Asymptosis

An old friend dropped by recently and we had a few beers on the back deck. He runs his family’s commercial real-estate business; they own and operate half a dozen or so pretty large properties (and just bought another) — a mall, office buildings, mixed use.

I was really curious to talk to him about why commercial property owners don’t invest more in energy efficiency. By all accounts there’s great ROI in doing so — serious low-hanging fruit.

Why do commercial property owners leave five-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk?*

At least, it sure looks like there are five-dollar bills lying around. Here from a McKinsey report (PDF; see page 15) showing how much it costs to save (not buy/pay for) a million BTUs of energy, by instead investing in energy efficiency:

Sorry, it’s hard to see without going to the PDF. But short story: there are quadrillions of BTUs in efficiency savings available for less than $2 per million BTUs.

Now look at the cost of buying a million BTUs instead, to heat your building or power your plant (2011 figures, Energy Information Administration):

Coal: $2.39/MMBTU
Petroleum: $12.48
Natural Gas: $4.72

This is the cost to a utility company buying these fuels. The meter cost of the electricity produced (after line losses, administration, profits, etc.) — the cost for building owners — will of course be somewhat higher.

So it sure seems like there’s money to be picked up. Why don’t building owners do it? The short answer my friend and I came to? Triple-net leases — the ubiquitous standard in the commercial real-estate industry.

In these leases tenants pay per-square-foot rent, plus their pro-rata share (by square feet) of the building’s 1) taxes, 2) insurance, and 3) repairs, maintenance, and energy expenses. (Many NNN leases don’t include pro-rata energy costs, but tenants are separately metered and either pay directly or through the landlord. There are lots of variations, but landlords rarely pay all energy costs.)

Notice what is not included: the cost of improvements — for instance improvements to increase energy efficiency. So the owner gets all the costs, right up front. And the benefits go mostly or completely to the tenants, in the form of lower energy bills.

“But hey,” I asked my friend, “don’t lower energy costs for tenants mean you can charge more rent? Doesn’t it all come out in the wash?”

“Welllllhh,” he said… Most tenants are on long leases. “We just signed a ten-year lease with the anchor tenant for our mall.” My friend won’t see any dollar benefit from those energy savings for a long time, as leases turn over and are renegotiated. And it’s not at all clear how much benefit he’ll get, because tenants tend to fixate on the square-footage rental rate, which would go up. 

Imagine you’re a leasing agent for the building, trying to rent some space. You’re competing with other buildings that haven’t done the energy upgrade, so their rent/square foot is lower. You’re stuck saying “yeah yeah yeah yeah but you’ll spend less on energy!” This, if you even get the chance: Prospective tentants scanning the listings might never even call you because your rent is so high.

A building owner considering a big spend for energy efficiency really has to think thrice: would I rather have a million dollars, cash in hand, or the likely but uncertain prospect of higher profits somewhere (perhaps way) down the road? It’s easy to understand why they make the choices they do.

And all of this is true even though there’s money lying on the ground waiting to be picked up.

It’s a classic coordination problem — people acting in their own best-guess best interests, with ridiculously inefficient results — that is caused or at least greatly exacerbated by the institutional convention of triple-net leases. (The reasons the convention arose are yet another subject, about passing off risk and retaining returns.)

Obviously triple-net is not the sole villain in this very big picture. From the McKinsey report:

Got central planning?

* For those who don’t know the old joke: Two economists walking along, they see a five-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. One of them gestures for the other to pick it up. “I’m not picking that up,” says the other. “If it were there somebody would have picked it up already!”

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

This if nifty, from The Wall Street Journal:

Hat tip Barry Ritholtz.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

That is all.

FRB: Press Release–Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement–May 1, 2013.

Cross-posted at Asymptosis.

Fiscal austerity–or deficit cutting–is the subject of much current debate. As Europe proves, severe austerity can slow growth or lead to recession.

Despite periodic slowdowns, the US economy is on a sustainable fiscal path. The deficit is projected to drop below 2.5 percent of GDP by 2017, below its 30-year average, helped partially by the sequestration budget cuts.

Instead of pursuing short-term fiscal reform, as suggested in the president’s recently released budget, Congress should focus on working toward long-term tax and entitlement reform.

via Austerity undone – Economics – AEI.

Cross-posted at Asymptosis.

I’d like to push back on Paul Krugman a bit, on this bit in particular:

Yes, the government must pay its bills in the long run

You hear this from him a lot. And I want to ask him:

Paul, are you letting yourself be sucked into the very syndrome that you so bemoan and berate? Are you saying this because you feel the need to cast yourself as being sensible, responsible, moderate, and somewhat centrist — in short, as a Very Serious Person?

I ask because over four centuries and two centuries respectively (six hundred years combined), the U.K. and the U.S. governments have paid off their debts exactly once: the U.S. in 1836.

This happy event was followed, in 1837, by one of the most catastrophic depressions in either country’s centuries-long history. Likewise, the one other time that the U.S. got close to paying off its debt (the U.K. never has), in 1893, a disastrous depression followed immediately thereon.

Every depression in U.S. history has been preceded by a major decline in nominal Federal debt. It’s not a sufficient condition for, or reliable predictor of, depression (many declines have not been followed by depressions), but it does seem to be a necessary condition.

So we haven’t had to pay off our debt, and the one time we did (plus one time we got close), we were not happy with what ensued. From that history, how can you conclude that, now, “the government must pay its bills in the long run”?

To quote Chris Cook (HT Izabella Kaminska; emphasis mine), the national debt:

…is a national equity…

At least two-thirds … came into existence as mortgage loans, and are therefore backed by claims over the productive value of the US land and buildings which they fund. Much of the rest consists of claims over the value of US assets which fund the productive capacity of US corporations. The remainder – which provides the credit necessary to finance the circulation of goods and services in the US – is based upon the magnificent productive capacity of the US people.

Only by liquidating US Incorporated could this National Equity [read: Debt] ever be redeemed.

Such a liquidation, of course, would involve liquidating our overwhelmingly largest real asset: the ability of the American people to work. (Something your ideological opponents seem intent on doing.)

Of course you might well mean that we can’t increase deficits faster than GDP growth forever. But in today’s monetary world you have to at least question even that. Since 1971, when the U.S. stopped promising to redeem its dollar for anything besides…dollars (perhaps in some other “dollar” form, like Fed reserves), that proposition has become at least questionable. Dollars really might be like points issued by a bowling alley, and we may be able to issue a lot of them before we see problems with inflation.

I don’t think we really know; we don’t have any comparable situation to look back on (except maybe Japan, and that’s a glass, darkly). For a decade or so after the ’71 sea change, monetary authorities and markets flailed to adjust their reaction functions to the brave new world. Then those interacting functions settled down and we saw twenty years of steady inflation and steadily-declining interest rates. That may have been the inevitable emergent path for the world’s dominant economy and currency issuer, resulting inexorably from the game rules put into place in ’71/’73.

The place we are now — where Japan landed two or three decades earlier — may be the inevitable (and perhaps enduring) result.

Yes, rising globalization and the political rise of neoliberal Reaganomics may have contributed, but it seems possible that even absent those trends, we would have ended up in this place, perhaps sooner perhaps later.

So now, having arrived at this point, reaction functions are getting rejiggered again, and in a big way. (The institution of IOR was a big change, for both the Fed’s and the markets’ reaction functions.) One key element of those reaction functions is the belief that “we can’t keep running deficits forever.” But at least some parts of the market are acting as if we (and certainly Japan) can. And they may very well be right.

All of which is to say, think again. Think deeply. I’m not sure you’re thinking in your usual clear-eyed manner about a belief that may not be true. At least, given the new rules of the game, we might be a very long way — decades? centuries? — from a point where large government deficits or debt might pose any danger to our economy.

All my tentative language above should make clear that I’m not at all certain of this. I’d sure like to hear what you think.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

This is utterly brilliant:

Twitter / izakaminska: Why equity is a type of privately issued currency

Steve Randy Waldman has been here before, with the idea that currency issued by government (ultimately through deficit spending) is “equity” in government, or in America. But this reverses it beautifully, with the notion that private equity issuance is also currency issuance. Google stock is currency.

I won’t recap the argument here; you really need to read it. Just some thoughts:

I think different words might help make it clearer. I would say that there are many units of exchange in the world —  dollar bills, t-bills, stock shares, etc. Financial assets. They have various characteristics, a key one being limits on what they can be exchanged for. In general when we say “currency” we mean physical tokens that can be exchanged for (small quantities of) real goods. But we confuse things by not realizing that “currency” is a somewhat vaguely defined subset of “units of exchange.”

(Key distinction: the “units” I’m talking about are not measurement units like inches, degrees, or “the dollar” — units of account. Rather, in the sense of discrete units, chunks. As when a factory produces a certain number of units, which can have their value described relative to a unit of measurement/account, such as the dollar. More on the distinction between “unit” and “medium” of account/exchange here.)

You can’t buy a car or a government bond with quarters. So are quarters currency? Likewise, you can’t buy a pack of gum with a treasury bond — but you can use it to buy Fed reserves (if you’re a bank). Is the bond currency? You decide. But both quarters and bonds (and Google shares) are units of exchange. (This is why I’m still struggling with JP Konig’s “moneyness” concept: it seems to hinge on a single axis of “liquidity,” when in fact different units of exchange are differently liquid.)

We can also call these units of exchange “financial assets.”

I do not define a “bushel of apples” as a unit of exchange or a financial asset, but as a unit of commodity. Ditto an ounce of gold. Because in my definition:

1. Units of exchange/financial assets cannot be consumed by humans to produce human utility, and

2. Their creation requires no (or vanishingly little) input to production.

Returning to a previous (excessively long) post, these units of exchange/financial assets embody exchange value — money. Hence (alert: precise definition here) money is exchange value as embodied in financial assets. Money does not, cannot exist, absent such embodiment. A bushel of apples does not embody money: That bushel has exchange value, but the value is not embodied in non-consumable, only-exchangeable form.

Not sure how much this will help others, but it’s working for me.

Cross posted at Angry Bear.

Revisiting a previous post, “Saving” ≠ “Saving Resources”*, wherein I question Scott Sumner’s notion that people who spend and consume more (save less) take resources “out of society.”

Try this:

John works for Debbie, and Debbie works for John.

They each start out with $100 in dollar bills, $200 total.

They pay each other in dollar bills: $100 a year, each direction.

Between them, through their labor, each year they produce $200 in real resources — things that humans can consume to derive human utility (or to produce more consumables in the future).

But: This year Debbie decides to save money, so she doesn’t hire John for as many hours, and only pays him $80. She leaves $20 sitting in her drawer; she doesn’t circulate it this year.

At the end of the year Debbie has $120, and John has $80.

Debbie has produced $100 worth of real resources, and John has produced $80 worth. $180 total, instead of $200 the year before.

Did Debbie “take those $20 in real resources ‘out of society’”? (Or was it John — lazy, feckless soul that he is — who didn’t do that $20 in resource-creation?)

We can certainly say that Debbie’s decision to leave the $20 sitting in her drawer instead of circulating (spending) it caused “society” (read: John) to produce less resources than it would have if she had circulated (spent) it.

Is Debbie a “taker”?

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Or to be more precise, all currency is consensus currency.

Units of exchange (dollar bills, great big rocks at the bottom of the ocean) can have value merely because everyone in a community agrees that they have value. That value need not be declared, defined, or enforced by some “fiat” authority with powers of (ultimately physical) coercion — though it often or usually is.

That’s one big realization I came to from Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. (Though he doesn’t state it so succinctly, and I’m not sure he’d agree with it.)

Think of gold coins. If their exchange/consensus value is (enough) less than the (commodity) value of their metal content, people will melt them down and sell the metal. Arbitrage happens. Their consensus exchange value must be higher than the exchange value of their constituent metal, or they’re simply not currency any more; they’re chunks of commodity.

So why gold coins? Because the next city-state over, or the one 500 miles away, might not have the same consensus about those coins’ value as in your city-state. But there is a much wider consensus as to the value of gold. As far as they’re concerned, your ruler’s gold coins have the value of their gold content, and that’s all. But at least they have that value, because the gold-value consensus is widespread. 

So if you’re a trader looking to buy 1,000 yak skins from the remote Azbakalians, you can carry a bunch of gold coins there and trade them instead of carrying 1,000 amphoras of lima-bean oil. Yeah, you sacrifice the extra consensus value you’d have if you instead used those gold coins to buy things locally, but the cost of transporting all that oil is higher than that loss.

So is a physical one-ounce lump of gold a unit of “currency”? I’d say no. Because while the consensus value of gold might be different and might change at different times and places, there is no particular time and place where it has two different exchange values: its local consensus value and its foreign-trade commodity value. It only has its commodity value.

That differential between currencies’ consensus value and their commodity value is their very sine qua non: the thing that makes them what they are, without which they would not be currencies.

How does this work for cigarettes in a POW camp? They’re obviously used as some type of currency, as units of exchange. I’d suggest that because some people smoke and some don’t — some people value them highly for the utility their consumption can deliver, while others have no use for them — their average commodity value is lower than their average exchange/consensus value. (Also: new cigarettes are constantly being delivered and shared out in some way by the Red Cross or whoever, and they’re constantly being consumed. This is never true of coins or paper bills, which can’t be consumed.) This raises issues of distribution, power, wants, needs, and satisfactions, which I’d love to hear discussion of by my gentle readers.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

The other day I dissed the analysis in Reinhart and Rogoff’s Growth in a Time of Debt as being on the level of a blog post from an amateur internet econocrank. I still hold that opinion.

But I want to walk back on that, or at least clarify, and give lots of credit where due. Because they did make a huge contribution, of a quality that you will not find in econoblog posts from even the best bloggers: they assembled a great data set. As I can attest — having spent hundreds of hours assembling data sets that were far less challenging than theirs — this is not a trivial task. And the value of that data set is high, assuming you throw high-quality analysis at it.

Now of course, they didn’t release the goddam data set for years. That seems unforgivable, especially given the paper’s political and policy impact. This paper wasn’t in a peer-reviewed journal (it was a “discussion paper,” which makes its impact even more eyebrow-raising), but I really wonder why those journals (in any field) would publish such papers without requiring that the data sets accompany them, for vetting by other researchers. (Yeah I know: not a new idea.)

I totally understand why this is problematic. This is the researchers’ crown jewels, upon which they can build future papers, at least. Not just the data, but the analysis methods and the coding of those methods (intellectual property?), is often included in the files. At most, you’re looking at corporate/university/personal assets, trade secrets, generally some (at least potentially) damned valuable stuff. (Throw in the issue of partial or complete government funding for the research, and it’s even more complicated.) But providing the data should be the default requirement, with some clear guidelines justifying and explaining why the data is not provided, when it isn’t.

The “damn valuable stuff” double-points to the other topic I want to mention here: the BEA’s move change the NIPAs, to count spending on R&D and the development of creative works as investment spending rather than consumption spending — as real-capital building.

“Double” because 1. the new accounting highlights the real value of this kind of data-gathering and knowledge-creation, and 2. the change itself required (and will continue to require) a huge amount of data gathering.

I was kind of wowed by this line in the Financial Times writeup on the change:

The Internet Movie Database may not seem like a natural source of data for the national accounts, but it was one of many combed by BEA researcher Rachel Soloveichik, who went through film studio records as far back as the 1920s to build a series on investment in movies.

(Another good FT post on this here.)

So when you hear me kibbitz about the structures and methods used in the national accounts, please know that I have wide-eyed respect for the diligence and skill of hundreds of accountants and economists involved in building those structures, and populating them with data from hundreds of diverse sources. (This actually sounds like one of those Google interview/hiring questions: how would you go about estimating the value of every movie made in America since the 1920s? Books? TV programs?)

That information is hugely valuable. It’s a great example of Your Tax Dollars at Work, delivering value far above the government’s cost.

Or at least, I think it is. Somebody should gather some data on that.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

I finally figured out a simple way to explain my confusion (and that of many others, including many economists) with the whole Saving issue. I may also have figured out a useful solution to that confusion, which I present at the bottom here for my gentle readers’ delectation and denunciation.

Econ profs: I’m really curious. Do you think this post would help your intro students understand this stuff?

First: The accounting’s fine. Of course. But for some not-crazy reasons, the definition of “Saving” changes in the course of the accounting.

Thinking of the “real” sector for the moment, for simplicity and clarity. For each of the economic units at the bottom level of that sector (households and nonfinancial businesses), Saving means money saving:

(1) Saving = Income – Expenditure

But at the top, the level of “sectoral” saving, Saving means saving of real goods:

(2) Saving = Income - Consumption Expenditures

Or in words that more aptly describe what’s being depicted:

(3) Saving = Production – Consumption

(Reminder: Consumption Spending + Investment Spending = Expenditures = Income = Production)

Explanatory aside: There’s Gross or Net Saving, depending on whether Consumption just includes Consumption Spending (on goods that are bought and consumed within the period), or also includes Consumption of Fixed Assets — the very real “depreciation” of those assets. Gross is long-lived goods produced; Net is long-lived goods added, above and beyond what’s “consumed.”

Back to identities: Unlike every other measure in the national accounts, if you sum up the money Saving of all the bottom-level units, it doesn’t equal Saving for the sector. Rather:

(4) Sectoral Saving = Units’ Combined Money Saving + Investment Spending*

Investment spending, of course, causes the creation of real, long-lived goods. But this is the thing that has confused me from the get-go: Saving is (savings are) some combination of money and real goods? Aren’t financial assets supposed to be representative of, proxies for, the real assets? (Equally confusing: economists’ insistence on talking about “capital” as if it were some undifferentiated, homogeneous or vaguely contiguous lump of real and financial capital.)

Here’s what you need to know to sort that out: You know that money saving? It’s zero.

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