economy Archives - Page 7 of 8

Optimistic Wishes for 2010

In today’s The Straits Times, occasional columnist Tom Plate writes about ‘an optimist’s wish list for 2010‘. Tom Plate is a relatively regular columnist for The Straits Times and writes for many other newspapers in the Asia-Pacific as well. His articles also often make for interesting reading because he writes in a rather cheerful and casual (yet still professional) style, a style not exactly like Paul Krugman’s whose writings I recently referred to in my last entry for erpz.net but I enjoy his writings as much as Krugman’s.

In this article, he tries to infuse some optimism into his hopes for the coming year. Some of the wishes are really wishful thinking, but still no harm keeping your fingers crossed.

His wishes:
1. World pays more attention to South Korea, less to North Korea
Well, actually this tactic might work. North Korea is sometimes like an attention-seeking kid throwing a temper-tantrum and sometimes you need to ignore the kid for a while so that he calms down. But then again, does your kid have nuclear weapons that he can throw at his ‘friends’?

2. These bad big shots will resign: Britain’s PM Gordon Brown, Burma’s junta leader Than Shwe & North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il
I agree on the latter two but Gordon Brown… he’s not doing a good job at all in Britain, but he’ll probably be kicked out through the elections this year. Why is Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not on this list? He’s a greater danger to the world than Gordon Brown is.

3. India’s Odd Couple named Time’s Man and Woman of the Year: PM Manmohan Singh & Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi
Like Plate says, US needs to pay more attention to India. It will make not ‘just a good strategic partner’ as US President Obama claims, but a staunch ally and friend not just in the War on Terror but in terms of the global economy and climate change for instance. US needs to soothe the frayed nerves of their Indian counterparts.

4. China’s President Hu opens up, gets down with Western media
This is not that hard to do on a personal perspective, but if you think about the Chinese leadership and how they go about doing things… this is pretty much like expecting Wish Number 2 to magically be granted.

5. Japan finds a successful premier: NOT Yukio Hatoyama
In all honesty, is anything so wrong with current PM Yukio Hatoyama? I think he is hamstrung by his 2 parties allied to his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) that are imposing many demands on him and not toeing the official alliance line. And then there’s DPJ Chairman Ichiro Ozawa who pulls strings behind the scenes… which makes the current PM’s life so difficult. Give him a chance to learn the ropes. We are so willing to give President Obama chances to make mistakes as a newly-minted leader without much experience, so why not PM Hatoyama?

He did not tackle climate change in his article as I hoped he might have, but let’s just stick to politics and economy for now. Or he probably feels pessimistic about climate change as well? We dont really know what he doesnt write, but from what he has written in his above list, if any of the wishes came true it’d make global affairs less complex and less troublesome for America at least.

The Big Zero

Paul Krugman’s article, published in The Straits Times, regarding the 2000s, gives quite a bit for thought. Paul Krugman is a famed American economist from Princeton who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008 for his theories on trade and economic geography. I have always loved to read his articles in The Straits Times because they have always been very insightful and succintly written, and always hit the nail on the head. This article that I introduce here is no different, but it’s slightly different in tone from what he writes.

Usually, he adopts a rather neutral or slightly positive tone in his writings, even if they are regarding the economic crisis today (he studies economic crises, hence his expertise in commenting on them). But in this article he takes a rather pessimistic, negative view towards the decade that just passed us: the Noughties (2000s). He proposes calling it ‘The Big Zero’ because ‘nothing good happened’ and ‘none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true’.

And then he justifies with some general statistics based on America: almost zero job creation, private-sector employment decline, fall in median household income after adjustment for inflation, zero gains for houseowners, zero gains for stocks. Read the article for moredetails, but we all have seemed to come back to square 1, in 1999, or gotten worse off. So what’s with all that optimism about the economy?

By right things were supposed to go well. There was confidence in the financial system, expressed by Lawrence Summers in 1999. Summers is, by the way, the current administration’s top economist and in 1999 then deputy Treasury secretary. He believed then that America had ‘honest corporate accounting’, but this seemed to just vapourise if we look at this century. Even before the current financial meltdown, much earlier on there was Enron and WorldCom, two large and supposedly reliable firms that were exposed for dishonesty.

And then American politics does not seem to have a solution to the problem. The Democrats try to seek compromise in what they seek and their ideas are vehemently opposed by many as being too socialist, while the Republicans seem to believe that the solution to the problems caused by ‘tax cuts and deregulation’ is more ‘tax cuts and deregulation’.

Certainly not a very inspiring decade. But this restricts itself to America of course. I must say that for most other countries it was probably not this bad. If we take the example of China, to call this decade The Big Zero would be to forget its ascent onto the global arena as a superpower. So… the Americans have it bleak but the Asians are having it better.

Meaningful, I’m not so sure

Key states have announced what they call a “meaningful” agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Summit to tackle climate change. The agreement between the US, China, Brazil, India and South Africa would set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than 2C and, importantly, to take action to meet this objective.

The five-nation brokered deal promised to deliver $30bn of aid for developing nations over the next three years, and outlined a goal of providing $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change. The agreement also included a method for verifying industrialised nations’ reduction of emissions. The US had insisted that China dropped its resistance to this measure.

However, it seems that only the US and China are supposedly “happy” from a meeting which seemingly had a “positive result”, or rather, what I term as a poor return from the 2 weeks worth of discussion.

In the face of a globalized world and the many challenges that we face, what the US and China put forth together seemingly only benefits them. For instance, nothing is done about limiting carbon emissions and on a legally binding treaty, something which sort of “liberalizes” the major powers in the form of US, China and India. With US out of Kyoto and the lack of a legally binding contract, China and India can be said to be free to do whatever they want, with all three nations insisting that national sovereignty comes first.

Now, I’m not saying national sovereignty should be ignored, but as we attempt to tackle a problem that we should have been engaged in long ago, we realize that the Copenhagen Accord, as Jo Leinen, chairman of the European Parliament’s environment committee described, is a completely “disappointment and below our expectations”.

Selfish interests of the global powers dominated the discussion table in Copenhagen, while the rest of the world are let down by their inability to co-operate and come up with a more radical approach to the problem. Yes, this is progress from what has come before, a necessity, but whether it will truly solve the problem, no. The roots of the problem ultimately lie in the countries’ inability to break out of their shell – their inability to come to a solid-enough compromise, and their covert belief that the economy should come first. This inability to commit to this cause from the US, China and India seemingly portrays them in a green limelight.

Progress has been made, yes, but it’s no longer about the ability to make progress, that almost didn’t happen, but rather, how fast we can reach humanity’s goal.

The clock is ticking.

Popping Up?

With the Subprime Financial Crisis, the global economy tumbled, trade flows scaled down rapidly as economies started contracting. Initially, during the boom, trade was growing faster than global income, implying that the global growth, mainly concentrated in the already developed parts of the world economy was gained from increasing specialization and division of labour through trade and exchange. And for a slight contraction in the global economy, a lot of these supply chain will face problems in-between and go bust, resulting in a huge contraction in trade since the businesses relied on each other heavily for business. Daniel Gross discusses the decline of trade, and the implied slowdown/reverse of globalization on Slate.com. The situation is probably not as serious as Gross makes it sound.

The crisis is leading to a re-organization of globalization, towards greater degrees of cooperation and perhaps with less imbalances. With economists finding a better means of carry trade, and more reasons for Asia to get together, the world won’t be drifting apart that soon. In the latter article from Banyan column, The Economist highlights the strengths of a more integrated Asian economy and the challenges facing Asia.

The world seem to have accepted the global multilateral trade isn’t exactly going to be possible with all that decline in trade and rise of calls for protectionism and so regional multilateral trade and economic integration is the second best thing. Forming trade blocs or even common markets would do a great deal to help further globalization and put it on a path with more supranational bodies’ control. The idea is that having authorities in the process of globalization might help make it a better force in this world.

Age of Turbulence

I read the review of Alan Greenspan’s book 2 years back in The Economist, but didn’t buy it until late last year when I went on a book-shopping spree. The book gone on to stay on my book table (yes, I seriously need a bookshelf) for another year or so before I dusted it two weeks ago and began reading it. In any case, I bought an updated version, which features an epilogue detailing Alan Greenspan’s take on the Subprime Financial Crisis and his prescriptions.

I was immediately surprised by Alan Greenspan’s clear writing and simple style so contrary to his famous inscrutable public announcements about the Fed. It is this that earned The Economist’s rare praise:

Sub-heading of the book review: “Not many surprises in this memoir-cum-essay except that it is an unexpectedly enjoyable read.”

Book Review Quote: “[D]espite everything, the book turns out to be first-rate. It engages on different levels: it is intelligent in a way that few popular books on economics manage or even try to be; and, wonder of wonders, it is a good read.”

The book begins as a memoir, detailing Greenspan’s childhood, interest in music, schooling, economic/technical inclinations and his long career in the Federal Reserve Bank where he was Mr Chairman. His memoir ends somewhat abruptly in retrospect at the eleventh chapter, The Nation Challenged. Beginning with the chapter, The Universals of Economic Growth, he went on with his economy essays and analysis of various economies, industries and trends. Like what The Economist says, Age of Turbulence is a good read, his memoir was very neutral and he was very humble about his work at the Fed. His accounts of the workings of the Fed provides non-American readers a good starting point to learn about their system. Greenspan’s essays on the world economy and economics stays faithful to his belief in the power of free markets and respect for the freedoms and rights that the American Founding Fathers have sought and preserved.

He defends his views that no one can possibly identify a bubble and actively sought to burst it before it gets too big and cause a crisis in its subsequent burst. As a matter of fact, this is the case because anyone who can confidently identify the bubble can profit from it by going against the flow and thus end up defusing it before it builds up. At times, when the so-called ‘irrational exuberance’ exerts too powerful a market force then regulators wouldn’t actually be able to defuse it anyways. He seem to sigh at the voter’s expectations that the government is almighty and is disappointed by typical politicians who doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of ‘trade-offs’. These are typical economist’s perennial concerns about the world in democracies that never seem they’ll ever go away.

As a pragmatist, Greenspan shows great appreciation for the rule of law that has maintained the workings of the market and fostered a culture of trust so essential to capitalism. And reflecting on that, Greenspan gives suggestions on how the emerging economies need to improve their governance and legal systems to catch up with their prosperity and march towards developed status. These are valuable insights gained from Greenspan’s 19 years of being the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Indeed, Greenspan confesses that he knows little about international economics until he took on this role since his work at Townsend-Greenspan & Company (which closed following his nomination to that post) deals little with the economies of other nations.

Overall, Age of Turbulence provides wonderful insights into workings of the capitalist system of America and great ideas about emerging economies, the direction the world economy is heading to – knowledge significant to any economics students and economist-wannabe.

Another sort of Criticism

After penning the entry on Yuan’s appreciation, I come to observe another sort of criticism that is used on China that does contribute to the global imbalance and probably needs more attention than the currency but is an issue the Chinese government have way less control. That is the lack of spending by the Chinese, which is something repeated time and again. The Economist’s Banyan column recently compared India to China:

Levels of capital and infrastructure investment [of India] compare favourably with China’s. And, much more than in China, the hot story in India is domestic demand. India is no mercantilist adding to global imbalances. It imports more than it exports, creating much needed global demand.

Although the article goes on to discuss the flaws of the Indian economy, especially its lack of participation in the supply chains that link up much of the emerging economies of Asia as a result of their focus on exporting services rather than industrial goods. Industrial production in India remains largely in the hands of a huge number of medium-sized enterprises.

Anyways, back to the fact that China is under-consuming; James Surowiecki explains on The New Yorker why the Chinese don’t spend. He briefly ponders over culture, but goes on to focus on the nature of their economy, and the structures that are reducing access to credit and thus raising the need to save, which means perenially low consumption.

In a sense, the culture revolves around the idea of investment for the future, saving first so that one would be able to spend them. The long history of struggles and uncertainty means the Chinese are probably more risk adverse than their Western counterparts and reluctant to take on debts. In a period of growing wealth, the Chinese naturally hopes to put aside money for the future (be it studies, starting a business, a family or just for rainy days).

As the economy develops, it’ll mature and eventually shift towards higher credit and lower savings. The large investment that the government is pumping into the economy will have to induce greater efficiency in use of capital to help speed up the maturity. Till then, Americans will still get the chance to complain about Chinese inability to spend in the consumer sense.

Insuring Nothing

Tyler Cowen mentioned something about product insurance at one part of his book, Discover Your Inner Economist. He says that one should not argue with his wife when she insist on buying product insurance even when you know that the results are economic analysis are at your favour. Presumably, there are some other cost-benefit analysis taking place, at the level where the cost of winning the argument greatly overwhelms the benefit (which of course is the cash saved on the product insurance). The Economist asked why people continue to buy them even when products are unlikely to fail, which means that these product insurances are immensely profitable for the electronics retail sector. The researchers who examined purchase data from a big electronics retailer for over 600 households from November 2003 to October 2004 concluded that the purchases were linked to the shopper’s mood. Of course, a less-than-rational wife might be the explanation, but even the wife has a sound explanation for that:

[…] the emotional tranquillity that comes with buying a new warranty is not in itself without value, even if “rationally, it doesn’t make sense”.

But I find an ingredient missing in this story; the researchers probably falsely assume that all the shoppers have got the same level of perceptiveness. And I believe perception have all to do with the purchase of product insurance. Think about it, when was the last time you had a product which failed and the warranty period was just over and you blame yourself for not buying additional coverage? But how about the last time when you did buy the product insurance and it didn’t fail at all within the span of its usage, not once? Just like the belief that we’re unlucky enough to always join the slowest queue in the supermarket; our erroneous perception of the frequency we get unlucky can make us more frustrated with a product insurance unextended than a product which didn’t fail after we bought the coverage despite the fact that they probably inflicts the same cost on you. Obviously it actually hurts you more when you think back and regret not extending coverage; you probably won’t even think back on how stupid you were to buy product insurance for a reliable product since you’re using it happily.

This creates a bias for purchasing product insurance. Our faulty perception supplements our faulty memory in suggesting that buying product insurance would be the wise choice, going by the seemingly sound argument of ‘if the product fails, I’m protected; and even if it doesn’t, I get a peace of mind plus the retailers deserve the reward if they recommended me the durable kind of good’. You could very well have realised that if the product was that durable the manufacturer would already have taken a cut for that on the retail price and that if the product ran a high chance of failure the retailer wouldn’t even offer you the product insurance in the first place. And if your wife has anything to say about that, it’ll probably be “Must you be that calculative?”

Rising Yuan, But not now

In one of the economics essay I’ve written for A Levels Practice, I argued that the appreciation of Yuan is unlikely to solve the trade surplus problem that they have and thus reality will not play out as the Americans choose to believe – trade imbalance will continue to mount and China may risk deflation, following the fate of Japan in the past. I was very lucky because during A Levels a somewhat similar question came out and I made the same sort of argument with points already in my mind.

Most journals and publications I read insist on the need for Yuan to be revalued, giving little credit for the fact that China already allowed it to appreciate against the dollar substantially compared to the past. Without the unpegging of Yuan to the Dollar in 2005, trade imbalance could have been worst. That doesn’t mean that it was the appreciation of Yuan that naturally lend its hand at achieving balance; it was mainly the gradual appreciation and the timing it was allowed to appreciate. The Economist analysed China’s side of the Yuan policy. It gives a balanced account of how political forces and potential economic problems makes China hesitant about revaluing its Yuan.

It is unfair that America always seem to put China into bad light by hinting that China could make a difference (since its central government wield a whole lot of power) but don’t want to. The fact is that there are way too many instances where Americans had the power too, but then they’d exclaim that all sorts of lobbying and market forces are in the way. If China were to give in to this sort of pressure, it would make them way too weak. Besides, America isn’t always right (in fact, most of the time it isn’t); China has done too well in their transition from central planning to market economy so far and will continue to create their own path.

The Becker-Posner Blog also features Becker and Posner’s individual views on the need for China to revalue the Yuan and when so.

Fake Stuff

The Economist ran a story about counterfeit handsets in China lately. Counterfeiting and piracy is not exactly all imitation and no creativity but it does actually hurt the economy, or so claimed by original manufacturers because it affects their incentives to innovate. The difficulty lies with assessing whether the consumer would even consume the good in the first place if the imitation is not available. As a matter of fact, I think the best way for these problem to solve themselves is for consumers to realise which one of the products (real or fake) offers them the utility they need. In most cases, people may just be satisfied with imitations then so be it; the original manufacturers simply may not have profited from these group of consumers who would otherwise not be able to afford the real thing.

It is only when the utility functions of these products coincide and people switch from using original to fakes that matters (but the difference should be made up by the disparity in quality or the time lag in introduction of imitations) and becomes a huge problem. And it would be a bad thing if manufacturers ends up engaged in the competition of who is best able to prevent piracy – that’s senseless innovation that penalizes the society in general. Take Digital Rights Management (DRMs) for example. It sucks, everyone hates them and games like Red Alert 3 lost business because of it (though most part of its lack of popularity was attributed to its poor interface design and lame scenarios) and consumers hate big firms for them.

Perhaps intellectual property should be contained in ways that are stricter such that innovations built upon ideas that belongs to others are welcomed. In many sense, parodies are imitations, and so are fan fiction, built upon characterization or story frameworks that belongs to others. We should perhaps start treating the NPhone’s relation with iPhone like Shrek’s relation with Matrix. A joke.

On Incentives & Debts

James Surowiecki fiddled about the idea that our tax breaks on debt interests are encouraging debt, the ones that eventually pulled down the system with it. He makes a lot of sense, especially when he mentioned:

Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

Of course, he was speaking largely of corporate debts as well as mortgages but he did also raised the point that “In the U.S., people used to be able to write off the interest they paid on credit cards. That tax break was abolished in 1986…” Interestingly, Fortune Magazine ran a story about record debt in China. The diagnosis sounds grim but it does little to compare the context of the debts in China and US, making it difficult to assess if the ‘some economists’ quoted by them makes sense. Moreover, the statement about infrastructural investments is way too wobbly, China has much room to pull ahead when you compare them with the developed world; to be frank, the top cities in China barely compare with top cities of the world. In addition, The Economist have also tried to offer an alternative, more comprehensive explanation of China’s growth linked to productivity.

Some economists believe China’s infrastructure, already superior to that of many other developing economies, has now passed the point where more investment can contribute much to growth. China, in other words — despite the rosy, headline GDP numbers — might be stuck.

And yes, Japan is now fearful of the D-word, or rather the comeback of it; not depression, or debts. It’s kind of cool to have a central bank that combats ‘deflation’ rather than ‘inflation’ though.