What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it
Year: 2013
By James Kwak
The Economic Policy Institute put out a series of charts detailing inequality in retirement savings across several different demographic characteristics. The most obvious picture is that the shift to 401(k) plans has produced vast increases in retirement inequality across income groups.
Here’s one:
By James Kwak
College application essays? They’re all the same. That’s according to Rick Clark, the head of admissions at Georgia Tech, who kicks off this past weekend’s episode of This American Life by, in part, mocking the tired trope of “idealistic teenager goes to Central America to help the people there but becomes transformed by the experience.” Clark, however, is self-aware enough to realize that the colleges are equally bad: the glossy brochures they send out to high school students, trying to attract their application fees if not their tuition checks, are all exactly the same in virtually every respect.
This reminded me of what it’s like trying to raise money from venture capitalists. The number one thing they care about is your sustainable competitive advantage (unless you’ve already started a successful company, in which case they’ll write you a check to deliver peanut butter sandwiches by text message, but you don’t need their money anyway). Why, if your idea is so good, won’t big company X (in our case, SAP or Oracle) just copy you and crush you? It’s like they all took the same class in business school and only paid attention for the first fifteen minutes.
Then, at the end of the meeting (occasionally at the beginning), they talk about themselves and why you should want their money as opposed to the equally green money of the identical-looking, khakis-wearing, bicycle-riding people on the other side of Sand Hill Road. They really focus on improving operations; they sit on a small number of boards; they care about developing entrepreneurs; blah blah blah. They all have exactly the same pitch. But they can get away with it because they have the thing that matters: money. The one VC I liked the most was the only one who said, “Basically, we’re the money, and we try not to mess things up too much.”
(The rest of that TAL episode is a fantastic story about Emir Kamenica and how he made it from being shot at in Bosnia to going to Harvard—so good I almost took the wrong exit on the way to work yesterday.)
By James Kwak
As the fifth anniversary of the Lehman bankruptcy approaches, the Internet is filling up with reflections on the financial crisis and the ensuing years. My main feeling, as expressed in my latest Atlantic column, is amazement at how little we seem to have learned. Looking back, the period in late 2008 and early 2009, when it was obvious that the financial sector would have to change in important, structural ways, now seems like a naïve, youthful delusion. Sure, there are some new rules around the margins, but for the most part little has changed—not just in the financial sector itself, but more importantly in the political and ideological landscape that shapes regulatory policy.
Of course, this isn’t simply the product of collective amnesia. It’s the result of the fact that ideas are shaped by money and political power. And that’s where little has changed.
By Simon Johnson
“Entrepreneurship Without Borders” is an MIT Sloan class, primarily designed for MBA students. The course looks at economic growth, financial crises, and the distribution of income through the details of entrepreneurship in various parts of the global economy. Below is a summary of class #1, from September 4, 2013. The full running order of classes is here; all readings are freely available, with the exception of Harvard Business School cases. The course consists of 12 sessions through mid-October, and summaries or other perspectives will appear regularly in this space.
Entrepreneurship is a broad and sometimes amorphous concept, particularly when we try to compare business conditions around the world. Who has a lot of entrepreneurs and what does that mean? Should policymakers always want more people to start their own firms? Who exactly is an entrepreneur and does using the same definition make sense in all places?
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) has done a great service by bringing clarity and some transparent data into this discussion. (The specifics below refer to their 2012 report.)
A particular strength is that GEM looks, through opinion surveys, at what the broader public believes about starting their own business – including whether they think there are opportunities, whether they have the right personal capabilities to be an entrepreneur, and whether they are afraid of failing. Continue reading “Entrepreneurship Around the World: An MIT Course”
By James Kwak
Not Greg Mankiw. Or, to be precise, not “Republicans.”
This past weekend Mankiw wrote a column for the Times laying out the arguments for a carbon tax. They are so well known and so obviously correct that I won’t bother repeating them. (A tradable permit system could work equally well, depending on how it is designed.)
In addition, many people think that the national debt is a serious long-term problem. A carbon tax (or a tradable permit system where permits are auctioned off) would obviously bring in revenue. In White House Burning, we estimated this at about 0.7–0.9 percent of GDP by the early 2020s (citing Metcalf, Stavins, and the CBO).
By James Kwak
People occasionally ask me what it takes to succeed in the business world (since they assume at least that I know some successful people). Luck probably belongs at the top of that list. But I have a very clear idea of the most valuable skill to have in business (in part because I don’t really have it): the ability to pick up the phone, call someone, and convince her to do something that is in your interests—even though she has no other reason to do it.
I’m not saying this should be the most valuable skill in business. People like me would prefer it if all decisions were made on the basis of factual evidence and logical reasoning. But they’re not. And the people whom I have seen become very successful are the ones who are hard to say “no” to, whether in person or on the phone. How they do it can vary: some do it with charisma, some with logic, some with sheer stubbornness. But they can all do it.
By James Kwak
The Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to require securitizers to retain 5 percent of the credit risk of the mortgage-backed securities that they issued, in order to reduce the risk of a repeat of the last housing bubble. Today, the federal financial regulators said, “Whatever,” and ignored that requirement. In particular, they created an exemption that would have covered at least 98 percent of all mortgages issued last year.
Why? Because
“adding additional layers of regulation would have contracted credit for first time home buyers and borrowers without large down payments, and prevented private capital from entering the market.”
That’s according to the head of the Mortgage Bankers Association.
This is the exact same argument that was made in favor of deregulation during the two decades prior to the last financial crisis, without the slightest hint of irony. It’s further proof that everyone has either forgotten that the financial crisis happened or is pretending that it didn’t happen because, well, maybe it won’t happen again?
Even leaving aside the specific merits of this decision, the worrying thing is that the intellectual, regulatory, and political climate seems to be basically the same as it was in 2004: no one wants to to anything that might be construed as hurting the economy, and no one wants to offend the housing industry.
By James Kwak
In finance, there are rarely battles between good and evil. Instead, you have battles of, say, greedy and corrupt versus greedy and ruthless. This is roughly the case in the debate between entrenched corporate CEOs (and boards) and activist hedge funds.
Activist hedge fund managers, like Daniel Loeb or Bill Ackman, buy large blocks of stock in a target company and agitate for change (new board members, asset sales, dividends or buybacks, etc.). The idea is that either they will get their way, or the company will respond to the pressure by doing a better job for shareholders; either way, the stock goes up, and they sell at a big profit.
By James Kwak
Apparently my former professor Ian Ayres has made a lot of people upset, at least judging by the Wall Street Journal article about him (and co-author Quinn Curtis) and indignant responses like this one from various interested parties. What Ayres and Curtis did was point out the losses that investors in 401(k) plans incur because of high fees charged at the plan level and high fees charged by individual mutual funds in those plans. The people who should be upset are the employees who are forced to invest in those plans (or lose out on the tax benefits associated with 401(k) plans.)
In their paper, Ayres and Curtis estimate the total losses caused by limited investment menus (small), fees (large), and poor investment choices (large). Those fees include both the high expense ratios and transaction costs charged by actively managed mutual funds and the plan-level administrative fees charged by 401(k) plans.
By James Kwak
The indefatigable Brad DeLong has devoted his energies to singlehandedly protecting Larry Summers from the Internet (although, he makes pains to say, he likes Janet Yellen almost as much). Although I’m letting most of the Fed chair sideline debate pass me by, DeLong and others have raised one issue that played an important symbolic role in 13 Bankers and, more generally, the historical background to the financial crisis: Brooksley Born’s proposal to think about regulating OTC derivatives in 1998.
For those who don’t know the story, it basically goes like this. Born, as chair of the CFTC, was worried about the risk posed by OTC derivatives, which were effectively unregulated at the time. On May 7, 1998, the CFTC issued a “concept release” asking for comments about the regulation of OTC derivatives. Summers, then deputy treasury secretary, along with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, and SEC Chair Arthur Levitt, opposed Born, and they issued their own press release on the same day opposing the CFTC. Over the next several months they successfully blocked the CFTC from regulating OTC derivatives, convincing Congress to stop the CFTC from moving forward, a position that was enshrined in statute in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.
By James Kwak
I generally refuse to be drawn into the Yellen-Summers horse race because (a) everything that can be said, has been said, (b) I have no original information or insight, and (c) it’s all speculation anyway. But I’m going to comment on one parenthesis in Felix Salmon’s good summary post, since it has broader application:
Summers is, to put it mildly, not good at charming those he considers to be his inferiors, but he’s surprisingly excellent at cultivating people with real power.
In my personal experience, especially in the business world, this is absolutely the worst personality trait you can find in anyone you are thinking of hiring. You see it a lot, especially in senior executives. Unfortunately, at the time of hiring, you only see the ability to manage up—not the inability to treat subordinates decently. By the time you figure it out, you’ve already suffered serious organizational damage. (Thanks to my friend Marcus Ryu for identifying this problem so clearly.)
By James Kwak
Tyler Cowen thinks that we are entering an age of debates over wealth taxes. If only.
It’s true, as Cowen notes, that national debt everywhere is a relatively small fraction of national wealth and that, therefore, “fiscal problems are best regarded as problems of dysfunctional governance.” One of our central arguments in White House Burning was that the United States obviously, easily has the ability to pay down the national debt, and how it will do so is basically a distributional issue.
Even if wealth taxes make sense, that doesn’t mean they will happen. Cowen claims that “Like the bank robber Willie Sutton, revenue-hungry governments go ‘where the money is.'” But all that is cleverly phrased is not true. Consider this chart from White House Burning:
By James Kwak
In the wake of the Detroit bankruptcy, Paul Krugman has a post pooh-poohing concerns about public pensions. His conclusion:
“Nationwide, governments are underfunding their pensions by around 3 percent of $850 billion, or around $25 billion a year.
A $25 billion shortfall in a $16 trillion economy. We’re doomed!”
(Yes, that’s sarcasm.)
I know why Krugman wants to argue that this isn’t a problem. If everyone believes that public pensions are a big problem, then the austerity crew will convert that belief into a push to cut public pensions—just like they have tried to use future shortfalls in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to insist on privatizing or voucherizing those programs.
Continue reading “Yes, We Should Worry About Public Pensions”
By Simon Johnson
On Thursday of last week, four senators unveiled the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. The pushback from people representing the megabanks was immediate but also completely lame – the weakness of their arguments against the proposed legislation is a major reason to think that this reform idea will ultimately prevail.
The strangest argument against the Act is that it would not have prevented the financial crisis of 2007-08. This completely ignores the central role played by Citigroup.
It is always a mistake to suggest there is any panacea that would prevent crises – either in the past or in the future. And none of the senators – Maria Cantwell of Washington, Angus King of Maine, John McCain of Arizona, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts – proposing the legislation have made such an argument. But banking crises can be more or less severe, depending on the nature of the firms that become most troubled, including their size relative to the financial system and relative to the economy, the extent to which they provide critical functions, and how far the damage would spread around the world if they were to fall. Continue reading “Remember Citigroup”
By James Kwak
If there is a central argument to 13 Bankers, it is that politics matters. The financial crisis was the result of a long-term transformation of the financial sector and its place in the overall economy, and that transformation occurred because of—and contributed to—a shift in the political balance of power.
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nations Fail, take up this theme on a much broader scale in their recent article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “Economics Versus Politics: Pitfalls of Policy Advice,” burnishing their reputations as two of the most subversive thinkers around. People have always known that economics and politics are related: that economic power produces political power and that political institutions constrain economic policy choices. Still, however, at least for the past several decades, the universal assumption has been that good economic policy is always good policy, full stop: for example, that it is always good to eliminate market failures.
The Baseline Scenario 