According to Bloomberg, Yellen is obama’s pick for spot under fed chief, bernanke. shewrote a bunch on unemployment and is at least married to economist I respect a lot. “She and her husband, George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, have written more than a dozen papers that included studies on unemployment, wages, street gangs and out-of-wedlock births.” More on who she will come out.
On March 12, 2010, In The Public, By Tiffiniy Cheng
On March 12, 2010, In The Public, By Joe Costello
The question I have for the folks at PIMCO is what sort of haircut would you find acceptable?
Bill Gross’ partner at PIMCO, Mohammed El-Erian has a piece in the FT which should be read. It provokes thought, and most important, this is the voice of the bond kingdom. They are united in one thing, the debt they hold is made good. After all, that is how the game works, but I’d suggest the bond kingdom has some responsibility for the ocean of garbage debt the world has been flooded with over the past couple decades, thus a responsibility beyond recommendations on how to insure they’re paid.
Mr. El-Erain states, and he’s right, the Panic of 2008 created a sea change, and no one really yet understands what this means. He suggests:
Today, we should all be paying attention to a new theme: the simultaneous and significant deterioration in the public finances of many advanced economies. At present this is being viewed primarily – and excessively – through the narrow prism of Greece. Down the road, it will be recognised for what it is: a significant regime shift in advanced economies with consequential and long-lasting effects.
He then adds:
The shock to public finances is undermining the analytical relevance of conventional classifications. Consider the old notion of a big divide between advanced and emerging economies. A growing number of the former now have significantly poorer economic and financial prospects, and greater vulnerabilities, than a growing number of the latter.
These ideas are important for several reasons. First, this isn’t a situation that developed in the last two years. It has taken several decades to get here. Second, what Mr. El-Erian is describing is the process of corporate globalization, specifically, its impact on older industrial economies. The win-win-win notion of corporate globalization has always been the most vile of propaganda. 6.5 billion people on this planet cannot live like 300 million uber-consumptive Americans. It is physically impossible.
Over the past decades, growth in the “developing” world has in many instances been at the cost of the “developed” world. This fact has been literally papered-over with debt. The United States is the best and shiniest example of the creation of historic levels of pubic and private debt to obscure the impact of corporate globalization. Of course, it’s important to understand this corporate model was built atop a five-centuries old model of European/American global domination. If you have any sense of fairness, that situation could not be defended. You cannot, except at the point of a gun, ask the vast majority of people in the world to be economically subservient to the few.
Mr El-Erian points out it’s ridiculous to look at the global economy and suggest one size fits all. The old industrial nations of Europe, the US, and Japan do not need the kind of growth of China, India, Africa, or Brazil. At the same time, the model of modernity of the United States and to a lesser extent Europe is simply not transferable to the other six billion people on this planet. We all need to rethink how and for what our economies function.
Mr. El-Erian writes the world is birthing a new era:
We should expect (rather than be surprised by) damaging recognition lags in both the public and private sectors. Playbooks are not readily available when it comes to new systemic themes. This leads many to revert to backward-looking analytical models, the thrust of which is essentially to assume away the relevance of the new systemic phenomena.
I couldn’t be in more agreement. The question is what are these new “systemic phenomena. Mr. El-Erain then writes:
Here, history suggests that it is not easy for companies and governments to overcome the tyranny of backward-looking internal commitments.
Compare this to what Keynes wrote in his Treatise on Money:
I think it is desirable that the obligations arising out of past borrowing, of which National Debts are the most important, should, as time goes on, gradually command less and less of human effort and of the results of human effort; that progress should loosen the grip of the dead hand; that the dead hand should not be allowed to grasp the fruits of improvement long after the live body which once directed it has passed away.
Compare both with Thomas Jefferson’s thinking on the matter in a letter to James Madison:
The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another…is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government…I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self evident, “_that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living_;” that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.
The received opinion, (is) the public debts of one generation devolve on the next. …but between society and society, or generation and generation there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.
But with respect to future debts; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years? And that all future contracts shall be deemed void as to what shall remain unpaid at the end of 19 years from their date? This would put the lenders, and the borrowers also, on their guard. By reducing too the faculty of borrowing within its natural limits, it would bridle the spirit of war, to which too free a course has been procured by the inattention of money lenders to this law of nature, that succeeding generations are not responsible for the preceding.
It is quite incorrigible for one generation to bind the next with their debts. As Mr. El-Erian suggests, we are in a new era, it would be despicable via massive debt to chain it to the past. We need to destruct a great deal of this debt, and it must be done to free the future. The future must be allowed to find their own way. The dead hand of the past through gross negligence has lost moral, and, one can add, fiscal authority.
Finally, Voxeu has an argument(tx yves) for not just accepting the debt, but piling more on. The author writes:
In the UK between 1918 and 1932 debt increased from 121% of GNP to 191%. It was not until 1960 that debt returned to its 1918 level.
Proving once again, economists for the most part do not make good historians. Besides a few years in the 1920s, the British economy over most of that period was awful. You want to propose the first fifteen years of post-WWII Britain as an economic model to aspire? No thanks! As far as how economies deal with debt, a much better model might be the Germans in the 1920s. Leaving aside the always popularly noted couple years of hyper-inflation, the debt crippled the economy for well over a decade and half, creating one of the greatest reactionary tragedies of human history. As Jefferson noted, national debt and war go hand in hand. We don’t need stagnation or war, we need to revitalize our economy, but it needs to be a vastly different model than the past fifty years.
So, what say you Mr. Gross and Mr. El-Erian? How about a little public service? Explain what sort of haircut you’d be willing to take to help right the ships of state on this sea of change we all are embarking.
Cross-posted from Archein: on debt and a new world
On March 10, 2010, In The Public, By Tiffiniy Cheng
The Raging Grannies were followed around yesterday by a BBC reporter because of their stealth ATM Teeth activism. It’s really exciitng to see. They also made a video of it and also created this video that we hope will get you to put up some teeth on an ATM near you too. If you like the video, send it to friends who need to break up with their big banks.
By the way, some banks are turning their overdraft fee scheme into a new kind of scheme where they charge 120% on short-term loans. Not sure what that means, except that there is no way that big banks are going to give up $15 billion in revenue that goes to pay for bonuses without refashioning it and slipping it under your nose as something else, according to Bloomberg.
This is a well-done video worth sharing:
The report from The Grannies, cross-posted from the Indy bay:
A respected international news source caught wind of the Raging Grannies’ stealth action and followed them to the Grannies’ latest “hit”.
Grannies say: Break up that abusive relationship with your bank! Change to a local or regional bank and cut up that Big Bank credit card.Visit Bankbreakup.org for detailed instructions on exactly how to do it!Keep in touch with the Grannies via their website, Raging Grannies.com and find out more about their stealth actions on their blog.Song: Tune: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
We need a new way forward
big banks just get in the way
Don’t let the banks abuse you
Move your money out today!
Song for Big Banks (tune: It’s Off to Work we Go from Snow White movie)
Hi-ho, hi-ho
It’s off to jail you go!
You got us into one big mess
Confess, confess!
Shirley accompanied Granny singing with her ukeInterviewing the Grannies by E. Wentworth. Other photos courtesy E. Wentworth.
On March 10, 2010, In The Public, By Joe Costello
I tried but I could not find a way
Looking back all I did was look away
Next time is the best time we all know
But if there is no next time where to go?
– RM
The first rule of bubbleology is, you don’t know when they will pop, and in fact, they can expand a lot longer than you think. Or as Mr. Keynes said, markets can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent. The second rule of bubbleology is — bubbles always pop. In the last year, we’ve watched as “man of the year” Mr Bernanke flooded the world with liquidity and it has had an impact, most importantly “inflating” global currency markets, what that means over time, well, we’ll see. Doug Noland is a bubbleologist extraordinaire, he writes at the Asia Times:
The markets’ perception of “too big to fail” has for years been an integral facet of bubble dynamics. And despite all the talk of trying to rid the marketplace of this notion, the markets remain more persuaded than ever: the unfolding global government finance bubble is much too gigantic for policymakers to risk letting it come anywhere close to failing.
So, the real question is how long policymakers can keep things afloat. In the end, that depends on the real economy, and looking at that has become a Rorschach test, unless you’re unemployed, it just looks one way, pretty shitty. It certainly seems deflationary trends are fairly entrenched. The most recent inventory numbers in the US show they remain down a whopping 10% from last year. While the FT reports regulators are telling US banks to hold onto their money “until political and economic uncertainty surrounding the industry dissipates.”
Over in Europe, the roulette wheel turns to see which sovereign debt problem makes it to the front page next — Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Brits, or back on red with the Greeks once more? Ed Harrison has good piece on the not looking too good European economy. Can everyone really export and devalue their way out of this mess?
There is one bright spot and that is Asia. And China is moving, but where? The problem with command and control economies is they push on the thing that is working, until it doesn’t work anymore, and then there’s great problems. The FT reports the Chinese are indeed exporting and certainly from last year’s cratered numbers things look better, but in the last paragraph the FT notes:
The “new export orders” component of China’s official PMI fell from 53.2 in January to 50.3 in February, while the import component dropped from 53.4 to 49.1. The PMI readings are forward looking and a level above 50 indicates expansion while a level below 50 indicates contraction.
On March 9, 2010, In The Public, By Joe Costello
Ain’t that a kick in a head.
– Dean “Dino” Martin
The FT has an Op/Ed by Dino Kos about shorting(betting against) US Treasuries. Mr. Kos asks, “Should traders and investors short the US Treasury market?” He briefly lays out the pro-case, but then spends the rest of the article making the con-case, concluding the time’s not yet right, at least as Dino states in “the medium term.” And for Dino, the medium term is the “next several quarters.” Webster defines several as, “more than two but fewer than many.” So, lets say Dino’s giving us three or four quarters, Phew, being able to rely on stable money for only three or four quarters ain’t much of a way to run a railroad, or country for that matter, nonetheless.
So why does Dino, get to speculate on US creditworthiness in the FT? Well, he worked for the Fed, the Reserve Bank of New York no less. In fact, his resume shows he went to work for the Fed in 1985, that would be right before the Fed’s salad days and the splendorous papal reign of Mr. Greenspan. Dino’s bio shows a curios timing, he left the Fed in the summer of ‘07, right when things began to get interesting. When he left, Dino was the Executive Vice President of the Market Groups with “responsibility for all the trading activity of the Federal Reserve including repo, government securities, foreign exchange and foreign reserves management.” Upon his hiring in ‘07, Morgan Stanley stated, “Dino’s extensive experience in this market, combined with his proven leadership abilities, will enable him to make a significant contribution to the growth of our business as we further develop our Central Bank and Sovereign Wealth Fund capabilities.”
Now today, Dino opines on US creditworthiness and the dollar, one would certainly want to know what his thoughts on the matter were in 2007. Did he flee the Fed cause he was worried about the future workload? Remember, when Dino left the Fed their balance sheet was at $800 billion, a little over a year later it would be over two-trillion! Since Dino left, they’ve been some trading S-O-Bs down there at the Fed. Or was he just leaving in that grand American Wall Street tradition of cashing in on his years of public service? Whatever the case, his tenure at MS wasn’t long and now he’s an analysis at Portales Partners, which doesn’t seem as heady as Managing Director and Head of Central Banks and Sovereign Wealth Funds at Morgan Stanley.
I don’t mean to be picking on Dino personally here, he’s probably a swell guy, but we need to understand the background of the folks out there these days putting the dollar and other global currencies into play. How do you run a country in any long term capacity if you can’t have stable money supply? We’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq for almost ten years now, how do you run a war if you can’t rely on stable money? Or better, how do you build energy or transportation infrastructure? How do you listen to a guy who was at the Fed when policies were predominately for the overwhelming benefit of quarterly Wall Street profits, undermining the long term sustainability of the American economy?
The bubble is in the global currency system now, and we will hear a lot more about the unsustainable fiscal and monetary policies of the US from people, who in some cases, benefited greatly from creating the mess, and now advise how to profit on the growing instability. As the other Dino sang, “Tell me quick, aint that a kick in the head.”
Cross-posted from Archein.
On March 9, 2010, In The Public, By Joe Costello
John Authers has a nice little piece at the FT marking the 10th Anniversary of NASDAQ peak, yahoo, or should I say pets.com, those were the days. Authers shows the charts on how when a bubble pops, it’s many years before things recover. For example, ten years on, the NASDAQ has barely and briefly seen half its high, while the Japanese Nikkei is just above a quarter of the value it reached at its peak 20 years ago. Don’t count on seeing any new housing highs for a very long time.
Authers makes a most important point on leverage, it is a serious aspect of many bubbles, and nothing helps leverage like low interest rates. Mr. Bernanke has done everything he can and the results of what he’s done, they won’t be good, will take years to play out. Auther’s writes:
The past decade was driven by leveraged investors. Those low interest rates made it far cheaper for investors such as hedge funds to magnify their returns with leverage. Thus they came to drive the market.
They were helped by another artefact of the dotcom crash. Mutual funds (and the portfolios of the new breed of day traders) crashed with the Nasdaq. Hedge funds, able to sell short and to switch between asset classes, were able to make money during the years of the dotcom bust. That in turn attracted huge new flows from institutions, who are as prone to chase performance as anyone else.
As a result, many of the technical and leverage-driven strategies used by hedge funds, and by banks’ proprietary trading operations, became top-heavy. Far too much money was thrown at structured credit investments, or at emerging markets’ currencies.
We all now know the consequences. A decade on, they are the consequences of the Nasdaq boom.
At some point, we’re going to have to reboot the monetary system.
Cross-posted from Archein.
On March 9, 2010, In The Public, By Tiffiniy Cheng
Our rallying cry from the very beginning was Nationalize, Reorganize, Decentralize. Nationalize meant to let the big banks fail if they were bankrupt anyway and put them into a process of Reorganizing, wiping out the CEO’s that got them into the mess and sell off the chunks in the market. Decentralize is keep the big banks small so they can’t take over the country’s economy and political system again.
Citigroup may be doing the Reorganize part.
REORGANIZE:
Last week, Citigroup announced they would break up Citigroup by selling 40% of the company and cut off a good chunk of their risk taking.
The chief executive of Citigroup told a government panel on Thursday that no financial institution should be too big to fail and that he was aggressively moving to break up the bank and rein in excessive risk-taking.
“We are selling 40 percent of the company,” Vikram S. Pandit said to the Congressional Oversight Panel, which is monitoring the use of federal bailout money. “We are breaking it up.”Mr. Pandit used his testimony on Thursday to try to blunt criticism from committee members who held up Citigroup as the quintessential too-big-to-fail bank. The members also suggested that a government guarantee implied by the bailouts might encourage the bank to make imprudent bets.
In more than two hours before the five-member committee, Mr. Pandit sought to convince the committee that Citigroup had broken with its troubled past. “This is a different company,” he said. “You can count on me. You can count on my management. You can count on the board to manage this institution prudently.”
AIG is expected to do the same, and sell parts of themselves.
Taxpayer-controlled American International Group (AIG) said Monday it will sell its Asian life insurance business to British insurer Prudential Plc. (PUK) for about $35.5 billion in a move that will help AIG pay down the roughly $180 billion it owes the U.S. government.
AIG will receive $25 billion in cash and $10.5 billion in new shares and securities from Prudential for the sale of American International Assurance Group, considered the company’s crown jewel Asia. AIG is already expected to sell its American Life Insurance Co. unit to MetLife (MET) for as much as $50 billion, half of which has already been earmarked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
AIG was the single biggest recipient of federal bailout funds in September 2008, as a liquidity crisis threatened the sprawling insurer with collapse. Since then, it has needed additional financial backstopping from U.S. taxpayers, adding nearly $100 billion in potential commitments to the initial $85 billion bill; the government now owns nearly 80% of the company. The sale of the AIA business will help AIG pay back the U.S. more quickly, the company said.
“In considering two viable, very attractive alternatives to successfully monetize AIA, including an initial public offering, we decided that a sale to Prudential enables AIG to realize value on a faster track to repay U.S. taxpayers,” said CEO Bob Benmosche in a statement. “This transaction, the most significant milestone to date in our ongoing effort to repay taxpayers, also gives us greater flexibility to move forward with AIG’s restructuring.”
One small step closer to DECENTRALIZE:
Citigroup is selling off its risky investment side, and gets close to suggesting that all bank holding companies should be made to do so too.
In his testimony, Mr. Pandit advocated tougher federal supervision and called for broader powers to allow for the orderly unwinding of large financial companies that fail. Banks, he added, should not use their capital for speculative trading.
“I do believe that banks should be banks,” Mr. Pandit said, stopping short of endorsing the so-called Volcker Rule, which would bar companies that accept customer deposits from sponsoring hedge funds, private equity funds or engaging in proprietary trading. Citigroup has been trying to sell many of its remaining alternative investment funds, and has disbanded certain proprietary trading units amid heavy regulatory pressure.
The small elite may not want to publicly recognize that they failed and were insolvent, but the more we realize it, the closer we’ll get to reorganizing and decentralizing the industry. I’ve been reading 13 Bankers by Johnson and Kwak and it’s a pretty interesting read so far. It’s pretty clear that we can have a decentralized banking system that not only helps to lead to innovation and entrepeneurism, but also feeds and fulfills masses of people. First, Citi needs to see that they were too big and did fail.
Mr. Pandit, in an uncomfortable moment when C-Span’s cameras caught him grinning, asserted that Citigroup was “healthy” when it sought a second bailout in November 2008. He said Citigroup’s stock collapsed under pressure from short-sellers — not bad assets — although he eventually acknowledged that the bank’s weak financial position made it a target.
Despite near perfect recollection of most other events, Mr. Pandit said he did not recall if he had spoken to Treasury officials or other federal regulators regarding the second rescue.
The testimony left Damon A. Silvers, a committee member who is special counsel to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., incredulous. “Your memory seems pretty good to me otherwise,” he told Mr. Pandit.
Under similarly harsh questioning, Mr. Allison went to great lengths to avoid saying that Citigroup would have failed without receiving assistance. But he eventually conceded that Citigroup was in such fragile shape in November 2008 that bank executives feared “they could have difficulty funding themselves” as their borrowing costs soared and investor confidence evaporated. He said that Citigroup management had notified federal officials that “they were facing a serious situation.”
Mr. Allison’s remarks came after a frosty exchange with Mr. Silvers, who suggested that he also had not adequately responded to questions about Citigroup’s collapse. “I don’t understand why the U.S. government can’t admit what everyone in the world knows: that during that week Citigroup was a failing institution,” Mr. Silvers said.
On March 9, 2010, In The Public, By Tiffiniy Cheng
Change happens slowly sometimes, especially when there is a healthcare proposal in Congress.
Robert Reich makes a point I’d like to highlight: “Bailing out the financial system, but not bailing out schools in financial trouble because of the crisis, is unconscionable.” This kind of thinking takes some time to produce, though some of us, including Reich have been saying it for some time. Our collective conscious is there already, but many of our friends and family wouldn’t know how to put it in words. Much of our job is about helping people to put into words the injustices and issues they already know.
Fordham University is hosting the first ever Too-big-to-fail and Break Them Up conference, called “Breaking up the Banks? New Ideas for Limiting Bank Size”. We have a new kind of concentrated power to deal with, this conference is a culmination of a year’s work of many people who have pushed to break up the big banks and address the issues the big financial institutions pose to society and the economy. Major influences for this conference come from Simon Johnson, Zephyr and Shawn Bayern, and the work that ANWF organizers have done here. Zephyr is a good friend, advisor, policy person, and organizer to A New Way Forward and now conference convener. We’re grateful to all the stuff she has done in the past year to make breaking up the banks that much more possible, including bringing the world of anti-trust into the prescient issue of too-big-to-fail. This is a paradigm shift in anti-trust, which once only meant trustbusting to make sure sure consumers got the best price. Now, it means that and the securing a safe financial system, and hopefully, the securing of real democratic structures. If you’re interested in going, you can RSVp and get a free meal. I’ll be there, as well ad Donny Shaw of ANWF.
Location:Fordham Law School, Lowenstein Building, 12th Floor
Time:8:30AM Friday, March 12th
On March 9, 2010, In The Public, By Tiffiniy Cheng
Heidi Montag, reality TV star, star on The HIll and someone who once made magazine spreads through her 10 plastic surgery operations.
“Heidi Montag speaks out about the horrors of having to pay for plastic surgery with a credit card. … Watch videos about heidi montag, the hills, heidi, speidi, spencer pratt, plastic surgery, credit ..”
She’s saying no to plastic, or rather this video is about Plastic on Plastic. She does a public service through Funny or Die.
On March 8, 2010, In The Public, By Joe Costello
The result has been a massive transfer of wealth, with its centerpiece the greatest theft from the public purse in history. This campaign has been far too consistent and calculated to brand it with the traditional label, “spin”. This manipulation of public perception can only be called propaganda. Only when we, the public, are able to call the underlying realities by their proper names—extortion, capture, looting, propaganda—can we begin to root them out. — Yves Smith, Econned
When we dropped political from economy, we made a grave and what might prove fatal error. We made the republic subservient to mega—corporations and allowed the dominance of crackpot pop-economic theories to trample over the millenia-old hard won wisdom of self-government. For example, how many economic theories have been written on the importance of the First Amendment’s freedom of the press to the vitality of the American political economy — not many, if even one?
Yet, a vigorous free press is essential to every aspect of American prosperity. So, as our newspapers folded and consolidated and our broadcast media became handmaidens to corporate power, we witnessed a tremendous decline in journalism, particularly investigative journalism, which had a long and important tradition in this republic’s vitality. The mother of investigative journalism, particularly concerning corporate power, is Ida Tarbell, who a century ago wrote, The History of the Standard Oil Company, documenting the manipulations, thefts, grafts, and other criminal activities of John D. Rockefeller and his cohorts in their monopolization of the oil industry.While we have lost the great tradition of a hearty journalism in our old media, it is rising again across the new medium of the Internet, and it has been utilized in helping shed light on the underlying scandal of the financial crisis. In the tradition of hard hitting, no bullshit investigation, Yves Smith has written Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.
Econned is the story of how our financial system has become a mass ruse, allowing Wall Street and the largest banks to become predatory, treating their clients as lambs to be fleeced and fatted calves to be slaughtered. It is the story of how a very small group of people gained complete control over the American, and much of the global economy, driving it into the ground, then walking away with trillions of more dollars, while the economy remains on life-support.
How did this happen? Econned tells the story, starting with the greatest problem of contemporary economics, an economics stripped of politics, so it might pretend to be a science. Smith goes through the litany chanted by our economic priesthood for the past several decades – efficient market theory, free markets, and mathematically modeling the future – the equivalent of economic hokum that allowed Wall Street and the banks to dismantle New Deal regulations which kept their worst abuses in check for a half-century.
Once establishing the intellectual foundations, Smith explains the great scaffolding of fraud erected on top of it. She documents the roles of Bankers Trust, Salomon Brothers, JP Morgan, Citi and others as they “innovated” their way out of regulation and into their clients’ pockets with derivatives, securitization, and other “efficiencies.” All along, right beside them, stood our elected officials and regulators, such as Fed Chiefs Greenspan and Bernanke, Treasury Secretaries Baker, Rubin, Summers, and Paulson, SEC chiefs, congresspeople, and presidents — all co-conspirators.
In the final third of the book, Smith details the pinnacle of the great con and how it all came crashing down. Then, the government stepped in to help an orderly looting of the public purse worth trillions of dollars and counting, thus insuring a crippled economy for many years to come.
Econned is an excellent read and needs to be read by all. It is the story of a criminal class, who have separated themselves from the majority to seek their own profits. It is the story of how our political economy is broken. In the end, it is a call to the American people, in the great tradition of this republic, to step-up and fix it. Yves Smith is a citizen and patriot, she deserves our gratitude.
Cross-posted Econned
A List of Resources
ANWF HOMEImportant Blogs
Archein
Bailout Analysis: Economic Policy Institute
- S&P Says TALF Putting CMBS Market on the Road to Recovery January 29, 2010 afuller
- Democrats get mixed budget office views on TARP January 29, 2010 afuller
- Treasury Streamlines Its Mortgage Program January 29, 2010 afuller
- Small businesses leery of Obama's jobs plan January 29, 2010 afuller