.25. Not only would this provide the bank with extra cash to satisfy the demands of the panicking debt holders and prime brokerage customers. It would also re-inflate the equity cushion that protects the debt holders from any losses (recall that the debt holders begin absorbing the losses once the value of the bank’s equity disappears). This might persuade the remaining debt holders to stay put and even convince those who had already fled to return. However, despite frantic negotiations over the weekend with a few potential suitors, none was willing to take on the risk.

This prompted the bank’s management to push for the second option – a government bailout. Under this plan, the government would guarantee most of the losses incurred by a private institution that acquired P.J Nagrom. That is to say, any institution that agreed to purchase the bank would have its potential losses capped at, say, $1 billion. The government would pick up the tab for any additional losses. At this late stage, though, the public and its elected representatives were suffering from a severe case of bailout fatigue. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 6, 2009, the president of the New York Fed notified P.J. Nagrom’s CEO that no government assistance would be forthcoming.

This left the bank with the much-loathed third option – bankruptcy receivership and liquidation. That Sunday night, P.J. Nagrom’s chiefs filed for bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of employees, having already witnessed the value of their stock options disintegrate, would be cast onto the street. Control of the bank was handed to a government-appointed bankruptcy receiver charged with overseeing the winding up of the hundred-year-old institution. The receiver would sell all of P.J. Nagrom’s assets and distribute to the debt holders any resulting cash that was raised.

Needless to say, the sudden appearance of such a vast supply of assets for sale on the market, umatched by any corresponding increase in demand from willing buyers, precipitated a severe drop in their prices. The prices of everything from mortgages to corporate loans, credit card debts, and auto-loans began tanking.

This development pushed a number of other large financial institutions into insolvency, as the prices of the assets they owned had now fallen to levels well below the amount they owed to their own creditors. The bank run, previously restricted to P.J. Nagrom, had now become systemic; fleeing creditors and frightened prime brokerage customers withdrew their money in hordes. The country was now on the brink of its first nationwide banking panic since the 1930s.

The placing of these institutions into bankruptcy receivership presented the horrific prospect of further asset firesales on an even larger scale; the new receivers, having taken control of the other bankrupt institutions, would now have to sell off the banks’ speculative assets in order to raise money to pay back the claims of creditors. This would further spur the downward spiral of asset prices and threaten still more banks, hedge funds, and other institutions.

To stem the panic, president Obama announced, for the first time since the Great Depression, the imposition of a national bank holiday. Nobody would be able to withdraw their funds from any bank for an indefinite period.

The bank holiday, however, was not sufficient to soothe the fears enveloping the remaining financial institutions. Amidst such unprecedented uncertainty, the country’s largest banks, money market funds, and other institutions had all but stopped lending to businesses and began calling in their loans. This offered up the possibility of a new wave of insolvencies throughout the broader economy, much bigger than any seen in decades; those businesses that did not have the cash to pay back their loans would be forced into bankruptcy and their assets sold to pay off their creditors. While the effect on unemployment would be difficult to estimate, it was clear that millions would lose their jobs.

The United States stood on the edge of the abyss.


Conclusion
While the above scenario may sound depressing, it is merely a possibility, not an inevitability. And, despite the short-term harm it could inflict, it will ultimately pave the way for a recovery. But it is a real danger.

The next and final part of the series will examine how we got to this point, what should be done, and what is likely be done (which is quite different from what should be done). I will also present a few simple steps you can take to protect yourself.

*For further reading, I recommend House of Cards by William D. Cohan, which provided the inspiration for this piece. It is the story of the rise and demise of Bear Stearns and includes a particularly gripping account of its final days.

Israel-Palestine: Get a Grip

Few subjects bring out the idiocy in otherwise smart and reasonable people quite like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Enter any gathering here on Berkeley's campus, mention the word "Palestine," and watch as brilliant academics transform at once into blathering lunatics. The principle applies regardless of whether the individual in question supports the Palestinians or the Israelis.

I normally approach this strange phenomenon by studiously avoiding discussions of the topic with anyone in my life. Whenever the conflict flares up, I go into hibernation until it dies down again.

This time I've decided - unwisely, probably - to lay my position on the line. In doing so I will likely attract a barrage of condemnation from most everybody I know. The upside is that whenever someone tries to draw me into this argument in the future, I can wash my hands of it simply by pointing them to this blog post and running away.

Most people who have a strong opinion on the conflict tend to regard one side as "good" and the other as "bad." The Palestinian (Israeli) cause is fundamentally just, while the Israelis (Palestinians) are a bunch of conniving brutes who flat-out refuse a reasonable compromise. As always in international politics, reality is far too complex to warrant such one-sided judgments.


Extremists and the perpetuation of hostilities

To me, it is short-sighted to regard one community as innocent and the other as malevolent. When I look at the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, I rather see the same thing I observe in almost every other civil conflict around the world. On each side you have a faction of relatively moderate leaders pitted against a group of extremists. The moderates tend to be receptive to compromising with the other side. They seek support among their constituents by posing as the party of reason.

The extremists, by contrast, cast themselves as the defenders of the nation from enemy aggressors. Paradoxically, however, they must continue stoking this external threat in order to justify their political existence. Without it, there is no rationale behind their quest to hold positions of power. In this way, extremists thrive on discord and violence. They gain political advantage by undermining any and all peace efforts initiated by the moderates.

Remarkably, this dynamic holds in practically every civil conflict around the globe, from Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Congo to Chechnya, Georgia, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Turkey/Kurdistan, and Colombia. In the case of Israel-Palestine, the moderates take the form of the Labor Party and Kadima on the Israeli side and the PLO and parts of Fatah among the Palestinians. The extremists on the Palestinian side consist of Hamas; Fatah's military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades; and Hezbollah, a militant group operating in southern Lebanon. Among the Israelis, the extremists are to be found in the Likud Party, segments of the religious right wing, and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank (and, previously, Gaza).

Palestinian and Israeli extremists engage in a symbiotic dance, each undertaking provocative and often violent actions that unwittingly promote the interests of the other. The pattern is eminently predictable; each time moderates among the two sides seem close to an agreement, the extremists step in to scupper it.

In the early 1990s the Oslo peace process, which ended the first Palestinian uprising, terminated abruptly when a radical Jewish settler assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the only Israeli politician with enough authority to oversee the full implementation of the accords. His successor, Shimon Peres, restarted peace negotiations but failed to win re-election in 1996. Why? Just before the elections were held, Hamas carried out a string of suicide bombings, sparking outrage among Israelis and springing Binyamin Netanyahu, his hawkish opponent, to power. This was precisely the outcome desired by Hamas, who wanted to ensure that Peres' peace initiative never got off the ground.

In 2000, the two sides were arguably as close to a settlement as they had ever been. It was at this time that Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the opposition Likud Party, staged his famous visit to the Temple Mount, one of the holiest sites in both Judaism and Islam. While Sharon could not have predicted the scale of the response, he surely knew his action would prove incendiary. Fatah responded by sending trained Palestinian youths into full-fledged rebellion against Israel. The second Palestinian uprising thus began. The resulting violence hardened Israeli public opinion and, in elections held a few weeks later, propelled Sharon and Likud to power.

Further examples abound. In 2002, on the eve of a major peace summit in Beirut, a Hamas youth blew himself up in the "Passover Massacre." Later, in 2006, Hezbollah crossed the Lebanese border to attack and kidnap a contingent of Israeli soldiers. The results must have exceeded their wildest expectations; the incursion brought on a massive retaliatory response by the Israeli army, killing scores of civilians and solidifying Hezbollah's standing as the exalted defenders of Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians. Israel's current offensive in Gaza began in similar fashion; this time, Hamas escalated its rocket attacks in the weeks preceding the assault, prompting the heavy-handed Israeli reaction you are now witnessing.

On both sides of the conflict, then, one can observe a small group of elites who cynically bolster their own power by keeping ordinary people locked in a semi-perpetual state of violence. Granted, it is only the Palestinian extremists that deliberately target civilians. Does this mean their Israeli counterparts are to be regarded as more virtuous? Hardly. The extremists on both sides will do anything they can get away with. It is simply that the Israeli ones can get away with less. Israel, an internationally-recognized state that seeks normal relations with most of the world, cannot afford to be seen intentionally and indiscriminately blowing up Palestinian civilians. Therefore, Israel's leaders - even the extremists among them - go to considerable lengths to avoid such displays.

Hamas, by contrast, is not bound by the niceties of diplomatic relations and international treaties. Since they have far less at stake, they can send their suicide bombers into Israeli cafes without fearing serious consequences. They are also free to use as weapons of war the very Palestinian civilians they claim to be defending, firing rockets into Israel from launchers stationed in heavily-populated areas. That way, any retaliation by Israel has a high probability of killing these civilians and stoking more rage of the kind on which Hamas thrives.

If you insist upon taking a strong moral stand on the Israel-Palestine issue, then at least direct your hostility where it is due. Refrain from silly and simplistic condemnations of one side in favor of the other and dispense your venom towards the extremists who reign over both.


Stifle yourself, please

Even then, however, you must explain why you are so concerned with this particular conflict over the many other worthy candidates the world has to offer. Most of these other disputes are equally, if not more, deserving of your outrage. If you are Jewish or Palestinian, or even simply Muslim, your preoccupation with Israel may be justified. If you do not belong to any of these communities and still find yourself furiously pounding your fist over what is happening in Palestine, then a bit of self-reflection may be in order.

Why, for example, do you support the Palestinian cause while ignoring the plight of the Sahrawis, oppressed under Moroccan domination since 1976? Or the Kurds' struggle against Turkey, whose military regimes have brutally crushed their quest for independence? Why are you not similarly enraged at India's occupation of Kashmir? Or Sri Lanka's ham-fisted repression of its ethnic Tamil population? The list of embattled minority groups goes on and on. If you are to persist in your cheerleading for the Palestinians, then you must promote all of these other causes as well - unless, that is, you are unburdened by a desire for logical consistency.

Palestine's armchair activists, when pressed on this point, give a common reply. There is, they admit, nothing special about the injustices endured by the Palestinians. Their anger, they claim, stems instead from the fact that their tax dollars are supporting these injustices by way of the billions America provides each year to Israel in the form of aid.

This argument fails to stand up to scrutiny, however. The US extends similar aid, directly or indirectly, to Turkey, which represses its Kurdish minority; to Colombia, whose military and paramilitaries terrorize rural peasants suspected of sympathizing with the FARC rebels; and to Egypt, which brutalizes, jails, and tortures its own population. Yet when it comes to these other instances, Palestine's Upper West Side crusaders fall strangely silent.

There is, I believe, another explanation for their arbitrary rage. Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories offers up the stark image of rich white people oppressing poor brown people. This pattern harks back to European imperialism in the Third World along with America's own mistreatment of its African-American population. The concept is an easy one for Westerners to digest.

Yet most of the oppression in the world today is perpetrated by poor brown people against other poor brown people - think of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the rest of the Middle East. Unlike white-on-brown injustice, the notion of brown-on-brown repression is too complex for many people in the West to fit into their simplistic moral frames. Aren't the dark-skinned people of the world supposed to live together in harmony and unite against the White Man?

Thus, when it comes to mass rape, mutilation, and murder in Congo, most people in the West just turn away befuddled. But when the Israeli army bulldozes homes in the West Bank, the legions of "progressives" start plastering their Volkswagen Jettas with bold-lettered bumper stickers.

At best, we can chalk up this tendency to ignorance; most people are simply unaware of what's happening in these other places because the media devotes less coverage to them. At worst, however, it is a subtle form of racism. Many of us in the West expect a higher standard of conduct from prosperous white people than we do of impoverished brown people. How else to explain why the Israelis' comparatively light treatment of the Palestinians monopolizes everybody's attention while the bloodletting in Congo barely merits a headline? The total body count in Palestine since the second uprising began in 2000 numbers several thousand. In Congo, five million people have been killed since 1997. Yet when was the last time you heard your aunt, the professor of comparative literature who routinely rants about the Israeli occupation, say anything at all about Congo? Or Zimbabwe? Or Colombia?

If you feel compelled to render judgment, then at least apply some logic in how you apportion it.

Pakistan: The World's Most Dangerous State

Lost amidst the graphic images of this week's stunning terrorist display in Mumbai was a discussion of its origins. If American intelligence is to be believed, the group claiming responsibility is connected to a radical Islamist organization at the forefront of efforts to "liberate" the province of Kashmir from Indian rule. This group has received financing and logistical backing from the notorious Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA.

A closer look at Pakistan reveals a deadly mix of corruption, violence, and lawlessness, the consequences of which extend far beyond the Indian subcontinent. It is, put simply, the world's most dangerous state.


Opportunistic origins
The founding of modern Pakistan can be credited to a whiskey-drinking politician whose late discovery of Islam had more to do with opportunism than conviction. In 1939, the British, who had long been India's colonial masters, were mobilizing international support for their war against the Nazis. Ali Jinnah, head of the local Muslim League, saw an opportunity and threw his weight behind Great Britain while the Indian Congress Party, India's main independence movement, vacillated. In return, he secured British support for an independent Pakistan to be carved out of the Muslim sections of India.

His ambitions were finally realized in 1947, when a war-weary Britain was seeking a quick exit from its overseas imperial burdens. The British convinced Jinnah along with the Congress Party to let the leaders of India's princely states decide for themselves which country to join: India, or the newly-established Pakistan. In most cases, the decision was a foregone conclusion; the Muslim-majority regions to the north joined Pakistan, while the Hindu-majority provinces in the south opted for India.

In one region, however, the decision would prove more complicated. The state of Kashmir had a majority-Muslim population but was ruled by a Hindu prince. His decision to unite the territory with India provoked an invasion by Muslim tribesmen intent on absorbing the province into Pakistan. But the new Indian government mobilized its forces and was able to defend most of Kashmir against the attack, heading off the invading army at what would soon become known as the "Line of Control."

To this day, the Line of Control remains the most dangerous nuclear flash point in the world.


Violence and its advantages
Kashmir is a region of legendary scenic beauty set in the Himalayas. The same mountains that create its picturesque landscape also give it a critical strategic importance. Four times in the past fifty years the conflict over Kashmir has led to war between India and Pakistan - in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999.

Since 1947, however, the bulk of Kashmir's territory and population have remained under India's writ. This is despite the wishes of most of its Muslim inhabitants for independence. India maintains control through the heavy-handed presence of its troops, who have often been accused of mistreating Kashmir's populace. Pakistan, for its part, demands that India allow a plebiscite that would give the people of Kashmir the choice to remain part of India or become independent. India insists that Pakistan withdraw its troops from the Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir before any independence vote is held. With neither side willing to budge, a stalemate has prevailed, albeit one that is perfectly acceptable to India.

Despite the frequent maneuverings of the Pakistani and Indian governments, Kashmir's own population remained relatively docile until 1987. During that year the first independence movement arose in protest against a provincial election that India had blatantly rigged. Within a few years, however, the initiative for an independent Kashmir was hijacked by radical Islamist militants imported from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Saudi Arabia. The jihadists received training and support from the Pakistani government, who sought to use them to undermine India's hold on the province.

One of these groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba ("The Army of the Pure"), is believed to be behind this week's attacks in Mumbai. Its main stated goal is independence for Kashmir. Recently, however, it, along with its backers in Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) , has faced a new obstacle in the form of Pakistan's newly-elected president, Asif Zardari. Zardari, who in September replaced the country's long-serving military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, has gone to great lengths to pursue peace with India, referring to Kashmir's militant jihadists as "terrorists" and taking steps to weaken the ISI.

The worst possible outcome for Lashkar-e-Taiba and the ISI would be a resolution of the Kashmir dispute and a final peace settlement with India. The Indian threat is the primary justification for these organizations' activities, and a lasting peace with India would eliminate the very rationale for their existence. What better way to derail Zardari's peace initiative than to launch a colossal terrorist attack that stokes India's rage against the Kashmiri mlitants and their Pakistani backers?


Lawlessness, corruption and nukes
To account for why Pakistan serves as a launching pad for terrorism and militancy requires one to look well beyond Kashmir. Since its founding as an independent state, Pakistan has endured decades of instability and mismanagement. Periods of thieving civilian rule (1947-58, 1971-77, and 1988-99) have been interspersed with equally long stints of military dictatorship (1958-71, 1977-1988, and 1999-2008). Uniting all these governments has been an enduring proclivity for incompetence and corruption.

What's more, the Pakistani state has historically proved unable to control large parts of its territory. Vast sections of the country continue to exist under the rule of autonomous tribal strongmen. Some of these tribes have provided a haven for Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and other militant groups. So long as these organizations have a base of operations inside Pakistan, they will continue to threaten India, America, and the world.

The dangers posed by Pakistan's feeble and corrupt state would not be nearly as ominous were it not for the country's sizable nuclear weapons arsenal. India first tested a nuclear device in 1974 and Pakistan followed with a successful test of its own in 1998. While India has vowed not to be the first to launch a nuclear attack in a dispute with a foreign state, Pakistan has decidedly refrained from such a promise. Maintaining a first-strike nuclear stance is one of the only ways that Pakistan can offset its clear military disadvantage vis-a-vis its larger and more powerful neighbor.

To make matters worse, Pakistan lacks the robust system of checks and safeguards that most other nuclear powers have in place to prevent an accidental nuclear launch. Combine this with a paranoid, trigger-happy military elite that has a habit of seizing the reins of power and the prospect of a devastating nuclear conflict becomes all the more conceivable.

But a state-to-state nuclear conflagration is not the only scenario the world has to fear from a nuclear-armed Pakistan. A state bureaucracy as corrupt as Pakistan's opens up the real possibility that officials with direct access to the country's nuclear technology might sell it to the highest bidder. In fact, this has already happened. A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, admitted in 2004 to selling vital nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. The notion that well-placed personnel might move actual nuclear weapons onto international black markets is not so far-fetched.

Who else might Pakistan's crooked bureaucrats be selling to?

*For a fascinating introduction to contemporary India, I highly recommend Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India. Several chapters detail the history of the conflict with Pakistan.

The Crisis in Congo - A Primer

The worst humanitarian disaster since WWII remains overshadowed in the media by ones far less severe. Here is everything you need to know.

It was Africa's First World War and it is on the verge of erupting again. Already, an estimated five million people are dead. Another sixty million remain trapped under a corrupt and impotent government that provides no social services to its long-suffering population. All this in a country that possesses one of the world's most fantastic endowments of natural riches - gold, diamonds, copper, and tin, among others.

The conflict, which lasted from 1997 to 2003 and simmers on today, drew the involvement of eight countries. It birthed a dozen armed organizations with such misleading names as the "Congolese Rally for Democracy" and the "Movement for the Liberation of Congo." Congo, formerly called Zaire, today looks much as Europe did 500 years ago. Among the few modern trappings is the rather advanced technology of killing, readily supplied to the combatants by shady arms dealers from Russia and Ukraine.

In the developed West, the individuals who rise to the upper echelons of politics and commerce may not be the best that society has to offer. But they are hardly the worst either. Selfish, manipulative, and narcissistic, perhaps, but most are law-abiding citizens. Society's criminal elements - those who thrive by theft and strong-arming - generally remain on the margins or in prison.

In the countries I've lived in over the past couple of years, the situation is often reversed. Most of those at the top would be in jail if they lived in America, prosecuted for crimes like fraud, bribery, and racketeering. Those who are honest find themselves deliberately sidelined and often imprisoned. Elsewhere in the world too, the kinds of people who hold top positions in politics and business would in the West be incarcerated, though for far more heinous and violent offenses

In Congo, however, it is as if Sing Sing emptied its murderers, armed robbers, and rapists into the gleaming halls of Washington. How could a country come to this point?

The Rwandan genocide

The seeds of the Congolese civil war were set in 1994 in neighboring Rwanda during the genocide of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the "Interahamwe," radical bands of militant Hutus. In the precolonial era, the terms "Tutsi" and "Hutu" denoted class distinctions, not ethnic ones; to be a "Tutsi" merely signified having greater wealth than a "Hutu." This changed in the late 19th century with the arrival of the Belgians, who decided the two groups were different races, one superior and the other inferior. The colonial state bestowed power and privilege on the minority Tutsis, who now ruled as an ethnic aristocracy over the Hutu majority.

The end of colonial rule coincided with periodic ethnic violence as members of the two groups jostled for power, culminating in the 1972 genocide of Hutus by Tutsis. In 1994, the Hutu president of Rwanda was assassinated in mysterious circumstances, prompting Hutu leaders to attempt their own final solution against the Tutsis. The Interahamwe embarked on a massacre. Using the medium of radio, extremist demagogues, later prosecuted for war crimes, called on their Hutu brethren to rape, machete, and burn their Tutsi neighbors to death.

The carnage ended later that year with the seizure of power by a Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame. The Interahamwe were forced to flee into neighboring Zaire along with thousands of Hutu refugees. Yet Kagame and the RPF would not rest until the organizers of the genocide were killed. Zaire's fate had thus been sealed.

Congo/Zaire under Mobutu

Even before the Europeans arrived, the region that would later become Congo had a rich history of exploitation by the powerful. However, King Leopold II of Belgium raised the bar. Author Michela Wrong, a former Financial Times correspondent, aptly describes him as "the only European king to ever personally own an African colony."

Among the tasks he neglected while extracting Congo's riches and repressing its inhabitants was building a functioning state bureaucracy. The feeble government that Belgium bequeathed the country's post-independence rulers in 1960 was wholly unable to fulfill the administrative functions that we in the West take for granted - the collection of taxes, the provision of basic public services, and monopolizing control over the use of force within its borders.

The Belgians left Congo during the height of the Cold War at a time when dozens of countries throughout Africa and Asia were gaining independence from their colonial masters. America, looking to prevent the Soviet Union from winning influence with the new states, was searching out regional allies. Congo, a mineral-rich country the size of Western Europe, was seen as a key pawn in this struggle.

Standing in the way of the US was the democratically elected, left-wing prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who looked to the Soviets for support. To resolve this problem, the CIA in 1961 backed a coup by the military chief, a man named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Lumumba, with America's blessing, was jailed and executed.

Mobutu went on to become one of the most infamous dictators the world has known, notorious less for his brutality, which he dished out generously, than for his sheer venality and astonishing corruption. As part of his "authenticity" campaign designed to bring the country back to its African roots, in 1971 he renamed the country Zaire. He himself adopted the name Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga - more commonly shortened to Mobutu Sese Seko.

While his underlings plundered and decimated Zaire's state institutions, Mobutu was known for packing his family on the Concorde and taking off to Paris for weekend shopping trips. In place of traditional religion, he promoted a doctrine called "Mobutuism," which glorified the visionary thinking of the man himself. The nightly news opened with a depiction of Mobutu's image descending from the heavens.

In an environment where resources were scarce and potential rivals constantly knocking on his door, it was far too dangerous for Mobutu to attempt to rule by relying on Zaire's weak state institutions - the executive, legislature, and bureaucracy. Instead, he put trusted allies and family members in key positions in the army and police. He constantly shuffled ministerial appointments to prevent any one official from building a base of power that could rival his own.

William Reno, one of the most astute Western observers of sub-Saharan Africa, shows how Mobutu systematically maintained personal control over Zaire's economic resources while preventing them from falling into the hands of his opponents. He concluded agreements with multinational mining firms, giving them access to Zaire's immense natural resource deposits in return for billions of dollars in revenue. The vast preponderance of this money was deposited not in the state coffers but rather the foreign bank accounts of Mobutu, his family, and key supporters. By the 1980s Mobutu was personally worth an estimated five billion dollars.

While amassing this wealth, he not only avoided funding Zaire's state agencies but actively undermined them. For the doctors, teachers, and civil servants who staffed these bodies, Reno notes, "could become the nuclei for demands to spend state resources on development...or even mobilize people directly against him." Left to their own devices, the bureaucrats, police officers, and soldiers of Zaire tyrannized the population, extracting any meager tribute that they could from the country's hapless citizens.

Aside from natural resources, Mobutu's other source of funding was the United States government, which during the Cold War granted, either directly or through international institutions like the IMF and World Bank, a total of $8.5 billion to Zaire - or rather, to Mobutu himself.

Had the conflict with the Soviet Union endured, so might have Mobutu. Alas, it did not. With the collapse of the Soviet Union went any incentive America had to continue propping up its African ally. By 1990, US aid to Zaire had dried up entirely. The game was over, though Mobutu managed to stay in power for another seven years. But his sway over Zaire steadily deteriorated, as he could no longer pay off the strongmen he needed to support him.

The civil war
What's more, Mobutu provoked the enmity of his neighbors. He provided money and a territorial base within Zaire to rebel movements from Angola and Uganda, thereby alienating the governments of these countries. Yet his most fateful error was to ally with the Hutu Interahamwe who had organized the Rwandan genocide. Eastern Zaire had a large Tutsi population of its own. When the Interahamwe arrived, local elites saw an opportunity to seize for themselves the landholdings of the local Tutsis and enlisted the Interahamwe's help to do it. Mobutu backed this effort and even stripped the Tutsis of their Zairian citizenship.

For the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, this was the final straw. President Kagame, in alliance with the Ugandan and Angolan militaries, launched an invasion of eastern Zaire. They chose as their local proxy a washed-out Maoist rebel named Laurent Kabila. Kabila, riding towards the capital, Kinshasa, on the back of the foreign armies, swiftly advanced across Zaire's enormous landscape. The dilapidated Zairian army collapsed; it turned out that thieving generals had sold the bulk of the army's military hardware to the rebels prior to the invasion. "To misquote Churchill," writes Wrong, "never in the field of military history had so much territory been captured by so few with such little effort." An ailing Mobutu was forced to flee to Morocco, where he died four months later.

In addition to the foreign powers, notes Reno, Kabila also enjoyed backing from a slew of multinational mining companies who in early 1997 made substantial payments to him, promising more if he managed to take Kinshasa. Once in control of the capital, Kabila renamed the country The Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, he quickly fell out with his foreign allies, and in 1998 issued an order for all foreign armies to leave the territory of Congo. Rwanda and Uganda had little intention of complying and began advancing once again on Kinshasa, this time to oust Kabila. Their bid would have succeeded were it not for the quick intervention on Kabila's behalf of three other regional powers, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Angola. Three more countries, Chad, Libya and Sudan, followed later. The stage was now set for the much longer and brutal second phase of Congo's civil war.

The foreign states were mostly interested in exploiting Congo's mineral resources. Kabila secured Zimbabwe's support by offering exclusive mining concessions to family members and allies of president Robert Mugabe. Namibia received similar benefits. Angola, meanwhile, wanted to prevent its own rebels from gaining control over Congolese diamonds. It also received lucrative contracts to sell its petroleum products in Congo.

Material motivations figured in even for Rwanda and Uganda. They initially intervened to eliminate existential threats to their own statehood (the Hutu Interahamwe for Rwanda, and the Lord's Resistance Army fighting against the Ugandan government). Yet the two allies soon found themselves battling for control of diamond mines around the town of Kisangani. More recently, in 2007, they came to blows around Lake Albert, which is believed to contain significant oil deposits. That said, Rwanda's primary motivation remains the elimination of the Hutu elements in Congo who were responsible for the 1994 genocide.

The peace accords
In 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated and succeeded by his son, Joseph, who immediately set about negotiating a peace agreement with the warring parties. A deal was finally concluded in 2002. It had two main components - for Rwanda, a promise to clamp down on the Hutu genocidaires in eastern Congo and, for the others, lucrative positions in a unified transitional government in Kinshasa. Four vice presidencies were created for the leaders of the main rebel factions, each of whom received $250,000 per month in compensation for what would surely be a job well-done. Others, according to observer Jason Stearns, were granted posts in state companies earning monthly salaries of $20,000. During the next two years, Stearns notes, military officers were found to have embezzled half the payroll of the army and police each month.

The foreign armies that had backed the rebel groups agreed to withdraw their troops from the country. To enforce the peace accords, the United Nations sent in an 18,000-strong peacekeeping contingent. Elections were held in 2006 that saw Joseph Kabila and his party solidify their control.

While peace has returned to most of Congo, large parts remain tense and have occasionally erupted in renewed violence. The main unresolved issue is the continued presence in eastern Congo of organizers of the Rwandan genocide. The Tutsi-led Rwandan government is not likely to cease its interventions until these elements have been liquidated entirely. Yet the Kabila government in Kinshasa has little capacity to comply with Rwanda's demand, whether it wants to or not; its writ in this part of the country is far too feeble.

For this reason, Rwanda continues to support a renegade Tutsi general in eastern Congo named Laurent Nkunda. His Congolese Rally for Democracy has repeatedly sparred with Hutu remnants of the 1994 genocide, who fear annihilation at the hands of their Tutsi rivals. Nkunda's troops have terrorized the local population as well and are responsible for the latest displacement of up to one million people from around the town of Goma. Most of these refugees have been reduced to living in makeshift camps and are on the verge of starvation.

The UN peacekeepers who are supposed to prevent such episodes have proved adept at avoiding confrontations with the rebels. Incompetent, anxious, and wary of suffering any casualties, their conduct resembles that of 18,000 Woody Allens in the heat of battle.

Even in those parts of the country that are mostly peaceful, the primary instruments of Congolese politics remain personal control over economic resources and the use of force. This was illustrated in 2006 when Kabila's presidential guard clashed in the capital with armed contingents loyal to his vice-president, who was forced to flee abroad as a result. Until this fundamental dynamic changes, Congo will continue to be ruled by criminals and thugs instead of that less unsavory type of politician to which we in the West are accustomed. And the suffering of Congo's people will endure.

A Portrait of the World in 2018

America's Great Retreat

Will there be war? There is much disagreement on the prospect. What everyone does agree on is that, if war comes, America will not participate. A destabilizing conflict between China and Japan can only heap more misfortune on the US economy, having already shriveled to sixty percent of its previous size.

The great Panic of 2008-2009 spared few countries. Among the hardest hit was the United States. The near-absolute drying up of bank lending unleashed a wave of insolvencies that penetrated every sector of the economy. America experienced the worst economic slump in its history, exceeding even that of the Great Depression.

The US financial system now exists entirely under the ownership of the Treasury and Federal Reserve. This places finance in the same league as national security as a government-provided public good. The third and final bank bailout, this time to the tune of $1.2 trillion, left the federal government stuck with loads of assets that nobody else had the stomach to buy.

It was at this point that President Obama proposed a comprehensive solution. Inspired by Roosevelt's New Deal, it was to involve massive, government-sponsored public works projects to stimulate investment and growth. The program would be called "The Audacity of Hope," after the title of Obama's autobiography. It soon emerged that the government was to pay him royalties for the rights to the phrase.

Before Congress even had a chance to consider it, however, the capital markets staged a revolt. The mere announcement of the gargantuan initiative sent yields on US Treasuries into the stratosphere. Overnight, the government's cost of borrowing skyrocketed from 14 to 35 percent, forcing the program's complete abandonment. It turned out that all the money the Treasury had spent bailing out the financial institutions had left it unable to finance a viable recovery plan for the broader economy.

Obama was duly ousted in 2012. His replacement was Cleetus Jenks, a plain-talking country singer and town mayor from Tennessee. His first move in office was to extend the ban on short-selling and long-buying to cover "sideways glancin'." This brought trading on the New York Stock Exchange to a complete halt, as nobody could figure out what the new policy actually entailed. He went on to abolish the Fed, loot the Treasury, and fire up the printing presses to finance his bizarre initiatives. Most of these involved NASCAR in some form or another. With inflation at 40 percent and gold pushing $22,000 an ounce, voters returned Obama to power in 2016 under the slogan of "boundaries." Jenks now sits in a federal prison.

Obama's second presidency was to bring more misery upon Americans. Fiscal necessity, heightened severely by the economic crisis, dictated a drastic reduction in Social Security and Medicare provisions. For many seniors, the added financial burden proved too difficult to bear, pushing masses of retirees to move in with their children.

One unanticipated consequence was the return of the credit-default swap (CDS), an esoteric financial derivative whose blowup in 2009 cemented America's final descent into the economic abyss. As more and more seniors shacked up with their kids, financial entrepreneurs began selling CDS to help people offload this risk onto those more willing to shoulder it. In return for a premium, the CDS seller would offer to take the buyer's parents into his or her own home in the case of a "move-in event."

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan praised the new derivatives for "effectively spreading risk from those with large short-term obligations to those with diffuse long-term liabilities, or no liabilities at all."

The drastic curtailment of entitlements followed a long series of similarly momentous spending cuts initiated under the first Obama administration. Of these measures, the most far-reaching was the withdrawal of US troops from all military outposts around the globe. The consequences were disastrous, not least in Asia, where Japan was now left on its own to fend off a rapidly rising China.

Few in America expected the resulting wave of paranoia that was to spread across Japan. The Liberal Democratic Party, having governed the country for the previous seven decades, was unable to present a viable solution. Swept away on the back of mass anti-government protests, the Liberal Democratic era gave way to that of the fascist Forward Japan Party. The FJP summarily dispensed with the constitution and jailed the political establishment. It then deployed the country's immense foreign currency reserves toward a massive military build-up, propelling Japan out of its 23-year economic slumber and forever shaking the world's geopolitical map.

It was not long before Forward Japan abandoned the pacifist foreign policy of the preceding decades. Its first act was to create and finance a rebel group that ousted the rapidly decaying North Korean regime following the third and final death of Kim Jong-il. This prompted China to step in and back remnants of the Korean People's Army in an attempt to undermine the new government, spiraling the country into a calamitous civil war.

North Korea's collapse has prompted many to ponder the whereabouts of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons arsenal.

The Korean civil conflict was only the first in a series of proxy wars between Japan and China. Their rapid economic growth has placed renewed pressure on the world's natural resources, leading the two Asian powers to finance rival warlord factions in several oil-producing states. The "energy wars" have brought devastation to Venezuela, Angola, and Saudi Arabia, where intense fighting over oil wells has created frightening refugee flows into neighboring countries.

The new geopolitical environment has thrust Russia, with its vast oil and gas reserves, into the role of kingmaker. To the surprise of many, the Putin-Medvedev partnership has endured. Putin, known derisively to the public by his new nickname, "Sani Abacha," spreads the Kremlin's plentiful oil revenues around the country's corrupt and venal elite. He has secured his alliance with president Medvedev by engineering the government takeover of Lukoil, Russia's last privately-owned energy conglomerate, and selling it to the president's brother-in-law in exchange for a half-eaten Chicken McNugget.

If the shocking effects of America's Great Retreat in Asia came as a surprise to many, no less dramatic were its consequences for the Middle East. The Obama administration's first foreign policy move, of course, was to hastily withdraw all US forces from the region. To be sure, the intensifying economic crisis left Obama with few other options. The aftermath in Iraq, however, was horrifying. The halting progress it had made since the "surge" now disintegrated into a vicious three-way civil war. Opposing factions backed by Syria, Iran, and Turkey clashed violently, plundering, raping, maiming, and killing in their pursuit of Iraq's oil wealth.

The unspeakable atrocities committed by all sides eventually triggered a popular backlash against the three foreign powers and their domestic clients. Having transparently cloaked their naked quest for riches in extreme religious ideologies, the warlords unwittingly laid the foundation for a new movement espousing a secular, pan-Iraqi nationalism. Formed mostly by Shias, it brought under its universal umbrella many Sunnis and Kurds as well. Its ability to inspire mass support and recruit committed volunteers enabled it to gradually expel the warlords and their foreign backers. As it did so, the new ruling party consolidated its authority across ever-larger swathes of the country, bringing with it stability and economic modernization. Iraq had finally gotten its Ataturk.

Inspired by the Iraqi example, a similar movement sprung up in neighboring Iran. The pampered and privileged Islamist elite under the Ayatollah Brezhnev soon found itself under siege, its authority limited to a rapidly diminishing island around Tehran. Accelerating its demise was a series of newspaper exposés detailing the full extent of top officials' involvement in the trafficking of Afghan opium.

Afghanistan, for its part, witnessed the rapid advance on Kabul of the Taliban following America's withdrawal. From Kabul the Islamists descended on Pakistan, where years of economic collapse had left its previously imposing army decimated by mutinies. The Afghan Taliban was able to rely on the help of its Pakistani counterpart to briefly take control of the capital, Islamabad, before being ousted by a China-backed coalition of army officers. The country's substantial nuclear arsenal is assumed to have disappeared onto the international black market.

Halfway across the world in Europe, things are looking better, but gloomy still. Europeans' widespread gloating at America's misfortunes ended with a severe depression of their own, prompting a backlash against dark-skinned immigrants from North Africa and Turkey. Frightening pogrom-style attacks ensued in Austria and Denmark. Across the continent, radical nationalist parties were swept to power. One by one, they pulled their countries out of the Euro mechanism and re-adopted their own national currencies. This prompted a wave of competitive currency devaluations from country to country, bringing Europe back to the brink of 1920s-style hyperinflation.

On paper, the single European market still exists. In substance, it is all but dead. Governments responded to the financial crisis with massive bailouts of loss-making national "champions" and, later, of smaller firms. The European Union is now little more than a collection of protectionist fiefdoms. This time, however, there will be no Great War; Europeans, fortunately, have become too lazy to fight each other.

Like Europe, Latin America did not manage to avoid the financial contagion. New debt and currency crises befell Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, wiping out the middle classes that had emerged there over the preceding two decades. With them went the democratic regimes that depended on these middle classes for support.

In Zimbabwe, the good news is that Mugabe is finally dead. The bad news is that his defiant corpse has vigorously rebuffed all attempts to remove him from his chair in the National Security Council meeting room.

Israel has extended to its logical conclusion its policy of walling itself in from the Palestinian territories by erecting a roof over top of itself connecting the walls. It has been nicknamed "the Jafrodome."

Al-Qaeda broke up following bin-Laden's insistence that the group change its name to "Osama and the al-Qaedans." He went on to launch a solo career releasing more threatening videos.

But something, alas, is stirring in America. A group of PhD dropouts from Berkeley trying to engineer an ever-more potent strain of marijuana stumbled upon a cheap source of renewable energy. They have already secured a patent along with backing from venture capitalists, and the project is set to go into mass production. If the new technology succeeds, it will require scores of industrial-made products to be redesigned and manufactured anew to utilize the new energy source. Demand from Asia is set to explode. America may be back yet.

Some Hard Truths About You and Your Money

Edges and anti-edges in the markets

The reader must forgive me for devoting three entries in a row to the financial markets. It was my intention when creating this blog to present essays on a wider range of topics, from Pakistan and Iran to the future of American power. But these are extraordinary times. And they call for an extraordinary response, not least from irrelevant bloggers.

As I write this, the markets have just closed in New York. Last week's breathtaking decline puts the S&P 500 43 percent off its peak a year ago. This places the current slump within striking distance of the second and third worst bear markets of all time, set respectively from 2000 to 2002 and 1973 to 1974.

Now is thus as good a time as ever to draw your attention to some basic market realities. Of course, they constitute the truth "as I see it." You are free to disagree. But most of these ideas are regarded as self-evident among successful traders. And they are principles you must be aware of if you are to avoid severe damage to your savings and an impoverished retirement.

Brace yourself; for most of you, what follows is not going to be pleasant to read.

Truth #1: Only a small minority of market participants can consistently make money over the long run. This is the essence of market speculation; ultimately, it rewards the few and punishes the many. If it were really that easy, you would see a lot more multi-millionaires walking around.

Truth #2: As soon as you buy a stock, commodity, or any other financial instrument, you are entering into competition against thousands of professionals. What is your edge? "Incidentally," notes famed market chronicler Jack Schwager, "if you don't know what your edge is, you don't have one."

In most markets, you can only make money by taking it away from other participants. These other participants are trying equally hard to take your money away from you. You must ask yourself what, exactly, your advantage is over the legions of large trading firms that staff hundreds of specialists equipped with proprietary software.

Truth #3: Buy-and-hold is not an edge. Let me repeat that: buy-and-hold is not an edge. This, of course, is contrary to what the financial industry tells you. If they are to be believed, you can profit over the long run by purchasing a "diversified" basket of stocks and bonds and holding them until retirement. Alternatively, you can follow the same strategy by buying into a mutual fund, which itself buys and holds any number of stocks, and "letting the magic of compounding turbo-charge your wealth."

The buy-and-hold concept is problematic for a number of reasons. First, as has become all too evident in the current crisis, plenty of the stocks you own may fall to zero while you're holding them. Second, there is no such thing as a diversified basket of stocks. In a bear market, they all tank together.

An even more serious problem is that the buy-and-hold philosophy is based on a myth. It is simply not true that stocks always go up over the long-run. Victor Sperandeo, a well-known stock trader, notes that if you bought stocks at any time between 1896 and 1932, you would have lost money by 1932. This is a 36-year period in which a buy-and-hold strategy failed.

However, you might object, that was a different era. The stock market has surely matured since then. No, it hasn't. If you bought at any time between 1962 and 1974, you would have lost money. By August 1982 the Dow Jones average was at the exact same level as it was in 1967. But the ravages of inflation over that period meant that a dollar invested in 1967 would have been worth a lot less fifteen years later. Currently, the S&P 500 is at approximately the same level as it was ten years ago.

Even in periods where buy-and-hold does work, such as 1982-1999, most people have a hard time sticking to the approach. Our natural inclinations lead us to buy at the highs, when hysteria is at its peak, and get out at the dead lows, as panic envelops the markets. As a result, people's actual performance in such periods tends to fall well below the opportunities the markets present.

This past week, the stock market plummeted to levels not seen since 2003. And it may still have a ways to go. Will the next 20 years be more like the 80s and 90s, or more like the 60s and 70s? Who knows? If you're buying and holding, however, you are leaving it to chance.

If you want to learn more about the often disappointing returns the stock market has offered buy-and-hold investors over the last 100-odd years, read Ed Easterling's sobering empirical study, Unexpected Returns.


Your anti-edge
If you are like most investors, you do not have any kind of edge that would allow you to grow your funds over time. What, then, does constitute an edge? There are many, and few of them are rocket science. An example would be systematically buying stocks that are going up and selling stocks that are going down. This is called trend-following, and it is a well-known strategy employed by many of the world's most successful traders. Another edge is to sell strength and buy weakness. This is counter-trend trading, the opposite of trend-following. Used wisely, it can produce plenty of profits.

To put these strategies into practice, you must surely render them more specific than the way they are outlined here. The point, however, is that they are actual strategies, made up of rules applied consistently across similar opportunities. This stands in contrast to trading on your whim, the method preferred by the masses.

Truth #4: Most people do not simply lack an edge. They possess any number of what might be termed anti-edges. That is, you are wired, by virtue of experience, beliefs, and genetics, to lose money in the markets. Here are some of the most common anti-edges.

Being human. Four decades of experimental research in behavioral finance has demonstrated, time and again, that we as humans are built to hemorrhage money in the markets. The golden rule of trading, as you may have heard before, is to cut your losses short and let your profits run. That is, if you are in a losing investment, sell it, and if your investment is making money, keep holding it. Our brains, unfortunately, are wired to do the opposite. As popularly disseminated as this finding is, it does not seem to be heeded; most people who encounter it believe it applies to everyone but themselves.

The reason that cutting losses and riding profits works is precisely the fact that it is psychologically difficult to do. As a result, most people cannot follow this maxim. If most people are not doing it, then the few who are will profit from it. This follows logically from Truth #1: it is the essence of markets to reward the few and punish the many.

Perhaps this is why studies have found that brain-damaged patients outperform individuals with normally functioning brains in financial investments. If you have brain damage, you are probably acting contrary to the majority of market participants. This is likely to help you profit.

If everybody suddenly started cutting their losses short and letting profits run, the optimal strategy would be to let your losses run and cut your profits short. But I don't expect that to happen anytime soon.

Investing on the basis of your common sense. If human nature leads you to make the wrong financial decisions, it does so by acting on your common sense. "Hey, everybody's wearing white headphones. I think I'll buy Apple." By the time you figure this out, chances are that others have too, and the opportunity is gone.

A better strategy might be the following. Post the Wall Street Journal stock listings to the wall, throw 50 darts at it, and buy the stocks the darts land on. Sell a stock if it drops 20% below your purchase price or, if the trade is profitable, exit it after three months. Why might this be an edge? Precisely because you are not making decisions in line with what human nature - and your resulting common sense - is telling you to do.

Possessing a graduate degree. In the financial markets, having a PhD can put you at a disadvantage. The same is true for a degree in law, medicine, or dentistry. People with advanced degrees are fodder for predatory brokers and financial advisers who flatter your intelligence in pursuit of commissions and fees ("you're a sophisticated investor; you deserve a solution that meets your demanding needs").

If you have one of these degrees, you are prone to believe you are more intelligent than most people. Even if you are, this has nothing to do with making money in the markets. The problem with intelligent people is that they have trouble admitting when they're wrong. As such, they are likely to hold onto plummeting investments until, finally, in a state of panic and dejection, they are forced to sell.

Having an MBA is even worse. For it spawns people who are not only intelligent but who consider themselves particularly shrewd when it comes to trading and investing. Most all executives of the Wall Street institutions that recently collapsed had MBAs.

I do not mean to say that everybody with an MBA is unsuited to market speculation. Many MBAs are smart, prudent risk managers and successful investors. I am instead referring to those people who believe they are better investors because they have an MBA. These are the ones who may one day find themselves on the wrong end of a bankruptcy receiver.

Being an avid reader of The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is a tremendous newspaper. That does not mean you should use it to make investment decisions. Like a graduate degree, reading a financial newspaper on a regular basis can lead people to the erroneous conclusion that they are savvy investors. By the time it is in the newspaper, the opportunity is gone.

Watching a 24-hour news network, especially CNBC. These networks are toxic waste for your financial decision-making. The people who appear on CNBC are there because of their velvety voices and sound-bite sensibilities, not because of any higher power to offer profitable advice. Turn it off!

Investing on the basis of tips. A tip refers not only to a "hot" stock idea from a friend but also any advice from a broker or financial adviser about what to buy. If your financial adviser actually had good investment ideas, why would he give them to you? Why would he be working as a financial adviser in the first place? Good traders trade. They do not seek employment as financial advisers.

Investing on the basis of market history. This method is a little more sophisticated than tip-taking. It involves looking at past history, assuming the future will be like the past, and making trading decisions accordingly. An example: "National real estate prices have never gone down. Therefore, they will never go down." This was the belief of traders and executives in many Wall Street institutions that are no longer with us. In the markets, things that have never happened before happen all the time. (For more on this, see my previous post, "Financial Market Chaos Explained.")

Handing your funds to a "money-manager" such as a mutual fund. The problem with mutual funds is that they follow a buy-and-hold strategy. If the stock market doesn't go anywhere for the next 15 years, chances are any money you place with a money manager won't either.

Investing without any background in statistics and probability. If you intend to speculate, you need to have a basic grasp of such concepts as standard deviation, expectancy, and probability distribution. If you don't understand them, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage to those who do.

Investing with too much background in statistics and probability. Be careful. Many conventional statistical methods are downright dangerous when applied to the markets (again, see "Financial Market Chaos Explained"). If, in your studies, you ever come across the word "normal distribution," run.

Not having a preconceived exit point. This is perhaps the most hazardous anti-edge. When you buy a stock, or any other investment, and you have not already specified the conditions under which you will sell it, you are setting yourself up for disaster. Note that the decision about when to exit must be made before the trade is entered. Otherwise, you end up having to make on-the-fly judgments in the midst of battle, when your irrational human emotions are at their peak. You must actually have two exits - one in the event that your investment loses money, and another for taking profits.

Most people do indeed use exits. Two of them are particularly popular. The first is to sell when you need the money. Of course, you must hope the investment is still profitable by the time you reach that point. The other method is to wait until the value of the investment goes to zero. This is the exit type that comes most naturally to the majority of people; at least you don't have to pay any capital-gains taxes afterward.


Is there an easy answer?
The good news is that most all of the anti-edges boil down to your beliefs. Do you believe you can invest successfully using your own common sense? Do you believe you are more intelligent than most people, and that this gives you an edge in the marketplace? Do you believe you can consistently find profitable investment opportunities by reading a financial newspaper every day? All you really have to do is change your beliefs. If you manage to do that, you just may have a chance.

The bad news is that finding a real edge that is right for you can take a lot of work. And applying this edge successfully over a long period of time often requires a degree of psychological introspection with which many people are uncomfortable.

Just remember this: if you do choose to put your money anywhere besides US Treasuries, you have now joined the ranks of the speculators. And you had better learn what you are doing. A great place to start would be Market Wizards and The New Market Wizards by Jack Schwager. They are a fascinating series of extended interviews with top traders. If nothing in these two books really grabs you, then you probably have no business in this business.

There are many other good books out there that touch on important aspects of trading strategy development, trading psychology, and building a trading business. Among the best I've encountered are The Psychology of Trading and Enhancing Trader Performance by Brett Steenbarger; Mastering the Trade by John Carter; Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom and The Definitive Guide to Position-Sizing by Van Tharp; Way of the Turtle by Curtis Faith; The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Strategies by Robert Pardo; The Complete Guide to Building a Trading Business by Paul King; Technical Traders Guide to Computer Analysis of the Futures Markets by LeBeau and Lucas; Winner Take All by William Gallacher; Smarter Trading by Perry Kaufman; Trading for a Living by Alexander Elder; Street Smarts by Connors and Raschke; and Evidence-Based Technical Analysis by David Aronson. I also highly recommend the numerous home trading courses offered by Van Tharp's International Institute of Trading Mastery.

I am personally skeptical that you can make money consistently by adopting someone else's strategy and putting little work into the process yourself. If it is possible, then the only reliable place I know of where you might find an answer is Tharp's book, Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom, along with his weekly newsletter. His focus, like that of all the authors listed above, is not on giving tips but rather following an established set of rules for when to buy and sell. Check it out for yourself.

If you do not take the time to learn what you are doing, you are setting yourself up for frustration and failure. You are better off sticking your cash under a mattress.