Author: James Kwak

More Bad Software

By James Kwak

Last week BATS admitted that its software suffered from systematic problems for four years, failing to obtain the best execution price for about 250 customers and costing them about $400,000. That should be a giveaway: no self-respecting company would break the law just to steal $400,000 from its customers. This was a programming error, pure and simple.

Also last week, a RAND study revealed that, despite billions of dollars of investment, electronic medical records have done little to reduce costs for healthcare providers. This is more complicated than a simple programming error. The issue here is that projected savings of this kind are typically based on some model of how operations will be done in the future, and that model depends on perfectly-designed software functioning perfectly. Medical records systems apparently fall far short of this ideal: as the Times summarized, “The recent analysis was sharply critical of the commercial systems now in place, many of which are hard to use and do not allow doctors and patients to share medical information across systems.”

The common feature to these stories, however, is that big, complex, business software is really, really important—and a lot of it is bad. In many niches, it’s bad because there aren’t that many companies that serve that niche, it’s hard for customers to evaluate software that hasn’t been delivered and installed yet, and there are all sorts of legacy problems, particularly with integration to decades-old back-end systems. And most of the incentives favor closing the sale first rather than making sure the software works the way it should.

I don’t have much to add that I didn’t put in my Atlantic column on a similar topic last summer. Nothing has changed since then. So I’ll stop there.

A Weak “Defense of the CEO”

By James Kwak

I finally bit the bullet and read “In Defense of the CEO,” Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan’s article on the cover of the “Review” section of Saturday’s WSJ. The inside continuation page is headlined “When CEOs Are Worth a Fortune.” In fact, I read it twice. But nowhere could I find any evidence or even an argument that any CEOs are worth a fortune—just a lot of implying, assuming, and asserting that they are.

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It’s Not That Complicated

By James Kwak

Of course the tax bill couldn’t have passed today, even if the two sides reached a compromise. Today it would have been a tax “increase.” Tomorrow it will be a tax “cut.” As my daughter would say, “Duh.”

Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge will remain technically inviolate, which was not terribly hard to predict. And it will have done its most important work: making a small and obvious policy change—allowing moderately higher taxes for the rich—seem like an enormous, gut-wrenching concession by Republicans.

See you next year!

Nationalization Works

By James Kwak

The Treasury Department today announced that it has sold off the rest of its stake in A.I.G. Treasury will focus on the claim that taxpayers made a profit on the deal. As I’ve written before, the story is a bit more complicated.

But that’s a sideshow. The point of nationalizing A.I.G. (what else do you call it when the government buys 80% of a company?) wasn’t to make money; it was supposedly to save the global economy. In any case, things have worked out pretty well: the global economy is intact, though still not healthy, and A.I.G. is a private company again.

Which brings up what, to me, is the bigger question: Why were we so afraid of nationalizing Citigroup and Bank of America four years ago? And isn’t A.I.G. looking like a better company today than those two?

Entitlements Scare Tactics

By James Kwak

A friend asked me about last week’s WSJ op-ed by Christopher Cox and Bill Archer claiming that the government’s true liabilities exceed $86 trillion—not the $16 trillion national debt that people usually talk about. There’s something to it, but there’s also a huge scary story in there that’s purely meant to frighten people.

$16 trillion is the amount of Treasury debt outstanding at the moment. The more relevant figure is the amount of debt the federal government owes to people and institutions other than itself. If, for some reason, I lent money to my wife and she promised to pay it back to me, we wouldn’t count that as part of the debt owed by our household. The debt owed to the public is about $10 trillion these days.

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New (Free) Book About U.S. Government Debt

By James Kwak

I contributed a chapter to Is U.S. Government Debt Different?, a book published by the Financial Institutions Center of Wharton. It includes chapters by many people more distinguished than I, such as William Bratton, Peter Fisher, James Hines, Howell Jackson, Deborah Lucas, Steven Schwarcz, Richard Sylla, and others. You can download the whole thing for free at the link above. Enjoy.

High-Frequency Trading and High Returns

This guest post is contributed by Ricardo Fernholz, a professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College. Some of his other work was profiled on this blog here.

The rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) in the U.S. and around the world has been rapid and well-documented in the media. According to a report by the Bank of England, by 2010 HFT accounted for 70% of all trading volume in US equities and 30-40% of all trading volume in European equities. This rapid rise in volume has been accompanied by extraordinary performance among some prominent hedge funds that use these trading techniques. A 2010 report from Barron’s, for example, estimates that Renaissance Technology’s Medallion hedge fund – a quantitative HFT fund – achieved a 62.8% annual compound return in the three years prior to the report.

Despite the growing presence of HFT, little is known about how such trading strategies work and why some appear to consistently achieve high returns. The purpose of this post is to shed some light on these questions and discuss some of the possible implications of the rapid spread of HFT. Although much attention has been given to the potentially destabilizing effects of HFT, the focus here instead is on the basic theory behind such strategies and their implications for the efficiency of markets. How are some HFT funds such as Medallion apparently able to consistently achieve high returns? It is natural to suspect that such excellent performance is perhaps an anomaly or simply the result of taking significant risks that are somehow hidden or obscured. Indeed, this is surely the case sometimes. However, it turns out that there are good reasons to believe that many HFT strategies are in fact able to consistently earn these high returns without being exposed to major risks.

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Rewriting History

By James Kwak

This morning Matt Yglesias wrote a post arguing that the December 2010 tax cut was an Obama victory. By the time this evening that I finally found time to figure out what annoyed me about it, I had to go to the second page of his blog to find it, since he had posted so much in the interim. That man sure can write.

I’m not so sure about his memory, though. Yglesias says Obama won because he got the (Bush) middle-class tax cuts extended along with some other goodies like a payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits, and all he had to give up was an extension of the (Bush) upper-income tax cuts. The reason people think it was not a good deal, he says, was that “to get a favorable deal Obama had to downplay the extent to which he hadn’t given anything up.”

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Grover Still Matters

By James Kwak

Last week I wrote a post arguing that Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge is alive and well and still a binding constraint on Republican lawmakers. The media continue to push the story of Republicans renouncing the pledge, however, and who knows, I could turn out to be wrong. Maybe some Republicans will vote to reduce deductions without a compensating reduction in marginal rates.

Even in that world, however, the pledge will still have a major impact. All this focus on the pledge makes it seem as if the few apostates—Peter King, Lindsey Graham, etc.—are making some enormous, admirable stand on principle. In fact, all they are saying is that they might be willing to close a few loopholes and keep tax rates where George W. Bush left them; they are still adamantly opposed to increases in tax rates (even though those increases, set to take effect on January 1, are the result of Bush’s choosing to use reconciliation to pass his tax cuts).

The specter of the pledge has allowed them to dress up a tiny concession—conservatives should want to get rid of distortions anyway, since they distort economic choices—as a major move to the center. In return for breaking the pledge, they can demand that Democrats agree to major changes to entitlement programs.

The tactical beauty of the pledge is that it credibly committed the Republican Party to never increase taxes, thereby forcing Democrats to meet them not in the middle, but all the way over on their side. (See the tax compromise of December 2010 and the debt ceiling compromise of August 2011, for example.) Even if a few signatories break free, it will still have much the same effect.

Maybe Nate Silver Was Wrong

By James Kwak

I think Nate Silver does a good job aggregating polls to make meaningful quantitative predictions about upcoming elections. But as he said himself shortly before the election, if the polls he relies on are systematically biased, then his forecasts are going to be off.* Many people have noted that Silver (and other quantitative poll aggregators like Sam Wang) correctly predicted an Obama victory and the outcomes in most if not all states.

But the fact remains that Obama did modestly better than the polls, and hence the poll aggregators, expected (not to mention than the Romney campaign expected). We shouldn’t read too much into this, as even where Obama significantly overperformed—like in Iowa, where Silver forecast a 3.2 percentage point victory and the actual came in at 5.7 points—the results were within the confidence intervals. But it’s also possible that the polls really were systematically biased, only they were biased against Obama—not against Romney, as conservative pundits were claiming in the last days.

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I’m Betting on Grover

In the wake of their overwhelming defeat last week (at least relative to expectations a few months ago), Republicans are wondering how to improve their position in the next election. John Boehner has apparently told his caucus to “get in line” and support negotiations with the president over the “fiscal cliff” and the national debt. More shockingly, The Hill reported rumblings that Grover Norquist’s stranglehold over tax policy may be weakening, with one Democratic aide even saying, “As far as [Norquist’s] ability to sway votes, it’s gone.” Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge forbids lawmakers from voting for legislation that would either raise tax rates or increase tax revenues; if Republicans are questioning the pledge, that might pave the way for a bipartisan compromise to increase taxes.

Norquist’s response: “Nobody’s actually broken the pledge. That doesn’t keep me up at night.” He’s right not to worry. He has history on his side.

Let’s take a brief look at American political history since the 1970s, courtesy of the incomparable xkcd:

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