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First I wanted to thank you for the wonderful comments I’ve been enjoying and compiling from my last post about what’s corrupt about the financial system and what should be done about it. Even if I don’t end up doing the teach-in (hopefully I will! In any case I’ll go down there, even if it’s just to try to set up the teach-in for a later date) I think this is a really fantastic and important discussion. I’m putting together a final list of issues tonight and I think I’ll make a flyer to bring tomorrow, so if I don’t actually conduct the teach-in (yet) I’ll at least be able to give the info booth the flyers.

And it’s not too late! Please keep the comments coming.

Today I want to start a discussion on Richard Koo’s book, which is about Japan’s so-called “lost decade” (a reader suggested this book to me, and it’s fascinating, so thanks! And please feel free to make more suggestions for my reading list).

You can actually get a pretty good overview of his book by watching this excellent interview by Koo. For those of you, like me, whose sound doesn’t work on their computers, here’s his basic thesis:

• After the housing bubble in Japan burst, a bunch of firms, banks and otherwise, became technically insolvent. This meant that, although they had cash flow, they owed more than their assets.
• Because they were insolvent, they didn’t maximize profits like in normal times; instead they minimized debts.
• In other words, they didn’t borrow money to grow their businesses, like you’d expect in normal circumstances, which is proved by looking at data showing that corporate borrowing went down even as interest rates lowered to zero.
• The CEO’s didn’t talk about this because they don’t want anyone to know they’re insolvent!
• Investors are also somewhat blind to this, because they typically look at growth and cash flow issues.
• Japan’s government made massive investments in order to cover the lack of private investments.
• Rather than this being a mistake, this was absolutely essential to the Japanese economy and prevented a massive depression.
• Moreover, the idea that Japan had a lost decade is false: actually, there was a lot going on in that decade (actually, 15 years) but people didn’t see it. Namely, the balance sheets were slowly improved over the entire economy.
• This is a lesson for us all: any time there’s a massive credit bubble which breaks, we can expect a balance sheet recession where behavior like this is the rule. The U.S. economy right now is an example of this.

I have a few comments about this. I wanted to mention that I’m only about halfway through the book so it’s possible that Koo addresses some of these issues but on the other hand the book was published in 2009 but was clearly written before the U.S. credit crisis was really full-blown:

Do you remember, back in 2005 or 2006 or even up to early 2008, how absolutely everyone seemed to be buying flat screen TVs? And not only one, they’d actually buy new ones when new models came out, or ones with different high definition properties. And not just people who could afford it, either. The marketers did an excellent job in somehow convincing people that they needed these flat screen TVs so bad that they should just put it on their credit cards, all 3 thousand dollars of it, or whatever those things cost.

I don’t know exactly how much they cost because I never bought one. The last TV we bought was in 1997 and it still works, for the most part, although it’s really hard to turn it on and off. When it finally kicks the bucket I’m thinking we go without a TV, since TV pretty much sucks anyway. When we do watch it, it’s for live sports (local, or nationally televised, since we don’t pay for cable). Baseball we watch or listen to on the computer.

I was reminded of the the “flat screen TV era” by my friend Ian Langmore the other day when we were discussing household debt amnesty. His argument against debt amnesty for consumers was that they might spend it on crappy things. His example was luxury dog poo, but I’ve been obsessed with the flat screen TV phenomenon ever since a friend of mine, who was $120,000 in debt and didn’t have a salary, somehow managed to buy a flat screen TV in 2007. It blew me away in terms of wasteful consumerism. Ian found this unbelievable blog which kind of sums up my concerns.

In Ian’s opinion, the danger of amnesty, or any system where money is put willy-nilly into the hands of consumers, is twofold:

1)  We waste time on unproductive activities.  E.g. people spent time buying/building cars that are unneeded.
2)  If a miscalculation is made, then the over-leveraged money-go-round stops with a huge mis-balance.  E.g. home mortgage crisis.

These are very good points, and put together form a lesson we somehow can’t learn, although perhaps that can be partially explained by this article.

I have two thoughts. First, I’m also uncomfortable putting money in the hands of irresponsible consumers. But the truth is, the way I see it is currently working, we are already putting money in the hands of irresponsible bankers (that’s what the term “injection of liquidity” really means), and they are not doing anything with it, so let’s try something else. In other words, an alternative unpleasant idea.

Second, I don’t think we are going to see a new wave of flat screen TV buying any time soon. If we put money into the hands of consumers right now, I think we’d see them pay down their debts, go to the doctor, and buy jeans for their kids. Of course, there is always someone whose pockets burn with cash, and they would waste money in any situation. Let’s face it, though, credit is tight right now compared to the mid-2000’s. In fact, since economists seem to have a tough time spotting bubbles until afterwards, maybe we can take “a huge part of the population starts buying useless gadgets on credit” as almost a definition, or at least a leading indicator. Then at least there would be some point to all of that wasteful spending.

Being a mathematician, I find myself forced to consider statements like “higher taxes kill jobs” as statements of theorems with missing stated assumptions. How could you fill in the assumptions and prove this theorem?

First I think about extreme cases- sometimes extreme situations need fewer assumptions, they kind of spill out as obvious. So here’s one, the tax rate is at 80%, what would happen if we raised taxes? My first reaction is, 80%!? That must mean you have way too much government and regulation and for those reasons businesses are probably already quite pinned down and don’t have lots of freedom- don’t tax them more, that will make their good ideas (if they have them) all the more suffocated. Just think of the paperwork you’d need to go through in a society that government-heavy, to hire someone.

What’s another extreme case? How about taxes are super low, more like fees for doing business. Then no, I don’t think raising them a moderate amount would kill jobs at all, in fact it may introduce enough government to make things less wild west and safer for businesses to operate.

So in other words at some level I buy the anti-regulation anti-government angle. I don’t want super duper high taxes because I think it encourages too much bureaucracy and that stuff is boring (but some amount of it is necessary to make things safe).

Moreover I’m assuming that governments generally use taxes to protect people from food poisoning and the like, regulate to force companies to play fair, and as social safety nets when things go bad, and that they’re not particularly efficient. Those of course are my assumptions, which anyone can disagree with.

But in terms of proving my theorem, I’m stuck thinking it’s more like, there’s some point in between very low and very high taxes where it gradually becomes true that raising taxes more will indeed start to kill jobs.

How about our situation now? Right now we have pretty low taxes by historical measures, and moreover the known loopholes mean that businesses (especially big ones with fancy lawyers) pay much less than their stated tax rate.

Why, in this case, would a moderate bump in their tax rates kill jobs?

Here’s a possible argument: if higher taxes actually encourage more regulation, then that could be a major problem for smaller businesses, who don’t have the margin for dealing with hiring that many lawyers for compliance issues. Although this article argues that “regulation kills jobs” is an invalid statement in general.

Pet peeve of mine: when you hear conservatives talk about killing jobs, they often frame it in terms of struggling small businesses, often run by a woman. But it’s easy enough to imagine that we introduce taxes and regulation that are easier for small businesses to avoid smothering them. It’s really the huge businesses that we want to see start hiring, and it’s the huge businesses that pay so little taxes.

Here’s another one: if you raise taxes people will spend their cash on taxes instead of hiring people. But wait, that doesn’t apply right now when we have so much frigging cash on hand (and hidden in other countries). In other words, companies are not not hiring people for cash flow reasons, it’s because they don’t see the demand.

In the end I can’t see how to prove or even argue that theorem, assuming today’s conditions. Would love to hear the argument I’m missing.

This week has been particularly confusing when it comes to the European debt crisis. It’s complicated enough to think about the various countries, with their various current debt problems, future debt problems, and austerity plans, not to mention how they typically interact at the political level versus how the average citizen is affected by it all. But this week we’ve seen weird and coordinated intervention by a bunch of central banks to address a so-called “liquidity crisis”.

What is this all about? Is it actually a credit crisis disguised as a liquidity crisis? Is it just another stealth way to bail out huge banks?

I’m going to take a stab at answering these questions, at the risk of talking out of my ass (and when has that ever stopped me?).

Finance is a big messy system, and it’s hard to know where to begin on the merry-go-round of confusion, but let’s start with European banks since they are the ones in need of funding.

European banks have lots of euros on hand, just as American banks have lots of dollars, because of the actual deposits they hold. However, European banks invest in American things (like businesses) that need them to come up with short term funding denominated in dollars. Similarly American banks invest in Europe, but that’s not really relevant to the discussion yet.

How do European banks get these short term (3 month) loans? Historically they do a large majority of it through money-markets: much of the money people have in banks is funneled to huge vats called money markets, and the fund managers of those vats are very very conservatively trying to make a bit of interest on them. In fact they were burned in the credit crisis, when they famously “broke the buck” on Lehman short-term loans.

Well, guess what, those same American money managers are avoiding European short-term loans right now, because they are super afraid of losing money on them. So that source of funding has dried up. Note that this is a credit problem: the money market managers do not trust the banks to be around in 3 months.

Another source of funding for the European banks’ American investments has been just to use their euros, exchange them to dollars (the currency market is very very large and liquid, especially on this particular exchange), then wait until the term of the short-term financing is over, and then convert the dollars back to euros. What actually happens, in fact, is that they borrow euros (at the going rate of 1%), do the exchange, then financing, and then get their money back in the future.

The guys who work at the European banks and who do this short-term financing aren’t allowed to take on the risk that the exchange rate is going to violently change between now and when the short-term term is over. Therefore they need to hedge the risk, which means they have to have a guarantee that the dollars they get out at the end of the term will be turned into a reasonable number of euros.

This kind of guarantee is called a currency swap, and the market for those is also very large and liquid, but has been less liquid recently because of the one-sidedness of this problem: European banks need short-term dollars but American banks don’t need euros at the same rate at the same maturity. So the end result is that the swaps are very very expensive for European banks.

Let’s put this another way, the way that seems strangest and most confusing: right now the European banks can borrow at 1% in euros but at 4% in dollars (for three month maturity), and more generally the demand for USD seems to be skyrocketing recently from all over the place. Does this mean there’s an arbitrage opportunity somewhere? The swaps market is at 3% so no obvious arbitrage. More likely it means that the markets are expecting the exchange rate to drastically change, or at least they are pricing in the risk of it changing violently in the very near future. (The strangest thing to me is why it hasn’t just changed the spot exchange rate as well.)

By the way, a pet peeve or two I have with people talking about arbitrage: firstly, many people use the term so loosely it means nothing at all, as when they take risk over time (exposing themselves to the possibility of an exchange rate change for example). But even here, I’m misusing the term, since in an arbitrage it’s literally supposed to be a way to make money risk-free, but the whole point of my post is that this is really all about counter-party risk! In other words, there’s no arbitrage opportunity to get into contracts with people where you’d make money except if they go bankrupt tomorrow, when there’s a good chance that will happen.

The bottomline is that although the ECB and the Fed and the other central banks have spun this as a coordinated effort to help out a liquidity squeezed but functional market, it doesn’t pass the smell test. What’s actually happening is that the shoddy accounting and investments of French banks and others is not being trusted by American money market managers who are wise to them.

One more thing: the collateral being asked of the European banks is purportedly of low standard, which is to say the ECB is allowing thing like Greek debt as collateral, which wouldn’t past muster with other institutions (or with U.S. money markets!). In that sense this can be seen as a stealth bailout, although I think not the first one in Europe under that definition. This isn’t going away until they figure out how to deal with the Greek debt problem.

There’s an article here in the Financial Times which describes how the International Accounting Standards Board is complaining publicly about how certain financial institutions are lying through their teeth about how much their Greek debt is worth.

It’s a rare stand for them (in fact the article describes it as “unprecedented”), and it highlights just how much a difference in assumptions in your model can make for the end result:

Financial institutions have slashed billions of euros from the value of their Greek government bond holdings following the country’s second bail-out. The extent to which Greek sovereign debt losses were acknowledged has varied, with some banks and insurers writing down their holdings by a half and others by only a fifth.

It all comes down to whether the given institution decided to use a “mark to model” valuation for their Greek debt or a “mark to market” valuation. “Mark to model” valuations are used in accounting when the market is “sufficiently illiquid” that it’s difficult to gauge the market price of a security; however, it’s often used (as IASB is claiming here) as a ruse to be deceptive about true values when you just don’t want to admit the truth.

There’s an amusingly technical description of the mark to model valuation for Greek debt used by BNP Paribas here. I’m no accounting expert but my overall takeaway is that it’s a huge stretch to believe that something as large as a sovereign debt market is illiquid and needs mark to model valuation: true, not many people are trading Greek bonds right now, but that’s because they suck so much and nobody wants to sell them at their true price since then they’d have to mark down their holdings. It’s a cyclical and unacceptable argument.

In any case, it’s nice to see the IASB make a stand. And it’s an example where, although there are two possible assumptions one can make, there really is a better, more reasonable one that should be made.

That reminds me, here’s another example of different assumptions changing the end result by quite a lot. The “trillion dollar mistake” that S&P supposedly made was in fact caused by them making a different assumption than that which the White House was prepared to make:

As it turns out, the sharpshooters were wide of the target. S&P didn’t make an arithmetical error, as Summers would have us believe. Nor did the sovereign-debt analysts show “a stunning lack of knowledge,” as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner claimed. Rather, they used a different assumption about the growth rate of discretionary spending, something the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office does regularly in its long-term outlook.

CBO’s “alternative fiscal scenario,” which S&P used for its initial analysis, assumes discretionary spending increases at the same rate as nominal gross domestic product, or about 5 percent a year. CBO’s baseline scenario, which is subject to current law, assumes 2.5 percent annual growth in these outlays, which means less new debt over 10 years.

Is anyone surprised about this? Not me. It also goes under the category of “modeling error”, which is super important for people to know and to internalize: different but reasonable assumptions going into a mathematical model can have absolutely huge effects on the output. Put another way, we won’t be able to infer anything from a model unless we have some estimate of the modeling error, and in this case we see the modeling error involves at least one trillion dollars.

There’s a pretty good article here by Gretchen Morgenson about how the banks have been treated well compared to average people- and since I went through the exercise of considering whether corporations are people, I’ve decided it’s misleading yet really useful to talk about “treating banks” well- we should keep in mind that this is shorthand for treating the people who control and profit from banks well.

On thing I really like about the article is that she questions the argument that you hear so often from the dudes like Paulson who made the decisions back then, namely that it was better to bail out the banks than to do nothing. Yes, but weren’t there alternatives? Just as the government could have demanded haircuts on the CDS’s they bailed out for AIG, they could have stipulated real conditions for the banks to receive bailout money. This is sort of like saying Obama could have demanded something in return for allowing Bush’s tax cuts for the rich to continue.

But on another issue I think she’s too soft. Namely, she says the following near the end of the article:

As for making money on the deals? Only half-true, Mr. Kane said. “Thanks to the vastly subsidized terms these programs offered, most institutions were eventually able to repay the formal obligations they incurred.” But taxpayers were inadequately compensated for the help they provided, he said. We should have received returns of 15 percent to 20 percent on our money, given the nature of these rescues.

Hold on, where did she get the 15-20%? As far as I’m concerned there’s no way that’s sufficient compensation for the future option to screw up as much as you can, knowing the government has your back. I’d love to see how she modeled the value of that. True, it’s inherently difficult to model, which is a huge problem, but I still think it has to be at least as big as the current credit card return limits! Or how about the Payday Loans interest rates?

I agree with her overall point, though, which is that this isn’t working. All of the things the Fed and the Treasury and the politicians have done since the credit crisis began has alleviated the pain of banks and, to some extent, businesses (like the auto industry). What about the people who were overly optimistic about their future earnings and the value of their house back in 2007, or who were just plain short-sighted, and who are still in debt?

It enough to turn you into an anarchist, like David Graeber, who just wrote a book about debt (here’s a fascinating interview with him) and how debt came before money. He thinks we should, as a culture, enact a massive act of debt amnesty so that the people are no longer enslaved to their creditors, in order to keep the peace.

I kind of agree- why is it so much easier for institutions to get bailed out when they’ve promised too much than it is for average people crushed under an avalanche of household debt? At the very least we should be telling people to walk away from their mortgages or credit card debts when it’s in their best interest (and we should help them understand when it is in their best interest).