Category: Finance & Economics

The Private Equity Boom, Easy Money, and Crony Capitalism

by Brendan Brown – Mises Daily:private equity

Amongst the big winners from the Obama Fed’s Great Monetary Experiment has been the private equity industry. Indeed this went through a near-death experience in the Great Panic (2008) before its savior — Fed quantitative easing — propelled it forward into new riches. There is no surprise therefore that its barons who join the political stage (think of the last Republican presidential candidate) have no interest in monetary reform. And the same attitude is common amongst leading politicians who hope private equity will provide them high-paid jobs when they quit Washington.

The ex-politicians are expected by their new bosses to join the intense lobbying effort aimed at preserving the industry’s unique tax advantages, especially with respect to deductibility of interest and carry income. They are also expected to do this while establishing the links with regulators and governments (state and federal) that help generate business opportunities for the private equity groups themselves. The special ability of these political actors to take advantage of the monetarily induced frenzy in high-yield debt markets — and secure spectacularly cheap funds — means they become leading agents of malinvestment in various key sectors of the economy.

 

What’s Makes Private Equity Run?

Spokespersons for the industry claim that the private equity business is all about spotting opportunities to take over already established businesses, and then using home-grown talent (within the private equity management team) to transform their organization so as to create value for shareholders. And this can all be accomplished, they say, without the burden of frequent reporting requirements as in public equity.

That is all very laudable, but why all the leverage, why all the political connections, and why all the tax advantages? And even before getting to these questions, why should we praise the secrecy? After all, public equity markets are meant to do a good job of incentivizing and disciplining management, especially in this age of shareholder activism. So why is private equity supposedly superior?

Perhaps there are instances where companies which are now in the public equity market cannot economically justify the fixed costs of maintaining their presence there (filing reports, auditing, etc.). In practice, though, this public-to-private conversion function of the private equity industry has been dwindling in overall significance compared to private-to-private acquisitions and new ventures.

 

Why There’s So Much Leverage

But why should there be so much leverage? Why could their economic functions not be achieved on a purely or largely equity basis?

After all, there are reports of private equity groups turning away would-be new participating partners offering to bring in zillions of new funds to the party. If individual investors in private equity wanted high leverage they could do this on their own account without saddling the particular enterprises with large debts.

The obvious answer to this conundrum is that the private equity groups are in fact risk-arbitragers (and tax arbitragers) between what they view as greatly over-priced high-yield debt markets (sometimes described as junk-debt markets) and less overpriced equity markets.

 

How Easy Money Enables Private Equity

The Great Monetary Experiment has induced such a plague of market irrationality characterized by desperation for yield that the price of junk has reached the sky. On top of this, the US tax-code incentivizes such arbitrage by allowing full deduction of interest from corporate profit. Why are some affiliates of private equity groups buying the junk? Perhaps that has to do with the benefits to be derived in the event of any particular enterprise owned by the group filing for bankruptcy. The private equity group would be in a better position to negotiate a debt-equity swap if it is on both sides of the deal.

The name of the game is achieving as high a leverage as possible and nothing brings success here like success. Specifically, as private equity investments have produced a series of great returns in recent years — as indeed we should expect from highly leveraged strategies in a powerfully rising equity market — the speculative story that their managers really have talent has attracted more and more believers who are willing to back it with their funds. One aspect of this has been the ability of private equity groups to leverage up their businesses to an extent never previously achieved as the buyers of their junk debt believe that unique talents of the partners and their managers make this acceptable. And the cost of equity to the private equity groups falls as a wider span of potential partners believes in their power of magic.

 

The Crony Capitalist Connection

The new business ventures on which private equity has concentrated in recent years are often in areas where regulatory or political connection is important — whether in finance, real estate, energy extraction, or providing health-care facilities. A private equity group buys the advantages of “connections” (otherwise described as cronyism) for all the small or medium-sized enterprises operating within its fold. If each one were to build up its connections independently that would be much more expensive per unit of enterprise capital.

Hence one essential feature of private equity is the taking advantage of economies of scale in cronyism. And the tax advantages secured by political connections are crucial to the private equity model. The case for a reform of the tax code which would lower the overall rate on corporate profits but end the tax deductibility of interest is strong. But how could this ever make headway against the private equity industry and its deep roots in Washington, DC?

 

Private Equity, Shale Oil, and Other Bubbles

In thinking about the downside of private equity for economic prosperity there is much more to consider than stalemate on tax reform. There is the specter of the infernal combination of monetary disequilibrium and cronyism producing huge malinvestment. That picture is already emerging in the shale oil and gas industries where private equity with its highly leveraged structures has been prominent. Elsewhere, the finance companies spawned by private equity and outside the ever-more regulated traditional bank sector. These have played a lead role in rapid growth of sub-prime auto-loans which have contributed importantly to the boom in vehicle sales. Private equity owned leasing companies have outsmarted their competition to provide enticingly cheap terms to aircraft carriers especially in Asia and helped fuel a tremendous boom in sales by Boeing and Airbus. Private equity participation in investing in apartment blocks has helped fuel the mini-boom in multifamily housing construction.

This is all fine whilst folks are dancing to the music of the Great Monetary Experiment. But what will happen when speculative temperatures fall across a wide range of markets presently infected by asset price inflation? We know much about the disease of asset price inflation from the past 100 years of fiat money under the leadership of the Federal Reserve. Each episode of disease is different but there are common elements. One of these is a deadly end phase featuring plunging speculative temperatures, great recession, and the revelation of huge capital squandered in previous years. The private equity story is new, but there is nothing new under the sun.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

The Scary Truth Behind Friday’s Jobs Shocker

by Bill Bonner – Bonner and Partners.com:jobs

On Friday, the Labor Department released a shockingly weak March jobs report. The feds and their cronies on Wall Street spent the weekend trying to put a bag over its head.

Former Pimco CEO and Bloomberg columnist Mohamed El-Erian gave this quick reaction:

The US employment machine notably lost momentum in March, with just 126,000 new jobs added – far fewer than the consensus expectation of around 250,000 – and with revisions erasing 69,000 from the previous two months’ total, according to the Labor Department. The lackluster result ends an impressive 12-month run of job gains in excess of 200,000.

Yes, the employment numbers were ugly. They confirm the other evidence coming in from hill and dale, industry and commerce, households and homesteads all across the nation, and all the ships at sea: This is no ordinary recovery.

Nip and Tuck

In fact, it’s no recovery at all. It is strange and unnatural, like the victim of a quack plastic surgeon.

But the damage was not an accident. No slip of the hand or equipment malfunction produced this horror. It was the result of economic grifters plying a fraudulent trade.

The Dow rose 118 points in Monday’s trading. A 0.7% increase, this was neither the result of honest investing nor any serious assessment of the economic future. Bloomberg attributed it to scammery from the Fed:

New York Fed President William Dudley said the pace of rate increases is likely to be “shallow” once the Fed starts to tighten.

His comments were the first from the inner core of the Fed’s leadership since a government report showed payrolls expanded less than forecast in March.
While data signaling rates near zero for longer have previously been welcomed by American equity investors, concern is building that economic weakness will worsen the outlook for corporate profits.

Get it?

“Shallow” rate increases. Translation: Savers will get nothing for their forbearance and discipline for a long, long time.

Instead, the money that should be rightfully theirs will be transferred to the rich… and to gamblers and speculators… as it has for the last six years.

A Frankenstein Economy

Back to El-Erian who, having seen the evidence of this botched operation, then goes goofy on us. He calls upon the authorities to “do something.”

As if they hadn’t done enough already!

The feds were the ones who injected the credit silicon, hardened the upper lip and created the Monster of 2008.

And then, when the nearest of kin started retching into the hospital wastebaskets, they went back to work. Now, the economy is more grotesque than ever.

But here’s El-Erian, asking for more:

The report is a further reminder of how much more the US economy could – and should – achieve if it weren’t for political dysfunction in Washington and a “do little” Congress that preclude more comprehensive structural reforms, infrastructure spending and a more responsive fiscal policy.

El-Erian is not the only one. One of our favorite knife men, Larry Summers, is suggesting more nip and tuck on the whole world economy.

It was Summers, as secretary of the Treasury between 1999 and 2001, who helped stitch this Frankenstein economy together.

He and his fellow surgeons are responsible for its unsightly lumps and inhuman shape. Their trillions of dollars of EZ credit leaked all over, causing bulges almost everywhere.

Does China have too much industrial capacity? Does the world have a glut of energy? Are governments far too deep in debt? And corporations?And households? Didn’t nearly every central bank in the world try to stimulate demand with cheap credit… thus laying on a burden of debt so heavy that it now threatens the entire world economy?

Poor Larry Summers

Now, Summers waves his scalpel in the air and can’t wait to get the patient back on the table.

He worries that the US should have given the International Monetary Fund more money, which would have “bolstered confidence in the global economy.”

He thinks the world’s problem is that “capital is abundant, deflationary pressures are substantial, and demand could be in short supply for quite some time.”

Poor Larry can’t tell the difference between capital and credit.

Capital – what you get from saving money and investing it wisely – is an economy’s real muscle. EZ credit – what the quacks pump into flabby tissue to try to make things look more fetching – is what has turned the economy into such a freak.

Alas, failing to give more money to the IMF, says Summers, may mean “the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system.”

That would be a real pity.

Article originally posted at Author Joe WithrowPosted on Categories Finance & EconomicsTags , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment on The Scary Truth Behind Friday’s Jobs Shocker

Markets Restrain Bank Fraud; Central Banks Enable It

by Frank Shostak – Mises Daily:Bank

Originally, paper money was not regarded as money but merely as a representation of a commodity (namely, gold). Various paper certificates represented claims on gold stored with the banks. Holders of paper certificates could convert them into gold whenever they deemed necessary. Because people found it more convenient to use paper certificates to exchange for goods and services, these certificates came to be regarded as money.

Paper certificates that are accepted as the medium of exchange open the scope for fraudulent practices. Banks could now be tempted to boost their profits by lending certificates that were not covered by gold. In a free-market economy, a bank that overissues paper certificates will quickly find out that the exchange value of its certificates in terms of goods and services will fall. To protect their purchasing power, holders of the over-issued certificates naturally attempt to convert them back to gold. If all of them were to demand gold back at the same time, this would bankrupt the bank. In a free market then, the threat of bankruptcy would restrain banks from issuing paper certificates unbacked by gold. Mises wrote on this in Human Action,

People often refer to the dictum of an anonymous American quoted by Tooke: “Free trade in banking is free trade in swindling.” However, freedom in the issuance of banknotes would have narrowed down the use of banknotes considerably if it had not entirely suppressed it. It was this idea which Cernuschi advanced in the hearings of the French Banking Inquiry on October 24, 1865: “I believe that what is called freedom of banking would result in a total suppression of banknotes in France. I want to give everybody the right to issue banknotes so that nobody should take any banknotes any longer.”

This means that in a free-market economy, paper money cannot assume a “life of its own” and become independent of commodity money.

The government can, however, bypass the free-market discipline. It can issue a decree that makes it legal (or effectively legal) for the over-issued bank not to redeem paper certificates into gold. Once banks are not obliged to redeem paper certificates into gold, opportunities for large profits are created that set incentives to pursue an unrestrained expansion of the supply of paper certificates. The uncurbed expansion of paper certificates raises the likelihood of setting off a galloping rise in the prices of goods and services that can lead to the breakdown of the market economy.

Central Banks Protect Private Banks from the Market

To prevent such a breakdown, the supply of the paper money must be managed. The main purpose of managing the supply is to prevent various competing banks from over-issuing paper certificates and from bankrupting each other. This can be achieved by establishing a monopoly bank, i.e., a central bank-that manages the expansion of paper money.

To assert its authority, the central bank introduces its paper certificates, which replace the certificates of various banks. (The central bank’s money purchasing power is established on account of the fact that various paper certificates, which carry purchasing power, are exchanged for the central bank money at a fixed rate. In short, the central bank paper certificates are fully backed by banks’ certificates, which have a historical link to gold.)

The central bank paper money, which is declared as the legal tender, also serves as a reserve asset for banks. This enables the central bank to set a limit on the credit expansion by the banking system. Note that through ongoing monetary management, i.e., monetary pumping, the central bank makes sure that all the banks can engage jointly in the expansion of credit out of “thin air” via the practice of fractional reserve banking. The joint expansion in turn guarantees that checks presented for redemption by banks to each other are netted out, because the redemption of each will cancel the other redemption out. In short, by means of monetary injections, the central bank makes sure that the banking system is “liquid enough” so that banks will not bankrupt each other.

Central Banks Take Over Where Inflationist Private Banks Left Off

It would appear that the central bank can manage and stabilize the monetary system. The truth, however, is the exact opposite. To manage the system, the central bank must constantly create money “out of thin air” to prevent banks from bankrupting each other. This leads to persistent declines in money’s purchasing power, which destabilizes the entire monetary system.

Observe that while, in the free market, people will not accept a commodity as money if its purchasing power is subject to a persistent decline. In the present environment, however, central authorities make it impractical to use any currency other than dollars even if suffering from a steady decline in its purchasing power.

In this environment, the central bank can keep the present paper standard going as long as the pool of real wealth is still expanding. Once the pool begins to stagnate — or, worse, shrinks — then no monetary pumping will be able to prevent the plunge of the system. A better solution is of course to have a true free market and allow commodity money to assert its monetary role.

The Boom-Bust Connection

As opposed to the present monetary system in the framework of a commodity-money standard, money cannot disappear and set in motion the menace of the boom-bust cycles. In fractional reserve banking, when money is repaid and the bank doesn’t renew the loan, money evaporates (leading to a bust). Because the loan has originated out of nothing, it obviously couldn’t have had an owner. In a free market, in contrast, when true commodity money is repaid, it is passed back to the original lender; the money stock stays intact.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

How Free Markets Enhance Freedom of Choice

by Hunter Hastings – Mises Daily:freedom of choice

Ludwig von Mises was careful to establish the individual actor as the basis for all economic analysis. An individual acts to improve his circumstances. To do so, he chooses among various available means in order to achieve his ends. Those ends are based on his individual values, which are subjectively established. Methodological individualism and dynamic subjectivism are distinctive features of Misesian Austrian economics.

The Importance of Economics Based on the Individual

Interventionists and Keynesians, on the other hand, use economic aggregates such as GDP and aggregate demand as their basis for analysis. By reducing economic activity to a matter of measuring aggregates, interventionists seek to justify the manipulation of those aggregates in order to establish policy goals, and to design interventionist policies that purportedly are intended to achieve those goals.

In order to manipulate such immense aggregates, Keynesians turn to powerful government institutions that, the Keynesian rationale goes, are necessary to manage such a huge economy. These institutions include not only government agencies and regulations, but also their favored partners including big banks (protected financial franchises benefiting from central bank policies and bailouts), big pharma (government-protected pharmaceutical monopolies), and big food (government-protected purveyors of government-approved diets).

This regulation and manipulation is supposedly done for the good of “the economy,” but in the face of so much government favoritism and management for the benefit of certain special interests, it is easy for individual economic actors to feel disempowered. And it’s not just a feeling. The more government intervenes to control markets, the less sovereignty the consumers have.

How Governments Destroy Competition

An example is the increasing domination of the major Wall Street banks in the US. Consumers and small businesses report in surveys that two-thirds of respondents consistently report dissatisfaction with big banks, and three-quarters say it is important to bank locally. Yet, the number of community banks has declined by 24 percent over 2000–2013, while big banks grew their share of deposits — the five biggest banks now hold 47 percent of deposits, and in some counties, as much as 75 percent of deposits. Their low consumer satisfaction scores are a result, at least in part, of higher prices. For example, Consumer Reports found that the ten largest banks charged a monthly fee of $10.27 for a non-interest checking account, compared to $7.45 at small banks and $6.00 at the ten biggest credit unions.

Professor Amat R. Admati of Stanford University stated in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee in July 2014 that Too-Big-To-Fail legislation provides an explicit subsidy to large banks in the form of a lower cost of capital, and bemoaned the “extreme opacity of large banking institutions” that grow “to inefficiently large sizes.”

Yet customers do not switch. Some of this can be explained by the convenience found in banking with a very large enterprise, but consumers also find it costly to switch to smaller banks in the face of market dominance facilitated by government protection.

Things would be different if big banks had to truly compete. In Liberty and Property Mises explained that the real power in the market lies with individual consumers who are making the choices that ultimately determine output and prices; he termed it “consumer sovereignty.” Murray Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State elevated the idea of individual economic power, emphasizing not only the right to choose, but also (and perhaps more tellingly) the right to refuse: “Economic power, then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange. Every man has this power. Every man has the same right to refuse to make a proffered exchange.”

To choose and refuse to make an exchange, i.e., to do business with any other economic entity, is the essence of individual economic power.

True Diversity in the Marketplace

True freedom in the marketplace can greatly shape a consumer’s entire lifestyle.

In their financial lives — if true market competition is allowed — individual economic actors can refuse to do business even with big Wall Street or global banks, and choose, instead, community banks or credit unions.

In their home lives, consumers can install solar panels or a home generator and disconnect from the regulated energy utility. This releases them from guaranteed price increases, often caused by the need for the utilities to support their excessive pension commitments, and the charges imposed by the forced redistribution of energy subsidies to low-income households.

Consumers can refuse to buy from the food companies that hide behind government food regulations and agricultural subsidies, and instead choose smaller, more local and healthier options. They can choose online education in the form of free MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses offered by top professors at many universities) or pay per course from online providers like Udemy, and refuse the offerings of pro-government biased content and tenured Keynesian professors. They can choose Uber and refuse the highly regulated local taxi monopoly, which is often typified by old, uncomfortable, and poorly maintained vehicles caused by the high cost of taxi regulations and lack of competition.

On the other hand, every government subsidy, every regulation, and every tax-code change that favors one group of businesses over another reduces consumer sovereignty. This interference results in monopolies and oligopolies which are typically the product of government intervention in markets.

Nevertheless, short of a total monopoly — such as those often enjoyed by the government itself in law and other areas — the individual economic actor does have freedom to refuse to do business with these government-favored industries.

A Partnership of Entrepreneurs and Consumers

Freedom of choice is best secured by allowing true freedom for both entrepreneurs and consumers.

Entrepreneurs “are at the helm and steer the ship,” Mises noted in Human Action. “But they are not free to shape its course. They are not supreme, they are steersmen only, bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer.”

Not only is the exercise of individual economic power a choice, it is a powerful tool for directing change, one that we can wield with purpose. As Frank Fetter wrote in The Principles of Economics: “Every individual may organize a consumer’s league, leaguing himself with the powers of righteousness. Every purchase has far-reaching consequences. You may spend your monthly allowance as an agent of iniquity or of truth.”

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

How Truly Free Markets Help the Poor

by Ryan McMaken – Mises Daily:free markets help the poor

Discussing poverty as an advocate of free markets is tricky business in today’s world. If one takes poverty seriously and points out the very real plight of the impoverished, it is often assumed that one must therefore be advocating for government “solutions” to the problem. The knee-jerk reaction of many defenders of free markets is to simply deny that poverty exists much at all, or that if the poor just try a little harder, or aren’t so lazy, they won’t be poor anymore.

This sort of reaction is natural for one who labors under the mistaken impression that the American economy is a free-market economy. Since the American economy is so free and filled with opportunity, they think, there’s really no excuse for being poor.

But, of course, the American economy isn’t even a mostly free economy. The entire financial sector is heavily subsidized and regulated. The regulatory costs imposed on small businesses are enormous. Trade of all types is regulated, and many goods are prohibited outright. Minimum wages make many entry-level jobs illegal, and one can’t even drive people around for money without facing a bevy of government regulations — and sanctions.

With all these millstones tied around the necks of poor and low-skilled workers, it’s a bit nonsensical to declare that poor people should just try harder. Perhaps they did try, and the government sent them the message loud and clear: “just give it up, because we’ve made everything you’re qualified to do illegal.”

Yes, it’s true that, to the extent markets are still free, they have led to an abundance of conveniences that even the poor can afford: air conditioning, television, household appliances, cell phones, and more. But at the same time, it would be wrong to sit back and say “they have enough” when an even greater abundance is to be had if the poor were simply given the freedom to work and own businesses without navigating a myriad of government requirements and regulations that often pose an insurmountable opportunity cost.

There are several ways that a turn to freer markets would open up a whole world to low-income families and unskilled workers immediately.

End the Minimum Wage

This is one of the worst offenders since it renders jobs illegal for the most unskilled workers, and hits the poor the hardest. As explained in the pages of mises.org, the primary effect of the minimum wage is to make the lowest-skilled workers legally unemployable. In other words, if the minimum wage is $10 per hour, and a worker only produces $8 of goods or services per hour, he will never be hired. Naturally, with a little experience, an unproductive (in the economic sense of the word) worker becomes more productive with job experience. But with a minimum wage, how is the worker supposed to get his first job? He can’t. As a result, many workers caught up in this catch-22 become long-term welfare recipients or they turn to black markets where they are branded criminals by the legal system.

Abolish All Income Taxes (Including Payroll Taxes)

Even low-income wage earners pay taxes on income. Social Security and Medicare taxes are nothing more than income taxes that go straight to the general fund — the “social security trust fund” does not exist. That claim by Mitt Romney that half the country doesn’t pay income taxes was never anything more than disingenuous political hair-splitting. Payroll taxes are income taxes, and we all know they take a big bite out of our paychecks, at all income levels.

Thus, even the poor pay taxes to finance TARP and various bailouts of the ultra-rich. As if this insult were not enough, the federal government then punishes the poor further with a central bank that punishes them for saving what little they can.

End the Fed

The Federal Reserve — and central banks in general — have in recent decades functioned largely to push down interest rates and devalue the currency.

The Federal Reserve — in addition to giving us the gift of the boom-bust cycle — has been key in bailing out huge too-big-to-fail corporations and has facilitated endless government spending on wars, corporate welfare, and social programs. Whether the amount of money poured into low-income households via social programs rivals the amount of money sucked out of them — in the form of devalued currency and below-inflation interest rates for low-income savers — remains to be seen.

What we do know is that the Fed’s commitment to low interest rates has made it almost impossible to save money through savings accounts and other low-risk traditional investments. Once upon a time, it might have been possible to put money in a savings account or CD and receive a respectable amount of interest on those funds, and at least earn an interest rate that exceeded the inflation rate. That certainly isn’t possible today. If you’re poor and try to make any returns off a savings account or CD, you’re out of luck. You’ll be very lucky to get 0.9 percent, and you’ll probably get lower than that. Meanwhile, the official low-ball inflation rate is well above that. So, your savings lose value in real terms constantly. You might as well keep that money in your mattress — where your money will also constantly lose value. On the other hand, if you have $100,000 to put in a CD right now, you might be able to get 1.5 percent at some banks. But poor people rarely have that kind of money lying around. People with more money are able to hire financial advisors and stock brokers and better keep up with an inflationary economy. The poor are just on their own.

Stop Regulating Small Businesses

Starting small businesses are often the preferred way for low-income, non-white workers to find work and build capital. Immigrants often turn to small businesses because they offer flexibility and work for people who are unattractive to larger established operations. While the wages and incomes associated with small businesses are often lower than they are in larger businesses, many turn to small business employment because they offer many non-monetary advantages over other types of income.

Governments work to crush small businesses on a daily basis. Every small business owner must deal with a myriad of government agencies from the IRS, to OSHA, to the EEOC, Obamacare, and beyond. Every new regulation and every new tax makes it harder for a small business owner to make payroll and to turn a profit. The net effect, of course, is to both restrict growth of small businesses and to restrict the number of small businesses. The decrease in competition then lessens benefits for both consumers and wage workers in the communities where these businesses are likely to spring up — in low-income communities. Instead, governments make sure that only large, well-capitalized companies can afford to open new businesses in many cases — probably miles away in higher-income areas.

Legalize Poverty

Everywhere the government intervenes to “help” we find not more choice, but less. Not more jobs, but fewer. Do you want to start up your own taxi service by driving people around? Forget about it if you have not obtained all the applicable (and costly) government licenses. Do you want to rent out your converted garage to tenants for cash? Too bad. Zoning laws don’t allow it. Do you want to get a job at five bucks per hour for your teenage son who has no skills? Sorry, that’s illegal too. Do you need a loan, but you’re a high risk borrower? Get lost. We’d have to charge you a high interest rate. That’s usury, and it’s not allowed.

We’re told every day that the only solution to poverty is more government power, more government regulation, more central planning, bigger deficits, and less freedom.

The true solution, however, is better described by a left-wing slogan: “Legalize Poverty.” The left usually says this when homeless people are being thrown off government property, but it’s better applied to the many types of free enterprise that are placed out of reach to the poor by government edicts. So many low-income workers must turn to black markets and low-wage semi-legal work because that’s all that’s open to them. It’s simply illegal for them to find entry-level work in mainstream enterprises, keep all of their meager wages, or start up small enterprises. Needless to say, these assaults on free markets help no one but the government agents paid to enforce them.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

The US Has Become a Nursing Home Economy

by Bill Bonner – Bonner and Partners.com:

The key feature of age is that it happens no matter what you think.

What does this mean?

It means the “old countries” – their assets and their institutions, at least the ones that depend on population, income and credit growth – are “fastened to a dying animal” and are not likely to survive in their present form.

Today, these countries, including the US, are victims of demography. Older people get more money from the government. And they pay less in taxes. Old people also slow the rate of GDP, for obvious reasons: They are not adding to output; they are living on it.

As people age, the whole society – its institutions, its laws, its customs, its economy and its markets – ages, too. They all become as familiar, comfortable and shabby as a well-worn shoe.

An economy is not independent of the people in it. The economy ages with them. And when they reach retirement age, the economy gets arthritis.

A Nursing Home Economy

Even the Congressional Budget Office has noticed how government debt slows growth:

Increased borrowing by the federal government generally draws money away from (that is, crowds out) private investment in productive capital in the long term because the portion of people’s savings used to buy government securities is not available to finance private investment.

The result is a smaller stock of capital and lower output in the long term than would otherwise be the case all else held equal (CBO, July 2014, p. 72).

Why does the federal government need to borrow so much? Before the invention of the welfare state, almost all large borrowing was done for war. Since the end of World War II, however, most developed countries – with the exception of the US – have borrowed heavily only to pay for social programs.

But neither debt nor spending contributes to a dynamic, innovative and growth-oriented economy. Instead, they produce an economy that looks like the people in it – old, creaky and in need of around-the-clock care.

As people age, they begin fewer new businesses. “The Other Aging of America: The Increasing Dominance of Older Firms” is the title of a major study from the Brookings Institution. Done by Robert Litan and Ian Hathaway, it showed that American business was becoming “old and fat.”

Taken together, the data presented here clearly show a private sector where economic activity is sharply concentrating in older firms – a trend that is occurring in a nearly universal fashion across sectors, firm sizes and geographies…

An economy that is saturated with older firms is one that is likely to be less flexible, and potentially less productive and less innovative, than an economy with a higher percentage of new and young firms.

Young people try to create new wealth. Old people try to hold on to the wealth they believe they have in the bag. They are less entrepreneurial. They are also, perhaps, more eager to protect their businesses and professions from competition.

Part of the reason for fewer business start-ups is that it has gotten a lot harder to launch a new company in America.

That was the conclusion of a study by John W. Dawson and John J. Seater (“Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth”). What they found was that there has been a huge increase in economic regulation and restrictions in the US since World War II. They point out that these regulations have an economic cost. Like debt and demography, regulations reduce output.

In fact, they estimate that had the level of regulation remained unchanged since the year I was born – 1948 – today’s GDP would provide every man, woman and child in America with about $125,000 more in income per year.

A Glorified Ponzi Scheme

It was Alexis de Tocqueville who observed that democracy was doomed. He said it would soon degrade into tyranny. As soon as politicians realized that they could win elections by promising the voters more of other people’s money, it was just a matter of time until they overdid it.

Had he imagined how old people would get, he wouldn’t have been so optimistic.

As things developed, politicians noticed two important things: that young people (especially those who hadn’t been born yet) didn’t vote… and old people’s votes could be bought fairly cheaply, at least so it appeared at first.

When the US Social Security program was first put in place, for example, the typical American male could expect nothing from it. He was expected to live to 61. He’d be dead before benefits kicked in. But as the 20th century led to the 21st, his life expectancy increased, and so did the burden of old people.

Early Social Security participants paid in trivial amounts and got a very good return on their money. My mother, for example, only worked a few years at a low-paying job, from which she retired in 1986. She has been collecting Social Security ever since.

“Don’t you feel guilty about getting so much more than you put in?” I teased her.

“Not at all. That’s just the way the system works.”

The way the system works would be illegal for a private annuity plan. It would be labeled a Ponzi scheme. Its promoters would be fined or put in prison. The money that goes into the system is not locked away in wealth-producing investments so that the cash will be available to finance the retiree’s pension. Instead, the contributions of new participants are used to pay benefits to old ones.

This has the obvious and fatal flaw of all Ponzi schemes – eventually, there is not enough new money coming into the system to meet its obligations. This point was reached in the US system in 2010. Since then, the system has been running an annual deficit.

You’ll see why in the chart showing the retirement-age population.

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Everybody knows Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, veterans’ pensions and other support programs are dangerously underfunded. What is not appreciated is the effect that this has on GDP growth and stock market prices.

The crankshaft of age leads to the universal joint of social spending, which then goes to the axles of debt. Finally, where the rubber meets the road, the wheels turn more slowly.

This is not just a problem for government finance. Companies make money by putting out products and selling them. But when people grow old or population growth declines, so do both supply and demand.

Then, companies earn less money. Their shares are worth less. Personal incomes go down. Capital gains retreat. And tax revenues fall, too.

When this happens in an economy that is already deeply in debt, it triggers a crisis.

Article originally posted at Bonnerandpartners.com.

Government Regulation is a Hidden Tax

by Brady Nelson – Mises Daily:Regulation

Perhaps due to it not being as readily quantifiable as government taxation, debt, welfare, and money creation; regulation has too often been superficially dealt with. In many ways, the largely “hidden tax” of regulation is a bigger threat to liberty, economy, and morality than other weapons of forceful government intervention.

What Is the Problem?

The total number of restrictions in federal regulations has grown from about 835,000 in 1997 to over one million by 2010, and the number of pages published annually in the Code of Federal Regulations, never substantially declined, and in fact has consistently grown. It has been estimated that regulatory compliance and economic impacts cost $1.863 trillion annually. This amounts to US households paying $14,974 annually in regulatory hidden taxes, with households thereby spending more on embedded regulation than on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel and services, and savings.

However, this is just the proverbial tip of the regulatory-burden iceberg. The tangible burdens above are a quite manageable list of the more immediate impacts such as extra money spent by business to comply and government to enforce regulation. However, the intangible burdens are an almost infinite list of the less immediate impacts, such as lower performance throughout the economy in terms of entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, customer service, and jobs. The intangible burdens do not readily lend themselves to quantification like the tangible burdens do, and thus it is harder to understand the magnitude and even the exact nature of the almost infinite potential problems caused-and-effected. This is made harder due to the fact that value is always subjective (and ordinal) to each individual at any one point in time and, thus, there are no objective (or cardinal) opportunity costs and benefits of regulations as a whole that can simply be observed, calculated, and compared using cost benefit analysis (CBA).

Why Is There a Problem?

The most important of these intangible burdens of regulation are the unintended negative consequences on decentralized and dispersed knowledge and incentives. As Frédéric Bastiat pointed out: “In the economy … a law gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen.”

Thus, in terms of regulation and other policies: “[I]t almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse.” The unintended consequences of regulation are usually even worse than this, as they usually — unlike in free markets — promote a relatively small group of private interests at the expense of a relatively large group of individuals.

From a Public Choice school perspective, the regulation problem is essentially one of government failure andrent seeking, noting that: “(1) individuals in government (politicians, regulators, voters, etc.) are driven by self-interest, just as individuals in other circumstances are, and (2) they are not omniscient.”

Worse still: “[S]pecial interests are disinclined to seek direct wealth transfers because their machinations would be too obvious. Instead, regulatory approaches that purport to provide public benefits confuse the public and reduce voter opposition to transfers of wealth to special interests.”

From an Austrian school perspective, the regulation problem is essentially one of economic calculation and bureaucracy. Ludwig von Mises explains: “Without market prices for the means of production, government planners cannot engage in economic calculation, and so literally have no idea if they are using society’s resources efficiently. Consequently, socialism [and regulatory interventionism] suffers not only from a problem of incentives, but also from a problem of knowledge.” Mises said regarding the latter that: “A bureau is not a profit-seeking enterprise; it cannot make use of any economic calculation.” And this inevitably leads to regulatory failure as: “… [t]he lack of [profit-and-loss, price and customer-oriented] standards [which] kills ambition, destroys initiative and the incentive to do more than the minimum required.” All of this is, of course, the antithesis of consumer-driven entrepreneurialism.

At perhaps a still deeper level, Murray Rothbard reasoned:

When people are free to act, they will always act in a way that they believe will maximize their utility. … Any exchange that takes place on the free market occurs because of the expected benefit to each party concerned. If we allow ourselves to use the term “society” to depict the pattern of all individual exchanges, then we may say that the free market ‘maximizes’ social utility, since everyone gains in utility.

On the other hand:

Coercive intervention … signifies per se that the individual or individuals coerced would not have done what they are now doing were it not for the intervention. … The coerced individual loses in utility as a result of the intervention, for his action has been changed by its impact. … [I]n intervention, at least one, and sometimes both, of the pair of would-be exchangers lose in utility.

What Is the Solution?

The solution is of course deregulation — as much as possible, as fast as possible. However, both special interests (as emphasized by the Public Choice school) and bad economics (as emphasized by the Austrian school) will need to be overcome.

This combination was colorfully dubbed the “Bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon. It has been observed that:

[U]nvarnished special interest groups cannot expect politicians to push through [regulation] that simply raises prices on a few products so that the protected group can get rich at the expense of consumers. Like the bootleggers in the early-20th-century South, who benefited from laws that banned the sale of liquor on Sundays, special interests need to justify their efforts to obtain special favors with public interest stories. In the case of Sunday liquor sales, the Baptists, who supported the Sunday ban on moral grounds, provided that public interest support. While the Baptists vocally endorsed the ban on Sunday sales, the bootleggers worked behind the scenes and quietly rewarded the politicians with a portion of their Sunday liquor sale profits.

More dauntingly, Murray Rothbard reminds us that, in many ways, the history of humanity can be seen as a race between bigger government versus freer markets:

Always man — led by the producers — has tried to advance the conquest of his natural environment. And always men — other men — have tried to extend political power in order to seize the fruits of this conquest over nature. … In the more abundant periods, e.g., after the Industrial Revolution, [freer markets took] a large spurt ahead of political power [including over regulation], which ha[d] not yet had a chance to catch up. The stagnant periods are those in which [such] power has at last come to extend its control over the newer areas of [freer markets].

It will not be easy to slow, stop, and reverse the century-plus growth of the regulatory state in the US and around the world. The crucial job of pursuing deregulation cannot just be left to politicians from the top down. It will need to come more from as many voters and seceders as possible from the bottom up and every direction in between.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

Employment Does Not Drive Economic Growth

by Frank Shostak – Mises Daily:economic growth

For the head of the Federal Reserve Board Janet Yellen — and most economists — the key to economic growth is a strengthening in the labor market. The strength of the labor market is the key behind the strength of the economy. Or so it is held. If this is the case then it is valid to conclude that changes in unemployment are an important causative factor of real economic growth.

This way of thinking is based on the view that a reduction in the number of unemployed persons means that more people can now afford to boost their expenditures. As a result, economic growth follows suit.

We Need More Wealth, Not Necessarily More Employment

The main driver of economic growth is an expanding pool of real wealth, gained through deferred consumption and increases in worker productivity. Fixing unemployment without addressing the issue of wealth is not going to lift economic growth as such.

It is the pool of real wealth that funds the enhancement and the expansion of the infrastructure, i.e., an expansion in capital goods per individual. An enhanced and expanded infrastructure permits an expansion in the production of the final goods and services required to maintain and promote individuals’ lives and well-being.

If unemployment were the key driving force of economic growth then it would have made a lot of sense to eradicate unemployment as soon as possible by generating all sorts of employment.

It is not important to have people employed as such, but to have them employed in wealth-generating activities. For instance, policy makers could follow the advice of Keynes and his followers and employ people in digging ditches, or various other government-sponsored activities. Note that the aim here is just to employ as many people as possible.

A simple commonsense analysis however quickly establishes that such a policy would amount to depletion in the pool of real wealth. Remember that every activity, whether productive or non-productive, must be funded. When the Fed or the federal government attempt to increase employment through various types of stimulus, this can result in the expansion of capital goods for non-wealth generating projects which leads to capital consumption instead of growth.

Hence employing individuals in various useless non-wealth generating activities simply leads to a transfer of real wealth from wealth generating activities and this undermines the real wealth-generating process.

Unemployment as such can be relatively easily fixed if the labor market were to be free of tampering by the government. In an unhampered labor market, any individual that wants to work will be able to find a job at a going wage for his particular skills.

Obviously if an individual demands a non-market related salary and is not prepared to move to other locations there is no guarantee that he will find a job.

For instance, if a market wage for John the baker is $80,000 per year, yet he insists on a salary of $500,000, obviously he is likely to be unemployed.

Over time, a free labor market makes sure that every individual earns in accordance to his contribution to the so-called overall “real pie.” Any deviation from the value of his true contribution sets in motion corrective competitive forces.

Purchasing Power Is Key

Ultimately, what matters for the well-being of individuals is not that they are employed as such, but their purchasing power in terms of the goods and services that they earn.

It is not going to be of much help to individuals if what they are earning will not allow them to support their life and well-being.

Individuals’ purchasing power is conditional upon the economic infrastructure within which they operate. The better the infrastructure the more output an individual can generate.

A higher output means that a worker can now command higher wages in terms of purchasing power.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

Private Enterprise versus Free Enterprise

by Logan Albright– Mises Daily:free enterprise

The United States Export-Import Bank is scheduled to expire at the end of June 2015, and the elected representatives of both parties are tripping over themselves to reauthorize it, citing the importance of exports and strong private enterprise to the American economy.

“I’m a very strong supporter of the Ex-Im Bank, because it is a tool for us to be competitive in order to support our businesses exporting,” said Hillary Clinton. “[F]ailure to reauthorize Ex-Im would amount to unilateral disarmament and cost tens of thousands of American jobs,” commented Harry Reid. It would seem that Democrats are eager to claim the mantle traditionally applied to Republicans of “The Party of Business.” But there is a difference between being pro-business and being pro-markets.

In his book, Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, libertarian attorney and historian John V. Denson observes, “Many businessmen and bankers believe in private enterprise but do not believe in free enterprise” (emphasis in the original).

It’s an important distinction to make. Free enterprise is the laissez-faire, free-market ideal, with the peaceful interactions between individuals being wholly unregulated by government. Under free enterprise, anyone can trade with anyone else on mutually agreeable terms. Since all interactions are voluntary, all traders necessarily benefit, and both wealth and welfare are free to increase without the imposition of artificial limits.

Private enterprise, in contrast, means merely that business and the means of production are held in private hands, although the government may make any number of demands on how these individuals go about their business. The fascist governments of Europe in the past century maintained a system of private enterprise, while simultaneously exercising near complete control over business operations. Similarly, the Roosevelt economy during World War II was marked by extensive private enterprise serving at the pleasure of government.

This is not to say that private enterprise is bad — it isn’t — but merely that it is insufficient for economic liberty, and prone to be corrupted by the political process. At first glance, one would think that business owners would favor free enterprise. After all, who wants to be pushed around by the government? But in fact, we see just the opposite. James Buchanan, founder of the Public Choice school of economics, was famous for exposing the incentives for private companies to attempt to manipulate government into playing favorites in the marketplace. A free enterprise system benefits everyone who is willing to be productive. Government controls on business, on the other hand, benefit the few at the expense of the many, which means the few who benefit have every incentive to lobby for, and support such a system. Thus, we see everywhere lip service being paid to free enterprise, but an actual promotion of private, unfree enterprise.

The U.S. Ex-Im Bank is a perfect example of this. Founded as part of FDR’s New Deal eighty years ago, the Bank has been providing taxpayer-backed loans to private companies. We are told by supposedly pro-business politicians that the program is needed to stimulate exports, even though competition unhindered by corporate cronyism has always proved a superior economic stimulant. Especially egregious is the fact that most of the money the Bank hands out goes to huge corporations that certainly do not need the government’s help to export their goods.

While defenders of the Bank like to claim most of the Bank’s activity is devoted to helping small business, in fact, 97 percent of the Bank’s loan guarantees go to just ten corporations, with the top two being Boeing and General Electric — hardly mom and pop enterprises that need handouts to keep running. While these companies are not owned by the government, the fact that they are private entities does not justify this kind of interventionism, which stifles competition and creates perverse incentives.

If it is reauthorized, the Ex-Im Bank is estimated to cost taxpayers $2 billion over the next decade. It wastes millions on self-promotion and PR, and, due to specific mandates handed down from the Obama administration, it disproportionately rewards political interests, such as the green energy boondoggle known as Solyndra and foreign companies mired in corruption like Abengoa. It would be hard to imagine a less free market approach toward supporting business. Meanwhile, government guarantees of loans to companies that could not secure them on the open market ensures that the money will be poorly invested, serving special interests rather than sound economics.

This sort of protectionism is perhaps the most seductive and insidious example of the lure of private enterprise at the expense of free enterprise. Despite being thoroughly debunked as effective or wise by virtually all credible economists, protectionist policies have been among the most entrenched and difficult to dismantle. The Ex-Im Bank remains a drop in the bucket compared to other protectionist policies, such as the mammoth farm subsidies Congress cheerfully votes for every few years. But even this relatively small program has proven remarkably hard to kill. Part of the reason for this is that Republicans and Democrats alike can vote for protectionist measures while simultaneously claiming to be “pro-business.” The distinction between supporting business freedom and supporting business directly through government action is rarely made.

Private enterprise is a subset of free enterprise; All free enterprise is private, but not all private enterprise is free. The failure to bear this distinction in mind is what leads to public support of indefensible programs like the Ex-Im Bank. The support of private enterprise at the expense of free markets results merely in corporatism, where business becomes an extension of government instead of the agents of competition and choice.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

There’s No Political Freedom Without Economic Freedom

by Patrick Barron – Mises Daily:freedom

Can we have political liberty without first having economic freedom? Is the form of government predetermined by the form of economic organization? At first blush the opposite would seem to be self-evident, i.e., that our form of government determines all else, including our economic structure. But Mises advises otherwise. In Human Action (page 283 of the Mises Institute’s scholars’ edition), Mises explains (my emphasis):

“Freedom, as people enjoyed it in the democratic countries of Western civilization in the years of the old liberalism’s triumph, was not a product of constitutions, bills of rights, laws, and statutes. Those documents aimed only at safeguarding liberty and freedom, firmly established by the operation of the market economy, against encroachments on the part of officeholders.”

Likewise, in The Law by Frédéric Bastiat (page 49 of the Mises Institute edition),
Frédéric Bastiat has this to say (my emphasis again):

“Political economy precedes politics: the former has to discover whether human interests are harmonious or antagonistic, a fact which must be settled before the latter can determine the prerogatives of Government.”

Economic Freedom Is the Foundation of All Freedom

These insights counsel us that attempts to pass laws — or even constitutional amendments — to ensure our political liberty will be wasted as long as our economic freedom continues to be usurped by government. In other words, limited government will fade in the face of the modern regulatory state, and no laws can protect us from its deprivations. Economics not only trumps politics, it determines its very form.

The root cause of economic interventions is the mistaken belief that government can improve our lives by making economic decisions for us. As I explained in an earlier essay, by their very nature, economic interventions by government are coercive in nature. Voluntary cooperation in the marketplace, on the other hand, requires only access to an honest criminal justice system to enforce contracts and protect property rights.

Government mandates require government coercion for their enforcement, including, for example, the mandate that everyone contribute to the government’s Social Security and Medicare programs. Although the public requires no government mandate to buy any of the wide ranging retirement savings and health insurance products available on the free market, government must force us to participate in its Social Security and Medicare schemes.

Absent the mandates, few would participate, because many understand that these programs are fatally flawed transfer taxes — Ponzi schemes of sorts — posing as retirement savings and healthcare plans. There are no real profit-producing assets from which to pay the plans’ distributions, merely the promise by government that it will continue to force others to pay you in the future as it forces you to pay others in the present.

These programs must be maintained by the police power of the state, and what may appear to be widespread acceptance of the Social Security and Medicare mandates is really the vociferous support of those receiving benefits. Meanwhile, the taxpayers who understand the reality of the program continue to pay to stay out of jail.

Economic Regulation Requires Coercion

The more government meddles in the economic sphere — which should require no regulation at all, since it is completely voluntary — the more police power is necessary to force us to comply. All government agencies possess huge enforcement mechanisms that not only can confiscate our property but take away our freedom. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is little more than a government-supported extortion racket, finding nebulous health and safety violations in the workplace that apparently do not concern the actual workers themselves, who haven’t been chained to their machines for quite some time now.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shuts down businesses and threatens entire industries for violations of arbitrarily established environmental standards that are of little concern to the people affected. Smokestack emissions and the like are local environmental issues for which one would expect a wide variety of standards across the nation. Undoubtedly the people employed by the giant steel mills of Gary, Indiana tolerate smokestack emissions that Beverly Hills residents would find unacceptable. These arbitrary EPA standards are depriving Americans of the opportunity to work at higher paying jobs: their freedom to tolerate more pollution in order to enjoy a higher standard of living has been usurped by government.

Speaking of jobs, just try practicing some profession that requires a government issued license, even if the parties using your service do not care whether you have one or not. Better yet, employ someone who is willing to work at a wage rate below the proscribed minimum or who is willing to work without healthcare or family leave benefits. The police power of the state will descend upon you, even though there is no dispute between you and your employee. Want to reclaim discarded furniture, refurbish it, and sell it out of your house? Better not try to do that without a business license and a store front in an area that is properly zoned. Do you want to hire “an able bodied man” to do some heavy lifting at your place of business? Uh, oh! The discrimination police will put you in your place, which may be a jail cell if you cannot pay their fine.

No truly limited government can perform these police functions, so expecting a limited government in a world where such regulations are common falls into the category of a cognitive dissonance. In laymen’s terms, we are just kidding ourselves that we are a truly free people with a government that is subservient to our wishes and exists primarily to protect our life, liberty, and property. Keep this in mind the next time you hear that some new economic regulations have been proposed or implemented. Concomitant with these regulations comes an ever more powerful and coercive government.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.