Housing: Part 271 - Another Canada quote.

Sorry, I don't mean to be obsessing on Canada.  It's just that these stories about Canadian housing keep crossing my path.  Here's one I saw today:

And with unemployment at cycle lows, the stock market back at cycle highs and the economy still not yet officially in recession, the cash crunch is just getting started. A comment I received this week from a reader in the Greater Toronto Area offers a glimpse of the pressures building as low yields and high costs prompt boomers (many still in debt) to try and downsize. 

"Being a mortgage broker for 11 years - a bank employee for a dozen years and a previous real estate agent & real estate appraiser; I think I have some insight into the real estate market and buyers, sellers and clients. I see a lot of financial hardship. So many people are struggling. Currently, I have several clients wanting to downsize but are not getting any showings on their houses for sale. They are overpriced and reluctant to drop their prices because once they pay off their mortgage and debts, there will not be enough for a down payment on a cheaper home."

 We see here the budding catastrophe.  There will be a debt deflation spiral where households face shrinking balance sheets, defaults will pile up, etc., etc.

Notice the inevitability about it - "still not yet officially in recession" - reminiscent of the Fed's "ongoing" housing "correction" in 2007.  Even an inevitability about a "cash crunch".  Hmm.  Where does cash come from?  Could the Canadians get their hands on some?  Would that help?

But, they won't get their hands on any cash, because people are unanimous in blaming cash, credit, the banks, and government stimulus for the problem.  From the comments:

The governments around the world should have never allowed it to get out of control.

I think it's time to crack the whip on the money-changers.  

Has this been the result of cheap money and money printing: very inflated property valuations?  

What's worse, the government will eventually bail out those who over-reached by taxing every other single prudent taxpayer later on. How can you lose when there's always a bailout around the corner?  

But yes, it's a great time to be a big bank.  

It would be outrageous to suggest that the closest thing Canada has to a solution is to print lots of money and build lots of houses.  That is such nonsense, it would clearly be worthy of ridicule.  It wouldn't even lose the argument.  It's a solution from another dimension.

So, Canada will likely walk right into the final act of this drama, just as the US has.  Everyone convinced of its inevitability, patting one another on the back, pleased with their own foresight as the inevitability of collapse seems to be proven by the coming events.  As one commenter notes:

Meanwhile, Down Under: "National Australia Bank (NAB) said on Thursday it had fired 20 bankers and reprimanded dozens more for submitting home-loan applications that had inaccurate or incomplete customer information."

With the median Canadian house selling for 7.5x income, do you think there are some mortgages that are flouting convention?  Do you think some desperate brokers and home sellers might tell a fib or two?  Do you think you might find some e-mails on a bank server somewhere where workers are sharing the same sentiments as these commenters?  Pretty self-incriminating, since we all know, they're responsible for all of this.

The selfish question is how to play it.  Short Canadian equities?  Buy Canadian bonds?  Short Canadian banks?  Is there a way to go long on Canadian law firms?  Will there be a Canadian "The Big Short"?

Housing: Part 270 - More on Canada and self-enforced limited access

I have been noting that it looks to me like Canada is setting up for a self-imposed contraction, like the one the US engineered in 2006 and 2007.  Recently, I saw a few pieces about Canadian real estate that seem to confirm my fears, and also make good examples of how limited access orders are self-reinforcing, and how public conversations about housing affordability need to change.

First, here is a piece outlining a plan from a Canadian labor union.  The plan includes:

• progressive land value taxes
• added taxes on land value that is derived from public infrastructure improvements
• tax land speculators, foreign buyers, and short-term rentals
• use all those taxes to fund public affordable housing

Notice a pattern there?  As taxes go, some of these do actually have some positives.  For instance, taxing land value derived from public investments is interesting and ethically quite defensible.  I wonder if they would pair that with tax credits to land owners who lose value because of new mandates, etc.  Aside from that, while this is ethically interesting, there is a minefield of unintended consequences there.  I don't know if it would actually lead to any sort of improvement in equitable housing development.

The Canadian government also has recently issued its own plan, called "A Place to Call Home".  It funnels $40 billion over 10 years into various programs of public housing and public shelters.

The thing is, what is lacking isn't public expenditures.  The reason Dallas has less of a housing problem than San Francisco isn't that Dallas spends billions more on public housing than San Francisco.  The difference is that Dallas exists in an open access order (to use North, Wallis, and Weingast's terminology), where private capital flows to valued purposes, and affordable housing emerges.  That is the solution to a housing affordability problem.  It's really the only solution.

We can see the problem here with public responses to economic challenges.  It is the development of limited access order dynamics that have created scarcity.  It is the inability of private capital to create emergent abundance that is the problem.  But, fairly universally, once polities enter a limited access order, there isn't a natural political path back to an open access order.  So, while there are some places that appear to be encouraging new private supply, in most areas with a housing problem, that path is met with skepticism and public responses involve a deepening of the limited access order.

Instead of reducing obstacles to the inflow of private capital, proposals tend to coalesce around taxing the economic rents that come from limited access orders and funding public provisions of housing.  Public provisions will never be a sustainable replacement for private capital development.*  And, it is the economic rents themselves that are the problem, so taxing them simply asserts a commitment to permanent dysfunction.

Thinking again about the land value taxes from the union proposal above, those taxes seem to be based on the notion that those properties get their value from access to public amenities.  But, in the problem cities, the vast amount of value comes from limited access.  It comes from exclusion and the resultant economic rents that flow to it.  Properties in Dallas can gain value from being close to mass transit, etc., but that doesn't cause the median home in Dallas to be worth $700,000.

Policies that tax those economic rents appear to solve the problem but they really rely on the permanence of the problem.  The obstacle to that development has little to do with tax and budget policy.  It has to do with dense webs of regulations that prevent reasonable investments from being made.

One way we can see how this problem seeps into public expectations, and how limited access begets limited access, is how there is a widespread fear of "oversupply" in Closed Access cities.  The irony is that for any of these cities to get anywhere close to reasonable supply would take a regime shift in local governance and at least a generation's worth of high rates of new building.  For them to be oversupplied, the price of a new home would need to fall below the replacement cost.

Yet, here is a post on the housing market in Toronto that purports to explain how unsustainable supply cycles drive the market (emphasis mine):

Phase three is the hyper-supply phase, which is the phase I believe we’re entering in Toronto. This is when everyone feels like a real estate investment genius, even though most people can’t even tell you much they paid in interest. Construction starts picking up, and starts to catch up. The supply will inevitably overshoot demand...Toronto is a great example of this right now, with over 70,000 units currently under construction. That’s about one unit per person, projected to move to the region over the next year. Keep in mind that most households are not single person households. The most recent Census pegs Toronto at an average of 2.4 people per home. Basically, we have enough housing in the pipeline for up to two years. This excludes the almost 17,000 pre-sale units hitting the market between October 1 to November 30, which won’t hit the market for three years.

This is a widely shared sentiment.  So, perversely, in cities where there have been years of undersupply, which is the only way to drive prices to double or triple replacement value, any time markets shift to a correction of that undersupply, there is an uproar and a demand for policy responses that lead to economic contraction.  Note the irony.  In cities that don't have undersupplied housing, this uproar doesn't occur, because, homeowners in those cities paid something close to replacement value, and markets aren't likely to push prices much below that.  It is in the undersupplied cities where homeowner value is derived from economic rents, from excluded supply, and markets left to function properly would destroy those economic rents.  That's what markets do.  So, in those cities, in the name of economic stability, growth is purposefully constrained in order to maintain those economic rents.

We will know when Toronto has oversupply when homes are selling for less than replacement value.  Don't hold your breath.

To further the irony, the business cycle is blamed on the natural instability of markets.  ("Everyone feels like a real estate investment genius.")  And, public policy is called on to undermine the market by undercutting demand:

Prolonged phases of high home prices inevitably cause a recession. Higher prices mean a higher percentage of income goes towards servicing shelter costs. The less disposable income you have, the less you have to spend in restaurants or shops. High cost of real estate, and a lack of customers is killer on businesses. This in turn leads to less businesses, and less jobs – creating less opportunity....Investors and governments should not be driven by irrational emotional decisions to appease voters. Lengthening amortizations, flooding the market with additional credit, or creating additional down payment programs don’t help with affordability. They impede a natural cycle, and extend peaks higher than they would typically reach. The higher the peak, the further the fall to the trough will be.

So, the collapse is a natural outcome and should be allowed to continue.  Notice that rising prices and rising supply are implicitly presented as a pair here, unlike above where added supply was presented as the catalyst for the collapse.  Here, it is crimped demand that leads to the downfall.  But, nominal spending is a product of monetary and credit policies.  There is no reason this should have to happen.  The collapse in demand is really a product of public demands to impose the end of the cycle.  And, here we see those demands explicitly.

And, here is where another common problem comes into play.  It is that home prices are frequently referenced as the measure of affordability.  This really has nothing to do with affordability.  Affordability is about rent.  The public policy proposals do address this, but only in terms of public housing, where rents are just an arbitrary policy rate.  There is little talk of market rents.  Market rents are what need to come down, and this can only happen through the unfettered development of private capital.

Notice that, in the earlier portion of this description of the cycle, where rising supply would reduce home prices, the natural co-movement of rent and price is implied.  Both would decline in that scenario.  But, in this later portion of the description, rent has been removed from the story.  Now, affordability is about price.  Affordability is never about price.  Viewed correctly, this phase of the cycle is the phase where, at worst, investors are finally helping to fix the housing affordability issue by lowering rents with supply, and this will create massive capital losses among both new and old homeowners.

The way to break this cycle for good would be for the government to loosen up monetary and credit policy during the hot market and to continue to loosen supply constraints at the same time.  There is no way to do that without suffering much local dislocation, because, the fact of the matter is that, whatever solution these cities try to implement, that solution, necessarily, will end with local housing prices that are back near their replacement values.

So, there is a persistent public outcry to fix the affordability problem together with a parallel public demand to undercut economic growth and housing expansion to ensure that affordability never comes, and a third outcry for rising taxes and rising public provision of affordable housing in a futile attempt to fix the problems caused by the first two outcries.  All of this while bemoaning the mysterious malady that afflicts our economies where monopoly profits seem to keep growing while real wages stagnate.


Added PS: Here we can see some of these dynamics at play in the US.  Here is Neel Kashkari getting abused on twitter by some monetary hawks.  Note, since inflation isn't high, they fall back on high asset prices as evidence of a profligate Fed.  In an open access order with free flowing capital, high home prices would trigger new supply, causing rent to decline, and actually serving the hawks' goals of declining inflation.  But, this can't happen in the Closed Access cities, and broad capital repression in mortgage markets since 2007 means it can't really happen anywhere now.  So, instead of increasing supply and lowering rents, any economic growth (either real or nominal, really) leads to rising home prices.  It isn't monetary policy that is behind the concerns of these twitter critics, it is our limited access order that prevents financial capital from funding physical investment.  And, as in Toronto, this leads them to demand publicly-imposed economic losses.




* By the way, note how the difficulty of accepting emergent order plays out here.  Among those who are skeptical that new supply can create affordability, there is rarely a professed skepticism that publicly provided supply will create affordability.  That is because public supply has arbitrary prices, so that the households who get those units win the affordability lottery and the households that are left out continue to pay market rents, where they either escape our attention, or simply can be described as victims of the uncaring market and political forces that prevent further public supply.  So, perversely, the only source of supply that can realistically create broad affordability is dismissed while the source of supply that could never realistically create broad affordability is the focus of the effort.  This perversity is maintained in spite of the existence of hundreds of cities that stand as proof of reality where private capital creates affordable housing, and the lack of a single city that creates broadly affordable housing without it.

Progress = Change = Dislocation

I saw this recent post by Don Boudreaux, where he is discussing the issue of foreign trade, and how the fact that foreign trade "destroys jobs" is an entirely uninteresting point.  Every bit of economic activity creates change, which means it creates dislocations.  All economic progress of any type "destroys jobs".  That is, in fact, it's virtue, all things considered.  How many 18th century jobs have you been pining after?  Thank your lucky stars those jobs were destroyed.

So, if one's intuition is to fight international trade in order to protect jobs, one's intuition is to fight literally all economic activity.  All growth.  All abundance.  Everything beyond a dirt floor and an ox.  That may not be the intention.  But, it is true.  The only way one could favor any economic progress would be to ignore or defeat that intuition, selectively.

That sounds extreme, doesn't it?  I am taking a marginal point and stretching it to an unfair extreme.

In 1942, the Supreme Court, almost completely selected by FDR by that time, ruled in Wickard v. Filburn:

An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production based on acreage owned by a farmer, in order to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than the limits he was permitted and was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that his wheat was not sold, so his activity could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce...among the several states"). The Supreme Court disagreed, stating that, "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us...[b]ut even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'"

I'm afraid that my rhetoric doesn't even fully describe the extent of existing US law.  The New Deal did apply this logic universally and locally.  It's even worse than my exclamation above, because, in this case, not only was this not an international transaction; it wasn't a transaction at all!  And, the justification for it was explicitly to harm consumers so that some producers could be sheltered from competition.

So, if you think it's too extreme to suggest that opposing international trade is the equivalent of opposing tractor manufacturing in order to protect the oxen industry, I am afraid the federal government has already galloped past you.  They say it's the equivalent of making it illegal to grow your own food during a depression.  Except, the federal government makes this reductio ad absurdum in approval of the intuition.  And the Supreme Court concurs.

Filburn was recently cited as precedent that allows the federal government to prosecute marijuana growers who are following state laws regarding marijuana they grow for their own personal usage.  It was also cited in Obamacare cases.  This isn't an archaic position.

Housing: Part 269 - Maybe it's not just the Closed Access cities.

As reader Benjamin Cole frequently points out, the constraints on new building are not limited to urban cores.

It could just be most noticeable there because that is where demand is the highest for new building.

Here is a great post at "Granola Shotgun" about the generalized problem of costs imposed on investors who want to improve properties or start new small businesses. (HT: MR)

At the post, the author runs through several examples of basic infrastructure and building improvements in places that really could use them that are stymied because of the array of regulatory hurdles that are in place.

Really, this gets at the heart of the problem with the current discourse about moneyed interests, monopoly profits, haves vs. have-nots, etc.  So much of the discourse builds on the notion that moneyed interests benefit from deregulation.  But, we can see in the post at Granola Shotgun, in so many little ways, how small, little, well-meaning regulations pile up, add tremendous fixed costs to any sort of at-risk investment, and these costs are extremely damaging to small-scale investments.  Those investors are willing to take on significant risks.  Taking on those risks is a service they are providing to their communities.  But, the risks aren't economical if they have a quarter-million dollar fixed cost.

On the other hand, a Burger King franchise, for instance, has a pretty good idea of the cash flow expectations a new location will have, so those fixed costs aren't a large of a problem for a large organization with an established model.  And, those fixed costs make sure the mom-n-pop hamburger stand doesn't open up in the old abandoned bank building down the block.

Maybe, to an extent, this is a universal problem.  In urban centers that have this problem, but that also have a tremendous amount of economic momentum, development of the city infrastructure is obstructed, but the existing infrastructure is valuable enough to induce a bidding war for access to the infrastructure that exists.  Those are the Closed Access cities.

Then, there is a middle tier of cities who have some combination of growing economies, more liberal land-use policies, and open spaces for building that can avoid this problem, and those cities take in many in-migrants, grow, and maintain a moderate level of income growth that is somewhat universally available to any households who can move there.

Then, there is a bottom tier of cities and towns that aren't growing.  There is no point in growing out into the undeveloped surroundings, because the existing town is underutilized.  (Although, in some cases, we do see dying Main Streets while new retail centers open up in places like highway intersections on the edge of town.  Of course, since the country is bound up in its politics by attribution error, this just gets blamed on the capitalists involved in the developments, and not on the structural problems that lead to it.)  So, while incomes rise in the Closed Access cities because of the bidding war to get into a space with limited infrastructure, incomes in these cities and towns decline.  And that decline is hastened by the inability to improve existing infrastructure.

Maybe, it's all just one big problem, and the problem is decades and decades of unfunded mandates.  As John Cochrane comments about all of these regulations:

These (KE: mandates like building code updates, parking requirements, landscaping, etc.) are important, and desired, public goods. The problem is, these things we want cost a lot of money. $340,000 for one firehouse. The town wants them, but is not willing to raise general taxes to pay for them.  It's sane enough to realize that it cannot make owners of existing properties fork over $340,000 per firehouse. So it passes, what is in essence, a lump-sum tax on people who want to start new businesses, or use the property up the economic foodchain. Alas, the people second-most-unlikely to be willing or able to pay such taxes are small-scale entrepreneurs trying to start a marginally better business in a run down neighborhood.  So nothing happens until either the town reverts to wasteland, or until nearby prospects brighten enough that a large commercial developer can move it back to the top of the food chain, and also extract enough tax breaks so that in essence the city does pay for the public goods from general taxes in the first place.

The thing that makes the Closed Access cities different is that these problems have creeped so far into dysfunction that even the developers who can run the gauntlet are harassed because they have to pass the costs of those obstacles on to the residents and consumers of those new homes and shops. Having effectively pressed all of those costs  onto the developers, and having been convinced that governance is some sort of redistributionist magic machine that forces costs onto capital that are simply paid for by capital's bottomless vat of funds, some locals are offended when those costs become visible to them and reality comes crashing into that fantasy.

And the irony is that when all of this adds up to economic inequity and stagnation, so many blame deregulation.  If someone living in a place like San Francisco, paying $4,000 in rent on a 1,000 square foot condo with an hour commute, can convince themselves that deregulation is the cause of rising economic rents, and economic opportunities moving out of reach of common people, then, I don't know what to say to them.  And, you see this all over the place.  Expensive housing units are blamed on investors and developers pushing up prices and rents.  If what we desperately need is an influx of capital to provide housing in locations that are bursting with opportunities for working class employment, I don't see how that problem can be solved without a wholesale change in perspective.  When this can appear in a Bloomberg article:

Housing advocates have called for federal intervention: They complain that lower-income home buyers are being shut out of the market, worry that the need for big profits will push up rents and are skeptical that the return of the real estate money machine will end well. “The last time Wall Street devised a plan to make mountains of money off our homes it ended catastrophically,” the Atlanta branch of the American Friends Service Committee said on its blog after a protest at a foreclosure auction that was dominated by private-equity bidders. Economists at the Federal Reserve have noted the same potential for danger.

...how can we ever really supply enough housing?  What source of capital is acceptable?  That's one of the things I worry about if I am able to get this project into the public eye.  What if I get that sort of question - "What if the need for big profits will push up rents?" - and I'm facing a room full of people who sincerely want to know the answer?  What do you say to that?  I wouldn't even know how to begin unwinding the web of odd presumptions that the question is resting on.  But, this seems to be a consensus way of thinking.

In this context, maybe the best solution we can hope for is to just make housing a federal service.  Put out $2 trillion in Treasuries to fund 10 million units, placed in cities with high incomes.  Even subsidized rents would create a huge amount of Federal revenue.  It would probably be a disaster, in the end.  But, what choice do we have as long as every possible source of private capital is presumptively derided?



I wonder if we can generalize this to the broader economy, and not just to building.  What if the tech sector is like the outskirts of town, where new things can happen without the legacy of obstructions?  And, healthcare, education, etc. are like the old Main Street.

October 2017 CPI

TTM Shelter inflation at 3.2%.  Core CPI ex. Shelter at 0.7%.

This still could go either way.  It looks like the Fed will hike rates in December.  Are there enough headwinds to keep things going the right direction?  Rising interest rates late last year probably helped to passively loosen policy, but the yield curve has flattened somewhat since then.  It will be interesting to watch the yield curve over the next few months.

The story remains the same.  Maybe we eke out a few years of moderate growth, but we are on the borderline of too tight policy that could turn disastrous.  And, of course, our horrible collection of policies regarding housing continues to stifle growth and labor mobility, while claiming a decent portion of economic growth as a transfer to rentiers.

Great news for liquidationists!

I was reading this terrible article with all the standard tropes about how private equity debt causes all the world's problems, and I came across this:

The Republican tax plan actually recognizes this. The House bill proposed a cap on the deductibility of interest payments over 30 percent of a company’s earnings; the Senate bill defines earnings in such a way to reduce that cap even further. This would discourage some debt-fueled buyouts, and private equity firms are screaming about it.

I didn't realize this was how the tax bill was structured.  Now, I agree that in an optimal system, we would re-engineer the tax code to stop favoring debt.  It seems clear to me that the best approach is to simply reduce corporate income taxes to minimal levels.  Because the incidence of corporate taxation is pretty diffused and because of its side effect as a highly regressive subsidy for homeowners, not only would the lower corporate tax rate reduce the incentive to debt financing, but it would also probably be a progressive change to the tax code.

I don't really know if the tax code should be any more progressive.  It seems pretty progressive already.  But, my point is, if you want a more progressive tax code, a corporate tax cut is probably a pretty good way to get there.  It's not going to be part of a CBO score, but I think if we implemented a large enough corporate tax cut, the disappearance of several tax incentives for high tier residential investment would lead to a decline in high tier prices and high tier housing expenditures.

But, why simplify things when we can make the code more complicated?  So, instead of this, Congress is talking about removing the interest expense deduction.  And, even worse, making it a function of earnings.

Of course, all of the focus of the chattering class is on private equity leveraged buyouts.  But, most firms with large debts are mature, asset-intensive firms like utilities with very stable income streams.  Investors don't like to lend to overleveraged volatile firms.  In fact, that's the reason that firms like Sears - a focus of the terrible article - leverage up, because eventually they become real estate investment trusts with a vestigial retailer attached to them.  Blaming the management for trying to manage the drawdown of that organization is like blaming the auctioneer for your foreclosure.

The other type of business that is overleveraged is a firm that is out of equilibrium - a firm that has just experienced a major shock to earnings or revenue.

And, this is what should make the liquidationists happy.  When we have a systemic contraction, which is frequently related in some way to monetary policy, there is a certain portion of the American populace, punditry, and economics profession, that cheers the dislocation.  It's seen as a way to clear out the chafe.  Let the weaklings fail.

I consider this to be the broken window fallacy applied to nominal economic growth.  There are plenty of ways for people to be harmed without us doing it on purpose in order to discipline them.

But, for liquidationists who see economic contractions as beneficial, this tax policy is ingenious.  First, a nominal shock hits the economy.  Some firms will be hurt worse than others.  Their earnings will collapse.  Usually, when that happens, one of the largest problems for the firm is paying creditors or re-issuing debt that matures in a market that is highly unfavorable.  Now, in addition to those problems, we will treat that shock as a trigger to raise their taxes!

Do you see why the liquidationists should love this?  Now, monetary and fiscal policy will be naturally aligned.  Fiscal policy will be targeting the "chafe", putting those firms out of business, while the good, profitable firms thrive with a lower tax rate.

In a general sense, I am afraid that governance has become so complicated and convoluted at every level, even if good ideas see some light of day, they get tortured and turned into terrible ideas by the time our politics are done with them.  I don't see how this improves without a revolutionary simplification.  But, there is such a shared sense of acrimony in this country.  It is obvious on the right, but really, just as obvious on the left, as the terrible article makes clear, that our citizenry and our leaders couldn't possibly be trusted to do it right.  I mean, we just had a financial crisis that basically was caused because there was a national consensus that stability would prevent other people from experiencing financial catastrophe, and imposing that catastrophe on them was just too important, even if we all had to share in the crisis in order to impose it.

Housing: Part 268 - Trickle Down Economics meets Housing Policy

"Trickle down" economics refers to economic policies that are meant to remove obstacles to private capital development.  The story generally told (skeptically) is that if employers pay lower taxes, they will invest more, hiring more workers and raising wages.  This tends to rhetorically frame economic activity in a way that focuses on anecdotal transitional shifts between employers and employees.

As framed, there isn't anything explicitly false about this description, and, as framed, this story is one about which we might be wise to be skeptical.  The devil is in the framing, because:

• Systematic effects are more important than anecdotal effects.
• Long-term effects are more important than transitional effects.
• The relationship between producers and consumers is more important than the relationship between employers and employees.

In each case, "trickle down" rhetoric focuses on the least relevant ways of contextualizing capital-friendly economic policies.

This rhetoric is even used in housing markets.  In a 2015 opinion piece in the San Francisco Examiner, titled "It's still called trickle-down economics, even in San Francisco", then San Francisco Supervisor David Campos wrote:

Free marketeers are claiming that if we build enough luxury housing it will eventually trickle down and turn into housing for the poor and middle class. This is the failed policy of Reaganomics at its worst.

I had referenced the Campos piece before.  I was revisiting it recently, and I had forgotten how obtuse it was.  It is strange that the "trickle down" rhetorical logic is applied here to housing.  First, housing is basically a pure form of capital.  There is no employer/employee relationship.  This is purely a matter of capital deployed for use by consumers.  Where in this story is there anything trickling down?  If 100 new units are allowed to be built, then there are 100 new units available, now.  If those are "luxury" units, they are still units.  It's not like high income households are some sort of alien symbiotes that spontaneously reproduce when a unit is completed to claim the new space.  Somebody, most often somebody already living in the city, will claim the new unit and another unit will become available immediately.  There is no need to wait for some hoped for investment.  The investment itself is the initial action.  There is nothing left to trickle.  In traditional trickle down rhetoric, one might argue that giving tax breaks to developers in the hope that they invest it in new units is futile.  It's the hope for the investment itself that is deemed naïve.  But, here, the investment is the whole point of the thing.

Second, Closed Access housing policies have been in place long enough to see the difference between the long-term effects and transitional effects.  Campos is complaining here about transitions - that new market rate units will just attract wealthy new tenants, leaving working class tenants out in the cold.  Let's forget for a moment the near-sightedness of that contention.  We don't need to logic through the way new supply would help all parts of the local housing market.  We don't need to work through the logic because there are "n minus 5" metropolitan areas in this country who have what Campos would call trickle down housing markets, and all of them have more affordable housing.  In fact, the more "trickle down" they go, the more affordable their housing is.  Working class families aren't lined up in Dallas, hoping for that promised affordable housing which somehow never comes.  It never left.  Don't call it a comeback.  It's been there for years.  Where are working class families waiting for affordable housing to trickle down?  New York City, Boston, LA, and San Francisco, where heroes like David Campos get letters from desperate residents who need someone to fight against the free market ideologues to help secure them some lottery ticket to publicly subsidized housing.  (From the op-ed: "If you're currently seeking housing in our city and can't afford market rates you have three choices: be homeless, leave, or get on a long wait list for low-income housing.")

Third, these policies have also been in place long enough that we can see the systemic effects.  Campos references 2,000 Ellis Act evictions, which arise when landlords sell homes that have tenants in them, usually at controlled rental rates.  Each of those is an anecdote.  But, tens of thousands of households are forced to move away from the San Francisco metro area every year because of the lack of units.  Those are systematic.

Part of the problem is that cities like San Francisco have implemented such extreme levels of capital repression for so long, that their housing markets don't have anything close to market rates.  Even the publicly negotiated "below market" rate units are more expensive to build than units in an actual market would be, but for the capital repression.  And, since this is the case, it seems clear that people like Campos see the housing market in San Francisco as some sort of foreign creature and only the subsidized stock of housing is true San Francisco housing.

When people are evicted from their rent controlled homes we diminish supply. When apartment owners convert units to condos we diminish supply. When homeowners put units on the short term rental market we diminish supply.  

He is making that distinction quite explicitly here.

It is tempting to point out the absurdity here.  I mean, go listen in on any conversation among macro-economists, market forecasters, realtors, Fed officials, developers, investors - basically any group of people engaged in anything but politics.  You will never here a single conversation based on this conceit.  None of those people have ever talked about how rising supply will lead to rising rents.  It is quite the opposite.  In fact, it is part of the problem, because while people like Campos deny a central role for market-developed units in affordability, all of those other people are concerned about stability, and every time new supply in the Closed Access cities gets close to something reasonable, they start worrying about oversupply, and how its going to crater the local real estate market - fearing the ever near bubble/bust dynamic.

But, the problem here is that San Francisco is so far out of sorts that the long-term is far, far away.  It's transition as far as the eye can see.  And, it really would take tens or hundreds of thousands of units to bring costs in market-rate housing down far enough to start to effect supply with costs that are in the range of subsidized affordable housing.  In Campos' world, the real San Francisco really wouldn't benefit from those new units.  It's not that supply isn't the long-term solution.  It's that San Francisco is too far from the end of the tunnel to see the light.

From the piece: "Think about it this way: if there were a bread shortage in San Francisco and the cost of bread skyrocketed, no amount of fancy cake would fix the bread market." and later "If the city needs more affordable housing then let's build affordable housing."  Notice that, here, Campos treats "luxury" housing and "affordable" housing as two different stocks of units, differentiated by some sort of real, material characteristic.

But, this is at odds with his description of the housing market above.  When he describes a unit shifting from subsidized rentals to market condos as a loss of a unit, he implicitly acknowledges that there is nothing special about "luxury" units.  If an "affordable" unit can suddenly become a "luxury" unit simply by moving from apartment to condo, then, surely a "luxury" unit can become an "affordable" unit when supply growth in other parts of the city lowers market rents.

Campos is engaging in some real rhetorical hocus-pocus here.  There is no question that supply and demand work in the San Francisco housing market.  If units rent for $4 per square foot, added supply would bring them down to $3.50 or $3, or whatever.  Campos' position is that if affordable housing is housing that rents for $1 or $2, then reducing rents to $3 per square foot is useless.  That's all happening out in the "luxury" market, which Campos considers irrelevant to the "affordable" market.

He claims that he is fighting "trickle down" or "supply-side" ideology, and that it is he and his allies who actually understand supply and demand.  But, he has rhetorically removed supply and demand from the San Francisco market.  When units are moved from his subsidized programs into markets, he explicitly refers to this as a loss of a unit.  The world of supply and demand has been wholly and explicitly erased from his view.  He goes through the motions of that for us.  You can see him doing it in the piece.

The stock of "affordable" units in San Francisco, which is the only market he acknowledges the relevance of, certainly has nothing to do with supply and demand.  That stock of units is explicitly part of a program that has politically imposed prices in a context of perpetual shortage.

He says, "Let me be clear - not a single affordable housing activist denies the existence of the law of supply and demand."  Really?  His own piece is a systematic contradiction of that statement.  On the other hand, he follows that sentence with, "Where we all agree is that the incredibly complex San Francisco housing crisis won't be solved by the recitation of freshman economics notes." And, on this matter, the rest of the piece is a systematic confirmation of the statement.

Shooting a ball into a basket can be solved by a recitation of freshman physics notes.  However, winning a game of basketball is incredibly complex.  Why?  Because in basketball, one must contend with defense.  Building affordable housing can be solved by a recitation of freshman economics notes.  However, building affordable housing in San Francisco is incredibly complex.  Why?  Because in San Francisco, one must contend with defense.

In historically developed urban centers some defense is inevitable.  There are legacy residents who have certain expectations and demands, and those sorts of demands might be universal - just as complicated if Austin attempts to build a dense residential center for tech workers as it would be in San Francisco.  The international scope of this problem suggests this is the case.  And, surely, in those contexts, nonsense is an important tool for those legacy residents in the quest for stability and exclusion.  So, in a way, this sort of rhetoric is endogenous.  Supply and demand exists for nonsense, too.  But, it must also be true that, on the margin, nonsense might be coaxed into advancing or retreating, and in retreat, might allow for enough progress to pull some cities past a tipping point into functionality.  When it comes to tipping points for the quantity of nonsense, San Francisco is probably nowhere near the margin.  But, cities like Seattle and Washington, DC are.

Seattle and Washington, DC build a lot more housing than San Francisco does, and while supply there has some constraints, housing markets are still functional enough for supply to affect costs in a way that can still be immediately felt in affordable neighborhoods.  Supply and demand is visible in those cities, so that it can't so easily be rhetorically dismissed.  The demand for both housing and nonsense in those cities is strong - in a way, they seem to be complementary goods.  We need to supply the former and not the latter.

Upside-down CAPM, Part 2: The magical elasticity of investment demand

I previously have discussed my skepticism about the idea that monetary policy works by inducing leveraged investment with low interest rates.  I just don't see evidence for it.

But, I don't really even quite get it, theoretically.  The idea is that the Fed lowers interest rates to well below their market rate, and this induces households and firms to borrow.  There are countless examples, which I won't bother to link to here, of either laypeople or financial professionals referring to phantom activities such as firms propping up share values by borrowing cash on the cheap and buying back shares.  There are certainly firms that borrow.  And there are firms that return capital through buy backs.  Sometimes there are firms that do both!  Thus, as with the idea that loose money or loose credit is responsible for high asset prices, this is an idea that will never die for those who are disposed to believing it.  Hey, maybe they are even right about it.  Surely, getting rid of money and credit will solve these supposed problems.  Who could deny it?

It seems to me that there are two basic camps, here.  Austrian business cycle proponents, who attribute the misallocated borrowing to Fed signals, and Minsky-type proponents who attribute the misallocated borrowing to complacency as economic expansions progress.  Some version of this idea seems to be an important part of Fed policy decisions, given comments made by FOMC members on occasion, though I'm not sure if it is the Minsky idea or the Austrian idea that dominates.

In either case, it seems the proscription is the same - nominal stability (which is managed by the Fed) leads to over-leverage, which must eventually lead to a sharp contraction when it becomes clear that loose money or nominal stability can't endure forever and the economy contracts, triggering a debt-spiral.  Thus, the contractionary policy is demanded now, before the over-borrowing becomes larger, so that the contraction will be more muted.  Please correct me in the comments if you feel that I have misrepresented either school of thought.

But, these bubble theories have a wildly uneven sense of elasticity.  Here is a graph of the one year change in Fed assets (before 2008, Fed assets were almost all funded by currency in circulation), and total borrowing in the US.  I have graphed them both as a percentage of GDP in order to maintain scale over time.

Source

It is true, if we look at the graph, that borrowing sometimes rises during periods of declining and cyclically low rates.  It is also true that levels of borrowing were rising during the high inflation 1970s and 1980s, which I touched on in the previous post on this series.

But, if I understand these business cycle theories correctly, the Fed lowers interest rates by purchasing bonds with cash.  The reason this lowers interest rates is because the market for the securities is not very liquid, so that the extra demand represented by the Fed moves the price.  So, the Fed buys bonds worth around 0.3% to 0.4% of GDP each year, and this changes short term interest rates.  (This is pre-QE.)  It may be hard to see, but on the graph, this is the blue line near the x-axis.

So, the idea is that over a period of months or years, the Fed pushes interest rates down by buying bonds totaling less than half a percentage point of GDP.  Now, one could argue that this bond buying uses new cash, which adds more boost than, say, new bank lending.  But, that is a monetarist argument.  That is not an argument from interest rates.  That is an argument from quantity of cash.  It seems perfectly reasonable to me that injecting cash into the economy will boost nominal values, in the long run, proportionately, and some combination of immediate liquidity and expectations of future liquidity will create short term inflation pressures, too.

I should note that there are many complexities here, and even the effect of the quantity of money is hard to pin down.  There isn't much of a systematic relationship between the rate of new bond buying by the Fed and either NGDP growth or inflation.  Lower market rates increase demand for money, which is disinflationary but a lower target rate is inflationary.  So, the monetarist story is difficult to quantify, too.

But, the interest rate approach has a widely referenced mechanism - lower interest rates lead to borrowing.  So, the strange thing, to me, is that 0.3% of GDP worth of lending by the Fed can apparently move interest rates around by several percentage points, and hold them in place for years.  Yet, when the borrowing that this change in interest rates triggers amounts to 5% to 15% of GDP, all that extra borrowing has no effect on interest rates.  That is some magic elasticity.

The same question remains if the cause of new borrowing is low credit spreads.  If complacency causes spreads to tighten, why doesn't the new borrowing push rates back up?

In fact, the new borrowing does push rates back up.  This is where the Upside-down CAPM fits in.  When equity risk premiums are low, credit spreads tend to also be low, and real interest rates tend to be high, as they were in the late 1960s and late 1990s, at the end of long periods of stability.

This seems to be the motivation behind concerns about NGDP targeting, that nominal stability will cause complacency and that low credit spreads will lead to massive over-borrowing which will get out of hand.  This idea relies on interest rates that are insensitive to investment demand.  The idea is that if investors feel confident that stable NGDP growth will keep equity values from collapsing, for instance, they will invest on margin, borrowing at 4% to invest at 7%-10%.

It's true.  If you could do that, it would be tempting.  Too tempting.  So tempting it would be inevitable.  It would also be inevitable, then, that nobody would be lending money at 4%!  But, if you're working with some whacky model that imagines that cyclical surges of investment keep happening without any consequence to interest rates, this may not seem obvious.  In fact, I think one of the many benefits of NGDP targeting would be that fixed income yields would be high, which is exactly what the global economy could use right now.

Can anyone direct me to readings that address this elasticity question?  How can the Fed buying a few T-bills lower interest rates persistently, but when this triggers hundreds of billions of dollars in new borrowing, that doesn't move interest rates back up?  This seems like such a basic question, I am afraid that I am simply exposing some ignorance.  Enlighten me, readers!

Musical Instruments and Economic Development

Source

Phoenix has a wonderful museum called the Musical Instrument Museum.  It has an amazing collection of musical instruments from all over the world.

The geographical exhibits really can be divided into two sections.  There is a section, shown here, where instruments are generally made of dried gourds, sticks, animal skins, etc.  These are inexact instruments.  They are played in community and it seems that where they are used, everyone is expected to play.  The style and difficulty of the music is inclusive and accessible.

Then, there is a section where the instruments are intricate.  They are played by virtuosos as an exhibition, to be observed.

There is very little in between these two extremes.  There is a tipping point, and you either live in a communal musical context or a performative musical context.  Certainly, even in the performative cultures, we value communal music, and many of us still perform it in some ways.  That could be singing hymns at church, or sitting on a patio or around a campfire on a Saturday night.  But, much of our musical experience, and even its place in our sense of identity, is our experience with performative music.

The difference between these musical cultures is extreme.  In the communal cultures, music is a joyful, messy bonding experience where the performance settles around a sort of lowest common denominator standard.  It is comfortable, but unimpressive.  In performative cultures, musicians toil and strive, they get nervous about playing, they get stage fright, they are judged, and they create forms of beauty and expression beyond imagination.

On this side of the tipping point, we make amazing objects, do amazing things together, induce each other to better ourselves, show our appreciation for excellence, and yet we crave the community of the lowest-common-denominator.  But, for the most part, as a society, we have to choose one or the other.  There isn't a middle ground.  There are some middle ground countries - places where you might find guitars made out of gas cans and drums made from discarded lids.  Those places don't tend to be comfortable and safe places to live.  Excellence and growth is mostly only available past the tipping point, and it is inevitably bound up with stress.

Normally, that sort of social stress is associated with capitalism.  But, here, I think we can see capitalism as only a late manifestation of a longer historical development.  Most of the instruments used by virtuosos today were developed before the industrial revolution.  Performative culture to some extent goes back hundreds, even thousands, of years.  We crossed the tipping point a long time ago, for better and for worse.

Housing: Part 267 - Lot Size and Housing Demand

I haven't written much about this, because I'm not sure that the aggregate data bears this out.  But, the trend is so universal and extreme in the Phoenix area, there has to be something going on.

Since the financial crisis, new homes in Phoenix have been squeezed into very small lots.  There are many in-fill residential developments going up with two story homes that have barely more than a back patio.  This is especially surprising because the growth of Phoenix has largely been based on affordable middle class homeownership, and part of that ideal has always been the backyard swimming pool.  Most of the new homes since 2007 don't seem to have room for a pool.  This is a fundamental change.

The reason I think this is the case is because land prices are high because of low interest rates.  We can see this in the price of farm acreage, which has remained high.  But, home prices have been pushed to a level below their previous norms because of repression in mortgage credit markets.  This means that demand for housing in Phoenix is held down, putting downward pressure on the quantity of housing purchased.  And that demand is constrained by limited credit access, not by spending preferences.

The price of the home itself, in places like Phoenix, will be regulated largely by the cost of building.  So, the cost of lots is high and the cost of the homes themselves is relatively level.  If we didn't have repressed mortgage credit, this wouldn't matter much.  Low real long term interest rates would lower the cost of the mortgage at the same time they would raise the cost of the lot.  Home sizes might rise, but not so much at the expense of the lot.  Today, I think there is tremendous downward pressure on lot size - enough to lead to these fundamental shifts in home design.

Since financial repression is the binding constraint in housing markets, this upends many intuitions we might have about the market.  Yields on housing investment are very high while long term real interest rates on treasuries are very low.  This is odd.  Future market shifts will not be a result of these yields moving in parallel, which is what they might have done in the past.  Future market shifts will more likely result from these yields re-converging, in one way or another.

With continued financial repression, that might mean that housing starts remain low, rent inflation high, and generally real housing consumption will continue to decline until a new equilibrium is reached.  I'm not exactly sure what the endgame looks like there.  I suspect there would be a two-tiered market where upper middle class families would tend to live in larger homes while other families would rent smaller units.  Maybe in that case, these large patio homes would remain the norm in entry level markets, especially if low real long term interest rates remain low as a result of the various ways that capital repression maintains the limited populations and high costs of the Closed Access cities.

But, if financial repression is eased so that marginally qualified borrowers can buy homes again, then home prices should rise and long term real interest rates will also rise.  In that case, lot sizes will also increase in some cities.  Our intuitions will tell us that rising interest rates and rising home prices will cramp housing demand and favor entry level homebuilders of the kind that are building these crowded new neighborhoods.  But, in that scenario, it might be the case that neighborhoods which have been planned and permitted for very small lots would be out of favor, and builders with larger lots would gain market share.

This is all academic.  The sorts of shifts in mortgage market regulation I am describing here aren't even on the political radar right now.  So, it's probably not particularly useful to you as a reader.  But, I am reminded of this issue every time I drive around suburban Phoenix and notice those incredibly small lots.

Corporate profits and taxes. Nothing to see here.

This is an interesting article by Matthew Klein about an idea from Dean Baker to tax corporate income through silent ownership of shares.  It may not be feasible, practically, but it does make sense in a lot of ways.  It fits with my recent posts about property taxes as a form of silent ownership and homeowner subsidies as a form of mandated annuity.

But, the article seems to ignore issues of tax incidence.  Corporations don't really pay taxes.  In the long run, after tax wages, profits, and prices should settle at some relative level of returns and incomes that reflects a complex stew of social preferences and challenges.  This is forgivable in some ways, because the tax proposal in the article seems like it would avoid a lot of the negative consequences that make corporate taxation problematic - legislated special favors, tax avoidance activities, etc.

Politics, realistically, is mostly about status moves and insider-outsider alignment.  Tax avoidance is a fundamental, universal economic issue.  In positive terms, economists would typically treat tax avoidance as a signal of dislocation.  Where there is avoidance, it is a sign that taxes might be too high or the base too narrow, and we would look for ways to pull back.  Our political postures can frequently be divined by recognizing where we invoke attribution error vs. sympathy or indifference.  For instance, few of us would think twice about, say, crossing a state border to buy a car or fill up our gas tank, if taxes across the border were lower.  We might not even recognize that we were engaging in tax arbitrage.  We might just be reacting to price signals.

Corporations are basically engaged in the same activity.  But, we attribute their tax avoidance to their soulless greed.  Much is made of foreign tax shelters, etc.  Some of that is going on, clearly.  But, most corporate behavior, just as with our own behavior, can simply be described as reactions to price signals.  But, corporations are pretty universally outside the zone of sympathy.  So, our reaction to their tax avoidance is to turn up the heat and to find ways to force the taxes onto them, in spite of their avoidance and the inevitable secondary and tertiary effects on price that inevitably mitigate some of the intended taxation.  This is ironic, since aggregate corporate after tax profits aren't that sensitive to taxes.  This is explicitly understood in markets like municipal bonds, where different tax treatments change securities prices with little effect on after-tax returns.

Here is a chart from Klein's article:

He shows declining corporate tax collections over time in the US.  He blames this mainly on foreign tax shelters.

It seems clear to me that the reasonable response to this problem is to lower corporate taxes because the foreign tax shelter problem is created by corporate taxes, and cutting corporate taxes would not really be problematic - prices, wages, and profits would adjust in the long term so that more income would be earned through wages, and more taxes would be paid through sales and income taxes.  And, as we see here, we're talking about 2% of national income. Whatever the actual proportion those taxes would actually fall on various agents, those debates are talking about a small fraction of a percent of national income.  And the benefit would be that firms wouldn't be able to gain an advantage from international tax arbitrage.

To this point, here is a graph of the share of national income of various forms of capital.  The Klein chart ignores composition.  This is a very common problem.  Economists and journalists frequently compare corporate profits over time.  Changing corporate profits over time are dominated by changing composition - using debt financing versus equity, proprietorship versus corporate organizations.  Furthermore, there is the issue of inflation premiums in interest expense.  This is accounted for as an expense to firms and income to lenders.  But, in real terms, this is an arbitrary transfer.  In real terms, the inflation portion of interest payments is like a debt buy-down.  For all of these reasons, changing corporate profits or taxes paid over time are just not that useful of a metric.


Source

Before 1980, there was a shift into corporate forms, then that shift reversed back to proprietorship.  There has been a shift toward debt financing, and in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a significant inflation premium on interest payments.  When we stack these forms of income, they are remarkably flat over many years.  Here, I have also placed corporate taxes at the top of the stack.  When corporate taxes were higher in the early 20th century, capital incomes before tax were higher, and they were somewhat higher even after tax.  Over time, corporate taxes have fallen, yet total capital incomes after taxes have a remarkably stable mean, as a share of national income.

There is much less here than meets the eye.