Category: Politics

Does poverty give a country the right to pollute the atmosphere?

July 24, 2009 8:39 pm

In the current worldwide debate about greenhouse gas emissions, the political leaders of the new big polluters (NBPs, especially China and India) attempt to shift the burden of reducing the global flow of new carbon-dioxide-equivalent (CO2E) emissions to the old big polluters (OBPs, mainly Europe, North America and Japan) by claiming the moral high ground, based on two arguments: (1) we are poor, you are rich, and (2) it’s our turn now to pollute.

I will, in what follows, take as given the proposition that (1) global warming is a reality; (2) global warming is a bad thing and (3) that human-made CO2E emissions are a significant contributor to global warming. The science underlying these propositions is inevitably shaky – as has to be the case for any non-experimental science. Still I believe that, even if I don’t really know whether my grandchildren are more likely to swim down Oxford Street or to ice-skate down Oxford street, the cost of not doing something about man-made CO2E emissions if they are indeed as harmful as the Greenhouse Lobby argues is vastly greater than the cost of unnecessarily restricting CO2E emissions – an application of the precautionary principle, if you want.

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Posted in Chindia, Culture, Economics, Environment, Ethics, European Union, Financial Markets, International Trade, Politics, Religion | Permalink

Islamic finance principles to restore policy effectiveness

July 22, 2009 6:18 pm

The problem

Further expansionary monetary policy has become rather ineffective in the overdeveloped world because banks are capital-constrained rather than liquidity-constrained and because liquidity spreads in financial markets that bypass the banks have shrunk remarkably. Remaining spreads between sovereign debt instruments and assorted private securities of similar maturities can now be rationalised quite easily as reflecting just differential default risk. Until the banks get significantly more capital on their balance sheets, quantitative easing, credit easing and enhanced credit support are examples of pushing on a string.

The banks will take the liquidity offered and redeposit the bulk of it with the central bank again rather than lending it to the private sector or purchasing more risk financial instruments. Low official policy rates (and the expectation of the official policy rate being kept at a low level for a further significant period of time) will help recapitalise the banks. So will the quasi-fiscal subsidies most central banks have been channelling into the banking system through the favourable terms offered by the central banks to the private banks in their transactions, facilities etc., but such gradual recapitalisation through wide margins on low volumes of lending is slow and could lead to a re-run of Japan’s lost decade for much of the G7.

Further expansionary fiscal policy is likely to be ineffective in most of the G7 countries (possibly excepting Germany and Canada). This is, first, because households are short of capital and overly indebted and, second, because any further increase in short-term fiscal deficits is likely to undermine confidence in the sustainability of the fiscal-financial-monetary programme of the state.

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy, Politics, Religion | Permalink

The real estate roots of the crisis in the US

July 21, 2009 3:42 pm

Today’s guest blogger is Elena Panaritis, an expert in property rights, creating markets in illiquid real estate assets, and public sector management. She is also the author of Prosperity Unbound; Building Property Markets with Trust, which is definitely not one of those odious get-rich-quick-in-real-estate-without-capital-brains-or-effort books. Instead it is a get real book for social entrepreneurs about how to turn real estate possessions into socially productive, and indeed also privately profitable, capital.

This Crisis Demands Non-Traditional Solutions to Get to a Path of Quick Recovery

By Elena Panaritis

Two years after it began, there is now a coalescing of opinion about the causes of the U.S. financial crisis and what should be done to resolve it, yet there is a serious element missing both in the causation analysis as well as in the prescriptive solution. This crisis, which has infected the global economy so severely, is very much a non-traditional one that calls for a non-traditional solution. The impact in the United States so far has been worse than anything since the Great Depression: unemployment reached 9.5 percent in June, up from 7.8 percent in January, home prices were down 27% at the end of the first quarter from their 2006 peak, and 1.5 million homes were in foreclosure. After jumping by 30 percent in February, home foreclosure rates tapered off but are again on the rise. According to the New York Times, the loss in property value could total $500 billion.

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, European Union, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy, Politics, Religion, Uncategorised | Permalink

A walk down Maiden Lane

July 20, 2009 1:15 am

A reader of this blog drew my attention to the informative Fed publication, the Federal Reserve System Monthly Report on Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance Sheet . The most recent installment is that for July 2009. This provides a wealth of information (not enough, of course, but more than is provided by most other central banks) relating to the quality of the assets contained in the special purpose vehicles the central bank has created to house the often distressed assets it has acquired from or funded on behalf of a number of always distressed private counterparties. I will focus here on the three Maiden Lane vehicles created by the Fed to park some of the wonky assets it acquired from Bear Stearns (Maiden Lane (which I shall refer to as Maiden Lane I)) and from AIG (Maiden Lane II and III).

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Posted in Economics, Ethics, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy, Politics | Permalink

What to do with the Fed

July 17, 2009 1:39 am

The Fed is in trouble. Obama administration proposals for enhancing the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory role and for assigning it new macro-prudential responsibilities and powers – effectively turning it into the nation’s systemic risk regulator - are meeting with strong and vocal opposition. The criticism is not just coming from the other agencies in the US financial sector regulatory and supervisory spaghetti bowl – agencies that would stand to lose power and influence or could be put out of business completely. The desire for stronger Congressional oversight of the Fed is no longer confined to a few libertarian fruitcakes, conspiracy theorists and old lefties. It is a mainstream view that the Fed has failed to foresee and prevent the crisis, that it has managed it ineffectively since it started, and that it has allowed itself to be used as a quasi-fiscal instrument of the US Treasury, by-passing Congressional control. Are any or all of these criticisms justified? Let’s ponder a few of them.

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, European Union, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy, Politics, Religion, Uncategorised | Permalink

From direct democracy to direct federal financial rule in California

July 13, 2009 5:06 pm

California’s public finances are in many ways a microcosm of those of the US as a whole. Admittedly, the state government’s deficit is tiny compared to that of the federal government. The state of California has a budget deficit this year of $26.3bn (about 1.5% of state GDP, which was just over $1.8 trillion in 2007), on revenues of just $113bn. Its total outstanding stock of state debt is also small, with just $59bn in general debt, $8bn in bonds linked to securitised revenues and about $2bn in commercial paper. In contrast, the US federal government is about to run a budget deficit in the 13 to 14 percent of GDP range (that is, the federal deficit is about the size of the state of California’s GDP!).

California, like every US state, will be hit by federal deficit and by the manner in which this is eventually brought under control again, be it through tax increases, public spending cuts, inflation or sovereign default. The state deficit, and the manner of its eventual resolution, represents pain for Californians on top of the shared misery they will endure as a result of California’s contribution to the resolution of the unsustainability in the federal public finances.

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, Financial Markets, Politics, Religion | Permalink

The inevitable socialisation of health care financing

July 7, 2009 6:05 pm

Private insurance only works if there is risk. If the risk is eliminated, profitable insurance is impossible. This holds for health insurance as it holds for credit default swaps. When risk vanishes, insurance turns into redistribution. That’s a task for the state, whether through the tax payer or by mandated pooling in quasi-private insurance schemes of individuals with known heterogeneous health profiles.

The rise of genomics - the branch of genetics that studies organisms in terms of their full DNA sequences or genomes – will in the not too distant future kill off most private health insurance. That’s probably a good thing, for two reasons. First, because of asymmetric information, when there is risk and uncertainty about a person’s future health, health insurance markets are badly affected by adverse selection and moral hazard. Second, because the private health insurance industry is a monument to inefficiency everywhere and, especially in the US, a rent-seeking Leviathan whose ruthless lobbying efforts corrupt all it touches.

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, Politics, Religion | Permalink

Harmful financial innovation

July 1, 2009 1:49 pm

Like most authors, I tend to cringe when I read something I wrote more than a few years ago. But while engaging in some authorial auto-archeology recently when preparing the index for a new paper (after all, if I don’t cite myself, who will?), I was pleasantly surprised with a few bits from a paper I wrote in 1999 and published in 2000 in the Bank of England’s Quarterly Bulletin, titled “The new economy and the old monetary economics”.

The paper takes aim at the assertion, rampant in 1999, that the behaviour in recent years of the world economy, led by the United States, could only be understood by abandoning the old conventional wisdom and adopting a ‘New Paradigm’. Prominent among the structural transformations associated with the New Paradigm were the the following: increasing openness; financial innovation; lower global inflation; stronger competitive pressures; buoyant stock markets defying conventional valuation methods; a lower natural rate of unemployment; and a higher trend rate of growth of productivity.

I argue, first, that the New Paradigm has been over-hyped. “…Unfortunately, the ‘New Paradigm’ label has been much abused by professional hype merchants and peddlers of economic snake oil.”

Second, I argue that, to the extent that we can see a New Paradigm in action, its implications for monetary policy have often been misunderstood.

I was particularly pleased that I had written following about financial innovation:

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, European Union, Financial Markets, International Trade, Monetary Policy, Politics, Religion, Uncategorised | Permalink

Recapitalising the banks through enhanced credit support: quasi-fiscal shenanigans in Frankfurt

June 28, 2009 8:04 pm

Last week the Eurosystem performed a €442bn injection of one-year liquidity into the Euro Area banking system. They did this at the official policy rate – the Main refinancing operations (fixed rate) – of 1.00 percent, against the usual collateral accepted for Longer Term Financing Operations, effectively anything euro-denominated, not based on derivatives and rated at least BBB-. It was a fixed-rate tender, that is, the ECB was willing to meet any demand at the 1 percent interest rate, as long as eligible collateral was offered; 1121 banks participated in the operation.

You will not be surprised to hear that this was the largest one-day ECB/Eurosystem operation ever. Even more remarkable than its scale are the terms on which the one-year funds were made available. There can be no doubt that this operation represents both a subsidy and a gift from the Eurosystem to the banks that participated in the operation. I hope to clarify the distinction between a subsidy and a gift in what follows.

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, European Union, Financial Markets, International Trade, Monetary Policy, Politics, Religion, Uncategorised | Permalink

Too big to fail is too big

June 24, 2009 3:03 am

The too big to fail problem has been central to the degeneration and corruption of the financial system in the north Atlantic region over the past two decades. The ‘too large to fail’ category is sometimes extended to become the ‘too big to fail’, ‘too interconnected to fail’, ‘too complex to fail’ and ‘too international’ to fail problem, but the real issue is size. The real issue is size. Even if a financial business is highly interconnected, that is, if its total exposure to the rest of the world and the exposure of the rest of the world to the financial entity are complex and far-reaching, it can still be allowed to fail if the total amounts involved are small. A complex but small business is no threat to systemic stability; neither is a highly international but small business. Size is the core of the problem; the other dimensions (interconnectedness, complexity and international linkages) only matter (and indeed worsen the instability problem) if the institution in question is big. So how do we prevent banks and other financial businesses from becoming too large to fail?

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Posted in Culture, Economics, Ethics, European Union, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy, Politics | Permalink