Author: James Kwak

How to Back Up the Shadow Banking System

Mike from Rortybomb has an interview with Perry Mehrling on the shadow banking system. I was going to try to put this in some context, but Mark Thoma (who played an important role in this saga) beat me to it.

Merhling’s takeaway point is that there needs to be a “credit insurer of last resort,” who will insure any asset against a fall in value – for a sufficiently high premium. This would make it possible for financial institutions to unload the risk of their asset portfolios in a crisis, if they are willing to pay enough to do so. The only institution that would have the credibility to play this role in a real crisis would be the federal government; as we saw, AIG – the world’s largest insurance company, remember – was not up to the task. Still, though, I’m not sure this would do the trick. If I’m a large bank with a balance sheet full of toxic assets, and I don’t want to pay the premium that the insurer of last resort is charging, then I go to the government, say the price is too high, and ask for a bailout. The credit insurer of last resort would need to be coupled with a commitment not to provide an alternative form of government support, or we would end up where we are today.

By James Kwak

How to Win Friends and Influence People

An old friend of mine asked me for some advice about how to increase readership for his blog. I was going to write him a long email, but I thought if I put it here other people can chime in as well.

The conventional wisdom about how to make your blog successful is “write great content.” Of course, that’s very self-serving for established bloggers to say, since it implies that they write great content. I think Felix Salmon is more accurate: write a lot of content.

Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently. . . .

Mostly, blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level — and if you want to win the lottery, your best chance of doing so is to maximize the number of lottery tickets you buy.

(Of course, we at The Baseline Scenario don’t follow this rule, but if I had more time I would.) I recommend Felix’s whole post, most of which I agree with. But I’ll add a few thoughts of my own.

Continue reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” →

The Future of Computing?

Google announced the Google Chrome “Operating System” a few days ago, and the world I used to live in is abuzz with people talking about the earthquake this represents for the computing industry. TechCrunch says, “Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft.” Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has a more thoughtful response, but also subscribes to the “future of computing” theme: “Google is moving everything online, and I really believe this is the future of computing. The desktop model of computing — the Microsoft era — is coming to an end. It’ll take a few years, but it will happen.”

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People Who Think Taxes Will Have to Go Up

David Leonhardt has started a new club, which has already attracted some additional members.

Count me in, in spirit at least (there must be dozens of more prominent people for the Times to bother with). Because, ultimately, I think we Americans are a decent people (or at least a squeamish people), and we will not be able to endure the sight of millions of seniors being thrown onto the streets or deprived of medical care. And so the looming combined shortfall of Medicare, public pensions, private pensions,  and individual savings will at some point motivate us to raise taxes on ourselves.

By James Kwak

The Limits of Economics

In honor of Mark Sanford and that other guy from Nevada, the fun-loving crowd over at Planet Money has been talking about the economics of adultery, and even got Simon to comment for them. I’m all in favor of a cute model, but I think this is as much a sign of the over-expansion of economic reason as anything else.

Chana Joffe-Walt’s post asks this question of the typical cheating politician: “Didn’t he know he’ll get caught, put his family through hell, exhaust all of us with the details and jeopardize his career? The costs are so great, how could the affair possibly be worth it?”

Well, that assumes that he was going to get caught, and the odds of being caught in an affair are one of those things that are inherently very difficult to measure (and that cheaters are likely to underestimate, because of selection bias). We can see the numerator, but we can’t see the denominator. It also assumes that trading your political career for a steamy affair is a bad outcome. On some level, don’t you suspect that a lot of male politicians do it because they want to impress women, and that affairs are part of the payoff of politics? And what sane person would really want to be in electoral politics anyway?

More generally, the motivations that drive people to want to have sex with people they are not married to, or otherwise live secret lives other than the one they are supposed to live, seem to me not only too complex for a Chicago-school rational-actor model, but even perhaps too complex for a behavioral model. That is, I suspect that this type of behavior involves multiple actors inside the same person: one person who combines the ambitious, values-touting politician; the typical middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis and hoping for someone to validate his self-image; and, of course, the lout who thinks with something other than his brain. I think combining those sides of the psyche into a single utility model and maximizing it subject to a budget constraint (be it money or time) is basically a fantasy. But economists these days wil stop at nothing.

By James Kwak

The Finest of the Flavors

Richard Thaler has a simple argument for plain-vanilla financial products. Mike at Rortybomb deals with some of the predictable objections. This is also similar to Adam Levitin’s position on credit cards, which I wrote about a while back.

I’m in favor, although I don’t think it will be enough to simply make the vanilla offering available; in that case nothing would stop lenders from paying higher commissions to brokers in order to steer customers toward exploding mortgages.

By James Kwak

Bankslaughter, Tort Law, and Optimal Deterrence

Felix Salmon has been helping popularize Paul Collier’s idea of bankslaughter. (No, it’s not what you wish it were.) The idea is that there would be a crime called bankslaughter, or “managing a bank irresponsibly.” If a bank blows up, there could be a criminal investigation to determine if the bank managers behaved recklessly (more on that term later); if so, they would be convicted. The analogy is to manslaughter, which is actually a family of crimes; Collier probably means criminally negligent homicide, or causing death through negligent or reckless (more on those terms later) behavior.

Not surprisingly, the conservatives are not happy about this, even though it seems to conform to the conservative principle that people should bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions. (Or maybe that only applies if you are a pregnant teenager.) Salmon cites John Carney, who calls bankslaughter “the worst idea of the week.”

Continue reading “Bankslaughter, Tort Law, and Optimal Deterrence” →

Recently Bailed-Out Banks Refuse to Take California IOUs

The Wall Street Journal (via Calculated Risk) reports that a group of large banks has announced that it will not accept IOUs issued by the state of California. The group includes the four horsemen of the financial crisis: Citigroup, Bank of America/Merrill/Countrywide, JPMorgan Chase/Bear Stearns/WaMu, and Wells Fargo/Wachovia.

Write your own ironic commentary.

By James Kwak

Still Skeptical About Banks

It’s getting somewhat lonelier being a large financial institution skeptic, although there still a lot of us left. I would say that among the skeptics, the general view is that we may have seen an end to bank panics for this cycle – I’m not sure anyone is saying there will definitely be another crisis in the near future – but we may not have, and we may come to regret not taking stronger measures now. (How’s that for prognostication?)

Lucian Bebchuk, in Project Syndicate (a well-intentioned collaboration that manages to sound ominous and conspiratorial), makes the argument in clear terms. First, the recent stress tests only projected losses through 2010, ignoring the large number of loans and mortgage- and asset-backed securities that mature in later years. More fundamentally, though: “Rather than estimate the economic value of banks’ assets – what the assets would fetch in a well-functioning market – and the extent to which they exceed liabilities, the stress tests merely sought to verify that the banks’ accounting losses over the next two years will not exhaust their capital as recorded in their books.” Put another way, the focus has been on the accounting value of assets, not their economic value; so for a given asset, as long as it doesn’t have to be written down before the end of 2010, there is no problem.

Bebchuk also points out that the ability of banks to raise equity capital should not be taken as an “all clear” sign. As he and others have previously argued, equity in large banks by its very nature represents a leveraged bet whose downside risk is limited by the implicit government guarantee. That is, as a shareholder, if the economy does OK and bank assets appreciate in value, you get all of the upside (leveraged by the bank’s liabilities); if the economy does terribly and bank assets fall in value, your losses are not only limited to the amount of your investment, they are further limited by the implicit guarantee that the government will not wipe you out. That guarantee is weaker than the implicit guarantee on bank liabilities, but it is still there; given the way the government has treated Citigroup, Bank of America, and GMAC, betting on the “no more Lehmans” policy seems like a sensible bet.

Most attention is now focused on the battle over financial regulation (if it isn’t on health care and energy), which is appropriate. But it may be premature to declare victory over the financial crisis.

By James Kwak

The Efficient Market for Cristiano Ronaldo

Cristiano Ronaldo, perhaps the best soccer player in the world and still only 24 years old, was sold by Manchester United to Real Madrid for 94 million euros (that’s just the transfer fee, and has nothing to do with his salary). Ronaldo:

“I think it’s a fair price. If Manchester and Real agreed on the price, there is nothing to add.”

Eugene Fama could not have put it any better. Perhaps Ronaldo has an investment banking career in his future.

Update: tkt points out in the comments that Zinedine Zidane was actually more expensive in real terms. If I recall correctly his transfer fee was over 70 million euros in 2001, so that’s almost certainly right.

By James Kwak

The Mystery of Rating Agencies

Calculated Risk has a routine post about S&P increasing its loss projections for subprime and Alt-A loans and for the mortgage-backed securities built out of those loans. These announcements have been so common over the last several months that I usually don’t even think about them. But today I had a thought about them: these are forecasts, which means that they should not get worse just because the economy is getting worse. Forecasts should only change when there is new news that affects expectations about the future. So if you take these rating agency reports at face value, they imply not only that the economy is getting worse (by traditional measures such as the unemployment rate), but that there is new bad news about the future of the economy, despite all this talk you hear about green shoots and a recovery. If there is only old news, then that should have been “priced in” to S&P’s forecasts already.

So what gives? Do the rating agencies see some new perils in the economy that are being overlooked? Or are they just stretching out a writedown in their forecasts over several quarters? Under the latter theory, they should have known what would happen to subprime and Alt-A loans the same time people like Calculated Risk did – that is, several months ago – but it would be too embarrassing to do a massive writedown all at once, so they are spreading it out over time for respectability.

By James Kwak

Little Hoovers, Part-Time Employment, and Me

Paul Krugman is generally credited with coining the term “fifty little Hoovers” to refer to our state governments and the current economic crisis. The macroeconomics textbook says that when a recession hits, the government should implement expansionary policy, whether monetary – making cheap money available – or fiscal – borrowing money and spending it to compensate for falling private-sector demand. However, states have no monetary policy, since they don’t control the money supply, and they generally can’t engage in expansionary fiscal policy, because most have made it prohibitively difficult to borrow money and go into deficit. So in a recession, states tend to cut spending and raise taxes, which only compound the effect of a recession. Since most states’ fiscal years end on June 30, some of the effects of this belt-tightening should be hitting right about now.

One thing that states spend money on, but that people generally don’t think about, is legal services for poor people. I think about this because I am spending the summer working (for free) for a legal services provider in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, like in many states, funding for legal services for the poor comes mainly from two sources: (a) interest on lawyers’ trust accounts (IOLTA) – that is, the short-term interest paid on money that your lawyer is holding for you for some reason; and (b) direct appropriations in the state budget.

Continue reading “Little Hoovers, Part-Time Employment, and Me” →

The Importance of Mark Thoma

David Warsh has an article about economics blogging that is focused on Mark Thoma. Mark isn’t the most controversial blogger on the Internet, but he is one of the most invaluable, because he provides long excerpts of lots of economics material, from all different perspectives. (He also has his own points of view, but he is willing to entertain people who don’t agree with him. He is also gracious and welcoming to new bloggers (like we were not so long ago). If you have a general interest in economics and don’t subscribe to him, check him out.

By James Kwak

Catching Up with the Bandwagon

Sorry about the recent silence; I’ve been trying to kill off a rewrite of a paper, and sometimes I find that to get things done you just have to be singleminded about your priorities.

In case you haven’t seen them yet, I wanted to point out a couple of things that have been making the rounds of the Internet:

  • Most of the people writing about health care reform on economics blogs – present company included – are not health care economics specialists. Uwe Reinhardt is. So when he writes about “rationing health care,” I recommend reading (hat tip Mark Thoma).
  • Brad Setser is branching out from foreign reserves, holdings of U.S. government and agency bonds, and China – on which he is probably the leading figure on the Internet – to, well, everything. Visit the Council on Foreign Relations’ “Crisis Guide: The Global Economy” and click on Motion Charts. There are four charts in the sidebar to the right. For each one, you can watch Setser on video, or you can click the “Interact with Motion Chart” link and play with it yourself.

Happy reading.

By James Kwak

Statistics and Basketball for Beginners

I think that the general difficulty that many people have in understanding statistics is an important problem, because it leads people to misinterpret the world around them. General managers of baseball teams overpay for free agents coming off of good years because they underestimate the chances that the recent good year was just the result of variance around a mediocre mean – or at least they did until the Billy Beane era. Retail investors plow money into expensive mutual funds that have beaten the S&P 500 index for a few years in a row because they underestimate the chances that recent success is the result of pure, dumb luck; more importantly, the scandal of mutual fund expenses goes unchallenged because of the conventional wisdom that you should pay more to get into “better” funds. (I think it is possible, though unlikely, that some fund managers could actually be better than the market; but with all the statistical noise, you are not going to find them unless you look at a very long period of time.)

So I was happy to learn that my second-favorite radio show, Radiolab, was doing an episode on randomness. (You can stream it at that link, or download an MP3 from their podcast.) Their first segment does a good, clear job of debunking the human tendency to make too much of seemingly improbable events. For example, a woman in New Jersey wins the lottery in two consective years; what are the chances? But if you look at all the lotteries and all the lottery winners everywhere, it would be shocking if you didn’t have repeat winners.

Continue reading “Statistics and Basketball for Beginners” →