Coyote Blog

Paul Kedrosky reports:

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced the creation of the
Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), a facility that will
complement the Federal Reserve's existing credit facilities to help
provide liquidity to term funding markets. The CPFF will provide a
liquidity backstop to U.S. issuers of commercial paper through a
special purpose vehicle (SPV) that will purchase three-month unsecured
and asset-backed commercial paper directly from eligible issuers.

Kedrosky has a lot of interesting coverage of the current financial crisis.  He observes:

As Buffett has said, everyone in the world is trying to deleverage at
once -- which is unworkable -- leaving the U.S. as the only institution
in the world that can lever up at all -- and levering up it is. I just
wish it was more obvious to me how you exit the other side of programs
like this. Would we not be better off to quickly recapitalize and
backstop some banks?

I share his concerns, but I actually kind of like the idea of bringing liquidity to main street business directly, rather than indirectly by bailing out failing financial institutions.  The problem of unwinding the program is a big one.  Right now, I get the sense that the financial markets are operating almost entirely on expectations of government action -  will the Feds buy back mortgages, will the Feds keep the overnight borrowing window wide open, will the feds gaurantee commercial paper, how much commercial paper will they buy.  This latter actually seem the least bad of a lot of other options.  At least the Feds are buying good assets from good companies.

No, at least not yet, with the dollar at a 13-month high.

OK, I know burn-out is setting in.  I certainly think that explains, in part, why the House voted for a demonstrably worse bill than they voted against the week before.  But John Moore has a number links to an interesting set of charts from the Milken Institute on the financial meltdown.

They hit on many of the things I discussed earlier, but put a greater emphasis on 1) securitization, and the effect it had on good underwriting standards and 2) on interest rates as a driver of the housing bubble.

Update:  And an interesting post on the link between credit default swaps and short-selling.  My personal view is that credit default swaps will someday be looked at like earthquake insurance -- nice premiums today, but too much systematic risk, too much certainty that in 10 or 20 years there will be an event that forces nearly every policy to pay simultaneously, wiping out the insurer.  You can't get earthquake insurance, and you nearly can't get hurricane insurance, and I think the default insurance market may go the same way.  Or, as a minimum, the price is going so high few people will buy it.  This is not a market failure, it is a market lesson learned and adjustment to reality.

Update #2:  Even more from economists on the rush to bailout.

After having time to think more about the current crisis, I think the reason it is confusing is that it is the result of two parallel but largely independent causes that worked together to create this mess.  I told my mother-in-law in an email last week that the financial crisis would likely be a Rorschach test where everyone sees the crisis caused by all the things they opposed before the crisis.  Conservatives will see government intervention, liberals will see greed and deregulation.

What makes this situation particularly confusing is that of the two causes I believe led to the crisis, each has been embraced by one of the two parties as the only cause.  It's a case where everyone is half right, but the other half is important too.  It's a two part recipe, with neither active ingredient causing much of an explosion until mixed with the other. (special thanks to the folks at Q&O who have had a lot of good posts on these issues).

Cause 1:  Creating the Asset Bubble

The first thing that had to happen for the crisis was the creation of an asset bubble.  We need some type of over-valued asset whose prices crash to earth to spark the crisis.  So we begin with housing.

Home prices have gone through boom-bust cycles for years, just as have many commodities.  There is a whole body of literature on such cycles, so we will leave that aside and accept their existence as a feature of markets and human behavior. 

But this housing bubble had a strong accelerant, in the form of the Federal government.  For years, this nation has made increasing home ownership a national goal and many laws and tax policies have been aimed at this goal.  The mortgage interest deduction on personal income taxes is just one example.

Starting in 1992, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were strange quasi-public / quasi-private entities, came under pressure from the Congress (e.g. Barney Frank) and the Clinton administration to add increasing home ownership to poorer people part of their missions.

Fannie Mae, the
nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under
increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage
loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock
holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In
addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been
pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime
borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings
are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get
loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates --
anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional
loans.

''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of
families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said
Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer.
''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch
below what our underwriting has

The results were astonishing:

Beginning in 1992, Congress pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to
increase their purchases of mortgages going to low and moderate income
borrowers. For 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave Fannie and Freddie an explicit target "” 42% of their mortgage financing had to go to borrowers with income below the median in their area. The target increased to 50% in 2000 and 52% in 2005.

For 1996, HUD required that 12% of all mortgage purchases by Fannie and Freddie be "special affordable" loans, typically to borrowers with income less than 60% of their area's median income. That number was increased to 20% in 2000 and 22% in 2005. The 2008 goal was to be 28%. Between 2000 and 2005,
Fannie and Freddie met those goals every year, funding hundreds of
billions of dollars worth of loans, many of them subprime and
adjustable-rate loans, and made to borrowers who bought houses with
less than 10% down.

Fannie and Freddie also purchased hundreds
of billions of subprime securities for their own portfolios to make
money and to help satisfy HUD affordable housing goals. Fannie and
Freddie were important contributors to the demand for subprime
securities.

Simultaneously, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was pushing private banks to make more loans to less qualified borrowers:

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) did the same thing with
traditional banks. It encouraged banks to serve two masters "” their
bottom line and the so-called common good. First passed in 1977, the
CRA was "strengthened" in 1995, causing an increase of 80% in the
number of bank loans going to low- and moderate-income families.

These actions had a double whammy on the current crisis.  First, by pushing up housing demand, they inflated the housing pricing bubble.  Second, it meant that these inflated-price homes were being bought with lower and lower down payments.  In effect, individuals were taking on much more leverage  (leverage is a term that I will use to mean the percentage of debt used to finance a set of assets -- more leverage means more debt and less equity.  The term comes from the physics of a mechanical lever, in that more debt, like a lever, can magnify force.  Profits from assets are multiplied by leverage, but, alas, so are losses.) 

When the economy softened and the housing bubble started to burst, these new mortgage customers the government went out of its way to bring into the system did not have any resources to handle the changes -- they did not have the down payment to cushion them (or the banks) against falls in asset value and did not have the cash flow to cushion them against falling income in the recession and/or rising interest rates. 

The result:  Huge portfolios of failing loans with rapidly falling collateral values.

Cause 2:  Over-leverage of Risky Assets and Related De-regulation of Capital Requirements

I think the word "greed" was used about a zillion times last night in the Vice-Presidential debate.  But what does it mean in this context?  After all, we are all greedy in one way or another, if one equates greed with looking after one's self-interest.

So I will translate "greed" for you:  When you hear "greed on Wall Street", think leverage.  Remember, we said above that as long as the underlying asset values are going up, leverage (ie more debt) multiplies profitability.  [Quick example:  Assume a stock that goes from $100 to $110 in a year.  Assume you pay 5% interest on money.  No leverage, you make $10 on a $100 investment.  With 95% leverage -- ie buying $2000 worth of the stock with $100 equity and $1900 debt -- you would make $105 on the same $100 equity investment.  Leverage multiplied your returns by more than a factor of 10]

Remember that around the year 2000 we had the Internet bubble burst in a big way.  A lot of companies not only dropped, but went to $0 in value.  This was painful, but we did not have a cascading problem.  Why?  In part because most of the folks who invested in Internet companies did not do so in a highly leveraged way.  The loss was the loss, time to move on.  Similarly in this case, if these mortgage packages had been held as a piece of a un-leveraged portfolio, like a pension fund our an annuity, the loss would not have been fun to write off but it would not have cascaded as it has.  The government would have had to bail out Fannie and Freddie, a few banks would have failed, but the disaster would have been limited.

One reason this problem has cascaded (leaving aside blame for Henry Paulson's almost criminal chicken-little proclamations of doom to the world) is that many of these mortgage packages or securities got stuck in to highly leveraged portfolios.  The insurance contracts that brought down AIG were structured differently but in the end were also highly leveraged bets on the values of mortgage securities in that small changes in values could result in huge losses or gains for the contracts.   (Some folks have pointed to actual securitization of the loans as a problem.  I don't see that.  Securitization is a fabulous tool.  Without it, we would be seeing a ton more main street bank failures, as they would have had to keep many more of these on their books.) 

If this all sounds a bit like cause #1 above, ie buying inflated assets with more and more debt, then you are right.  There is an interesting parallel that no one wants to delve into between the incentives of home buyers trying to jump into hot housing markets with interest-only loans and Wall Street bankers putting risky securities into highly leveraged portfolios.  Leverage is really the key theme here.  In a sense, houses were double-leveraged, bought the first time around with smaller and smaller down payments, and then leveraged again as these mortgages were tossed into highly-leveraged portfolios.  Sometimes they were leveraged even further via oddball derivatives and insurance contracts whose exact operation are still opaque to many.

Those who have read me for a while know that I am in the "let them die" camp.  These Wall Street guys have been living high on the extra profits from this leverage in the good times.  They knew perfectly well that leverage is a two-edged sword, and that it would magnify their losses in a bad time.  But their hubris pushed them into doing crazy things for more profit, and I am all for a Greek-tragedy-like downfall for their hubris.  The sub-prime, first-time home buyer can claim ignorance or unsophistication, but not these guys.

During the Bush Administration, these bankers came to the SEC trumpeting their own brilliance, and begged to be allowed to leverage themselves even more via a relaxation of capital requirement rules.  And, in 2004, without too much discussion or scrutiny, the SEC gave them what they wanted:

Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis
since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28,
2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency's
failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why
Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that
bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and
Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an
urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an
exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited
the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle
billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on
their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent
company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of
mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for
bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

In part they traded capital requirements for computer models, a very dubious decision in the first place, made worse by the fact that most of the banks were gaming the models to reduce the apparent risk.  The crazy thing is that, in gaming the models, they really weren't trying to fool regulators, who pretty much were not watching anyway, but they were fooling themselves!  Certainly I would not expect government regulators to do a better job of risk assessment in this environment, which argues for a return to the old bright-line capital requirements that are fairly simple to monitor.  Investment banks played a game of Russian Roulette, and eventually blew their own brains out.  Which begs the question of whether the government's job is to protect consumers at large or to protect financial institutions from themselves.

"We foolishly believed that the firms had a strong culture of
self-preservation and responsibility and would have the discipline not
to be excessively borrowing," said Professor James D. Cox, an expert on
securities law and accounting at Duke School of Law (and no
relationship to Christopher Cox).

The Dog that Didn't Bark:  Ratings Agencies

Clearly, ratings agencies have really failed in their mission during this fiasco.  Right up to the last minute, they were giving top ratings to highly risky securities.  But I think folks who want to lay primary blame on the rating agencies go to far.   Ratings agencies are for individuals and state pension funds and the like -- I have a hard time imagining Goldman or Lehman depending on them for risk assessment.  Its a nice excuse, and we may well have very different companies rating securities five years form now, but its just a small contributor.

The Fix

So you see what is going on.  Republicans are running around saying "the government caused it with the CRA" and Democrats are saying "it was greed and deregulation."  Incredibly, both parties seem to come to the conclusion that sickly mortgage securities need to be pulled out of the hands of the folks who created and bought them and put in ... my hands.  I had smugly thought that I had avoided buying a home with zero-down at the peak of the market, but I was wrong.  Via the federal government, I have bought a lot of them!

I personally would let the whole thing sort itself out, and live with the consequences.  My hypothesis is that much of the current credit squeeze in the money markets is due to Henry Paulson's clumsy public statements and the Fed's busting open the door to overnight borrowing.  Everyone is frozen not by the crisis, but by the prospect of some sort of government action.  Short term borrowers and lenders are doing their business with the Fed, as the government crowds out the private short term markets and causes the very problem it is trying to prevent. 

Without the government bending over backwards to take in short term money from lenders, private firms would be forced to find private options.  Lenders have to lend to stay alive financially, just as much as borrowers have to borrow.  Money may go into the mattresses for a week or two or three, but it can't stay there forever.

I do know that the fix is NOT. 

Fixing these financial problems listed above does not include:

Sec. 101. Renewable energy credit.
Sec. 102. Production credit for electricity produced from marine renewables.
Sec. 103. Energy credit.
Sec. 104. Energy credit for small wind property.
Sec. 105. Energy credit for geothermal heat pump systems.
Sec. 106. Credit for residential energy efficient property.
Sec. 107. New clean renewable energy bonds.
Sec. 108. Credit for steel industry fuel.
Sec. 109. Special rule to implement FERC and State electric restructuring policy.
Sec. 111. Expansion and modification of advanced coal project investment credit.
Sec. 112. Expansion and modification of coal gasification investment credit.
Sec. 113. Temporary increase in coal excise tax; funding of Black Lung Disability
Trust Fund.
Sec. 114. Special rules for refund of the coal excise tax to certain coal producers
and exporters.
Sec. 115. Tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration.
Sec. 116. Certain income and gains relating to industrial source carbon
dioxide treated as qualifying income for publicly traded partnerships.
Sec. 117. Carbon audit of the tax code. Sec. 111. Expansion and modification of advanced coal project investment credit. Sec. 113. Temporary increase in coal excise tax; funding of Black Lung Disability Trust Fund. Sec. 115. Tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration. Sec. 205. Credit for new qualified plug-in electric drive motor vehicles. Sec. 405. Increase and extension of Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund tax.Sec. 306. Accelerated recovery period for depreciation of smart meters and
smart grid systems. Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa. Sec. 317. Seven-year cost recovery period for motorsports racing track facility. Sec. 501. $8,500 income threshold used to calculate refundable portion of child tax credit.

And, of course, the big one:

Sec. 503 Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

All of these, however, are part of the bailout bill approved by the Senate.  Sources here and here.

Apparently Zimbabwe had an inflation rate of 14,000% last month, for a total of 531 billion percent inflation this year.  If we assume for simplicity that inflation occurs only during working hours, if we spread if over 22 days a week, this means that ones pay at the end of the day is worth only 1/3 its value by lunch the next day, and 1/6 its value by the end of the next day.  My understanding is that Zimbabwe companies pay their employees several times a day and let them go out at lunch and buy something, anything, tangible with the cash before it is worthless a few hours later. 

By the way, I have my Zimbabwe 50 and 100 billion dollar notes on the wall of my office.  I am hoping for a trillion dollar note to go with it.  Meeses and Gippers coming soon.

The US Conference of Mayors has introduced a "study" extending on Obama's idea of millions of new green jobs:

A major shift to renewable energy and efficiency
is expected to produce 4.2 million new environmentally friendly "green"
jobs over the next three decades, according to a study commissioned by
the nation's mayors.

The study to be released Thursday by the U.S. Conference of Mayors,
says that about 750,000 people work today in what can be considered
green jobs from scientists and engineers researching alternative fuels
to makers of wind turbines and more energy-efficient products.

But that's less than one half of 1 percent of total employment. By
2038, another 4.2 million green jobs are expected to be added,
accounting for 10 percent of new job growth over the next 30 years,
according to the report by Global Insight, Inc.

Well, lets leave aside the measurement issue of making forecasts and establishing targets for metrics like "green jobs" that can be defined however the hell someone wants.  For example, if they really were to define "green jobs" as they say above "makers of ... more energy-efficient products," then nearly everyone in industrial America already has a green job.  Every car made today is more fuel-efficient than the equivalent car made 20 years ago, every motor more efficient, every machine more productive.

But lets discuss that word "incremental."  Politicians NEVER, EVER cite job growth projections that are truly incremental.  For example, tariff program X might be billed as saving 100 jobs in the steel industry, but what about the jobs lost in the steel-consuming industries due to higher costs?  The same is most certainly true in this whole "green jobs" fiasco.  It is the perfect political promise - impossible to define, impossible to measure, and therefore impossible to establish any accountability.  Everyone who makes the promise knows in his/her heart the jobs are not truly incremental, while everyone who hears the promise wants to believe they are incremental.  Politics thrives on this type of asymmetry.

I looked before at the impossibility of these numbers being incremental, but here is a second bite of the apple.  The article says specifically:

The report, being presented at a mayor's conference in Miami, predicts
the biggest job gain will be from the increased use of alternative
transportation fuels, with 1.5 million additional jobs, followed by the
renewable power generating sector with 1.2 million new jobs.

Let's take the second number first.  Here are the current US employment numbers for the US power generation field:

Construction of power generation facilities:	137,000
Power generation and supply:	399,000
Production of power gen. equipment	105,000

That yields a total of 641,000.  So is it really reasonable to think that these green plans will triple power generation employment?  If so, then I hate to see what my electricity bill is going to look like.

The fuel sector is similar.  There are about 338,000 people employed in petroleum extraction, refining, transportation and wholesale -- a number that includes many people related to other oil products that are not fuels.  Add in about 100,000 for industry supplies and you get perhaps 450,000 jobs current tied to fuel production plus 840,000 jobs in fuel retailing (ie gas stations).  How are we going to add 1.5 million net new jobs to a fuel production sector with 450,000** currently?  And if we do, what is going to happen to prices and taxes?  And if the investments push us away from liquid fuels to electricity, don't we have to count as a loss 840,000 retail sector jobs selling a product no longer needed?

** Your reaction may be that these job numbers look low.  They are all from the BLS here.  Here is a quick way to convince yourself there really are not that many people working in the US oil and gas industry:  Despite years of mismanagement and government subsidies, politicians continue to fawn over auto companies.  Despite years of excellence at what they do, politicians demonize oil companies.  The reason has nothing to do with their relative performance, ethics, importance to the country, greed, etc.  The difference is that the auto companies and their suppliers employ millions of voters.  Oil companies employ but a few.

This is such ridiculous garbage as to be unbelieveable, but every paper in the country will print this credulously.  Because if journalists were good with numbers, they wouldn't be journalists, they'd be doing something that pays better.

The comedians have pretty much nailed it, via Jeffrey Tucker

I know this may be pointing out the obvious, but I think it needs to be said:  Lenders have to lend, just as much as borrowers have to borrow.  I know most people understand the "borrower" part of this phrase, but they seem to act as if lenders are somehow only putting their money on the street as some sort of charitable activity, and if we don't sufficiently kow-tow to all their needs, they will run away and never help us all again.

The fact is that people with large pools of money -- banks, pension funds, insurance companies -- HAVE to lend.  And in a time where stocks are dicey, they probably have more, not less, cash than normal they want to lend, much of it short-term.  Now, they may be temporarily scared off from doing so for a few days or weeks as they try to assess what is safe and what is not, but they can't stick their money in a mattress or buy tons of gold or invest in ammunition and run for the hills.  Banks have to pay off depositors; insurance companies often aim to break
even on premiums and payouts and make their money on investing the cash
in between; pension funds can't make their long-term obligations
without making steady returns.Their very survival, in many cases, depends on making continuous returns off their free cash. 

Wisdom from Schoolhouse Rock:

You got a couple hundred bucks saved up in your birthday stash.Why not deposit them dollars in the bank instead?
Then at the end of the year you'll come out way ahead,
Because the bank'll pay you money in exchange for the use of your cash!
And that's called interest; you're makin' money that way,
And you can buy that gear about a year from today.

      

As I have pointed out any number of times, when supplies of something are short, you can allocate them either by price or by rationing.  Robert Rapier, via Michael Giberson made the point that combining shortages with tough state price-gouging laws inevitably led to rationing and long lines:

Someone asked during a panel discussion at ASPO whether we were going
to have rationing by price. I answered that we are having that now. But
prices aren't going up nearly as much as you would expect during these
sorts of severe shortages. Why? I think it's a fear that dealers have
of being prosecuted for gouging. So, they keep prices where they are,
and they simply run out of fuel when the deliveries don't arrive on
time. If they were allowed to raise prices sharply, people would cut
back on their driving and supplies would be stretched further.

Neal Boortz made the same point yesterday, as the gas shortages in the southeast dragged out (unsurprisingly) for a second week:

nearly 200 gas stations in Atlanta are being investigated for price gouging.  Don't investigate them!  Reward them!  Price gouging is exactly what we need!  It should be encouraged, not investigated....

The real problem now is panic buying.  People will run their tanks
down by about one-third and then rush off to a gas station.  Lines of
cars are following gas tanker trucks around Atlanta. The supplies are
coming back up, but as long as people insist on keeping every car they
own filled to the top and then filling a few gas cans to boot, we're
going to have these outages and these absurd lines. 

So, how do you stop the panic buying?  Easy.  You let the market do
what the market does best, control demand and supply through the price
structure.  The demand for gas outstrips the supply right now, so allow
gas stations respond by raising the price of gas .. raise it as much as
they want.  I'm serious here so stop your screaming.  The governor
should hold a press conference and announce that effective immediately
there is no limit on what gas stations can charge for gas.  I heard
that there was some gas station in the suburbs charging $8.00 a
gallon.  Great!  That's what they all should be doing.  Right now the
price of gasoline in Atlanta is artificially low and being held down by
government.  That's exacerbating the problem, not helping it.  Demand
is not being squelched by price. 

As the prices rise, the point will be reached where people will say
"I'm fed up with this.  I'll ride with a friend, take the bus or just
sit home before I'll pay this for a gallon of gas."  Once the price of
a gallon starts to evoke that kind of reaction, we're on our way to
solving the problem.  When gas costs, say, $8.00 people aren't going to
fill their tanks.  They also aren't going to rush home to get their
second car and make sure it is filled up either ... and you can forget
them filling those portable gas cans they have in the trunk.  Some
people will only be able to afford maybe five gallons!  Fine!  That
leaves gas in the tanks for other motorists.  Bottom line here is that
people aren't going to rush out to fill up their half-empty tanks with
$8.00 gas.

Here is something else to think of about lines and shortages.  What is the marginal value of your time?  I think most people underestimate this in their day to day transactions.  Some will say it is whatever they make an hour at work, and that is OK, but I will bet you that is low for most folks.  Most folks would not choose to work one more hour a week for their average hourly rate.  Start eating into my free time and family time, and my cost goes up.  That's why overtime rates are higher.   

So let's say an individual values his/her time at the margin for $25.  This means that an hour spent waiting in line or driving around town searching to fill up with 10 gallons raises the cost by $2.50 a gallon.  And this does not include the fuel or other wear on the car used in the search.  Or the cost of that sales meeting you missed because you did not have the gas to get there.  So an anti-gouging law that keeps prices temporarily down by a $1 or so a gallon may actually cost people much more from the shortages it creates.   

Several people I know have argued with my "do nothing" approach to the current mortgage and liquidity mess.  Their argument is that the current crisis has frozen the short term money market, with banks refusing to lend to each other, and only doing so via central banks.  The problem, they claim, is that this could lead to an extended drying up of business to business credit.  For example, two people both used the fuel retailing example, arguing that inventory purchases are made on credit, and paid off as the inventory is sold.  The logic, I assume, is that businesses have all reduced their working capital, and so a drying up of short term business credit will cause the economy to lock up, with producers and retailers unable to buy components and inventory.  One such argument here.

I guess the questions are 1) for how long and 2) how best to fix it.  To the first question, this is by no means the first time in my lifetime that short-term credit has dried up.  Liquidity eventually returns, mainly because lenders need to lend as much as borrowers need to borrow.  As to the second question, central banks are currently handling this by increasing the amount of money they will lend short term.  Rather than lend to each other directly, bank A deposits with the Fed and then the Fed lends to bank B.  The cycle ends NOT when every bank is healthy but when banks and other institutions are confident they know which banks are healthy.  All the bailout is doing is delaying this reckoning.  I don't think it matters that banks and certain financial institutions survive, I think it matters that the ones who are not going to survive are identified quickly so the rest can start lending again to each other.

Given these concerns, I reiterate my position that if the government is going to inject liquidity and create new financial asset insurance programs, it makes more sense to me to do it at the point of concern, i.e. in the credit market to main street businesses, rather than dumping the money into the toxic sludge of credit default swaps. 

Mark Perry observes that if we are in for a credit crunch, its not showing up in the numbers yet, as bank loans and leases hit an all-time high and most other types of lending are still near their peaks.

Saul Hansell at the NY Times has an interesting article about why risk assessment programs in investment banks were not sounding the alarm coming into the recent turmoil.  The article contains this gem:

Ms. Rahl said that it was now clear that the computers needed to
assume extra risk in owning a newfangled security that had never been
seen before.

"New products, by definition, carry more risk," she said. The models
should penalize investments that are complex, hard to understand and
infrequently traded, she said. They didn't.

I continue to see parallels between recent problems and the meltdown at Enron.  In fact, in many ways events in the natural gas trading market were a dry run for events in the mortgage market.   One filmmaker coined the phrase "Smartest Guys in the Room" to describe the hubris of the guys who ran Enron.  To some extent the phrase was absolutely true - I knew Jeff Skilling at McKinsey and he was indeed the smartest guy in the room.  But everyone can be wrong, and sometimes the smartest guys can be spectacularly wrong as they overestimate their ability to predict and control complex events.  I think this is a fair description of what went on in Wall Street over the past several years.

I am seeing an increasing number of articles of late about differential inflation rates, and how changes in income inequality may be overstated by using a single inflation rate for rich and poor.  The argument goes that lower income folks who spend a relatively high share of income on goods that Wal-Mart and China have made cheap are experiencing a lower inflation rate than wealthier folks who have seen huge price increases at their favorite Four Seasons resort.  Mark Perry has two interesting articles along these lines.

Mark Perry has had a series of posts of late presenting the hypothesis that high rates of home ownership in the US may be detrimental as it reduces labor mobility.  The argument goes that homeowners have a harder time moving for new jobs than renters do.

Homeownership
impedes the economy's readjustment by tying people down. From a social
point of view, it's beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment
to a given town or city. But, from an economic point of view, it's good
for people to be able to leave places where there's less work and move
to places where there's more. Homeowners are much less likely to move
than renters, especially during a downturn, when they aren't willing
(or can't afford) to sell at market prices. As a result, they often
stay in towns even after the jobs leave. And reluctance to move not
only keeps unemployment high in struggling areas but makes it hard for
businesses elsewhere to attract the workers they need to grow.

The argument makes sense on its surface, but I am having a bit of trouble buying into it (though I will admit that as an American, I am steeped in decades of home-ownership-boosterism, so I may not be approaching the problem without bias).

On the plus side, the selling a home and buying a new one certainly has more costs than switching apartments, particularly if you add in a moving premium for home owners who can accumulate a lot more stuff than apartment dwellers and the switching costs due to emotional attachment to the current house.  Also, on its face, the argument is similar to criticisms of the economy of the antebellum south, where too much capital was invested in land and assets tied to the land.

However, I see a couple of problems with it.  First, its hard to find an increase in structural unemployment rates in the past decades to correlate to the increase in home ownership.  Second, the costs to change homes has been falling of late as the government-protected Realtor monopoly is finally being broken by technology and commission rates are falling.  Third, my sense is (though I can't dig up the data) that the average time in a home is dropping, meaning homes flip owners more frequently, again indicating a decreasing barrier to moving.

I would, however, be willing to accept that in a high home ownership regime, falling home prices and lengthening for-sale times could exacerbate an economic downturn by slowing mobility and thereby slowing the correction.  I would have argued in the past that this was offset by home equity as a savings tool and a source of cash in difficult times, but that could be different this time around as mortgage policies have tightened, drying up the ability to convert equity to emergency cash.

OK, the light at the end of the tunnel may be a train, but so far it is too soon to panic about bank failures.*  Mark Perry brings us this chart for perspective:

Of course, since we are in an election cycle, current problems are going to be portrayed as the worst economy since the Weimar Republic, or whatever.  Perry has a lot more in the post.

I was just volume-gouged on gasoline today in Atlanta.  I was returning my rent car, and needed to fill the tank.   Stations here seem to fear a hurricane-related gas shortage, to the first station would only sell me 10 gallons maximum.  The second claimed to be out of gas.  At the third I was able to fill my tank the rest of the way.  These stations gouged me on volume, simply because they didn't have the simple courtesy to re-price their product upwards in a shortage in order to ensure continued availability of supply.

By the way, memo to news guys -- telling everyone to run out and fill their tanks RIGHT NOW in order to avoid a possible gasoline shortage will only precipitate said shortage.  If everyone fills his or her tank at the same time, this shifts inventory from large regional reservoirs to individual reservoirs (e.g. gas tanks), the most inefficient of inventory storage models.  Having every car's gas tank go nearly instantaneously from 5/8 full to full requires something like 600 million gallons of draw down from retail and wholesale inventory to car fuel tanks.  The system cannot survive that in 24 hours, and the hypothesized shortage becomes a reality.

Postscript:  By the way, the question of whether to run out and fill your tank tonight is a classic prisnoners dilemma game.  We are all better off if no one does it, but each invidividual probably maximizes his or her well-being by deciding to fill up, so everyone does it.

US unemployment in August "jumped unexpectedly" to 6.1%, by the oddest of coincidences in the first full month just after new, 12% higher US minimum wages took effect. 

The unemployment rate is higher than it has been in the United States in the last 5 years, but substantially lower than the rate most Western European countries like France and Germany experience even during peak economic times. 

In response, the Obama campaign is urging further increases to the minimum wage and emulation of labor policy and legislation in France and Germany.

Michael Cannon writes about the new trend in airline pricing to charge extra fees for different services (ranging from sodas to checked baggage).  I have seen several writers of the progressive ilk all up in arms about these extra fees.  Which in my mind confirms that there is no foundational position among progressives on such matters, only opportunistic attacks on corporations for whatever they happen to be doing.  They want air travel pricing to be bundled into one rate, covering all potential services one may or may not use.  But wait, they want cable TV pricing to be unbundled, with a la carte pricing rather than one rate so viewers can pay for only what they use. 

Anyway, the only irritation I have with the new airline pricing is that it drives people to try to carry on every bag they can, particularly since, at least on US Airways currently, bags that are gate-checked are not charged a fee.  This is fouling up security lines and making it a necessity to board early on a plane to have any hope of finding a carry-on space.  Which may add another revenue opportunity, that of charging extra for the option to board early.  Which, come to think of it, Southwest is already doing.

One of Megan McArdle's readers wonders why India, which in population is larger than any other country save China, has so few Olympic medalists.  I think the answer is fairly easy:  wealth.

It's a situation very parallel to the Italian Renaissance.  Then, the issue was the proliferation of so many great artists rather than athletes, but the fundamentals were fairly similar.  For a society to be able to give up its strongest and most talented youth to non-productive (meaning they don't contribute to food, clothing, or shelter) occupations like painting or competitive swimming requires a lot of wealth and leisure time.  Subsistence farmers can't give up a strong back from the fields, much less pay any kind of specialized training costs.  The explosion of artists in the Italian Renaissance was made possible
by an explosion of wealth in the great Italian city-states of Florence
and Venice and the like.   Further, wealth also means better neo-natal care and better childhood nutrition which leads to bigger and stronger adults. 

As with Renaissance painters, modern Olympic athletes need either a family that is wealthy enough to give up their labor and support him or her; or, they need a wealthy patron; or, they need support of the government.  US Olympic athletes generally have some of all three, though the role of the government is smaller than in other nations thanks to corporate patrons and the relative wealth of the American middle class.  China, and before it Russia, were successful because, lacking the first two, they had the government shoulder the entire burden.  India has chosen not to go the government route, which is fine.  It will have its successes in time, as the exploding middle class will raise kids who have the time and money to pursue excellence in various sports.

Kevin Drum posts this chart as a one-picture refutation of McCain's statement that we are living in the best of times.

Um, OK.  We all got wealthier.  And the problem is, what?  That someone else got even wealthier than I did?  So what.  Do we really have to keep refuting this zero-sum economics-of-envy argument?

I won't get into the whole zero-sum thing, because the chart itself proves that the world can't be zero-sum, since everyone got richer on average.  But here is a full refutation of zero-sum wealth arguments.  Also, a zero-sum wealth quiz here.

Looking at changes in income brackets is
always misleading. In the US, most folks are migrating up the brackets
as they age and gain experience. So most folks benefit not just from
the increase in their bracket but a migration to the next bracket.

To this last point, the bottom end of the bracket is being flooded
with new immigrants (legal or not) with poor skills and often no
English. They drag down the averages, again understating how well the
typical person is doing.  Lifetime surveys of individuals rather than percentile brackets always demonstrate that individuals gain wealth over time much fast than this type of analysis demonstrates.  And even the new immigrants at the bottom are presumably gaining vs. their previous circumstances, or else why else would they have immigrated in the first place.

Here is an alternate response to whether we are in the best of times.

By the way, here is an interesting article on why using a single inflation rate for the poor and the rich to get real income growth may be incorrect.  There is an argument to be made that the poor have a lower inflation rate than the rich, thanks to Wal-Mart.

I always find it fascinating to observe how the same folks who criticize the US for not taking drastic action based on the "settled science" of global warming are often the first to ignore hundreds of years of study in the science of economics.  While the full breadth of economics is far from settled science, one thing that is far better understood than the effect of CO2 on global temperatures is the effect of higher prices on demand:  (via Market Power)

This chart confirms that for teenagers, those between the ages of 16
and 19 years old, all of the jobs that disappeared in 2007 were minimum
wage jobs. In essence, a total of 94,000 hourly jobs disappeared for
this age group overall. This figure is the net change of this age group
losing some 118,000 minimum wage earning jobs and gaining some 24,000
jobs paying above this level.

This represents what we believe to be the effect of the higher
minimum wage level increasing the barriers to entry for young people
into the U.S. workforce. Since the minimum wage jobs that once were
held by individuals in each age group have disappeared, total
employment levels have declined as those who held them have been forced
to pursue other activities.

Now consider this: The minimum wage was just reset on 24 July 2008
to $6.55 per hour, a 27.2% increase from where it was in early July
2007. Our best guess is that a lot of additional teenagers will be pursuing those other activities. 

Meanwhile, the lack of employment opportunities for the least
educated, least skilled and least experienced segment of the U.S.
workforce will likely have costs far beyond the benefits gained by
those who earn the higher minimum wage. The government might be able to
make the minimum wage earning teenage worker disappear, but they didn't
do anything to make the teenagers themselves disappear.

The increase in minimum wage earners in some of the middle brackets is likely due to a sweeping effect -- if the minimum wage is increase from $6 to $7, people making $6.50 before are swept into the "minimum wage" characterization.   

Because they are too freaking low!  ExxonMobil (XOM) is a cyclical company that is following on 20 years of middling prices for their commodity and finally have a price spike, and they only manage to make 8.5% return on sales  ($11.68 billion profit on $138 billion of revenues).  At the top of their cycle they are barely making the same profit margin as the average industrial company.  This is not good.   Sure, the absolute dollars are large, but it is a large company, and the absolute dollars of revenues, expenses, and taxes are also large.

While this outcome may be confusing to many  (since the press and politicians insist on calling these mediocre profits "windfall"), they are in effect the reflection of a new reality for western oil companies.  Less and less do companies like XOM operate their own oil fields.  They are increasingly concession operators or really glorified service companies and middle men to state producers. 

Disclosure:  I am an XOM stockholder, and I am not happy.

Postscript:  This from Mark Perry is kind of interesting:

Exxon has already paid $19.828 billion in income taxes for 2008 (data here),
and will probably pay almost $40 billion in income taxes this year (see
graph above, income tax data for 1999-2007 taken from Exxon's annual
reports).

To
put $40 billion of income taxes in perspective, it can be reasonably
estimated that Exxon will pay more in income taxes this year (both here
and outside the U.S.) than the entire bottom 50% of American individual
taxpayers (about 67 million) will pay in income taxes this year.

Perry has a number of notes and updates in response to questions about how he got these figures at the bottom of his post.

Update:  Yahoo Finance data and ranking on profitability by industry.  Integrated oil companies come in around #60.

Kudos to Kimberly Strassel for going off on a world class rant against their airlines, and their desire to blame their woes on "oil speculators."

I want to say thanks for the July 10 email you sent to
all your customers seeking to explain why today's air travel experience
is so painful. The letter, signed by 12 of you, explained that "oil
speculators" -- presumably by betting on future oil prices -- are
killing your industry and thus requested that I, as a consumer,
pressure Congress to rein in this "unchecked" market "manipulation."

I admit that just lately I'd begun to feel that flying
was something akin to having my intestines fished out with a long hook.
Actually, I'd been wondering whom to blame for the fact that it would
probably be cheaper, easier and maybe even faster to drive to wherever
I want to go than to board one of your planes. Suddenly, all is clear.

I now understand that it is oil speculators who set
your hiring policies and who must have outlined the three types of
people you may employ: those who grunt at me, those who sigh deeply as
if my presence has ruined their day and those who are actively hostile
to my smallest request.

She goes off for quite a bit more.  Check it out.  I guess I am glad somebody's futures are going up in value.  My airline travel futures, also known as frequent flier miles, seem to get devalued constantly.

Here-to-fore, I had generally accepted the meme that where Wal-mart moves in to small towns, smaller stores tend to fail due to the competition.  Unlike most who spread this meme, however, my response has generally been, "so?"  The number of people shoveling coal into steam boilers has decreased with the rise of diesel locomotives.  The number of people employed physically connecting phone calls with patch cords has fallen with the rise of automatic switching.  Technology and distribution systems change and morph over time. 

But I have to admit I appear to have been wrong -- the meme itself may not be true.  Via Mark Perry, who discusses this study in more depth.

I while back, I wrote that I could fix our Arizona water "shortage" in about 5 minutes.  I pointed out that we in Phoenix have some of the cheapest water in the country, and if water is really in short supply, it is nuts to send consumers a pricing signal that says it is plentiful. 

David Zetland (via Lynne Keisling) follows up on the same theme:

The real problem is that the price of water in California, as in most
of America, has virtually nothing to do with supply and demand.
Although water is distributed by public and private monopolies that
could easily charge high prices, municipalities and regulators set
prices that are as low as possible. Underpriced water sends the wrong
signal to the people using it: It tells them not to worry about how
much they use.

Unfortunately, water is one of those political pandering commodities.  Municipal and state authorities like to ingratiate themselves with the public by keeping water prices low.  At the same time, their political power is enhanced if shortages are handled through government rationing rather than market forces, since politicians get to make the rationing decision -- just think of all those constituencies who will pour in campaign donations to try to get special rights to water from the water rationers.