Economic crisis? How about ‘equity mate’?

During 2009 farmers were paid $61million per month in drought assistance as part of Exceptional Circumstances Subsidies. But the public got nothing for it.

I have often said that public subsidies, even in a crisis, should always come with obligations. The simplest of all is to make the subsidy an asset swap rather than a gift—provide the cash, but take an equity stake in exchange, diluting ownership. This 'equity mate' public policy can help ensure the continuity of productive capacity during crisis periods.

Central banks provide liquidity via asset swaps to financial institutions in exceptional times. 'Equity mate' is just a way to provide cash via asset swaps to the companies that do the actual production in the economy. 

But in practice, this is not easy.

In a crisis, the value of equity falls. By taking a new equity stake when the value is low, you are providing much less cash per share while diluting an already lower equity value.

How this could work in practice is to have a “standing facility” whereby a rule about the value of equity the Treasury or Central Bank would pay is set in advance, and businesses can choose to use it up to a maximum share, of say 10% of the business value. As an example the rule could be:

For listed companies, equity comes at a price of the lower of—

1. The middle of the price range of the two prior years, or
2. The middle of the price range of the prior year, or
3. The current price plus 15%.

For unlisted businesses, equity comes at a price of—

1. The average of the marked-to-market balance sheet from the two prior years.

These rules would have to be broadly considered, but you get the idea. When equity values are rising, the price paid would be too low compared to the option of expanding cash for investment by issuing equity to private investors. Only during downturns would this kick in, when sudden declines in economic activity spook the market as a whole. Having this option in place might also dampen selling during a crisis, just like the government guarantee on bank deposits deters bank runs. 

This ‘equity mate’ injection of funds is a way to provide liquidity insurance to our productive enterprises without massively changing their incentives. A problem with drought assistance, for example, is that the expectation of future subsidies gets capitalised into the value of farmland. The insurance is free, and the incentives to invest in a way to mitigate loses from predictable rain variation are reduced. 

Buying up the nation's companies in a downturn is also just a smart investment. Buy low, sell high, make money. In the 2008-09 financial crisis, the Reserve Bank of Australia used counter-cyclical investment in currency to stabilise the dollar. It bought a lot of AUD using its USD reserves when the AUD fell to below USD0.60. In the following years, the AUD increase to above USD1, making a large profit for the Bank, which is an income for the public sector. Like this example, counter-cyclical purchases of a small public stake in a wide range of companies will provide future public revenues. 

What are your thoughts?

The easiest retirement system - Retiree Tokens

People are often confused about retirement income systems. Understandably so. Most economists, and organisations such as the IMF, OECD, national treasuries, and think-tanks, have promoted a view that countries that rely more heavily on taxation and transfers to facilitate retirement incomes (pay-as-you-go systems) are at an economic disadvantage compared to countries with “pre-funded” systems. The aggregate value of assets held in pension funds is believed to measure a country’s capacity to support a retirement income system. More funds, more capacity.

But this is wrong, and it is easy to demonstrate why.

All retirement income systems merely allocate goods and services to the retired at the time they are needed. They only differ in terms of the accounting system used to implement them. Some use public finance and cash transfers, while others, such as superannuation, require compulsory asset transfers.

But the problem of allocating goods and services to the retired does not necessarily need any accounting system at all. Just make a law that requires all retailers to supply their products to people over retirement age for free. Voilà. Retiree incomes, in terms of the goods and services they consume, are automatically and immediately guaranteed.

When a retiree fills their car with fuel, there is no charge. When they shop at the supermarket, again, there is no charge. When a customer reachers their magical retirement age birthday, their electricity and gas bills go to zero. New clothes? Free for the elderly.

This system redirects real resources to the retired. The cost is borne by the non-retired in the form of higher prices and hence lower real incomes. All retirement income systems do this — the non-retired have less ability to consume goods and services, the retired have more.

But, this "no accounting" retirement could be easily gamed. Retirees could begin to sell their free goods in secondary markets, on-selling to non-retirees to profit for themselves.

To fix this problem you could introduce a Retiree Token system. Each retired person gets a limited number of Retiree Tokens that they use at retailers to exchange for the free goods they are entitled to. This Retiree Token system would limit the ability for retirees to on-sell in secondary markets the goods and services provided to them for free. Hypothetically, you could provide each retiree with, say, 24,000 Retiree Tokens each year that they can swap at a 1:1 exchange rate to the dollar for the free goods and services that businesses are legally obliged to provide.

As you can see, a retirement income system can be achieved without any accounting system. It might be operationally problematic, and could be improved by using Retiree Tokens to limit the free goods and services that the retired are entitled to.

So if retirement income systems do not need money at all, where does that leave the idea of “pre-funding” a system? After all, there is no way to use financial markets to create more Retiree Tokens, just as there is no way for airlines to uses financial markets to “pre-fund” their frequent flyer token system.

The answer is simply that it is not possible to “pre-fund” a retirement income system. In terms of goods and services consumed by the retired, all systems possible systems are pay-as-you-go. There should be no confusion about this.

The puzzle of high home prices and vacant homes

One pattern that stands out in the property market is that although homes prices are at all-time highs, so too is the proportion of vacant dwellings. This is a puzzle. How can it be the case that when housing is in high demand it is also rational to keep more housing vacant?

Australian data shows that the number of residential dwellings has grown faster than the number of households for the past decade, indicating a substantial rise in the proportion of empty homes. This phenomenon has been a broad one, experienced in cities such as Sydney, Vancouver, and Toronto. Here are some of my previous thoughts on the topic.

The resolution to this puzzle is as follows. Housing is an asset, and in asset markets there is a trade-off between liquidity and returns. A vacant home is a more liquid asset than an occupied home. Timing a sale is easier, the sale is faster, and it is likely to result in a higher price when vacant. When capital gains are a large proportion of the total return, and capturing this return requires timing the market because of price variability, the value to liquidity from vacancy can be high.

In short, when yields are low and prices high and variable, the benefits to vacancy are high.

Here’s an example. In Scenarios A and B the total asset return to housing is 10%. But in Scenario A the price is high and yields are low. Here, leaving the property vacant forgoes only a quarter of the total return from the asset. If prices are variable in this Scenario, then timing a sale becomes an important factor for earning the capital gains. Hence, the liquidity from vacancy has a large benefit.

	Return	Cap. gains	Rent
Scenario A	10%	7.5%	2.5%
Scenario B	10%	2.5%	7.5%

In Scenario B the price is low, as the rental yield is 7.5% of the price. Capital gains are also low at 2.5%. In this low price, low capital gain, scenario, keeping the property vacant requires giving up three-quarters of the total return. The benefits from doing so are limited since capital gains are low, and hence less variable.

So there is an economic logic behind the puzzle of high prices and high vacancy, and it stems from the fact that housing is an asset as well as a consumption good. But there is also a criminal logic. Much of the vacant housing in Australia (and probably Canada and a few other locations) is due to money laundering. There are no checks on the source of finance for home purchases and no checks on who the ultimate beneficiaries are in the ownership structure. You can buy a home in a trust or company name, and the identity of the trustees and the company owners need not be disclosed. If you then also do not earn rental income, the corporate structure is protected from scrutiny by tax authorities. Housing is a great way to hide ill-gotten gains.

The criminal logic and economic logic are closely aligned. When most of the return to housing comes from capital gains it makes housing a more attractive place to hide money as three-quarters of the total return can still be had. But when most of the return comes from rent it is much less attractive — and it may require corporate disclosure due to local incomes warranting taxation.

Finally, some new data
On another note, new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics came out recently, filling one of the holes in the housing data landscape — the share of lending to investors that is directed towards purchasing or building new homes.

This data helps to answer questions about the economic value of new credit in the economy, the real economic effects of monetary policy, and more. In standard economic thinking, low interest rates make borrowing to invest in new buildings and equipment more viable. Because standard economic models do not include secondary markets, the effect on the trade of existing assets is mostly ignored. Yet we can see that the majority of home purchases are simply trades of existing housing, and hence are a key mechanism through which low interest rates mostly cause higher prices without having much effect on new construction.

As you can see in those few months of investor data,  investor lending is not substantially more biased toward new housing than lending for owner-occupiers. For investors, 24% of loans have been for new housing in the past few months, just as 24% of loans to owner-occupiers have been.

The main difference seems to be that the typical existing home bought by owner-occupiers is more expensive than the typical new home, whereas for investors the mean value of lending to both is the same. 

Rent control is totally normal price-cap regulation

Bernie Sanders has smashed the Overton window. Rent control is going global.

Unfortunately, this means that the economics 101 brigade has come out in force to smugly Vox-splain their incorrect model of rent control and housing market dynamics.

The Onion’s Vox parody is so spot on I can’t stop laughing pic.twitter.com/Q9oQKFr46P

— 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐨𝐬 (@ChuckEChaves) September 15, 2019

Regulating housing rents makes economic sense because homes are attached to land monopolies. Monopolies are inefficient, and regulations can improve outcomes. The two classic regulations are 1) a tax on monopoly super-profits, which is common for mineral and energy resources, and 2) a price cap, which is usually applied to network infrastructure, like rail, electricity, and water. If price caps sound to you a bit like rent control, then you would be spot on. They are rent control.

Rent control is not weird or unusual for regulating monopolies. The weird thing is that land is no longer considered a form of monopoly.

Let me explain how these two classic regulations would work in housing markets to socialise monopoly profits from housing locations.

A super-profits tax would work like this. When a new home is constructed, the owner would be able to seek the market rent. That first year’s market rent would become the regulated price that would attach to that home in a rental database. The home would still be allocated in the rental market using open market prices. But any gap between the market price and the regulated price would be 100% taxed. This is shown in the figure below.

If the market price fell below the regulated price for some reason, that loss would accumulate as a credit against future tax obligations when the market price increased again.

With a super-profits tax system housing resources, including new construction, are always allocated by market prices.

Since the financial crisis, rents have increased by roughly 25% in the United States. A quick guess-timate suggests that around a trillion dollars of rents are paid in the US each year. Had such a tax been implemented ten years ago it would now raise about $250 billion a year with no efficiency loss. In Australia, total housing rents have increased from around $30 billion to $45 billion in that period, meaning a housing super-profits tax would now raise around $10 billion per year (after adjusting for the increased housing stock).

The second way to regulate the land monopoly in the housing market is with price caps (rent controls). Here, the sitting tenant is protected from price increases that are not the result of additional housing investment or renovation but arise due to the favourable location-monopoly of the owner.

As before, market prices match tenants to housing and provide incentives for new construction. However, a sitting tenant is protected from price increases that arise from the location-monopoly. This only works if their tenure is secure, and they cannot be evicted as a way to change the rental price back to the market price.

The image below shows how the gap between market price and rent-controlled prices is a transfer to sitting tenants. If market prices fall below the regulated price, the tenant can have the option to renegotiate or move to pay the lower market price. Again letting markets decide resource allocations. It is only in periods of rapid price growth that sitting tenants are protected.

On balance, this type of regulation transfers some monopoly super-profits to tenants in the short-term but gives them back to owners as tenants relocate and homes are again allocated by market prices.

Either system of regulations will socialise some of the monopoly rents in housing markets. In fact, it is widely acknowledged that a reduction in volatility of returns can accelerate new housing investment. Recent studies also show that owners of older housing choose to accelerate redevelopment into more dense housing if their rents are regulated.

Both regulations are common in other monopolistic sectors of the economy. The main issue is that these regulations will transfer billions of dollars of value away from landlords, and landlords won’t like it. And the economic 101 brigade will always find a way to argue that policies to help the poor are bad for them.