This Must Be a Joke

Posted on April 8, 2012 by | 22 Comments

By James Kwak

From the Times article on President Obama’s signing of the JOBS Act (emphasis added):

While soliciting investment funds online has triggered fears of fraudulent schemes, the law’s backers said the greater availability of information through social media sites like Facebook would allow would-be investors to conduct their own background checks, making it difficult for such schemes to succeed.

“While it seems reasonable to worry about these issues, there is just so much more information these days,” said Timothy Rowe, the chief executive of the Cambridge Innovation Center, which provides office space for start-up firms next to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The thing speaks for itself.

(True, the phrase “social media sites like Facebook” is paraphrase from the reporter, not a direct quotation, but I have no reason to believe it isn’t an accurate representation of what the act’s backers said.)

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Someone Is Wrong In The Times*

Posted on April 6, 2012 by | 20 Comments

By James Kwak

James Stewart has doubled down on his infatuation with Paul Ryan. Ryan’s budget, he says, is a viable centrist starting point for budget negotiations, and attacks from “left and right” are mere “partisan rhetoric.”

This is several different kinds of crazy. First, Stewart repeats his belief that Ryan’s plan would increase taxes on investment income. But that belief has no basis other than Stewart’s own belief that it would be a good idea. As I pointed out before, Ryan’s own budget argues against raising taxes on capital gains and dividends. The only thing Stewart can find is Ryan’s apple-pie platitudes about the need for tax reform. But Ryan’s own vision of tax reform, as evidenced by his budget’s own words, doesn’t include higher capital gains taxes. (In addition, as a signatory to the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, Ryan is sworn to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and business.” That sounds to me like it includes the capital gains tax rate, which is a marginal income rate.) This is further evidence of columnists’ ability to project their own fantasies onto Paul Ryan’s handsome face.

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The Impossibility of Defense Cuts

Posted on April 6, 2012 by | 23 Comments

By James Kwak

Apparently the thing we need to keep ourselves safe is a fast, lightweight ship that can sweep mines, launch helicopters, fight submarines, and perform other assorted duties—but can’t withstand heavy combat. I don’t claim to know if we really need the Littoral Combat Ship to ensure our national security. According to an article in the Times, John McCain—the Republican Party’s last presidential nominees and one of the Navy’s more famous veterans—is critical, although other Republicans and the administration are in favor of it.

I do know that the Littoral Combat Ship is a classic example of why it’s so hard to reduce budget deficits. You have local politicians who want the jobs. You have a large group of representatives who are reflexively pro-military and will vote for anything the Pentagon wants, and even things the Pentagon doesn’t want. (You have Mitt Romney, who bemoans the fact that the Navy has only 285 ships, the fewest since 1917. Would he rather have the Royal Navy of 1812, which had 1,000 ships, or our navy, with eleven aircraft carrier groups—while no other country has more than one?) You have a procurement and development process that stretches on for years so that even when a weapons system turns out to be a dud, it has to be kept alive because it’s too big to fail—there is no other alternative. Both the Center for American Progress and the Project on Governmental Oversight have recommended cutbacks in the Littoral program. Yet there is no practical way to check its momentum.

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Something for Nothing?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by | 19 Comments

By James Kwak

The so-called JOBS act is a victory of faith over basic logic. The motivating idea seems to be that if we reduce the regulations that govern the process of raising capital, small companies will find it easier to raise money, and that money will translate into jobs. Many people have pointed out some of the problems with the bill: recently, for example, Andrew Ross Sorkin highlighted the potential for companies to take advantage of investors, and Steven Davidoff pointed out that regulation is probably not the reason for the decline in the number of small company IPOs.

There are a couple of more fundamental misunderstanding I want to focus on, however. First, it’s not clear that relaxing regulations will actually make it cheaper for companies to raise money. Sure, eliminating the independent audit requirement will save companies a few bucks. But what really affects the cost of capital is not out-of-pocket fees but the price that investors are willing to pay for equity. The less confidence that investors have in a company’s prospects, the cheaper that company will have to sell its stock. If small companies are allowed to provide less information to investors, that could simply make it more expensive for them to raise money.

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Magical Investment Thinking

Posted on April 2, 2012 by | 29 Comments

By James Kwak

From a Times article on pension fund investing:

Mr. Dear cautioned that there were big differences in how various alternative investments performed during the financial crisis.

He said that Calpers’s investments in real estate had been “a disaster” and that its hedge fund investments had not met their benchmarks and were under review. But he said that its private equity holdings had easily beaten public stock returns over the last decade.

“Over the longer term, that kind of outperformance represents real skill, not luck, and it’s worth paying for,” he said.

Holy confirmation bias, Batman! When one asset class beats the stock market that’s skill. But when your other asset classes do badly—that’s random variation? If high returns on private equity are evidence that you should continue investing in private equity, then low returns in hedge funds and real estate are evidence that you should pull your money out of them.

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Volcker Rule Would Cause Irreparable Damage To The Muppets – And Much More Broadly

Posted on April 1, 2012 by | 12 Comments

By Simon Johnson, April 1st, 2012

A major new research report – released this weekend by the renowned international consulting firm, IMS – finds conclusively that implementation of the proposed Volcker Rule would damage not just the irreplaceable Muppets but also “all children-oriented television or other media-based educational program content.”

The logic in the report is straightforward and, quite frankly, compelling.  The Volcker Rule – which aims to limit proprietary trading and excessive risk-taking by the country’s largest banks – would reduce the ability of “too big to fail” institutions to bet heavily on the price of commodities used to produce puppets (mostly cotton, but also apparently wood, aluminum, and some rare earths.)

“In response to the changing demands of their customers, banks have expanded their role of providing financial resources and services to include risk management and intermediation services to [various kinds of puppets]” (p. ES2)

These services are highly profitable and of great value to the skilled artisans who produce puppets, but if the very biggest banks are not allowed to engage in these activities, then no one else will. Continue reading →

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What’s Liberty Got To Do With It?

Posted on March 30, 2012 by | 43 Comments

By James Kwak

Constitutional law is not my field. I think we spent one day on the Commerce Clause in my constitutional law class. I’ve barely been following the Supreme Court oral arguments this week because I figured (a) they would be silly, (b) we won’t know anything useful until June, and (c) with the rest of the commentariat focusing on it I would have nothing to add. But even at that distance, I can’t help but be shocked by the ludicrous nature of the proceedings, best represented by the framing of the case in terms of individual freedom and government coercion. According to the Times, the case may turn on Anthony Kennedy’s notion of liberty.

What’s wrong with this? Liberty should have nothing to do with this case. I’ll repeat the analysis, made my dozens of law professors more expert than I (Charles Fried, for example). The question is whether Congress has the power to impose the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, which gives it the power to regulate interstate commerce. If the individual mandate does in fact regulate interstate commerce, then it’s fine unless it violates some other part of the Constitution.

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