Professor Elam

(separate interview)

 

Hostess:  Jim, Wall Street is saying Mr.
Geithner’s plan is a bomb.  What do
you think?

 

Rogers:  Well, Mr. Geithner has been bombing for
fifteen years.  Mr. Geithner caused
this problem.  Mr. Geithner has
been head of the New York Fed for several years.  That was the office that was supposed to be symbolizing Wall
Street and the banking system.  He
caused the problem…and all last year, he came up with TARP…he came up with
these absurd bailouts.  Mr.
Geithner has never known what he’s doing. 
And pretty soon everybody’s going to find out including Mr. Obama.

 

Hostess:  How do you assign value to all these
toxic assets…?

 

Rogers:  All right, the way you do this is you
do what America told Japan to do in the nineties.  You let them go bankrupt.  You clean out the system.  You wipe out everybody out who is insolvent, and the solvent
people take over and start over. 
In the 1990s Mr. Greenspan went to Japan and said, “You’re doing it
wrong.  You’ve got to let people go
bankrupt.  You’ve got to clean out
the system.”  The Japanese didn’t
do it.  They continued to prop up
zombie companies and zombie banks, and they still talk about the lost
decade.  Mr. Geithner was
supposedly in Japan in the 1990s. 
You know what he said the other day?  I almost fell on the floor.  He said, “The Japanese didn’t spend enough money.”  Balderdash, the Japanese did nothing
but spend money, and at the same time they refused to clean out the banking
system.  America is making exactly
the same mistake.  The politicians
are making it worse, not better. 
You know why?  They want to
support their friends on Wall Street, so they can all keep their Masaretis or
Ferraries, or whatever they’re driving.

 

Lorie:  Jim, let me get in here with
something.  There are no bad
banks…they’re not coming out with…

 

Rogers:  What do you mean no bad banks?  They’re not letting people fail…and
what the Swedish did…they said, “OK, put your bad assets over here, keep the
good assets here, then we start over, and those of you who still have some good
assets can revive.  The Swedes at
lease did that.  But the idea that
the US government is going to buy these toxic assets…whose going to set the
price, Lorie?  Either the banks
are, and they’re going to set it too high and the taxpayers are going to lose
out, or they’re going to set it too low and it’s not going to work.  It never has worked.  This approach has never worked, Lorie.

 

Lorie:  But to play the devil’s advocate, we
could go ahead without the bad banks, and let some of these banks fail.

 

Rogers:  Who?  Who are they going to let fail?  I haven’t seen anything…They put out 350 billion dollars last
year, and they all continued to pay their dividends, and their bonuses.  Who failed?  You don’t fail when you continue to pay out dividends or
bonuses with the government’s money.

 

Lorie:  Jim, you
probably heard Bill Gross’s commentary this morning which said, unless we get
more government funding, we’re in for a second wave of a global crisis.  He began drawing up a term
“mini-depression” as a risk.

 

Rogers:  If we do get more money we’re going to
have a depression.  Mr. Gross has got it exactly wrong.  It doesn’t do any good to take money
from over here…either print, borrow or tax…and put money over here.  Of course the guys over here love it
that you are doing that, but it weakens the whole system.  It has never worked.  Go back and look at what has worked in
history.  Look at what South Korea
did, or Russia or Mexico.  The
countries that took their pain…it was horrible pain for a year or two, but then
they came out of it, and every one of those countries became rapidly growing,
sound economies for several years. 
The countries which did it our way never came out of it until a long,
long time later, if ever.  I’m just
telling you what has happened and what hasn’t happened, and what has worked in
the past, and what hasn’t worked.

 

Lorie:  Don’t mince words, Jim, don’t beat
around the bush.  What did you want
to hear from Geithner yesterday?

 

Rogers:  I would have loved for Mr. Geithner to
have said, “Listen, guys, we’re in a serious problem.  We didn’t cause the problem…”  Actually he did cause the problem.  Mr. Obama could have said, “To make up for a lot of excesses
over the last ten years, the people are going to suffer…we have umbrellas, we
have safety nets.  We will do our
best to help all of you who are affected by all of this, but it’s going to be
tough for a couple of years.  Don’t
worry, America will come out of this in the end if we increase our savings, if
we increase our investments, everything will be fine.  But,what they did was come out and say, “Look we have a
horrible problem of too much debt and too much consumption and too much
borrowing.  You know what we’re
going to do?  We’re going to go
deeper into debt and consume more.

 

Lorie:  Are you making money here?

 

Rogers:  Am I making money here?  I’m selling short here again.  I covered most of my shorts back in the
fall, but I’ve been shorting again because I can see these guys don’t know what
they’re doing.

 

Lorie:  Shorting what?

 

Rogers:  IBM, GE, JP Morgan…you know, same old
companies

 

Lorie:  Jim, thanks for your time.  Always fun talking to you.  Thanks for your insight.