Archive for July, 2009
Since When Is Plunging Trade ‘Good News’ for GDP?
This morning’s Commerce Department report on second-quarter GDP contained what passes for good news these days: the U.S. economy shrank at an annual rate of only 1.0 percent in the April-to-June quarter. And in the twisted logic of conventional thinking, a drastic fall in international trade was supposedly part of the good news.
An Associated Press report beautifully captures the conventional wisdom. Buried deep in the story was this gem: “An improved trade picture also added to economic activity in the spring. Although exports fell, imports fell more, narrowing the trade gap. That added 1.38 percentage points to second-quarter GDP.”
Behind that statement is the Keynesian assumption that exporting goods adds to GDP, while importing subtracts because every car, shirt, or DVD player we import is supposedly one less that we make ourselves. So never mind that exports have fallen sharply in the past year; imports have fallen even faster, leaving us supposedly better off.
The mistake is seeing imports as a subtraction from GDP. The fact that we import $1 million worth of t-shirts does not mean our GDP is therefore $1 million less than it would be if we did not import the shirts. In fact, the $1 million we sent abroad to buy the shirts quickly comes back to buy something valuable in our own economy.
The money foreigners earn selling in our market can be used to buy U.S.-made goods, but it can also be used to buy U.S. assets, such as stocks, real estate, or Treasury bonds. This investment also creates economic activity, and if the investment inflow is used wisely, it will actually raise our productivity and GDP. A rising level of trade allows us to deploy our economic resources more efficiently, boosting output and economic growth.
As I explain in a previous Free Trade Bulletin, rising imports are not a drag on growth but in fact usually signal rising demand in the domestic economy, just as falling imports are a reliable sign of slumping demand. That is why an “improved” (i.e., shrinking) trade deficit has accompanied every recent recession, including the one we’re still mired in.
If we want our economy to recover and grow, we should be rooting for more trade, not less.
Barney Frank, on the Road to Socialized Medicine
More evidence, in case you needed it, that a new “Fannie Med” is designed to suck all Americans into a single government-run system:
Socialized Medicine Socializes the Cost of Irrationality, Too
Over at The New York Times‘ Economix blog, health economist Uwe Reinhardt has a fun post about the fundamental irrationality of American voters when it comes to health care reform:
To be responsive, then, to the “simple common sense” of the American people, any proposed health reform must not reduce the revenues of hospitals, lest some neighborhood hospital may have to close; or of doctors, lest some doctors might refuse to see patients; or of the manufacturers of health products, lest they are unable to innovate; or of anyone on the supply side of the health sector, lest they go out of business and have to lay off employees.
At the same time, the “simple common sense” of the American people dictates that any health reform that fails to bend down the growth curve of future health spending — the current jargon for controlling health spending better — is unacceptable, too.
But Reinhardt does not ask why the American public is so fundamentally irrational when it comes to health care reform.
The answer is actually pretty simple: government has given us a health sector where everyone is spending someone else’s money. In such an economy, individuals can make irrational demands (cut spending — but don’t reduce my access to care!) because they don’t bear the cost of their irrationality.
Professor Reinhardt closes, “Your homework assignment, dear reader, is to design such a plan,” one that satisfies the irrational demands of American voters.
How about a plan that forces each individual to bear the cost of their own irrationality? That would improve our health sector — and public discourse.
Battle Of Race-to-the-Top Editorials
In the battle of the Race-to-the-Top editorials, the Wall Street Journal beats the New York Times, hands down.
Yesterday, both papers ran editorials about the so-called “Race to the Top Fund,” a pot of $4.35 billion over which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was given control under the ”stimulus” law. Last Friday, as I reported, Duncan and President Obama staged a lovely dog-and-pony show for the release of draft Race to the Top regulations, and they naturally went on about how a new day was dawning, and this fund would force real reform, and blah, blah, blah, blah…
The Times must have been very impressed by the canine-and-equine event:
The federal government talks tough about requiring the states to improve schools in exchange for education aid. Then it caves in to political pressure and rewards mediocrity when it’s time to enforce the bargain. As a result, the country has yet to achieve many of the desperately needed reforms laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 and other laws dating back to the 1990’s.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is ready to break with that tradition as he prepares to distribute the $4.3 billion discretionary pot of money known as the Race to the Top Fund. States that have dragged their feet or actively resisted school reform in the past are screaming about the rigorous but as yet preliminary criteria by which their grant applications will be judged.
Now, the Old Gray Lady is absolutely right that the feds have talked tough time and again about demanding real improvment, but have produced precious little by way of improved achievement. In light of that, why would they possibly believe that Obama and his crew are really “ready to break with that tradition”? Oh, right: because they have produced draft regulations for Race to the Top that seem tough, and they appear to really, really want states to adopt national standards.
Uggh.
Keeping Allies at Bay
Many people who care deeply about the Henry Louis Gates incident will steer clear of it because of the racial component and the high dudgeon. Maybe I’m not so wise. At the risk of sounding ”I know what it’s like . . . .”
I’ve been harassed by police for idling my car outside of a grocery store, waiting for a friend to bring out his groceries. I gave them the wrong look as they passed, I guess, so they circled back to berate me on the pretext that the asphalt in front of the store was a fire lane. Never mind that it was after 11:00 p.m. and the parking lot was empty.
I held my tongue – even pretended to get a little weepy – and collected their car number. Once home, I called the sheriff’s office, saying I had gotten some help from some officers and wanted to get their names to ”write a nice letter or something.” The next day I called back and spoke to their Senior Deputy, Deputy Arnaldi, about what was at a minimum rudeness and to me very threatening. It turns out that Deputy Tuller was a training officer bringing a young man named Vargas up to speed on how to intimidate and offend the public.
Also in college, police came to a party of mine because of a noise complaint – well-founded, I’ll admit. Instead of quieting the party, they drew my roommate outside and claimed they needed his ID, but refused to let him get it. Instead, they encircled and harangued him. It appeared to me that they were trying to draw him into violence. It’s a tribute to his lifelong decency and dignity that he didn’t take the bait. My roommate was black, and the inference I drew from the circumstances is that the police had it in for him because he was black.
I was a little more assertive this time. I demanded the name of the ringleader. He responded by asking me to come talk to him on the street, but I guessed that he would have stronger grounds to arrest me there so I declined.
The Benefits of Going Naked…Swaps and Derivatives
Key House Democrats have just proposed a new plan for regulating our Nation’s derivatives’ markets. While the heart of the plan mirrors the Obama Administration’s proposal to require standardized derivatives, such as credit default swaps (CDS), to be traded over a centralized exchange, the House proposal also goes further, raising the possibility of banning “naked” positions in the derivatives, equities and debt markets.
Taking a naked position, where one hedges or bets on a specific risk without actually holding the underlying asset or liability, has been widely blamed for bringing down our financial system. This blame is misplaced. For instance, credit default swaps betting that companies such as Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns or AIG would fail did not bring down those companies – bad management practices and excessive risk-taking did. Of course when those companies were on the way down, their management wanted to blame everyone but themselves; short-sellers and speculators were just the messenger of a truth that management wanted to hide.
At heart, our markets, particularly our capital markets, serve as valuable aggregators of information, generally via the price mechanism. Speculators, including those holding a naked position, help bring new and valuable information to the market place. Recall it was the short-sellers who discovered Enron’s frauds, not the regulators or the rating agencies. Banning naked positions will only serve to reduce the information content of market prices, and also further entrench incompetent management.
In addition to the aid in price discovery, speculators also provide much needed liquidity to other holders of the same instruments. For instance if you purchase a GM bond and also a credit default swap on GM to hedge the credit risk in that bond, you would prefer to be able to see that CDS contract in as broad a market as possible. If you were limited to selling that contract only to another holder of that same bond, you will likely have both a harder time selling that contract and will receive a lower price for it. One of the hardest parts of resolving AIG has been finding buyers for its derivatives contracts. A deeper market in derivatives would lessen the potential “fire sales” that can occur when a large financial firm fails.
Of course how one treats derivatives in the case of an issuer failure can greatly impact the stability of the financial system. By removing derivatives and CDS from the automatic stay provisions of the bankruptcy code in 2005, Congress guaranteed that when a large issuer of CDS got into any trouble, there would be a run on its collateral. The solution is not to ban naked positions, but to reduce the potential for collateral runs by treating CDS counter-parties like any other creditor.
Transparency: Read the Bill? See the Earmarks!
Via MLive.com, here’s House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) pooh-poohing the idea that members of Congress should read legislation before they vote on it.
He is under attack for it — attacks he can deflect because they’re partisan and because he’s from a quintissential safe district. So instead of gulping the too-potent elixir of outrage, let’s sip a while on substance.
Members of Congress don’t read bills. Instead, they efficiently (for them) place trust in staff and other politicians to know enough of what’s in a bill, and enough of the politics, to get by.
I agree with the ReadtheBill campaign, which wants Congress to post all legislation online for at least 72 hours before it is considered. It’s complementary to President Obama’s 38-times-broken promise to post bills online for five days before he signs them.
The point, of course, is not having 535 people sit down and thumb through every single page of the legislation coming before them. It’s having the 535 members of the House and Senate know what’s in the bills they vote on. But even more than that, it’s about letting the public know what is in the bills before Congress votes.
“What good is reading the bill if it’s 1,000 pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find what it means after you read the bill?” says Conyers. Give us two days — no, make it three — and Americans, including lawyers, will let you know.
Cult Watch: Obama’s “Chat” About Cambridge Arrest
So President Obama is going to host Professor Gates and Officer Crowley today at the White House. Much has already been said about the controversial arrest for “disorderly conduct.” IMHO, it seems like a false arrest. I wasn’t there, but it is not a crime for someone to be obnoxious to the police (and that is basically the cop’s version of the incident). For additional background, I recommend the columns by Eugene Robinson, Harvey Silverglate, and Radley Balko.
But leave the arrest itself aside. Even more disturbing is Obama’s leap into this matter. It is yet another indication of the Cult of the Presidency where the President sees a role for himself in just about any aspect of life. The news media covers the event as if it is pretty much ordinary business. What’s next? Will Mr. Obama try to help the Gosselins out by having Jon and Kate over for tea? Obama could bring in the best counselors in the world while Michelle takes the kids on a helicopter ride to Camp David for the afternoon.
Is America About to Be Overrun by the Chinese/Russians/Anybody?
One of the frequent tropes of recent years is the notion that the United States is in decline, and America is plunging from being the only great power in the system to a status merely as first among equals. A veritable slew of books have come out in recent years making this argument. You also get this rhetoric when folks are arguing that we need more F-22s than we actually do, or for various other military-industrial-congressional boondoggles that the MIC complex and its supporters don’t want to give up.
One rhetorical tactic these folks have used is the “defense spending as a share of GDP” approach, which implicitly argues that defense needs should not be based on threat assessment, but rather on economic growth. The more economic growth, the more defense needs we have. (By this ramshackle logic, an uncharitable critic like me could note, economic growth is deleterious to national security. By contrast, if we went into a serious and enduring economic downturn, we’d get much more secure.)
A couple of useful data points have recently emerged that could help lower our pulse a little. The folks over at the U.S. Naval Institute blog point to the sixth failure of the latest Russian SLBM technology, snarkily observing that “generally speaking, the preferred direction for a ballistic missile, especially a sub-launched one is UP.”
In addition, Tom Donnelly offers a sensible take on the “Russia is going to reassemble the USSR” argument, noting
Moscow’s ability to enforce its writ in the hinterlands has fallen far down. And even Putin isn’t spending the rubles required to rebuild the Red Army. Second, the collapse of the Soviet Union cost the Russian empire about 400 years worth of conquests. Retaking Abkhazia [sic] might seem like a first step, but the road to great power status — as measured by something more than nuclear weapons and commodity prices — is very long.
Still, recognizing that Russia is not capable of reassembling the Soviet empire does not mean that we ought to be sending Joe “Ukrainian Chicks Are Hot” Biden over to Georgia and Ukraine to plump for NATO expansion and dance on the Soviet grave.
Who are Entrepreneurs?
The Kauffman Foundation has produced an interesting study about the background of entrepreneurs. They create businesses for many reasons, including to make money and work for themselves, and play a major role in generating the economic growth that benefits the rest of us. Too bad politicians, who create so little of value, so often stand in the way of productive entrepreneurs.
Then Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
According to CNS News:
In a sign that intra-party negotiations continue to drag on, [House Democratic Majority Leader Steny] Hoyer [MD] declared that no single provision was sacred, not even President Obama’s coveted government-run “public option” plan.
“I want to see the Senate give its proposal so that in September we can contribute to having a conference that’s productive and results in health care reform,” said Hoyer. “I don’t think there’s any specific item that is absolutely essential to reform.”
You can say that again.
Cherry Picking Climate Catastrophes: Response to Conor Clarke, Part II
Conor Clarke at The Atlantic blog, raised several issues with my study, “What to Do About Climate Change,” which Cato published last year.
One of Conor Clarke’s comments was that my analysis did not extend beyond the 21st century. He found this problematic because, as Conor put it, climate change would extend beyond 2100, and even if GDP is higher in 2100 with unfettered global warming than without, it’s not obvious that this GDP would continue to be higher “in the year 2200 or 2300 or 3758”. I addressed this portion of his argument in Part I of my response. Here I will address the second part of this argument, that “the possibility of ‘catastrophic’ climate change events — those with low probability but extremely high cost — becomes real after 2100.”
The examples of potentially catastrophic events that could be caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas induced global warming (AGW) that have been offered to date (e.g., melting of the Greenland or West Antarctic Ice Sheets, or the shutdown of the thermohaline circulation) contain a few drops of plausibility submerged in oceans of speculation. There are no scientifically justified estimates of the probability of their occurrence by any given date. Nor are there scientifically justified estimates of the magnitude of damages such events might cause, not just in biophysical terms but also in socioeconomic terms. Therefore, to call these events “low probability” — as Mr. Clarke does — is a misnomer. They are more appropriately termed as plausible but highly speculative events.
Consider, for example, the potential collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS). According to the IPCC’s WG I Summary for Policy Makers (p. 17), “If a negative surface mass balance were sustained for millennia, that would lead to virtually complete elimination of the Greenland Ice Sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 m” (emphasis added). Presumably the same applies to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
But what is the probability that a negative surface mass balance can, in fact, be sustained for millennia, particularly after considering the amount of fossil fuels that can be economically extracted and the likelihood that other energy sources will not displace fossil fuels in the interim? [Remember we are told that peak oil is nigh, that renewables are almost competitive with fossil fuels, and that wind, solar and biofuels will soon pay for themselves.]
Second, for an event to be classified as a catastrophe, it should occur relatively quickly precluding efforts by man or nature to adapt or otherwise deal with it. But if it occurs over millennia, as the IPCC says, or even centuries, that gives humanity ample time to adjust, albeit at a socioeconomic cost. But it need not be prohibitively dangerous to life, limb or property if: (1) the total amount of sea level rise (SLR) and, perhaps more importantly, the rate of SLR can be predicted with some confidence, as seems likely in the next few decades considering the resources being expended on such research; (2) the rate of SLR is slow relative to how fast populations can strengthen coastal defenses and/or relocate; and (3) there are no insurmountable barriers to migration.
This would be true even had the so-called “tipping point” already been passed and ultimate disintegration of the ice sheet was inevitable, so long as it takes millennia for the disintegration to be realized. In other words, the issue isn’t just whether the tipping point is reached, rather it is how long does it actually take to tip over. Take, for example, if a hand grenade is tossed into a crowded room. Whether this results in tragedy — and the magnitude of that tragedy — depends upon how much time it takes for the grenade to go off, the reaction time of the occupants, and their ability to respond.
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