New Geography

Author: Susanne Trimbath

  • Transportation Aborted

    Like most Americans, I was bombarded by sound-bites and blog-bytes surrounding an amendment to an Act of Congress that would require a woman to submit to and review the results of a trans-vaginal ultrasound before receiving an abortion. This amendment was covered ad nauseam by everyone from the Huffington Post to the nightly news on broadcast television. I don’t mind admitting that I’m past the age where this Act of Congress would have an effect on me personally.

    What really bothered me was that no one talked about the core problem of how deranged our political process has become in Washington. The real issue here that impacts all of us is that this amendment was attached to a transportation funding bill – TRANSPORTATION, not a Health Care Bill or a Health Insurance Bill or even an Equal Opportunity Employment Bill but a TRANSPORTATION funding bill.

    All of these journalists are as at fault over the issue as the bunch of Congressmen who tried – once again – to slip one past the balance of powers and our democratic form of government. The guilty parties in Washington DC start with:

    In the House of Representatives, Mr. Fortenberry (NE), Mr. Boren (OK), Mrs. McMorris Rodgers (WA), Mr.Scalise (LA), Mr. Tiberi (OH), Mr. CONAWAY (TX), Mr. Lamborn (CO), Mr. Walberg (MI), and Mr. Lipinski (IL) who introduced  “H.R.1179 — Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011” on March 17, 2011. By the time the bill was attached as an amendment to the highway funding bill, the number of co-sponsors had risen from 8 to 221.

    In the Senate, Mr. Blunt (MO), Mr. Rubio (FL), and Ms. Ayotte (NH)) introduced S. 1467 on August 2, 2011. The cosponsors in the Senate went from 2 to 37.

    That’s a total of 260 elected representatives who will be responsible for the continuing deterioration of highway infrastructure in the United States. The current Federal authorization for funding surface transportation programs ends March 30, 2012.

    The current funding authorization is just the most recent in a long line of temporary extensions that have been strung together since the last 5-year plan expired in 2009. The highway funding bill in question – to which this healthcare amendment is being attached – would authorize funding of $109 billion over 2 years. If nothing is done by March 30, if no action is taken to fund US highway infrastructure, the Department of Transportation (DoT) will have to furlough workers and stop paying contractors, according to Humberto Sanches of Roll Call. Last summer, DoT sent home 4,000 FAA employees and 70,000 private-sector workers because Congress failed to act on funding.

    The process for highway funding is already convoluted and inefficient – watching the current Congress add abortion amendments to the funding bill gives us a peek into how it got that way. In the meantime the United States’ infrastructure is crumbling and the rest of the world is getting ahead of us. No wonder we’re deranged.

  • Replaced by a Machine

    I love the Omaha World Herald – I read papers all over the world and this one is the best local paper I’ve seen. The bias is largely limited to the Opinion pages and they do original research on local topics. For national and world news, they have reporters outside the Omaha metro, but they also include the best of the news wire articles. The paper is a readable length, yet it contains enough stories that you know what’s going on but not so many that it’s a repeat of the nightly news from the national broadcast networks. Mostly, I like the way they let the reader connect the dots.

    A perfect example appeared on Sunday March 11, 2012 on page 10A in the print edition. Two stories occupy the three columns on the left side of the page. The story occupying the top of the three columns is about IBM’s Watson supercomputer (from Bloomberg news). Watson’s newest consulting client will be Wall Street bank Citigroup, Inc. “the third-largest U.S. lender.” Directly beneath that is a story from the Associated Press (AP) about Main Street abandoning Wall Street – seems that if individual “ordinary” investors do not start giving their money to Wall Street banks again soon, the re-inflated stock market bubble will deflate – bye-bye Dow 15,000.

    How do these two stories relate? Well, Citigroup is feeding information to Watson on “sentiment and news not in the usual metrics” like what you post on Facebook or search on Google. Citigroup will use Watson to “analyze customers’ needs” and process that with their client data to figure out how to get you to put your money back where it makes them the most money in fees and commissions.

    Watson doesn’t come cheap – according to the Bloomberg News article, banks spent $400 billion last year on “information technology,” helping to generate $107 billion in revenue for IBM. How can banks afford to spend billions of dollars to get consultations with a computer? The answer is in the AP article in the bottom of the same columns: “corporate America has racked up double-digit profit gains” since the official end of the Great Recession in 2009.

    These two articles make me a little happy. The first one pleases the economist in me because an American company with a real product is going to thrive by charging Wall Street billions of dollars for something. The second article pleases me because it means that Main Street got the message – don’t eat the hot dogs at the Wall Street party because the fuel for the weenie roast is your future. Let the machines do it.

    [NOTE: Omaha.com links are available without registration for up to 2 weeks after publication. Access to the archives requires email registration.]

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. Dr. Trimbath’s credits include appearances on national television and radio programs and the Emmy® Award nominated Bloomberg report Phantom Shares. She appears in four documentaries on the financial crisis, including Stock Shock: the Rise of Sirius XM and Collapse of Wall Street Ethics and the newly released Wall Street Conspiracy. Dr. Trimbath was formerly Senior Research Economist at the Milken Institute. She served as Senior Advisor on United States Agency for International Development capital markets projects in Russia, Romania and Ukraine. Dr. Trimbath teaches graduate and undergraduate finance and economics.

  • Suppressing the News: The Real Cost of the Wall Street Bailout

    No one really knows what a politician will do once elected. George “No New Taxes” Bush (George I to us commoners) was neither the first nor will he be the last politician to lie to the public in order to get elected.  It takes increasing amounts of money to get elected. Total spending by Presidential candidates in 1988 was $210.7 million; in 2000 it was $343.1 million and in 2008, presidential candidates spent $1.3 billion. Even without adjusting for inflation, it’s pretty obvious that it takes A LOT MORE MONEY now. For those readers who are from the Show Me state, $210.7 million in 1988 is equivalent to roughly one-third of the buying power used by Presidential Candidates in 2008.

    When Texas Governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry told Iowan voters in early November, “I happen to think Wall Street and Washington, D.C., have been in bed together way too long,” it made headlines for Reuters and ABC . But that’s not news; that’s advertising. News, according to Sir Harold Evans, is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. News Flash: The average member of Congress who voted in favor of the 2008 Bank Bailout received 51 percent more campaign money from Wall Street than those who voted no – Republicans and Democrats alike. That’s according to research by Center for Responsive Politics and was reported as news by the OpenSecrets.org blog on September 29, 2008.

    In other news fit to be suppressed, the Federal Reserve "provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world." This was revealed in an audit of the Federal Reserve released in July 2011 by the Government Accountability Office. All the goods and services produced in the United States in the last twelve months are worth about $14 trillion – Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner spent more than that to bailout Wall Street in twelve months! This is news, news that Bloomberg and Fox Business Network had to file lawsuits to get access to and that Bernanke and Geithner want to suppress.

    The answer to the differences in the value of the bailouts – it was “only $1.2 trillion” according to Bernanke – can be found in the GAO’s audits.  The latest audit of the TARP, released November 10, 2011 makes it clear: “In valuing TARP …, [Office of Financial Stability] management considered and selected assumptions and data that it believed provided a reasonable basis for the estimated subsidy costs …. However, these assumptions and estimates are inherently subject to substantial uncertainty arising from the likelihood of future changes in general economic, regulatory, and market conditions.” [emphasis added]. TARP is under Treasury – which is run by Geithner – and is headed up by Timothy Massad, formerly of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York …[still following this?]…, who represents Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc. as underwriters for (among other things) European public debt. Cravath, Swaine & Moore advised Citigroup on their repayment of TARP funds and Merrill Lynch in their orchestrated takeover by Bank of America.

    The dispute about the cost of the bailout is not the stuff of conspiracy theories. This is basic finance and economics,  not accounting. In accounting, debits and credits balance at the end of the day; in finance, you get to assume rates of return, costs of capital, etc., etc. – a lot of stuff that has much room for judgment. It is in the area of judgment that Bernanke and Geithner are able to make their numbers look smaller than those added up by Bloomberg and Fox. The GAO, on the other hand, should have no dog in this fight and therefore should (we live and hope) give us the right stuff to work with. GAO says (in a nice way) that Geithner has been fiddling with the numbers.

    The GAO had been recommending to Congress that they get audit authority over the Federal Reserve System at least since 1973. They finally got that authority in the Wall Street Reform Act of 2010 – about the only piece of that legislation that has so far resulted in anything of substance. The Center for Responsive politics also did an analysis of the campaign contributions for Senators who opposed the financial regulatory reform bill in 2010. Those opposing the reforms got 65 percent more money from Wall Street banks than those voting for the bill.

    For politicians, it doesn’t matter who votes for them. They will figure out what they need to say to get the money to get the votes to get elected. What they need most – and what makes them Wall Streetwalkers – is the money. The big donors don’t care who they give to, as long as the one they give to gets elected. According to Federal Election Commission data, Warren Buffett gives money almost exclusively to Democrats; Donald Trump likes to spread it around between the parties, as do Goldman Sachs employees. But that’s only the money that can be traced back to a source, unlike the opaque donations given to PACs and SuperPACs.

    The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington swings both ways. When John Corzine departed Goldman Sachs he left Hank Paulson in charge in 1999. Investment Dealers’ Digest reported that Corzine left Goldman “against a backdrop of fixed-income trading losses.” Corzine won a Senate seat in 2000 (D-NJ).  He was then elected Governor of New Jersey in November 2005, where he put forth Bradley Abelow for state Treasurer. Abelow worked with Corzine at Goldman and was a former Board member at the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the world’s largest self-regulatory financial institution. Together, Corzine and Abelow later went on to run MF Global into bankruptcy. Both have been invited back to Washington, the first time a former Congressman has been called to testify before a Congressional Committee. Wherever they get started, Washington and Wall Street tend to end up in bed together.

    It’s this kind of knowledge that makes me question why I should vote at all. Congressmen from both parties are generally for sale. Even with self-described liberals in Congress, right-wing conservatives could get approval for everything they want – free-for-all-banking and the US military engaged in active combat.  It’s the taxpayers – the mothers, fathers and families of service men – who suffer. Sure, Barack Obama took more money from Wall Street than John McCain – but it was only $2 million more, hardly enough to run one ad campaign in a big state.

    Then I pause and remember what my mentor, Rose Kaufman, from the League of Women Voters of Santa Monica told me: if you don’t vote, you open the door for someone to take away your right to vote.  The benefit of living in a democracy with freedom of the press is that you can find out all those things that Washington and Wall Street “want to suppress.” Whether or not we have good choices among the presidential candidates, we have choices.  It’s better than nothing.

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. Her training in finance and economics began with editing briefing documents for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She worked in operations at depository trust and clearing corporations in San Francisco and New York, including Depository Trust Company, a subsidiary of DTCC; formerly, she was a Senior Research Economist studying capital markets at the Milken Institute. Her PhD in economics is from New York University. In addition to teaching economics and finance at New York University and University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business), Trimbath is co-author of Beyond Junk Bonds: Expanding High Yield Markets. She participated in an Infrastructure Index Project Workshop Series throughout 2010.

    Follow Susanne on Twitter @SusanneTrimbath

    Photo by Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department

  • Occupy Wall Street: About D@%& Time!

    "Privileged people don’t march and protest; their world is safe and clean and governed by laws designed to keep them happy. I had never taken to the streets before; why bother? And for the first block or two I felt odd, walking in a mass of people, holding a stick with a placard…" Michael Brock in John Grisham’s The Street Lawyer (Doubleday, 1998).

    I’ve been waiting for three years for Americans to get out in the street and protest the actions that created the Financial Crisis that sparked the Great Contraction. As ng.com frequent commenter Richard Reep put it back at the beginning: “What happened to people’s outrage? Where are the torch-bearing citizens marching on Washington?” If some third-world leader had pillaged the national treasury on their way out of town the way Hank Paulson did – with the full and enthusiastic support of New York Fed chief and now Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – when he convinced Congress to spend $750 billion to bailout the Wall Street banks, there would be angry mobs, riots and possibly UN Peacekeepers.

    Three years later, all we can muster is a sort of hippy sit-in – but I’ll take it! It’s better than letting it run over us, drip-by-drip, until there is no middle in our increasingly bifurcated economy.

    Let me summarize what 99% of Americans should protest. It started in the early 2000s with good intentioned policies directed toward leveling the playing field by re-designing consumer credit ratings to allow more Americans to own homes. The move was embraced by Mike Milken and his followers as a way to further the cause of The Democratization of Capital – oddly enough, an idea born out of the outrage of the Watts Riots of August 1965.

    Republicans and Democrats alike joined in the movement and a great boom in home prices was born. Expanding homeownership opportunities, especially for minorities, was a fundamental aim of the Bush Administration’s housing policy, one strongly supported by Democrats in Congress. Then everyone got greedy, including wanna-be real estate moguls who started flipping houses instead of working for their living.

    Banks that were writing mortgages soon turned to securitization – bundling mortgages into bonds called mortgage-backed securities – so they could use the proceeds to lend more money to subprime borrowers. The banks were collecting fees at every step. They charged fees for making the mortgage loan and for putting together the bond deal; then they charged commissions for trading the bonds. The interest paid on the bonds was high because the interest charged on the mortgages was high – after all, these were less-than-credit worthy borrowers by traditional standards.  The banks wanted to be compensated for taking the risk – even though they were selling the risk to someone else. It was all about making money on money and eventually demand overtook supply. But that didn’t stop Brother Banker!

    According to a story on PBS (originally aired November 21, 2008), managers at Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency were pressured to give mortgage bonds triple-A ratings in the pursuit of ever higher fees. In essence, the banks paid credit rating agencies to get triple-A ratings for their mortgage bonds so that insurance company and pension fund money could be added to the scheme. Insurance companies and pension funds are highly regulated in order to protect investors who rely on them for compensation in disasters and retirement.

    If the bank couldn’t get the top credit rating for some mortgage bonds, they turned to selling an unregulated kind of insurance called Credit Default Swaps. The swaps became so popular that people who didn’t even own the bonds were buying the swaps. Eventually, there were more credit default swaps than there were bonds – and the banks were making fees on top of fees with no incentive to stop. In the end, there was more money to be made in mortgage defaults than mortgage payoffs and some banks even stopped taking mortgage payments to force the defaults. It was a little like the failing businessman who burns down his own shop because he can make more on the insurance than he can trying to sell it.

    When the swaps came due, companies like AIG collapsed under the pressure of the payments – and American taxpayers were left holding the bag. Using your insurance and pension benefits to create their bonfire, Wall Street staged a weenie-roast! Two years ago you could have purchased all the common stock of Lennar Homebuilders for $1.2 billion – but if they went bankrupt you could collect $40 billion on the swaps. (The European Union fixed this problem in their markets – the US did not.) Like any Ponzi scheme, this one also required that “new money” continue to flow in so that the early investors could receive payouts – hence the need to get your benefit money invested in these things. When Uncle Sam took 80% ownership of AIG in Hank Paulson’s bailout scheme, again approved by our current administration’s financial geniuses, the US Treasury in combination with the Federal Reserve provided an unlimited source of new money. THAT is what you should be protesting today because it can – and probably will – happen again.

    Critics of the protesters like to equate Wall Street with all the companies that create jobs. This ignores how the stock market works. The only time that a company gets money from its stock is in the initial public offering. Those shares are mostly sold to syndicates, underwriters, and primary dealers, not the general public. What happens day in and day out on Wall Street is simply stirring the pot. When the company’s stock goes up, it is the next seller and his broker that make money, not the company. The stock market should have everything to do with jobs. When households have excess earnings – more money than they need for their expenses – they make savings deposits or investments in the stock market through banks. Banks channel savings from households to entrepreneurs and businesses. Entrepreneurs use the money to create new businesses which employ more people, thus increasing the earnings that households have available for savings and investment, which would bring the process fully around the virtuous circle. But Wall Street doesn’t exactly do that anymore. It just makes jobs for Wall Street.

    The other argument is that the problem isn’t Wall Street, it’s the government. Anyone who thinks that only one or the other is to blame doesn’t understand how politics is financed. According to the MAPLight.org’s analysis, Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign received more money in 2007-2008 from Wall Street than anyone else, but it was only $2 million more than the $22,108,926 that went to Senator John McCain.

    Blame the government and blame the Wall Street banks that sponsor their political campaigns – they are blaming each other anyway. The occupy protestors – with the possible exception of the violent black band anarchists – are not the perpetrators we need to put in handcuffs.

    The sad fact is that nothing in Washington, D.C. or Wall Street, NYC has changed since that day in September 2008 when Hank Paulson told Congress that the world would end if they didn’t give him $750 billion to spread around Wall Street. For many people, like a Michael Brock, it takes a life-changing event to make you look at the truth all around you. Fixing our broken financial markets requires systemic reform of a great scale.  

    I think a lot of people who joined the 2008 tea parties – myself included – thought we were mounting a petition against bank bailouts and the misuse of public funds. The U.S. Government Accountability Office audit of the Federal Reserve, released in July 2011, proves that petition failed. Call your Representative, write to your Senator, and show up for the #Occupy or Tea Party events in your city. Like Michael Brock, you may find yourself savoring the exercise in civil protest.

    A version of this article appeared in the Omaha World Herald on November 4, 2011.

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. She participated in an Infrastructure Index Project Workshop Series throughout 2010. Her training in finance and economics began with editing briefing documents for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She worked in operations at depository trust and clearing corporations in San Francisco and New York, including Depository Trust Company, a subsidiary of DTCC; formerly, she was a Senior Research Economist studying capital markets at the Milken Institute. Her PhD in economics is from New York University. In addition to teaching economics and finance at New York University and University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business), Trimbath is co-author of Beyond Junk Bonds: Expanding High Yield Markets

    Occupy Wall Street Photo by Paul Stien.

  • Things They Don’t Tell You About GDP

    I was watching Book TV on C-SPAN last week and I came upon Mr. Ha-Joon Chang talking about his book “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.” For example, Thing #1 is “there is no such thing as a free market.” I actually use this line in my finance and economics courses. If someone thinks there is, I tell them to walk into the office of any securities lawyer and look at the books on the shelf – there are a mountain of regulations just for the stock market. There wasn’t anything in Ha-Joon’s book that I didn’t already know about capitalism – but I spent 11 years in college earning 3 university degrees to learn it. I’m assuming most of my readers have had better things to do than spend that much time in the library.

    It got me thinking. What else doesn’t the general public know about economics? I decided to let you in on some secrets you may not know about the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a number you see every day in the news as a measure of the performance of the national economy.

    Many people believe that the GDP comes from something like an income statement prepared by accountants.  It does not.  The GDP is an estimate of the total output of all production that occurs in the nation.  The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates the GDP using a variety of assumptions based on information reported from surveys conducted by the Census Bureau and from tax returns submitted to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

    The BEA began by creating concepts and a structure of accounts to create an idea for implementing a theoretical income statement for the nation. If the data were 1) accurate, 2) always available, and 3) fit their definitions exactly, then the estimate of income would always equal the estimate of output.  It does not, however.  The “statistical discrepancy” between estimated income and output for the first quarter of 2011 was 1.3 percent of the GDP or about $180 billion.  This discrepancy cannot be accounted for by anything other than how the numbers are created.

    Since some data is simply not available, BEA has to make assumptions about the direction of the changes that they cannot record.  For example, for the first quarter of 2011, the BEA assumed that nondurable manufacturing inventories increased, exports increased, and imports increased. When you read that exports increased this year, that is because the BEA assumed it increased – they did not actually have any data to measure it when they released the new GDP numbers.

    Some data that the BEA needs, such as new car sales, are simply not reported anywhere.  Thus, the BEA developed estimating methods that adjust the data they can collect to match their concepts.  When they need to fill in missing data, the new values are estimated from average list prices, rather than actual sales prices.  For example, “an estimate of expenditures on new cars is calculated as the number of cars sold times average list price” for all cars (at transaction prices—that is, the average list price with options adjusted for transportation charges, sales taxes, dealer discounts, and rebates).  One obvious problem with this approach is that few people pay the actual list price for a car.  Note also that this is not the number of 2010 Toyota Corollas sold times the list price of 2010 Toyota Corolla and the number of 2010 Mercedes C240s sold times the list price of a 2010 Mercedes C240, etc.  It is estimated as the number of all cars sold times the average list price of all cars.

    Some of the data that the BEA uses comes from IRS income tax reports, which use different definitions for income and expenses; or from surveys conducted by the Census Bureau which does not survey all the categories the BEA uses.  Import data comes to us “in a bilateral data exchange” with other countries.  Some values come in as valued at the point of manufacture; the BEA adjusts “these data to foreign port value by adding the cost of transporting the goods” within the other country from the point of manufacture to the point of export to the U.S.  This adjustment is made using average known costs of transportation.

    The BEA also estimates wages as the number of people employed times the average hourly earnings times the average hours worked.  As income inequality rises – hence, salaried employment wages move further away from hourly employment wages – these reported incomes may become increasingly less accurate.  An estimate of interest received may be calculated as the stock of interest-bearing assets times an effective interest rate.  The BEA collects employment data in the middle of the month, which is assumed to represent conditions for the entire month – so they make judgment calls to adjust employment data when there are “significant events” like blizzards on the east coast or hurricanes in Florida, which occur after the data is reported.

    Sometimes there just is no primary source data and the entire category is estimated.  The BEA makes seasonal adjustments, uses moving averages, inputs new data as “best level” or “best change,” and data series are interpolated and extrapolated.  All of that happens before we even begin to discuss the several methods available for calculating adjustments for inflation.

    Don’t put too much weight on every number reported about the economy.  When politicians start talking about, say, the impact of new tax rules on the GDP, they are not just comparing apples and oranges – they are making apple sauce! When someone asks me – a professional economist – how I think the economy is doing, I tell them: “Look out your window.” Do your neighbors have jobs? Are the streets being cleaned and the trash being picked up? Is there more or less traffic when you go to work or the grocery store? Any of those signs will tell you as much as the GDP will about the economy.

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. She will be participating in an Infrastructure Index Project Workshop Series throughout 2010. Her training in finance and economics began with editing briefing documents for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She worked in operations at depository trust and clearing corporations in San Francisco and New York, including Depository Trust Company, a subsidiary of DTCC; formerly, she was a Senior Research Economist studying capital markets at the Milken Institute. Her PhD in economics is from New York University. In addition to teaching economics and finance at New York University and University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business), Trimbath is co-author of Beyond Junk Bonds: Expanding High Yield Markets.

    Image courtesy of US BEA.

  • Transportation Infrastructure: Yankee Ingenuity Keeps California Moving

    A friend was explaining some philosophy to me the other day and he used an analogy to make his point: If you can get a cannibal to use a knife and fork, is that progress? Of course, the answer is "no". So when I heard the next day that transportation infrastructure performance in the US improved significantly at the height of the worst recession since the great depression I had to ask: is that progress?

    We do not want to stop all economic progress just so that a privileged few with access to resources may enjoy an easier ride on the I-95 interstate highway between Wall Street and Congress. Stopping economic growth is not a solution to the problem of crumbling infrastructure in America.

    In fact, my economic analysis shows that transportation infrastructure is a “leading indicator” of economic activity. In other words, infrastructure performance has to improve for a while – and stay improved – before economic activity will pick up in an area. Alternatively, infrastructure performance would have to decline for a while before businesses would leave that location, too. Think about it this way. From the perspective of a company already in business in a particular location, they would not pack up and leave town the first day that, for example, traffic congestion slows down the delivery of products to their customers. Companies like FedEx Freight plan distribution locations 20 years in advance. For a while, they will find a way around congestion. FedEx Freight uses elaborate technology to “route trucks around huge bottlenecks, but this adds circuitous miles and costs”. Their policy is to “minimize the impact as best you can.”

    We see evidence of how business finds a way to make it work even when government and infrastructure try to stand in their way. California ranked 43rd in 1995 and fell further to 47th in 2000 and 2007 among the 50 states (plus D.C.) in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s transportation infrastructure performance index. Although California’s infrastructure is crumbling, businesses are finding a way to work around it. California’s economy could grow faster than the rest of the US economy this year.

    In economics we talk about the efficient use of resources – getting the most out of what you have to work with. In a new study getting underway at the University of Delaware, early results indicate that businesses are operating successfully in the United States despite being hampered by problems like congestion and the lack of intermodal-connectivity (that is, being able to move products from trucks to trains and from trains to ships). California, in fact, may be a benchmark state for economic efficiency. They rank at the bottom for infrastructure performance but business is finding a way to make it work.

    My old pal, Larry Summers – former Economic Advisor to President Obama and subverter of all things economic – took a last final swipe at spending on transportation infrastructure in April 2011. In his first public appearance at Harvard University after leaving the White House, he talked about investment in infrastructure as a way to “…tackle high levels of unemployment, especially among the low-skilled.” He just doesn’t get it. He continues to believe that the way to stimulate the economy is to give tax breaks to business – as if they will build their own roads. He just didn’t get that infrastructure is what supports all economic activity. It’s the stuff that business does business on, not the classical economic “capital” that business brings to the table.

    In fact, it costs businesses to have to work around the crumbling infrastructure. When you ask academic, government and researchers to measure that cost, you get a wide range of views about what constitutes a direct or an indirect cost to business from traffic congestion. But some of these costs are undeniable. There is a cost of computer technology for monitoring congestion; the cost of employees for communicating with drivers about alternate routes; the cost of extra fuel; driver overtime resulting from congestion; refunds to customers for missing guaranteed delivery deadlines, etc. etc.

    So, there’s a benefit to business from improving the performance of transportation infrastructure. They will be saving the money that they are spending now to work-around the infrastructure. And money not spent is at least as good as a tax break.

    Disclosure: Dr. Trimbath’s research on the economic impact of transportation infrastructure performance was supported by the National Chamber Foundation and sponsored in part by FedEx Freight. The 2009 Transportation Performance Index will be released on July 19, 2011 in Washington, D.C. It will show a substantial improvement over 2008.

  • Debt Ceiling or Spending Limit?

    We’re seeing a lot of debate in Washington about what is commonly referred to as the "national debt ceiling." This post is an attempt to shed some light – and provide some good resources for further information – on what this really means. National debt is not the total future obligations of the federal government to pay. It is basically all the public debt (like Treasury bills) plus money we owe to other governments – in other words this ceiling only puts a limit on how much the federal government can borrow, not on how much they can spend.

    The national debt number is available "to the penny" at the Treasury Direct website. There are only a few categories of debt that are not subject to the limit, mostly having to do with the way that Treasury Bills are issued to pay all the interest up front (discounted) and the way that payment is handled in accounting terms. Raising the National Debt Ceiling involves raising the limit on the public debt ceiling.

    There is a bigger number that most other countries use to define “debt”. The official definition for “debt” used in the European Union, for example, includes obligations to Social Security, Medicare, etc. at the national level, plus regional and local government debt. (Thanks to Yannick for initiating a discussion of the distinction with his comment to my 2009 piece on Public Debt Crisis.) In the U.S., the larger number is usually referred to as "total indebtedness". There is no limit set on the promises of the US government to spend money — for example, the almost $13 trillion committed to the post-crisis bailouts and stimulus was not subject to the debt limit despite that number being almost equal to the total national debt. The limit only applies to how much the Treasury can borrow to meet its obligations. So if the question is “should the ceiling be raised?” then my answer is “it doesn’t really matter.” Congress can keep spending without it.

    When politicians say they are against raising the debt ceiling it’s usually referred to as “Grandstanding” – which Merriam-Webster explains is to act so as to impress onlookers.

  • The Tax Cut that Killed California?

    I studied with the Austrian economists at New York University. The Austrian school of economics (as contrasted to Keynesians or Chicago school economists) work with a theory about business cycles that essentially starts from the understanding that what appear to be almost mechanical, regular ups and downs in the economy are actually caused by the periodic disappointment of the expectations of entrepreneurs. The alternative is to suggest that business owners periodically and collective wake up stupid one morning and start making a lot of bad decisions. A connection to the routine horizons of fiscal policy – for example, the 5-year funding cycle for federal highways – is a more likely cause of what appear to be “cycles”.

    A current example of how government spending policy can make a disaster of the economy by confounding decision making is the changes/not-changes in US tax policy. What if you are a business owner who has a fiscal year that runs from July 1 to June 30? All of your plans for the first half of 2011 would have been based on the tax cuts expiring (which is the reasonable thing to do – don’t change your plans until the law is changed). If the tax cuts are extended, then the last half of your budget is completely changed. In this case, there will be more net income. Being unable to plan for this, according to economic principal-agent theory, will put a lot of cash in the hands of managers who may not spend it in the best interests of the shareholders. The failure of managers to invest wisely when government stimulates business through unexpected and excessive free cash flow is well-documented.

    Now imagine you are a state whose tax policy mirrors the federal policy. Tax cuts to businesses and individuals translate into revenue cuts for states, counties and cities. Any state that opts out of mirroring whatever Washington D.C. passes risks being cut-out of certain federal funding programs in the future. Nebraska, for example, passes a biannual budget. The last one covered the fiscal-years 2009-2011, which was based on the tax cuts expiring at the end of 2010. The difference if the tax cuts are extended will be a $200 million shortfall. Nebraska is a relatively small state, so consider what this will do to the budgets of all the states, plus counties and cities in the U.S. This could be the event that brings the global financial crisis in public debt home, especially to states like California which are already in trouble.

    Note: A good source for more on Austrian economic theory is the Mises Institute at Auburn University. Click this for a brief on “The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle” from Roger Garrison – who is an expert on the subject.

  • Catching up to the Fed

    It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly two years since we first wrote about the game of “hide the ball” that Junkmeister Ben Bernanke is playing. Finally, Congress is getting some admissions out of the Federal Reserve about the gusher of cash that was opened up when the insides fell out of Wall Street’s Ponzi scheme. Remember, you read it here first! Trillions of dollars were funneled to private, non-regulated companies. According to the New York Times article, the release of documents on 21,000 transactions came about as a result of a provision inserted by Senator Bernard Sanders (I-VT) into the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. I covered the hearing in March 2009 when Bernanke told Senator Sanders he would not reveal who got the money – but I wrote three months earlier about the deal brokered between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to circumvent a Congressional prohibition on lending to non-regulated companies. Sanders called it a Jaw Dropper by the time he saw the actual documents.

    Lest you think that all is hunky-dory because the money is being paid back, don’t forget the old adage: “It takes money to make money.” Everyone that borrowed had the opportunity to make money on the money they got at (virtually) no cost. In the interim, small businesses, homeowners, student borrowers, etc. are paying enormously high interest rates for the little credit they can get. The profits go to Brother Banker.

    The Federal Reserve released papers on $12 trillion, about half of the $23 trillion distribution estimated by Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky. Despite admitting to pumping an amount equal to about the entire annual national output into the economy in the form of cash – belying the real decline in the output of goods and services – Ben Bernanke told 60 Minutes recently that he was “100% certain” that inflation is not going to be a problem. Makes you wonder what else they’re hiding.

    Inform Yourself:
    Click here for the Federal Reserve Press release.

    Click here for Regulatory Reform Transaction Data from the Federal Reserve website.

    Click here for an internet article with additional links to original sources and media coverage (thanks to Dennis Smith for providing the original article).

  • The Financial Crisis Continues to be an Inside Job

    Over the weekend I saw the documentary movie Inside Job with a friend who is not a financial markets expert. After the show, I told her I was relieved to see that the movie covered the majority of the causes of the collapse of the financial markets in 2008. Part of my relief was from thinking that everything would be better now that “everyone” knows the facts. Then my friend pointed out that there were only six people in the audience – obviously “everyone” wasn’t seeing this movie!

    The movie did a good job of covering virtually everything I’ve been writing about at NewGeography since 2008. They did leave out the part where Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks were issuing mortgage-backed bond without writing mortgages. This is totally understandable. It’s very difficult to show what doesn’t exist in video. It’s easy enough to show homes in foreclosure — but what pictures and video can you use to show that there aren’t any mortgages behind bonds, especially when the bonds that aren’t even printed on paper? The pictures of hookers, strippers and cocaine make the movie ominous enough and have a certain visual appeal that producers look for in a story.

    Inside Job included lots of stuff on who is funding the academic studies being used to justify wrecking the financial markets. They present more on the serious academic fraud in the crisis than I was aware of. I first posted Tweets about Duke University back in June 2009. A couple of Duke University professors published a research report about a model they developed that justifies manipulating stock prices and corporate votes. What I Tweeted was: “It should be illegal to write this crap.” Duke University’s research center is funded by a wide selection of the bailed out financial institutions. Your tax dollars at work!

    The point I try to raise — perhaps loudly because it’s a little self-interested coming from me — is that the perpetrators of the financial crisis are funneling billions of dollars to the academics who will write anything they are told for the sake of continued funding. In the meantime, those who are willing to take the adverse position are relegated to the Daily Show (no offense, Jon).

    Then I sat through Inside Job and I saw this segment on former Federal Reserve Board of Governors member and current professor at Columbia University Business School Frederic Mishkin. Before the crisis, Mishkin took money from the Chamber of Commerce in Iceland to write a report about the “Stability” of their banking system. The source of the funding was not disclosed in the published report (an academic no-no). Then, after Iceland’s banks completely collapsed, Mishkin changed the name of the paper on his resume to the “Instability” of Iceland’s banking system. This was shocking to me, as I didn’t realize how deeply the desire to deceive ran among these guys. Mishkin resigned from the Federal Reserve Board in the middle of the crisis – yes, even the rats will abandon a sinking ship.

    Last week, Mishkin was on CNBC’s Squawk Box (a chuckle-head fest about how to make money on the day’s stock trades) pontificating about Fed monetary policy. CNBC is no stranger to corrupting academics to support their bad habits. Inside Job included examples of a slew of academic economists taking money from Wall Street to write papers justifying the systemic failures. Here’s an example they didn’t have. Someone recently sent me a study penned by professors at the University of Oklahoma Price Business School. The study concluded that naked short selling (the practice of selling shares you don’t own and can’t borrow) is beneficial for making financial markets more efficient. (If you don’t know what short selling is, here’s a five minute video that explains it in a light-hearted way.) Insane, right? No reasonable person would agree that it is good for markets if you can sell things that don’t exist – yet it happens every day, even in the market for US government securities. It takes fewer than 6 degrees to connect the dots. The University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business is named for major donor Michael Price. Price is “personal friend” of CNBC personality Jim Cramer. For more on Jim Cramer’s ties to Naked Short Selling follow @deepcapture on Twitter and check out the March 12, 2009 episode of the DailyShow.com.

    I was getting very discouraged about continuing to write about the causes of the crisis, since no corrective actions are being taken. A lot of work remains to educate the public about the issues and to come up with solutions. The old political ways are too corrupt to work anymore. It seems like we keep covering the same territory without progress, but I’m inspired by the closing line of Inside Job: “Some things are worth fighting for.”

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. She will be participating in an Infrastructure Index Project Workshop Series throughout 2010. Her training in finance and economics began with editing briefing documents for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She worked in operations at depository trust and clearing corporations in San Francisco and New York, including Depository Trust Company, a subsidiary of DTCC; formerly, she was a Senior Research Economist studying capital markets at the Milken Institute. Her PhD in economics is from New York University. In addition to teaching economics and finance at New York University and University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business), Trimbath is co-author of Beyond Junk Bonds: Expanding High Yield Markets.

    Photo by carlossg