Fun debt graphs

I was having a bit of fun making graphs for a talk. Are we all fine and debt is no longer a problem? I went back for a closer look at the CBO's long term budget outlook and The budget and economic outlook 2013 to 2023. All numbers from these sources.

Growth in the UK?

I thought European "austerity," meaning mostly large increases in marginal tax rates on anyone daring  to work, save, invest, start a company or hire people, while spending stays north of 50% of GDP, was a pretty bad idea.

So I was glad to read the tiltle, when a friend sent me a link to the Telegraph, announcing Osborne to unleash raft of policies to kick-start growth. Great, I thought, after trying everything else, the British will finally try the one thing that will work.

The fair price of catfish in Vietnam

Source: Wikipedia

Another fish story.  In recent news, our Federal Government is now taking on the "fair price" of catfish in Vietnam, and imposing large "anti-dumping" tariffs. Can the price of tea in China be far away?

Lovers of free markets and free trade, this is for you. Fry it with a little hot sauce.

Capital not a lost cause?

Admati and Hellwig (my review here) (and fellow travelers) may be having some effect! From today's WSJ "Heard on the Street":

There is growing talk among regulators, for example, of forcing banks to issue a minimum amount of long-term debt, cap the size of their short-term liabilities or restrict activities that can be conducted within regulated bank subsidiaries.

At the same time, regulators seem to be focusing more on the need to pre-emptively address potential systemic risks.

Any such moves could further constrain banks' ability to juice returns through leverage while also limiting lucrative activities that fall outside a traditional lending function. That could subdue earnings growth already hampered by the superlow interest-rate environment.

The danger isn't lost on banks themselves. A number of banking groups recently joined together in a public attempt to rebut notions of a big-bank borrowing subsidy.”

OK, 3 out of 4 ain't bad. Admati and Hellwig (and I) take a dim view of asset risk regulation and the chance that regulators have any hope of seeing bubbles emerge. But more capital, and more people understanding that leverage and TBTF is a subsidy to banks, so banks are forced to fight about it... that's progress.

GMO Salmon

Source: http://www.aquabounty.com

This weekend's New York Times brought the interesting story of AquaBounty's genetically modified salmon, which are genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as normal Salmon. A few choice bits:

"In 1993, the company approached the Food and Drug Administration about selling a genetically modified salmon that grew faster than normal fish. In 1995, AquaBounty formally applied for approval. Last month, more than 17 years later, the public comment period...was finally supposed to conclude. But the F.D.A. has extended the deadline...

Appropriately, it has been subjected to rigorous reviews... scientists, including the F.D.A.’s experts, have concluded that the fish is just as safe to eat as conventional salmon and that, raised in isolated tanks, it poses little risk to wild populations.

Why the delay?

Taxation of capital and labor

"Redistributing from Capital to Workers: An Impossibility Theorem" is a fine post by Garrett Jones on Econlog, explaining the theorem that the optimal tax on capital is zero. It's the best blog-post length, evenhanded, accessible summary I've seen. It includes all sorts of links where you can see arguments in detail, an unusually scholarly approach for a blog post.

His one-sentence summary

 Under standard, pretty flexible assumptions, it's impossible to tax capitalists, give the money to workers, and raise the total long-run income of workers. Not, hard, not inefficient, not socially wasteful, not immoral: Impossible.

Crunch time

David Greenalw, Jim Hamilton, Peter Hooper and Rick Mishkin have a nice op-ed in the Wall Street Journal summarizing their recent paper, Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy, (The link goes to from Jim's website there is also an executive summary.)

David, Jim, Peter and Rick are after the same question in my last WSJ oped and Blog post: Suppose the Fed wants to raise interest rates with a huge debt outstanding. With, say, $18 trillion outstanding, raising interest rates to 5% means raising the deficit by $900 billion a year. That's real fiscal resources. In a present value sense, monetary tightening costs someone $900 billion a year of taxes.  There is no chance that current tax revenues can go up that much, or current spending can go down that much. So, raising interest rates to 5% with a lot of debt outstanding means we will borrow it, the debt will grow $900 billion a year faster, and the larger taxes /lower spending will come someday in the far off future.

Or maybe not. David,  Jim, Peter and Rick delve in to the "tipping point" I alluded to.

Countries with high debt loads are vulnerable to an adverse feedback loop in which doubts by lenders about fiscal sustainability lead to higher government bond rates, which in turn make debt problems more severe.

Comic of the day

Greg Mankiw posted this lovely "comic of the day." He called it "not completely fair." I'm not sure what he meant.

Perhaps it's in need of a better caption. To be fair to Keynesian economics, perhaps the caption should continue,

"When you're done, another half a box will magically appear on the wall." 

Maybe this is a good time for a cartoon caption contest!

Monetary policy with large debts

This is a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, March 4 2013. They titled it "Treasury needs a better long game," but the most important question is whether the Fed can keep any independence, if 5% interest rates will cause $900 billion interest costs. There is a pdf version of the oped on my webpage. 


Sooner or later, the Federal Reserve will want to raise interest rates. Maybe next year. Maybe when unemployment declines below 6.5%. Maybe when inflation creeps up to 3%. But it will happen.

Can the Fed tighten without shedding much of the record $3 trillion of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities on its balance sheet, and soaking up $2 trillion of excess reserves? Yes. The Fed can easily raise short-term interest rates by changing the rate it pays banks on reserves and the discount rate at which it lends.

But this comforting thought leaves out a vital consideration: Monetary policy depends on fiscal policy in an era of large debts and deficits. Suppose that the Fed raises interest rates to 5% over the next few years. This is a reversion to normal, not a big tightening. Yet with $18 trillion of debt outstanding, the federal government will have to pay $900 billion more in annual interest.

Will Congress and the public really agree to spend $900 billion a year for monetary tightening? Or will Congress simply command the Fed to keep down interest payments, as it did after World War II, reasoning that "Fed independence" isn't worth that huge sum of money?

The banker's new clothes -- review

I wrote a review of Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig's nice new book, "The banker's new clothes" for the March 2 2103 Wall Street Journal.

Bottom line: Banks should issue a lot more equity, a lot less debt, especially short term debt, and a heck of a lot less nonsense.

I admire Anat and Martin. The rest of us read the gobbledygook in the newspapers, chuckle at the faculty lunch -- "Ha ha, xyz is CEO of a huge bank and has never heard of Modigliani-Miller! Ha Ha -- pdq is a senior regulator, and doesn't know the difference between capital and reserves!" -- and then we go about our business. Anat and Martin have admirably taken the bull by the horns. They write opeds, they go to interminable banking policy conferences, they fight it out with bigwig bankers, regulators, and their consultant economists, and endure their scorn. This nice book summarizes their arguments very clearly (without the foaming at the mouth ranting and raving that I would have had a hard time avoiding in their place!)

(Links: This review at the Wall Street Journal (html), in a pdf from my webpage. Admati and Hellwig have a book website with lots of extra material and response to critics.)

Enough preamble. The review: 

Four and a half years ago, the large commercial banks nearly failed, inaugurating our great recession. They were saved by the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Federal Reserve lending and other government support. If you think all that was bad, imagine the ATMs going dark. What has been done to avoid a repetition of these events? Sadly, and despite all the noise you hear about bank regulation, not much.

The central problem, at the core of Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig's "The Bankers' New Clothes," is capital.

Limited clairvoyance

The current approach to financial and banking regulation relies a lot on the idea that our now-wise regulators, armed with new powers and the tens of thousands of pages of Dodd-Frank regulations, really will see trouble around the corner next time and do something about it. If only they had more power back then....And of course even conventional macro policy chat revolves around wise heads of the Fed, IMF, ECB, and so on spotting "global imbalances," pricking "bubbles," "coordinating policies" and otherwise guiding the ships of state.

In this context, a lovely little piece at "The American" AEI's online magazine, caught my eye, Alex Pollock's "The housing Bubble and the Limits of Human Knowledge"

An excerpt:

Consider the lessons of the following 10 quotations:

1. About whether Fannie and Freddie’s debt was backed by the government: “There is no guarantee. There’s no explicit guarantee. There’s no implicit guarantee. There’s no wink-and-nod guarantee. Invest and you’re on your own.” — Barney Frank, senior Democratic congressman, notable Fannie supporter, later chairman of the House Financial Services Committee

It would be difficult to imagine a statement more wrong.

Two cents on the minimum wage

Once upon a time, the minimum wage, like free trade, was a basic test of whether you were awake in the first week of econ 1. We put a horizontal line in a supply and demand graph. Minimum wages increase unemployment of poor people.

It's  back of course. I won't review here the debate over Card and Kruger's provocative results, diff in diff estimators, empirical work without theory (is there really no substitution to capital or high skilled labor? Is the price elasticity really zero?) and so on. This is all low-hanging fruit. (See Greg Mankiw, who asks if $9 why not $20,  David Henderson's nice post with great quotes from Paul Krugman on just how bad minimum wages were before evil Republicans didn't like them, the Becker-Posner Blog, and Ed Glaeser, noting how minimum wages are hidden taxing and spending and better ways to achieve the same goals, and this clever Steve Chapman oped asking, why not fix prices lower instead?.)

Let's presume for the sake of discussion that a rise in the minimum wage would indeed not much change the demand for labor, the costs would just be passed on in the form of somewhat higher prices, with little decline in output -- as usual in non-economics, assume that all elasticities vanish.

It still strikes me, that like much of the current policy discussion, we're asking the wrong question. The question is not "is this great" or "is this terrible" but "does this have anything to do with current problems?"  The fiddling while Rome burns is worse here than the belief in minor economic magic.

Bloomberg TV on debt and magic

I did a short interview on Bloomberg TV this morning. Nothing new for readers of this blog, but fun anyway. Coffee just starting to kick in at 6:15 AM. As always, walking home I figured out 10 better ways to answer.

Surprising candor at NYT on health care

The New York Times published a surprisingly sensible piece on health care on Sunday, "The health care benefits that cut your pay" by David Goldhill. A sample

We manage health care as if our needs were always urgent and unpredictable, ignoring how deeply this industry is integrated into our lives, with a vast amount of care now devoted to treating ongoing, chronic conditions.

Our system takes resources from all of us, pools the cost of certainties disguised as risks, extracts enormous costs of administration and complexity and then returns — to almost all of us — a fraction of the money we’ve put in.

Try to imagine what homeowners’ insurance would look like if we expected everyone’s house to burn down and then added coverage for each homeowner’s utility bills and furniture wear-and-tear. This would be insanely expensive without meaningfully reducing anyone’s risk. That, in short, is how health insurance works.

...Traditional health experts may repackage their ideas, but they are never discouraged by past failure. So the new Accountable Care Organizations are a reinvention of H.M.O.’s. The Independent Payment Advisory Board is the new Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC. Bundled payments are the new Prospective Payment System.

We often see some early benefit from the introduction of new ideas, but over time such initiatives are always subjugated by our system’s nefarious economic incentives. Implement cost control reforms and watch providers circumvent new rules and guidelines. Reduce reimbursement rates for procedures, and witness providers expand the definition of required services. Convert fee-for-service reimbursements into bundled payments, and soon more severe diagnoses are given. Attempt to use government buying power, and see providers turn to lobbyists to keep prices up. We are approaching a half-century of fighting this losing battle

...

Here’s a completely different idea, one that might actually work. Let’s give every American health insurance, but only for truly rare, major and unpredictable illnesses. In other words, let’s cover everyone but not everything. It would take a generation to transition fully to such a system, but eventually the most routine and expected medical treatments, from checkups and minor illnesses all the way to common chronic conditions and expected end-of-life care, would be funded from our individual health savings; only the most major needs — for example, cancer, stroke and trauma — would be paid out of insurance.

Defining insurable events more narrowly and enabling Americans to use the premium savings to build health savings would reduce the distortions inherent in our insurance approach. Most importantly, it will also compel providers to compete on the basis of price, quality and service, as they meet the one force that creates real incentives for good performance, innovation and safety: the consumer.

Sheer poetry, in few words accomplishing what took me many pages of "After the ACA."  Newspapers often publish contrary views to show they are balanced (or so a WSJ editor once told me when I complained!) But that this can even get aired at the Times is pretty remarkable.

What's holding back the US economy?

This is a video I did with Steve Davis and Amir Sufi, moderated by Hal Weitzman, part of the new Chicago Booth "The Big Question" series. Youtube link here. I'm actually a lot calmer through most of it than I appear in the cover shot.

Three views of consumption and the slow economy

I'm still digesting New-Keynesian models. As part of that effort, today I offer some thoughts on how economists come to such different views of the current situation and desirable policies. It's a nice story, in the end. Real economists, unlike much of the commentary and blogging world, come to different conclusions by using much the same model, but making different assumptions and simplifications, each of which we can look at and evaluate, and hopefully come to some consensus.

The economy is not doing well. The black line in the graph shows log consumption. (The units are percent increase in consumption since 2002.) After trending up steadily at close to 3% per year through the previous decade, consumption -- along with output and everything else -- took a dive, totaling 10% loss relative to the red trendline. And consumption has been stuck there ever since.

So, the big questions: why, and what might be done about it?

Is Finance Too Big?

Is finance too big? Here's a draft essay on the subject. There is a pdf on my webpage, and updates, revisions and a final version will end up there.

This came about as a "response essay" to Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein's "The growth of modern finance" for the Journal of Economic Perspectives. That's why Robin and David are the target of a lot of criticism. But they're really just standing in for a lot of opinion that finance is "too big," in part because they did such a good and evenhanded job of synthesizing that point of view. So, sorry for picking on you, Robin and David!

I'm sure the JEP will make me cut it down and tone it down, so this is the fun first draft.


Is Finance Too Big?

John H. Cochrane [1],[2]
January 7 2013

I. Introduction

The US spends $150 billion a year on advertising and marketing[3]. $150 billion, just to trick people into buying stuff they don’t need. What a waste. 

There are 2.2 people doing medical billing for every doctor that actually sees patients, costing $360 billion[4] -- 2.4% of GDP. Talk about “too big!”

Wholesale, retail trade and transportation cost 14.6% of GDP, while all manufacturing is only 11.5% of GDP. We spend more to move stuff around than to make it! 

A while ago, my wife asked me to look at light fixtures. Have you seen how many thousands of different kinds of light fixtures there are? The excess complexity is insane. Ten ought to be plenty.

It’s ridiculous how much people overpay for brand names when they can get the generic a lot cheaper. They must be pretty naive.

Business school finance professors are horribly overpaid. Ask an anthropologist!  We must really have snowballed university administrations to get paid nearly half a million bucks, and work a grand total of 10 weeks a year, all to teach students that there is no alpha to be made in the stock market.

Did you know that Kim Kardashian gets $600,000 just to show up at a nightclub in Vegas?  How silly is that?

It’s a lot of fun to pass judgment on “social benefits,” “size,” “complexity” of industry, and “excessive compensation” of people who get paid more than we do, isn’t it? But it isn’t really that productive either.

As economists we have a structure for thinking about these questions.

More new-Keynesian paradoxes

Last week I saw Johannes Wieland's paper "Are negative supply shocks expansionary at the zero lower bound?"  A side benefit of the job market season is that we see interesting new papers like this one, and it contributed to my project of trying to better understand new-Keynesian models.

Though starting academic papers with blog quotations is usually a bad idea, Johannes starts with a great and very appropriate one,

As some of us keep trying to point out, the United States is in a liquidity trap: [...] This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment.” -Paul Krugman

I endorse this quote, because it is an accurate and pithy description of the properties of many careful new-Keynesian analyses in the academic literature.

Two cents on the trillion dollar coin, and a debt-limit schedule

The Fed and Treasury say they're not going to try the trillion-dollar coin idea to avoid the debt limit. But the episode is very revealing about how our fiscal and monetary policies work, (or don't, as the case may be), numerous misconceptions floating around, and leads to a thought on a better way to approach the same objectives, which might be a useful compromise for both sides.

I. Why the limit binds

First, just to be clear, let me clarify the playlist: 

• Debt: US government bonds, issued by the Treasury. Promises to pay for your healthcare is not "debt," and if the government reneges on that promise it's not a "default."
• Cash: Bills and coins.
• Reserves: Essentially checking accounts at the Fed. Banks may freely obtain cash in return for reserves and vice versa.We often say "the Fed prints money" when in fact what it does is to create reserves.

In the first debt-limit debate, I was initially puzzled that it was a problem at all. The "debt limit" does not include currency or reserves, though both are functionally US government debt. That seems like an unfortunate oversight:  Why can't the government just pay its bills by printing money, i.e. creating reserves? Sure, you might worry about inflation sooner or later, but this is a legal question. The government can print money to pay its bills, no?

Well, no, which is really interesting.

Birthday

Two milestones passed this week, the one year birthday of this blog, and the millionth hit. OK, I'm not in the big leagues yet, but it continues to be a lot of fun. I appreciate all of you who read, and all the comments too. Well, almost all the comments.

(Photo credit: Ty Bellitti Photography)