7/11/17: To Fine Gael or not: Employment Stats and Labour Force

Recently, Fine Gael party PR machine promoted as a core economic policy achievement since 2011 election the dramatic reduction in Ireland’s unemployment rate. And in fact, they are correct to both, highlight the strong performance of the Irish economy in this area and take (some) credit for it. The FG-led governments of the recent years have been quite positive in terms of their policies supporting (or at least not hampering) jobs creation by the MNCs. Of course, they deserve no accolades for jobs creation by the SMEs (which were effectively turned into cash cows for local and central governments in the absence of any government power over taxing MNCs), nor do they deserve any credit for the significant help in creating MNCs’ jobs that Ireland got from abroad.

Now, to briefly explain what I mean by it: several key external factors helped stimulate MNCs-led new jobs creation in Ireland. Let me name a few.

1. ECB. By unleashing a massive QE campaign, Mario Draghi effectively underwritten solvency of the Irish State overnight. Which means that Dublin could continue avoiding collecting taxes due from the MNCs. And better, Mr Draghi’s policies also created a massive carry trade pipeline for MNCs converting earnings into corporate debt in Euro area markets. The combined effect of the QE has been a boom in ‘investment’ into Ireland, and with it, a boom of jobs.
2. OECD. That’s right, by initiating the BEPS corporation tax reform process, the arch-nemesis of Irish tax optimisers turned out to be their arch blesser. OECD devised a system of taxation that at least partially, and at least in theory, assesses tax burdens due on individual corporations in relation physical tangible activities these corporations carry out in each OECD country. Tangible physical activity can involve physical capital investment (hence U.S. MNCs rapidly swallowing up new and old buildings in Ireland, that’s right - a new tax offset), an intangible Intellectual Property ‘capital’ (yep, all hail the Glorious Knowledge Development Box), and… err… employment (that is why Facebook et al are rushing to shift more young Spaniards and Portuguese, French and Dutch, Ukrainians and Italians, Poles and Swedes… into Dublin, despite the fact they have no where to live in the city).
3. EU. Not to be outdone by the aforementioned ‘academics’ from Parisian La Defence, the EU Commission helped. It waved in the utterly ridiculous, non-transparent, skin deep in fundamentals, Irish tax optimisation scheme that replaced the notorious Double-Irish Sandwich  - the scheme is the already mentioned above Knowledge Development Box. The EU Commission also aggressively pursued a handful of top MNCs trading from Ireland - Apple, Google, etc. This put more pressure on both the Irish Government and the MNCs to cough up some at least half-credible scheme that would show some sort of tangible business expansion and growth in Ireland.

So the result of all of the above has been a jobs boom in the MNCs-dominated sectors, a boom that soaked up quite a bit of the younger graduates from Irish Universities as well, but also helped to grow indigenous ICT sector in Ireland. The latter soaked up some more graduates. Unemployment fell. employment rose.

If this sounds like Nirvana, it ain’t. Because above the silver lining of the good and strong employment/unemployment numbers there is also a cloud of rather darker hues. That club is the Labour Force Participation Rate.

As Chart above shows, seasonally-adjusted LFP for Ireland stood at 59.8% in 2Q 2017 - matching the lowest recorded levels for the entire 16 years since the end of !Q 2001. And the lowest level in 13 consecutive quarters. Worse, as the chart above clearly shows, the dismal performance of the economy in terms of LFP has been in place since the Great Recession. In other words, all the recovery to-date has not been able to shift Irish participation rate.

Which brings us to the real point of the crisis: the current levels of LFP are much much worse than the comparable headline rates attained in 1999-2000. How? Simple.

• Unlike in 2000-2001, we have years of net outward emigration (and continued net outward emigration for Irish nationals). This should increase LFP, and yet it clearly does not.
• Unlike in 2000-2001, we have widening retirement age, not shrinking as was the case in 2000-2001. This too should have supported LFP to the upside. And again, it clearly is not happening.
• In contrast with the 2000-2001, we also have more students in the third level and above education today. Which, again, should have supported current LFP to the upside relative to the early 2000s. 

And so on… in simple terms, our starting conditions (post-crisis environment) and our demographics all suggest that current LFP is reflective of deeper structural problem than the same LFP reading back in 2000-2001 was.

So, yes, Fine Gael can claim some strong record of improvements in the economy that took place on its watch. But, no, this is not the time to enjoy the laurels. Until such time when more Irish people go back to search for jobs, train for jobs and the LFP rises to 63.2% range (2005-2008 average), it is way too early for us to declare a victory over the Great Recession.

Now, what does 3.4% increase in LFP mean? To keep current rate of unemployment fixed at 6%, that means adding 70,450 new jobs and adding roughly 4,500 new unemployed to the Live Register. What that would take in terms of time? Given the current rate of 17,150 new employment added per quarter over the last 4 quarters, this implies about roughly 13 months of jobs creation.

Of course, attracting the disillusioned folks back into labour force is not as easy. So the more important bit is not whether we can achieve it, but rather, what would it mean in terms of economic policies necessary to achieve it? I expect answers from the various FG departments and may be even some Ministers…

28/10/17: Trade vs Growth or Trade & Growth?

Much has been written down recently about the dramatic slowdown in growth in global trade flows. For example, after rebounding post-Global Financial Crisis (global trade volumes fell 10.46% in 2009) in 2010-2011 (rising 12.52% and 7.1% respectively), trade volumes growth slowed to below 4% per annum in 2012-2016, with 2017 now projected to be the first year of above 4% growth in trade (4.16%).

This has prompted many analysts and academics to define the current recovery as being, effectively, trade-less growth (see, for example https://www.bis.org/review/r161125c.pdf).

This is plainly false. In fact, growth in global trade volumes has outpaced growth in real GDP (based on market exchange rates) in every year since 2010, except for 2016. As the chart below clearly shows, the difference between the rate of trade volumes growth and the rate of real GDP growth remained positive in average terms:

Instead, what really happened to the two series that both real GDP growth and trade volumes growth have fallen significantly since 2011. Average growth in trade over 1980-2017 period stood 2.31 percentage points above growth in real GDP. The 2010-2017 period average gap between the two is 1.78 percentage points, the second lowest decade average after 1.48 percentage points gap recorded in the 1980s. However, these comparatives are somewhat distorted by influential outliers - years when post-recessions recoveries triggered significantly higher spikes in growth in both series, and years when trade recessions were substantially sharper than GDP growth slowdowns. Omitting these periods from decades averages, as the chart above illustrates, makes the current recovery (2010-2017 period) look much much worse than any previous decade on the record (green dashed lines).

Still, the above presents no evidence that trade weaknesses contrasted GDP growth trends. And there is no such evidence when we look at decades-based correlations between trade growth rates and GDP growth rates:

In fact, correlation between trade growth and GDP growth is currently (2010-2017 period) running at an extremely high levels of 96%, compared to historical correlation (1980-2017) of 87% and compared to pre-2010 average (1980-2009) of 88%.

So what has been happening, thus?

As the chart above clearly shows, there are significant differences in trends between the two series. Using indexing approach, setting 1979 = 100, we can compute index of real GDP activity and trade volumes activity based on annual rates of growth. The two series exhibit a diverging pattern, with divergence starting around the end of the 1980s, accelerating rapidly during 1993-2008 period and then de-accelerating since the onset of the post-GFC recovery. Notably, however, this de-acceleration simply slowed the expansion of the gap between the two series, and it did not reverse it or close it.

Currently, global GDP growth is just above the long-term trend. But global trade growth has been running below its historical trade since 2014. Back in 2004-2008 period, rate of growth in global trade vastly exceeded its trend. Why? Because 2004-2008 period was the period of rapidly inflating real assets bubbles around the globe - the period of ample credit and ample demand for investment goods and raw materials. Similar logic applies to 1994-2000 period of  In other words, the glorious days of global trade expansion, the period of accelerated growth in trade.

In other words, past periods of exploding trade volumes growth are unlikely to reflect sustainable trends in the real economy. These were the periods of substantial misalignment between trade and growth much more than the current period of slower trade growth suggests. In other words, something is happening to both trade and growth, and that, most likely, is what we call a structural slowdown or a secular stagnation.

28/10/17: Supplies of Monetary Methadone: ECB's Recalibration

My take on ECB's latest policy announcements for the Sunday Business Post: https://www.businesspost.ie/opinion/supplies-monetary-methadone-will-continue-401179.

28/10/17: Income Inequality: Millennials vs Baby Boomers

OECD's recent report, "Preventing Ageing Unequally", has a wealth of data and analysis relating to old-age poverty and demographic dynamics in terms of poverty evolution. One striking chart from the report shows changes in income inequality across two key demographic cohorts: the Baby Boomers (born at the start of the second half of the 20th Century) and the Millennials (born in the last two decades of the 20th Century):

Source: http://www.oecd.org/employment/preventing-ageing-unequally-9789264279087-en.htm.

The differences between two generations, controlling for age, are striking. In my opinion, the dramatic increase in income inequality across two generations in the majority of OECD economies (caveats to Ireland and Greece dynamics, and a major outliers of Switzerland, France and the Netherlands aside) is one of the core drivers for changing perceptions of the legitimacy of the democratic ethics and values when it comes to public perceptions of democracy. 

You can read more on the latter set of issues in our recent paper, here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2017/09/7917-millennials-support-for-liberal.html.

The dynamics of income inequality for the Millennials do not appear to relate to unemployment, but rather to the job markets outcomes (which seemingly are becoming more polarized between high quality jobs/careers and low quality ones):

In other words, where as in the 1950s it was sufficient to have a job to gain a place on a social progression ladder, today younger workers need to have the job (at Google, or Goldman Sachs, or other 'star' employers) to achieve the same.

Thus, as low unemployment swept across the advanced economies in the post-Global Financial Crisis recovery, there has not been a symmetric amelioration of the youth poverty rates in a number of countries:

In 25 OECD countries out of 35, poverty rates for those aged 18-25 are today higher than for those of age 65-75. Across the OECD, statistically, poverty rates for the 18-25 year olds cohort are on par with those for of 76+ year olds cohort, and both are above 12 percent. 

There is a lot that is still missing in the above comparatives. For example, the above numbers do not adjust for differences between different age groups in terms of quality of health and education. Younger workers are also healthier, as a cohort, than older population groups. This means that their incomes should be expected to be higher than older workers, simply by virtue of better health.  Younger workers are also better educated than their older counterparts, especially if we consider the same age cohorts for current Millennials and the Baby Boomers. Which also implies that their incomes should be higher and their income inequality should be lower than that for the Baby Boomers.

In other words, simple comparatives under-estimate the extent of income inequality and poverty incidence and depth for the Millennials by excluding adjustments for health and education differences.

22/10/17: Italian North: another chip off Europe's Nirvana

Having just written about the Czech electoral pivot toward populism last night, today brings yet another  news headline from the politically-hit Europe.

In a non-binding referendums in two wealthiest Italian regions, Veneto and Lombardia, the voters have given local governments strong mandates to push for greater autonomy from Rome and the Federal Government. Both regions are dominated by the politics of Lega Nord, a conservative, autonomy-minded party with legacy of euro scepticism, strong anti-immigration sentiment and the past promotion of outright independence for the Northern Italy.

In both referendums, turnout was relatively strong by Italian standards (58% projected for Veneto and over 40% for Lombardia). And in both, exit polls suggest that some 95% of voters have opted for stronger regional autonomy.

The referendums were not about outright independence, but about wrestling more controls over fiscal and financial resources from Rome. Both regions are net contributors to the Italian State and are full of long run resentment over the alleged waste of these resources. Both regions want more money to stay local.

In reality, however, the vote is about a combination of factors, namely the EU policies toward Italy, the monetary conditions in the euro area, the long-term stagnation of the Italian economy and the centuries-old failure of Italian Federal State to reform the economy and the society of the Southern Italian regions. Italy today is saddled with stagnation, huge youth unemployment, lack of business dynamism, weak entrepreneurship, dysfunctional financial institutions, high taxes, failing and extremely heterogenous public services, collapsed demographics and centuries-old divisions. Some of these problems are european in nature. But majority are Italian.

Greater autonomy for wealthier regions, in my view, is a part of the solution to the long running problems, because it will create a set of new, stronger incentives for the Southern regions to reform. But in the end, it is hard to imagine the state like Italy sustaining its membership in the euro area without an outright federalization of the EU.

In the nutshell, within a span of few weeks, the dormant political volcano of the Europe has gone from stone cold to erupting. Spain, Austria, Czech, & Italy are in flames. Late-stage lava flows have been pouring across Poland, Hungary and the UK, Slovakia and parts of the Baltics for months and years. Tremors in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, (especially Eastern Germany) and Finland, as well as occasional flares of populist/extremist activity in other parts of the Paradise are ongoing. And, it is only a matter of time before populism resurges in France.

All of this with a background of stronger economic growth and booming markets. So wait till the next crisis/recession/market correction hits...

22/10/17: Robot builders future: It's all a game of Go...

This, perhaps, is the most important development in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) to-date: "DeepMind’s new self-taught Go-playing program is making moves that other players describe as “alien” and “from an alternate dimension”", as described in The Atlantic article, published this week (The AI That Has Nothing to Learn From Humans - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/alphago-zero-the-ai-that-taught-itself-go/543450/?utm_source=atltw).

The importance of the Google DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero AI program is not that it plays Go with frightening level of sophistication. Instead, it true importance is in self-sustaining nature of the program that can learn independently of external information inputs, by simply playing against itself. In other words, Google has finally cracked the self-replicating algorithm.

Yes, there is a 'new thinking' dimension to this as well. Again, quoting from The Atlantic: "A Go enthusiast named Jonathan Hop ...calls the AlphaGo-versus-AlphaGo face-offs “Go from an alternate dimension.” From all accounts, one gets the sense that an alien civilization has dropped a cryptic guidebook in our midst: a manual that’s brilliant—or at least, the parts of it we can understand."

But the real power of AlphaGo Zero version is its autonomous nature.

From the socio-economic perspective, this implies machines that can directly learn complex (extremely complex), non-linear and creative (with shifts of nodes) tasks. This, in turn, opens the AI to the prospect of writing own code, as well as executing tasks that to-date have been thought of as impossible for machines (e.g. combining referential thinking with creative thinking). The idea that coding skills of humans can ever keep up with this progression has now been debunked. Your coding and software engineering degree is not yet obsolete, but your kid's one will be obsolete, and very soon.

Welcome to the AphaHuman Zero, folks.  See yourself here?..

22/10/17: Framing Effects and S&P500 Performance

A great post highlighting the impact of framing on our perception of reality: https://fat-pitch.blogspot.com/2017/10/using-time-scaling-and-inflation-to.html.

Take two charts of the stock market performance over 85 odd years:

The chart on the left shows nominal index reading for S&P500. The one on the right shows the same, adjusted for inflation and using log scale to control for long term duration of the time series. In other words, both charts, effectively, contain the same information, but presented in a different format (frame).

Spot the vast difference in the way we react to these two charts...

22/10/17: Leverage risk and CAPE: Why Rob Shiller Might Be Wrong

Rob Shiller recently waxed lyrical about the fact that - by his own metrics - the markets are overpriced, yet no crash is coming because there is not enough 'leverage in the system' to propagate any shocks to systemic levels.

The indicator Shiller used to define overpricing is his own CAPE - Cyclically Adjusted PE Ratio - and the indicator does indeed flash red:

CAPE is defined by dividing the S&P 500 index by the 10-year moving average of index components' earnings. The long-run average of CAPE is 16, and the index currently sits above 31, making the current markets valuations trailing those of the dot.com bubble peak (using recent/modern comparatives).

So the markets are very expensive. But what Shiller says beyond this mechanical observation is very important. His view is that these levels of valuations are 'sustainable' in the medium term because there is very little leverage used by investors in funding these levels of stock prices. In the nutshell, this says that if there is any major correction in the markets, investors are unlikely to be hit by massive margin calls, triggering panic sell-offs. So any correction will be short-lived and will not trigger a systemic crisis.

All fine with the latter part of the argument, if we only look at the stock market brokerage accounts leverage, ignoring other forms of leverage.  And we can only do this at a peril.

Investor is a household. Even an institutional one, albeit with a stretch. When asset prices correct downward, income received by investors falls (dividends and capital gains are cut) and investor borrowing capacity falls as well (less wealth means lower borrowing capacity). But debt levels remain the same.  Worse, cost of funding debt rises: as banks and other financial intermediaries see their own assets base eroding, they raise the cost of borrowing to replace lost income and capital base with higher earnings from lending. Normally, the Central Banks can lower cost of borrowing in such instances to compensate for increased call on funds. But we are not in a normal world anymore.

Meanwhile, unlike in the dot.com bubble era, investors/households are leveraged not in the investment markets, but in consumption markets. Debt levels carried by investors today are higher than debt levels carried by investors in the dot.com and pre-2007 era. And these debts underwrite basics of consumption and investment: housing, cars, student loans etc (see https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-18/don-t-rely-on-u-s-consumers-to-power-global-growth). Which means that in an event of any significant shock to the markets, investors' debt carry costs are likely to rise, just as their wealth is likely to fall. This might not trigger a market collapse, but it will push market recovery out.

An added leverage dimension ignored by Shiller is that of the corporates. During the crises, cash-rich and/or liquid corporates can compensate for falling asset prices by repurchasing stocks. But corporates are just now completing an almost decade-long binge in accumulating debt. If the cost of debt carry rises for them too, they will be the unlikely candidates to support re-leveraging necessary to correct for an adverse asset prices shock.

I would agree with Shiller that, given current conditions, timing the markets correction is going to be very hard, even as CAPE indicator continues to flash red. But I disagree with his view that only margin account leverage matters in propagating shocks to a systemic level.

22/10/17: Oh my... Germany Looks Like Japan ca 2000-2001?

A pic worth a 1,000 words:

Via Holger Zschaepitz @Schuldensuehner

In simple terms, despite its current fortunes, on the longer time horizon, German economy is suffering the same fate as the Japanese one, with two caveats:

1. A lag of a couple decades; and
2. An adjustment for institutional structures (e.g. greater openness to migration).

These are reflected in the distance between the German yields today and the Japanese yields in the 1990s and 2000s. That distance, of some 1,000 basis points, is material to the debt carry capacity (meaning Germany has much greater borrowing capacity than Japan had back in the early 2000s). But it is also more uncertain, as ECB monetary policy cannot fully converge to the German conditions alone (it can be dominated by these conditions for quite a long while, but neither perpetually, nor fully).

So here we have it, folks, our value systems (reflected in demographics) have Japanified Germany... before our fiscal policies did... 

21/10/17: Prague Pages Brussels... Following Vienna

Just after Austria, the Czech Republic too has swung decisively in the direction of embracing populism as Populist billionaire's Eurosceptic party wins big in Czech Republic.

As Radio Praha describes it: "The Czech Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi, maverick millionaire, political populist, mould breaker; these are all labels that have been tagged on to ANO leader Andrej Babiš".

Jakub Patocka for the Guardian: "Open racism has become a normal part of public discourse. Trust in democratic institutions and the European Union has been crumbling before our eyes. It is shocking how easily and quickly this has happened. Many Czechs are going to the polls with grim fears for the future. A broad coalition of democratic parties is not likely to have enough votes to control parliament. Apart from the far right, communists and a peculiar Czech version of the Pirate party are expected to do well."

The headlines from Prague are sounding more like something the 'Kremlin-backed' news outlets would produce. Except, they are printed by the mainstream international media this time around.

But things are much worse than Babis and ANO victory and 29.8 percent of the vote implies. Four out of top five parties by voting results are now parties with populist leanings, far removed from the traditional Czech elites. The mainstream opposition conservative party, the Civic Democrats, are now a distant second with only 11.2 percent of the vote. Czech Republic's "most radical anti-migration, anti-Islam and anti-EU party, Freedom and Direct Democracy", came in the third place with 10.8 percent of the vote, statistically indistinguishable from the Civic Democrats. Another populist party - the Pirate party - is on 10.6 percent with a Parliamentary representation for the first time in its history. And the Communists got 7.9 percent. In simple terms, more than 59 percent of the voters have gone either extreme Left or extreme Right of the Centre, and backed populist politics.

Credit: Petr David Josek/Associated Press

In a recent paper, we explain how the trends amongst younger voters around the world are shifting away from support for liberal democratic values. These shifts are now starting to translate into votes.
Corbet, Shaen and Gurdgiev, Constantin, Millennials’ Support for Liberal Democracy Is Failing: A Deep Uncertainty Perspective (August 7, 2017): https://ssrn.com/abstract=3033949

20/10/17: Lancet Report on Impact of Pollution

A top-level, comprehensive report compiled by the Lancet Commission details estimates of economic and human costs of pollution worldwide. The full report is available here: http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/pollution-and-health.

Before I summarise some of its main findings, it is worth noting that such an undertaking is, by definition, a difficult one and the one that involves a lot of assumptions, models, estimates and uncertainty around its findings. There will be debates and there will be those who disagree with the report findings. However, two things are clear:

1. Pollution is costly in terms of health, life, quality of human capital (young age development, etc), and economically;
2. Incidences of pollution impacts are bound to be concentrated in the areas where other factors (e.g. poverty, location of extraction industries, etc) are also at play.

Here are the key findings of the report:

• Pollution (in all forms: from water pollution to air pollution to soil contamination, from spills to accidental discharges to regular releases and so on) is linked to 9 million deaths in 2015 with pollution-linked diseases accounting for ca 1 in six deaths worldwide
• By one measure, pollution led to economic damages to the tune of USD 4.6 trillion or roughly 6 percent of global GDP
• In emerging economies, pollution related health and life costs are resulting in a labour productivity decline that accounts for the reduction in potential economic output of around 1-2 percent of GDP annually. And this is only due to productivity declines.
• Map below shows deaths from pollution:

• As the above map indicates, much of the impact of pollution in terms of deaths is concentrated in the emerging economies and Eastern Europe. Three countries with strong presence of extractive industries: Russia, Chile and Australia all have lower pollution-related deaths
• In China, almost 20 percent of all deaths are linked to pollution. And that is hardly the worst record. India and Bangladesh, two major population clusters, have the rates closer to 25 percent
• The likes of Ireland may be faring way better than that, but airborne pollution being the biggest killer, the idea of sticking an outright pollution intensive trash incinerator in the middle of the country largest city is clearly signaling and entirely wrong political agenda

Quoting from the report:

"Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today. Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide — three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. In the most severely affected countries, pollution-related disease is responsible for more than one death in four.

Pollution disproportionately kills the poor and the vulnerable. Nearly 92% of pollution-related deaths occur in low-income and middle-income countries and, in countries at every income level, disease caused by pollution is most prevalent among minorities and the marginalised. Children are at high risk of pollution-related disease and even extremely low-dose exposures to pollutants during windows of vulnerability in utero and in early infancy can result in disease, disability, and death in childhood and across their lifespan."

This is a very important report, worth reading.

17/10/17: Intel Opens the Era of Unemployed Insurance Brokers...

If you have a job structuring and selling, marketing and monitoring/managing car insurance contracts, you should stop reading this now... because, Intel has developed the first set of algorithmic standards for self-driving vehicles that aim to ensure that any accident involving a self-driving vehicle cannot be blamed on the software that operates that vehicle.

How? Read some scant details here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-18/intel-proposes-system-to-make-self-driving-cars-blameless.

What does this mean? If successful, regulating algorithmic standards, most likely more advanced than the one developed by Intel, will mean that self-driving vehicles collision will be by system definition blamed only on human drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians. Which will, de facto, perfectly standardise all insurance contracts covering vehicles other than those operated by people. The result will be rapid collapse in demand for car insurance as we know it.

Instead of writing singular (albeit standardised) contracts to cover individual drivers (or vehicles driven by them), using actuarial risk models that attempt to identify risk profiles of these drivers, insurance industry will be simply writing a single contract to cover software running millions of vehicles, plus a standard contract to cover the vehicle (hardware). There will be no room left for profit margins or for service / contract differentiation or for pricing variation or for bundling of offers. In other words, there will be no need for all the numerous marketing, sales, investigative, enforcement, actuarial etc jobs currently populating the insurance industry. Car insurance sector will simply shrink to a duopoly (or proximate) providing cash management service to autonomous vehicles owners.

There will be lots of armchair-surfing for currently employable insurance industry specialists in the near future...