Business Ethics & Political Economy Linkage

Brad DeLong: Re-Capturing the Friedmans →

Brad DeLong writes:

…the Friedmans made three powerful factual claims about how the world works – claims that seemed true or maybe true or at least arguably true at the time, but that now seem to be pretty clearly false. Their case for small-government libertarianism rested largely on those claims, and has now largely crumbled, because the world, it turned out, disagreed with them about how it works.

The first claim was that macroeconomic distress is caused by the government, not by the unstable private market, or, rather, that the form of macroeconomic regulation required to produce economic stability is straightforward and easily achieved.

The Friedmans almost always made the claim in its first form: they said that the government had “caused” the Great Depression. But when you dug into their argument, it turned out that what they really meant was the second: whenever private-market instability threatened to cause a depression, the government could avert it or produce a rapid recovery simply by purchasing enough bonds for cash to flood the economy with liquidity.

In other words, the strategic government intervention needed to ensure macroeconomic stability was not only straightforward, but also minimal: the authorities need only manage a steady rate of money-supply growth. The aggressive and comprehensive intervention that Keynesians claimed was needed to manage aggregate demand, and that Minskyites claimed was needed to manage financial risk, was entirely unwarranted.

Real libertarians never bought the Friedmans’ claim that they were as advocating a free-market, “neutral” monetary regime: Ludwig von Mises famously called Milton Friedman and his monetarist followers a bunch of socialists. But, whatever its packaging, the belief that macroeconomic stability requires only minimal government intervention is simply wrong. In the United States, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has executed the Friedmanite playbook flawlessly in the current downturn, and it has not been enough to preserve or rapidly restore full employment.

The second claim was that externalities were relatively small, or at least that they were better dealt with via contract and tort law than through government regulation, because the disadvantages of government regulation outweighed the harm done by those externalities that the legal system could not properly address. Here, too, reality does not seem to have endorsed Free to Choose. In the US, this is most apparent in changing attitudes toward medical-malpractice lawsuits, with libertarians no longer viewing the court system as the preferred arena to deal with medical risk and error.

The third, and most important, claim is the subject of Noah’s The Great Divergence. In 1979, the Friedmans could confidently claim that, in the absence of government-mandated discrimination (for example, the South’s segregationist Jim Crow laws), the market economy would produce a sufficiently egalitarian distribution of income. After all, it had appeared to do so – at least for those who did not suffer from legal discrimination or its legacies – for the entire post-WWII era.

So the Friedmans argued that a minimal safety net for those whom bad luck or a lack of prudence had rendered destitute, and elimination of all legal barriers to equality of opportunity, would lead to the most equitable outcomes possible. Profit-seeking employers, using and promoting human talents, would bring us as close to a free society of associated producers as is attainable in this fallen sublunary sphere.

Here, too, the Friedmans’ hopes have been disappointed. The end of American preeminence in education, the collapse of private-sector unions, the emergence of a winner-take-all information-age economy, and the return of Gilded Age-style high finance have produced an extraordinarily unequal pre-tax distribution of income, which will burden the next generation and make a mockery of equality of opportunity.

It would have been nice if the political program laid out a generation ago in Free to Choose had lived up to the Friedmans’ billing. It would have been nice if a relatively equal and prosperous society with full employment and equal opportunity had followed from a government that stood back from the economy and provided nothing but a minimal safety net, courts, and a constantly growing money supply.

Alas, that did not happen. And it did not happen because the world described by the Friedmans is not the world in which we live.

The Fed: bringing you the finest economic recovery a rigid 2% inflation ceiling can buy.

— @ryanavent

The Student Loan Tax →

How does the government profit from student loans?  In two words, yield spread.  Treasury can borrow money at 0.5% or less, and lends it to students at 3.4%.…

So what are the President and Congress arguing about?  They are arguing about how much of the federal deficit to plug with student loan interest money.  The current “baseline” budget assumes that the rate will jump up to 6.8% for 2013 loans, yielding another $30 to $40 billion return to Treasury.  Congressional Republicans see the expiration of the rate cut as a given, and any extension as increasing the deficit (by reducing student borrowers’ subsidy to all other federal programs). They are demanding offsetting cuts in other programs before agreeing to keep the rate at 3.4%.

Want to live near a good school? It will cost an extra $205,000 →

At Wal-Mart in Mexico, a Bribe Inquiry Silenced →

Political valence of real business cycle theory would probably shift if we went back to calling it Marxism.

— @mattyglesias

The 40 richest individuals on Earth lost a combined $6.2 billion yesterday as stocks dropped…

— World’s Richest Worth $1 Trillion on Billionaire List - Bloomberg

(via From Recession to Recovery - NYTimes.com)

(via Who Gets the Breaks and Benefits - Graphic - NYTimes.com)

A.I.G. Earnings an Illusion of a Bend in U.S. Tax Laws →

Last week, the American International Group reported a whopping $19.8 billion profit for its fourth quarter.…

But if you dug into the numbers, it quickly became clear that $17.7 billion of that profit was pure fantasy — a tax benefit, er, gift, from the United States government. The company made only $1.6 billion during the quarter from actual operations. Yet A.I.G. not only received a tax benefit, it is unlikely to pay a cent of taxes this year, nor by some estimates, for at least a decade.

The tax benefit is notable for more than simply its size. It is the result of a rule that the Treasury unilaterally bent for A.I.G. and several other hobbled companies in 2008 that has largely been overlooked.

The tax benefit comes in the form of something called net operating losses — NOLs in Wall Street parlance — that could be worth more than $25 billion, possibly more. Those losses can be very valuable, in part because companies can spread them over many years to lower or wipe out their income tax bills.

However, according to longstanding tax laws, if a company files for bankruptcy or is taken over, it loses the ability to use its net operating losses. A.I.G. would fit that profile perfectly: on the verge of bankruptcy, the federal government took control of A.I.G., exchanging its bailout billions for shares in the company. The government — taxpayers — still own 77 percent of the company, down from 92 percent three years ago.

Still, the Treasury issued “notices” exempting A.I.G. from losing its right to make use of its net operating losses. In total, the insurer estimated that those losses were worth $26.2 billion as of 2009, and it claimed almost $9 billion in other “unrealized loss on investments.”

Goldman board muppet of the day, James Johnson edition →

There’s one corporate-governance metric which isn’t looked at nearly enough, and that’s director pay. Reading the compelling broadside that Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb, who manage the Sequoia Fund, has launched against James Johnson, who’s running for re-election to Goldman’s board, I was glad to be reminded of the governance fiasco he oversaw at Fannie Mae, and I was shocked to learn of his involvement in an options-backdating scandal at United Healthcare. But absent from the letter, and present only in Shahien Nasiripour’s report about it, is the fact that Goldman paid Johnson $523,000 last year.

People respond to incentives, and it’s pretty self-evident that the more directors are paid, the more captured they are by management. After all, director pay isn’t set by shareholders. Michele Leder put it well back in 2009:

“Let’s face facts,” said Michelle Leder, the editor of Footnoted.org, a corporate watchdog web site. “If you had a part-time job that was paying you $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year, and you didn’t have a lot of work to do, would you rock that boat? That’s just human nature.”

Banks Seen Dangerous Defying Obama’s Too-Big-to-Fail Move →

Five banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs — held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, according to central bankers at the Federal Reserve.

Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the largest banks’ assets amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. The Big Five today are about twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy…

Citigroup's Chief Rebuffed on Pay by Shareholders →

Corporations That Spent The Most On Lobbying Saw Tax Rates Decline →

Tax System Is America’s Biggest Spender →

Insidious Mechanism

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with spending through the tax code. Politically, though, the mechanism can be insidious. Unlike typical government spending, tax expenditures aren’t reauthorized each year by Congress, so they have immense staying power. Because they aren’t as visible as outright spending, they aren’t subject to the scrutiny of campaigns to pare back waste or assess effectiveness.

Indeed, spending through the tax code is so politically stealthy that it has won over enemies of government largesse, such as Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. These are the same people who hate mandates, as the current debate about the legality of Obamacare demonstrates. It’s a tribute to our psychological biases that getting a subsidy through the tax system is treated so differently from receiving a government check or copping a fine.

The result: Even as many areas of government spending have been cut to the bone, our tax code remains larded up with expenditures that cost taxpayers $1.3 trillion every year. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the biggest tax expenditures apply to employer-provided health insurance, pension contributions and mortgages.

Popular as such tax breaks may be, they differ from typical government spending in that they give bigger subsidies to wealthier families. Imagine if we mailed checks to all homeowners to help them pay their mortgages. Would you support giving millionaires with mansions 25 times more than the typical family? That’s effectively what we do: Middle-class families get an average benefit from the mortgage interest deduction of $139, while families in the top 1 percent get $3,752.

Taken together, individual income tax expenditures are the equivalent of sending $686 each year to those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, $3,175 to those in the middle fifth, and $30,714 to those in the upper fifth. The average member of the top 1 percent gets nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year — a statistic that might have proved useful for the folks protesting in Zuccotti Park.

The rich get such big subsidies for three reasons. First, they spend more on the things the tax system favors, such as homes and health care. Second, they are subject to higher tax rates, so they get more benefit from each dollar of deductions. Finally, they’re rich enough to take full advantage of their deductions. The poor typically have too little income to itemize, while many families in the upper middle class find themselves siphoned off into a separate tax system known as the alternative minimum tax, which allows fewer deductions.