Signs of the Economic Apocalypse, 12-4-06

From Signs of the Time, 12-4-06:

Gold closed at 651.20 dollars an ounce Friday, up 2.5% from $635.40 at the close of the previous Friday. The dollar closed at 0.7498 euros Friday, down 1.9% from 0.7637 euros at the end of the week before. That put the euro at 1.3338 dollars compared to 1.3094 the Friday before. Gold in euros would be 488.23 euros an ounce, up 0.6% from 485.26 for the week. Oil closed at 63.67 dollars a barrel Friday, up 7.5% from $59.24 at the close of the previous Friday. Oil in euros would be 47.74 euros a barrel, up 5.5% from 45.25 euros for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 10.23 Friday, down from 4.9% from 10.73 at the close of the Friday before. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,194.13 Friday, down 0.7% from 12,280.17 at the end of the week before. The NASDAQ closed at 2,413.21, down 1.9% from 2,460.26 for the week. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.43%, down 11 basis points from 4.53 at the end of the Friday before.

Oil shot up 7.5% last week and the dollar fell again. Gold rose too, but only slightly against the euro. According to the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Paulson is encouraging the drop in the dollar. The problem, given the massive triple deficit in the United States is that, as in Iraq, there are no good options. Letting the dollar drop risks Asian central banks pulling out of the dollar and a currency collapse followed by sky-high interest rates and complete economic collapse. On the other hand, keeping the dollar high exacerbates the massive trade deficit:

Volatile Dollar May Not Be Scary to Washington

By Steven R. Weisman

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — As the dollar tumbled against the euro this week, reflecting fresh concern about a possible weakening of the American economy, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. issued the usual phrase from the catechism: “A strong dollar is clearly in our nation’s best interest.”

Treasury secretaries since Robert E. Rubin in the 1990s have, with rare exceptions, offered precisely that formula whenever the subject comes up.

But many economists say that Mr. Paulson’s statement does not reflect what the United States actually seeks right now. For one thing, the Bush administration is in active pursuit of a weaker dollar against China’s currency, which would probably encourage similar changes with other Asian competitors. The goal would be making American exports there less expensive, and imports more expensive, helping to spur an industrial revival at home.

And though there are high risks if the dollar were to continue to fall rapidly against the euro and the British pound, the United States is generally seen as hoping for the economic gains delivered by a lower dollar as American exports become more competitive against planes, machinery and other goods produced in Europe.

“Paulson has got to like a euro that’s appreciating in value,” said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute of International Economics and a longtime advocate of a weak dollar. “He came into office facing an overall American trade deficit that is close to $1 trillion a year. He’s got to welcome something that shows the trade deficit likely to go down.”

Still, the fluctuations of the dollar have unsettled many in the world of finance this last week, when it sagged about 2 percent against the euro, bringing its decline this year to more than 12 percent. On Friday, the dollar fell to 1.33 euros; it dropped against the British pound as well, with it now taking $1.98 to buy a pound.

By contrast, against the Japanese currency, the dollar has slipped much less, closing Friday at 115.35 yen.

In Europe, the French finance minister, Thierry Breton, has expressed concern about a weakening dollar, noting that exports have helped Europe’s recent economic recovery. But other European finance ministers said this week that at least for now, gains in the euro do not appear to threaten prospects for growth in Europe.

The gyrations of the dollar highlight the sensitivity of Mr. Paulson’s role at this particular moment, as he prepares for his biggest overseas trip so far as Treasury chief: a veritable expedition to China, accompanied by five cabinet members and by Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman.

The goal of the trip, which starts Dec. 14, is to engage China on a range of economic issues but most particularly to press Beijing to let its currency, the yuan, rise in value against the dollar. That would help, American officials hope, to narrow a Chinese trade surplus with the United States that soared past $200 billion last year.

As a former investment banker who lived and breathed the logic of international markets for decades at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Paulson is trying to engineer a kind of correction in which China would cease what American officials say have been currency manipulations aimed at pumping out exports.

Against the background of the rise of the euro, the China trip illustrates the three-cornered complexities of the world economy and of Mr. Paulson’s dollar diplomacy.

Suddenly with a declining dollar, Europeans are stepping up their purchases of American goods, and it has become more expensive for Americans to visit Europe as tourists or business officials. American investors overseas, meanwhile, are enjoying the extra kick that a falling dollar delivers on their foreign profits.

The decline of the dollar against the euro, while the dollar-to-yuan ration remains stable, also has the effect of increasing tensions between Europe and China. European businesses, like their American counterparts, are already upset about cheap Chinese exports to Europe. Now these goods are even cheaper because the yuan is declining against the euro, pulled down by the dollar.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are likely to get more nervous than ever that a decline in the dollar against the yuan will damp their exports and reduce the value of their dollar-denominated assets, putting pressure on Chinese banks that are holding those assets.

China has resisted American appeals to let the yuan rise in value, arguing that China is already undertaking painful economic reforms — writing off bad loans and closing money-losing state enterprises — and cannot afford further social disturbance brought on by new difficulties in exports.

“We are committed to a market-based exchange-rate mechanism,” said a senior Chinese official, speaking anonymously under Chinese ground rules. “But we will do it in a responsible way — responsible to the health of our country, the United States, Asia and beyond.”

Part of the reason for the dollar sell-off, many analysts say, has been a recent sense of disappointment about the American economy even as Europe has picked up some momentum, prompting traders to look for more promising investments in markets overseas. The prospect of higher interest rates in Europe while rates remain stuck or drift lower in the United States has also drawn funds out of the dollar.

…If American policy makers are pleased about the prospect of the dollar’s providing a kick for exports, they fear a dollar falling so far and fast that it fuels inflation in the United States. Higher inflation might force the Federal Reserve, which is still concerned that price increases are outside its comfort zone, to raise interest rates, slowing the American economy further.

“The fall of the dollar has both benefits and risks,” said Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics. “The danger is that the willingness of foreign investors to buy dollars is shrinking. If the fall of the dollar accelerates, investors could start dumping U.S. assets, and you’ll get a hard landing for the economy.”

The fear of a loss in the value of its assets is a factor in China’s rebuffing American imprecations to let its currency float more flexibly against the dollar, many analysts say. China has amassed $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves after years of trade surpluses with Europe and the United States.

About $700 billion of those reserves are said by many economists to be in dollars. One reason China does not want a cheaper dollar against the yuan, these economists say, is that the value of its holdings would decrease, limiting the lending ability of its banks.

Nevertheless, Mr. Paulson’s trip is organized around the principle that China needs a bit of a weaker dollar now because its current path of binging on exports will overheat the Chinese economy — it is growing at 10 percent a year — and cause a collapse sooner or later if it is not cooled off slowly.

The dollar has declined about 5 percent against the yuan in the last year and a half, but American policy makers say that the yuan is still artificially low. That is also the view of leading members of Congress, especially Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who becomes the speaker of the House in January.

Not all economists agree that am upward revaluation of the yuan will benefit the American economy. They note that cheap exports from China are desired by American consumers, and that Chinese imports have not led to rising unemployment, as critics charge.

“Let’s say China revalues by 10 percent overnight,” Mr. Sinche said. “Then prices at Wal-Mart go up by 10 percent. So we then see worse inflation numbers, the Fed tightens monetary policies, and we end up with higher inflation, higher prices and higher interest rates. Remind me again why that’s what we want.”

Further complicating the situation is the financial vulnerability of banks due to the explosive growth in derivative-based hedge funds:

Derivatives debacle

December 1st, 2006

The wipeout of a major U.S. bank could easily be one consequence of the explosion in derivatives — now totaling $370 trillion, nearly seven times the world's economic output — according to Strategic Investment 's Dan Amoss:

Most of the incomprehensibly large notional value of derivatives are traded "over the counter," meaning one guy calls another and writes a contract saying "let's swap fixed liabilities for floating liabilities." Then, the one that wants to shoulder interest rate risk (basically speculation on the future direction of rates) agrees to make the payments on the floating-rate instrument in return for getting the other guy to make the payments on the fixed-rate instrument.

Normally, one party is hedging and the other is speculating. The problem is, there's no good disclosure in the public domain on who the speculators are and how exposed they are to risk.

My conclusion after studying them pretty intently: this market will experience growing pains. But this was my conclusion in 2002-2003. Now, considering the exponential growth of the derivative market (and its subtle connections with housing market speculation), I think we may see LTCM on a nationwide scale, with the U.S. dollar playing the role of LTCM's capital base. In other words: waking up one morning to the announcement that a bank heavily exposed to derivatives is insolvent and working with the Fed and Treasury on an orderly liquidation and bankruptcy.

The most likely catalyst for this announcement? Interest rate spikes due to massive movements out of the dollar (Chinese/Japanese/Saudis/Hedge funds). Those who contracted to pay skyrocketing floating rates are immediately insolvent and unable to pay the myriad other obligations they have. This sets off more bank failures, and all of a sudden Ben Bernanke has too few fingers to plug into an increasingly leaky dike.

Another major vulnerability of the world economy is the insurance industry, particularly catastrophic insurance. With climate change and who knows what else in store, a choice needed to be made: who will assume the risk, the financial system, governments or individual victims? Guess in which direction the financial powers that be are leaning:

Is Catastrophe Insurance Headed for Disaster?

Mark Thoma

November 28, 2006

Peter G. Gosselin of the LA Times describes recent changes in catastrophe insurance markets, some of which have shifted risk from insurance companies to the government and individuals. For example, in many states the government has capped the total amount insurance companies must pay to policyholders after natural disasters. In these cases, the government agrees to cover any costs over and above the cap limiting the insurance companies' exposure to risk.

But the big change is the ability of insurance companies to assess risk at the individual level to a greater degree than ever before. This allows them to design policies and rates to match an individual's characteristics. Whether this is good or bad overall is an open question. While it improves the efficiency of insurance markets in a variety of ways, if winners and losers can be predicted accurately in advance insurance markets break down because there is no way to pool risk across individuals. For example, if one out of ten people will face high losses after an earthquake, and you can tell which person it will be in advance, there is no way share the risk across these ten individuals. Instead, one will face very high costs and nine very low costs - same average, but a different distribution (all else equal, e.g. the individual who faces the high rate may take preventative measures to reduce risk lowering overall and average costs).

In addition, with individual pricing there is a worry that the poor will face very high rates and be unable to afford insurance coverage. With the ability to assess risks at the individual level and predetermine winners and losers, each individual will, in essence, enter into a savings program that covers lifetime disaster costs with an individualized monthly premium. But if those who are poor also happen to be high risk, then many will not be able to afford insurance. If so, this shifts risk to the government and to private sector agencies such as non-profits that deliver aid since they will have to step in and help to some degree after a disaster.

I think that insurance companies should be allowed to vary rates according to factors within an individual's control, but factors beyond an individual's control ought to be pooled even if they can be identified a priori. For example, the risks of being born with a costly genetic problem ought to be shared across the population even if a prenatal blood test will reveal it, while the risks from smoking ought to fall on the individual. This may be difficult to define in practice, e.g. if we expect the an unemployed person to take any job that is open or face a cut in their unemployment benefits, is the decision to move and take a job in an area with a high earthquake risk fully within the individual's control? But mostly the lines are clear and I think it's a good guiding principle:

Insurers learn to pinpoint risks -- and avoid them, by Peter G. Gosselin, LA Times: Hemant Shah is in the business of creating catastrophes. The computers at Shah's Silicon Valley company, Risk Management Solutions Inc., contain mathematical models of every U.S. disaster from the 1812 earthquake ... in St. Louis to the 9/11 assault ... in New York, as well as 100,000 synthesized "extreme events."

RMS runs its disasters through your community — and sometimes right through your home — to see how you'd fare in a hurricane, hailstorm, earthquake, epidemic or terrorist attack. The firm sells its knowledge to insurance companies to help them decide whom to cover and how much to charge.

Since Hurricane Katrina last year, those decisions have been running pretty much in one direction. Based in part on RMS' predictions, companies ... have gotten out of some lines of coverage altogether ... and ... have spent the year dropping or paring back policies... And this may only be the beginning.

"Between hurricanes along the East and Gulf coasts and earthquakes along the West Coast, it is an open question whether the private insurance industry will continue to insure the coastline at all," said University of Pennsylvania economist Howard Kunreuther, one of the country's foremost authorities on disaster.

RMS is at the vanguard of a technological revolution that's reshaping the nation's ... property casualty insurance industry. The industry ... is embracing a new generation of powerful computer techniques to learn everything it possibly can about you — or at least people very much like you — your health, habits, houses and cars. It is using this new trove of data to replace traditional uniform coverage at uniform rates with an increasingly wide array of policies at widely varying prices.

Industry executives say the aim is to create a finely tuned system in which companies can better manage the risks they bear while consumers can more carefully pick the protection they need and pay just the right amount for it.

As insurers become more adept at the techniques, "American consumers can be more assured that their companies will be there when they need them to pay their claims," said Robert P. Hartwig, chief economist of the industry-funded Insurance Information Institute in New York. ...

But some regulators, economists and consumer advocates contend that the industry's growing use of sophisticated computer-aided methods is producing side effects that could undermine the very nature of insurance.

Traditionally, insurance companies group people facing similar dangers into pools. Company actuaries determine how often events such as illnesses or accidents have befallen pool members in the past and how costly those occurrences have been. Insurers set their rates based on the frequency and loss histories...

A key characteristic of this approach is that there's an incentive for insurers to assemble pools as big as possible. The bigger the pools, ... the more accurate their frequency and loss numbers.

But the question has always hung in the air: What if insurers could ... predict who's more likely to be hit with setbacks in the future? What if they could charge such customers steeply higher rates, or avoid them altogether? Wouldn't that boost profits, making shareholders and executives happy, and ensure that insurers had plenty of cash on hand to pay the smaller claims of the safer customers?

That is the promise of catastrophe models like RMS'. And it's the promise of new "data-mining" methods that let companies use a person's income, education or ZIP code to predict future claims. That in turn encourages insurers to raise rates or refuse coverage for the very people who need it most — low- and moderate-income families, for example, or those who've suffered such setbacks as unemployment.

As the industry expands its ability to "slice and dice" customers and applicants, Texas Insurance Commissioner Mike Geeslin, among others, worries that "the risk-transfer mechanism at the heart of insurance could break down." If that happens, Geeslin warned, "insurance will stop functioning as insurance."

Rushing into harm's way?

By providing companies with so much information about individual properties and policyholders, new techniques ... are riveting insurers' attention on how choices made by individuals are raising the cost of disasters, while dampening industry interest in the kind of broad risk-reduction measures that were once a hallmark of American insurance.

The industry now contends that one of the chief reasons Katrina and other recent disasters caused so much damage — and produced such huge insurance claims — is that Americans are rushing into harm's way by moving to hurricane-prone coasts and earthquake zones like California. And one of the chief reasons, according to this argument, is that they're being subsidized by homeowners insurance premiums that have been held artificially low by state regulators.

The argument has attracted a wide following in the last year both inside the industry and out. ... The solution, according to industry leaders and many policymakers, is to let insurers charge higher rates in danger zones to discourage people from moving there, and to make those who live there pay for the additional risks they run.

The problem is that some key statistics don't seem to support the argument. Though government statistics do show various sorts of growth in the nation's danger zones, they don't show it occurring at an appreciably faster pace than for the country as a whole. ... What this suggests is that rising disaster damage and costs are more a function of demographics than insurance rates.

"You simply cannot make the case from the numbers that America's coastal counties have grown at a disproportionately faster rate than the country as a whole over the last 25 years," said Judith T. Kildow, who runs the largely government-funded National Ocean Economics Program at Cal State Monterey. If anything, Kildow said, "the numbers show that growth is now greater inland." ...

Of course, the latest round of rate hikes and coverage cutbacks is not RMS' handiwork alone... Indeed, many of the recent changes are extensions of ones begun after the nation's last major run-in with natural disasters, including the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area, the 1991 Oakland firestorm, 1992's Hurricane Andrew in Florida and the Northridge earthquake in 1994.

Those disasters destroyed tens of thousands of homes and uprooted hundreds of thousands of people. They also scrambled the finances of many insurance companies... The industry responded by seeking state help and changing the terms of homeowners policies.

After lengthy political battles with state regulators, insurers were effectively relieved of responsibility for covering the wind and quake dangers that had just cost them so dearly. Those jobs were shifted to a set of state-created companies and agencies.

In California, the insurers were no longer required to sell earthquake insurance as part of their homeowners policies. Henceforth, most homeowners would get that coverage from the California Earthquake Authority. ... CEA's creation effectively capped the amount that the industry could lose to quakes at a comparatively modest few billion dollars.

In Florida, the state set up a fund to provide insurers with low-cost insurance of their own to help cover wind damage claims. In addition, Florida officials established what eventually became Citizens Property Insurance Corp. as a home insurer of last resort...

The industry's other response was to begin changing the language in homeowners policies. Industry executives maintain that the changes have been solely intended to clarify what companies cover. ... But regulators say many of the changes have shrunk the protection that policyholders get.

"Insurers are taking on a helluva lot less risk than they used to," complained California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi.
The story of a single change illustrates the gulf that has opened between what insurers say they are selling and what most homeowners think they are buying.

When the late-1980s-to-early-'90s disasters hit, the gold standard for homeowners was the "guaranteed replacement cost" policy. ...[R]egulators interpreted "guaranteed replacement cost" to mean that insurers had to replace a destroyed home essentially no matter what the ... expense... And most policyholders — both before and since the '80s and '90s disasters — have assumed that this is the kind of coverage they purchased. ...

After the 1991 disaster, companies began dropping guaranteed replacement cost policies in favor of similar-sounding but substantially more limited "extended replacement cost" ones. Under the latter policy, an insurer is obligated to pay only up to the dollar amount ... plus, typically, an additional 20%. By now, industry executives say, the former type of policy has all but disappeared.

The problem is that few policyholders understood what was at stake in the word change. Encouraged in part by industry advertising, they continued to believe that their insurance would replace their houses if they were destroyed. ...

[P]olicyholders had better prepare themselves; more changes are on the way.

…Perhaps most broadly, the new techniques appear to be dismantling much of what insurance traditionally has been about. Until now, insurance of almost every type has performed two key functions.

The first is pooling. Anyone buying an insurance policy is, in effect, kicking into a pot that covers the cost of future bad events befalling a few of their number. The second is providing cross-subsidies. Some buyers are more likely to get nailed by bad events because, for example, their genetic makeup leaves them prone to disease or their houses are not built to the latest code, and others are less likely.

But for the most part, insurers have not known which policyholders fall into which category, so they have charged generally uniform rates, which means that those in the "more likely" category get a subsidy by being able to pay the same as those in the "less likely"...

However, as disaster models such as RMS' and data-mining provide companies with increasingly detailed knowledge about individual policyholders, there are fewer and fewer pockets of such ignorance and therefore less and less room for cross-subsidies.

"Insurers are squeezing subsidies out of the system across the board, and they're going to carry it absolutely as far as they can," said Columbia University economist Bruce Greenwald.

On its face, the trend might seem a positive one. Among other things, it means that policyholders with good genes and safe houses can enjoy lower rates. But at least in some cases, Greenwald and others argue, the end of cross-subsidies spells trouble.

In the case of healthcare insurance, it would mean that a substantial fraction of the nation could no longer afford coverage. In the case of homeowners insurance, it ultimately might mean that large swaths of the nation's coasts become unaffordable for all but the wealthiest Americans who can bear unsubsidized rates.

And this may not be where the dismantling ends. Some analysts say that the same kind of modeling and data-mining that's helping companies squeeze out cross-subsidies could end up squeezing out much of the pooling in insurance as well.

As insurers use the new techniques to get ever-more-refined estimates of what individual policyholders are likely to cost in the future, they may be tempted to charge people closer and closer to full freight for treating an illness or rebuilding a fire-damaged home. Then even those who benefited from the end of cross-subsidies could see their rates go up as they effectively are asked to pay their own way, rather than share the cost by pooling with others.

Industry executives argue that competition among insurers will prevent such an eventuality. "I don't think you're ever going to get to the extreme of no pooling," said Greg Heidrich, senior vice president of policy with the Property Casualty Insurers Assn. of America, one of the industry's largest trade groups. But regulators are not as confident.

"When you begin to tailor or refine policies," said Alessandro A. Iuppa, president of the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners, which represents the nation's 50 state insurance departments, "you could end up with people basically covering their own losses."

But that, of course, would not be insurance. ...

Last week we discussed the death of Milton Friedman as marking the end, perhaps, of the era of neoliberalism, the political ideology based on neo-classical economics. Duncan Foley, a critic of what he calls “market theology, published a book this year, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology. According to Foley, the foundation of the science of economics in the era of Adam Smith occurred when it was decided that there was a sphere of human relations, economic ones, that could be exempted from any moral considerations. The development of modern economics followed by a century or so the establishment of capitalism in western Europe. Before the capitalist era, economics was a branch of moral philosophy. Classical economics, according to Foley, was

a way of looking at modern society as made up of two spheres: an economic sphere of individual initiative and interaction, governed by impersonal laws that assure a beneficent outcome of the pursuit of self-interest; and the rest of social life, including political, religious, and moral interactions which require the conscious balancing of self-interest with social considerations. This division is the foundation of the liberal economic world-view that in one form or another has shaped political economy and economics as intellectual disciplines. (Duncan K. Foley, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology, pp. 1-2)

Adam Smith, Foley writes,

was a moral philosopher, and the secret of his powerful hold on our imagination lies in his accomplishing two intertwined purposes in his writing. He manages to put forward a clear vision of how capitalist society might develop, a vision that withstands the criticism of hindsight better than that of most of his contemporaries
and successors. But he also addresses more directly than anyone else the central anxiety that besets capitalism—the question of how to be a good person and live a good and moral life within the antagonistic, impersonal, and self-regarding social relations that capitalism imposes. Smith asserts the apparently self-contradictory notion that capitalism transforms selfishness into its opposite: regard and service for others. Thus by being selfish within the rules of capitalist property relations, Smith promises, we are actually being good to our fellow human beings. With this amazing argument, Smith proposes to absolve us of the moral ambiguity and pain that haunt capitalist reality.

This is Adam’s Fallacy. For many people it works as a rationalization for tolerance or active support of the fundamental institutions of capitalism, private property, and the market. But it is an argument that is logically fallacious (like a lot of Smith’s purported arguments), and in the end it is unsatisfactory both morally and psychologically.

The moral fallacy of Smith’s position is that it urges us to accept direct and concrete evil in order that indirect and abstract good may come of it. The logical fallacy is that neither Smith nor any of his successors has been able to demonstrate rigorously and robustly how private selfishness turns into public altruism. The psychological failing of Smith’s rationalization is that it requires a strategy of wholesale denial of the real consequences of capitalist development, particularly the systematic imposition of costs on those least able to bear them, and the implacable reproduction of inequalities that divide people from one another in society. (Ibid., pp. 2-3)

Foley was on NPR’s, On Point last week along with the neoclassical economist, Allan Meltzer. Meltzer, a disciple of Milton Friedman, said that free markets work best because they both take humans as they are and encourage trustworthiness. The market society doesn’t require that people be the way we want them to be. Foley, however, argued that classical economics makes assumptions about human nature (humans seek to rationally maximize self-benefit, for example) that are essentially theological. What is worse, these assumptions limit our perceptions of what people and society could be.

Neoclassical ideology, or theology, as Foley would put it, takes classical economics a step further. Not only does it carve out a sphere of human activity where normal moral considerations do not hold, but it proposes that the amoral values of that sphere of the economy should be the values of the other spheres of life. An example of this is the trend in U.S. jurisprudence since the 1980s to make market efficiency the yardstick to determine a just outcome or a just law (see Richard Posner or Douglas Ginsburg, for example).

Thus neoclassical ideology has been a boon to those in our midst who are incapable of moral reasoning: psychopaths, those with no conscience. In fact, it could be argued that Neoclassical economics could only be the basis of organizing society if either no one were psychopathic or if everyone were. In our mixed world, where perhaps 6% of the people have no conscience, neoclassical economics is a way station to tyranny since it simultaneously provides a way for the unscrupulous to gain wealth and power while inhibiting the natural conscience-based morality of normal humanity.