That’s the headline the Canberra Times gave to my article on the implications of the recent short squeezes on Gamestop and AMC . It’s uninformative, but maybe more clickworthy than WallStreetBets and financialised capitalism, the title I gave to the early version posted here. With a bit esprit d’escalier and ignoring word constraints, I’d now go for “You wouldn’t let a bookie manage your home finance, so why let a casino plan our national investment”.

Canberra Times is paywalled, so I’m putting the text over the fold. We should soon resume the standard model where articles are published first in Inside Story (free), then reproduced (with a new headline, natch) in the Canberra Times

It’s been hard to miss the chaos that’s arisen from a bunch of Reddit users (on sub-reddit WallStreetBets) getting together to squeeze shortsellers on stocks including GameStop and AMC Theatres. Most of the attention has been confined to the stockmarket action, but I was struck by this piece in The Bulwark[1], making the point that the process has enabled AMC to issue high-priced shares, repay debt and thereby stave off impending bankruptcy.

I don’t have a view on whether AMC should go bankrupt or not, but this is the kind of decision about capital allocation that is driven, in large measure by stockmarkets. The efficient markets hypothesis says that stockmarkets do the best possible job of estimating the value of assets, and thereby guides the allocation of capital. In the absence of the WallStreetBets push, it appeared that the market judgement was that it would be better to steer capital away from AMC, and into some other activity. Now, it’s the opposite.

One possible response is that WallStreetBets is an episode of craziness that will soon pass. But once you strip away newsworthy bits like the role of Reddit and the scale of the price movement, this kind of squeeze (or conversely, short-selling raid) is available, and potentially profitable, to any group of traders who can mobilize the necessary few billion (using options, those billions can be magnified a fair way). That’s part of the reason why stock prices are far more volatile than would seem justified by the arrival of new information relative to future earnings.

If stock prices are more volatile than underlying value, the two must differ most of the time. That undermines the claim that financial markets do a better job of allocating investment capital than would, for example, a central planning board. Even if you don’t want to go that far, there’s no obvious reason why limiting stock trading to (say) once a week would impair the allocation of capital to an extent that would outweigh the savings from cutting the financial down to a small fraction of its present size.

fn1. A Never-Trump website, well worth a look.

Slightly behind the pack, it seems, I’ve suddenly started hearing about “ergodicity economics”, presented as an alternative to expected utility (EU) theory. Commenter James asked me about it here, and I also received from a colleague a copy of a paper in Nature, by Ole Peters, who appears to be the main developer of this idea. The essential idea of ergodicity is that the long-run distribution of outcomes for a dynamic process should match the uncertainty of the process at any point in time. You can get something more precise in Wikipedia. Expected utility starts with preferences over uncertainty at a point in time. Peters argues that things are better understood in terms of evolution over time. I haven’t followed all of the details of this argument as yet.

What piqued my interest is that the discussion involves a lot of discussion of probability weighting and particularly the idea that extreme low-probability outcomes may be overweighted. The most famous expression of this idea is the cumulative prospect theory put forward by Kahneman and Tversky in 1992. Their original prospect theory applied the same weighting function to all events, which raises a number of difficulties. These were resolved using the idea of rank-dependent probability weighting which I proposed in a paper in 1982 (under the name ‘anticipated utility’ and now usually called rank-dependent utility or RDU) .

The underlying reasoning is that, in a dynamic process repeated over time, taking low-probability extreme risks will (very probably) catch up with you. I’m pretty sure I made an argument of this kind in support of RDU back in the 1980s, but I haven’t been able to locate it for now.

This is one of many independent rediscoveries of the rank-dependent approach, with a variety of motivations. I think this reflects the fact that the RDU is, in some sense, the natural generalization of EU.

For decision theory and finance fans, my latest working paper with Ani Guerdjikova https://ideas.repec.org/p/gbl/wpaper/2020-10.html Some difficult math, but there are fundamental implications for financial markets, which will be spelt out later.

The self-explanatory title of my latest piece in The Conversation. I look back at the last time this scare was run in the 1980s. An interesting sidelight is that the term did not, it seems, originate with Lee Kuan Yew as is commonly claimed.

That’s the title of my latest piece in Inside Story, expanding my earlier discussion of intangibles and monopoly to take account of Apple’s startling market valuation of $2 trillion. As I observe, this can’t be accounted for in terms of big profit gains

Admittedly, Apple’s business hasn’t been harmed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but neither has it greatly benefited — earnings in the June quarter were only about 10 per cent higher than in 2019, yet the stock price has doubled in less than six months.

It’s mostly about the combination of secure monopoly power and long term interest rates near zero, which increase the value of any stable source of income, like monopoly rents

I’ve been working for some time on a review of the first full-length text based on Modern Monetary Policy, Macroeconomics by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts. A near-final draft is over the fold

I forgot to link to this piece in The Conversation when it came out a week ago. Unlike much of what I’ve written lately, it hasn’t been overtaken by events.