Banks and cost of funding

This week ANZ and Westpac increased interest rates on variable rate loans. ANZ also reduced intereste rates on three year fixed mortgages. The banks have been telling us for some time that they have increased funding costs so the rate rise was no surprise. However, given their level of profitability, I think the interest increases are indicative of an industry lacking sufficient competition. In a competitive environment a business is limited in its ability to pass cost increases on to its customers. In many cases it will need to accept a lower level of profit instead.

Jessica Irvine addresses this issue in High returns, little competition - life is still sweet for the big banks. She argues that Australia's big four banks have an excessive return on equity (average 15%) given their low risk level.

Banking, by contrast, ain't exactly rocket science. It's a very simple process of buying low and selling high. Borrowing at a certain rate, lending at something higher and sitting back to collect the interest. The potential for innovation is low, on par with, say, a utility. Banks are a low-risk investment. Why, then, should they offer shareholders average or above rates of return? They shouldn't.

She argues that we have a failure of competition in the banking industry:

So how do the big banks get away with it? When faced with higher costs, businesses in a competitive market have only three options: cut costs, raise prices or accept lower profits. Most businesses have only a limited capacity to raise prices - because they would be undercut by a competitor. If a business can pass on higher costs entirely to customers, it is a clear sign that there is a failure of competition in the market. Which, of course, is the bottom line with the Australian banking system. Has been for a long time.

I agree with her conclusion:

Customers have every right to feel ripped off if they're slugged with higher rates. Australian banks just don't take enough risks or add enough value to justify their high rates of return.

Disclaimer: I own shares in ANZ bank.

Ross Gittins on economic modeling

Ross Gittins has some interesting things to say about economic modelling in The very model of a future based on guesswork.

Ian Verrender looks at the impact of the high Australian currency on productivity in Let's be prudent as we rush to find who's responsible:

Australia, meanwhile, is being flooded with capital. It is pouring in on an unprecedented scale as resources companies scramble to build ever bigger mines to supply the rapidly emerging global economic powerhouse that is China.

The earnings impact of that investment, and the effect it will have on productivity, has yet to be felt. Right at the moment, however, it is having a seriously negative impact.

That flood of cash has kept our currency at near record levels, which has put the squeeze on manufacturing and other export-oriented industries. Earnings have shrunk and the ability to invest in new technology has waned as a result.

The Government's industry assistance

In Industry's secret shield of taxpayer dollars Jessica Irvine gives an insight how much the Government spends on industry assistance packages:

But while tariffs have fallen out of fashion, and rightly so given the costs they impose on consumers and other businesses, industry continues to clamour for direct government subsidies and tax concessions. Australian industry received some $7.9 billion from such assistance in 2009-10. About half came in the form of direct payments and half in tax concessions.

To put that into perspective, the cost of budgetary assistance to Australian industry is approaching half of the federal government annual spending on defence ($21 billion) and a third of what it spends each year on education ($30 billion). These are no small bickies.

She notes that the car industry receives just under 10% of Government industry assistance ($721m). It's number three on the list after property and business services ($799m) and finance and insurance ($794m).

Next time you hear an industry calling for more assistance, remember it all adds up. The hidden cost for tax taxpayers is either higher taxes or less spending on health, education and other services - sometimes both.

Europe's economic woes

I've seen some people suggest that the Australian Government didn't need to stimulate the economy to offset the effects of the GFC. They argue that cutting interest rates alone would have been enough. I think their argument is rubbish.

• Monetary policy has a lag. Cutting interest rates today will have negligible effects on demand in the short term. Indeed some people argue that it can take 18 months to flow through the economy. By then the economy will be in deep recession and unemployment and rates of business failure will have increased significantly.
• The point of cutting interest rates to stimulate economic activity is two fold. One, people and businesses will pay less in interest on existing borrowings and so will have more money available to spend on other goods and services. Two, lower rates are more likely to encourage people and business to borrow money and spend it. However the reality is that when the economy is doing poorly many people and businesses become fearful of the their economic future. They're more likely to try to reduce their debt and save rather than spend and borrow.

In Europe must not ignore the tough lessons of history Ross Gittins somes up this latter point well:

One thing the central bank can do is cut interest rates to encourage borrowing and spending. In normal times this is usually effective, but in really bad times a lot of people are too uncertain about the future to want to borrow and expand no matter how low rates are. And if interest rates are already very low - as they are in the advanced economies now - you can't cut them below zero.

The current Government talks about keeping the budget in surplus over the economic cycle. That doesn't mean that the budget will be in surplus every year. What it does mean is that the Government will run a budget surplus when the economy is going well, but will run a deficit if it needs to stimulate the economy when growth is too low.

So why run a surplus? Two reasons: it helps to control inflation; and it means that the Government has enough funds available to stimulate the economy when it needs to.

The problem for the USA and many countries in Europe is that they've been running deficits when their economies have been strong. Over time they've built up substantial levels of debt to finance their deficits. Although this was bad policy they could afford to do it because they had enough tax revenue to service their debt. However, the GFC has seen their tax revenue plummet and their expenditure increase (on things like unemployment assistance). Now some of these countries are having trouble servicing the debt they already have. They're in a catch-22 situation. They need to run a deficit to stimulate their economies. However, they don't have the reserves to pay for the required budget deficit and are having trouble borrowing money to finance it. In fact the deterioration in their budgetary position means that they are now having to implement austerity measures - increasing taxes and reducing Government expenditure. This in turn is reducing economic activity in their economies and driving them further into recession.


As Ross Gittins writes:

Their economies are still quite weak, but they want to increase taxes or - more commonly - slash government spending to get their big budget deficits down in a hurry. In consequence of this policy of ''austerity'', the European economies are heading back into recession and their deficits are getting worse.

Why are they doing something so counterproductive? Because their stock of government debt is so unsustainably high. Whereas sensible policy involves running surpluses and reducing debt during the good years, they kept running deficits and piling it up in the noughties.

When the global financial crisis struck in 2008, many had to borrow heavily to rescue their banks and then borrow even more to kickstart their economies. Their debt is now so high the financial markets have started wondering whether they'll be able to repay it.

Then you have Greece:

Of course, when a country's sovereign debt gets so high that markets will soon refuse to lend more to it at any price, it has no choice but austerity. You can renege on your debts, but you can't run a deficit if no one will finance it.

Even if some international institution bails you out, it will punish you for your profligacy by insisting on austerity. Will this make things worse long before it makes them better? Inevitably.

The other problem for Greece is that it's in the Euro. Normally a country with its problems can at least devalue its currency or try to inflate its way out of its problems. Greece can't as it shares its currency and interest rates with the other Euro zone countries.

Back to the other countries. Ross Gittins again:

But most of the European countries aren't in those dire straits, so why are they slashing spending? What they should be doing is promising and laying plans to reduce their spending down the track, as their economies recover and can take it in their stride.

Why don't they? Because, after decades of fiscal indiscipline, they don't have much credibility when making promises to be good tomorrow. But that doesn't change economic reality: cut when the economy's weak and you make it weaker. The answer is to find ways of making their promises more credible.

High taxing economies

It seems they don't do so badly after all. Lane Kenworthy compares the performance of the USA with two high taxing countries: Denmark and Sweden in Is heavy taxation bad for the economy?

Has Gillard changed her speaking style?

I've always thought that Gillard had the Simon Crean disease - she talked too slowly, especially in news conferences and speeches. This can sound boring and patronising. It can also come across as artificial if it's not your normal speaking voice.

However, watching her today she seemed to speak at a much more normal pace.

Some comments by Tony Abbott

In Don't give Gillard any free kicks, says Abbott Phillip Coorey writes:

Addressing his party room as Parliament resumed for the year, Mr Abbott cited internal divisions over the Murray-Darling Basin and subsidies for the automotive industry as examples.

''The fight you have over $500 million here and 1000 gigalitres is the type of fight you have in government,'' sources quoted Mr Abbott as saying.
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''In opposition we can't fix these things so don't get bogged down in them.''

Tony Abbott is right, there's a limit as to what an opposition can do about these issues (with the reservation that when the Government does not have a majority in either house the Opposition does have some influence). However, the Opposition is the alternate Government. When they next go to an election they need to be able to tell voters what their policies are. It's better to have the debates (even if behind closed doors) and decide these matters now rather than have to do it in the middle of an election campaign. If the issues are controversial then the Opposition might not have the opportunity to postpone the decision until after they obtain Government.

Tim Dunlop on the media and politicians osbcuring the truth

Tim Dunlop has written an interesting piece at The Drum: Have the dark arts of spin outflanked the fourth estate?
The recent kerfuffle at The Lobby restaurant in Canberra involving the leaders of both major parties and protesters from the Tent Embassy is a nice example of the way in which the media and politicians operate in a way that obscures, rather than reveals, the truth.
It's worth a read if you care about what's happening in our media (and if you don't care it's probably even more important that you read it.

Recommendations to improve the competitiveness of the banks

Mike Bouris and Christopher Joye have written an essay entitled Our banks: too big to fail, too few to be competitive. It's an interesting discussion on the competitive advantages the large banks have in Australia in raising funding. They also make three recommendations to improve the situation.

Edit 1st March: Crikey takes a critical look at the claims by Bouris and Joye in Wallis not Joyris, the Yellow Brick Road duo.

The myth of cost of living pressures

Mike Seccombe looks at how, except for the unemployed, cost of living pressures in Australia are a myth in Economic Hypochondria Down Under:

By the time we members of the vast Australian middle class have saved some 10 per cent of our income (not counting superannuation), paid for the private school fees, the house extension, the new flat screen TV, the overseas trip (did I mention the number of Australians taking advantage of the high Aussie dollar by holidaying abroad was up 13 per cent in the year to November 2011, compared with the same period the previous year, and up 34 per cent in two years?), our wallets are a little light.

Thus we notice the power bill and the price of bananas.

One thing that is expensive in Australia is housing:

The big cost rise he identified was housing. He compared the two most recent Housing Expenditure Surveys from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, done for 2003-04 and 2009-10. They showed weekly mortgage payments had jumped 37 per cent in real terms over six years. Over the same period consumer prices, as measured by the CPI, had risen only half as much - 18.7 per cent.

The cause did not appear to be interest rates; they were almost identical at the time of both surveys. He attributes much of it to the "quite frightening undersupply" of housing. The reasons for this are many, including a shortage of suitable land, convoluted approvals processes, constraints on builders' finances, and Australians' stubborn resistance to higher-density living.

Of course people who already own a home are happy when house prices increase:

Yet even as increasing home prices made it harder for new entrants to the housing market, for those who already owned homes - 70-odd per cent of Australian households own outright or are paying them off - increasing prices were often perceived as a good thing.

"I am reminded of one election night, when John Howard had just won re-election, and I asked someone why he had voted Liberal, and he said, 'When Johnny Howard was elected my house was only worth $200,000 and now it's worth $400,000. He made me real well-off,'" McAuley says.

"Over the past two years, we've had a flattening, and some falls in house prices, and it's made people feel nervous."

The economy is not like a speedboat

Greg Jericho has a look at interest rates and their impact on our economy in Rates, jobs and speedboats: the economy explained. He concludes with the following remark:

Let's hope we can keep our eyes on what matters and remember that while maybe 35 per cent of the population have a mortgage, 62 per cent have a job – there may be a link between the two, but it is hard to pay for the first if you don't have the latter.

Greek and Southern Europe Debt

Nicholas Gruen looks at the economic problems besetting Greece and the other southern European countries in The Greek default death spiral. He notes that vested interests and rent seekers have effectively derailed needed reforms and that default is inevitable.

The cost of scrapping the NBN

In Coalition shuffling feet on broadband "Jack the Insider" has an interesting point on the cost of scrapping the NBN if the Coalition win Government at the next election:

By the next election, the Commonwealth will have invested $15 billion into NBN Co. Should the Coalition win the next election and NBN Co.’s windows are boarded up as promised, standard accounting practices dictate that the $15 billion invested will have to appear as a line expenditure item in the Budget.

It is entirely possible that the Commonwealth could sell NBN Co.’s fibre assets in various locations around Australia to a telco of one stripe or another but it would be at a bargain basement price and significant contractual penalties would be payable.

Put another way, the Coalition, already committed to $70 billion in savings over the forward estimates, would have a further $15 billion to find.

None of that would be good news for Joe Hockey.

But it gets worse because Coalition policy would effectively shut down any sort of broadband roll out for at least five years. Citigroup estimates six months will be spent on the preparation of the cost benefit analysis the Opposition insists they need, two years will be needed to complete all contractual negotiations with stakeholders, including Telstra and Optus with a further three more years to be spent completing a necessary separation of Telstra. The policy won’t be implemented until 2018.

The cost to the Commonwealth? Citigroup puts it at $16.7 billion. Put in the $15 billion already spent and we’re getting close to the overall cost of the NBN: $35.9 billion.

So the Coalition’s policy is just a little cheaper but the concern is that it won’t even be half as good, will effectively ignore the existing structural problems in Australia’s telecommunications architecture and leave regional Australia in the dark yet again.

A book I need to read....

Satoshi Kanazawa has given a glowing endorsement of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Apparently it's "a marvelously fascinating survey of how our language – and how we speak it – reveal how the mind works". I guess I'll have to track down a copy at some stage.

The Labor leadership

For various reasons we keep hearing about instability in the leadership of the Labor Party. The press gallery have been reporting that Kevin Rudd appears to have been undermining Julia Gillard since early in the last election campaign. It seems that every month we're hearing that next month there'll be a challenge. Of course, journalists being journalists, and politics being politics, there's also speculation on a third candidate (anyone but Julia or Kevin I guess).

Let me put my two cents in. Kevin Rudd was not a good Prime Minister. He's not even a good Foreign Minister, his supposed area of expertise. If given the job again, he's still not going to be a good Prime Minister. There's a reason half the cabinet would rather quit than serve under him again. There's a reason why so many in caucus will never vote for him again. The only way Kevin Rudd should even be considered by the Labor Party is if the election was due within weeks and they were still 20% behind 2PP. Considered and then rejected. If he became leader there's no way the party could win a subsequent election if half the cabinet resigned in protest. As for Kevin Rudd himself, I hope he's enjoying all the international travel he's been having because after the next election he's going to be a back bencher at best. The only reason he's not on the back bench now is because of the numbers in the Parliament.

So, what about a third candidate? I think NSW has shown the folly of that. Nope, Labor needs to stick with Gillard for as long as she wants the job. If they remove her they just open themselves up to accusations of having the NSW disease.

The only practical way I can see for the Labor Party to change leader in this term and not be worse off is if Gillard resigns. Moreover there would have to be absolutely no hint whatsoever that she was pushed. Personally, I can't see that happening. From all reports she's not a quitter. Nor can I see a reasonable replacement. While Labor seems to have considerably more talent on its front bench than the opposition, they do seem to be lacking alternate leaders. Crean, Swan and Smith don't have the charisma or communication skills and Shorten and Combet lack the experience. Shorten also has the baggage of being one of the "factional daleks" who removed Rudd. Labor would also have to face the fact that they would "burn" the replacement leader.

So, in the highly improbably event that members of caucus read this all I can suggest is the following: stop talking about the leadership and get on with governing the country.

The inverse relationship between intelligence and conservatism

One of John Stuart Mill's most often quoted remarks is:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

This has often been misquoted as "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." A recent study has shown that there is some truth to Mill's statement.

“We found that lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology,” said Professor Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. “A secondary analysis of a US data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact.”

Satoshi Kanazawa addressed the issue from an evolutionary psychology point of view in Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than Conservatives (subtitled Liberals think they’re more intelligent than conservatives because they are). First he gave a definition of liberalism:

It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them.

Kanazawa then goes on to note that liberalism, as per the definition above, could be considered to be "evolutionarily novel". He then cites statistics that show that the correlation between liberalism and intelligence (the graph is from his blog):

For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.

However, he also notes that liberalism is absent from all the surveys of traditional cultures.

Now Kanazawa has an hypothesis that:

applied to the domain of preferences and values, ... more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values that did not exist in the ancestral environment and thus our ancestors did not have, but general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar preferences and values that existed in the ancestral environment.

This is based on the following principles and theories:

The Savanna Principle states that the human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment. The theory of the evolution of general intelligence suggests that general intelligence evolved as a domain-specific psychological adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. Their logical conjunction suggests a qualification of the Savanna Principle and leads to a new hypothesis about individual preferences and values.

So, back to the issue at hand.

Because all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the very least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does not qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used as modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to infer that sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never met or is not likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part of our ancestral life. Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily novel, and the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.

He finishes by noting that:

Incidentally, this finding substantiates one of the persistent complaints among conservatives. Conservatives often complain that liberals control the media or the show business or the academia or some other social institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life.

However, all is not lost for conservatives because Kanazawa, in a later column, asks the question If Liberals Are More Intelligent than Conservatives, Why Are Liberals So Stupid?

Bruce G. Charlton, Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham and Editor in Chief of Medical Hypotheses, may have an explanation. In his editorial in the December 2009 issue of Medical Hypotheses, Charlton suggests that liberals and other intelligent people may be “clever sillies,” who incorrectly apply abstract logical reasoning to social and interpersonal domains. As I explain in an earlier post, general intelligence – the ability to think and reason – likely evolved as a domain-specific evolved psychological mechanism to solve evolutionarily novel problems, whereas, for all evolutionarily familiar problems, there are other dedicated evolved psychological mechanisms. Everyone – intelligent or not – is evolutionarily equipped with the ability to solve such evolutionarily familiar problems in the social and interpersonal domains as mating, parenting, social exchange, and personal relationships, with the other evolved psychological mechanisms. Charlton suggests that the totality of all the other evolved psychological mechanisms (except for general intelligence) represents what we normally call “common sense.” Everyone has common sense. Intelligent people, however, have a tendency to overapply their analytical and logical reasoning abilities derived from their general intelligence incorrectly to such evolutionarily familiar domains and as a result get things wrong. In other words, liberals and other intelligent people lack common sense, because their general intelligence overrides it. They think in situations where they are supposed to feel. In evolutionarily familiar domains such as interpersonal relationships, feeling usually leads to correct solutions whereas thinking does not.

Basically, more intelligent people are also more likely to lack common sense.

Edit 7/02/2012: George Monbiot writing in The right's stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left argues that:

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

Stephen Koukoulas Economic Quiz

Stephen Koukoulas has put up The Great Big New Economic and Market Quiz:

There seems to be a lot of mis-information, twisting, spin and outright lies peddled about the Australian economy, its markets and policy settings.

I thought a quiz of pretty basic factual questions would help sort a few things out. I hope all economic Ministers and their Shadows undertake the quiz and indeed look at the answers, so that they might stop spreading distortions and misunderstanding to what are easy to find facts.

The quiz comprises 20 questions. The answers produced in red below each question come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, The Reserve Bank of Australia or Treasury.

There is no prize – other than hopefully a better knowledge of important facts in the political economy debate.

Cutting the NBN won't save money

Renai Lemay writes in Correction: Cutting the NBN won’t save money that Tony Abbott was wrong when, in his speech to the National Press Club, he claimed that "cutting Labor’s National Broadband Network project would free up Federal Government money to be spent in other areas such as transport". This is because the Government, as per internationally accepted accounting standards, treats the NBN as an asset rather than an expense (see the note below). What does this mean in practical terms. Well, say the Government was going to give NBN Company two billion dollars this year (a figure I made up). Because this is money spent on an asset, the Government can't treat that $2b as an expense (that's the way accounting works). So, not spending the money won't decrease the budget deficit or increase a surplus. If Tony Abbott came to power tomorrow and immediately cut funding to NBN Co he wouldn't suddenly have $2b extra to add to the budget bottom line. Of course he could use that $2b to purchase other assets. Alternatively, he could not spend that $2b and so not increase Government debt. However, I doubt that would save much as the Government is able to raise money incredible cheaply at the moment.

Note
The reason the NBN is an asset is two fold. One: It will generate revenue. Two: It can be sold. To quote Wikipedia:

In financial accounting, assets are economic resources. Anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic value is considered an asset. Simply stated, assets represent ownership of value that can be converted into cash (although cash itself is also considered an asset).

The state of political journalism

Sometimes I despair for this country. Yesterday Tony Abbott gave a speech at the National Press Club. I haven't seen the speech, nor have I read the transcript. However, it's interesting how the reports of the event vary. The media seems to have reacted positively, talking about how Abbott was able to cut through and attack the Government's economic performance.

Unfortunately, it seems that he was given an easy run by the media - the tough questions were most noticeable by their absence. Greg Jericho takes this up on his blog (it's a shame it didn't become this week's article for The Drum). Greg discusses the NPC speech and the coverage it received. He makes this telling point:

I keep wondering why journalists are so stymied by Abbott, but really the reason is clear – he’s a journalist. The guy was a leader writer for The Australian. He thinks in anecdotes. He thinks the one does actually represent the all. There’s a school with a poor BER spend? Why then $16b was wasted. Gerry Harvey says in an interview that he could do set-top boxes for less? Why then it must be true. Run with it! So when he spouts lines in the same manner that journalists would report them, well geez… what do journalists do… hmmm maybe ask if he is going to go positive?

Most in the press gallery are hamstrung because he thinks like they do. Paul Bongiorno actually had the temerity to stand apart and introduce some facts taking about the fact all credit agencies rate Australia AAA, that the cash rate is lower than when the Howard Govt was in office, and the response was “lower taxes, less waste yada yada yada”. It was a good effort by Bongiorno, but he had little support.

Instead we treated to endless reruns of the "Australia Day riot" (a point address by Andrew Elder on The Drum).