Fortune magazine and the N-word

John Quiggin68 Comments

Nationalization, that is. In this piece on doomsday scenarios for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (H/T Calculated Risk) the cutely named and quasi-private mortgage packagers and guarantors, Katie Benner says

So what might it look like if the government had to lend a hand? Outright nationalization is an unlikely option given that neither the current administration nor the presidential candidates could afford to support such a move in an election year.

but goes on to imply that the likely alternatives could be far more costly, citing a Standard & Poors estimate of a trillion dollar cost to taxpayers, and possible loss of the US government’s AAA rating. Agency ratings aren’ t reliable indicators, but the US government has been in the category of issuers who are assumed to be exempt from scrutiny. A change in this status would be a huge problem for a big debtor like the US.

Either a bailout or a nationalization of Fannie and Freddie would make the Northern Rock fiasco in the UK pale into insignificance. The Northern Rock case shows that a policy towards financial enterprises in which both failure and nationalization are regarded as unthinkable cannot be sustained. The shareholders of these companies have been happy to accept the higher returns associated with an implicit government guarantee and they (the shareholders) should pay the price when the guarantee is needed.

Meetings, bloody meetings

John Quiggin14 Comments

There have been quite a few important meetings lately including COAG, G8 and the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change (MEM) in Japan, attended by Kevin Rudd. Anyone expecting substantial progress to come out of these particular meetings was surely disappointed. But to look on the bright side, if any of these meetings had been held even a year ago, the results would have represented a substantial breakthrough.

Starting with COAG, the obvious disappointment was the lack of any immediate response to the drastic problems facing the Murray-Darling system. While most of the policies are now pointing in the right direction, nothing will really happen until 2009. The decision not to increase the amount of water that could be traded out of a region from 4 per cent to 6 per cent (still a tight restriction) was symbolic of the process as a whole. That said, there is currently so little water in the system that no amount of reform is going to do much good in the short run. We have to hope for the best.

The Major Emitters Meeting produced fairly predictable statements by China and India that the developed countries had to do more. With the US still to make any firm commitment, we’re unlikely to see much advance on that before the Copenhagen meeting, with a new Administration, next year. Still, that was accompanied by an acceptance in principle of targets for reduced emissions. And at least in one respect, these countries are walking the walk. Fuel subsidies in Asia are being cut in response to increased costs associated with higher oil prices. That’s a pretty sharp contrast with proposals for new concessions coming from (among others), Clinton and McCain in the US and Nelson and Turnbull here.

Finally, although the G8 proposal for a 50 per cent in global emissions by 2050 was carefully hedged, it’s still good news. Although this wasn’t spelt out a 50 per cent in global emissions requires a much bigger cut in developed country emissions, so even a weak commitment now will make backsliding harder in Copenhagen.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin51 Comments

Climate Code Red by David Spratt and Philip Sutton (more details here). This is a book that will doubtless be welcomed by those with a sceptical attitude towards the mainstream discussion represented by the IPCC, and makes many points that will be familiar from debates here – there’s more uncertainty in the IPCC models than is commonly recognised, important factors have been omitted, the intergovernmental process is subject to political constraints, emissions projections are problematic and so on. On a first reading, Spratt and Sutton make a pretty convincing case that the apparent scientific consensus position is well off the mark.

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Carbon taxes vs emissions trading

John Quiggin98 Comments

Now that nearly everyone is agreed on the need for a market-based policy instrument to reduce CO2 emissions, the biggest unresolved question is whether to implement carbon taxes, tradeable emissions permits or some hybrid of the two.

I support tradeable permits, but I’ve never really spelt out my reasons for doing so. It’s important before doing this to observe that the differences between the two approaches are more limited than most of the discussion suggests. Both ensure the existence of a price for CO2 emissions and both can be set up to distribute the costs of emissions in a lot of different ways.

That said, tradeable permits have some significant advantages in my view.
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Sheridan on 1972

John Quiggin15 Comments

Greg Sheridan’s panegyric to Alexander Downer includes the following aside,

Australian foreign policy history, and Australian history generally, is written overwhelmingly by people who are institutionally sympathetic to the Labor Party. In fact they are generally quite a fair bit to the Left of the Labor Party. And one of Labor’s great virtues is its creation and nurturing of its own legends. Thus, at the end of 1972, the Whitlam government extended official diplomatic recognition to China.

Several Western countries had done this already and by the end of 1973 the whole world, more or less, had recognised China. Thus Australian recognition was as near inevitable as anything could possibly be in history. No matter who was in power in Canberra in 1973, it would have happened. Yet the Labor school of history has elevated this to an act of mythical heroism and far-sighted statesmanship by Gough Whitlam.

Sheridan is either playing on his readers’ ignorance or displaying his own here. He asserts that the inevitability of recognising China was obvious to anyone at the time. In fact, when Whitlam (then Opposition leader) visited China in 1972, he was vigorously attacked by the conservative press (a group the Oz was to join a couple of years later) and the conservative parties. Then PM McMahon said of Whitlam “And, of course, Zhou Enlai played Mr Whitlam like a fisherman plays a trout.” It was typical of the McMahon era that it came out shortly afterward that Kissinger had been secretly visiting China at the same time, laying the groundwork for Nixon’s famous trip. Even so, the McMahon government didn’t recognise China, leaving this to Whitlam.

To set the record straight for Sheridan, Whitlam’s willingess to visit China in 1972 was indeed a piece of far-sighted statesmanship, and took some political courage. By the time Whitlam won office at the end of the year, it was indeed obvious that recognition was inevitable, but even so, there were plenty of people, then as now, who ignored the obvious.

The political economy of networks

John Quiggin11 Comments

I’ve had this post in mind for quite a while, and never got in finished to my satisfaction, but it’s been stimulated to a significant extent by reading Clay Shirky, so I thought I’d pop it up now, somewhat half-baked, since Clay is currently visiting Crooked Timber, where I’ve crossposted this.

The biggest single question in political economy is whether and to what extent we can achieve social equality without sacrificing other goods like liberty and prosperity. Neoclassical economics (a project in which I’m a participant) begins with models which imply that, with competitive markets, all factors of production will earn their marginal product. This in turn implies that any intervention that shifts wages or returns to capital away from their marginal product must imply a loss in aggregate income (there are some complex technical issues here which I’ll skip over)

There are all sorts of problems with simple-minded applications of this result. Still, in an economy that fits the standard model of lots of competing firms, all operating in a region where constant returns to scale apply, the standard neoclassical analysis has considerable force. But the growing part of the economy centred on the Internet doesn’t fit this model at all. The Internet is a network and the economies of networks are different, in critical ways, from those of the standard neoclassical model.
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Garnaut draft report released

John Quiggin68 Comments

The Garnaut Review draft report has just come out. The site is clogged, but I’ve managed to get a copy of the report and press release (I’ve attached the latter here.

There’s a lot of discussion of the Murray Darling Basin where the worst-case projections are about as grim as they can possibly be. My UQ research group (Risk and Sustainable Management Group) did the economic modelling that translated the climatic projections into predicted changes in land and water use. There are big adverse impacts under most of the ‘business as usual’ scenarios. On the other hand, in the projections where CO2 concentrations are held to 450 ppm things aren’t bad, and even 550 ppm would still allow irrigation to continue.

More soon on the policy recommendations. Whether or not the government ultimately follows Garnaut’s proposed model, there’s no doubt that the Review has shifted the terms of debate substantially. Those (like the Federal Opposition) who are tempted to play the issue for short-term political gain will pay a big price in the end if they succumb to that temptation.