Category: investments

More general ignorance of economic fundamentals

Fannie Mae’s new National Housing Survey, intended “to gauge the public’s current attitudes toward housing,” shows that Americans still believe buying a home is a good investment, and socially beneficial. Both ideas are, as Felix Salmon put it, “horribly misguided.”  Public policy subsidizes owner-occupants in numerous ways, all of which get capitalized into the price of real estate making it even less affordable.  One might be able to time the market so as to buy and sell one’s house profitably, but it’s not something to count on and many of us have had things go disasterously the other way.

Salmon’s done a good job of describing some of the social costs

[T]he top two reasons to buy a home are that “it means having a good place to raise children and provide them with a good education”; and “you have a physical structure where you and your family feel safe”. Reading between the lines here, I think that what we’re seeing is the effect of rental ghettoes, and the fact that neighborhoods with high levels of homeownership tend to be safer, and have better schools, than neighborhoods which are mostly owned by landlords. That’s a negative aspect of homeownership, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s clearly here to stay: no one’s anticipating a more sensible world where it’s commonplace to be able to rent a house in a good school district.

And most of those surveyed– renters, unmortgaged owners, mortgaged owners, underwater mortgaged owners– still think that now is a good time to buy themselves a house.  Imagine how they’d react if told that now is a good time to shift more taxes on to the land they want to buy. Will they sit still long enough to understand the mechanism that makes housing easier to afford when land is taxed?

Measuring the costs of political corruption

Trying to do some investment research, I got diverted to a couple of articles from the Review of Financial Studies.

In Corruption, Political Connections, and Municipal Finance, the authors assert that “Higher state corruption is associated with greater credit risk and higher bond yields.”  They apparently can measure the corruption and the cost; however the actual article is behind a paywall. I wonder if their results allow us to estimate how many dollars Illinoisans pay in higher debt service due to our political culture, or if the current estimate of “lots and lots” is sufficient.

Do Politically Connected Boards Affect Firm Value? might not seem to be a question worth asking, but it’s nice that academics have, they say, hand-classified corporate board members as “politically connected” to either of the two dominant U S parties. They find that nomination of a politically-connected individual to a board tends to increase stock prices, and that after the 2000 election, stocks associated with Republican boards went up, whereas those associated with Democrats went down.  Again, I cannot see the original article.

Stumbling onto another land value tax endorsement

Just happened to find it while searching for something else in a Florida library

The killer argument in favour of a national tax on land values for any modern government relates to the effect of globalisation on the tax base. The ability of companies to shift their operations from one tax jurisdiction to another in a world of increasingly mobile capital means that the corporate tax base is likely to erode. This is taking longer to happen than intuition might suggest, but the logic of capital mobility and of transfer pricing by large corporations makes it inevitable. Rich private individuals are similarly prone to shift residence and domicile to minimise their tax liabilities. But it is much harder to shift factories, offices, shops and houses, and impossible to move the ground on which they are built.

The article also includes a prescient observation regarding the housing bubble

Better still, the effect on the housing market would be inherently countercyclical. When house prices and land values are rising, the tax would admittedly with a delay act as a dampener on the boom.

source: One tax to untangle this unholy mess.(real property taxes).
Estates Gazette (Feb 28, 2004): p.50.

Dangers of debt

“Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb at the Royal Society:

Debt is a product of overconfidence. The more confident you are, the less it makes sense to use equity. The problem is that we– humans– cannot be trusted with knowledge because we tend to be overconfident …Religions…don’t like debt. It’s not without a reason. You had debt jubilees, cancellation of debt from Babylonian times… Debt was not necessarily a good thing….Debt is something that’s very toxic and can hit you very quickly, which is why I don’t like leveraged buyouts…so you need to protect people from themselves.

You can express overconfidence with equity, without harming yourself too much…The debt bubble we have now is still here.

He gives some annoyingly persuasive arguments for a conservative approach to public policy. I don’t find any transcript, but there is an mp3 from Radio National, and the Royal Society offers both video and audio.  It’s worth listening just to hear him say “Silly Con Valley.”

Inflation or Deflation?

That was the title of a talk this evening by UCGSB Booth School prof John Cochrane.  “I don’t make forecasts,” he said, “but I can offer scenarios.”  He actually offered only one scenario, which is basically one of inflation.  We are all aware of the huge and growing federal debt, but it’s much smaller relative to GDP than it was in 1945.  So how have the feds paid off big debts?  Thru growth.

But we’re not growing, and future growth will be difficult if taxes are increased.  And it seems the bailout pattern is continuing, so who knows how high the debt might go? So inflation seems more likely than the opposite.  Cochrane pointed out that inflation is based on what people anticipate rather than actual events, and noted that Japan continues to experience little inflation despite a large debt.

Of course, he apparently didn’t consider the possibility that taxes might be raised on things not produced by people.

Also:

(1) He acknowledged that the Phillips Curve, the alleged inflation-unemployment tradeoff, isn’t supported by actual data over the past several decades, and showed a couple of charts illustrating this.

(2) Why he isn’t making a forecast: “I’m an economist; I don’t know anything about political will.”

(3) “Every economist I know [apparently including himself] is buying TIPS [Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities].” If that turns out to have been a smart strategy, I guess we should assume that economists are able to advise themselves better than they can the rest of us.

(4) Reportedly, the talk will be posted somewhere, probably around here, in a few days.

Wealth stolen thru privilege

We already know this in general, that government-protected privilege is used to steal wealth from the public.  An outrageous specific example appears to be Goldman Sachs, as profiled in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi. The text seems to be here and a pdf scan here.

Tho especially aided by a revolving door between GS and regulatory agencies, none of this could happen under a government which sought to eliminate privilege where possible and tax it where it cannot be avoided.   Taibbi doesn’t seem to be aware of this latter point, or maybe it just isn’t as interesting to focus on policy solutions as to discuss evil persons and their organizations.

A rather weak response from Goldman Sachs is reported here, the good news being that

in the wake of the events of the past year or two, Goldman’s partners have pretty much lost their appetite for going into public service.

But as long as privilege thrives, some will find ways to manipulate it to their advantage.

The Secret Life of Real Estate

is subtitled “How it Moves and Why,” but this isn’t about the Kinetic Condos. It’s a response to a questions Georgists often hear: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”  Different Georgists give different answers, including “I am rich.”

We know that the major cause of the business cycle is the capitalization and trading of government-protected privilege.  This privilege can be any kind of income obtained without producing, and may flow from spectrum licenses, drilling rights, patents, copyrights, or a hundred other sources.  But the main one is land ownership, since land is not a product of human labour.

When demand increases for a product or service, production can increase, but that isn’t true of privilege. The only limit on the price of privilege is what the market will bear without breaking.   So can’t we measure that price, use the information to forecast economic meltdowns, and thus become wealthy?

Our massive government statistics operations, which know how much more Asian-American households spend on rice than the rest of us do (4 times as much, as of 2003), and that people spend an average of 2.43 hours each weekday watching television, know just about nothing about the price of land.  Only a few countries maintain any such information (Korea, Japan, Denmark, and Australia come to mind).  Many local authorities compile land assessments, but the relationship to actual market prices is, at best, elastic, and the information is not systematically reported.  So indirect and ephemeral indicators must be relied upon.

Moreover, they land price cycle tends to run about 18 years, and may be disrupted by war (not by much else, it appears). This means that taking advantage of it requires a great deal of patience and, one can only say, a certain amount of faith.  And starting at a young enough age, by the way. Of course the cycle might be entirely abolished, but that would require the elites, and some of the non-elites, to surrender significant privilege.

The book is well-written, well-edited, and well-documented. (A subject index would be nice.) Economist Mason Gaffney’s  review is far more informed than anything I could have produced.  He points out a number of imperfections, but on the whole this is a very useful book for anybody who wants to know why many of us aren’t rich, or who would like to be.