Covid

A series of three blog posts about the governments response to Covid:

 https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/part-1-the-ugly-corrupt-lie-of-the-experimental-covid-jab/

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/part-2-how-the-liars-spread-the-ugly-corrupt-lie-of-the-covid-jab/

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/part-3-against-the-covid-liars-and-their-strong-arm-edicts-the-wheels-of-justice-are-grinding-forward-slowly/

Scammers

Here is an interesting article about the military-romantic scam that is run out of Africa and that cost gullible American women millions of dollars. The author was able to upload spyware onto their computers and thus trace everything they were doing. My favorite quote from the article:

An interesting anomaly that was later confirmed to be a wide scale trend was the frequent appearance of President Obama’s picture in many of the scammer workspace images (Image 21). Seventeen out of forty workspace images exhibited this trend. It turns out that BHO is considered to be the patron saint of the scammer industry in Nigeria and Ghana and is viewed as the ultimate scamming success story that everyone is trying to emulate.

The Check Tax

From the NBER Reporter Fall 1995 page 31, summarizing William D, Lastrapes and George Selgin, University of Georgia, “The Check Tax and The Great Contraction”, a paper delivered at the Workshop on Macroeconomic History, Oct 13 In Cambridge, Mass.

“Although its role has been overlooked by monetary historians, a two cent tax on bank checks effective from Jun 1932 through December 1935 appears to have been an important contributory factor to the periods severe monetary contraction. According to estimates by Lastrapes and Selgin, the tax accounted for between 11 percent and 17 percent of the total increase in the ratio of currency to demand deposits and for between 11 percent and 19 percent of the total decline in M1 between October 1930 and March 1933. The contractionary consequences of the check tax had been anticipated by many legislators, but they were unable to prevent the measure from being included in the Revenue Act fl 1931.”

The resulting paper can be found at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=33320

I have read a fair amount about monetary history and the Great Depression and I do not recall hearing about the check tax.

(This piece is the result of reading and discarding old publications of the NBER.)

Cereal crops vs root crops in the development of civilization

Did the potato and other root crops hinder the development of complex societies among those who cultivated it? A group of economists present a case that they did in a recent article, "The sinister, secret history of a food that everybody loves," in the Washington Post. Their thesis in short is that when cereal grains are harvested at the end of a growing season their storage attracts thieves. Those who grow the crop want it protected. Because the stored crop is easily taxed, it encourages the rise of a protector class. Thus cereal crops provide both the demand for protection and the supply of protection. Root crops, on the other hand, are not harvested and stored but are dug and used as needed. Without storage bins full of wealth, there is less temptation for thieves because they would have work digging a crop and they cannot store it. Hence, the demand for protection is less and the way to finance that protection is also more difficult. The result is that societies that grew cereal crops developed complexity and hierarchy that the societies that grew root crops did not.

This is a logical way for economists to view the issue. Not all anthropologists are convinced.

The science was settled

The Sugar Conspiracy is a long article that argues that the epidemic of obesity was caused by nutritionists, a group that has for years almost unanimously promoted a low-fat and therefore a high carbohydrate diet: "Harder, too, to deflect or smother the charge that the promotion of low-fat diets was a 40-year fad, with disastrous outcomes, conceived of, authorised, and policed by nutritionists."

What happened in nutrition is reminder that the process of science is not the pure pursuit of truth that some think it is and that peer review is not a guarantee of quality. Peer review can be stifle criticism and protect incumbent theories from evidence. Personalities, reputations, and politics play important roles in science and incentives matter. From the article: "When I asked Lustig why he was the first researcher in years to focus on the dangers of sugar, he answered: 'John Yudkin. They took him down so severely – so severely – that nobody wanted to attempt it on their own.'"

Let's repeal the law of supply and demand

Found on Powerline:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/03/the-best-sanders-endorsement-yet.php

Betty Glan

In The Forgotten Man (HarperCollins, 2007) author Amity Shlaes recounts a visit to the USSR in 1927 by a group of American intellectuals including Paul Douglas, economist and future Illinois Senator. After Douglas gave a talk at a factory, the workers started chanting "Sacco and Vanzetti," the names of two anarchists who had been convicted of terrorism and recently executed in the U.S. Their execution had been used by the Soviet Union for propaganda to denigrate the U.S. Although sympathetic to the Sacco-Vanzetti cause, Douglas pushed back, replying that Sacco and Vanzetti had had the benefit of a full legal defense. He contrasted their treatment with that of two local bank clerks he had heard about. They had been arrested at two in the morning, sentenced at four, and executed at six. 

What Douglas would remember from the incident was a young woman named Betty Glan who came forward and told him, "You talk only about individual justice. This is a bourgeois ideal." They talked about an hour, and on leaving, Ms Glan remarked, "History will prove us right and you wrong." (p 75)

A decade passed and Betty Glan reappears:

"The next year Douglas would happen to be reading an item in the New York Times about a Trotskyite leader whom the Russian secret police had executed, and recognized the name with a start: Betty Glan. It was the Russian woman who had come up to him on his 1927 tour. Murdering one's corevolutionists seemed the very opposite of the liberalism the American Left saw as part of the spirit of revolution. What was the point of revolution, anywhere, if it led to this?" (p 321)

When I read this account I wondered if we should feel sorry for people like Betty Glan who in their quest to do good actually support and promote evil that ultimately consumes them. Glan had no sympathy for the bank clerks who were summarily executed because it was done for a cause that she thought would bring heaven on earth. Why should we have any sympathy for her when she was executed in the same way? We can feel sorry that the Betty Glans of the world stupidly align themselves with evil, but should we feel more?

A quote about Argentina

"For example in the 1920s, Argentina had a larger market capitalization than did the United Kingdom. However, its equity maraket all but disappeared by the 1930s." (Source: Campbell R Harvey, "The Future of Investments in Emerging Markets," NBER Reporter, Summer 1998, p 6.)

Argentina was doing something right early in its history but then changed course and has never been able to find its way back to first-world status.

Reflections on The Big Short by Michael Lewis

In The Big Short Michael Lewis tells the story of the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 from the point of view of several people who saw it coming and tried to find ways to profit from it. The story involves complex financial contracts and activities such as asset-backed bonds, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit default swaps, and short selling. Lewis skillfully integrates the explanation of these concepts with his tale of individuals who recognized that bonds backed by subprime mortgages (mortgages made to people with poor credit scores) would fail. As a result, the reader is not overwhelmed with technical details of complex concepts.

After reading how those who bet against the market were vindicated, several messages should remain with readers. The experts and very smart people at the center of this market had no clue as to what would happen even though the end outcome was obvious in hindsight. When those making the loans no longer had to worry about whether the loans would be repaid, the smart people should have recognized that loan originators no longer had an incentive to worry about loan quality, and thus quality would inevitably fall, ultimately resulting in high defaults. Their assumption that housing prices would only rise was reckless. It was not the smart insiders and experts who first recognized that the market was flawed. Outsiders, people often on the fringes of investing, like a California MD with Asperger's syndrome, were the first to understand the situation. Although Lewis does not explore why the insiders were so blind, it seems obvious that group thinking and wishful thinking played huge roles. The insiders had found a way to make vast amounts of money and they wanted to believe that it was sustainable, so they did. Being smart does not immunize one from self deception--rather the hubris of smart people may make them more susceptible.

The pessimists of the story, who were the realists, wanted to bet against subprime mortgage-backed securities, but they struggled to find a way to do so. Eventually they discovered credit default swaps, which in simple terms are insurance policies on bond. As long as the bond is alive, the holder of the insurance policy must pay premiums. When the bond dies or is severely injured, the owner of the policy can collect. One does not need to actually hold the bonds to have an insurance policy on them. Further, it does not seem that this way of "shorting" the market has any corrective effect, unlike in the stock market, where shorting a stock helps drive the price down.

Why were large financial institutions willing to sell these insurance policies? Again, the experts on Wall Street did not realize how risky these bonds were. In part that was because the rating agencies--Moody's, S&P, and Fitch--said they were safe. They rated the bonds based on models, and those models were based on the assumption that pooling assets reduces risk because though some will fail, most will not. That assumption is valid when the performance of assets is uncorrelated, that is, when what happens to one is independent of what happens to others, the way a second coin flip does not depend on the results of a first coin flip. When the assets are correlated, so that they tend to move together, diversification may not reduce risk. The models were flawed and the very smart people on Wall Street gamed them to get alchemy: lead was certified as gold.

When the subprime mortgages finally crashed the world-wide financial markets, those who had bet against the subprime bonds walked away rich. But so too did those who had been originating, packaging, and selling the toxic financial instruments that had wreaked havoc. The U.S. government, fearful of total economic collapse, bailed out poorly run institutions and those who had caused the carnage walked away whole. Lewis does not blame the debacle on a lack of government regulation--if those at the center of the market did not understand what was happening, there is no chance that government bureaucrats would have. Rather he stresses the importance of incentives. When investment banks were organized as partnerships, the partners would suffer huge financial losses if the firm failed, so they worried a great deal about risk. When stockholders own the financial institution, managers have incentives to worry about the short run and not so much about risk and the long run. Top managers can and do walk away from companies that they have ruined with their wealth intact; life is not fair.

The Big Short views the collapse of the market for mortgage-backed securities from a narrow perspective. Yet it is one of the best books I have read on the episode and certainly the most entertaining.

Review of Flash Boys by Micheal Lewis

No one matches Michael Lewis' ability to take an arcane topic of finance and use it to build a narrative that is not only educational, but also a pleasure and a joy to read. In Flash Boys the arcane topic is the way that computer geeks have been able to game the newly computerized financial markets, extracting billions of dollars from investors large and small. As in his other books, he uses the experiences of real people to build the narrative, and his main character in this book is a Brad Katsuyama, who begins the story as a stock trader at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).

In 2006 Katsuyama noticed an anomaly in the market. He could see bids and offers in a variety of the different stock markets, but when he tried to make a trade, that stable market disappeared as if someone knew what he wanted to do before he acted. What the reader needs to know is that by 2006 the old world of individuals trading stocks on the floor of the stock exchange had disappeared, replaced by computers that matched buy and sell orders. Further, the market had fragmented, so that in addition to the old NYSE, NASDAQ, and American Stock Market, there were a dozen other markets, all matching orders with computers.

Brad Katsuyama and the reader gradually learn that high-frequency traders, doing all their trading using computer programs, had learned how to rig the new market where a few milliseconds, less than the blink of a human eye, was enough time for a computer to execute many trades. What the high-frequency traders discovered is that a buy or sell order did not arrive at all the computerized exchanges at the same time and the delay allowed for an opportunity to "front run" it. Suppose an investor wanted to buy a large block of stock and looking at the market saw that plenty of shares were offered at the various computerized exchanges. The high-frequency traders would offer a small block on the first exchange at which the order arrived and this would allow them to see what the trader wanted to do. The high-frequency traders would use this information to race to the other markets to buy up the stock before the investor's order arrived. They would then sell those shares at a higher price to the investor. Although this may sound fantastic and impossible, it became the main activity for the high-frequency traders.

To be able to game the market in this way, speed was everything. You wanted your trading computers to be as close to the market matching computers as possible, and the high-frequency traders paid the exchanges to allow their computers to be in the same building as the computers of the exchange. The price of having a company's computer in the building depended on how close it was to the computer that ran the market. The high-frequency traders also paid to get the fastest communications links because the time that it took light to travel a hundred feet could make the difference between making money and being too late to the deal.

Lewis explores all this from the view of traders trying to discover what was happening to their trades. It would have been even more interesting, perhaps, to have traveled with those who discovered how to rig the system, but they have an incentive to remain silent. After all, a reason for their success was that people did not understand what they were doing. (And even after the outsiders understood, they were often astounded that what was being done was even technically possible.)

Eventually RBC developed a software program that neutralized the high-frequency traders by sending orders to the various exchanges with time lags so that all the orders would arrive at the various exchanges simultaneously. This prevented the high-frequency traders from using their order information on one exchange to exploit them on other exchanges.

After the reader discovers that the markets are rigged, an expected reaction would be that the government needs to regulate more. Lewis dismisses this idea using one of the characters who researches scandals on Wall Street and finds "[e]very systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice....[T]he regulators might solve the narrow problem of front-running in the stock market by high-frequency traders, but whatever they did to solve the problem would create yet another opportunity for financial intermediaries to make money at the expense of investors." (p. 101) The current regulation that was being exploited was Regulation National Market System, passed by the SEC in 2005 and implemented in 2007 in response to abuses that surfaced in 2004.

The last part of the book describes the efforts of Brad Katsuyama to establish a new exchange, the IEX, that would be fair and constructed in a way that would not be gamed by the high-frequency traders. His main obstacle was that so many of the big players had a stake in the existing system. The exchanges made lots of money by selling fast access to the high-frequency traders. The big banks and brokerages with access to the markets made money both by establishing their own proprietary trading areas, called dark pools, and also by selling information to the high-frequency traders. However, large investors such as mutual funds were eager for this kind of exchange and by the end of the book the IEX has been launched. It had even attracted favorable attention from Goldman Sachs, where some executives thought a fairer market was in their long-term interest and who believed they could never really compete with the high-frequency traders.

Why does it all matter? The electronic markets in theory should be matching buyers and sellers so that all the benefits of the exchange accrue to them. However, the high-frequency traders have found a way to get between the buyers and sellers, extracting a bit of the gains for themselves while providing no benefit to anyone else. This is a tax on capital that takes billions of dollars from the financial markets and thereby make them less efficient in allocating capital to its most productive uses. (On the other hand, some of the fees to banks and exchanges may allow them to keep user fees lower than they would otherwise be, so some the money extracted from the investors may provide benefits.)

I highly recommend the book. Michael Lewis is an unique talent, one who can clearly explain difficult economic and financial concepts in an entertaining and engaging way.