The Investment Gods Are Angry

How Big-Government Is Obama?

LARRY KUDLOW

Tax cuts are now 40 percent of his new stimulus package.

Obama spoke Thursday at George Mason University about his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan — a.k.a. the stimulus package. There's an interesting section that would warm the heart of John Maynard Keynes. It goes like this:

It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth, but at this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe.

Well, 28 years ago Ronald Reagan said government was the problem, not the solution. Dealing with a bad recession like this one, the Gipper lowered taxes and domestic spending. Obama on the other hand has offered an $800 billion package, with plenty of infrastructure spending that alleges to create three million jobs.

Nobody really believes infrastructure spending will end the recession or create permanent new jobs. However, it's interesting just how much the Obama plan has changed since the election. The size has been roughly constant. But the mix of tax cuts and spending increases is now totally different.

Instead of $100 billion worth of tax credits, there are now $300 billion worth of tax cuts. This includes a big new piece for business, more cash-expensing for small-business investment, and a restoration of the five-year tax-loss carry-back, which will especially help banks and homebuilders. It might even result in tax refunds for businesses, and might also allow banks to rid themselves of toxic assets, since the losses will now be spread over many years.

So what we have now is an $800 billion stimulus package with $300 billion of so-called tax cuts which could infer less spending than before — maybe only $500 billion worth.

Obama's economic advisers are bragging to me about their new tax-cut package. They say they're very pro-growth. And you know what? I acknowledge it. People like Larry Summers, Austan Goolsbee, Christy Romer, and Tim Geithner are no left-wing big-government whackos. They may not be hard-core supply-siders. But in terms of the economics profession, I would call them center-right.

And they absolutely understand the importance of private business and investment in the job-creating economic-growth process. And I think they're views are the main reason for the reshaping of the Obama package between the campaign trail and the eve of inauguration.

The problem is that they're not reducing marginal tax rates on large and small businesses or individuals. Their tax credits will be two-year's worth, not permanent. There will be no incentive effects to maximize growth. And many of the tax cuts are refundable credits, which really are a form of government spending.

So it's not a supply-side package. However, I've really never met a tax cut I didn't like. And any tax cut is better than a spending increase since private companies and individuals will at least get the money instead of government.

This is the interesting part of the Obama plan. Somewhere in there the tax cuts will have a small positive economic effect. I would have designed it differently, but then again Team Obama won the election. I guess I could say it could have been worse.

Of course, Team Obama will have to contend with the sticker shock of a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009, just printed by the Congressional Budget Office. And that's before the Obama stimulus plan. But I don't think Republicans really have a leg to stand on with the deficit argument — or for that matter the spending argument.

Yes, Obama is raising the ante, and the new numbers are just about over the edge. But a lot of that new deficit is TARP money that should be scored as investment — not real spending. And in view of all the economic pessimism out there, I doubt if the public is very worried about deficits.

What's most regrettable is that congressional Republicans have yet to make the alternative case. They haven't pressed for marginal tax-rate cuts as an option to Obama's credits. So far, the GOP is me-too. They've offered an echo instead of a choice.

Meanwhile, polls now say the public favors Obama's plan by 55 to 65 percent. His personal approval rating is even higher. And he's being politically astute by reaching out to Republicans. He has virtually removed partisan rhetoric. Simply put, Obama is in the driver's seat right now.

Sure, the Democratic Congress may mangle Obama's plan. They might even repeal the Bush tax cuts this year. So there is considerable uncertainty about the details of the final package. But I must say, a crafty Obama is doing his best to employ his version of the Reagan tax-cut plan. Obama talks big government. But so far his program actually reduces the government-spending share and increases the private tax-cut share.

Very interesting.

The Investment Gods Are Angry

By Steven Selengut

The Working Capital Model (WCM) is an historically new methodology, but with roots deeply imbedded in the building blocks of capitalism, and financial psychology--- if there actually is such a thing.

The earliest forms of capitalism sprung from ancient Roman mercantilism, which involved the production of goods and their distribution to people or countries around the Mediterranean.

The sole purpose of the exercise was profit and the most successful traders quickly produced more profits than they needed for their own consumption. The excess cash needed a home, and a wide variety of early entrepreneurial types were quick to propose ventures for the rudimentary rich to consider.

There were no income taxes, and governments actually supported commercial activities.

The investment gods saw this developing enterprise and thought it good. They suggested to the early merchants, and governments that they could "spread the wealth around" by: (1) selling ownership interests in their growing enterprises, and (2) by borrowing money to finance expansion.

A financial industry grew up around the early merchants, providing insurances, brokerage, and other banking services. Economic growth created the need for a trained work force, and companies competed for the most skilled. Eventually, even the employees could afford (even demand) a pieceof the action.

Was this the beginning of modern liberalism? Not! The investment gods had created the building blocks of capitalism: stocks and bonds, profits and income. Stockowners participated in the success of growing enterprises; bondholders received interest for the use of their money--- the K.I.S.S. principle was born.

As capitalism took hold, entrepreneurs flourished, ingenuity and creativity were rewarded, jobs were created, civilizations blossomed, and living standards improved throughout the world. Global markets evolved that allowed investors anywhere to provide capital to industrial users everywhere, and to trade their ownership interests electronically.

But on the dark side, without even knowing it, Main Street self-directors participated in a thunderous explosion of new financial products and quasi-legal derivatives that so confused the investment gods that they had to holler "'nuff"! Where are our sacred stocks and bonds? Financial chaos ensued.

The Working Capital Model was developed in the 1970s, at a time when there were no IRA or 401(k) plans, no index or sector funds, no CDOs or credit swaps, and, a whole lot less risky product for investors to untangle. Those who invested knew about stocks and bonds; investment-qualified trustees protected workers pension plans.

The WCM was revolutionary then in its breakaway from the ancient buy-and-hold, in its staunch insistence on QDI selection principles, and in its cost based allocation and diversification disciplines. It is revolutionary still as it butts heads with a Wall Street that has gone madwith product differentiation, value obfuscation, and short-term performance evaluation.

Investing is a long-term process that involves goal setting and portfolio building. It demands patience, and an understanding of the several cycles that both create and confuse the environment in which it takes place.

The WCM thrives upon the cyclical nature of the process while Wall Street ignores it. Working capital numbers are used for short-term controls and directional guidance; peak-to-peak analysis provides longer-term performance analyses.

In the early 70s, investment professionals compared their equity performance cyclically with the DJIA, over the time from one significant market peak to the next--- from the 11,400 achieved in November 1999 to the 13,930 achieved in November 2007, for example. Equity portfolio managers would be expected to do at least as well as the Dow over the same time period, after all expenses.

Another popular hoop for investment managers of that era to jump through was Peak to Trough performance. Managers would be expected to do less poorly than the Dow during corrections, like the 33% drop between November 99 and September 02, or the much steeper 40% variety that we are immersed in today.

Professional income portfolio managers were expected to produce secure and increasing streams of spendable income, regardless. Compounded earnings and/or secure cash flow were all that was required. Apples were not compared with oranges.

Today's obsession with short-term blinks of the investment eye is Wall Street's attempt to take the market cycle out of the performance picture. Similarly, total return hocus-pocus places artificial significance on bond market values while it obscures the importance of the income produced.

WCM users will have none of it; the investment gods are angry. (Google Peak-to-Peak or Trough-to-Trough to see how far a field the financial community has strayed.)

The WCM embraces the fundamental building blocks of capitalism --- individual stocks and bonds and a few managed CEFs in which the actual holdings are clearly visible. Profits and income rule.

Think about it, in a working capital world, there would be no CDOs or multi-level mortgage mystery meat; no hedge funds, naked short sellers, or managed options programs; no mark-to-market lunacy, Bernie Madoffs, or taxes on investment income.

In a working capital portfolio today, lower stock prices are seen as a cyclical fact of life, an opportunity to add to positions at lower prices. There has been no panic selling in equity holdings, and no flight to 1% Treasuries from 6% Munis. In a WCM portfolio today, dividends and income keep rolling, providing income for retirees, college kids, and golf trips.

Capitalism is not broken; it's just been too tinkered with. The financial system is in serious trouble, however, and needs to get back to its roots and to those building blocks that the Wizards have cloaked in obscurity.

Let's stick with stocks and bonds; lets focus on income where the purpose is income; let's analyze performance relative to cycles as opposed to phases of the moon; let's tax consumption instead of income; let's not disrespect the gods.

Amen!

The Economy is Not a Machine

The Economy is Not a Machine
By Max Borders :

Beware. The fixers have come to Washington. "Fix" because this one little word, in a close race with "run," is now the most dangerous word in the English language. Fix and run, you see, are words that betray the false metaphor upon which most of today's economic vernacular is built: economy as machine.

• A CNN headline reads: "Obama's priority: Fixing the economy."
• Paul Krugman says that what's interesting about the Bush Administration "is that there's no sign that anybody's actually thinking about 'well, how do we run this economy?'"
• Mark Ames of The Nation thinks hiring Larry Summers "to fix the economy makes as much sense as..."

With Google's help I could go on. But even in social studies we learned that FDR and a coven of interventionists -- channeling John Maynard Keynes -- messed with the monetary system and dropped largess from on high to fix the Depression. This was referred to as "priming the pump."

Whenever I hear such talk, I'm reminded of a passage by Larry Eliot of The Guardian that describes, quite literally, an economic model from postwar Britain:

"A sensation when it was unveiled at the London School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy but now looks, at first glance, like the brainchild of a nutty professor...The prototype was an odd assortment of tanks, pipes, sluices and valves, with water pumped around the machine by a motor cannibalised from the windscreen wiper of a Lancaster bomber. Bits of filed-down Perspex and fishing line were used to channel the coloured dyes that mimicked the flow of income round the economy into consumer spending, taxes, investment and exports."

Keynes, the grand old man of the machine metaphor, would have been either delighted or angered by such a contraption—delighted by the idea that economic inputs and outputs could be rendered in tubing and Easter-egg dye, angered, perhaps, that the various inputs and outputs were not represented as faithfully as they could have been by a more enlightened designer.

Deus ex Machina?

But the whole idea of fixing, running, regulating, designing, or modeling an economy rests on the notion that, if the right smart guys are at the rheostats, the economy can be ordered by intelligent design. But the economy is no mechanism. There is no mission control. Government cannot swoop down like a deus ex machina to explain the inexplicable and fix the unfixable. Why? Because the knowledge required to grasp each of the billions of actions, transactions and interconnections would fry the neural circuitry of a thousand Ben Bernankes. This is what F. A. Hayek called the knowledge problem. Knowledge, Hayek reminded us, is not concentrated among a few central authorities but is dispersed around society. That's why bad unintended consequences follow government interventions like black swans.

A few economists have not succumbed to the "fix it" fixation. They know that society is not like a machine at all, but an ecosystem. Faster than you can say market fundamentalism, a Keynesian will scoff at this metaphor. But his favorite trope has helped to stagnate many an economy; making Rube Goldberg apparatuses out of means-ends networks, perversion out of productivity. As Czech President Vaclav Klaus wisely notes: "The market is indivisible; it cannot be an instrument at the hands of central planners."

Society as Ecosystem

So if not the machine metaphor, why an ecosystem? Economies, like ecosystems are complex adaptive systems. Nature, including the economy, can experience episodes of wild wobbles, fluxes and flows. But it almost always returns to a steadier state known as "ordered chaos." That is, when it's left alone. In clumsier but perhaps more familiar language—ecosystems tend towards equilibrium.

Both ecosystems and economies are distributed systems. In the former, billions of interdependent means-ends activities are a reflection of a billion preferences and choices. In the latter, species are dynamic and interwoven in a web of relationships. For both, the whole system is an ever-evolving cascade of change that is unfathomable to a single mind. Data snapshots may be useful for some things, but should not be intended as blueprints for government planners. Even sophisticated computer models will, like the old Philips machine, eventually fail. There are no oracles.

Once we come to discover not only that the economy is an ecosystem -- but that the laws of ecosystems are very different from the laws of machines -- we'll resist our urge to fix things from the top down. We'll realize that economic growth is a holistic process that happens by virtue of countless adjustments and adaptations within the system itself. That's why economic planning is, and always has been, a form of hubris.

Keynesians on the left are eager to dismiss Intelligent Design (ID) as the creationist afterthought to evolution, but just as eager to embrace its analog in economics. Disciples of Adam Smith know better. Darwin, after all, read Smith. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith's basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits."

Today, those working at the frontiers of complexity science are beginning to apply Darwin's insights to the social sciences, too. "[Economics in light of complexity] is based on the emergent behavior of systems rather than on the reductive study of them," writes theorist Stuart Kaufmann. "It defies conventional mathematical treatments because it is not prestatable and is nonalgorithmic. Not surprisingly, most economists have so far resisted these ideas. Yet there can be little doubt that learning to apply these lessons from biology to technology will usher in a remarkable era of innovation and growth." (Lest cries of 'social darwinism' go up, remember that we're only talking about the functional aspects of an economic order, not whether a safety net is justified.)

Kaufmann's insights echo those of Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—largely banished as they have been from the ivory towers by economists wishing to play god. Perhaps once these wayward "stimulus" experiments run their course -- like a fix passing from the body of an addict -- those who believe not in market fundamentalism, but in market fundamentals, will be vindicated.

Complexity and Rules

By fundamentals I mean rules. Only rules can be the product of human design. These are the simple rules that lower "transaction costs," which is a fancy way of saying help us trade with each other easily, minimizing conflict. We call these rules "institutions" (property rights, contract enforcement, and so on) -- not legislation meant to regulate failure away, but to protect people from force, theft and fraud. For these are the rules that bring market discipline in a system of prices, profit and loss.

Many continue to blame "greed" for our current state of affairs. But greed is rather more like gravity. When you fall, you can either blame Isaac Newton or the banana peel on the sidewalk. Profit motive is a good thing when it operates in an environment where bad bets are punished with losses and good investments are rewarded. Only government can distort that healthy profit-and-loss system, giving people incentives to make bad decisions. It is in such an environment that greed becomes dangerous.

With the rules right, however, greed can help our economy stabilize faster than government ever could. As the lubricant of our economic system, self-interest leads a billion market participants to redirect resources to projects that create value in our society—all in a kind of large-scale recalibration. When profit and loss bring discipline, we'll behave more "rationally" in this process. But if government continues to change the rules ad hoc to bias the market in favor of corporatism and irrational behavior, the balance between order and chaos will be lost. Invariably, the fixers will continue to descend upon the economy with bad metaphors.