Tag: economics

It’s not just scientists convinced of the universal superiority of their method who are deluded. Tim Price cites an amusing example of the extraordinary arrogance of economists:

“Most economists, it seems, believe strongly in their own superior intelligence and take themselves far too seriously. In his open letter of 22 July 2001 to Joseph Stiglitz, Kenneth Rogoff identified this problem. “One of my favourite stories from that era is a lunch with you and our former colleague, Carl Shapiro, at which the two of you started discussing whether Paul Volcker merited your vote for a tenured appointment at Princeton. At one point, you turned to me and said, “Ken, you used to work for Volcker at the Fed. Tell me, is he really smart ?” I responded something to the effect of, “Well, he was arguably the greatest Federal Reserve Chairman of the twentieth century.” To which you replied, “But is he smart like us?”

The thing is, most economists are extremely intelligent, particularly the more influential ones. One of the remarkable things about Rothbard’s history of economic thought is the way most – not some, most – of the significant economic theoreticians prior to the academic professionalization of the field had extremely successful careers in business, politics, or the Church. And their theoretical influence in most cases cannot be a considered a consequence of their societal success, because their theoretical writings tended to precede their obtainment of societally significant positions. The publications were, in fact, not infrequently the reason for their appointment to such positions.

The ironic thing is that the credentialization of the field has tended to reduce the power and influence of even the most intelligent economists, dumb down the general consensus, and permit the elevation of the less gifted at the expense of the more talented. One could not go so far as to say that Mises and Rothbard wasted their many decades in an unappreciative academy, given their massive literary output, but they were certainly far less materially influential than the economic theoreticians of yore who were elected to Parliament, handed control of monopolies like the East India Company, appointed Controller General of Finances by foreign countries, or given a royal charter to establish a central bank.

Now, one cannot read the heavily credentialed Paul Krugman on a regular basis without noticing that his arrogance is not supported by the intelligence of his political commentary, the accuracy of his economic predictions, or even the breadth of his theoretical knowledge. The decline of economics is especially apparent when one realizes that many of his arguments were anticipated and rebutted by men like John Locke in the 17th century.

Locke superbly put his finger on the supposed function of the Mint: to maintain the currency as purely a definition, or standard of weight of silver; any debasement, any change of standards, would be as arbitrary, fraudulent, and unjust as the government’s changing the definition of a foot or a yard. Locke put it dramatically: ‘one may as rationally hope to lengthen a foot by dividing it into fifteen parts instead of twelve, and calling them inches…’.

“Furthermore, government, the supported guarantor of contracts, thereby leads in contract-breaking: The reason why it should not be changed is this: because the public authority is guarantee for the performance of all legal contracts. But men are absolved from the performance of their legal contracts, if the quantity of silver under settled and legal denominations be altered… the landlord here and creditor are each defrauded of twenty percent of what they contracted for and is their due…”

This is precisely what Karl Denninger keeps banging on about at the Market Ticker when he points out how the Federal Reserve’s low inflation targets are in blatant contradiction to their charter to maintain price stability. As for Walras, whose neoclassical general-equilibrium theory is still in the process of being methodically dismantled and rubbished along with other classical fossils such as Ricardian free trade theory, the flaws in his perspective were presaged in Richard Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, published in 1730.

There is no question that economists are highly intelligent. It requires a high degree of intelligence in order to produce such a vast and convincing body of literature rationalizing politically useful concepts that have been known to be false for more than 300 years.

You may recall that as I’ve been tracking the debt sectors over the last few years, I have also been repeatedly warning that the federal government would not be able to indefinitely substitute public debt for the contraction in private debt. The gamble that the federal government could fill in the credit gap until private credit began to grow again was a high-risk one that was always likely to fail. The latest Z1 figures, reported yesterday, show that the gamble appears to be in the process of failing; consider the comparison of the growth rates of the largest debt sector, the financial, with the federal sector over the last six quarters:

Federal
+6.12% +4.16% +4.52% +4.08% +2.77% +0.96%

Financial
-4.40% -1.57% -1.99% -1.38% -0.93% -2.08%

This shows that the $4.5 trillion increase in federal debt is now slowing down while the $3.3 trillion decrease in financial debt is beginning to pick up speed again, precisely as I have been predicting. The state and local governments are shedding debt for the first time as well, being down -0.81% and -0.78% in the first two quarters of 2011. The household sector is officially down only $610 billion (4.4%) from the peak, but this is not an accurate number due to the gap between formal defaults and the very large number of informal defaults that have not yet been registered on the books of the mortgage banks.

These unreported defaults are the main reason most of the big banks stocks are trading at half their reported asset values. Everyone knows that somewhere between 35% and 60% of those paper assets no longer have any value. The net is that while total credit market debt outstanding is only down $280 billion from the Q1-2009 peak, the composition of that debt continues to change and there is a credit gap of $16.5 trillion from where the previous 2% average quarterly credit growth would have indicated.

When all these factors are taken together, it amounts to a strong indication are that the economy and the financial system are rapidly approaching another crash in the third and fourth quarters of 2011. There are, of course, other reasons to expect one, such as Greek two-year bonds being at 66.4% compared to 9.5% one year ago. But the Z1 report alone is sufficient to show that something wicked this way comes.

SH emails to alert us to a magazine cover:

No doubt you have already been alerted to the cover of the US Sept 10-16th edition of the Economist. Is there a closet admirer at the Economist?

I had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out that the current cover of the Economist bears a certain resemblance to an economics book written by some random guy. Coincidence or harbinger of economic apocalypse? You decide.

And speaking of economic apocalypses, I note that Greek two-year bonds are now pushing 60%. That would appear to indicate default before the end of the month. Better check your bank’s exposure to European sovereign debt.

Obama’s attempt to address unemployment and the economic contraction can best be described as “quixotic”. Another apt adjective would be “doomed”:

The White House scrambled Monday to finalize a new jobs initiative as President Obama nominated the last member of the economic team that will be charged with carrying it out. In tapping Alan Krueger, a Princeton University professor and noted labor expert, to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Obama turned to an economist who officials said was well suited to guide the White House through a jobs crisis…. Obama’s nomination of Krueger would largely reconstitute the economic policy team inside the Treasury Department during the first two years of the administration. At the time, Krueger served as Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s top economic adviser. His work overlapped with that of Gene Sperling, who was a top adviser on budget and tax issues.

The Krueger appointment only makes sense, given that Obama’s economic policy team did such an effective job in 2009 and 2010, avoiding the Second Great Depression and subsequently producing seven straight quarters of economic recovery, right? Let’s look at the elements of the proposed plan:

1. a tax cut that would directly reward companies for hiring new workers

The big companies already have billions parked in offshore accounts. The tax cut won’t be big enough to balance the risk and additional expenses that new hires impose on small companies. Conclusion: irrelevant, but at least it won’t cost anything.

2. new spending for environmentally friendly construction and for rehabilitating schools

This is just more of the same Samuelsonian stimulus, but not so much that the demand for labor it will create can’t be met by the existing construction labor force that is already half-idle due to the collapse in the real estate markets. Conclusion: this will increase federal debt and create no new employment.

3. clean-energy tax cuts.

Actual tax cuts will do nothing. I’m guessing these are actually subsidies disguised as tax credits. Conclusion: More federal debt, more malinvestment, no new employment.

4. programs to target long-term unemployment, potentially including a version of a Georgia unemployment insurance program that pays employers to hire workers who have been unemployed and provides funding for training.

Theoretically more useful, depending upon the industry. Serious employer-provided training could be a genuinely positive long-term boost to employment if it was combined with import tariffs in manufacturing industries, especially if tighter immigration restrictions were imposed as well. But since neither trade restrictions nor immigration restrictions will be incorporated and the training will probably be oriented towards low-skill service industry jobs, all of the subsidized positions will disappear as soon as the subsidies do. Conclusion: expensive and irrelevant. A 2012 Census would have the same effect and likely prove more useful.

5. new programs to lift the housing market, such as a refinancing initiative that could pump tens of billions of dollars into the economy.

Conclusion: This is the Bank of America bailout signaled by Warren Buffet’s investment. I suspect the plan will somehow involve shifting household debt to the federal sector and thereby attempting to encourage homeowners to take on more debt. This might involve something like a federal guarantee for X amount of debt with administration-approved banks in return for every XY amount of new debt borrowed from BACthose banks. The Fed and the administration are desperate to get the household sector borrowing again since the trillions in financial sector debt they ate in 2008 didn’t even slow down the decline in financial borrowing. Conclusion: if large enough, it would trigger a short term spending and employment boost combined with another debt-deflation disaster within three years.

6. renewing — and potentially expanding — ongoing efforts, such as a two-percentage-point cut in the payroll tax.

Trivial. They’ll have to eliminate it for at least a five year period for this to have any effect on unemployment.

This doesn’t even include the plan to extend “emergency” unemployment benefits, which will tend to increase the unemployment rate. The only way the Obama administration is going to reduce the unemployment rate is to continue the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s practice of artificially lowering the labor force participation rate to keep U3 below 10 percent. Of course, the continued decline in the Employment-Population Ratio to pre-1953 levels will expose this predictable shenanigan.

This promises an amount of amusement, as Sam Harris has unaccountably decided to dabble in economics:

I’ve written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of “wealth redistribution” that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance.

Sam is off to a bad and overly politicized start. First, Sam simply has it wrong as there is very little conviction that all taxes are intrinsically evil, since most of those opposing the income tax have no problem with a flat tax, sales taxes, or excise taxes. No one expects the government to do without any funding at all, it is the amount of funding required that is at issue. Thus, it is not an issue of taxation, but rather one of government spending. Harris also gets the Tea Party wrong, as it is a rebel force within the Republican Party that is primarily opposed to the pro-spending Republican establishment and is focused on unseating certain types of Republicans during the nomination phase rather than electing Republicans in the general elections. This should be obvious, as the Tea Party began in opposition to a Republican administration, not a Democratic one.

Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing.

Warren Buffett is a corrupt old bag of shit. He steals from the American people with the connivance of the Wall Street bankers, the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration. Witness his little deals with Goldman Sachs and now Bank of America. To point to Buffett as any sort of moral examplary indicates that Harris has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Buffett is the poster boy for how government creates the very income inequality that bothers Harris so.

Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft—and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment.

How is taking money from others utilizing the threat of violence not a form of theft? It is true that not all rich people become rich by creating value, of course. Some inherit it, but more often these days, they do so through government-enabled gambling and government corruption.

Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don’t have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don’t create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy.

Like, for example, Warren Buffett. Buffett creates nothing, neither do the financial institutions, which presently skim off around 30 percent of all the corporate profit in the USA.

Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent’s, parent’s, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn’t an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money.

But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others. But there is nothing to prevent the ultra rich from cooking all their meals at home, using vegetables grown in their own gardens, and investing the majority of their assets in China.

And the inevitable atheist tendency towards totalitarianism finally shows through. Rich people aren’t “allowed to keep money”. They have it. It’s theirs. As in, not yours, Sam. This is called the principle of private property, and upon it all the wealth of the Western world is founded. Or rather, was founded before it was turned into collateral in a ponzi scheme.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the two richest men in the United States, each have around $50 billion. Let’s put this number in perspective: They each have a thousand times the amount of money you would have if you were a movie star who had managed to save $50 million over the course of a very successful career. Think of every actor you can name or even dimly recognize, including the rare few who have banked hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years, and run this highlight reel back half a century. Gates and Buffet each have more personal wealth than all of these glamorous men and women—from Bogart and Bacall to Pitt and Jolie—combined.

In fact, there are people who rank far below Gates and Buffet in net worth, who still make several million dollars a day, every day of the year, and have throughout the current recession.

Some people have more money than others. Big deal. I don’t see Sam handing over his royalties to the poor. If he’s a typical atheist, he gives a lower percentage of his income to charity than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett does.

And there is no reason to think that we have reached the upper bound of wealth inequality, as not every breakthrough in technology creates new jobs. The ultimate labor saving device might be just that—the ultimate labor saving device. Imagine the future Google of robotics or nanotechnology: Its CEO could make Steve Jobs look like a sharecropper, and its products could put tens of millions of people out of work. What would it mean for one person to hold the most valuable patents compatible with the laws of physics and to amass more wealth than everyone else on the Forbes 400 list combined?

This is actually a very good point and something which has concerned me for nearly 20 years. I remember going over a list of 100 employees with my father and realizing that about 10 of them actually did anything particularly relevant to producing the products we sold. Everyone else was basically talking to other people or filling out forms.

How many Republicans who have vowed not to raise taxes on billionaires would want to live in a country with a trillionaire and 30 percent unemployment? If the answer is “none”—and it really must be—then everyone is in favor of “wealth redistribution.” They just haven’t been forced to admit it.

Dude, they already kind of do. There may not be a trillionaire yet, but since the Employment-Population Ratio is presently 58.1, that means 41.9% of the population is already not employed. And if he means U3, as I showed yesterday, that’s already over 15%. I haven’t recalculated U6, but if that’s not over 30% now, it’s very close.

Yes, we must cut spending and reduce inefficiencies in government—and yes, many things are best accomplished in the private sector. But this does not mean that we can ignore the astonishing gaps in wealth that have opened between the poor and the rich, and between the rich and the ultra rich. Some of your neighbors have no more than $2,000 in total assets (in fact, 40 percent of Americans fall into this category); some have around $2 million; and some have $2 billion (and a few have much more). Each of these gaps represents a thousandfold increase in wealth.

Some Americans have amassed more wealth than they or their descendants can possibly spend. Who do conservatives think is in a better position to help pull this country back from the brink?

The problem has nothing to do with income inequality. In fact, the income inequality stems from the real problem, which is the massive quantities of debt in the system. The relatively recent increase in income inequality is primarily an artifact of the massive quantities of financial sector debt combined with the way in which the federal government – the very institution Harris imagines using to reduce income equality – is providing a backstop insuring the very wealthiest against the negative consequences of the huge gambles they are taking. For example, Warren Buffett was probably the primary beneficiary of the federal government’s $85 billion credit line to AIG, $13 billion of which went directly to paying off Goldman Sachs.

I will address his addendum in a future post.

It’s interesting how so few of the objective measures tally well with the GDP statistics:

U.S. incomes plummeted again in 2009, with total income down 15.2% in real terms since 2007, new tax data showed on Wednesday. The data showed an alarming drop in the number of taxpayers reporting any earnings from a job — down by nearly 4.2 million from 2007 — meaning every 33rd household that had work in 2007 had no work in 2009.

Average income in 2009 fell to $54,283, down $3,516, or 6.1% in real terms compared with 2008. … Compared with 2007, average income was down $8,588 or 13.7%.

So, income is down 15.2% and I previously calculated that current U3 unemployment comparable to the Depression-era estimates are around 15.5%. I’m just not seeing a lot of economic growth there, seven straight quarters of reported GDP growth notwithstanding.