Cancel the FDIC

Okay, maybe just the insurance they provide. Sounds stupid right? Maybe not so much. Look at what FDIC insurance provides. It allows banks to lend out deposits in the form of mortgages, car loans, and even government bonds. The bank may loan out 75 cents of every dollar so if everyone came looking for their cash at the same time the bank wouldn’t be able to pay everyone back (Remember the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life?). FDIC insurance makes depositors whole. When recessions hit, we cut our spending and increase savings. We put our money in banks because (now) we can be promised to be paid back $250,000 if the bank runs out of money; which is backed by the faith and credit of the US government.

By canceling FDIC insurance, I’d create a run on the bank. People would pull their money out of banks and put it under their beds. The FDIC would make people whole using their fund and the line of credit they have with the Treasury. The Treasury was going to print money anyway, so why not do it this way and put the money back in the hands of the people? The banks weren’t lending anyway. Canceling FDIC insurance would shock the system.

The shock would be nothing short of the most widespread economic panic in the history of man, but sometimes you got to hit the reset button. Banks would fall, the stock market would collapse, or would they? The flight of cash out of deposits will end up under beds. But people will also start spending because of inflation concerns. Banks would survive because The Fed would keep interest rates low and allow them to borrow for essentially nothing to keep operations afloat. The money supply would double in a matter of weeks. Deflation concerns die. Inflation takes off, which increases the value of assets, including real estate. All of a sudden, people aren’t underwater on mortgages anymore. They can’t afford iPhones anymore because they spend $100 a week on bread, but like I said we’re shocking the system.

Over time the stock market outpaces inflation so people may be tempted to give their deposits to Wall Street to protect their money. But the stock market can’t beat hyperinflation. To return the economy to stability the FDIC will be rolled out again. You won’t see a mass of returning deposits because people will fear the system. So over a decade we see things calming down as the trust returns. The FDIC will collect premiums on the deposits from the banks, and with The Fed slowly decrease the money supply. Economic growth would be limited by this, but the stabilizing system alone should provide the source for growth.

Is canceling the FDIC really a good idea? Of course not. It’s not fair to the people that would suffer the hit a reset button. But this walk through what would happen to the economy if the FDIC was shut down is an interesting way to look at the economy. Instead of trying to boost spending or save the economy by stimulus, why not at least have a conversation about what would happen if the economy was forced to take a cold shower instead?

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For the record, I’m no fan of the deficit either.

Virginia came after Alaska, no doubt due to it’s location to DC and having lots of federal jobs.  Maryland wasn’t too far behind them.  But DC trumps even Alaska, thanks to all the federal jobs, with $83k in spending per person.  Most of the highest paying government jobs are in DC, so this makes sense.

Results are of course skewed since they’re represented in terms of the population.  Rest assured, California does get more money, but they have more people too.  Another way to read these results is that states above the average (like Alaska, Virginia, and Maryland) benefit from a redistribution of income from the other states.

Read: States That Received the Most Federal Funds

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I’m sure it will in some capacity, but not like today. The general theme in the macroeconomics of the developed world is employment. If unemployment is low you probably have a healthy economy, so the focus shifts on inflation. So when the economy turns sour the goal of many programs is to increase employment. Economists have come to think of this the same way we think about a law in science, such as gravity. Gravity is measured in terms of acceleration. We fall to earth at the rate of 9.81 m/s2. Another way to phrase this is for every second you fall, you go 22 mph faster. This is 1 g. This is the law of gravity (and yes physics nerds I know it goes deeper than this so put your slide-rules down and stop writing that “well actually” comment you’re thinking about).

For centuries we tried to defy the law of gravity without really understanding it. I’m sure there were hundreds of thousands of different experiments that failed miserably. But each experiment lasted as long as it took gravity to bring you back to earth. You can’t experiment with economics, and each attempt takes decades to analyze before any consensus can be reached. Even then, consensus is a relative term. There still isn’t agreement on the Great Depression.

In this respect economics is harder than physics. We’ve learned how to work around gravity by using other laws such as lift (planes), molecules lighter than air (balloons), and simply blasting through it (rockets). We’re to the point with gravity that the only thing holding us back (yeah, pun intended) are the resources to develop and expand on the existing knowledge. In other words we could probably get flying cars real quick if we put all our research money into it. There’s a threshold you cross that goes from “figuring it out” to “ah ha, now let’s run with it”. That probably happened with gravity around 1900 in Kitty Hawk NC, and you can see how far we’ve come since then.

In economics, we’re still strapping wings to our arms and jumping off cliffs. That’s because we’re simply trying to repeat what we see in nature. We seem to be better off with low unemployment, so let’s try to keep unemployment low.  Bird fly by flapping wings, so let’s make some wings and flap.  To our 16th century brains, there’s no other way to do it. I don’t even think we’re to the Isaac Newton level of understanding with economics, much less the Wright Brothers.

As my Indian tea buzz wore off, I imagined two futures for economics. Not two different futures, just that one comes first and then the other builds upon the first. They’re both best explained again within the concepts of gravity.

Near Future
By near, I only mean relative to distant. Just like Socratese would look to 2010 as the near future VS the year 210000. I just don’t have a better name for it yet.

This is where we hit our Wilbur and Orville moment. We finally figure out that it’s not the gold standard, maximum employment, or consumption aspects of an economy that give it health and stability; it’s something else. It’s not even capitalism or socialism, though these are both experiments that will get us to the right formula. During this time, we’ll have much more stable economies. It won’t be without crises, but between the Wright Brothers and today we’ve had plenty of airline and space related accidents. But most of the time the problem can be identified and fixed going forward. So when something goes wrong in the economy we’ll know what it is and can fix it much more quickly.

Distant Future
Ever watch Star Trek?  You should.  They actually do a good job of outlining the socio-economic utopia I’m about to describe.  They’ve figured out how to travel across the galaxy.  The only gravity they ever have to deal with is getting caught in the occasional collapsing star, or moving an asteroid out of the path of a planet.  Needless to say their mastery of gravity and physics goes beyond our own.  But they’ve also moved away from many forms of currency, or at least most humans have.  Humans are free to do just about anything, because they don’t need to work for money.  They work to advance society.  They don’t need money because they no longer need to deal with limited resources.

Though economics today is about employment, economics in general is about dealing with resources.  There’s never enough resources (money, raw materials, talent) to do everything at once.  In the Star Trek future, resources are no longer an issue.  I’m not saying our future will be like Star Trek’s, but I am saying that economics will be vastly different because we’ll eventually find a way to make many resources virtually unlimited.  I can’t describe this in a way that makes sense anymore than I could describe how a space shuttle works to a Mesopotamian that’s just learned how to make bronze or even how a light bulb works Christopher Columbus.

But it’s possible, and we’ll get there.  Many people, including my wife, laugh at my references to Star Trek.  But it was that fictional future that has inspired inventions we take for granted today such as: GPS, wireless headsets and cell phones, memory cards, flat screen TVs, lasers, and coming soon: a way to receive medications through the skin without needles.  Maybe we should spend a little more time dreaming about the future of economics, instead of bitching about the present.

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It got me thinking though about how the problem could be fixed. Many shelters and organizations require that the animals get fixed already. But people continue to buy animals from puppy mills, casual breeders, and stores. Admittedly, our own dog came from a casual breeder, but he’s also fixed. Many people keep their dogs intact with the intent of breeding them or just don’t want to pay or are too lazy. The same goes for cats, though I’d guess most aren’t planning on mating them. The reality is that either by laziness or intent to breed, these dogs and cats contribute to the overpopulation problem because they go out and hump, whether you want them to or not.

So what can be done to reduce overpopulate? Much has already been done. Crackdowns on mills and requirements of fixing to register in a county are good steps, but it’s obviously solved the problem the same way preaching abstinence in Africa has solved the AIDs problem. The problem is that most people don’t see any incentive to get their pets fixed. Let’s give them one.

Instead of paying a fee to register your animal with the county, how about the county pay you a fee? A hypothetical budget of $200k a year goes to running an animal shelter. It can cost about $100 or so to fix a dog. Cats can be done for a fraction of that. The government will eat this cost and also give you a check for $100 for getting your animal fixed. They’ll also chip your animal in case it goes missing. At that price the county could fix 1000 animals a year with the same budget. But then that leaves no money for operating a shelter. The humane society is interested in taking over shelters in some areas. Some humane societies are no kill but others do put animals to sleep. But they have advantages that animal control does not. First, they operate with volunteers, which is much cheaper to run. Second, many have networks of foster parents, which can house animals with the facilities are over capacity. Third, they can raise money much faster than a county government can while still charging adoption fees.

This same county spends about $200k a year on taking in 2800 animals, some of which are adopted out and fees are collected, but $200k in taxpayer money is spent. So my solution leaves a deficit of 1800 animals a year. It’s true the first year will be tough, but by attacking the problem at the source that mathematical deficit can be reduced over time. First of all, the incentives to get animals fixed should in theory reduce the overpopulation problem reducing the number of strays running around. Second, the animals that are fixed under this policy are chipped. If they show up at a shelter then the owner must pay $100 to get them back. If you don’t pay then you don’t get your animal back and you lose the ability to own a pet in that county for a specified period of time. This prevents low income and lazy pet owners from taking on pets they’d just release anyway. Yes this system can be gamed, but a blog isn’t the place to dive into details about hypothetical situations.

In an ideal “economist” world, this could reduce the availability of animals to adopt, raising prices for the animals that do exist. The reduces the burden on the Humane Society in terms of animal volume and expenses. People caught trying to give away or sell animals that were breed could be charged penalties that would again go towards supporting the system I’ve talked about above.

I’m mostly writing down the ideas falling out of my head, but with polish I think a system like this could work. Obviously the system in place does not work so we should give something else a try. I’ll close with two things. If you haven’t gotten your pet fixed, please do it. And even if you think my idea is stupid, consider donating time, money, or resources to your local humane society.

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In retrospect it kind of looks that way.  They were bailed out by Washington, and many banks were made whole (or at least survived) as a result.  My opinion is that the banks didn’t even really know how much risk they were taking, but maybe someone at the top was dealing with a moral hazard.

Either way, moral hazard is forever a part of our vocabulary as a result.  Somebody decided to take it to another level, and make music about Wall Street.  He calls himself Merle, Merle Hazard that is.  His newest song is a tribute to the concern of a double dip recession.

But he’s got a lot more too. Gems like “Mark to Market” and “Greek Debt Song” are some of my favorites.

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If there’s one thing that teachers hate more than frozen salaries, low pay, and bureaucracy, it’s No Child Left Behind. Also called NCLB or nicklebee, No Child Left Behind was one of the early Bush era bipartisan pieces of legislation. Though NCLB did many thing for the education system, one of the most notable was the establishment of official metrics for student success. In a matter of speaking, NCLB established standardized tests for the entire country to measure educational achievement. Sounds like a great idea, and it was in theory. But in implementation it can be seriously flawed.

The classic example is with math. Teachers know more or less what will be on these end of the year standardized tests. So they don’t want to waste time teaching practical applications of knowledge, they just stick with the facts. 2 + 2 = 4. A better teaching application would be in the form of some kind of word problem. Sally has two apples and John has two apples. If they put all their apples together then they’ll have how many? To you and me this is simple, but to a child today it’s tough. If they don’t practice word problems they’ll never grasp the concept of arithmetic. This is called teaching to the test. Teachers teach students what they need to know to pass the standardized test, and as a result the student may not learn nearly as much as they could have.

Why do teachers do this? Because their school’s funding depends on their student’s scores on these tests. Not only that, but their individual performance is also considered here. This is such a big issue that even Freakonomics devoted time to talking about teachers that are clearly changing the answers on kids’ tests to improve scores. The LA Times has just started talking about how teachers are rated with these scores as well. The not so shocking truth is that some teachers are really good at improving student scores, and some are terrible. As a result, the perception is that the student may be learning less in another class. The linked article is worthy of your attention.

Teachers are upset with the LA Times because they are going to publish the data about the teachers. Under the Freedom of Information Act this information is public, the LA Times is making it more public by providing an analysis. Whereas the focus used to be on getting into the right school, it may be changing towards getting into the right teacher.

This is dangerous territory, because it all comes back to NCLB. I think if we’re going to rate teachers, we need to do it the right way. I think that performance on standardized tests must be considered in a teacher’s performance, but shouldn’t be all or even half of their performance attribution. This is where the public education system can take a lesson from the best and brightest in the private sector.

According to the LA Times, the main portions of a teacher’s evaluation come from class visits by the administration and performance on these standardized tests. While these are useful, they’re far from useful alone. Throw in something called 360 feedback. This is where the teacher rates the principal in the same meeting where the principal rates the teacher. This is a conversation, not a performance evaluation. In middle and high school classes you could take it a step further and do student-teacher 360 feedback. A good evaluation will also use the BARS system, which is the Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale. Basically, ideal behaviors are identified and then the teacher is rated against those behaviors. This is a labor intensive system for teaching since it would require observation.

I’m scratching the surface here, but I can’t go too much further since I don’t know enough about the education system. The serious issue with using standardized scores is that it’s an attempt to standardize an art into a science. Teaching is no science. I don’t believe you can teach someone to be a good teacher any more than you can teach me to be a good football player. You got it or you don’t. The one’s that got it clearly have it and the metrics don’t tell the whole story. You can see what makes a good football player, and then they are polished and molded into a great football player. The same should be done with teachers. If we aren’t prepared to invest all the capital needed to truly rate a teacher, we shouldn’t bother trying with a flawed rating system based on a flawed testing system.

I’d love to hear from teachers and parents about what they think about this system, though I suspect I don’t have many in my audience.

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The easiest example is with getting to people to invest in 401ks at work.  Some people just don’t bother, others are daunted by the idea and too scared to make the wrong decision, so they don’t.  Others do it but just put their money in a money market or something.  Can we improve the situation?  Maybe.  How about automatically enrolling everyone in a conservative balance of stocks and bonds?  People that know they don’t want to save can opt-out, and others would at least get something.  This respects everyone’s right to choose, but nudges people in the right direction.
The book goes on to talk about other topics, including social security, and Bush’s Medicare Part D.  One of the more fascination subjects revolved around a system that could dramatically increase the number of donated organs in the US.  Really good stuff that includes practical solutions to every day problems.

So what else is good about the book?  It’s written in a great format.  The first part of the book seems to focus on educating the reader about different things.  For example, there are humans and there are econs.  Econs make rational decisions, humans often times do not.  Econs are the “in a perfect world” people that we use to make assumptions.  But humans are actually people, they make dumb decisions, or avoid decisions altogether.  The book then moves on to more specific problems with their suggestions on how to fix them.  Though there are a couple of policy recommendations, the book is not political and the format made for a good read.

But no book is perfect.  Nudge is written by economists, and you can tell.  They tend to dwell on topics for much longer than my attention allows.  This made for a long read for me, though I’m a very slow reader as it is.  I tore through two other books as I read Nudge though, so it may not be for everyone.  And while they do a great job of explaining topics that even your dog can understand, the book slows as a result.

Don’t let this detract from your reading of it though.  I try not to rate books, but if you like Predictably Irrational, The Economic Naturalist, or even Freakonomics, you should give this book a run.  I hope these guys do a follow-up as I’ll be in line for it if they do.  In the mean time they have a blog and twitter account, which I follow very closely.

And just for fun, here’s a picture of my dog nudging me.  He’s saying, stop reading Nudge (which I was) and pay attention to me.

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I observed the obesity epidemic first hand, which I’m okay with since I enjoy the ice creams myself, but I also observed the blatant disregard for humility in the matter.  I’m not going to walk around in a Speedo anymore than women such as exhibit A to the right should be rocking bikinis.  Being a people watcher means that I should attach a story to each large person in a bikini to back up my judgment.  But being the conceited narcissist I am I of course had to take their love of fried food, Jack Daniels, and C-Sections a step further and tie it back into something I could learn.

This image, which is not mine, actually does an excellent job of explaining what I learned from women just like them at the beach.  Exhibit A1, which is front and center, is the average investor.  The average investor makes an investment in a specific stock, loses money, but refuses to sell.  They don’t sell because of an emotional attachment to the stock they thought would outperform the market.  They also know that by selling the stock they are acknowledging a loss because it’s technically not a loss until they actually sell.

Exhibit 1B is rocking the flowery one piece.  She made the same investment and lost the same money, but she admits it’s a loss, sells, and moves on with her life.  What separates the two investors?  Other than a piece of string that turns one spare tire into 2, it’s how they treat the same situation.

These women are roughly the same size.  They are both medically obese.  But one covers herself while the other does not.  Exhibit A1 wears a bikini, but why?  No person on earth will enjoy the view, and any attempt to increase attractiveness via a tanned torso will be offset by the size of said torso.  So why does she wear a bikini?  Because she doesn’t think she’s fat.

Oh sure, she knows she’s big, but she’s refusing to admit how big she is.  Just like the investor knows they’ve lost money, but they won’t sell because they don’t want to admit it to themselves.  In her world, she isn’t really fat until she gives up and starts wearing the one-piece.  She hasn’t lost money until she sells the stock.

By wearing the bikini, she’s sending a message to herself that she could still slim down, or that she’s not as big as she is.  Exhibit 1B on the other hand knows she’s big, and just wants to have fun at the beach.  She knows she’s big, but doesn’t want to distract herself or others by jumping into the back-cleavage olympics.  She’s just as likely, if not more likely to actually make a turn around.  She’s the one who sold her stock at a loss and moved on with her life.  It’s the rational decision, and the best one for her bottom line (and perhaps her waistline.

As I sat on the beach and pondered such thoughts sure to get me a special place in hell or at least a stern look from St Peter, I realized there are other examples of this, even in my own life.  In high school, I was chunky.  I slimmed down a lot, but after I met my future wife stopped trying so hard (plus she’s has a serious sweet fang.  Not tooth, fang).  But when a pair of pants got too tight, what did I do?  I kept buying the same size.  I admit I bought pants too small with the expectation of slimming down and fitting into them.  This makes me no better than Exhibit A1.  So please, before you get upset with me, please know that it was the large women in bikinis that gave me this idea, but they ain’t exactly the only guilt party.

Photo: Mr TGT

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1. Will the GOP take back the House in November?
2. Do you know what Silly Bandz are?
3. Where’s the S&P headed next: 1000 or 1200?
4. Will the government do another round of stimulus?
5. Will the Bush tax cuts expire?
6. This time next year, will houses cost more or less?
7. Inflation or deflation next?
8. If you own a home, are you underwater?
9. What percentage of your income do you have saved for emergencies?
10. Who is going to win the Super Bowl?
11. Gold: Worthless metal or currency of the future?
12. Will financial reform fix Wall Street even a little?
13. Will financial reform benefit the consumer?
14. Do you want universal healthcare?
15. When do interest rates start going up again?
16. If more jobs meant $4 gas again, would you still want more jobs?
17. Does the US have a stronger or weaker influence on the rest of the world today compared to 2005?
18. CEOs: overpaid or just paid in the wrong way?
19. Has someone in your immediate family collected unemployment in this recession (parents, siblings, kids)?
20. More important: spending less or earning more?

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NY Times contributor and economist Tyler Cowen writes

Donald C. Shoup, professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, has made this idea a cause, as presented in his 733-page book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.”

Brilliant. Except where it’s not (which not surprisingly is how I describe my blog). Shoup is a brilliant economist. His life’s work has been on parking it has helped local governments and even the federal government improve parking issues and policy. This is an example:

Shoup theorizes that street level parking should be at about 85% capacity. Any more and you have people filling up streets circling the block waiting for spaces to open. So you want to price that parking on the street so that enough people are deterred away. If you have people circling blocks looking for space that adds congestion, and burns gas.

I think that’s kind of brilliant. If 25 cents an hour encourages too much parking, then up it to 50 and see if that helps. If that’s too much take it down a notch. Or employ this guy at $500/hour to figure out the optimal price.

But this idea that we have too much free parking is ridiculous. I’ll qualify it with two examples.

1: It’s no secret that I live in the DC area. There is a metro station in this area that provides parking in order to allow passengers to ride into DC. Parking costs $5 or so and the metro ride another $9. That’s $14 to get in and out of DC. Or I can drive all the way in and park in the middle of DC for $20 or less. So what’s my response? I don’t go into DC. I specifically sought out living arrangements and working conditions that keep me away from the town. Ideally, I won’t be around the DC area any longer than I need to be. Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, but I don’t love it. The DC transportation systems (highways, roads, and public transport) are in such terrible shape that I hope to take my talent elsewhere. I’m not alone in this. People avoid DC like the plague because of this. Sure there are plenty of folks that love it here, but the system scares away a lot of talented minds from its economy.

2: I’m from the suburban south. Where I’m from the only place you have to pay to park is somewhere downtown. So guess where people don’t go? In my hometown there have been instances where I want to go do something downtown, drive down there, and drive right back because there is no place to park. If I want to park I can go to the parking deck 10 blocks away from everything, or park on that sketchy road that will likely result in the loss of the parts of my car that make it roll. And of course Shoup would just argue that it’s not priced properly. Sure. But if it were priced at all people would just leave it. Keep in mind, these are towns with no sufficient public transport from the burbs unlike DC.

Lest we not forget other parties here. Businesses want parking to be as cheap as possible. It brings in the most customers. Make parking more expensive and they lose customers.

I want to argue the exact opposite of having too much free parking. We don’t have enough of it. Shoup, having lived in a major metro for most of his adult life, and the author (who lives in a DC burb) have been blinded by what they want to see in their own urban areas. But even then the author, Cowen, must not be paying attention to the traffic in the morning commute. Every day traffic in DC is a nightmare, and yet metro prices are already artificially low and heading up. So people still aren’t using them. Do you need everyone to raise the cost of parking? Go ahead and try it, that’s a seesaw that can just never get level. Just watch the mass exodus of jobs from DC, especially in this day in age where telecommuting is getting more and more popular.

This is a classic example of academic economist thinking. “In a perfect world” scenarios are great. But we aren’t in a perfect world. There isn’t enough money to put in mass transit everywhere. Even then, they can’t make it cheap enough to compel enough people to actually use it without bankrupting the project.

Here’s how you fix traffic and parking issues:

Step 1: Stop writing 700 page books about it
Step 2: Stop pretending that charging for parking will fix it until you watch someone get stabbed on a subway
Step 3: Work with local employers and give them an incentive to allow workers flexible hours to avoid rush hour and peak parking
Step 4: Make parking free for the smallest cars and residents of the city, and charge a tax in the city based on vehicle size, time of day, and duration of time spent in the city

You’ll see movement to smaller cars, less peak road stress, and the tax revenue could be used to improve roads, subsidize the public transportation system, and give incentives back to employers. And I haven’t even touched on the cynical notion that jobs should stay in the city and not be moved to rural and suburban areas if city parking was jacked up. Heaven forbid we build a network of employee-towns. But urban planners don’t think that way. They’re retroactive, not proactive.

Photo: Nrbelex

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