The Zero Room

Charts! Nobody asked for them, but I have them anyway! Over the last few years the Bank for International Settlements have been publishing a fab set of statistics that are not usually brought to bear in the tea leaf reading of mainstream economists. This is a shame, as they are exactly the sort of statistics which would indicate the risk of imminent financial crisis. Last month the BIS updated the data to the end of (calendar year) 2016. Here's an illustration (courtesy of LibreOffice) of where Australia is, relative to some comparable and/or interesting countries (click to embiggen):

As the BIS explains, the Debt Service Ratio (DSR):

"reflects the share of income used to service debt and has been found to provide important information about financial-real interactions. For one, the DSR is a reliable early warning indicator for systemic banking crises. Furthermore, a high DSR has a strong negative impact on consumption and investment."

So as a measure of Australia's ability to pay at least the interest on our private sector debts, if not pay down the principal, you might think this is not a bad result. We clearly substantially delevered after the GFC, thanks in large part to the Rudd stimulus pouring public money into the private sector, then levered up a bit since, but we've ended up between Canada and Sweden, which is a pretty congenial neighbourhood. But this is total private sector debt; what happens when we take business out of the equation and just look at households (and non-profit institutions serving households - NPISHs)?

Woah! Suddenly we're in a league of our own. Canada's flatlined here since the GFC, meaning the subsequent increase in their total private debt burden has largely come from investment in business capital. In such a case, provided this investment is directed at increasing productive capacity, and is accompanied by public sector spending to proportionally increase demand, this is sustainable debt. Australia has been doing the opposite.

Here's another way of looking at the coming Australian debt crisis, private sector credit to GDP:

This ratio will rise whether the level of debt rises, GDP falls, or both, so it's another good indicator of unsustainable debt levels. The current total level (in blue) of over 200% is at about the ratio Japan was at when its real estate bubble burst in the early 1990s. Breaking this down again into household and corporate sectors, we see that over the mid-1990s Australia switched the majority of its private sector borrowing from business investment to sustaining households. What happened in the mid-90s? Data here from the OECD:

From the mid-1990s to 2007 Australia experienced the celebrated run of Howard/Costello government fiscal (or "budget") surpluses. We all know, or should know, thanks to Godley's sectoral balances framework, what happens when the public sector runs a surplus: the private sector must run a corresponding deficit, equal to the last penny. There is nowhere else, net of private sector bank credit creation (which zeroes out because every financial asset created in the private sector has a corresponding private sector liability), for money to come from. When the government taxes more than it spends, it is withdrawing money from the private sector. Mainstream economics calls this "sustainable", and "sound finance", meaning of course it is nothing of the sort.

How did the private sector, and the household sector in particular, continue to spend from that point onward, behaving as though losing money (not to mention public infrastructure and services) down the fiscal plughole was not merely benign but quite wonderful? It chose to Nimble it and move on, going on a massive credit binge. The banks were happy to provide all the credit demanded, because the bulk of the lending was ulitimately secured by residential real estate prices, and these were clearly going to keep rising without limit (thank heavens, because if they were to fall like they did in the US in 2007…).

The Global Financial Crisis put a dent in the demand for credit, but as subsequent government fiscal policy has tightened, under the rubric of "budget repair", it is rising again. We are already in a state of debt deflation: Australia's household debt service ratio (as above), at between 15 and 20 percent of household income for over a decade, has dampened domestic demand, leading to rising unemployment and underemployment, leading to more easy credit as a quick fix for income shortfalls ("debtfare"). More of what income remains is redirected to debt servicing rather than consumption, and so we spiral downwards, our incomes purchasing less and less with each turn. [I will post more about some of the social and microeconomic consequences in (over-)due course.]

The Australian government needs to spend much, much more - and quickly. Modern Monetary Theory, drawing on an understanding of the nature of money that goes back a century, shows us that government spending (contrary to conventional wisdom) is not revenue-constrained; a currency-issuing government can always buy anything available for sale in the currency it issues. There is nothing about our collective "budget" that needs repairing before we can do so. The same data from the OECD shows that most currency-issuing governments with advanced industrial economies run fiscal deficits almost all the time:

In fact, under all but exceptional conditions, government fiscal surpluses (i.e. private sector fiscal deficits) are a recipe for recession or depression. The greater the surplus, the greater the subsequent government spending required to lift the private sector out of crisis, as can be seen above in the wild swings in neoliberal governments' fiscal position from the mid-90s on. The fiscal balance over any given period is nothing more than a measurement of the flow of public investment into the private sector. What guarantees meaningful sustainability is a government's effective use of functional finance to manage the real (as opposed to financial) economy in pursuit of public policy objectives. Refusing to mobilise idle resources (including, crucially, labour) for needed public goods and services is not "sound finance"; it is the very definition of economic mismanagement, as was once widely recognised:

"It is true that war-time full employment has been accompanied by efforts and sacrifices and a curtailment of individual liberties which only the supreme emergency of war could justify; but it has shown up the wastes of unemployment in pre-war years, and it has taught us valuable lessons which we can apply to the problems of peace-time, when full employment must be achieved in ways consistent with a free society.

"In peace-time the responsibility of Commonwealth and State Governments is to provide the general framework of a full employment economy, within which the operations of individuals and businesses can be carried on.

"Improved nutrition, rural amenities and social services, more houses, factories and other capital equipment and higher standards of living generally are objectives on which we can all agree. Governments can promote the achievement of these objectives to the limit set by available resources.

"The policy outlined in this paper is that governments should accept the responsibility for stimulating spending on goods and services to the extent necessary to sustain full employment. To prevent the waste of resources which results from [un]employment is the first and greatest step to higher living standards."

Australian Government, 1945, White Paper on Full Employment

We chose to forget all this from the 1980s onward. We can choose to remember it at any time.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Philistine Factory — Stuart Whatley in the baffler: One plank in the Republican education-policy platform is student-loan privatization, even though most economists doubt that “liberalizing” this market would do any good. If private banks are brought into the process of granting student loans, they will have an incentive to favor certain academic majors over others. Any course of study that does not promise easy employment and a high salary after graduation will be denied financing, or treated as a subprime, punitively high-interest loan. This will, no doubt, have the desired effect of homogenizing the future labor force to fit American corporations’ standardized needs. As it happens, the Democrats’ ultimate goal for education in recent years has amounted to the same thing. To the extent that Hillary Clinton offered specific education policy proposals in the 2016 election, she did so only in the context of boosting workforce competence and productivity. The sole purpose of education, apparently, is to enable “young people from everywhere . . . to be prepared to compete for those jobs.”
• Centrelink’s Data-Matching Fiasco — Gerard McPhee in Arena: […] ministers want to reduce Centrelink expenditure and have a deep-seated suspicion about a class of people ‘rorting the system’. The factual basis of that suspicion is not critical here. What is critical is that Cabinet has a predisposition to support any additional method to detect imagined ‘rorters’ or ‘undeserving’ poor people, and will do so at a policy level, not considering the consequences of added complexity or transactional volume to the systems it will call on.
• Ten points for Democracy Activists — George Lakoff: Know the difference between framing and propaganda: Frames are mental structures used in thought; every thought uses frames. Every word in every language is defined relative to a mental structure — a frame. Frames, in themselves, are unavoidable and neutral. Honest framing is the use of frames you believe and that are used to express truths. Propaganda expresses lies that propagandists know are lies for the sake of political or social advantage.
• The world’s biggest gamblers — your chart porn for the week from the Economist: To the general public, Australia hardly leaps to mind as a gambling hotbed. Yet industry insiders know it is far and away their most lucrative market: according to H2 Gambling Capital (H2G), a consultancy, betting losses per resident adult there amounted to $990 last year. That is 40% higher than Singapore, the runner-up, and around double the average in other Western countries. The most popular form of gaming in Australia is on ubiquitous electronic poker machines, or “pokies”, which are more prevalent there than anywhere else. Although the devices are legal in many other markets, bet sizes are usually capped at modest levels. By contrast, in Australia, which began to deregulate the industry in the 1980s, punters can lose as much as $1,150 an hour.
  
• “Tulip bubble” Murray shakes snoring APRA — David Llewellyn-Smith in MacroBusiness: Switzer: “How vulnerable do you think our banks are to the apartment oversupply?” David Murray: “Well, the economy’s vulnerable because there’s a bubble in the housing market. All the signs of a bubble are there. Many of the signs are the same as the bubble in Dutch Tulips… People’s behaviour, people’s defensiveness about any correct in that market. All those signs are there. Now, if the economy tracks along OK, it might turn out that this thing sorts itself out. But when those risks are there, something needs to be done about it in a regulatory sense and the RBA and APRA need to stay on it”…
• What in the Heck Is “Money Printing,” Anyway? — Steve Roth at Evonomics has an interesting piece that packs a lot into a small word count. However I think it falls down by failing to distinguish between government-backed financial assets and real assets. Yes, when the dollar-denominated valuation of stock market or real estate assets goes up, we can say in one sense that private sector asset values have increased, but if everyone were to try to cash in at once those valuations would suddenly change drastically. On the other hand, for government-backed cash, central bank reserves, bonds, and private sector bank credits, a dollar is a dollar is a dollar — at least as far as extinguishing tax liabilities is concerned. For any other definition of "value", see a philosopher, not an economist.
• Universal Basic Income Accelerates Innovation by Reducing Our Fear of Failure — Scott Santens at Medium from an enthusiastically pro-market perspective, makes an argument that generalises to we socialist fuddy-duddies: For decades now our economy has been going through some very significant changes thanks to advancements in technology, and we have simultaneously been actively eroding the institutions that pooled risk like trade unions and our public safety net. Incomes adjusted for inflation have not budged for decades, and the jobs providing those incomes have gone from secure careers to insecure jobs, part-time and contract work, and now recently even gig labor in the sharing economy. Decreasing economic security means a population decreasingly likely to take risks. Looking at it this way, of course startups have been on the decline. How can you take the leap of faith required for a startup when you’re more and more worried about just being able to pay the rent?
• Listen up, Scott Morrison. It's time to bust the myth of the budget surplus — Warwick Smith brings MMT to the Guardian: Private sector debt in Australia is currently about 210% of GDP, compared to government debt of about 30%. What Scott Morrison needs to explain to the Australian people is why he’s so keen to increase the private debt they hold over their homes and businesses when it’s already so high.
• We showed I, Daniel Blake to people living with the benefits system: here’s how they reacted — Stephanie Petrie in the Conversation: During our screening, we were told that assessments often ignored significant health conditions. One profoundly deaf woman was informed: "In your application form for ESA you stated that following an illness when you were a child, you are now profoundly deaf. After your assessment I tried to contact you to discuss your assessment. I telephoned you several times, but you did not answer, therefore I left you a voicemail. You still did not respond. I have therefore found you fit for work."
• How will we get over the Trump addiction? — Robert Fisk in the Independent: Not long after the Lebanese civil war ended more than a quarter of a century ago, I found my landlord in a depressed mood. He had suffered in the fifteen years of war – part of his family had been “cleansed” from their home in east Beirut – but peace had returned to the ruins of the city, the Mediterranean sloshed opposite our apartment block and in front of the little candy store he ran on the Corniche. What on earth could be the matter? “It’s so boring, Mr Robert,” he confessed to me one bright morning.
• #ProtectTheTruth — George Lakoff: When President Richard Nixon addressed the country during Watergate and used the phrase “I am not a crook,” he coupled his image with that of a crook. He established what he was denying by repeating his opponents’ message. This illustrates a key principle of framing: avoid the language of the attacker because it evokes their frame and helps make their case.
• Why Australia’s rental system needs reform — Leith van Onselen, MacroBusiness: One of the great strengths of the German housing market is that it provides strong protections for tenants. […] because renting is the dominant housing choice in Germany (see below chart), the political system is highly sensitive to tenants’ rights and perceived threats to the status quo typically receive prominent media attention and political responses. Also, because renters enjoy secure tenure (and housing supply is fairly responsive), Germans have little incentive to rush into owner occupation. As such, Germany doesn’t suffer from the ‘panic buying’ and speculation often present in bubble housing markets, like Australia’s.

This week, I have been mostly hitting refresh on UK media sites and celebrating the imminent demise of neoliberalism. Otherwise fishing these from the depths of the reading backlog:

• Clown Therapy — Too Much Coffee Man by Shannon Wheeler:
  
• Why bad housing design pumps up power prices for everyone — Wendy Miller in the Conversation: Pumping heat from one place to another takes a lot of energy, which makes air conditioners particularly power-hungry appliances. The more leaky the house, the more heat needs to be pumped out. On hot days, when lots of aircon units are operating at the same time, this creates a challenge for the electricity infrastructure. It costs money to build an electricity network that can handle these peaks in demand. This cost is recovered through the electricity unit cost (cents per kilowatt hour). We all pay this cost, in every electricity bill we get; in fact the cost of meeting summer peak demand accounts for about 25% of retail electricity costs. This is more than twice the combined effect of solar feed-in tariffs, the Renewable Energy Target and the erstwhile carbon tax.
• Drugs du jour — Cody Delistraty in Aeon: Drug use offers a starkly efficient window into the cultures in which we live. Over the past century, popularity has shifted between certain drugs – from cocaine and heroin in the 1920s and ’30s, to LSD and barbiturates in the 1950s and ’60s, to ecstasy and (more) cocaine in the 1980s, to today’s cognitive- and productivity-enhancing drugs, such as Adderall, Modafinil and their more serious kin. If Huxley’s progression is to be followed, the drugs we take at a given time can largely be ascribed to an era’s culture. We use – and invent – the drugs that suit our culture’s needs.
• Emails — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Content Addressing is Magic — Brewster Kahle: Content Addressing starts by processing a digital file into a “hash” which is roughly 64Bytes, or 64 character long string of numbers (using sha256). This hash is has amazing properties– given a hash you can confirm that a digital file matches it, further given a hash it is very very difficult to create the digital file. And, here is the kicker, given a hash it is almost impossible to create a second digital file that matches it, but was not exactly the same as the original. […] Why this can be important [is] that materials can be served from many places, served from libraries and archives, and keep permanently available long after the original server is gone.
• We’re Wealthier Now, We Can’t Afford That Anymore — Peter Cooper, the heteconomist: Have you noticed how things we used to be able to do are beyond our capabilities now? We finally reached a point where we were able to provide free university education. Then we grew wealthier, and some countries couldn’t afford it anymore. Some of us still have universal public health care systems, but they’re increasingly a chronic burden. Maybe they made sense once, but it’s only a matter of time before they go. Sure, Cuba can do it, but they’re poorer than us.
• Change my power supplier? I haven’t got the energy — David Mitchell in the Guardian: Come on, there are over 40 suppliers to look at! They each have several different tariffs! You need to be checking them all out several times a year, working out what they would each mean for your specific home and energy consumption, making a decision and then embarking on the administrative process of changing supplier. If you don’t, the privatisation of the utilities will look like it doesn’t work! Get on with it – you’re making Margaret Thatcher look stupid!
• Towards an Anarchist Money and Monetary System: An Interview with Nathan Cedric Tankus — Alexander Kolokotronis, New Politics: Let me put my cards on the table: I think societies need a common measure for accounting purposes to do economic calculations and a general system of distribution. For various reasons I think that labor measures, energy measures, etc. are inadequate for the job (although I think statistical work on how much energy is needed to produce varieties of outputs is important). Thus, a monetary unit of account is the worst unit of account, except for all the others. I do not think this is a concession to the capitalist mode of production and this is where I disagree with a great many Marxist and radical thinkers. Traditionally, the existence of markets has been conflated with capitalism.
• Economists versus the Economy — Robert Skidelsky scores no points with the conventional wisdom that there are at present "virtually no usable macroeconomic tools", but I can't fault the punchline: What unites the great economists, and many other good ones, is a broad education and outlook. This gives them access to many different ways of understanding the economy. The giants of earlier generations knew a lot of things besides economics. Keynes graduated in mathematics, but was steeped in the classics (and studied economics for less than a year before starting to teach it). Schumpeter got his PhD in law; Hayek’s was in law and political science, and he also studied philosophy, psychology, and brain anatomy. Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.
• Evil Ethics — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
• On the Ridiculous Notion that the Federal Reserve is a Private Bank and Concerning Those Persons Who Peddle the Nonsense – My Final Words on the Subject — Ellis Winningham: By perpetuating mindless, ridiculous notions concerning the Federal Reserve that a six year old child can make up in his or her mind, you are obstructing progress; you are preventing federal deficit spending for full employment and the public purpose; you are helping to move GDP to capital; you are leaving people homeless in sub-zero weather; you are perpetuating poverty and hunger; you are keeping us idle while the climate declines; you are killing people by refusing to ask questions, listen and learn, and instead, preferring to live a life of pretense. A lack of an overall education, or a lack of education in monetary theory and macroeconomics is no excuse for making up explanations that you are able to understand.