Category: Economics

Very good sentences

many of the same people who ridicule the idea that private-sector output is meaningfully reduced by higher taxes are convinced that private-sector output is meaningfully raised by higher subsidies.

That’s from Don Boudreaux.  You’ll also find that many proponents of hiking the minimum wage think that subsidizing low-wage jobs will work.  There are models where the relevant effects switch at just the right margins, of course; surely those models are true.

With oil at $140 a barrel, can you still love Julian Simon?

Remember Julian Simon, the guy who argued that resource prices would fall, fall, fall in real terms?  I loved spending time with him and to this day he remains an underrated economist.  (By the way, the very first piece I ever wrote was a guide to using Julian Simon for high school debaters.)  But can we still advocate his major thesis?

The possible belief space includes the following:

1. There is still a good chance that future resource and oil prices will fall dramatically, so Simon should not be dismissed.  Still, the single best estimate today can be inferred from the current market price, which implies a good chance that resources will get more expensive.

2. Simon is right and futures markets currently indicate that the price of oil is expected to fall dramatically.

3. Simon is still right, the rest of the world is wrong, and betting on this is how I will get rich.

4. Simon is right but current markets don’t allow us to bet on his major claims.  Futures markets extend for only a few years’ time, not for say the twenty years or so that are needed to validate his prediction.

4b. The deliverance of plenty is truly far away and no one is willing to take those margin calls for the next 187 years; in this scenario the present expected value of the future improvement is pretty low.

5. Simon is right but nominal interest rates will soon fall so low that successive short selling of oil in the futures market won’t yield supernormal returns.  (This can mean, for instance, that you’d rather lock up all your money today at the higher rates, rather than short selling.)

No way does #2 work, though there is often slight backwardation in the futures price.  I’ve never heard anyone argue #5 and indeed most people haven’t even thought of it as an escape hatch.  My belief is closest to #1.  Bryan Caplan argues for #4 but Arnold Kling shows that doesn’t fly.  If you’re always rolling over a successively renewed short position in the futures market, sooner or later the price decline for oil will yield you supernormal profits; in the meantime your margin deposit is earning the rate of return on T-Bills, noting that you must buy into the new contract cycle before your old contract expires so as not to miss the window of opportunity.  OK there is margin call risk, etc. but if Simon is right that is small relative to your potential gains.

(Alternatively you might argue that if you are in contract cycle #3, the good news will arrive to affect the pricing of cycle #4 before you can buy in, adding on that even after the future good news is announced the MC curve is so steep that you don’t gain much on contract cycle #3.  That’s possible but a) ex ante you still have supernormal returns since it may not work out that way, and b) the reality is that huge good supply news, whether for oil or some other energy source, would lead to lots of pumping today and a plummeting oil price right away.)

I invite Alex to accept #1 or otherwise indicate his stance.

It’s amazing how much, on this issue, some people resort to what can only be called technical analysis — inferring future price movements from past trends — when they would scoff at that approach in almost any other context.  It’s OK to argue that belief #3 held for most of world history –before we all read Simon and perhaps before there were futures markets in oil — but I want to know if you are betting on #3 today and if not why not and also what other ways there are to get very rich that you can tell me about (does only the oil market malfunction so?).

I’ll also note that current oil prices hardly suggest (do click on that link) a level of bone-crunching, civilization-ending scarcity, so you can believe in #1 and still be an optimist overall, as indeed I am.  I’m just not nearly as much of an optimist as I was when oil was $10-$20 a barrel, wasn’t it even $8 a barrel for domestic oil less than ten years ago?

Also on belief #4 note that: forward contracts allow for longer bets than do futures contracts, contract length is endogenous to important events (though synthetic contract positions mean we don’t need all of the possible longer term contracts), and it is odd for libertarians — combinatorial prediction market fans at that — to suddenly cite missing markets to defend their broader position.

Addendum: Oh, yes, there is one more option.  I call it "#3 is correct but my wife won’t let us get rich."  I’ll say this in response: for all the virtues marriage has for men, when you look around and study it more closely, you’ll find the institution has even more virtues than you had thought.

Second addendum: Here is Jeffrey Sachs on this topic.

More on speculation

Here is Paul Krugman’s model, Mark Thoma covers related ground.  I view this as an intertemporal Hotelling model and not as analogous to a currency model as Krugman suggests.  In the bottom right hand graph of the four graphs in Krugman’s post, I don’t understand what institutional force hinders a market-clearing price.  More concretely, if expected future price goes up (or interest rates fall), the supply curve in that graph should shift back to the left (wait and pump more later for the higher price) and/or the demand curve in that graph should shift out to the right (buy now rather than later at the higher price).  Measured inventories will rise to the extent the demand curve does the shifting; if the supply curve does the shifting the "excess inventories" stay in the ground.

It is possible to derive Krugman’s desired result through another and indeed simpler channel.  Define speculation as the desire to hold more oil because of the perception that oil now has a greater convenience yield.  As Jeffrey Williams points out, a big part of convenience yield is the option value of selling the oil on favorable terms.  If you’re guessing that option value will pay off, it’s not unreasonable to call that speculation.  We now have a one-line proof: because of "speculation" the demand to hold oil goes up, and so the stocks of oil held will rise.

This again illustrates the value of starting with Holbrook Working when analyzing futures markets.

And it’s fair to say, as Krugman still does, there is no evidence that this mechanism is what is driving the higher oil prices.  Of course the people who are blaming "speculation" don’t seem to have any coherent definition of the concept in mind; that’s another problem with their argument. 

Oil and the Future

On oil I will make one point adding and one point detracting from Tyler’s analysis.  First, on speculation remember that demand and supply are both very inelastic so relatively small changes in either can make a big differrence.  That means that speculation, if that is what you want to call it, can shift prices a lot without being very significant in total demand.  Because of this point Krugman’s analysis is quite right for iron ore but a little off for oil – indeed Krugman’s analysis of oil is difficult to square with his analysis of the California electricity crisis.

My disagreement with Tyler is an agreement with Caplan. 

Bryan Caplan notes that commodity prices always have fallen back down in the past and argues that is likely to happen again in the future.  I say no, the current price is your best (rough) estimate of scarcity (adjusting for storage costs), don’t expect mean-reversion, future returns (but not prices) are a random walk, and extrapolation is a dangerous method to apply to financial time series.   

No, two points.  First, commodities are not stocks and nothing need be a random walk.  Imagine, for example, that you can produce 10 units of commodity X but no more (fixed production).  Thus you produce 10, 10, 10…. Now you know that a big technological innovation is about to increase production possibilities to 20, 20. 20…..   Does the price today necessarily fall?  No.  Price today is determined by supply and demand, supply is fixed and if substitution across time isn’t very easy (you still have to get to work today, right?) then demand doesn’t have to fall much with expectations of future supply.  Thus the price is high until it drops, even if everyone expects the drop.

Finally, on oil – who really cares what the price is?  The issue is energy, not oil.  I am confident that the long run price of energy will fall.      

Oil splat

It would take too long to sum up the dialogue, by this point you are either following the discussion or not.  A few points:

1. Bryan Caplan asks a good question: "You know now that the price of oil will be flat for five years, then
fall by 10% per year every year thereafter. Everyone else thinks the
price will be flat forever."  Can you profit?  Yes, by rolling over your short positions and constructing a synthetic long-term bet, even if the current futures markets extend for only three years or for that matter one year.  Fischer Black said so, so in other words you do have a chance to put your money where your mouth is.

2. Arnold Kling wonders why so many commodity prices have risen at the same time.  I’ll repeat that fundamental value — and thus the concepts of speculation and bubble — are trickier and vaguer with commodities than in stock markets.  I’ll say that "expectations" have driven the general rise in commodity prices.  If those expectations turn out to be wrong, we can call it all a bubble; if they turn out to be right, then it hasn’t been a bubble.  What should we call it in the meantime?  We’re not going to solve that problem in any factual way.  Make your bets, as they say.

3. Bryan Caplan notes that commodity prices always have fallen back down in the past and argues that is likely to happen again in the future.  I say no, the current price is your best (rough) estimate of scarcity (adjusting for storage costs), don’t expect mean-reversion, future returns (but not prices) are a random walk, and extrapolation is a dangerous method to apply to financial time series.  (For instance every time the stock market has fallen it has bounced back up again but that does not mean you can earn supernormal returns by buying on the downticks; even Shiller finds only small gains here.)  I love Julian Simon too but don’t let him overrule Eugene Fama.

4. Mark Thoma has an exhaustive post on convenience yield.  The models used are too piecemeal and they allow "inventories," "convenience yield," and "speculation," to serve as free-floating, not necessarily attached concepts.  The discussion here pays insufficient attention to Holbrook Working, who knew that convenience yield was front and center of the entire analysis, just as "the demand for money" is the centerpiece of the quantity theory.  Working himself didn’t even think that "speculation" was a well-defined concept in commodities markets; even if he went too far there the concept remains murky.  The current discussions are mixing fundamental conceptual definitions with some broader institutionally-motivated definitions and thus none of the results quite match up.

5. Contra Paul Krugman, invoking convenience yield should not be thought of as an Ptolemaic epicycle or a fudge factor.  The demand to hold oil is the starting point of the whole analysis, see also Jeffrey Williams’s work.  The upshot is that if speculation were driving the current price, it would be consistent with either a premium of the futures price over the spot or vice versa; invoking convenience yield to explain the relatively cheap futures is what you might expect in the first place, speculation or not, bubble or not.

6. Interfluidity has the most careful and accurate exposition of the relevant market relationships, mostly because he sticks closely to the Holbrook Working tradition. 

7. The bottom line is that when it comes to the key substantive questions about the oil market – why are prices so high — the correct answer is the Lachmannian one: "expectations."  If you push one step further on that, and try to evaluate or "source" those expectations, the correct answer is "we don’t know."  Jim Hamilton hints at some of this — and the imprecision of the "inventories" term — in this insightful post.

Addendum: On other practical matters, this new Op-Ed by Paul Krugman is essentially correct, although his claim that speculation is impossible in the iron ore market shows, better than anything else, the oddity of his semantic choices.

Arnold Kling is exasperating Paul Krugman

Krugman writes here on why speculation is not driving higher oil prices and offers a simple model here.  I agree with Krugman’s conclusion but not his reasoning.  Arnold Kling responds here and basically Arnold is right although his #2 on the Hotelling principle is trickier than his exposition indicates.  The key two points in response to Krugman are: a) oil in the ground can substitute for inventories and thus speculation can be driving prices higher without it showing up in measured inventories; here’s that reasoning in more detail, and b) when risk and liquidity premia are changing, the relationship between the spot price and futures price is obscure and difficult to interpret.  In particular a futures price for oil below the spot price does not refute the speculation hypothesis or even provide much evidence against it.

The more general point is that if a bubble, or lack thereof, could be read so easily from the available numbers, bubbles would be scarcer than they are.  There’s also a tricky problem in defining a bubble when there is two-way feedback across price and expectations and "fundamental value" at any one point in time itself depends on the marginal unit of supply and thus it depends supplier decisions and expectations.

My apologies to those whom I am exasperating.

If Krugman’s cited data don’t do the trick, why do I agree with his conclusion that speculation is not the villain?  The simplest alternative story, again blogged by Arnold, is that the earlier low price of oil was an anti-bubble of sorts and one which now has been corrected by market forces.  It was a kind of collective blindness, akin to the view that real estate prices would continue rising in value.  No, I can’t prove that is true but I find it the most plausible story, with p (truth) = 0.57.

Addendum: Note that most asset bubbles are based on the psychological property that bullishness is more common than bearishness in asset markets, if only for ESS reasons.  This same general bullishness can drive "anti-bubbles" or artificially low prices in oil markets (high oil prices are bad for good times) even though yes I know that sounds funny and we are used to bubbles bringing artificially high prices.

Second addendum: Paul Krugman responds.

Markets in everything, Japan edition (again)

You could devote an entire blog to this category:

Japanese toy company People has released a new age alarm clock
that supposedly helps kids wake up by turning them into Ultraman. It’s
called the Okiro! Asa Ichiban Taiyou Senshi – Charenjaa Kitto (Wake up!
First Sun Warrior of the Morning
– challenger kit) and was manufactured for the Japanese Ministry of
Education “early to bed early to rise” program. The $38 kit comes with
the extravagant eye shield and helmet; a series of talismans and
message cards (no doubt world-saving secret missions); and a 27-day
program that will involve your child taking orders from "the commander."

The commander wakes the child up at 6 a.m., and prompts players to put
on the helmet and hit a "roger" button to acknowledge their
wakefulness. Then, they are ordered to count to 10 in five different
languages: English, Japanese, German, Swahili and Malagasy. At that
point, the player is "allowed to take off the equipment and start the
day"…

Here is the full story (with illustrations) and thanks to Yana and Caleb for the pointer.  What if you can’t count to ten in Malagasy?  What happens to the rest of your day?  Keep this link in mind or maybe try How to Get a Date in Malagasy.

China/Syria Fact of the Day

I have been talking with GMU President Alan Merten, who is also in Kunming via Syria.  In Syria, Alan was surprised when he was asked to meet with President Bashar al-Assad.  Even more surprising, the President wanted to talk about entrepreneurship, GMU, and how Syria can benefit from better economics.

Later, talking with the Finance minister, Merten learned one of the key drivers of this new openness.  The Finance minister explained that he was meeting with a counterpart in the Chinese government.  "What can we do," the Syrian Finance minister asked, "to increase Chinese investment?"  "Well," the Chinese minister replied, "before we invest in Syria you most open your markets, cut your subsidies, and reduce regulation…"   

Markets in everything: lives for sale

He says he’s not the first person to put his life on the
block.

Australian philosophy student Nicael Holt, 24, offered his
life to the highest bidder last year to protest mass
consumerism.

American John Freyer started All My Life For Sale
(www.allmylifeforsale.com) in 2001 and sold everything he owned
on eBay, later visiting the people who bought his things.

Adam Burtle, a 20-year-old U.S. university student, offered
his soul for sale on eBay in 2001, with bidding hitting $400
before eBay called it off. Burtle admitted he was a bored geek.

Here is the story.  The current seller is Ian Usher, a lovelorn Australian:

From Sunday, June 22 for one week, Usher’s life is up for
sale on eBay with the package including his $420,000
(US$397,000) three-bedroom house in Perth, Western Australia, a
trial for his job at a rug store, his car, motorbike, clothes
and even friends.

Here is a previous MR post on an Australian life for sale.

Is microfinance the new subprime?

Ryan Hahn asks:

In the case of microfinance, however, it seems to me the problem of limited liability is rearing its ugly head. Poor borrowers generally have little or no collateral, so they usually have little reason to avoid a strategic default.

It is a common myth that microfinance loans have no collateral.  I sooner worry that the process of collateralization is too thorough.  Remember that microfinance loans are made to small groups of five to ten people, typically neighbors.  If you don’t pay up, your associate has to.  The reality is that the person left holding the bag — who knows you well — will come seize your TV set or in some cases the process is a bit less pleasant.  Part of the efficiency of microfinance is simply the separation of the lending and the "thug" functions.  Banks can lend to high-risk individual borrowers without themselves resorting to the illegal intimidation practices of the village moneylender.  The dynamics of cooperative behavior in the village are not always pretty but overall it works better than the moneylender; if nothing else the person seizing the collateral knows that next time around he or she may be the non-payer.  For more detail, see my Wilson Quarterly article with Karol Boudreaux.

High commodity prices

Guillermo Calvo writes:

Incentives to stockpile commodities stem from the combination of low
central bank interest rates (especially in the US) and the growth in
sovereign wealth funds. The latter, in my view, is the crucial factor.
Sovereign wealth funds have been created partly with the intent of
switching the composition of government wealth from highly liquid but
low-return assets to more risky but much more profitable investment
projects. Thus, their attempt to get rid of excess liquidity resembles
the econ 101 exercise in which the student is asked to trace the
effects of a portfolio switch away from money and into capital.  The answer is – of course – higher prices.

The piece is interesting throughout, hat tip to Mark Thoma.

Pay For It: Radical Water Privatization for Poor Countries

Here is my piece for Forbes.com on the privatization of residential water supply in the Third World.  Excerpt:

And no, I don’t mean a water
concession with a price regulated by the government, I mean true
laissez faire in water supply. No price regulation, no rate of return
regulation, no government ownership of assets, no political pressure to
keep prices low. Water companies should be allowed to maximize their
profits, and because supplying water is nearly always a monopoly, they
should be allowed to make monopoly profits. I know the idea sounds
crazy–to an economist, water supply is a classic "natural"
monopoly–but on closer inspection the other alternatives might be
worse.

And more:

If complete deregulation
is too radical for you, consider the interesting compromise proposed by
the economist Jeffrey Sachs, currently heading the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
He suggests that the private company be allowed to charge high prices,
but only under the condition that it allocates a minimum amount of
water for everyone, either for free or at a much lower price. Basic
water needs would be met, and the company still might make a profit.

That said, I’m less worried about high prices than Sachs. Let’s say
the new water prices were so high as to capture all the benefits that
buyers would receive from the new supply of water. We can expect much
lower rates of diarrhea and other diseases, if only because the water
supplier can charge more for cleaner and safer water. The resulting
decline in disease means that children will die less frequently and
adults will be healthier and more energetic. Those long-term social
benefits are of enormous help to poor communities, even if high prices
take away many of the initial, upfront benefits of the new water
supply. In other words, we should consider radical privatization
precisely because water is a public good and because clean water is so
important for long-run economic growth.

Read the whole thing.