Twenty Third Floor
Technical Business Advantage

It’s clear some people just don’t get that deflation is catastrophic from an economic perspective. You would have though that Japan’s lost decade (is it still only a decade?) would be sufficient warning.

Michael Pento from Euro Pacific capital writes about the options open Bernanke to stimulate the US economy through open market purchases given that interest rates are up against the zero bound.

He’s right about the options, but horribly misguided when it comes to wishing for deflation:

By keeping prices from falling more that they would have naturally, Fed intervention has created a burden.

The US public (and private) debt is such a significant portion of GDP, the correct answer cannot be to increase it as a percentage of GDP by deflating prices and keeping the nominal value of outstanding debt the same. Moreover, what the US needs is economic activity; encouraging everyone to leave their money in the bank because it increase in value every day and “nobody else is spending so deflation will continue” doesn’t sound like a success story to me. Downward price stickiness, particularly with wages (yes, even in the US) would add to the catastrophe.

Pent also raises the risk of hyperinflation:

…investors would be forced to once again abandon savings and chase runaway prices.

I don’t know how we went from fears of deflation to “runaway prices”. The challenge with this policy is to credibly promise moderate inflation for several years (depending on how strong your Ricardian views are).

Runaway prices are much easier to control than deflation. With inflation, we actually have a range of tools to use.

It’s unreal how many people have views on the economy that aren’t rooted in any economic theory at all.

Sharemax appears to be spiralling to its doom. Multiple stories today report that they are late on dividend payments to investors and may not be able to pay dividends in the forseeable future.

Cash has run out. The overvalued, over-geared properties cannot support the income stream that was demanded from them.

No surprises here then.

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I haven’t played Monopoly in a while (preferring Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, Tigris and Euphrates and even Cranium), but after a recent conversation I started thinking about the game dynamics. There is surprisingly much that is relevant to the current story of our economy.

1 The Competition Commission is necessary

Monopolies serve to increase prices for consumers. In Monopoly, the “rents” charged are instantly higher as soon as a player has a monopoly on property in a certain area.

Worse than the increase in prices and decrease in supply, the additional profit for suppliers is not equal to the cost to consumers from higher prices, resulting in an overall “dead weight loss of monopoly” or an overall cost to society. (more…)

Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker fame, has written an engaging account of the role that subprime lending played in the global financial crisis. The new book is called “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine”.

The jargon that Lewis uses is generally explained and shouldn’t prevent non finance geeks from understanding the role of subprime lenders, mortgage originators and, of course, the Wall Street banks that fed the frenzy with CDSs, synthetic CDOs and bonuses for all.

The story places a few characters at the centre of the story. I wasn’t convinced that these guys were all skill and no luck, but they certainly seemed to have a clearer idea of what was going on in the murky, muddy waters of securitisations of that era than many of the supposed experts.

Overall, it’s won’t be the smash hit that Liar’s Poker is, but it’s entertaining reading all the time. The links to Gutfreund are tenuous and smell a little of name-dropping. If Lewis wanted to remind the reader of his role in toppling the ex CEO of Salomon Brothers he succeeded. If he wanted to somehow project the glory onto the new book, he failed.

The Big Short at Amazon.co.uk

The Big Short at Kalahari.net

Check out Book Finder for prices from several stores (new and used) in your currency including delivery costs to your location.

The FT has an article (Banks win battle to tone down Basel III) describing how the proposed new rules for banking capital requirements might have some of the new requirements around liquidity removed or weakened.

Key amongst these new considerations is the limitation of mismatches between the term of assets and liabilities, which would limit the danger of a removal of deposits and wholesale funding in a crisis scenario. The problem is that this has been fundamental to the business model of banks for decades. Short-term assets (call, overnight, 30 day deposits) have been used to finance long-term liabilities (vehicle loans, home loans, business loans).

Retail deposits, even those technically call deposits, are generally quite sticky. This is in spite of the easily recallable image of queues of depositors wanting to get their money back. Typically, this is still a small fraction of total depositors (certainly in countries with retail deposit protection). Further, other banks have usually pulled or tried to pull their short-term funding (or simply not renewed overnight lending) well before the public even gets wind that there might be risks. As banks rely increasingly on wholesale finance, the risks of a liquidity and credit crisis are amplified as this money is teflon-coated and greased in terms of stickiness.

The banks argue there are other ways of managing the risk. It’s understandable that regulators around the world have had their confidence in banks’ risk management ability dented.

The real danger of overregulation of banks is not “too safe banks”, but rather an increase in the cost of providing banking and credit services to the economy (individual countries as well as the global economy) which could make limit economic growth and the replacement of jobs lost during the recession.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops.

May 6 2010.  Dow falls more than 1,000 points intraday, including a drop of P&G from around $60 to (according to some accounts) below $40. The Dow recovered most of the falls quickly, but these trades are now part of the historical time series.

Banks and others using risk management tools often back-test their models against historical data to see how whether the models capture past market movements in estimating potential future market movements. This blip may appear as an anomaly in these tests for some time.

(It’s more typical for the tests to use only closing prices rather than intra-day prices. However, this actually reflects a weakness in the typical models and is only a fortunate escape from today’s problems)

The safety rules and rigorous enforcement of these regulations damages the profitability of the entire industry – just not in the way you might think.

Regulations and Big Bank Buildings

Why have banks historically had impressive  marble-slathered floors and columns, high ceilings and ornate, heavy front doors? Would you really deposit your salary and savings into an operation run out of a caravan parked on a corner on your way to work?

The fixed, permanent high-investment nature of the impressive buildings is one way that banks can  communicate their seriousness, their high investment requiring a long-term relationship with a large customer base to recoup their upfront costs and their inability to up and off and disappear with all their assets overnight. This communication of financial strength and longevity gives customers the confidence to trust in them and bank with them.

If you’ve thought about this for more than a few seconds, you should be asking an important question. “How do Internet-only banks, with their apparent lack of real, physical assets and high upfront investment in their operations support this argument?” (more…)

I blogged recently about why I park on the fourth floor of the Cape Town airport parkade, and also about understanding and utilising unlikely but extreme events to your advantage. There is actually a link between these two posts.

Parking on the top floor does have a cost. It takes longer to drive up all the ramps and does, perhaps, on average take longer than parking on the most convenient floor every time. This extra time is a premium I pay to reduce the potential for really bad outcomes and thus optimising the parking problem. For example:

• I avoid the situation of attempting to park on a lower floor (trusting the untrustworthy electronic vehicle counter) and, after driving around for a while trying to find parking, having to give up and try a different floor. This much longer time, even if it only happens rarely, is a much worse outcome than 30 seconds on every flight. It can easily be the difference between making and missing a flight.
• I don’t have to worry about remembering where I parked my car. I don’t know that I am more forgetful than the average traveller, but travelling almost every week makes each trip blur into the next. I don’t waste headspace on trying to remember where I parked my car, and I don’t worry about forgetting. I have the peace of mind from having purchased a time of insurance against the risk of forgetting where I parked.

I get no value out of successfully memorising my car location, but gain from removing this risk and this worry from my routine.

If your company has a foreign currency exposure due to imported input components, this is a risk and a worry over which you have no control. Your energies are better expended elsewhere, on the operational and sales issues that you can effectively change. Get rid of these risks and get on with your real business.