Month: November 2012

New Threat to the Financial System: Gravity

By James Kwak

Last week reminded everyone that the heart of our financial system remains in Lower Manhattan, just a few feet above sea level. Amid all the tragedy and hardship, Knight Capital—the firm that earlier almost collapsed because of a software glitch—had to shut down its trading operations on Wednesday when its backup generators ran out of fuel.

Why? The answer is so ridiculous you wouldn’t believe me if I summarized it, so here is the story, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The company calculated that its three fuel tanks held a total of 1,200 gallons, or enough to power the generators “past 2 p.m.” [CEO Thomas Joyce] wrote. But the generators unexpectedly shut down at about 11:45 a.m. The problem: Fuel still in the tanks was useless. “Turns out the intake pipes, which [get] the fuel from tanks to generators, are higher than the bottom of the fuel tanks,” Mr. Joyce wrote. “In short, we had fuel but the construction of the fuel tanks prevented it from getting to the generators.”

So somewhere in the operational chain of command, somebody overlooked the fact that the effective capacity of their fuel tank was less than its actual capacity, because fuel doesn’t levitate. It sounds crazy to me, too, but the alternative is that the truth is even more embarrassing, and this is the story they concocted to cover it up.

Let’s hope that Citigroup knows how to measure the capacity of its backup generators. Some Masters of the Universe.

Too Big To Fail Remains Very Real

By Simon Johnson

Prominent voices within the financial sector are increasingly insisting on one point: We have ended “too big to fail.” The idea is simple: through a combination of legislation (the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010) and supportive regulation (particularly regarding how big banks would be handled in the event of “liquidation”), very large financial institutions are no longer perceived by investors to be too big to fail.

Unfortunately, while tempting, this idea is completely at odds with the facts. The market perception that some financial institutions are “too big to fail” is alive and well. If you want to remove that perception, you need to break up our biggest banks. Continue reading “Too Big To Fail Remains Very Real” →

The Economist on Romney’s Fiscal Policy

By James Kwak

It should be no surprise that I am voting for Barack Obama on Tuesday, despite all his flaws and failures of the past four years. There are just too many dimensions on which he is clearly preferable to Mitt Romney. One of the more important ones, on which I spent most of last year (writing White House Burning), is fiscal policy. And here, since anything I write will be dismissed by many readers as liberal propaganda, is The Economist on the topic:

“Yet far from being the voice of fiscal prudence, Mr Romney wants to start with huge tax cuts (which will disproportionately favour the wealthy), while dramatically increasing defence spending. Together those measures would add $7 trillion to the ten-year deficit. He would balance the books through eliminating loopholes (a good idea, but he will not specify which ones) and through savage cuts to programmes that help America’s poor (a bad idea, which will increase inequality still further). At least Mr Obama, although he distanced himself from Bowles-Simpson, has made it clear that any long-term solution has to involve both entitlement reform and tax rises. Mr Romney is still in the cloud-cuckoo-land of thinking you can do it entirely through spending cuts: the Republican even rejected a ratio of ten parts spending cuts to one part tax rises.”

That’s just about the same summary I would have written.

Why Do People Think the Race Is a Tossup?

By James Kwak

There’s been a minor controversy in the blogosphere not about whether Obama or Romney should be president, and not about whether Obama or Romney is ahead in the polls, but about the esoteric question of whether one should interpret the polls to mean that Obama is the favorite or that the race is a “tossup.” This debate has largely swirled around Nate Silver, who aggregates polling data, recalculates confidence intervals, and incorporates other factors (drawn from analysis of previous elections), and for the past few weeks has rated Obama as having about a 60–80% chance of winning the election. In response, various members of the pundit class have argued that the national polls show a tied race, polls can’t predict the future, or even that since both sides (supposedly) think each has a 50.1 percent chance of winning, their chances must be equal. (See Felix Salmon for a summary.)

Silver has responded to all of the coherent objections that might be made to his forecast, in detail. But what’s at work here isn’t a reasoned debate about how to interpret polls. It’s sheer innumeracy, pure and simple. The statement that Obama has about a 75–80 percent chance of winning is roughly equivalent to the statement—which no one contests—that his average lead in Ohio is about 2–3 points, once you take the confidence interval into account. As Silver has said, it’s analogous to the statement that a team that’s ahead by a field goal deep in the fourth quarter has a better chance of winning than the team that’s behind; no one would call that game a “tossup,” even though either team could win. Even if you can’t predict the next turnover or breakaway running play, that wouldn’t lead you to believe the three-point lead is irrelevant.

It’s the same thing we saw in Moneyball—people who can’t understand numbers claiming that numbers have no practical value. Unfortunately, in political journalism the sample size is so small and the monetary stakes are so low that the incoherent innumerates will never be drummed out of the marketplace.