Math for Economists, The ideal economic system

In the early 1990s I know that I went through a number of books and articles on the mathematics of feedback processes, Cedric, but my memory has never been very good and I cannot remember titles. You might want to do searches on words like “reflexivity”, “feedback”, and “pro-cyclical” and see what you get. One suggestion however: if you are interested in this topic mainly because you want to improve your understanding of finance and economics, you probably should focus on trying to understand as intuitively as possible the basic mathematics of how these things work, and not worry too much about taking the mathematics too far. Usually, as these feedback processes occur in the real world, we simply don’t have data with high enough levels of precision for us to do very sophisticated modelling and, more importantly, the ways these processes occur can be so complex and with so many moving parts that it is hard enough just to see all the relevant mechanisms, let alone model them accurately. But once you get the basic intuition of how feedback mechanisms work, both positive feedback in which volatility is exacerbated and negative feedback in which it is muted, you will start to see them everywhere.

My second suggestion is on how you incorporate them into your thinking. We know that increasing or reducing volatility affects value, partly because we value stability, of course, but also because there are “breaking points” at which the changes in value are discontinuous. To put it in a less abstract example, if I have assets and debt, and the value of one or both sides of my balance sheet is volatile, the range of outcomes when my assets are worth more than my liabilities might be very different from the range of outcomes when my assets are worth less than my liabilities. As you know almost any time there is a sharp discontinuity, which I call “a kink in the payout curve” in my classes, you can probably find one or more implied options buried in there. This means that you can model the impact of volatility on changes in value by using basic option theory, although once again these are complex “options” with many moving parts (and usually with no specified expiry date) and so there is little additional value in applying option theory much beyond the basics.

If you train yourself to identify feedback mechanisms and implied options, I promise you will find them everywhere, and they will, I think, profoundly improve your ability to understand the economy as a system. Because so few economists seem to think this way, it will be to your great advantage if you do and you can find yourself making predictions that seem crazy to most people but almost inevitable to you. But the key, and this is probably true much more widely, is to get a deep and intuitive understanding of the basics (feedback loops, options, and probability theory) and not worry too much about knowing the advanced stuff. This may seem like a strange thing to say, but it is much, much easier to find people who understand the advanced stuff than it is to find people who understand the basic stuff intuitively.

I am not sure you can design “just right” growth. Perhaps you can in principle design a system of incentives such that businesses and individuals are more likely to take advantage of existing resources in the most productive way, and this must include financing mechanisms and property rights that maximize the social value of intellectual and physical property while at the same time maximizing incentives to create more productive intellectual and physical property. Some people argue that this means effectively creating the ideal Adam-Smith economy of an infinite number of competitive agents who are free to innovate, none of whom, including the government, are important enough to create institutional distortions. But you quickly realize that these are mutually contradictory goals: Eliminate all institutional distortions and you eliminate the ability to enforce property rights, and while this might increase the value of the some or most of the existing stock of assets, it would also probably reduce the future value of assets by, among other things, reducing innovation and investment aimed at improving capital stock. Eliminate all institutional distortions and you also eliminate rules that prevent businesses from lying or otherwise taking advantage of credibility generated by someone else, and if you reply that requiring total transparency might solve this problem, then you need an agent powerful enough to enforce transparency. Eliminate all institutional distortions and you make it impossible, or at least much harder, to protect commonwealth assets or to invest in projects that create externalities that are greater than the ability to capture those externalities — for example it is hard to capture the full social value of creating a first-rate primary education system, or enforcing an optimal pricing structure in any industry with returns to scale.

But once you agree that certain institutional distortions are good for long term value creation then you face the problem that the economy is a dynamic system with strong learning capacity, so that even if you could design the optimal set of institutional distortions, it would almost immediately become sub-optimal as the economy adapted and developed. This brings us back to Minsky when we think of the financial sector. The optimal financial sector must allow for enough value destruction to impose discipline, but not too much, and as the economy evolves from the agricultural economy of mid-19th-century California or the industrial economy of mid-19th Century New York to the information economy of early 21st century California or the creative/design economy of early 21st Century New York, is it even conceivable that the financial system that created the optimal amount of value destruction for the former will also create the optimal amount for the latter?

I will not even pretend that I know the answer, but remember that while there are clearly advantages to economic stability, and we know the many ways in which economic and financial instability can be extremely damaging to wealth creation, on the other hand in the past two centuries the periods of greatest technological innovation were almost always also periods of financial excess, asset bubbles, and foolish capital misallocation, and there is some evidence that from the Renaissance onwards, the fastest growing countries and regions in Europe and North America were never those that enjoyed the most stable financial sectors or even the most stable currency systems, but were in fact countries or regions that were relatively poorly served by their financial and monetary systems (for example few have been able to explain why the US was the most astonishingly productive country in a period of great economic advances for Europe and North America even though the US probably had the most unstable financial sector of any major rich country and a currency system that barely functioned to maintain the value of savings, and this outperforming economy and under-performing financial and monetary system held even against British colonies that were similarly endowed socially, legally, culturally, and physically, like Canada and Australia).

America's Nightmare as The Fallen Angel

Many fear that the current deflation outbreak will turn into a “vicious circle of deflation,” in which consumption is postponed and investment plans are curtailed in anticipation of lower prices. These behaviors contribute to a further drop in demand and additional reductions in prices.

Deflation is misunderstood
The first part is correct "Consumption is postponed and investment plans curtailed" but is it

1) in anticipation of lower prices
2) in anticipation of job losses, not getting social security payment, not saving enough for retirement

there are very different explanations for consumer behavior here. 

One claims that future liabilities (expenses) will be lower if I wait, the other is based off expectations of future cash flow from my assets (in essence I've written down my social security assets and goodwill and must increase savings, lower expenses to meet future spending).
And is it really only fear itself  and something far fetched or is it something that happens all the time all over the world? 

Take what's being asked of the Greeks and their 'secure' retirement funds:

“Pensions should not be higher of 53% of the salary due to the financial situation of the social security funds.”

Pension for a civil servant (director, 37 years of work) should come down to €900 from €1,386 today after the pension cuts during the austerity years.

Pension for private sector – IKA insurer (37 years of work, 11,000 IKA stamps) and salary €2,300 should come down to €1,250 from €1,452 today after the austerity cuts. (examples* via here)

Of course, with the PSI in March 2012, Greece’s social security funds suffered a huge slap in their deposits in Greek bonds.

There's no confidence that the future will provide sufficient opportunities, there's no hope of a brighter tomorrow. The most powerful country the world has ever seen, slouched over on its mound of treasures, angry, divided and hopeless.

I agree with someone at the FED?

“If consumer behaviour is still being impacted by the experience of the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and the painfully slow recovery, then it is possible that the economy will not be as robust as many economic models would suggest, because the models do not take into account this behavioural change,” Eric Rosengren said.

How do you inspire confidence in the future? How does one unite a divided country and steer it towards a common productive goal? What has been the most effective way to redistribute wealth and lower inequality? What can bring back millions of manufacturing jobs in less than a year?

War...preferably between nations with great wealth that will purchase from the US, a repeat of WW2. perhaps SE Asia, Japan vs China? Maybe Saudi Arabia vs Iran? Maybe Europe vs Russia? the possibilities are endless.

The change in mindset (across the populace and as reflected in our congress, senate and white house) and wealth redistribution are the hardest tasks to accomplish and have a longer impact than the war itself.

The next bubble: snow tension cracks

Buybacks in US
“Buybacks have been a tremendous support for US equities,” says Orrin Sharp-Pierson, a strategist at BNP Paribas. Referencing the efforts of aggressive central bank policy, he adds: “It’s been like quantitative easing directly on equities, $40bn-$50bn per month.

Companies have been a key source of support in recent years as investors have stepped back from buying equities. Since the start of 2010, companies have spent $3.3tn on share buybacks and dividends, as the US economy has recovered and investors sought blue-chip names with stable and growing returns.

Over the past five years, US investors have poured $301.5bn into domestic equity exchange traded funds, data from XTF.com shows. However, with redemptions of $411.1bn from US stock mutual funds over the same period, there has been a shortfall of more than $100bn between the two, according to the Investment Company Institute.

Negative Bond Yields in Europe via QE
Negative bond yields cause the value of liabilities to balloon and the adverse impact on the pension fund’s solvency will tend to outweigh any benefit from QE on the value of the asset.

The risk is that cheap borrowing will finance suboptimal investments, whether in fixed assets or expensive share buybacks in a frothy equity market. At the same time the debtors’ paradise keeps zombie banks afloat and allows them to roll over the debts of zombie companies. That in turn holds back productivity growth.

US QE

China debt-fueled expansion

This ghost that runs after you, my brother, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones?

"Higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts. This ghost that runs after you, my brother, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones? " - Nietzsche

This ghost that runs after me, 
My brother, has caught me

My flesh and bones, my daughter
You are beyond me, more beautiful
An evolution and a leap ahead

Still warm from the blaze of the eternal
Zlatica defying the Fates
Ascending from the realm of the impossible
From ghost to flesh



Hours from the greatest country on earth
The streets of my youth will forever be memories
I am banished and excommunicated in modern times
I have no political enemy, the city itself warns me
Plagued with faceless, warped and savage brothers
Never to hold my grandmother again
Or to introduce her to her grand-daughter

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the death of a company & collapse of rouble

O

What my eye did when #Ebola hit dallas pic.twitter.com/V41mwTWukP
— October 6 (@Tank_2015) October 9, 2014

Richmond Fed president Jeffrey Lacker "The Fed’s Mortgage Favoritism"

Modern central banks enjoy extraordinary independence, typically operating free from political interference. That has proved critical for price stability in recent decades, but it puts central banks in a perpetually precarious position. Central-bank legitimacy will wane without boundaries on tools used for credit-market intervention.

Since 2009 the Fed has acquired $1.7 trillion in mortgage-backed securities underwritten by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , the mortgage companies now under government conservatorship. Housing finance was at the heart of the financial crisis, and these purchases began in early 2009 out of concern for the stability of the housing-finance system. Mortgage markets have since stabilized, but the purchases have resumed, with more than $800 billion accumulated since September 2012.

We were skeptical of the need for the purchase of mortgage assets, even in 2009, believing that the Fed could achieve its goals through the purchase of Treasury securities alone. Now, as the Fed looks to raise the federal-funds rate and other short-term interest rates to more normal levels, that normalization should include a plan to sell these assets at a predictable pace, so that we can minimize our distortion of credit markets. The Federal Open Market Committee’s recent statement of normalization principles did not include such a plan. For this reason, the first author, an FOMC participant, was unwilling to support the principles.

The Fed’s MBS holdings go well beyond what is required to conduct monetary policy, even with interest rates near zero. The Federal Reserve has two main policy mandates: price stability and maximum employment. In the past, the pursuit of higher employment has sometimes led the Fed (and other central banks) to sacrifice monetary stability for the short-term employment gains that easier policy can provide. This sacrifice can bring unfortunate consequences such as the double-digit inflation seen in the 1960s and 1970s.

But during the Great Moderation—the period of relatively favorable economic conditions in the 1980s and 1990s—a consensus emerged that, over time, the central bank’s effect on employment and other real economic variables is limited. Instead, the central bank’s unique capability is to anchor the longer-term behavior of the price level. Governments came to see that entrusting monetary policy to an institution with substantial day-to-day independence could help overcome the inflationary bias that short-term electoral pressures can impart.

The independence of the central bank cannot be boundless, however. In a democracy, the central bank must be accountable for performance against its legislated macroeconomic goals. What is essential for operational independence is the central bank’s ability to manage the quantity of money it supplies—that is, the monetary liabilities on its balance sheet—because this is how modern central banks influence short-term interest rates.

A balance sheet has two sides, though, and it is the asset side that can be problematic. When the Fed buys Treasury securities, any interest-rate effects will flow evenly to all private borrowers, since all credit markets are ultimately linked to the risk-free yields on Treasurys. But when the central bank buys private assets, it can tilt the playing field toward some borrowers at the expense of others, affecting the allocation of credit.

If the Fed’s MBS holdings are of any direct consequence, they favor home-mortgage borrowers by putting downward pressure on mortgage rates. This increases the interest rates faced by other borrowers, compared with holding an equivalent amount of Treasurys. It is as if the Fed has provided off-budget funding for home-mortgage borrowers, financed by selling U.S. Treasury debt to the public.

Such interference in the allocation of credit is an inappropriate use of the central bank’s asset portfolio. It is not necessary for conducting monetary policy, and it involves distributional choices that should be made through the democratic process and carried out by fiscal authorities, not at the discretion of an independent central bank.

Some will say that central bank credit-market interventions reflect an age-old role as “lender of last resort.” But this expression historically referred to policies aimed at increasing the supply of paper notes when the demand for notes surged during episodes of financial turmoil. Today, fluctuations in the demand for central bank money can easily be accommodated through open-market purchases of Treasury securities. Expansive lending powers raise credit-allocation concerns similar to those raised by the purchase of private assets.

Moreover, Federal Reserve actions in the recent crisis bore little resemblance to the historical concept of a lender of last resort. While these actions were intended to preserve the stability of the financial system, they may have actually promoted greater fragility. Ambiguous boundaries around Fed credit-market intervention create expectations of intervention in future crises, dampening incentives for the private sector to monitor risk-taking and seek out stable funding arrangements.

Central bank operational independence is a unique institutional privilege. While such independence is vitally important to preserving monetary stability, it is likely to prove unstable—both politically and economically—without clear boundaries. Central bank actions that alter the allocation of credit blur those boundaries and endanger the stability the Fed was designed to ensure.