Category Archives: Dubious statistics

Will S&P Downgrade Be Another Y2K Scare?

Remember Y2K? The world was gonna end because there was tons of legacy code that couldn’t accommodate the rollover to the new century. I know people in who went into survivalist mode, stocking up months of supplies, and others who took less extreme precautions, like having lots of cash on hand in case ATMs were disrupted.

As we now know, January 1, 2000 came in without major incident, since the widespread publication of this software threat to End the World as We Know It led to lots of preventive action. Perversely, the big effect of the Y2K scare was that it accelerated tech spending, since many firms bought new systems and upgraded hardware as part of their overhaul. That increased the severity of the post-bubble economic downturn. Remember, Greenspan dropped Fed fund rates to negative real interest rate levels and held them there for an unprecedented amount of time, which many argue helped stoke the housing bubble. So while Y2K’s direct effects were greatly overestimated, its indirect impact (on how long the former Maestro kept rates down) may not have been fully acknowledged.

It isn’t yet clear what the impact of the S&P downgrade of the US to AA+ will have. There are good reasons to believe, despite the media hyperventilating, that it won’t add up to much, and may perversely hit wobbly stock markets more than Treasury yields.

But there is a much bigger issue, namely S&P’s highly questionable conduct, the lack of any analytical process behind this ratings action, and the political implications.

“Europe plans its next crisis”

By Delusional Economics, who is unhappy with the current dumbed-down vested interest economic reporting. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

With the economic world firmly focussed on the US debt debacle this week it is likely that Europe will slip off the radar a little. I suspect, as many people do, that for the US there will be an eleventh hour resolution followed by a short lived bounce in the world markets. Once that bounce heads back to earth again it is likely that the world’s eyes will turn back to Europe. There is much to see.

Cash Flow Discounting Leads to “Astronomically” Large Mistakes Over the Long Term

Your humble blogger is a vocal opponent of placing undue faith in single metrics and methodologies, like placing a lot of weight in total cholesterol as a measure of heart disease risk. One of the most troubling examples is the totemic status of discounted cash flow based analyses. It’s a weird defect of human wiring that reducing a story about the future to a spreadsheet and then discounting the resulting cash flows (which means you are now layering a second story, about what you think reasonable investment returns will be over that time period) is treated as having a solidity and weight that simply is not there, a reality of its own that manages to take precedence over the murky future it is meant to help understand.

An article by physicist Marc Buchanan in Bloomberg gives a layperson’s summary of an important paper by Yale economist John Geanakoplos, and Doyne Farmer, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute. It shows that the conventional use of discounted cash flow models over long time periods, as is often the case when discussing environmental impacts, is fatally flawed.

Marshall Auerback: There is No Progressive Case for Deficit Cutting – The Myth of the “Virtuous” Clinton Surpluses

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager

For once, President Obama has sought to address his progressive critics, without caricaturing them as a bunch of out of touch, irresponsible radicals. At his press conference on Friday, the President made the following argument:

Satyajit Das: Bailing In to Bail Out – The Greek Bank Debt Exchange Proposal

By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Forthcoming September 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)

The proposal to extend the maturity of Greek bonds emanating from the Élysée Palace reflects French strengths first identified by Napoleon III: “We do not make reforms in France; we make revolution.” Structured to meet a German requirement that private creditors contribute to the Greek bailout, the proposal falls short of what is actually required.

Moody’s Hacked

Via Richard Smith and Tom Adams. FT Alphaville is also on the case and informs us that this is really not a hack but a URL script trick. Click to enlarge.

The Phantom Bond Market Vigilantes

Assuming current fiscal policies remain in force, our economic model suggests that interest rates will rise considerably over the next decade, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note reaching nearly 9% by 2021. – Private interest rates will rise as federal borrowing competes for saving that might otherwise finance private investment. – In addition, […]

Randy Wray: A PROGRESSIVE APPROACH TO FEDERAL BUDGETING – Or, Can One Take Billionaire Pete Peterson’s Money and Remain Progressive?

By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from FireDogLake

Yves Smith set off a firestorm in her criticism of several progressive groups that have joined forces with Pete Peterson to whip up deficit hysteria. There are three issues that need to be addressed:

1. Can a progressive take tainted money and remain progressive?
2. Did the Roosevelt Institute (in particular) take tainted money and remain progressive?
3. What would a progressive approach to federal budgeting look like?

Dubious Research: The More Debt Students Have, The Higher Their Self Esteem

It’s a sign of the times that your humble blogger is having to create finely stratified typologies for the various types of ~~propaganda~~ dubious research being deployed to promote the idea that rule by our new financial overlords, despite the considerable evidence to the contrary, really is for our own good.

We’ve already instituted the Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity for special-interest-group- favoring PR masquerading as research.

However, Mishkin is a Respected Personage, and the initial Mishkin Iceland Prize recipients, Charles Calomiris, Eric Higgins, and Joe Mason, presumably knew they were writing utter bunk and were handsomely compensated for attaching their names to less than credible arguments. That suggests we need a separate category for the more mundane, bread-and-butter shilldom that is dressed up to look like serious academic work. Let’s call it the Lobsters Really Want to be Your Dinner Prize.

Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name

Bribes work. AT&T gave money to GLAAD, and now the gay rights organization is supporting the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. La Raza is mouthing the talking points of the Mortgage Bankers Association on down payments. The NAACP is fighting on debit card rules. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts back in December. While it seems counter-intuitive that a left-leaning organization would support illiberal extensions of corporate power, in fact, that is the role of the DC pet liberal. This dynamic of rent-a-reputation is greased with corporate cash and/or political access. As the entitlement fight comes to a head, it’s worth looking under the hood of the DC think tank scene to see how the Obama administration and the GOP are working to lock down their cuts to social programs.

And so it is that the arch-enemy of Social Security, Pete Peterson, rented out the good name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the reputation of the Center for American Progress, and EPI. All three groups submitted budget proposals to close the deficit and had their teams share the stage with Republican con artist du jour Paul Ryan. The goal of Peterson’s conference was to legitimize the fiscal crisis narrative, and to make sure that “all sides” were represented.

Now this tidy fact is not obvious if you check the Peterson Foundation publicity for its “Fiscal Summit:”

China to Clean Up Toxic Local Government Debt?

This report by Reuters, suggesting that China was about to Do Something about its local government dud loans created a lot of chatter among investors:

China’s regulators plan to shift 2-3 trillion yuan ($308-463 billion) of debt off local governments, sources said, reducing the risk of a wave of defaults that would threaten the stability of the world’s second-biggest economy.

Quelle Surprise! Consumer Confidence Falls on Oil Prices, Housing, Job Outlook

Is the latest consumer confidence release yet another example of elite disconnect? One of the things that has become striking is the degree to which the chattering classes in New York and Washington DC seem utterly unaware of what is happening in the rest of the country. New York City is doing reasonably well based on the heroic efforts by the officialdom to prop up the major capital markets firm; DC is recession immune and more recently awash in lobbying funds. The influences range from visual signals (I had a friend visiting from Boston remark how striking it was that there were so few shuttered storefronts here in NYC) to continued Administration cheerleading (a constant since the 2009 bank stress tests). And since major media stories about the economy are driven by sources in these two cities, it feeds into business reporting.

Morgenson Runs Peterson Institute Propaganda Against “Entitlements” Meaning Medicare and Social Security

I’m generally a Gretchen Morgenson fan, since she’s one of the few writers with a decent bully pulpit who regularly ferrets out misconduct in the corporate and finance arenas. But when she wanders off her regular terrain, the results are mixed, and her current piece is a prime example. She also sometimes pens articles based on a single source, which creates the risk of serving as a mouthpiece for a particular point of view. And the one she chose to represent tonight is one that is in no need of amplification, that of the Peterson Foundation’s well-funded campaign to gut Social Security and Medicare.

Guest Post: Predicting the Improbable– Evidence from Playing the Lottery

By Claus Bjørn Jørgensen , Sigrid Suetens, and Jean-Robert Tyran. Cross posted from VoxEU.

Japan’s trio of tsunami, earthquake, and nuclear disaster has left the world stunned. As this column points out, even the experts were shocked. But while these events were highly unlikely, they were still possible. This column uses evidence from the Danish lottery to show that people tend to adjust their expectations of future events based on only small pockets of recent experience, often at their cost.

The Independent Commission on Banking Interim Report – Quick Take

Quick take on stability aspects: well trailed moderation (or pusillanimity) in that it preempts radical breakup; tougher capital requirements than Basel III, plus CoCos; leaves liquidity regulation to Basel, and shadow banking regulation to the Financial Stability Board.