Coyote Blog

One of the urban legends of the civics world is that is some project really requires investment for the long-term, the government needs to do it since private companies are too short-term profit focused. 

Over a series of posts, I have been showing just how terrible state run companies are at making long-term investments compared to private companies.   I showed the Mexican state oil company eschewing investment in favor of bloated patronage-based payrolls and social spending, and the nationalized Venezuelan companies doing the same thing.  What you see in both cases is that the state run oil companies are particularly bad at making investments to maintain production, investments that can be huge in the oil business.  Leftists have convinced themselves that oil companies make a fortune with little or no work, that oil extraction is kind of like clipping coupons.  But the maintenance of any infrastructure is hugely expensive, and takes a discipline and focus that the state does not have.  Belatedly, some of them are learning that producing oil takes real work and constant re-investment.  It bizarrely reminds me of Carl talking to Vernon in the Breakfast Club:
"You took a teaching position, 'cause you thought it'd be fun, right?
Thought you could have summer vacations off...and then you found out it
was actually work...and that really bummed you out"

But I don't want to imply that this is just a poor-country, banana republic problem.  Defenders of big government in the US will say that government can do all these things just fine, if only you have the right people in charge.  But under-investment in public assets, particularly in refurbishment, is a constant problem in the US as well.  Every Senator likes to get his name on building a new facility, but you don't get your name on a maintenance contract, so lots of things get built by the government but few get maintained.  Disney would never let its parks get as run down as the government
allows its public parks to get.  Wal-Mart (like most retailers) virtually rebuilds its stores every
twenty years, and would never let its infrastructure get as run
down as, say, the average US post office.

So I take as my example the Washington Metro system, one of the highest-profile public infrastructure projects in the country:

The Metro Rail system was built with federal dollars, with the
understanding that local governments would pay for its operation. But
no one was prepared to pay for rail reconstruction, which is
needed every 30 years or so and which costs a substantial fraction of
the original construction cost. Now, some of the system is approaching
30 years of age and is breaking down with increasing frequency.

The article, by Randal O'Toole of Cato, goes on to show another example of this same mindset:

Meanwhile, everyone is trying to ignore the gorilla in the corner,
which is that VTA's board wants to spend $4.7 billion to connect the
San Francisco BART system to San Jose. The agency only has enough money
to build to the edge of San Jose, but even if it had all the money for
construction, its general manager admits "we clearly do not have the money to operate the system." Nevertheless, the board recently voted to spend $185 million "” more than half of VTA's annual operating budget "” on preliminary engineering.

Meanwhile, VTA is still short on operating funds, so it is contemplating "eliminating or consolidating" service on more than a quarter of its remaining bus lines.

I am still getting the hard sell from cold-callers touting securities.  I am told this is because we small business owners are just behind dentists and doctors in terms of our capacity to make bonehead investments.

Before I proceed with this story, there are two things you need to know about me:

• I answer my own phone at the office
• I have never, ever listened to a sales pitch for an investment or security.  If I am in a good mood, I interrupt and say, "sorry, not iterested" before they can even name the stock.  If I am in a bad mood, I just hang up.

So the other day, I accidentally let one of them go further than I usually allow.  He said he was from Olympia Asset Management.  (There is an Olympia Asset Management web page, but I don't know if it is the same company and the web page has not been updated for several years.)  I let him run for a bit because a friend of mine runs a very well-respected financial planning firm with a different name but also with Olympia in the title, and for a moment I thought it might have been one of his folks.

Anyway, he proceeds to try to convince me that we have talked before and discussed a certain security.  "Remember me, we talked six months ago about ____".  Of course, I had never heard of the guy.  At this point I usually hang up, because I have heard this crap before -- it is a common pitch.  The best I can figure is that they are trying to give themselves more credibility by either:

1. Trying to imply that we have some kind of relationship we actually don't have.  Or worse...
2. Trying to convince me that he touted stock A six months ago, so now he can tell me stock A has gone up in price.  Many reputable brokers built their reputation by cold calling people and saying:  Watch these 3 stocks and see how they do and I will call you back in 6 months.  That way, you can evaluate their stock picking without risk.  The modern sleazy approach is to pick a stock that has gone up a lot in the last 6 months, and then call some harried business person and pretend you called them with that pick 6 months ago, hoping that they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

For some reason, maybe because I was bored, I decided to chat with him, and I had to admit that he was trained pretty well never to give up.  I interrupted him after the "do you remember" opening and said that we could not possible have spoken about a stock, because I always hang up on people within 5 seconds of knowing it is a stock pitch.  He said he had sent me a packet of information.  I said that he had not.  He insisted that we had talked, and that I had promised to write down the name of the stock on my calendar.  I told him I don't have a calendar  (which is actually true - I manage myself through a dysfunctional combination of memory and post-it notes).  Sensing weakness, I turned on him and said "gee, I was out of town a lot 6 months ago and am surprised you got hold of me.  What date did you call."  Then he starts getting all vague on me.  Anyway, I finally tired of the game and hung up but he never relented in his assertion that he and I had had a nice chat about some security.

Please, please.  Avoid these guys on the phone like the plague.  Several years ago I had a guy call me with some oil drilling "opportunity."  In that case, I also made an exception to my rule and listened to see just how bad this thing was going to be.  Finally I broke in and said "that's ridiculous, no one in their right mind would send you money for that."  He too was relentless, until I finally said "Look, I know Tony Soprano is standing behind you in the boiler room there and putting pressure on you, but I am not interested."  Then, without a pause, he starts telling me how he once threw a Molotov cocktail into the car of someone he didn't like.  I don't know if he was just having fun with me, but he was either wildly unprofessional or very creepy.  Beware, Beware, Beware.

In my earlier post, I commented that one reason a number of foreign oil fields may be "peaking" is not necesarily because they are hitting their production limits, ala "peak oil theory," but because state run companies tend to be terrible at making the intelligent long-term investments that are needed to maintain oil production in aging fields.  I observed:

There are a lot of things you can do to an aging oil field,
particularly with $60 prices to justify the effort, to increase or
maintain production.  In accordance with the laws of diminishing
returns, all of them require increasing amounts of capital and
intelligent management.

Unfortunately, state owned oil companies like Pemex (whose assets,
by the way, were stolen years ago from US owners) are run terribly,
like every other state-owned company in the world.  And, when
politicians in Mexico are faced with a choice between making capital
available for long-term investment in the fields or dropping it into
yet another silly government program or transfer payment scheme, they
do the latter.  And when politicians have a choice between running an
employment meritocracy or creating a huge bureaucracy of jobs for life
for their cronies they choose the latter. 

So today, via Hit and Run, we see this exact same effect in Venezuela:

No one sees an immediate crisis at Petróleos de Venezuela. But its
windfall from high oil prices masks the devilish complexity and rising
costs of producing heavy oil. Meanwhile, the company acknowledged last
month that spending on "social development" almost doubled in 2006, to
$13.3 billion, while its spending on exploration badly trailed its
global peers. And Petróleos de Venezuela's work force has ballooned to
89,450, up 29 percent since 2001 even as production declined
...
Petróleos
de Venezuela's cash is said to be running short as Mr. Chávez uses its
revenue to cement political alliances with Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua.
The company has borrowed more than $11 billion since the start of the
year, a rapid debt buildup that reflects a wager by Mr. Chávez that oil
prices will remain high indefinitely.

Well, we libertarians must be losing the battle, if these are all the rights I have left as a taxpayer:

Today at 10am the Republican Study Committee will
introduce a Tax Payers Bill of Rights with the aim of getting
bi-partisan support for the principles of such a bill of rights and
incorporating them in future legislation. The principles are:

1 Taxpayers have a right to have a federal government that does not grow beyond their ability to pay for it.
2 Taxpayers have a right to receive back each dollar that they entrust to the government for their retirement.
3 Taxpayers have a right to expect the government to balance the budget without having their taxes raised.
4 Taxpayers have a right to a simple, fair tax code that they can understand.

This is pretty thin soup, particularly from the party that once hailed itself as the party of small government.  I can't really disagree any of this stuff, but it really constitutes a low bar, and it is even scarier that this will probably be controversial.  In particular, #2 is a joke.  Getting all your principal back from forty year old retirement investments basically means that all your retirement income was invested by the government at a 0% rate of return.  Unfortunately, as I ran the numbers a while back, a 0% rate of return would actually be an improvement for Social Security.

This is really, really pathetic.

New SEC rules being drafted by the Bush administration are set to declare that Paris Hilton is a fully "accredited investor" with full freedom to invest in any way she likes.  I, who graduated near the top of my class at Harvard Business School, shall likewise be declared not capable of investing and the government will limit my options "for my own good"

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has just proposed
that the amount of liquid net worth an individual must have before
investing in hedge funds and other so-called risky investments be
raised to as much as $2.5 million.

The largest program the government has for protecting us from our own investing incompetence is called Social Security, which takes retirement savings from us by force and has the government invest it for us.   As I showed in previous posts, Social Security is returning -0.8% a year on our savings.  Thank god the government is investing this money for us - no way I could have beaten a -0.8% a year return during the greatest 20-year bull market of all time.

Tinfoil Hat Observation:  I use Google search to find old posts on my site.  Usually it is flawless.  For some reason, though, my post titled Social Security Ripoff is not indexed by Google.  A follow-up post on the same day is indexed, as you can see from this search, but not the original.  I have never failed to pull up a post before, even with inexact search words, and have never failed with the exact title in the search.  Weird.   Maybe something in the comments, I will have to check.

A few days ago, I did the calculations on my Social Security statement and discovered the government was paying me a -0.8% a year return (yes that is negative) on the taxes paid into the system on my behalf.  But rest assured, government workers, who know they are sticking it to us with Social Security, would never allow such a thing to happen with their own pensions:

In New York and Oregon, public employees who contribute their own money
to retirement plans get a guaranteed rate of return that is often far
beyond what the market provides, and taxpayers must make up the
difference. In Oregon, the return is 8 percent annually"”about double
what safe investments like treasury bonds provide today.

Part of a great article by Steven Malanga on the growing power of public sector unions.

A few weeks ago I got my annual "Your Social Security Statement" from the government.  This is a statement carefully crafted to look like it's telling you a lot while at the same time covering up Social Security's dirty little secret.  But with a spreadsheet and 5 minutes of work, one can figure out what is really going on.

The statement shows the total of my social security taxes paid into the system, including the employer share.  It also shows my taxed earnings per year, and my "benefits."  The main benefit is the monthly annuity payment Social Security will make to me after I retire.  My statement shows that $140,139 total taxes have been paid into the system on my behalf over the last 25 years.  Based on these taxes and (this is important) the assumption I and my employer will continue to pay in at least $7440 per year until I retire, I can expect an annuity at retirement age of 67 (under current law, which the statement makes clear can be changed at any time) of $1,985 per month.

So I built a spreadsheet (click to download excel file), going back to my first year of employment.  Each year, I added the social security taxes to savings, and grew the accumulated balance by some interest rate.  For past years I used actuals from the report, for future years I used the $7440 tax number the report uses to calculate the social security payout. 

This allowed me to answer a question:  If I had been able to take these social security taxes and instead put them in a savings plan, and then took the accumulated balance out at age 67 and bought an annuity (at current rates), what would be my monthly payment?  Well, assuming a very conservative after-tax rate of return of 5%, I would have $1,077,790 at age 67 to buy an annuity, which at current rates quoted on the Vanguard site, would give me $7,789 a month until I die.  This return is just about four times the amount I get from having the Social Security Administration manage the money for me instead. Ugh.  Also note that I did not assume "risky" equity investments or whatever straw man anti-reformers are using nowadays.    If I assume a higher return of 8%  (the stock market in the 90's returned something like 18%) then my annuity will be $17,860 per month, or 9 times the Social Security payout.  Double ugh.

In fact, this all opens up the obvious question, what actual rate of return is Social Security paying out on your "premiums?"  Well, in fact we can calculate this with the same spreadsheet.  I plugged in 2% for the interest rate.  No go -- resulting annuity is to high.  Then I plugged in 1%.  Still too high.  Could the government be paying you 0% on your money?  I plugged that in.  Still too high.  In fact, the implied rate of return on my money in the Social Security system is -0.8% a year.  In other words, not only is the government not paying me any interest, they are charging me to hold my money.

Social Security defenders insist that it is not a welfare program.  For example, Kevin Drum quotes this with approval:

The men in my family of my father's generation returned home after serving
their country and got jobs in the local steel mills, as had their fathers and
their grandfathers. In exchange for their brawn, sweat, and expertise, the steel
mills promised these men certain benefits. In exchange for Social Security taxes
withheld from their already modest paychecks, the government promised these men
certain benefits as well.

....These were church-attending, flag-waving, football-loving, honest family
men. They are rightfully proud of providing homes and educations for their
children and instilling the sorts of values and manners that serve them well as
adults. And if I have to move heaven and earth, now that they've retired, the
Republican party is NOT going to redefine them as welfare
recipients.

Fine, let's call it a retirement program.  Well, as a retirement program, it is a really, really big RIPOFF.  Ever worker in this country is being raped by this retirement plan.  In fact, it is the worst retirement program in the whole country:

• As we see above, it pays a negative rate of return
• It is not optional - you go to prison if you choose not to participate
• Unlike a private annuity contract, the government can rewrite your benefits level any time, and you have to take it.  In fact, my statement says "Your estimated benefits are based on current law.  Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time.  The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2040, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 74 percent of scheduled benefits."
• There are no assets backing this annuity!!  An insurance company that wrote annuities without any invested assets backing them would be thrown in jail faster than Jeff Skilling.  The government has been doing it for decades.

A couple of months ago, news-hog Eliot Spitzer had a well-publicized (what else?) suit against H&R Block for not providing high enough returns in its low-income retirement savings accounts.

New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer [official website] Wednesday launched a $250 million lawsuit [complaint, PDF] against H&R Block
[corporate website], the largest tax preparation service in the US, for
fraudulently coaxing its customers into a retirement account plan that
lost them money. Spitzer said that money in the retirement accounts
decreased over time because the low interest rate did not cover the
fees associated with the account.

Doesn't this exactly match the situation in my social security spreadsheet?  At least H&R Block's customers had a choice whether or not to sign up.

Postscript: As is usual with retirement issues, tax is a messy topic, so I mostly left it out.  My spreadsheet is correct if you call it an "after-tax" rate of return.  This may mean the nominal rate is higher, but it got taxed, or it could posit some tax-free savings alternative to social security.  Note also that we pay income taxes on the amount that gets taxed by Social Security (at least our employee portion).  This means an IRA type replacement for social security would actually have higher returns and dollars at retirement than those in my spreadsheet, because it would eliminate or at least defer income taxes on the premium.

Also note that the analysis is all in nominal dollars, because that is the way the dollars are on my SS statement - there are not inflation escalators in the program.

Postscript #2:  When last social security was a national topic, opponents of reform got a lot of mileage out of the 2001-2002 bear market in stocks.  They would ask, what if people had invested in stocks, they would have lost their money.  Well, as of today, if you had invested every dollar of your retirement savings on the worst possible day, the 2000 peak in the Dow, you would still be up 5% today.  This is a disappointing  return of less than 1% annually, but is STILL higher than the negative return in social security.  And remember, we are using nearly the worst five year before and after dates in this generation.  A real-world steady investment in stocks over the last 20 years, with equal amounts each year, would be way up  (anyone with an exact number is welcome to post it in the comments).

Postscript #3:  In an earlier post, I took on Social Security as intellectual welfare:

Advocates for keeping forced savings programs like Social Security in
place as-is by necesity argue that the average American is too stupid,
too short-sighted, and/or too lazy to save for retirement without the
government forcing them.  Basically the argument is that we
are smarter than you, and we are going to take control of aspects of
your life that we think we can manage better than you can.  You are
too stupid to save for retirement, too stupid to stop eating fatty
foods, too stupid to wear a seat belt, and/or too stupid to accept
employment on the right terms -- so we will take control of these
decisions for you, whether you like it or not.  For lack of a better
word, I call this intellectual welfare.

Update #1:  In response to some comments, the spreadsheet does work right, it is just labeled wrong.  The column that is labeled "investment income" is actually the saved balance to date plus the investment income.  The "End of Year" column is the correct balance at the end of year after investment income and new contributions.

Update #2:  A commenter reasonably points out that investment at the top of the market in the Nasdaq would still be way underwater.  However, I took this point investment on the worst day as an extreme example.  Even in the Nasdaq, which is still off 50% from its peaks, a steady monthly investment from 1997 or 1998 to date would be above water in total.  Leftists do a lot of bad things for the country, but trying to scare average workers away from equity investments for the long-term is certainly on of the most hypocritical.  I guarantee that every liberal politician has a big fat chunk of their savings in equities, because they know that is the way to create wealth over the long haul.

Update #3:  In a follow-up post, using this same spreadsheet, I conclude that only 17% of my Social Security taxes are going to my retirement while 83% are welfare for someone else.

As I wrote before, the new Democratic Congress try to end certain subsidies received by major oil companies.  All fine and good, at least as long as it is really a subsidy and not just an contract obligation they would like to get out of.

One might be led to believe that the Democrats were finally going to address the corporate welfare issues they have been promising to deal with for years.  Unfortunately, it appears that they are really only looking for an excuse for some populist demagoguing against Exxon.  Subsidies still appear to be A-OK:

The Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren are all in favor of eliminating energy subsidies.  By that measure, they find
the House Democrats' 100-hour energy legislation -- H.R. 6, the
Creating Long-Term Energy Alternatives for the Nation Act (aka the
"CLEAN Energy Act") -- to be quite a disappointment.

Energy subsidies, of course, have been a historical disaster.  If you have ever traveled around California, a common site you will see is 1) Windmills that are not working and 2) Rooftop solar fixtures that appear badly broken.  That is because these facilities were installed cheaply as subsidy magnets, rather than actual, you know, investments that made any sense.   Here in Arizona, every third rich persons SUV has this Arizona environmentally-friendly license plate that says the truck is dual-fuel.  When I moved here, I though that was kind of cool.  I know several countries that have good CNG (compressed natural gas) economies in their transportation sector.  It turns out, though, that none of these vehicles actually fill up with anything but gasoline.  Several years ago Arizona had a subsidy for buying dual-fuel trucks that exceeded the cost of conversion, so that everyone did the conversion as a money-maker. 

And these are far from being the worst.  How many billions have been sunk into R&D rat-holes that have produced nothing except some professor's tenure?  Remember that alternative energy and energy conservation technologies are among the hottest sectors in venture capital nowadays.  The VC's I know can't get enough of these projects, and are project rather than money limited.  This means that every subsidy and grant for energy can only go to one of two places:

• Projects that are already going to be privately funded, so that all they do is displace private funding, which makes them a total waste of taxpayer money
• Projects that were rejected for private funding as uneconomic or unpromising, such that the spending is a waste unless you assume Congressmen and government bureaucrats are sharper than VC's in picking investments.

My observation is the two political parties differ on subsidies only in terms of style.  The Democrats appear to have no problems with subsidies as long as they go to sympathetic and fashionable companies (e.g. Google via net neutrality) rather than companies they have deemed to be unfashionable (e.g. Exxon).

As a way to celebrate the holidays and perhaps compensate for a more relaxed pace of blogging for a while, I am beginning a serialization of my new novel BMOC.  If there is interest, I will keep it going for a while.  So, lets get started.  Enjoy!  (You didn't really feel like doing any real work today, did you?).   By the way, for you prospective business school students, though it may seem un-serious, embodies my best advice for you.  Chapters 3 and 4 continue here.

chapter one

Robert
Gladstone, multi-millionaire CEO of the M Group, looked around the
room at his fellow conspirators and longed for the piranha
button. 

Continue reading ‘BMOC, Chapters 1 and 2’ »

No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws  - 14th Amendment

The Arizona Republic had an article in the lead position on the business page that really got me fuming.  Here is the headline:

Bioscience push paying off.  But analysis says Arizona must do more

Apparently the Arizona and Phoenix governments decided several years ago it was their job to preferentially invest in getting biotech companies to move to Arizona.  And this article was about a consulting study the government engaged to see how they were doing against this original plan. 

Arizona's lucrative bet on the biosciences is yielding more high-wage
jobs, federal research dollars and new buildings that are expected to
birth scientific breakthroughs for decades to come.

But the state needs to accomplish a lot more to establish a thriving
research-based economy, particularly providing enough money, lab space
and support that will allow small research companies to grow and
prosper.

The study can be summarized as "The government spent lots of money.  Biotech jobs increased in Arizona, though we can't establish a link between the government spending and the job growth.  The government needs to spend even more money in the future."  These conclusions are from Battelle, a technology consulting company whose fortunes depend almost entirely on government spending for technology projects, and, magically, they came to the conclusion that government needs to spend a lot on technology projects.

Equal Protection

I seldom hear this argument about corporate welfare, but what the hell ever happened to the equal protection clause?  From the perspective of an Arizona corporation, my government is taxing me and every other business and handing our money over to businesses that call themselves "biotech."  What suddenly gives these other businesses such favored status?  Why is biotech somehow more desirable such that they are more equal under the law?   Or, for those of you on the Left who don't think businesses have equal protection rights, what about Arizona workers?  Why are workers in every other industry taxed so biotech workers can have more secure, higher paying jobs? 

The Worst Investor

Government is the worst investor.  I won't go into how bad they are historically at picking winners, but will make a different point this time.  Consider this hypothetical: 

You have some money to invest in real estate, and engage a consultant to invest your money for you.  The consultant comes back and says that he chose to invest in the most sought-after single property in town, where hundreds of other people were bidding against you for the project, but eventually you outbid them all and got it. 

What would be your reaction?  Mine would be rage and horror.  Why the hell did my consultant choose the project with the most competition, so prices were bid up into the sky?  How am I ever going to get a good return from that?  (Ask yourself what return the Japanese got for their high-profile real estate purchases of the eighties and nineties).

But this is exactly what Arizona has done.  They picked the sector to subsidize and fight for corporate relocations - biotech - that every other state and municipality in the US has also chosen as their highest priority.  They even admit this in their report:

Battelle representatives said Arizona's challenge is that bioscience is
an ultracompetitive field, and states across the nation are pursuing
initiatives to bring the good-paying jobs that the sector promises.

In business school, I would get an "F" for this.  Choosing to subsidize biotech means that for every potential company relocation, Arizona and Phoenix are up against ten other cities and states also throwing subsidy and tax abatement packages out there.  Stupid.

Circle Jerk

It just symbolized for me how stupid all this is when I saw that the big payoff of this state government spending was to attract ... federal government spending:

National Institutes of Health grants issued to Arizona-based
institutions jumped 30 percent from 2002 through 2005. That funding
growth outpaced the nation's top 10 research states.

No Linkage of "Investment" to "Returns"

When private firms make investments, they carefully track the returns from this investment to see if it was worth it.  However, when government makes what it calls "investments", this is impossible.  The study claims that biotech jobs in Arizona have risen faster than the national average, but shows no link to the government spending that had taken place.  Probably because there was little relation.  The fact is that just about any job sector you can name in Phoenix -- from electronics to garbage sorting -- has grown faster than the national average because Phoenix as a whole has grown faster than the national average.  Taking credit for the rising tide is a classic politician behavior.  Companies and individuals are moving to Phoenix because they like the climate and relatively low taxes and regulation, of which the latter are only hurt by corporate welfare programs for favored few.

Prisoner's Dilemma

I have written before how much the government subsidization of corporate relocations looks like a prisoner's dilemma game. 

I hope you can see the parallel to subsidizing business relocations
(replace prisoner with "governor" and confess with "subsidize").  In a
libertarian world where politicians all just say no to subsidizing
businesses, then businesses would end up reasonably evenly distributed
across the country (due to labor markets, distribution requirements,
etc.) and taxpayers would not be paying any subsidies.  However,
because politicians fear that their community will lose if they don't
play the subsidy game like everyone else (the equivalent of staying
silent while your partner is ratting you out in prison) what we end up
with is still having businesses reasonably evenly distributed across
the country, but with massive subsidies in place.

The practice of state governments spending massive amounts of tax money to move a few jobs over the state line, and then having other state governments spend even more money to move the jobs back, is a war of escalation that leaves everyone worse off except a few players with political pull or who work in a fair-haired favored industry.

It's all About the Sex Appeal

Here is the bottom line:  Programs like this are for politicians.
Period.  They benefit politicians by giving them things they can say in
elections, like "I brought biotech jobs to Arizona,"  which sounds
better than "I brought garbage-sorting jobs to Arizona."  This in
effect answers the equal protection question of "why biotech?"  The
answer is that biotech is currently sexy, and politicians in their focus
groups have found that tbiotech resonates the best among voters.  All of
which makes for a really crappy approach to "investing."

I was wondering this morning if I could turn public opinion against penicillin.   After all, hundreds of people die every year from taking penicillin.  If I ran a newspaper, every day I could feature another heart-rending story about a small child or a single mother with four kids dieing from a penicillin allergy.  Sure, some heartless fools who don't understand these poor people's suffering will say that penicillin is a net benefit.  But that will be easy to counter - I'd ask them to show me who was saved.  Sure, lots of people take it, but how can you prove they would have been worse off without it?  How can you prove how many people would have died without it?  I would have an easy time, because the victims of penicillin are specific and very visible, and the beneficiaries are dispersed.

I thought of this analogy while I was reading Jon Talton's column on the front page of the Arizona Republic business section celebrating the Democratic victory in Congress because we may finally be able to get rid of this awful free trade stuff.  As an aside, Talton has always been an interesting choice as the primary business columnist int he Republic, given that he doesn't really feel bound by the teachings of economics and he really does not like business.   His socialist-progressive formulations may be appropriate somewhere in the paper, but seem an odd choice for lead business columnist, sort of like finding a fundamentalist evolution denier, who still accepts Archbishop Usher's age of the earth, as lead science columnist.

I would fisk Talton's column in depth, but he doesn't really say anything except throwing together a hodge-podge of progressive rants against globalization (CEO pay, China, decimation of manufacturing -- he's got everything in there).   Like most progressives, he extrapolates flatness (not even declines, but flatness!) from 2001-2004 and declares that the world economy has changed and he has seen a major macro-economic trend (no mention of how the business cycle and recession we had in the same period might have affected things).

I will just take on one piece, where he says:

Americans were assured that new trade accords and China's membership in
the World Trade Organization would mean better living standards for
American workers. That's because China and other countries supposedly
would buy American exports.

Economists, what grade does Mr. Talton get?  F!  Because he demonstrates that he does not understand the economic argument for trade.  Because the argument does not actually require that foreign countries buy our exports for us to be better off with trade.   Comparative advantage says that even imports alone help our economy, allowing us to purchase inputs more inexpensively and refocus our domestic labor on tasks which we do comparatively better. 

The second fallacy with his statement is that export numbers grossly understate the amount of goods and services that foreigners buy from us.  Exports are only the goods they buy from us and take back to their country.  But foreigners buy many goods from us and use them in the US (say to build a factory or as an investment or financial instrument) and these foreign purchases of American goods don't show up as exports.  As long as the US is the safest and most stable country in the world, we will probably always run a trade deficit, as foreigners will continue to want to keep the goods and financial instruments they buy from us in the US where these assets are safer.  I wrote a lot more about this topic, and the recycling of dollars from China, here.

Finally, implicit in this anti-globalization view of trade is an assumption that the economy is zero-sum -- ie, there is sort of a global fixed pool of jobs, and if China gains steel market share and employment, the US net loses employment.  I have taken on this zero-sum mentality before, but it is particularly wrong-headed in this case.  Historically, the argument makes no sense.  For example, the automation of the farm sector wiped out 80 or 90% of the farm jobs in the US over the last century.  By the zero-summers logic, we should be impoverished.  Instead, these people were redeployed to manufacturing and service jobs that create far more wealth than the old 19th century farm employment.  But while people can sort of accept this historically, they can never accept this in real-time.  But the fact is that when we lose, say, a textile job to foreign competition, we not only gain because everyone pays less for textiles and thus has more money to spend on other things, but that worker gets redeployed over time to higher-value functions.  Look at the old textile belt in North Carolina - what's there now?  Electronics and Bio-tech.

The problem with trade is very like the one in the penicillin analogy -- it is all-to-easy to identify the few short term losers, who lost their job in American industries that can't compete with foreigners, but all-too-hard to find the huge dispersed benefits from lower prices and the continuing creative destruction that comes with strong competition.  This doesn't mean that individuals lives aren't disrupted, but it does mean that it's short-sighted to the point of being a Neanderthal to use these disruptions as an excuse to throttle free trade, just as it would be short-sided to ban penicillin because some people have allergic reactions.

It will be interesting to see if the Lou Dobbs populists rule the day on this issue.  If so, they it will be ironic that it is the Democrats, not the Republicans, who take the first major steps to dismantling the work of Bill Clinton  (because it sure as heck hasn't been GWB supporting free trade).

My prior posts on why you should stop worrying and learn to love the trade deficit are here and here and here and here.  I also looked at trade with China from the other side, and found it is China that should be mad about their government's trade policies and currency manipulation, not us:

It is important to note that each and every one of these
government interventions subsidizes US citizens and consumers at the
expense of Chinese citizens and consumers.  A low yuan makes Chinese
products cheap for Americans but makes imports relatively dear for
Chinese.  So-called "dumping" represents an even clearer direct subsidy
of American consumers over their Chinese counterparts.  And limiting
foreign exchange re-investments to low-yield government bonds has acted
as a direct subsidy of American taxpayers and the American government,
saddling China with extraordinarily low yields on our nearly $1
trillion in foreign exchange.   Every single step China takes to
promote exports is in effect a subsidy of American consumers by Chinese
citizens.

This policy of raping the domestic market in pursuit of exports
and trade surpluses was one that Japan followed in the seventies and
eighties.  It sacrificed its own consumers, protecting local producers
in the domestic market while subsidizing exports.  Japanese consumers
had to live with some of the highest prices in the world, so that
Americans could get some of the lowest prices on those same goods.
Japanese customers endured limited product choices and a horrendously
outdated retail sector that were all protected by government
regulation, all in the name of creating trade surpluses.  And surpluses
they did create.  Japan achieved massive trade surpluses with the US,
and built the largest accumulation of foreign exchange (mostly dollars)
in the world.  And what did this get them?  Fifteen years of recession,
from which the country is only now emerging, while the US economy
happily continued to grow and create wealth in astonishing proportions,
seemingly unaware that is was supposed to have been "defeated" by Japan.

Kevin Drum takes the following statistic:

As a result, wages and salaries no longer make up the smallest share of
the gross domestic product since World War II. They accounted for 46.1
percent of all economic output in the second quarter, down from a high
of 53.6 percent in 1970 but up from 45.4 percent in the spring of 2005.

And declares it to be a bad thing.  He doesn't really explain, but as a frequent reader of his site I can guess his issue is that he interprets this statement as a sign of the weakening fortunes of the American wage earner.

Isn't it really dangerous to leap to such a conclusion?  I can think of a number of perfectly innocuous, even positive trends that would cause such a shift:

• Aging of population means more people retirement age who take their income in form of dividends, investment returns, pensions, social security, etc., none of which are included in "wages"
• Ownership of investment assets, and thus income from these assets, has spread from just the rich to the middle class, meaning most people get more of a share of their personal income from investments and asset (e.g. house) appreciation
• Entrepreneurship rates are way up since 1970.  This means many more people, particularly in the middle class, have given up working for someone else for a wage and now work for themselves for a business profit.

I know Drum wants to interpret it as a "the poor are poor because the rich take all the money" zero sum game.  Anyone know what is really going on behind these numbers?

While I sometimes get grouped into economics blogs, I actually don't have a degree in the subject.  I have an MBA, some practical experience, some hobbyist reading, a few undergraduate courses, and, as my wife can attest, a willingness to pretend I know what I am talking about.  Unfortunately, that is not enough in this case.

Over the last 6 months, I have observed an interesting phenomena in the Phoenix area, one which I am sure I am not the first to discover, but I don't have enough background to put a name on it.  Here is what is going on:

Over the last year or two, the Phoenix real estate market has been red hot.  This has caused a lot of individual investors to make local real estate investments (I discussed more about this here).  The preferred type of investment seems to be to buy an old house on valuable land, tear it down, and sell the new house for a profit.

All fine and normal so far.  The interesting part comes when the investor chooses the style and appearance of the new home.  Remember that these are typically highly leveraged investments.  Investors take out a large mortgage, and that mortgage has to be paid every month that the investor cannot sell the home.  It is critical, then, that the investor build a home that is designed in a way to be most likely to sell.

Let's imagine that the pool of possible house buyers have the following preferences (I am making these numbers up):

1. Tuscan / Mediterranean style, 40%
2. Santa Fe style, 25%
3. Santa Barbara style, 20%
4. New England style, 10%
5. Ultra modern style, 5%

With only limited information on what is going on in the market around them (ie what others are planning to build) all of these investor-builders pick the most popular style on the list, thereby apparently maximizing their ability to sell the home.  As a result, every tear down / rebuild / remodel I see in our area is a new Tuscan home.  So, while 40% of buyers (or whatever the number is) want Tuscan, 100% of the supply is Tuscan.  By the way, the same thing apparently happened in the last big Phoenix real estate boom back in the 1980's, since nearly every house in our neighborhood that was built in the early eighties was built in what we call the "santa barbara" style.

This is obviously some type of market failure, but I don't know what it is called.  I might call it the "variety failure".  To a large extent, this dynamic is made possible by the fact that many of the investors in the real estate market are only entering the housing market for a single transaction, and are not well informed of the actions of other sellers in the market.  In most other industries, investors need to make money over multiple transactions over many years, which mutes this effect.  For example, there are always farmers who try to plant this year what was earning good money last year, but these players in the market are usually weeded out over time as last year's shortage leads to this year's glut and financial losses.  Also muting this failure nowadays are changes in manufacturing techniques, which allows low cost production of greater variety, as well as expansion of specialty retail space (e.g. category killers like Petsmart or Borders), which allows display of more product variations.

If you thought the idiots who ran Orange County's finances into the ground were bad, wait until you meet these jokers:

Two months ago, reports emerged that $300,000 in rare coins was missing from a
collection in which the state Bureau of Workers' Compensation (BWC) began
investing in 1998 as a peculiar form of stock hedge. That was bad enough. But
last week, word came that between $10 million and $12 million in coins had
disappeared. That caused BWC director Jim Conrad to announce his resignation,
and launched a flurry of accusations and calls for legal action.

As if my workers comp. rates weren't already too high.  There goes my idea to invest Social Security funds in beanie babies and 60's lunch boxes.  Apparently most of the major lawmakers in the state got large campaign donations from several large coin dealers, and they returned the favor by investing public funds in coins through these dealers.  I often make the argument not to let the government have control of large equity investment funds -- I did not even occur to me to include coins.  One of the things about coins - you have to hold them for a long, long time to make money, in part because commissions markups are so high vis a vis other investments (which explains why coin dealers so readily donated large sums of money for government business).

Reason has a good roundup.  Unfortunately, I am sure this will all lead to more restrictions on spending and speech in campaigns, though it appears the system is working fine - full disclosure of funding sources certainly has everyone running for their lives.

The real solution is to make elected officials take a real fiduciary interest in the state's investment funds (pensions probably being the largest).  What they would prefer to do is to legislate a set of rules and then leave managers to follow these rules, giving them plausible deniability.  What they should do is sit down once a quarter and review portfolio investment performance and asset allocations.

Running a small business can be quite "interesting".  Last summer we dealt with 4 hurricanes that shut down our Florida operations for over a month.  This winter we have had great success winning new contracts, including one we are very excited about at Pyramid Lake, California.  We got all our investments made to support this contract, got all the necessary staff on payroll, and wham, a local pipeline company spills over 100,000 gallons of crude oil into the lake and it is now closed for weeks, with a substantial loss of revenue in prime spring boating season.  Sigh.

A while back I wrote a series of posts here, here, and here on buying a small business.  One of the things I said in that post was:

Then, there are the banks. From my experience, it is very, very
difficult to get a bank to make an collateralized loan - i.e. a loan
that is secured only by the cash flow of a company rather than by
assets. In fact, I have never been successful at that. About the only
way that I have found that banks will make a loan is if it is an SBA
loan, where the SBA basically guarantees the loan for the bank. The SBA
goes through cycles of being very open to lending to being very tight.
I have not dealt with them for over two years, so I don't know what
their stance is today. Remember, though, that the SBA is not going to
approve any loan where the buyer has no experience in the industry or
where the buyer is not putting down his own money as well. The SBA has
a lot of information here.

This statement is still mostly true but I have learned a lot over the last couple of months.  The following is an update.

One of the things they tell you all the time in business school, but frankly I always found impossible to really internalize, was how much cash growth takes.  I guess I always thought of businesses with cash flow problems as being unsuccessful, slowly sliding down the drain and trying to make ends meet.  Wrong.  Growth is tremendously expensive.  And stressful.

My business is based on concession contracts.  Each winter, we are usually presented with the opportunity to bid on many contracts.  We narrow the field down to 4-6 we bid on, hoping to win about 2.  One of the things I did last year was greatly improve our standard bid materials, hoping that would help us win good projects.  Did it ever.  We bid on 6 last year and we won 6 (including Burney Falls, Pyramid Lake, and Lake Havasu).  Yea!  But then I began adding up all the investments in new inventory, new equipment, salary (you always have to hire people before the first revenues come in), licenses, building improvements, etc.  Eeek!

After a lot of work with bankers, I stand by most of my statement above.  Most bankers will not lend to businesses on cash flow, and always want some type of collateral (like my home equity).  Over time, though, I have found a few bankers who are willing to lend on cash flow and really understand business growth and why maybe I don't want to have my business's growth rate limited by how much equity I have in my personal home.  There are bankers who will put together packages of long-term loans backed by the SBA plus short term working capital loans that will now let me grow faster.  The folks at Copper Star Bank, for example, have been great. 

One of the reasons I felt the need to post this update is that I have been told that my difficulty finding a good business banker was due in part to my location here in Phoenix.  The Phoenix banking market is very real estate driven, so bankers usually come from that background rather than a business background.  I am told that those of you on the east coast or in the Midwest may have an easier time finding good business bankers.

Postscript: By the way, you might ask how I feel as a small government libertarian about accepting the government subsidy implicit in an SBA loan.  The answer is "conflicted".  Some libertarians are fine accepting government services, on the theory that they certainly have paid for them with all their taxes.  Some try to avoid government services, but that is almost impossible in today's world (such as using government roads).  I generally try to be pragmatic, operating somewhere in the middle.

As far as SBA loans go - I don't know what the commercial banking world would look like without SBA loans.  I think that the banking world would have found an alternative way to mitigate the risk (e.g. via securitization) without the government gaurantee, but we can't know.  The fact is that SBA gaurantees exist and banks would be crazy not to use the gaurantees in making business loans.  So, the reality is, if I want a cash flow based loan for a company my size, it will likely carry the SBA gaurantee.  My appologies to all those whose taxes support my loan gaurantee.

I am willing to make a bet.  I will bet that at least 90% and probably 100% of US Senators have money invested in equities.  Why?  Because, for long term investments, you would be insane not too.  Even with substantial drops in the market form time to time, equities outperform bonds and government securities by miles and miles.  From this chart, you can see that even if you had the misfortune at age 30 to invest all you savings in stocks the day before the 1929 stock market crash, you STILL would be better off by age 45 having invested in stocks than bonds and your investment would be worth 10 times more at age 65 than if it had been in bonds.  And remember, that is the case of investing on the worst possible day of the last century.  Any other comparison is even more favorable for stocks.  The difference in wealth between stocks and government securities at retirement age is staggering.  Any financial adviser who told a person under 50 saving for retirement not to invest some of their money in stocks should be fired on the spot for malpractice.

However, just like Senators who put their kids in private school but oppose school choice for the rest of us, Senators do not think the rest of us are mature or smart enough to invest in stocks.  Quoting Senator Specter:

On the issue of privatization, I had some time ago considered an idea to place a relatively small portion of benefits in an investment account, providing that the "security" aspect of Social Security was retained and the investment was under professional management. However, with the severe fluctuations of the stock market, I have since rejected that idea.

Men like John Kerry get most of their wealth from stocks, and would fire any financial adviser who did not invest a good portion of his wealth in equities. He understands that stocks will fluctuate from time to time, but that over decades (which is how one invests for retirement) they are the best choice. How hypocritical is it that he and others are saying "Stocks are great for me, they make me wealthy, but trust me, they're not right for you".  More on distrust of individual decision-making here.

I don't know whether it warrants the "crisis" moniker (to me, government is always in a disastrous state), but Social Security is indeed facing an enormous cash flow shortfall in just a few years.  Those who use bogus government accounting to say that there is no problem until 2042 are either disingenuous or delusional.  People making this argument are saying that yes, cash flow will be negative, but those negative cash flows will come out of the huge Social Security trust fund, which won't be depleted until 2042.

Um, the only problem with this is that... there is no Social Security trust fund.  I mean yes, there is such a thing on paper with a large number next to it, but there is no actual pool of cash or investments to draw on.  The "trust fund" is full of government IOU's to itself - the actual cash was spent for general budget needs over the years.  As a result, in just a few years, Social Security will require:

• Massive new taxes
• Large benefits cuts
• A complete restructuring of all parts of the program
• More government borrowing

Good post at Assymetrical Information goes into it in more depth.

Recently, the government announced that it would take over the United Airlines pilots pensions in the government-funded Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.  This move is irritating pilots, because their pensions get reduced, and it is annoying to me as a taxpayer, that I have to bail out a company that was too screwed-up to fully fund its pension obligations. 

This points up the biggest danger of government guarantees -- it causes companies to be more reckless.  Back in the 80's, banks and S&L's made insanely risky investments with bank deposits.  The people who should have been most interested in this problem - bank depositors - ignored it because they felt safe that the government had guaranteed their deposits.  In the same way, airlines and other ailing businesses with defined benefit pensions cut back on pension funding when times were bad, and the very group that should have been crying foul - the company unions - did not, because they again counted on a bail-out.

I put the blame squarely on the company's management, who made a commitment to employees and then failed to keep it, and now are using government pension gaurantees as a subsidy to close their cash flow gap.  However, it is interesting to look at the role of unions too.  For decades, unions have demanded defined benefit pensions (ones that promise a fixed amount per month at retirement) and have opposed defined-contribution pensions (ones where the company promised to contribute a fixed amount today into an investment fund).  I assume the main reason for this is that unions do not want workers to bear the market risks on investments.

Over time, though, defined benefit plans have, despite this opposition, gone the way of the dinosaur (at least in private companies - most government jobs still have them).  This is for a number of reasons:

• 401-K accounts now offer much of the same tax-deferral benefits for defined contribution programs that defined-benefit plans had
• Defined-benefit plans turn out to have market risk too.  One is inflation - benefits levels may be guaranteed, but unexpectedly high inflation can effectively reduce them, while defined contribution plans, if invested correctly, will likely produce returns to offset these inflation losses.  In addition, during go-go stock markets, holders of defined-benefit plans found out that they did not enjoy the benefits of higher investment returns - their employers pocketed them (by the way, may Americans are discovering the same about their Social Security benefits).
• As employees move around more, workers have found that defined benefit plans are not very portable, and tend to punish workers who do not stay for decades.  401-K plans are much more beneficial to workers who do not stay their whole career, or at least 20 years, in one place.
• As United pilots have found, defined benefit pension plans are hard to police by current employees- there are just too many variables that allow companies to argue that the pensions are OK.  On the other hand, defined contribution plans are very easy to police- one can check the amount of contribution each month against the amount promised.
• Finally, defined benefit plans rely on their company staying in business and fiscally sound for decades into the future.  This may have seemed a good bet at US Steel or United Airlines in 1950, but would anyone make that bet today?  For any company?

I am all for restructuring the whole social security system, but, as I have written before, we cannot let the government invest social security funds in private equities.  The potential for manipulation and creeping socialism are astronomical.  Its easy to picture fights over whether the social security funds should be invested in tobacco makers, gun makers, hospitals that conduct abortions, Domino's Pizza (that donates funds to oppose abortion), Haliburton, etc. etc. 

I have always used government-funding of universities as an example -- the government uses the leverage of this funding (and the threat of its withdrawal) to force all kinds of regulations on universities.  Today, we have a good case example that is even more directly applicable. 

Over the past several years, Calpers (the California state workers retirement fund) has been a great example of how government control of equity investments can be a disaster.  In the case of Calpers, their huge pension investments automatically make them one of the largest investors in each company in their portfolio.  Calpers has used that power wisely at times, promoting improvements in corporate governance, but has also used it astronomically poorly. 

Under Sean Harrigan, Calpers portfolio has been unbelievably politicized, up to and including having the portfolio use its ownership in several grocery chains to support striking members of the grocery union run by... Sean Harrigan.  Professor Bainbridge has a couple of good roundups here and here.

If we are change how social security funds are invested, let individuals make their own investment choices. 

I had some links on Social Security reform here. 

One thing I forgot to mention -- No matter what we decide to do, please, please do not let the government invest social security funds in private equities.  I am all for giving individuals control of their social security funds and allowing these individuals to make their own investment choices.  But, allowing the government to invest in equities will lead to all sorts of problems:

1. The most obvious is creeping socialism and regulation, particularly of companies that are not well-loved by the intelligentsia.  Mad at Dick Cheney?  Pass a law that the trust fund can't invest in Haliburton.  Don't like Dan Rather?  Pass a law that the trust fund can't invest in CBS.  You get the idea.  The mere threat of disowning the company's equity from the trust fund investments portfolio would force companies to kowtow to the populist notion of the moment.
2. If you worry about private individuals manipulating the stock market, just wait until the government has the incentive to get in the game.  The government has all kinds of ways, from small (control of economics data) to large (interest rates and SEC regulations) to manipulate the market for short term gain. 

Marginal Revolution also has an interesting post on whether the historic equity premium would still exist if the government invested massively in equities.