Results for “age of em”

15637 found

This paper integrates theories of political budget cycles with theories of tactical electoral redistribution to test for political capture in a novel way. Studying banks in India, I find that government-owned bank lending tracks the electoral cycle, with agricultural credit increasing by 5-10 percentage points in an election year. There is significant cross-sectional targeting, with large increases in districts in which the election is particularly close. This targeting does not occur in non-election years, or in private bank lending. I show capture is costly: elections affect loan repayment, and election year credit booms do not measurably affect agricultural output.

New appointee Jeremy Stein says yes:

Simply put, the government should force the banks to suspend all dividend payments," he told The Wall Street Journal in October.  "It makes absolutely no sense for the government to put money into the banks, only to see a significant fraction of it flow out again as dividends to shareholders, and in many cases, bank executives with large equity stakes."

I haven't seen much discussion of this issue.  Dividends are in general poorly understood by economists, in part because they continue to be paid when they face a significant tax disadvantage.  Surely there are cheaper ways to signal the quality of the firm.  One way of thinking about dividends is as a way to take advantage of bondholders.  Start a new firm, borrow $50, issue $50 in equity, and on day one pay $100 in dividends and by 4 p.m. declare bankruptcy.  Not a bad business model but of course neither the government nor the bondholders will let you.  This same strategy is also a way to take advantage of government subsidies and recapitalizations, even if you can't get the dividend up to one hundred percent.  So yes, I do see a case for following Stein's suggestion, at least for banks receiving government assistance above some threshold measure.

Stein, by the way, also favors this:

He advocated aggressive government audits of banks, aimed at separating
solvent ones from insolvent ones. Once that was done, insolvent banks
would be forced into closure or sale while solvent ones would be pushed
to raise more private capital. In addition to dealing with the bad bank
problem, putting the plan in place would remove much of the uncertainty
in financial markets that the government’s ad hoc approach to banks
thus far has helped instill.

But they are starting to be asked more and more often:

Moreover, will we have the guts to impose similarly large percentage
reductions in budgets when the stimulus is supposed to end in two
years? Or will we simply add to a long-term budget problem that is
already horrendous?

Here is more.

The Fed is ready to do more, namely:

Two points are worth making.  First, defenders of large-scale stimulus point out that such measures may well not work.  That is true, but what are the conditions under which unorthodox monetary policy maybe will not work?  Low confidence and zombie banks, which are more or less the same conditions under which fiscal policy may not work either.  In that sense unorthodox monetary policy doesn't face a separate problem.

Second, cash and T-Bills have a broadly similar risk profile but cash and these other assets do not.  At some point monetary policy becomes fiscal policy too, as a quick look at the Fed's balance sheet will indicate.  So it's fiscal policy based on Treasury borrowing vs. fiscal policy based on Bernanke and money creation.  In a time of deflationary pressures, and a bad fiscal future, usually I would prefer Fed-led fiscal policy.  I do recognize that we are placing more weight on the Fed than it can bear, but of course at this point there are no good options.

This was from a story in The Washington Post:

In testimony before the House Budget Committee yesterday, Alice M.
Rivlin, who was President Bill Clinton's budget director, suggested
splitting the plan, implementing its immediate stimulus components now
and taking more time to plan the longer-term transformative spending to
make sure it is done right.

"Such a long-term investment program should not be put together
hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package. The elements of
the investment program must be carefully planned and will not create
many jobs right away," said Rivlin, a fellow at the Brookings
Institution. The risk, she said, is that "money will be wasted because
the investment elements were not carefully crafted."

It's not a puffin, but here is a good post on the stimulus from Arnold Kling.  And read Marc Ambinder on which parts of the bill will take how long.

60 Minutes had a moving piece on Sunday about Wilmington, Ohio where thousands of people are losing their jobs due to the closure of the town's largest employer, DHL.  Many people had worked at the air distribution center for decades and through no fault of their own were losing their jobs, their health insurance and in one of the hardest losses of all, their community.  Barack Obama and John McCain both talked about Wilmington in their campaigns and yet for all their talk it's clear that neither monetary nor fiscal stimulus can do much for Wilmington.

One of the things that I do find very disturbing about this recession is that it is worldwide.  World trade may fall this year for the first time since 1982. As I argued earlier, the problem goes beyond any credit crunch, which according to the story below has been solved for trade.  The problem is a lack of demand.  Here is more frightening news on the trade front. 

Freight rates for containers shipped from Asia to Europe have fallen to zero for the first time since records began, underscoring the dramatic collapse in trade since the world economy buckled in October.

Trade data from Asia's export tigers has been disastrous over recent weeks, reflecting the collapse in US, UK and European markets.
Korea's exports fell 30pc in January compared to a year earlier. Exports have slumped 42pc in Taiwan and 27pc in Japan, according to the most recent monthly data. Even China has now started to see an outright contraction in shipments, led by steel, electronics and textiles.

A report by ING yesterday said shipping activity at US ports has suddenly dived. Outbound traffic from Long Beach and Los Angeles, America's two top ports, has fallen by 18pc year-on-year, a far more serious decline than anything seen in recent recessions.
"This is no regular cycle slowdown, but a complete collapse in foreign demand," said Lindsay Coburn, ING's trade consultant.

Idle ships are now stretched in rows outside Singapore's harbour, creating an eerie silhouette like a vast naval fleet at anchor. Shipping experts note the number of vessels moving around seem unusually high in the water, indicating low cargoes.

It became difficult for the shippers to obtain routine letters of credit at the height of financial crisis over the autumn, causing goods to pile up at ports even though there was a willing buyer at the other end. Analysts say this problem has been resolved, but the shipping industry has since been swamped by the global trade contraction.

A banker has absconded with 86 billion from Dynasty Banking.  Dynasty Banking?  Is that an obscure Icelandic bank?  Almost, it's a bank in the massive world of Eve Online.

Two years ago in a post called The Future of Macroeconomics I wrote the following:

The massive theft from Dynasty Banking is creating a bank run.  There is no FDIC in Eve Online but other banks have agreed to lend Dynasty cash if it is needed – no doubt they fear contagion.  No word yet on whether fiscal or monetary stimulus is planned but I will watch the experiment with interest.

If this is not enough to boggle your mind, Eve Online is in fact an Icelandic firm!  Which explains why the money in Eve is called ISK, also the code for the Iceland Krona.  To bring the story full circle the Icelandic banking collapse is causing problems for the developer.

"The present currency restrictions are putting us in a straitjacket.
We are in talks with the government, but if we can't let capital in, we
might be compelled to leave Iceland, even though this would be against
our wishes."

EVE currently has around 300K subscribers.

Gudmundsson's comments come after those of CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson,
who told Edge in October following the banking collapse, "I’m fortunate
that CCP has hardly been affected by the economic crisis here. We now
have to take advantage of our status as a global company and maintain
our diversified banking relationships."

CCP also has offices in Atlanta and Shanghai.

Finally, in other news, we have this:

Royal Khanid Navy Grand Admiral Zidares Khanid this morning released a
statement claiming that Khanid Kingdom forces yesterday attacked
thirty-three separate Blood Raider Covenant targets – ranging from
unmanned installations to fully-defended outposts – in what the release
terms “an effort to strike a blow against the spreading blight of
willful heresy.”

Just thought you would want to know. Does your head hurt yet?

Thanks to Roger Avalos for the pointer.

Matt Ygelsias asks what’s the
stimulus-skeptics’ alternative prescription?  Tyler offers his recommendations below.  I'm somewhat less of a skeptic about fiscal policy than Tyler – there is a good case for moving up useful infrastructure spending (both public and private) today – but I agree with Tyler that it is too early to think that monetary policy is ineffective.  M1 is rising sharply, M2 is up.  Monetary policy works with lags.  As to what to do instead I have offered a number of possibilities including:

1) Investment Tax Credit Unlike traditional fiscal policy an investment tax credit cannot be
fully crowded out and it works best when it is expected to be
temporary. Cuts in income taxes stimulate the least when they are
expected to be temporary.  But in contrast, an investment tax credit
stimulates the most when it is expected to be temporary because a temporary
credit must be used now or lost while a permanent credit gives you the
option to wait.

2)  A supply side stimulus: The IRS knows how much income that each taxpayer reported last
year.  So let's cut everyone's marginal tax rate based on last year's
income.  In other words, suppose that last year Joe earned $66,520
which puts him in a 25% tax bracket.  Joe's tax schedule this year will
be exactly the same as last year except for every dollar earned above
$66,520 the tax rate drops

to 15%.   We do this for all
taxpayers so that each taxpayer has their own schedule and for each
taxpayer there is a decreasing marginal tax rate.Note that this plan increases the incentive to work and it doesn't
increase the deficit.  In fact, the Tabarrok plan increases tax
revenues!  The key is a marginal tax cut with a different margin for
every taxpayer based upon last year's return.

3). A cut in the payroll tax ala Singapore.  If employment is down reduce the cost of employing labor.  This policy has lot to recommend it because unlike a fiscal stimulus it lets the reallocation process work towards its long run equilibrium.  A construction stimulus, for example, pushes people into construction (or keeps them there) when perhaps labor could ultimately be more productive in other sectors of the economy.  The payroll tax cut enhances this reallocation effort it doesn't impede it.

4)  Don't Panic.  This is the policy that has cured most recessions.  The do anything and do it now mindset feeds panic.  I do think this recession will be longer than average and quite deep, it is a concern that it is worldwide.  But recessions are normal and we have unemployment insurance and other assistance programs to help people through tough times.  The economy will recover and its very possible to make things worse by trying to make things better.

From Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef, I thought this was an important paper:

We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to
shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past
century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts:
financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly
paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim
period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that
financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and
credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers
and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also
shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from
the mid 1990s until 2006. For the recent period we estimate that rents
accounted for 30% to 50% of the wage differential between the financial
sector and the rest of the private sector.

Here is a summary article on the piece and one of the lessons is that the future of the income inequality debate lies at the micro-micro level.  The authors claim, by the way, that this 30 to 50 percent wage differential can be expected to disappear.  Right now that looks like a pretty safe bet.

Matt Yglesias has a very good post on Robert Barro's latest.  Brad DeLong seems to agree with Matt.  Paul Krugman uses the word "boneheaded" to describe the Barro piece.

This exchange is a good micro-cosm of how the stimulus debate has proceeded.  A highly respected anti-stimulus economist puts up some anti-stimulus evidence in a highly imperfect test (in Barro's defense, he did cover more than just WWII).  The anti-stimulus economist is attacked by pro-stimulus economists.  But the pro-stimulus proponents are focused on attack.  They are not putting up comparable empirical evidence of their own for the efficacy of fiscal policy and there is a reason for that, namely that the evidence isn't really there.

I fully admit that I don't trust the oft-cited evidence that tax cuts are 4x better stimulus than government spending boosts; I think the result is a mirage from underspecified models.  Overall we simply don't know how well the proposed stimulus will work — if at all (is aggregate demand always the relevant war?).  It's a kind of Hail Mary pass, an enduring belief in aggregate demand macroeconomics at the theoretical level, even in light of broken banks, sectoral shifts, and nasty, failing expectations, all mixed in with hard to spend well, slow to come on line, monies.  Yes it could work but our agnosticism should be strong rather than just perfunctory. 

Writing polemics against market-oriented economists, no matter what the failings of such economists (and I am one of them, and I have failings), doesn't get us out of that box.

I'll say it again to the pro-stimulus forces: a stimulus is going to happen, so I'd love to be cheered up by your evidence.  Put it on the table.

I also am confused by Krugman's view of the relevance of WWII.  On his blog, at the end of a discussion of how the historical example of WWII doesn't much apply, he writes:

I can’t quite imagine the mindset that leads someone to forget all
this, and think that you can use World War II to estimate the
multiplier that might prevail in an underemployed, rationing-free
economy.

And he is upset at Barro for thinking that the WWII experience does apply.  Fair enough, but a) the War didn't start at full employment, and b) is it possible that Barro received this impression from reading Krugman himself?  In Rolling Stone last week Krugman wrote:

It
took the giant public works project known as World War II – a
project that finally silenced the penny pinchers – to bring
the Depression to an end.

The lesson from FDR's limited success on the employment front,
then, is that you have to be really bold in your job-creation
plans. Basically, businesses and consumers are cutting way back on
spending, leaving the economy with a huge shortfall in demand,
which will lead to a huge fall in employment – unless you
stop it. To stop it, however, you have to spend enough to fill the
hole left by the private sector's retrenchment.

If you read both Krugman passages closely, there is not actually a literal contradiction.  But still, a fundamental decision has to be made on whether to run away from the WWII evidence or not.  I say the WWII evidence does not apply and so I am closer to Krugman as he writes on his blog.

Either way you cut it, there aren't any boneheads in the room.