By James Kwak

One of the central dramas of the early seasons of The Wire is the cat-and-mouse game between Avon Barksdale’s drug operation and the detectives of the Major Crimes Unit. The drug dealers started off using pagers and pay phones. When the police tapped the pagers and the phones, Barksdale’s people switched to “burner” cell phones that they threw away before the police could tap them. By Season 4, Proposition Joe advised Marlo Stanfield not to use phones at all.

Well, apparently, Wall Street currency traders don’t watch The Wire. I don’t think anyone was surprised to learn that major banks including JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays, RBS, and UBS conspired to manipulate currency prices — something that regulators have been investigating for over a year and a half. One common strategy was cooperating to time large transactions in order to manipulate daily benchmark rates at which other client transactions are executed.

Read more at Medium.

By Simon Johnson

At today’s daily briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest communicated the president’s threat to veto any trade promotion authority (TPA) that “could undermine the independence or ability of the Federal Reserve to make monetary policy decisions”.  (The question was posed at minute 42:50, Mr. Earnest’s answer starts at 43:31, and the lead up to this quote starts around 45:20.)

Mr. Earnest’s statement seems clear enough, but what potential TPA is he talking about?  Either the White House is confused or some other communications strategy is at work here.  Either way, Mr. Earnest is describing some imaginary version of TPA that is simply not on the congressional table.

He most certainly cannot be accurately describing the bipartisan Portman-Stabenow amendment, currently before the Senate.  This amendment specifically goes out of its way to state that it would not “restrict the exercise of domestic monetary policy.” Continue reading “Why Is The White House Threatening To Veto An Imaginary Trade Promotion Authority (TPA)?” →

By James Kwak

“In my many years of experience working in compliance, do you know how many fixed and variable annuities I’ve seen being invested in IRAs??? Countless.

“Investing a tax deferred investment within a tax deferred account simply does not make sense, except for very very few exceptions. … And when brokers answered me honestly as to why they picked annuities over mutual funds or even plain vanilla stocks??? Payout baby!!!”

That’s a compliance officer at Wells Fargo talking about the kinds of abuses that brokers — who advise clients about where to put their money, even if they aren’t “registered investment advisers” — inflict on their customers. For context: The benefit of an annuity is that taxes on earnings are deferred until withdrawals — but you get that benefit in any IRA, so there’s no point in putting an annuity (which has higher costs than an ordinary mutual fund) in an IRA. Yet in this case the brokers were pushing annuities because of the (legal) kickbacks they were getting from the annuity providers.

Read more at Medium.

By Simon Johnson and Andrei Levchenko

The Obama administration is lobbying hard for Congress to pass a trade promotion authority (TPA) and to quickly approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement that is on the verge of being finalized.

The administration and its supporters on this issue, including leading Republicans, argue that the case for TPP rests on basic economic principles and is only strengthened by the findings of modern research.  On both counts their claims are greatly exaggerated – particularly with regard to the notion that more trade, on these terms, is necessarily better for the United States.

There is a strong theoretical and empirical case – dating back to David Ricardo in 1817 – that freer trade should make countries better off. However, modern-day trade agreements, including those currently being negotiated, are very different from earlier experiences with trade liberalization. Continue reading “The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): This Is Not About Ricardo” →

By Simon Johnson

As Congress debates the trade promotion authority, TPA, the issue of currency manipulation remains firmly on the table.  The administration and Republican leadership insist that language discouraging currency manipulation should not be included in the TPA (and also not in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP, a trade agreement currently under negotiation).  Many Democrats and Republicans continue to argue in favor of prohibiting currency manipulation.

On Tuesday, the Treasury Department and White House claimed that the amendment proposed by Senators Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Deborah Stabenow (D., Michigan) would actually impede the ability of the Federal Reserve to conduct monetary policy.  This is absurd.  The Portman-Stabenow amendment clearly and precisely addresses protracted one-way intervention in foreign exchange markets, i.e., large-scale purchases of foreign assets by a central bank.  The Federal Reserve does not engage in such activities – nor will it engage in this kind of intervention in the foreseeable future.  US monetary policy involves buying and selling domestic assets.  The Fed does not buy foreign assets on any significant scale.  There is nothing in this amendment that would impede the workings of US monetary policy.  To suggest otherwise is to mischaracterize the nature of this amendment.

There are instead three main issues of substance worth further consideration. Continue reading “Preventing Currency Manipulation” →

By James Kwak

“At present, when zero interest rates make capital costs as low as they have ever been but corporate profits are at record levels, there needs to be much less concern with capital costs and more concern with the distributional aspects of capital taxation.”

That’s Larry Summers — with whom I have often disagreed in the past — at a Brookings event on the tradeoff between equality and efficiency. For most of our lives, government policy in the United States and most of the developed world has been focused (at least in theory) on efficiency: colloquially speaking, making the pie bigger rather than worrying about how the pie is divided up. Rising tide, boats, you know the rest: Laffer Curve, unleashing the job creators, and so on. Inequality is something we profess to regret while doing nothing about it.

Read more at Medium.

By James Kwak

Unemployment is down to 5.4%! Yay!

That was the summary of last week’s unemployment report. Yet the two-track “recovery” — about to enter its seventh year — continues. Average hourly wages increased by only 0.1% in April and 2.2% for the past twelve months, which amounts to basically nothing when you take inflation into account.

This is what the new normal looks like. Wages barely rise during periods of economic “expansion” (you know, the opposite of recession), then fall when unemployment spikes during a recession. In the long run, that means that average real earnings actually go down, and household income can only keep up if people work more hours. Yet the number of full-time jobs is lower today than it was before the financial crisis.

Read more at Medium.

By James Kwak

I’ve written several times about what I call the Economics 101 ideology: the overuse of a few simplified concepts from an introductory course to make sweeping policy recommendations (while branding any opponents as ignorant simpletons). The most common way that first-year economics is misused in the public sphere is ignoring assumptions. For example, most arguments for financial deregulation are ultimately based on the idea that transactions between rational actors with perfect information are always good for both sides — and most of the people making those arguments have forgotten that people are not rational and do not have perfect information.

Mark Buchanan and Noah Smith have both called out Greg Mankiw for a different and more pernicious way of misusing first-year economics: simply ignoring what it teaches — or, in this case, what Mankiw himself teaches. At issue is Mankiw’s Times column claiming that all economists agree on the overall benefits of free trade, so everyone should be in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, among other trade agreements.

Read more at Medium.