107 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  1. From a libertarian perspective it appears on initial inspection that the German elections represent a lurch in the right direction. FDP got the highest amount of voter support in their history. Bring on the tax cuts.

  3. Dear readers,

    Just writing to see if anyone can help me… I’m looking for information on the Henry Tax review. I’m not really well informed here – so I don’t know when the final report will be… I need relevant information for an article I’m writing for my blog – and for On Line Opinion (if they’re interested)… Importantly I’m not an economist – more of a generalist instead… So help from John here – or from anyone else reading this – would be appreciated… :))

  4. Dear readers – I’m also posting some information here on my blog ‘Left Focus’ – and hope some of you are interested…

    We’re up to 75 supporters on Facebook now – and I’m hoping we can reach 120 by the end of the year. (ambitious I know – but am hoping for the best…)

    You’re all welcome to visit the blog – and join our support group at Facebook. Please consider asking friends to do likewise if you think they’d be interested…

    You can find the blog here:

    http://leftfocus.blogspot.com/

    and you can find our Facebook page here:

    http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=58243419565

    ALSO – Remember that we’re also always interested in quality progressive commentary, analysis and opinion. If you’d like to write for us please let us know.

    FINALLY: our most recent post is a consideration of comments by Joseph Stiglitz from ‘The Age’ – feel welcome to read and to comment…

    kind and sincere regards,

    Tristan Ewins (Left Focus Moderator)

  5. @TerjeP (say tay-a)

    From a libertarian perspective it appears on initial inspection that the German elections represent a lurch in the right direction

    Pun noted …

    One suspects that the CDU will not give the FDP a free hand to trash German welfare provision or employment conditions. It will be interesting if despite this limitation between them the CDU/CSU and the FDP can send Germany’s economy down the toilet.

  6. Pun was not intended but I saw it also after I submitted the comment. JC notes in comments on my blog article that by the end of 2010 the EU is likely to look much more right wing and pro-market. Interesting in the context of the GFC and the associated anti-market rhetoric.

    CDU promised during the election to extend the life of nuclear power plants. I thought that might interest you in terms of nuclear PR.

  9. Dear Tony: thanks for this – it’s very useful… 🙂 I also need to know when the final report will be – does anyone know this – and maybe have a reference?

  10. TerjeP (say tay-a), don’t count your chickens before they hatch for Merkel is not going to undo all the good hard work she has done over the past few years for the sake of the FDP.

  12. MoSH – I don’t want her to undo the good stuff she has done over the past few years.

  15. Just writing to let readers know we’ve published another article at Left Focus – this time on ‘Isocracy’

    Left Focus author Lev Lafayette describes Isocracy as follows:

    ISOCRACY: The historic mission of isocracy, “equal rule”, with the universal principles of personal liberty through self-ownership and social democracy in the commonwealth is to create such a society in the context of contemporary technology.

    You’re all welcome to read and comment at the blog:

    http://leftfocus.blogspot.com/

    sincerely,

    Tristan

  17. @SeanG
    Im really abit disturbed by the proposal to restrict executives excessive salaries if they are voted down by 20% of shareholders IF and only IF it happens TWO years in a row.

    GREAT (NOT). So execs abuse the system and pay themselves double in years 1,3,5 and 7.

    BIG DEAL. Utterly pointless at giving any power to shareholders. What a nonsense. It wont restrain anything. Nothing at all.

  18. MoSH – your not very good at reading. I said I agreed with her good policies not her leftist ones.

  20. The “only if it happens two years in a row” is a bloody ridiculous idea. RIDICULOUS. I just cant get over it. So they (execs) constinue to rort their remuneration closed shop deals with large institutional shareholders every second year and NOTHING WILL CHANGE.

    Ive never ever heard of legislation so stupid. What is the RUDD govs advisers and legislation writers playing at here? Do they think we are all fools?

    MUST DO.

    The shareholders will get NO power from this NONE and nothing will change re the theft of shareholders monies as unjustifiable obscne remunerations to a few.

    Wake up Australia. Im in danger of joining the small govt libertarian crew (the anarchists even) when they make idiot decisions like this draft piece of rubbish.

  21. @Alice

    Haven’t read it yet, but don’t anticipate I will be impressed…

    On the other hand, I think Professors Bebchuk and Fried from Harvard and Berkeley, who have done extensive research into the issues, would have a far better handle on things. Maybe the government should have ‘off-shored’ the inquiry to them? Maybe the Productivity Commission should recommend that they be shut down and all their functions contracted out to the private sector? After all, that would be consistent with the dominant philosophy in the place. But I suppose that would leave them unemployed? Maybe I detect self interest raising its ugly head?

  22. Institutional shareholders need to show some guts over executive pay. Good executives should be well rewarded but poor executives should have their share options stripped from them.

    The best paid executives are those who own (partly own) and run their firms. If you put your capital at risk yuo should get the reward.

  23. @SeanG

    Institutional shareholders suffer from the ‘other people’s money’ problem. Also, those running those institutions would love to get their snouts in the trough as well by being highly paid directors on some of the companies. Good executives should be adequately rewarded for the good job they do. Share options should never be used. They should simply be paid a salary and be fired if they don’t perform (like the good old days).

  24. The EU have once again shown that they are not interested in inward investment. Due to the financial crisis, a new directive has been put out to increase capital requirements and transparency for hedge funds and private equity firms including requiring a professional valuer to value the assets.

    One hedge fund since the beginning of hedge funds has been “systemic”. There is significant creative destruction in the hedge fund world which do not destroy financial markets. They make them more efficient and help provide investors with an alternative source.

    Private equity are not a systemic risk to the marketplace. They were included because they represent a threat to the established European order. Basically big business and big government are getting together again to protect themselves.

    Venture capital is now caught up. Small VC firms according to regulations will have to hold €125k-1million. This is irrespective as to whether or not the VC firms can afford it!

    Trust the Europeans to try to destroy an industry that is vital for alternative platforms for investment.

  25. @SeanG

    SeanG :The EU have once again shown that they are not interested in inward investment. P>
    One hedge fund since the beginning of hedge funds has been “systemic”. There is significant creative destruction in the hedge fund world which do not destroy financial markets. They make them more efficient and help provide investors with an alternative source.
    Private equity are not a systemic risk to the marketplace. They were included because they represent a threat to the established European order. Basically big business and big government are getting together again to protect themselves.

    Well done EU. One Hedge Fund LTCM represented a Global Financial Crisis systemic risk All By Itself. Hedge funds generally represent systemic risks. And so does private equity. They create much more inefficiency than they eliminate, and to the extent they are profitable, often represent nothing more than a tax on other investors returns, which is not good for investment.

    Many of these schemes represent variants of martingale betting systems, which explains how they extract above normal profits (with good commissions for those running them) and then suddenly blow up. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

    This was the story of LTCM. Basically it was a martigale.

    See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTCM

    Another trick is leverage through massive borrowing to amplify the martigale gains.

    “LTCM’s strategies were compared … to “picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer” — a likely small gain balanced against a small chance of a large loss, like the payouts from selling an out-of-the-money option.”

    This comparison seems to apply to most hedge funds (when you get a chance to look inside). Not all though. Some actually involve some thinking rather than self-delusion or fraud.

  26. Hedge funds are not big enough to represent systemic risk. That is why hundreds have failed and yet the markets have not collapsed.

    Same things with private equity.

    Tax on investors earnings? Inefficiencies? What? So arbitrare is inefficiencies?

    Hedge funds have multiple strategies. They rarely have the capital to sustain such a martingale-type strategy. Do you really know what you are talking about?

    LTCM gave back half their capital just before Russia collapsed.

    Do you know what you are talking about?

    Have you ever interacted with a hedge fund or know anyone who works at a hedge fund?

    Do you understand the concept of a hedge fund?

    Do you know the difference between a hedge fund and a private equity firm?

  27. @SeanG

    If you follow your logic, Sean, nothing is a systemic risk. If everything was small and failed independently of everything else, there would be no systemic risk. Hedge funds and private equity seek risk becaue their is a premium for risk and that premium is often due to systemic risks. To that risk they typically contribute their own, through their operations, and through their leverage and undercapitalisation which creates futher systemic risk through counter-party risk. The people who drafted the changes for the EU, probably, understand these things. I think I have implicitly answered your remaining questions and you have also.

  28. Odd you think that. I stated that there was one hedge fund did have systemic fund. I guess it blows your interpretation out of the water.

    The people who drafted the EU policies have no idea – like you.

    Firstly, funds seek risk. Every investment is a risk. Systemic risk? What are you smoking? They seek risks and then cover their position except occasionally they take punts, lose money and fail. The system does not collapse. They have margin hair-cuts with brokers, they operate via exchanges all of which mitigate counterparty risk.

    Hence no systemic risks.

    Secondly, private equity firms raise money from investors to purchase a company. How can that collapse the credit markets?

    I think you have answered my questions. You don’t understand hedge funds or private equity firms.

  29. @SeanG
    Firstly, funds seek risk. Every investment is a risk. Systemic risk? What are you smoking?

    It appears everyone has been smoking a new and dangerous drug called the GFC. Im just waiting for round two which is coming. The entire system of investing the ordinary persons super is where all the systemic risk is…and less for those who have insider knowledge on how to gamble with other people’s savings.

    Systemic risk??? Not for some evil creatures.

  30. You said it yourself Sean – they take punts and occasionally lose – they dont invest prudently. They take punts with other peoples money.

  31. @Freelander
    Freelander – Bob Brown on TV tonight saying this new regulation is TOTALLY INEFFECTUAL.

    It doesnt take an idiot to work that out.

    How dare they listen to the greedy end of town which is exactly what I assume the govt has done re this new regulation throwing a one cent piece (alas they have gone out of circulation) to shareholders. Tragic.

    BOO. HISS. Alan Fels advising and all. Who did they listem to??? Not their own consciences.

  32. @SeanG

    The problem is to think that “too big to fail” is the only systemic danger. When a large group are behaving the same way or are highly interconnected, one or more can present a systemic risk, especially if there involved in making those interconnections more and more convoluted. That is why the risk is not just the LTCMs of the world but the whole sector. Many of them have the capacity to take big positions that can spiral rapidly out of control, and bring things down by themselves, but even if they were all small they are not indepedent in their behaviours and especially in their failures and that is where the systemic risk comes from.

    @Alice

    Still haven’t read it, but I think Bob is probably right (although I don’t agree with everything Bob says). I did see on the TV that Directors and CEOs were giving it the thumbs up. That doesn’t bode well.

  33. The problem with executive pay is a throny one. As much as I object to the productivity commission report, they do have a point about how to “incentivise” the right behaviour without simply turning enterprises into organs of the state. None of the potential metrics really works consistently to measure total performance, which is possibly why I favour having the larger ones community owned and controlled.

    One possible approach would be to allow comanies to pay their people anything, but declare that the maximum they could deduct as company expenses was a figure 25 times the lowest paid full time employee in the company or 20 times the average employee’s pay, whichever was the lower. After that, each $1000 would be deductible for tax purposes at a reducing rate, phasing out completely at 40 times the rate.

    One could also penalise companies tendering for government work who didn’t follow the pay scale by giving all who complied extra points in a bidding process so that all else being equal, the complying company gets the work.

  34. People do not understand systemic risk. Hedge funds are part of a patchwork of international finance. One hedge fund might have, say, $20bn invested in the credit markets. A certain amount of this will be OTC derivatives, others will be in exchange traded derivatives and others will be invested elsewhere.

    Now if this hedgefund collapses because its capital base cannot sustain loses being made, what happens? Does the entire system sink? No, of course it does not sink.

    Why is it that Lehmans and LTCM represent systemic risk but dozens indeed hundreds of hedge funds that have been forced to close have not? Simple: size and scope. Lehmans was a critical intersection for many CDSs and other complex derivative products. It’s size meant that many market participants believed that it could not fail or that it would be bailed out. When Lehman’s went under then no one was safe as no one ever should be.

    But this is the interesting point. When Lehman’s collapsed and AIG was tanking and the market was in free fall, the CDS market survived. Many thought it would create a catastrophic hole in the world’s financial systems. However, while there is a nominal $60 tn CDS market out there, once netted off this amount is considerably less. The CDS market survived.

    This is at the “high finance” stage. Lower down there are banks that represent systemic risks. But I must stress that size and scope relative to the broader market is vital to consider. LTCM was a massive player, earning more money than many investment banks and it was not involved in mature markets. Individual hedge funds do not have the scope to do what LTCM did to the broad marketplace.

  35. @SeanG

    Yes you are right “people do not understand systemic risk”. The Lehman’s problem wasn’t simply because of size. Lehman’s wasn’t bailed out. They were all in trouble at the same time. If they had been small, like savings and loans, they would all have been in trouble, in this case at the same time. That is why the CDSs were such a silly idea. There was a big likelihood that far too many of them would need to be paid out at the same time. Which is also why they used CDSs rather than insurance. Because the insurance industry is regulated and insurance isn’t issued in these types of situations. That is why you can’t get insurance for a nuclear accident because if the accident happened the issuer of the policy couldn’t pay out all those who took policies out (read policies they exclude nuclear accidents). Systemic risk is in the bad tail of undiversifiable risk. That is the part where you get the big premium. Derivatives let you slice and dice so you can pare off the tail and hold it. When the whole market, or a whole market, goes bad, then whether there is one Lehman or lots of little Lehmans there is trouble. The reason the whole thing didn’t collapse was due to massive bail outs. The LTCM problem would have been the same if it had have been lots of baby LTCMs doing the same thing. The only difference is that the task of bailing out a bunch of little LTCMs would have been considerably harder.

  36. Are you completely missing the FACT that DOZENS of hedge funds have collapsed this year? DOZENS last year? And DOZENS the year before?

    Are you completely ignoring that? Are you trying to ignore reality? I don’t like “shouting” with capitals but are you saying, hand on heart, that every hedge fund represents a systemic risk even though hedge funds have collapsed without the system failing? Systemic risk is one institution going lead to the entire system failing. Do you understand this simple concept?

  37. @SeanG

    Yes I do. It is no different to the sub-prime morgage situation. Sometimes one or two or more default but they can get into situations where it becomes likely that lots will default at the same time. Hedge funds need to be heavily regulated if allow at all. Hedge funds can get themselves into situations where lots are close to failing and a few failures can then ripple through and that’s systemic risk. It is not exactly something I made up. As I said “to big to fail” is not the only danger. The Lehman’s problem wasn’t really a too big to fail problem because they were all doing the same, playing the same shonky game, and they were all failing and would have been in that situation no matter what size they were.

    Here is the Casino version. Imagine a game of roulete where you only lose if your number comes up. All the players put their chips on numbers independently. A few lose each time. Some different players this time; they all put their chips on the same number. They all lose at the same time. Of course with hedge funds there are cases where a few lose all by themselves but when they all think they are on to the same ‘winner’ they will all do the same ‘smart’ thing and that is the danger and that is where the systemic risk comes in greatest. Big or lots of littles same problem when that happens. I think I have explicated enough.

  38. Update, Update, Update, it has been reported today that the World Bank estimates developing countries will need $85-$113 billion per year to adapt to climate change, plus much more in order to reduce emissions and maintain global warming below 2 degrees.

  39. A recent report I heard in the news is suggesting that 4 C is on the cards by 2050 anyway. Things need to start happening fast… The do nothing brigade have been far too effective at slowing things down.

  40. Freelander, nice thought but reality dictates. As for the global warming sceptics they must live in cloud cuckoo land.

  42. @Freelander
    No it doesnt bode well that directors and CEOs are giving this legislation the thumbs up. If it was going to have any effect at reigning in their obscene remunerations directors and CEOs would be kicking and screaming against it.

    Not a good sign.

  43. Update, Update, Update, the Obama administration has outfoxed everyone for today the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories and oil refineries to curb global warming. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson argues “By using the power and authority of the Clean Air Act, we can begin reducing emissions from the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitting facilities without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the vast majority of our economy’. The proposal would essentially regulate only emitters who produce more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases and force them to clean up their act. Thumbs up.

  44. @Freelander

    But lots have already failed! Don’t you get it? A systemic risk is when one institution destroys the entire system. You try to compare it to a roulette wheel – there are some that have deals which have specific payoffs like roulette, there are others involved in commodities, there are others who hedge a majority of their exposures, there are others who are primarily shorting specific equities, there are others who are macro-focused, there are fund of hedge funds…

    Do you get this simple fact: one company destroys the entire system.

    If you do and you still apply it to the entire hedge fund industry then you are spitting in the face of reality.

    This is frustrating beyond ability to talk to a wall. What part of systemic risk do you not understand? I keep asking because it is obvious that you don’t get it. You think that if all fail then the system collapses. No sh*t sherlock but that ain’t systemic risk because if you make a deal then the other party has the opposite deal so the system can’t break apart.

    Do me a favour, find out what type of hedge funds are out there, how many have collapsed and the sizes of hedge funds and then come back here and discuss this rationally or not at all.

  45. The system nearly fell apart.

    Not because the routlette wheel hit the wrong number.

    Not because a hedge fund failed.

    But because there was a panic.

  47. Good one. Action needs to be taken now and I don’t think things should wait until we decide the best way to do it.

  48. @SeanG

    In the GFC case things falling apart was a certainty. When something is unsustainable there comes a point in time at which it is no longer sustained. That’s what happens with Ponzi schemes and that’s what happened with the scheme of lending to people who couldn’t repay, putting off the date of reckoning, repackaging, making gurantees that couldn’t hold, sucking in more money and making everyone all around think they were getting a good deal. It can only work while it is sucking in more money. It came unstuck and people discovering they had been duped, panicked. I am sure Bernie’s clients also panicked when they discovered the truth!

  49. Freelander, that is my position which I have held since before the Rudd government got into power and still believe handing out free permits to the big polluters is bad policy. Thumbs up Obama.

  50. Free permits is bad policy. Giving free permits is like giving them money for nothing. It won’t change their behaviour they will still close down if that is the most profitable thing to do, and if it wasn’t they will keep producing. If they shut down they can sell their permits. Unions might think the free permits will protect their jobs but they will find that like many of the other handouts to industry it will make no difference at all. I am really surprised that more economists haven’t been vocal about the stupidity of giving free permits. It is rewarding industries for not having taken what should have been predictable into account. That is, that if they invest in dirty technology they risk losing money when something was finally done about climate change. If people make bad investments like that why should the government be bailing them out, especially given that it won’t have any benefits except benefiting the shareholder’s pockets.

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