Hazy emissions

Tim Colebatch's article on the Turnbull/Xenophon/Frontier Economics emissions trading scheme discusses some interesting points. Particularly the bit about whether increasing the price of electricity is going to be more effective at reducing emissions than giving away free permits to polluters. In the governments scheme higher electricity prices would reduce demand (depending on elasticity) and provide a slightly less un-level playing field for solar and wind etc. The Frontier Economics scheme reasons that free permits will allow the coal generators to use the money they would have spent on permits to make long-term investments in new technology.

I'm not convinced that private enterprise has the capacity to make large long-term investments when the market hasn't so far shown much ability to price in the future effects of climate change. In my opinion quicker results would be seen by increasing electricity prices, and spreading the incentives to either reduce wastage or invest in distributed clean generation. Factoring in the costs of carbon pollution would allow clean technologies to be more competitive sooner. Favoring large scale solutions have concentrated investment into dirty coal powered fire stations located along way from where the energy is used making things like Trigeneration impractical.

More likely to go down than up?

After reading this article about the housing market I can summarise the following:

Demand side factors • Highest population growth rate in four decades • Low interest rates • Increased government first-home buyers grants versus • Record levels of private debt • increasing unemployment

Supply side factors • Rising building costs • Weak building levels • Finance difficulties • Developer uncertainty versus • Fast tracking of development

The Great Depression in a nutshell

In the panel discussion "The Crisis and How to Deal with It" Nouriel Roubini gave a good summary of how the stock market crash of 1929 turned into the Great Depression of 1933. Over the following four years government policy exacerbated the problems.

The four causes were:

1. " ..we didn't believe in a counter-cyclical monetary policy. The money supply contracted rather than being eased. Interest rates were not falling, and that made the credit crunch worse."
2. "nobody believed in counter-cyclical fiscal policy. The general theory of Keynes was written only in 1936; in the early 1930s, the government was raising taxes and cutting spending in order to maintain a balanced budget. That made the recession even more severe."
3. "there was a belief that banks should be allowed to collapse. Thousands of them collapsed, the credit crunch became even worse."
4. "by 1933, 75 percent of households had defaulted on their mortgages; they couldn't pay them. So a stock market crash became a Great Depression."

Roubini concludes with other elements "add currency wars internationally, trade wars, protectionism, and capital controls; then you had default by countries and the rise of totalitarian regimens in Germany and in Italy, in Japan, and Spain" and the consequences of using the wrong policy prescription - "World War II"

The buck stopped

The economist Mark Thoma has a good description of how bad incentives at ever step of the lending process in the US made the housing bubble worse. Australia doesn't have non-recourse loans, but the tax laws and FHB grants certainly added to the inflation of the housing bubble in Australia.

Taking bets you can't pay out on

Just as with collateralized debt obligations (CDO), credit default swaps (CDS) are difficult to really understand, even after reading several explanations. Both are however critical to understanding much of the current problems in the finance sector. I understood that they were a type of insurance financial institutions could buy to cover their investments, but I didn't get how they could bring down large institutions.

A post by Satyajit Das on his blog went straight over my head so I went looking for something like this to explain the concept better. This one helped a bit by showing the interconnectedness of the large institutions effectively insuring each other for related risks, but still didn't quite fully explain it for me.

This facinating article from Rolling Stone linked to from Peter Martin's blog has given me the best explanation so far. CDSs were insurance policies sold to cover investment risks by people who had used the wrong risk models. Unlike insuring cars against theft, where large numbers of cars are extremely unlikely to be stolen simultaneously, but the event of a market crash (mistakenly calculated to be exceptionally rare like mass theft) can bring down the value of all investments in concert. Some made lots of money selling them before the music stopped. CDSs also formed a kind of short as players were able to buy insurance on assets they didn't own, akin to taking out an insurance policy on your neighbour's house.

Scrappage shmackage

A scrappage scheme is being raised as a way of getting old clangers off the road to be replaced with new cars. The government would give you $2000 to scrap your old falcon on the condition you bought a new car. Superficially this might have some appeal but if analysed it seems like a terrible idea. A cash grab by an industry that has failed to see the writing on the wall. This is a good example of why a broad based market mechanism, like carbon trading or a carbon tax is needed to find where the most cost effective savings can be made. A scrappage scheme could cost us a lot of money and achieve no reduction at all, because it doesn't necessarily reduce total emissions it just updates the fleet. It's dependent on the cars producing less total emissions, so the cars would have to be smaller on average than the ones they replace and the total distance travelled would also have to be held at a constant. Are people tempted to drive their new cars more?

100 year mortgages

I'd heard about 50 year mortgages in Japan but inter-generational 100 year loans..... Thankfully we haven't had this discussed in Australia yet. Give it time.

I particularly like this quote from the article:

"This is about giving people options - not telling them how to live their lives, not telling them that they can only have a 25-year mortgage which has to be paid off at the end of the term," says Mike Lazenby, the chief executive of Kent Reliance.

People can be trusted to make decisions in their own best interests, right?

"It's worked in Switzerland and Japan, but in this country we do tend to think in straight lines - I think a bit of innovation should be encouraged."

You can't argue with that!

Negative interest rates

To understand how interest rates can go negative, you need to view interest rates as a control lever. Interest rates are put up to slow the economy when demand outpaces supply, causing an increase in inflation and lowered to counteract a slow-down. What happens when you start to approach a zero rate of interest and the economy is still slowing?

Japan experienced a "lost decade" of relatively stagnant growth in the 90's, triggered by the collapse of a real estate bubble. It took Japan about 15 years to barely turn things around. Lately a lot of references are being made to Japan's multiple attempts to restart growth. Paul Krugman and others have written extensively on the topic.

In the Japanese collapse commercial real estate prices fell by over 80% and the Japanese Central Bank lowered interest rates from over 8% to 0% without significantly improving growth because people were concentrating on paying down debt.

Commercial interest rates don't have to reach zero to be considered negative, they just need to fall below inflation, but in Japan in 2003 the actual rate the banks were lending money to each other really did fall below zero. The interest on retail deposits in the bank was effectively zero or 0.001% - so you would be losing money with fees.

Like Australia and other western countries, the Japanese government tried multiple stimulus packages, but struggled to have an impact. It's difficult to draw comparisons with the Japanese experience because of the entrenched culture of savings that means the bonuses are mostly pocketed. They have at times apparently resorted to vouchers for electronic goods to get people spending.

iPhone and iTunes wish list 376

All the previous 375 ideas have been quickly forgotten.

Iphone Syncing

When the iPhone syncs it doesn't remember the track I was listening too. This is a problem for me because I listen to long podcasts. They can be an hour and a half long - Too long for me to finish in my commute to work.

Multi-tasking in iTunes

It would also be nice to have tabbed browsing in iTunes so I can be sorting my podcasts and choosing music to listen to. I also don't like to jump out of lists to go to the iTunes store. There could also be an icon to show which playlist the current playing track is in. So when I'm sorting other playlists I can return to the playlist I'm currently listening too.

Some alternative solutions are appearing

After reading Steve Keen's insightful analysis of the causes of the current crisis, I have been waiting to see what kind of solutions he would propose. Finally he has outlined ideas such as improving support for the unemployed. I haven't read everything he has written so he may have covered this earlier, and he has hinted before that some kind of debt forgiveness maybe required. The credit crunch is certainly a tricky situation. Deleveraging is going to take a lot of money out of the economy, but how can anything else occur when private sector debt combined with household debt has reached 165% of GDP. The only way is down. Something similar to Steve Keen's proposal for letting people stay on as renters to the bank has actually occured already in the US, although not on a coordinated national scale, and it happened after a wave of foreclosures rather than as a preventative measure.

One rule for the few

Shaun Carney wrote an interesting article in The Age about executive pay excesses. He notes that in the good times the public has been passive and excepting of the ever increasing remuneration paid to corporate executives. Now that things are turning down and governments around the world are having to prop-up or rescue companies it is now a cause for outrage. There are many competing arguments to justify and explain the escalating pay, but none have proven totally satisfactory and complete.

Is the high pay the economic rent that must be paid to secure rare and extraordinary talent? Explaining it as a reward for risk or exceptional results doesn't fly, because the risk is borne less by the executives than by the shareholders and sometimes taxpayers and their personal contributions to company performance isn't proportional to their rewards.

The pay doesn't necessarily represent rewards for innovation either. English economist John Kay has pointed out in his writings that many innovators aren't the beneficiaries of the wealth their inventions and innovations have generated.

I find what Malcolm Gladwell has written about serendipity, group dynamics and collaborative environments interesting when thinking about how an individual's output can be influenced by external factors. The market is not sophisticated enough to equitably reward all beneficial production, risk taking and innovation efficiently and money is not the singular motivator that it is often mistaken for. Perhaps it is a case of a self-selected greedy elite exploiting a weakness in the corporate governance. There doesn't appear to be a satisfactory way of linking executive performance with longer term outcomes. Relying on executives to rein in their own excesses doesn't fill me with hope.

Paul Woolley's excellent talk on the global financial industry still has me wondering about the evident failure of the market to make "super-profits" impossible through competition.

Priveleged jobs

Tim Colebatch writing in The Age calls for emissions trading to be delayed to protect jobs. This is a worthy sentiment on the surface, except that it's not backed up by proof. How can the assumption that emissions trading will cause a net loss in jobs be tested? Are existing jobs more important to the economy in the long term than the creation of new jobs?

Job losses cause trauma, family upheaval and stress and I'm not diminishing that or wishing it upon anyone. If unemployment was handled better in this economy then it may allow for faster innovation and adaptation. The shifting of risk onto the individual has made people more exposed to change and more vested in the status quo.

I wonder if boom times suppress innovation. Change is uncomfortable and when money is easy you don't need to engage in disruptive change to increase productivity. We should be on a war footing in tackling the risks of global warming. When pushed, necessity is the mother on invention.

Who caused the crisis - Savers or borrowers

Trade imbalances laid the foundations and bankers built their house of cards using the cards at the bottom again at the top and keeping a few up their sleeves. It is interesting to note that America was once to Europe what Japan is now to the US. A system was proposed by Keynes to keep a check on these imbalances.

Conspicuous thrift

Interesting but flippant article about keeping down appearances in bad times. I wonder if in our shallow, consumption-based economy there isn't a little longing for some balance or even hardship to give meaning to peoples lives. There is a lot of fat in the Australian economy, although not very evenly spread. After seeing how people live in other countries the idea that Australian's are doing it tough seems a tad out of proportion - it's all relative.

Government's bluff called on water

The 155 litres per day limit seems to have failed. I wonder if the practical limits on saving water after repeated calls to reduce consumption have been meet. The people who care about reducing consumption have either modified their behavoiur or spent the money they are willing or able to spend on grey water systems etc. The ones that don't care at all are not facing any penalties yet.

Limiting showers, water saving showerheads and toilets, using greywater and tank water for the garden will only get you so far. To go beyond this would require spending serious money which would have the risk of subsidising others making no effort. The savings in money terms of reduced consumption would not be captured by the individual at present.

Carrying around buckets of water have made me think about how poorly our built environment manages water in the current conditions. The built environment in part is a response to making life easier and the fact that we live on a dry continent has had precious little impact.

Taking a screenshot on an iphone

I discovered this today. Probably already documented - but as we all know only sadcases with too much time on their hands RTFM.

Press the top on/off button and the front button simultaneously. You will hear the screenshot sound and the screenshot will appear in your camera app's album.

One for the country

The baby bonus is responsible for a boost in the birthrate reported in the age. There are a number of interesting theories about the reversal of the decline in births. Have 30 year olds warned of declining fertility after age 36 rushed to have kids before it's too late, combined with the twenty somethings having also seen the limitations of postponing having kids to produce a boom. The demographic questions are interesting but difficult to prove. Another theory attributes it to general economic boom-time euphoria.

Would people really respond to a monetary incentive to have kids? I find it hard to imagine but could we be looking at a crime spike in 15-20 years.

That sinking feeling

At present there is little concrete sense in the public's mind that house prices are falling. Maybe 5%, 10%, 15% who knows for sure? Not that much property changes hands and each house is a unique proposition. During the heady days when anything seemed possible and people were simultaneously shocked and excited about the run up in prices people may have felt that even though they paid too much for their house next years value would make it all feel worth it. How will people feel about the mortgages they owe when we are on the way down?

Factors effecting property prices

What comes first, high property prices or access to infrastructure? How closely would distance to public transport and good schools correlate with land values? Should some of this value be captured to pay for the infrastructure?