Economy Archives - Page 71 of 133 - the patient investor

March 12, 2014

How a private credit boom can lead to a sovereign debt crises | FRBSF

From a FRBSF paper Private Credit and Public Debt in Financial Crises by Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor:

Recovery from a recession triggered by a financial crisis is greatly influenced by the government’s fiscal position. A financial crisis puts considerable stress on the government’s budget, sometimes triggering attacks on public debt. Historical analysis shows that a private credit boom raises the odds of a financial crisis. Entering such a crisis with a swollen public debt may limit the government’s ability to respond and can result in a considerably slower recovery.

In financial crises, steep declines in output worsen the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product (GDP) even if the nominal amount of debt remains unchanged. Progressive tax systems cause government revenues to decline at a faster rate than output. Meanwhile, other automatic stabilizers, such as unemployment insurance programs, quickly swell public expenditures. The public sector often assumes private-sector debts to prevent a domino effect of defaults from toppling the financial system. Programs to stimulate the economy put further stress on public finances. As budget deficits balloon, deep economic downturns resulting from a private credit crunch often turn into sovereign debt crises.

Hat tip to Barry Ritholz

March 9, 2014

Income inequality: Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer

John Mauldin writes

That income inequality stifles growth is not simply the idea of two economists in St. Louis. It is a widely held view that pervades almost the entire academic economics establishment. Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has been pushing such an idea for some time (along with Paul Krugman, et al.); and a recent IMF paper suggests that slow growth is a direct result of income inequality, simply dismissing any so-called “right-wing” ideas that call into question the authors’ logic or methodology.

The suggestion that income inequality stifles growth is a fraud, designed to promote a socialist agenda of redistributing wealth to the poor. We are currently experiencing slow growth because of the GFC, not because of rising income inequality.

The real question that needs to be answered is: which system best promotes growth and improves the living standards of the broad population? Evidence of the last 100 years is difficult to dispute. Socialism has an abysmal track record in uplifting the poor, while capitalism has fueled a massive upliftment in living standards over more than a century. High rates of tax on top income earners kills growth and redistribution to the impoverished does little to improve their living standards, whereas low tax rates encourage growth and raise living standards.

To recover from the GFC we need to allow capitalism to flourish instead of impeding it at every turn.

March 8, 2014

Mass Privatization, State Capacity and Economic Growth in Post-Communist Countries | Hamm, King & Stuckler (2012)

From the abstract of a paper by Hamm, King and Stuckler:

We perform cross-national panel regressions for a sample of 30 post-communist countries between 1990 and 2000, and find that mass privatization programs negatively affected economic growth, state capacity, and property rights protection.

March 8, 2014

The importance of regulation

Capitalism without regulation is prone to excesses, driven by individuals pursuing their own self-interest. Price-gouging and provision of inferior quality goods and services are held in check by competition, but there are other aberrations against public morals, or not in the public interest, that require regulation. Historical examples would be the use of slaves, the opium trade, usury, prostitution, child labor, conquest and exploitation of primitive cultures, and sale of weapons or related technology to a nation’s enemies.

Regulation is also required to curb monopolistic practices, where competition is ineffective. There is much talk of the importance of free markets, but unregulated markets are not free. They are prone to cheating, corruption and abuse of market power. What is needed are efficient markets, where there are:

low barriers to entry for new participants
low transaction costs
equal access to information, at the same time

Stock markets are often quoted as an example of an efficient market. Regulation has contributed to this over the years by policing illegal activities such as insider trading, front-running, wash sales, pump and dump, price manipulation, squeezes, and disseminating false or misleading information. But lately the prevalence of high-speed trading has eroded investor confidence, as most market participants no longer have access to price information at the same time. If this continues, the onus is on regulators to allow competitors to set up efficient markets for investors.

March 8, 2014

The importance of competition

Self-interest is held in check by competition. Without competition, capitalism leads to price-gouging and inferior goods and services.

More at St Louis Fed: The Role of Self-Interest and Competition in a Market Economy – The Economic Lowdown Podcast Series

March 8, 2014

In the Real World the Trade Deficit Is More Important Than the Budget Deficit | CEPR

Dean Baker writes:

….the trade deficit is a direct measure of the amount of demand that is going overseas rather than being spent here. This represents income generated in the United States that is not creating demand in the United States. By definition, this lost demand must be made up by other borrowing, either by the public sector (i.e. budget deficits) or the private sector. Currently the trade deficit is running at an annual rate of around $480 billion (@ 3.0 percent of GDP), which means that the sum of net borrowing in the public and private sector must be equal to $480 billion.

March 8, 2014

Recession time for Russia | The Market Monetarist

Lars Christensen at The Market Monetarist writes:

….. sharply increased geo-political tensions in relationship to Putin’s military intervention on the peninsula of Crimea has clearly shocked foreign investors who are now dumping Russian assets on large scale. Just Monday this week the Russian stock market fell in excess of 10% and some of the major bank stocks lost 20% of their value on a single day.

In response to this massive outflow the Russian central bank – foolishly in my view – hiked its key policy rate by 150bp and intervened heavily in the currency market to prop up the rouble on Monday. Some commentators have suggested that the CBR might have spent more than USD 10bn of the foreign currency reserve just on Monday. Thereby inflicting greater harm to the Russian economy than any of the planned sanctions by EU and the US against Russia.

By definition a drop in foreign currency reserve translates directly into a contraction in the money base combined with the CBR’s rate hike we this week has seen a very significant tightening of monetary conditions in Russia – something which is likely to send the Russian economy into recession (understood as one or two quarters of negative real GDP growth).

March 4, 2014

A Century of Policy Mistakes | Niels Jensen

In A Century of Policy Mistakes Neils Jensen describes the demise of Argentina over the last 100 years.

A century ago Argentina ranked as one of the wealthiest countries in world, behind the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia but ahead of countries such as France, Germany and Italy. Its per capita income was 92% of the G16 average; it is 43% today. Life in Argentina was good. It enjoyed the benefits of one of the highest growth rates in the world and attracted immigrants left, right and centre. Boom times galore.

Argentina’s wealth was based on agriculture, but also on its strong ties with the UK, the pre-World War I global powerhouse. Equally importantly, it understood the importance of free trade and took advantage of the relatively open markets which prevailed in the years leading to the Great War. Most importantly, though, it benefitted from, but also relied upon, enormous inflows of capital from the rest of the world. All of this is well documented in a recent piece in The Economist which you can find here.

Neils identifies three main causes:

An over-reliance on commodities;
Failure to invest in education; and
An increasingly closed, inward-looking economy.

It occurred to me that, apart from education, Australia has made the same mistakes.

March 3, 2014

Deflating Australia’s land bubble

ScreenHunter_18 Jul. 05 10.22

Great post by Leith van Onselen
Reproduced with kind permission from Macrobusiness.com.au.

Prosper Australia has provided a submission to the Senate Inquiry into Housing Affordability, which is well worth a look. The submission first provides nine metrics illustrating Australia’s residential property bubble, which include the following:

It took forty years from 1950 to 1990 for housing prices to double, but only fifteen years between 1996 and 2010 to double again. The surge in housing prices is driven by the tremendous growth in household debt, as owner-occupiers and investors take out ever larger mortgages to speculate on housing. The household debt to GDP ratio reached a record high of 98 per cent in 2010, the same year real housing prices peaked. In 2013, the mortgage and personal debt ratios were 86 and 9 per cent, respectively, for a combined household debt ratio of 95 per cent.

As mortgage debt escalated, investors’ net rental losses increased rapidly from 2001 onwards. In that year, net rental income losses were just over $1 billion, rising to $9.7 billion in 2008 as the cash rate peaked at 7.2 per cent. By 2010, when mortgage debt reached its historical peak relative to GDP, investor losses eased to $5.1 billion as the cash rate fell to a then historic low of 3 per cent in 2009 following the global financial crisis (GFC). The latest data shows income losses rose to $8.2 billion in 2011, the second largest absolute loss on record…

The housing market meets economist Hyman Minsky’s definition of a Ponzi scheme, as gross rental incomes minus expenses are clearly insufficient to meet principal and interest repayments. As 67 per cent of property investors are negatively-geared as of 2011, investment decisions are predicated upon expected rises in land values, not rents. This strategy will inevitably fail, as the escalation in real housing prices can only be sustained by a continual acceleration or exponential rise in mortgage debt.

The price to income (P/I) ratio, otherwise known as the median multiple, is another measure of residential property valuation…

From the mid-1990s onwards, housing prices outpaced household incomes, and the P/I ratio increased from 4 to 7 nationwide. It is impossible for household incomes to match the rise in housing prices during the boom phase of a property bubble, as wages grow more slowly, usually just above the rate of inflation…

Land is the largest tangible market in Australia… Our housing bubble is actually a residential land bubble, as the total land values to GDP ratio doubled between 1996 and 2010, when it reached a record high of 298 per cent ($4.1 trillion). In real terms, residential land values rose from $895 billion in 1996 to a peak of $3.2 trillion in 2010, a relative increase of 262 per cent. This ratio is closely matched by a similar rise in the value of the residential housing stock. The rise in residential land values, rather than structures, is responsible for almost all of the increase in the value of the housing stock…

Prosper then places the blame for Australia’s expensive housing on convergence of factors, with Australia’s inefficient tax system front-and-centre:

A convergence of factors are responsible: a large cohort of irrational investors gambling on housing prices, a FIRE sector willing and able to facilitate a credit boom, and low property and land taxes attracting speculators to this asset class…

A positive feedback loop has emerged between housing prices and mortgage debt, with rising prices prompting the take-up of more debt in an upwards spiral…

An inefficient taxation system, comprised of low property and land taxes, allows landowners to expropriate ‘geo-rent’ (economic rent derived from land) by capturing the uplift in land values generated by taxpayer-funded infrastructure and rising economic productivity… Government willingness to tax wages and business ahead of land has elevated its privileged status, resulting in larger capital sums being paid by owner-occupiers and investors.

It also advocates land tax reform, which it claims would significantly improve incomes, affordability, and productivity:

Counter-intuitively, reducing wage and business taxation and increasing land tax would not necessarily lower fundamental land prices, given the offsetting boost to disposable wages, profits and hence rents, but it would certainly lower bubble-inflated land prices. Land tax reform – urged on government by every independent tax review in living memory – would firmly correct the price to rent and income ratios. If Australia wishes to escape or ameliorate the profound financial destruction of a bursting land bubble, the solution lies in this equation…

Prosper also slams housing-related tax expenditures, which undermine the integrity of the tax system:

The generous scope of tax expenditures relating to the housing market has served to further increase prices. Tax expenditures are defined as a deviation from the commonly accepted tax structure, whether it is a tax exemption, concession, deduction, preferential rate, allowance, rebate, offset, credit or deferral. Australia has the highest rate of tax expenditures among our OECD peers, at more than 8 per cent of GDP. Tax expenditures are vulnerable to lobbying, and often compromise the fairness and efficiency of the tax system. Lavish tax expenditures for both owner-occupied and investment property has significantly worsened housing affordability because they allow landowners to capture greater amounts of geo-rent and prioritise unearned wealth and income over what is earned. Existing home owners capture the most benefit, ahead of first home buyers, investors and tenants.

These tax expenditures provide a strong incentive to speculate on housing prices, and are reinforced by already low property taxes. Investors perceive rental income as secondary to expected rises in capital prices, while first home buyers over-leverage themselves to enter a bubble-inflated market…

Tax expenditures, combined with the ongoing deregulation of the banking and financial system, has transformed the housing market into a casino. Residential property is commonly viewed as a speculative asset to flip, rather than shelter to raise a family in…

Finally, Prosper provides two recommendations to the Senate Inquiry:

Recommendation 1: Reform Land Value Tax. The ideal tool to moderate land bubbles and properly fund infrastructure already exists in the hands of state and territory governments: state land tax (SLT). Unfortunately, this tax has been so riddled with exemptions and concessional treatments it must be considered dormant…

We suggest the current government introduce a nationwide one per cent federal land tax (FLT) – fully rebatable on SLT paid – to oblige the states and territories to use their taxing powers properly. State governments could adjust their tax rules and keep every dollar the FLT raises, to the benefit of all Australians. The Commonwealth Parliament would be entitled to argue this intervention is for sound economic reasons and dissipate the political fallout. Placing state and territory finances on sound bases would vastly improve the federal system mandated by Australia’s Constitution. Transitional arrangements would need to be considered. Rebating all stamp duty paid against a hypothetical past SLT obligation would address concerns of fairness and equity…

Recommendation 2: Macroprudential Regulation. A range of macro-prudential tools are needed to moderate housing price inflation and subdue credit growth in a pro-cyclical financial system, such as those affecting the loan to value, (LVR), debt servicing (DSR) and debt servicing to income (DSTI) ratios.26 Quantitative restrictions should be placed on the share of new mortgages with moderately high LVRs…

To reduce systemic risk, a large rise in capital and liquidity ratios (buffers) is required to ensure banks can withstand a future economic downturn, bank run or large fall in the value of collateral. Research suggests the probability of a banking crisis can be reduced to a 1 in 100 year event by raising core equity (Tier 1) capital ratios to 11 per cent in isolation or raising core equity to 10 per cent with an addition rise in liquid assets of 12.5 per cent (the rise in liquid assets over total assets). For the Big Four banks, this would represent a rise of around 3 per cent in core equity…

The full submission is available here.

February 26, 2014

China faces challenges

I have kept Michael Pettis January summary of the four challenges facing China:

China is over-reliant on credit to generate growth;
Attempts to boost consumption will reverse the long-standing subsidy of new investment;
Attempts to resolve excess capacity also slow growth; and
Unrecognized bad debt on bank balance sheets means that growth is overstated.

China’s Shanghai Composite Index is again testing support around 2000. Follow-through below 1990 would signal a primary decline to 1850*. Reversal of 21-day Twiggs Money Flow below zero would warn of medium-term selling pressure. Respect of support is less likely, but would suggest another attempt at 2150/2250.

Shanghai Composite Index

* Target calculation: 2000 – ( 2150 – 2000 ) = 1850