Good Reading -- December 2009
A shortish "Happy Holidays" edition. Hope everyone is doing well.
Attached
Bethany McLean on the Goldman Sachs phenomenon. This is a fairly balanced and accurate article about a situation with no shortage of complexity and messiness. For more on Goldman's history, The Partnership and The Culture of Success are both good. Bethany McLean also co-wrote an exceptional book on Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room.
Copied/Linked
The SEC's brand of incompetence is really something special. Shortly after the Madoff fraud came to light, I read David Einhorn's book, "Fooling Some People All of the Time," regarding the blatant fraud at Allied Capital and the Small Business Administration that the SEC routinely ignored for years -- suffice it to say that the level of laziness, stupidity, arrogance, and incompetence displayed by the SBA and the SEC on a daily basis would make any decent person sick to his stomach. This interview with Bernie Madoff, in which he describes how amazed he was that the SEC didn't bust him years earlier, is especially galling. Basically, the SEC was tipped off on numerous occasions,by Harry Markoplos among others, and started nominal, lipservice style "investigations" of Madoff but failed to do even the most basic, common sense things, such as verifying his accounts at the clearinghouse (he had none) or auditing his trades (he never actually did a trade for years). I'll go take a long walk now, but the SEC's summary of its own incomprehensible failure is here ("Public Version"!!), the 500+ exhibits are here, and Madoff's interview transcript is here.
Gold is a gigantic, millenia old bubble -- an interesting history and explanation of gold as a commodity. I don't want to explicitly dispense investment advice, but I do think gold is (at best) a dubious asset for investment purposes and that everyone should calm down and think long and hard about how they're allocating their capital before rushing blindly to buy gold (as an inflation "hedge," as an "investment," or for any reason other than enjoying its aesthetics or to speculate on its price movement).
YTD (through Nov.10) global equity returns -- pretty amazing...
Taxing college students -- in a slowly dying Rust Belt city, no less...I can't think of a dumber idea
Gold - a six thousand year-old bubble
November 8, 2009 6:02pm
Gold is unlike any other commodity. It is costly to extract from the earth and to refine to a reasonable degree of purity. It is costly to store. It has no remaining uses as a producer good - equivalent or superior alternatives exist for all its industrial uses. It may have some value as a consumer good - somewhat surprisingly people like to attach it to their earlobes or nostrils or to hang it around their necks. I have always considered it a rather vulgar metal, made for the Saturday Night Fever crowd, all shiny and in-your-face, as opposed to the much classier silver, but de gustibus… .
The total stock of ‘above-ground’ gold is about 160,000 metric tonnes (a metric ton is 2,204 lbs. or 35,264 oz, for those of a non-decimal mind-set). About 50 percent of this existing stock of above-ground gold is kept as a pure store of value (for investment purposes), most likely somewhere below-ground, for security reasons. The other 50 percent exists as jewellery. I would argue that most of this jewellery demand is simply small-scale store of value (investment) demand by households, rather than demand driven by aesthetic considerations or other intrinsic sources of joy associated with having gold hanging from your extremities.
From a social perspective, gold held by central banks as part of their foreign exchange reserves is a barbarous relic (Keynes used the expression to refer to the Gold Standard, but close enough is close enough). The same holds for gold held idle in private vaults as a store of value. The cost and waste involved in getting the gold out of the ground only to but it back under ground in secure vaults is considerable. Mining the ore is environmentally damaging, especially if it involves open pit mining. Refining the gold causes further environmental risks. Historically, gold was extracted from its ores by using mercury, a toxic heavy metal, much of which was released into the atmosphere. Today, cyanide is used instead. While cyanide, another toxic substance, is broken down in the environment, cyanide spills (which occur regularly) can wipe out life in the affected bodies of water. Runoff from the mine or tailing piles can occur long after mining has ceased.
Even though, from a social efficiency perspective, the mining of new gold and the costly storage of existing gold for investment purposes are wasteful activities, they may be individually rational. There is no invisible hand here (or elsewhere) to ensure that the aggregation of individually rational behaviour adds up to anything desirable or sensible.
Because to a reasonable first approximation gold has no intrinsic value as a consumption good or a producer good, it is an example of what I call a fiat (physical) commodity. You will be familiar with fiat currency. Unlike what Wikipedia says on the subject, the essence of fiat money is not that it is money declared by a government to be legal tender. It need not derive its value from the government demanding it in payment of taxes or insisting it should be accepted within the national jurisdiction in settlement of debt. Instead the defining property of fiat money is that it has no intrinsic value and derives any value it has only from the shared belief by a sufficient number of economic actors that it has that value.
The “let it be done” literal meaning of the Latin ‘fiat’ should be taken in the third sense given by the Online Dictionary: 1.official sanction; authoritative permission; 2. an arbitrary order or decree; 3. Chiefly literary any command, decision, or act of will that brings something about.
The act of will in question is the collective attribution of value to something without intrinsic value. Being declared legal tender by a government may help achieving that status, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Gold is very close therefore to the stone money of the Isle of Yap. This stone money, known as Rai, consists of large doughnut-shaped, carved disks, consisting usually of calcite, that can be up to 4 m (12 ft) in diameter, although most are much smaller. Apparently, the total stock of Rai cannot be augmented any further. It also depreciates very slowly. This intrinsically useless form of money in the Isle of Yap is in all essential respects equivalent to gold today in the wider world. Another example would be pet rocks, as long as the rock in question is rare and costly to get into its final shape.
Gold has become a fiat commodity or a fiat commodity currency, just as the US $, the euro, the pound sterling and the yen (and a couple of hundred other currencies) are fiat paper currencies. The main differences between them are that gold is very costly to produce, while the production of additional paper money has an extremely low marginal cost. If we count the deposits of commercial banks with the central banks, which together with currency in circulation make up the monetary base, as fiat money, then the incremental cost of fiat base money creation is zero.
The outstanding stock of physical gold, at 160,000 tonnes or thereabouts, is very large relative to the maximum amount of new gold that can be mined and refined during a year. The short-run supply curve of new gold is steep and becomes vertical at a volume of production that is small relative to the oustanding stock (annual gold production has been declining from a peak of just over 2,500 tonnes in 2001 to 2330 tonnes in 2008 - only 1.5% of the outstanding stock).[1]
The good news for gold bugs
Since gold is a fiat commodity currency, its value will be determined largely by its attractiveness relative to other fiat currencies - the fiat paper currencies issued by central banks. Gold should not be analysed as one of a set of intrinsically valuable commodities (silver, iron, lead, zinc, platinum, aluminium, titanium etc. etc.) but as part of a set of intrinsically useless and valueless fiat currencies - the US dollar, the yen, the yuan, the euro, sterling, the rupee, the rouble etc. etc.). It is therefore in times that market participants are nervous about the future value of most other fiat currencies, that gold will be at its most attractive.
Such a time is what we are going through now. Many systemically important central banks have expanded their base money stocks and balance sheets massively. The Fed has doubled the size of its balance sheet. The Bank of England has tripled the size of its balance sheet. Many central banks have bought vast amounts of public debt. In the UK, out of the initial £175 bn of quantitative easing, as much as £173 was spent on gilts. The Fed has purchased only about €300 bn worth of Treasury securities, but has acquired a much larger amount of Treasury-guaranteed agency debt.
Although in most of the overdeveloped world (except the UK), deflation is the immediate threat, there is a medium and long-term threat of much higher inflation in all countries with enlarged central bank balance sheets and the prospect of large future fiscal deficits. The great advantage to investors of gold is that, although it is not intrinsically valuable, it is very costly to increase its stock. The tap can be opened at the drop of a hat for fiat paper and electronic currency. The tap produces never more than a trickle in the case of gold.
So when fiscal incontinence threatens price stability in some of the main industrial countries (especially the US and the UK) because the central banks in these countries may be forced to monetise both the stock and large new net flows of public debt, the one fiat money whose quantity cannot be varied at will by a monetary authority will do well. We see that with gold today. We also see that, to a lesser degree, in the strength of the euro. The ECB is by far the most independent of the leading central banks. They also have a heavily asymmetric de-facto interpretation of price stability: inflation is unacceptable, deflation is OK.
So until the risk of serious inflation is removed from the medium-term outlook for the US, the UK and other fiat currencies, gold will be a relatively attractive store of value despite the cost of storing it.
The gold bug’s nightmare
An economy with fiat money can have many different equilibria. To make the point as clearly and simply as possible, consider a stationary economy. Population, endowments, technology, government spending, taxes and preferences are constant. The government budget is balanced. Prices are flexible. There is a constant stock of fiat money (which could be paper money, gold, Rai or pet rocks. This fiat money is perfectly durable and therefore can serve as a store of value. It pays no interest. Assume that, for whatever reason, society prefers it (or even has decided to require) it as a medium of exchange or means of payment.
With a bit of further work, such an economy will have an equilibrium with a positive, constant price of money (a constant general price level). Economists call this the fundamental equilibrium. This stationary economy will, however, also have many other (in fact infinitely many other) non-stationary equilibria, called (speculative) bubbles. They always have equilibria in which the value of money starts at a positive value but falls steadily towards zero - the general price level rises without bound even though the quantity of money is constant. The holders of money anticipate the future inflation and reduce the real stock of money balances they want to hold. This further increases the actual and expected rate of inflation, and the real stock of money balances goes to zero: the general price level goes to infinity or the price of money goes to zero. We have Zimbabwe.
What is often ignored is that this economy has an equilibrium that is even more ‘fundamental’ than the fundamental equilibrium. That is the equilibrium in which the price of money is zero in every period, not just in the long run (as with the speculative inflationary bubble equilibria). Remember, fiat money, including gold, is intrinsically useless. It has value only because people believe it to have value. If everyone expects that money will have no value in the next period, it will have no value this period, because no-one will be willing to take receipt of money to carry it into the next period where it will be valueless. So fiat money with a zero value is always an (unfortunate) fundamental equilibrium.
I would actually call it the only fundamental equilibrium. All other equilibria with a positive price of money - an asset with no intrinsic value - are benign (relatively speaking) bubbles. The constant price of money (constant general price level) equilibrium is also a bubble, based entirely on belief and trust - a beneficial bootstrap equilibrium, lifting itself by its hair, like the Baron von Münchhausen.
In a world with multiple fiat moneys, the zero value of money equilibrium lurks for each of the fiat currencies, including gold. Admittedly, as regards gold, so far so good. Gold has positive value. It has had positive value for nigh-on 6000 years. That must make it the longest-lasting bubble in human history.
I don’t want to argue with a 6000-year old bubble. It may well be good for another 6000 years. Its value may go from $1,100 per fine ounce to $1,500 or $5,000 for all I know. But I would not invest more than a sliver of my wealth into something without intrinsic value, something whose positive value is based on nothing more than a set of self-confirming beliefs.
[1] Since gold is very durable, it is reasonable to assume that virtually all the gold that was ever refined is still out there somewhere. There is no gold ‘consumption’, just its transformation into jewellery and no significant depreciation of the stock.
135% RSX Market Vectors Russia ETF Trust 122% EWZ Ishares Msci Brazil Index Fund 116% TKF Turkish Investment Fund Inc 96% IF Indonesia Fund 96% GXG Global X/InterBolsa FTSE Colombia 20 ETF 96% EWS Singapore Fund 93% HAO Claymore AlphaShares China Small Cap Index 92% INP iPath MSCI India Index ETN 92% INP Ipath Msci India Index Etn 76% IDX Market Vectors Indonesia Index ETF 76% ECH iShares MSCI Chile Investable Mkt Idx 73% EWO Ishares Msci Austria Index Fund 72% EIS iShares MSCI Israel Cap Invest Mkt Index 67% EWD Ishares Msci Sweden Index Fund 66% IRL New Ireland Fund 65% ISR iShares MSCI South Korea Index 65% EWY Ishares Msci-south Korea Index Fund 63% EWT iShares MSCI Taiwan Index 53% EWM iShares MSCI Malaysia Index 49% EWC Ishares Msci Canada Index Fund 48% EZA Ishares Msci South Africa Index Fund 46% EWW iShares MSCI Mexico Investable Mkt Idx 42% EWN Ishares Msci Netherlands Index Fund 40% EWP Spain Fund 39% EWU Ishares Msci United Kingdom Index Fund 30% EWQ Ishares Msci France Index Fund 27% EWI Ishares Msci Italy Index Fund 24% SPY SPDR S&P 500 (ETF) 23% EWL Ishares Msci Switzerland Index Fund 21% EWG Ishares Msci Germany Index Fund 2% EWJ iShares MSCI Chile Investable Mkt Idx
Pittsburgh Pushes Tax on College Students
Local Colleges Give Poor Grades to Proposal by Mayor Ravenstahl That Aims to Raise Money to Alleviate City's Pension Woes
By KRIS MAHER
PITTSBURGH -- Facing big unfunded pension liabilities for city workers, Pittsburgh is proposing what appears to be a one-of-a-kind 1% tuition tax on local university and college students, who claim the tax is illegal and unfair.
More than 100 students filled Pittsburgh City Council chambers Monday morning, many bearing signs like "No Taxation Without Representation" to protest the tax, which, if passed this week, could become effective next year.
"This is going to be a double taxation of students in the city," said Daniel Jimenez, 27 years old, a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh, who pays property taxes on a home he bought in 2004.
The tuition tax, which would raise an estimated $16 million, threatens to drive a wedge between the city and its universities, which have been credited with fueling much of Pittsburgh's economic transformation from an industrial city to an education and medical-services center.
The cash-strapped city, which has 85,000 students at its 10 universities and colleges, including top-ranked engineering school Carnegie Mellon University, says it needs the tax to help cover a $600 million pension-fund shortfall and keep several branches of the Carnegie Library system open.
The "Post Secondary Education Privilege Tax" or "Fair Share Tax" is justified, the city argues, because the students use city services -- roads, police and fire protection -- and should pay for them. Moreover, the city contends that the tuition tax, which would range from $27 for students attending Community College of Allegheny County to $400 for those attending Carnegie Mellon, amounts to a small charge for services.
"This is really not a difficult thing for folks to pay when they're receiving services" from police and fire departments, among others, said Yarone Zober, chief of staff for Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, who proposed the tax Nov. 9.
University presidents and students say they already inject millions into the city's economy, and that the tax could hurt future enrollment. The Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education, representing the 10 schools, says 46,000 of the 85,000 students live in the city and pay commuter, parking and entertainment taxes.
Mary Hines, chair of the council and president of Carlow University, claims the tax is really aimed at forcing the universities to pay more into a public-service fund. In recent years, the universities have contributed several million dollars on a voluntary basis to help shore up the city's finances. The council is lobbying state lawmakers to prohibit the taxation of students statewide, and also plans to challenge the tax, if passed, in courts.
Douglas Smith, a Pittsburgh-based partner with Jackson Lewis LLP, said he doubted whether the city could tax students simply because they attended school in the city. "I think there's a real question about whether mere presence is enough to levy a tax," he said. He also questioned whether a CMU student could be taxed more than a community-college student for the same service.
Joseph C. Bright, a Philadelphia tax attorney retained by the city, said there was no question the city could impose the tax. "The state has delegated broad taxing authority to lots of municipalities in Pennsylvania," he said. Generally, cities are only prohibited from taxing anything that the commonwealth already taxes, such as alcohol, he said.
Cities across the country are grappling with rising costs and lower revenues from income and property taxes. For the most part, they are reluctant to raise income or property taxes, fearing it would drive more people beyond city limits, further compounding their fiscal troubles.
One of the problems facing Pittsburgh, and other municipalities with a large presence of nonprofit institutions, is that much of the property within city limits is tax-exempt. Pittsburgh officials say about 40% of its property is tax-exempt.
Ms. Hines, of the higher education council, said the 10 schools, though exempt from property taxes, paid more than $20 million in 2008 in other taxes, including on water use and on tickets to college football games.
Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A5