Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
24 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, fiscal policy, politics - USA, public economics Tags: 2016 presidential election, Denmark, growth of government, size of government, social insurance, taxation and labour supply, welfare state
20 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of media and culture, entrepreneurship, job search and matching, labour economics, managerial economics, minimum wage, organisational economics, personnel economics, theory of the firm Tags: living wage, offsetting behavior, The fatal conceit
19 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, development economics, economic growth, economic history, growth disasters, industrial organisation, law and economics, Marxist economics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: China, economics of planning, extreme poverty, famine, Great Leap Forward
18 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in fiscal policy, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, public economics Tags: growth of government, income inequality, measurement error, Ricardian theory of budget deficits, Social Security, top 1%, wealth inequality
Markus Poschke and Barış Kaymak have just put out a paper arguing that increased social spending is a major driver of wealth inequality:
Another important and often overlooked third factor is the rise in the generosity of government transfers since 1960, mostly due to the expansion of public pensions (social security) and the introduction of public health insurance for the elderly (Medicare).
Combined spending on these two programs accounted for almost 9% of US GDP in 2010, up from less than 3% in 1960…
These government programmes tend to curb the need to rely on personal savings for retirement, especially among low and middle-income households, and might thus explain why their share in total wealth has declined.
This makes a good to good degree of sense. I have previously argued that using the arguments of Edward Prescott that it is not wise for people on ordinary income to save for their retirement when they can go down to the local Social Security office and claim an old age pension.
51% of nonretirees doubt they will receive Social Security… on.gallup.com/1NcwzEa #GallupDaily http://t.co/ZhKnHYtr1X—
(@GallupNews) August 13, 2015
It is even less wise to save that for retirement if those savings reduce your eligibility for an old age pension. Far better just to invest in a nicer house and pass it on to your children. Poschke and Kaymak note that measures of private wealth inequality miss these claims to old age pensions:
… statistics on wealth inequality that do not capture households’ claims on the public sector are incomplete and overstate top wealth shares.
This is not a new argument. Back when the Ricardian theories of budget deficits came to prominence and before that in debates on theories of the public debt, the more Keynesian sides of those arguments did argue that people were irrational for not including their old age pension entitlements under social security schemes in their calculations of their wealth.
Some of their taxes were paying for their future old age pension and were another form of wealth rather than a tax. As such, taxpayers should regard this part of their taxes as investments and not cutting back their labour supply in response as they do to other taxes.
How much of the rise in wealth inequality is due to this failure to measure Social Security wealth as represented by old age pension entitlements? Their estimate is about 25%:
…technological factors play a dominant role not only for changes in income inequality, as is well known, but also for wealth inequality. As high-earning households save part of their additional income, their share of wealth also rises.
This channel accounts for about half of the total increase in wealth inequality. Tax cuts and the expansion of transfers each account for about half of the remainder…
While tax cuts encourage saving, larger transfers reduce saving incentives for retirement, in particular for low and middle income groups. This implies that these groups’ share of private wealth declines.
Note though that this is partly due to the fact that measures of private wealth inequality, like those compiled by Saez and Zucman, do not include claims to future government transfers, like social security, which constitute wealth for their owners.
17 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, entrepreneurship, fiscal policy, macroeconomics, politics - New Zealand, public economics Tags: company tax, Gareth Morgan, rational irrationality, taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply, taxation of capital income
The Morgan Foundation gave optimal tax theory a pass in yesterday’s publication about taxes on land and capital. Gareth Morgan is keen on a comprehensive capital tax.
Source: Taxing Wealth & Property – What Works? A Morgan Foundation Report.
This failure to refer to optimal tax theory is despite the Foundation’s strong commitment to evidence-based policy. Any discussion of tax policy that is evidence-based must refer optimal tax theory.
Source: Morgan Foundation, Public Policy Education.
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16 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, development economics, economic growth, industrial organisation, P.T. Bauer, population economics Tags: doomsday prophecies, endogenous growth theory, pessimism bias, population bomb
If only Paul Ehrlich had been right! Population explosion would have meant an explosion in people who could invent new technologies and populate in much larger markets to provide an incentive to invent new products.
Among Paul Ehrlich’s many analytical errors, he did not take into account that more people meant more inventors and more untapped markets.
Jones argued that in the very long run the only way to have further innovation is to have more people. If there are more people undertaking R&D and more people to populate the markets for those inventions, there will be further growth because the decreasing returns to knowledge creation will be overcome by having more R&D workers.
Jones attributes much of the growth in the 20th century to one-off effects that cannot be repeated such as putting more people into higher education:
… growth in educational attainment, developed-economy R&D intensity, and population are all likely to be slower in the future than in the past. These factors point to slower growth in US living standards.
Second, a counterbalancing factor is the rise of China, India, and other emerging economies, which likely implies rapid growth in world researchers for at least the next several decades.
Third, and more speculatively, the shape of the idea production function introduces a fundamental uncertainty into the future of growth. For example, the possibility that artificial intelligence will allow machines to replace workers to some extent could lead to higher growth in the future.
A larger population increases the rate of technological progress by increasing the number of geniuses and other creative people.The doomsday prophecies about the population bomb never took that into account. That is why they are wrong.
15 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, business cycles, economics of media and culture, global financial crisis (GFC), law and economics, macroeconomics Tags: moral hazard, The Big Short
12 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, development economics, international economics, job search and matching, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, politics - New Zealand Tags: antiforeign bias, free trade, makework bias, Paul Krugman, protectionism, tariffs, trade policy
Minister for everything Stephen Joyce wrote some nonsense in the paper today about how trade agreements and more exports will mean more jobs:
I would like to make the point that trade access is hugely important for a small country like New Zealand.
Without fair and equal trade access we can’t sell as much of our goods and we get less for them. And that means fewer jobs.
This make-work bias is as bad as those who oppose trade agreements on the grounds of an anti-foreign bias. Trade affects the composition of employment, not the number of jobs. Paul Krugman spent a good part of the 1990s trying to explain that to the general public and public intellectuals.
11 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic growth, economics, economics of media and culture, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: The Great Enrichment
11 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, business cycles, economic history, economics, economics of regulation, global financial crisis (GFC), macroeconomics, monetary economics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: bank runs, banking crises, banking panics, deposit insurance, Thomas Sargent
Many of the key issues about what modern macroeconomics has to say on global financial crises and deposit insurance are discussed in a 2010 interview with Thomas Sargent
Sargent said that two polar models of bank crises and what government lender-of-last-resort and deposit insurance do to arrest or promote them were used to understand the GFC. They are polar models because:
- in the Diamond-Dybvig and Bryant model of banking runs, deposit insurance and other bailouts are purely a good thing stopping panic-induced bank runs from ever starting; and
- in the Kareken and Wallace model, deposit insurance by governments and the lender-of-last-resort function of a central bank are purely a bad thing because moral hazard encourages risk taking unless there is regulation or there is proper surveillance and accurate risk-based pricing of the deposit insurance.
In the Diamond-Dybvig and Bryant model, if there is government-supplied deposit insurance, people do not initiate bank runs because they trust their deposits to be safe. There is no cost to the government for offering the deposit insurance because there are no bank runs! A major free lunch.
Tom Sargent considers that the Bryant-Diamond-Dybvig model has been very influential, in general, and among policy makers in 2008, in particular.
Governments saw Bryant-Diamond-Dybvig bank runs everywhere. The logic of this model persuaded many governments that if they could arrest the actual or potential runs by convincing creditors that their loans were insured, that could be done at little or no eventual cost to taxpayers.
In 2008, the Australian and New Zealand governments announced emergency bank deposit insurance guarantees. In Bryant-Diamond-Dybvig style bank panics, these guarantees ward off the bank run and thus should cost nothing fiscally because the deposit insurance is not called upon. These guarantees and lender of last resort function were seen as key stabilising measures. These guarantees were called upon in NZ to the tune of $2 billion.
- 1. The Diamond-Dybvig and Bryant model makes you sensitive to runs and optimistic about the ability of deposit insurance to cure them.
- The Kareken and Wallace model’s prediction is that if a government sets up deposit insurance and doesn’t regulate bank portfolios to prevent them from taking too much risk, the government is setting the stage for a financial crisis.
- The Kareken-Wallace model makes you very cautious about lender-of-last-resort facilities and very sensitive to the risk-taking activities of banks.
Kareken and Wallace called for much higher capital reserves for banks and more regulation to avoid future crises. This is not a new idea.
Sam Peltzman in the mid-1960s found that U.S. banks in the 1930s halved their capital ratios after the introduction of federal deposit insurance. FDR was initially opposed to deposit insurance because it would encourage greater risk taking by banks.
Late on Friday afternoon, Stuff posted an op-ed piece calling for the introduction of a (funded) deposit insurance scheme in New Zealand. It was written by Geof Mortlock, a former colleague of mine at the Reserve Bank, who has spent most of his career on banking risk issues, including having been heavily involved in the handling of the failure, and resulting statutory management, of DFC.
As the IMF recently reported, all European countries (advanced or emerging) and all advanced economies have deposit insurance, with the exception of San Marino, Israel and New Zealand. An increasing number of people have been calling for our politicians to rethink New Zealand’s stance in opposition to deposit insurance. I wrote about the issue myself just a couple of months ago, in response to some new material from the Reserve Bank which continues to oppose deposit insurance.
Different people emphasise different arguments in making the case for New Zealand to…
View original post 1,963 more words
10 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in economics, Euro crisis, international economics, macroeconomics Tags: Brexit, Common market, EU
05 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in fiscal policy, health economics, macroeconomics Tags: ageing society, disabilities, life expectancies
04 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic growth, economic history, history of economic thought, Robert E. Lucas Tags: industrial revolution
03 Apr 2016 1 Comment
in industrial organisation, monetary economics, politics - New Zealand, survivor principle Tags: economics of banking, government ownership, KiwiBank, New Zealand Greens, offsetting behaviour, privatisation, rational irrationality, state owned enterprises, The fatal conceit
The Greens want to cut mortgage rates by having KiwiBank expand in business lending. Wrong market.
This expansion into a market that is not the mortgage market is to be underwritten by a capital injection as the Greens explain:
Note well that the $100 million capital injection is to expand in to commercial banking. More aggressive passing on of interest rate cuts may jeopardise credit ratings if this lowers the profitability of KiwiBank. KiwiBank has an A- rating
The bigger hole in the policy is the more aggressive mortgage rate setting by KiwiBank will be done by keeping more of its profits and paying fewer dividends to its parent company Kiwi Post and through that to the taxpayer. There are next to no dividends currently to stop distributing to fund a more aggressive mortgage rate setting policy.
Source: KiwiBank pays its first dividend of $21 million to Government | Stuff.co.nz.
KiwiBank paid its first dividend last year. Prior to that, the bank kept all profits to allow it to expand its lending base. $20 million in foregone dividends does not go far given the actual size of all lending markets in New Zealand.
Source: G1 Summary information for locally incorporated banks – Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
KiwiBank is minnow in the mortgage market and a pimple in commercial lending. Rapid business expansion is risky in any market, much less in banking.
The government has declined further capital injections so profits were retained to meet capital adequacy ratios. The government in 2010 earmarked NZ$300 million for an uncalled capital facility for NZ Post to help maintain its credit rating and KiwiBank’s growth.
Saving the best for last, KiwiBank last year announced plans to borrow up to $150 million through an issue of BB- perpetual capital notes to be used to bolster the bank’s regulatory capital position.
The Margin for the Perpetual Capital Notes has been set at 3.65% per annum and the interest rate will be 7.25% per annum for the first five years until the first reset date of 27 May 2020. Kiwi Capital Funding Limited is not guaranteed by KiwiBank, New Zealand Post nor the New Zealand Government.
The Perpetual Capital Notes have a BB- credit rating compared to KiwiBank which has an A- rating. These capital notes were issued in addition to prior subordinate debt in the form of CHF175 million (about NZ$233 million) worth of 5-year bonds.
I doubt that KiwiBank can raise capital through subordinated debt under normal commercial conditions if it does not plan to seek profits in the same way as other commercial banks do. The current issue of Perpetual Capital Notes are already rated as junk bonds:
An issue of $150 million of perpetual capital notes from KiwiBank with a speculative, or "junk", credit rating have been priced at the bottom of their indicative margin range.
The closest the prospectus for these Perpetual Capital Notes got to complementing KiwiBank changing from a normal business to being a public good is the following risk statement:
Kiwibank’s banking activities are subject to extensive regulation, mainly relating to capital, liquidity levels, solvency and provisioning.
Its business and earnings are also affected by the fiscal or other policies that are adopted by various regulatory authorities of the New Zealand Government.
The interest rate on this subordinate debt will go up to offset the additional risk of aggressive lending and aggressive expansion, which will cancel out many of the advantages of not having to pay for dividends and the capital injection.
That discipline is one of the purposes of subordinate debt in the regulatory capital of banks. This is to provide another pair of eyes and ears to watch the performance of the bank and through rising costs of lending and risk ratings, signal trouble of imprudent lending and lack of cost control.
The proposal to use KiwiBank to lower mortgage rates does not add up. KiwiBank does not pay much in the way of dividends to fund such a foray. KiwiBank is already far more leveraged than any other New Zealand major bank.
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