Erika Eichelberger

Reporting Fellow

Erika Eichelberger is a reporting fellow in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She has also written for The Nation, The Brooklyn Rail, and TomDispatch. Email her at eeichelberger [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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Sorry, There's Been No Economic Recovery for Poor and Minority Households

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri May. 31, 2013 8:17 AM PDT

Zaretska Olga/Shutterstock

There has been lots of cheery news about the economic recovery lately. A new report out Thursday from the Federal Reserve puts that in check. American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth they lost during the recession, according to the study. And most of the wealth that has been recovered went to rich white people.

"A conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified," says the report. "Most families have recovered much less than the average amount."

The financial crisis destroyed some $16 trillion in household wealth. Americans have only recovered 45 percent of that amount, according to the Fed report. But when you break down that wealth recovery by income level, it gets worse. The Fed estimates that 62 percent of that wealth people have regained since the depths of the recession has come in the form of higher stock prices. And 80 percent of stock wealth is held by people in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. "Recent gains in the stock market mean that the recovery of wealth is nearly complete for white and Asian households and older Americans," Ylan Mui reported at the Washington Post Thursday.

But many families have not experienced any recovery at all, and some are still losing wealth, William Emmons, chief economist at the St. Louis Fed’s Center for Household Financial Stability, told the Post. "The families that lost homes are not the families making money off stocks," Mui notes. Though the number of foreclosures has dropped off a lot, it is still more than double what it was pre-crisis.

The report found that the most vulnerable households tended to be either relatively young and/or black or Hispanic, and not well-educated. Those families had low savings and high debt and had gained most of their wealth through their homes.

It gets worse. Because the housing market is improving overall, there is less of an incentive for the government to push any new measures to help underwater homeowners. Prominent economists say that allowing initiatives that would reduce borrowers' loan principle balances is the single most important thing the administration could do to help the Americans who lost all that home wealth. But for more than a year, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees the government-backed home-loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, blocked initiatives that would have done just that. President Barack Obama has nominated a new FHFA director, but as a report released Friday by the Progressive Policy Institute notes, it might be too late: "US housing markets have come roaring back to life, and while that's great news, it has probably closed the window for principal reduction."

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Banks Are Doing Better Than Ever. The Middle Class, Not So Much.

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu May. 30, 2013 7:44 AM PDT

The nation's banks are reporting record profits, according to new numbers out Wednesday from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Most of the rest of us aren't faring quite so well.

Bank profits topped $40.3 billion in the first three months of the year, according to the FDIC, attesting to a strong recovery... in the banking sector. "The banks are back," Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told the Washington Post Wednesday. "Only four years after the banking system was literally looking into the abyss, it is highly profitable again." The biggest banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup, accounted for most of the industry's profits. Here's what that looks like, via the Post:

The wider economy hasn't shared the banking sector's return to prosperity. Yes, the unemployment rate has dropped a little. Consumer confidence is up. The housing market is healthier. But the current share of the population that is employed is still well below what it was before the recession. Here is a chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The housing market hasn't bounced back at the same pace as bank profits, either. As Derek Thompson pointed out at The Atlantic earlier this year, overall business investment is growing, but companies are still reluctant to invest in housing. Here is what that looks like—the red curve is residential housing investment; the blue curve is non-housing investment:

The new FDIC numbers also show that loan balances at banks shrunk in the first three months of the year. As Isaac Boltansky, a banking analyst with Compass Point Research and Trading, told the Post, that's "a sign that the broader economy still has room for improvement." Indeed.

Obamacare Is Forcing Cuts to High-End Health Plans, and Not Just For the Rich

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Tue May. 28, 2013 9:23 AM PDT

Obamacare—a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act—is forcing employers to cut back on high-end health plans. And this doesn't just affect rich people. Many middle-income workers with high-quality plans are seeing a reduction in benefits and higher costs too, according to the New York Times.

One provision of President Obama's historic healthcare law, dubbed the Cadillac Tax, penalizes companies that offer extremely generous healthcare plans to their employees. If an employer offers a plan that costs more than $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family, the employer will be forced to pay a 40 percent tax on the portion of the plan cost that exceeds those thresholds. The idea, as the Times reports, is to "encourage employers to move away from plans that insulate workers from the cost of care and often lead to excessive procedures and tests, and galvanize employers to try to control ever-increasing medical costs."

In order to avoid the Cadillac tax, which goes into effect in 2018, employers are already searching for ways to scale back on costs, including cutting health benefits and increasing plan prices. (Employers are also amping up spending on preventive care services, which is a good thing.) And as Bradley Herring, a health economist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Times, these health plan changes will likely affect a lot of people, not just the well-off; up to 75 percent of plans could be affected by the tax over the next ten years. "The reality is it is going to hit more and more people over time," he says.

One of those people affected is Abbey Bruce, a nursing assistant in Washington state whose employer increased the costs of the plan that she and her husband, who has cystic fibrosis, rely on. The Times tells her story:

Starting this year, they have a combined deductible of $2,300, compared with just $500 before. And while she was eligible for a $1,400 hospital contribution to a savings account linked to the plan, the couple is now responsible for $6,600 a year in medical expenses, in contrast to a $3,000 limit on medical bills and $2,000 limit on pharmacy costs last year. She has had to drop out of school and take on additional jobs to pay for her husband's medicine.

The number of employers adjusting their plans because of the Cadillac tax has increased from 11 percent in 2011 to 17 percent this year, the Times reports. And the amount that employer plans require workers to pay as a deductible—the amount an insured person has to pay out of pocket for healthcare costs before the insurer will pay—has jumped. The number of workers in plans with deductibles of at least $2,000 doubled between 2009 and 2012 to 14 percent.

Even before Obamacare became law, health plan costs for workers had been rising for years. Some worry that the Cadillac tax will just be used as an excuse to bump up costs even more. Tom Leibfried, a legislative director for the labor federation AFL-CIO, one of the unions whose plans will be hit by the tax, says "We’re very concerned about the hollowing out of benefits in general. What the [Cadillac] tax will do is just fuel that."

See How Citigroup Wrote a Bill So It Could Get a Bailout

Citigroup lobbyists drafted a bill to allow more risky dealings by taxpayer-backed banks and—what do you know?—the House financial services committee passed nearly identical legislation.

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri May. 24, 2013 10:19 AM PDT

RedDaxLuma/Shutterstock

On Friday, the New York Times reported on the front page that Citigroup drafted most of a House bill that would allow banks to engage in risky trades backed by a potential taxpayer-funded bailout. The Times notes that "Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill." Special-interest lobbyists often play a role in writing legislation on the Hill, but such sausage-making is rarely revealed to the public. In this instance, members of Congress and a band of lobbyists have been caught red-handed, and Mother Jones has obtained the Citigroup draft that is practically identical to the House bill. As you can see in the side-by-side comparison below, the lobbyists for Citigroup really earned their pay on this job.

The bill, called the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act, was approved by the House financial services committee in May and is headed for a vote on the House floor soon. It would gut a section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called the "push-out rule." Banks hate the push-out rule, which is scheduled to go into effect on July 13, because this provision will forbid them from trading certain derivatives (which are complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates). Under this rule, banks will have to move these risky trades into separate non-bank affiliates that aren't insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive government bailouts. The bill would smother the push-out rule in its crib by permitting banks to use government-insured deposits to bet on a wider range of these risky derivatives.

Here is the key section of the legislation that Citigroup cooked up compared to the same section of the final bill:

The bill is sponsored by Republican and Democratic members—Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.), Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Richard Hudson (R-NC), and Sean Patrick Mahoney (D-NY)—and its passage would be great news for Citi and other financial titans. Five banks—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. "The big banks support [the bill] because it means that they'll get to keep the public subsidy"—FDIC insurance and the implicit promise of a taxpayer bailout—"to their derivatives-dealing business," explains Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial Reform.

The origins of the Citigroup proposal date back to 2011, when several large banks fought to repeal the push-out rule entirely. When it became clear that full repeal couldn't pass, Citigroup pitched an alternative: allow banks to use FDIC-insured money to bet on almost anything they wanted. It proposed letting banks keep most types of derivatives trading in-house, requiring only that derivatives based on certain pools of assets, such as mortgages, be moved into separate entities. Citigroup was not able to get the measure passed before the end of the last Congress, but its allies on Capitol Hill reintroduced it this year.

Citi's move to expand the types of derivatives it can trade comes as banks have increasingly been shifting derivatives out of their investment banking divisions (which aren't backed by FDIC insurance) and into taxpayer-backed entities. "The rule is needed more than ever," says Mike Konczal, an expert on financial reform at the Roosevelt Institute. The financial services committee passed the Citi-written bill on a 53-to-6 vote; all the no votes came from Democrats.

This is certainly not the first time that the financial industry has shaped financial reform laws for Congress. Citigroup was a central player in the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era law called the Glass-Steagall Act that forced banks not to engage in investment activities. Its lobbyists flooded Capitol Hill for that fight. "Citigroup was of course the bank that administered the coup de grace to Glass-Steagall," says Stanley.

Citigroup's drafting of the anti-push-out measure fits into "a long history of things being written by industry—and that generally has not worked out very well," says Konczal. "This is very bad news."

See how the Citigroup proposal allows more risky dealings by taxpayer-backed banks:

Expert: Congress Shouldn't Listen to Apple's Tax Plan

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri May. 24, 2013 7:54 AM PDT

The revelation that Apple used a web of baroque tax strategies to legally pay little to no taxes on tens of billions of dollars it earned overseas has re-ignited the debate over reforming the US tax code. But the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) warned this week against proposals pushed by Apple and other large multinational corporations that would reduce taxes on offshore profits in order to encourage companies to bring that money back home.

Offshore profits are currently taxed at the same rate as onshore profits: 35 percent. Big US corporations have lobbied aggressively for the United States to shift to what is called a territorial tax system, in which foreign profits would be subject to low or no US taxes. The idea was a cornerstone of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic platform last year. Now, Apple CEO Tim Cook is calling for a single-digit tax rate on overseas profits, as well as a reduction of the overall US corporate tax rate to the mid-20s.

Chuck Marr, the director of federal tax policy at the CBPP, explains that such a system would only make overseas profit-making more attractive—and that would weaken the US economy:

Multinational companies like Apple currently have a strong incentive to defer US corporate taxes by shifting and keeping profits overseas… [A] territorial system would create greater incentives for those companies to invest and book profits overseas rather than at home—and that, in turn, risks reducing wages at home by encouraging investment to flow overseas, increasing budget deficits by draining revenues from the corporate income tax, or raising taxes on smaller companies and domestic businesses to offset the revenue loss.

Democrats and trade unions agree, arguing that the United States should move in the other direction and tax foreign profits in the years they are made. They contend this would stem the corporate practice of deferring tax payments until the cash is brought back to the United States.

"We are dismantling vital government services because we don’t have revenue to support them," Damon Silvers, the policy director of the AFL-CIO told the Financial Times earlier this week. "And we have one of the most profitable corporations in the world [Apple] stashing $100 billion in [low-tax] jurisdictions."

Other high-tech companies are increasingly shifting profit-making overseas. The revelations about Apple's shenanigans—which apparently are legal—have drawn attention to similar behavior by many high-tech firms, including Google, HP, and Microsoft. "These [tax] incentives are creating unfair advantages for multinationals and draining much-needed tax revenue," says Marr. "The president and Congress should resist the lobbying campaign and instead focus on reducing the incentive to shift profits and operations overseas."