The Edgy Optimist

You could be forgiven for missing the latest installment of market panic over the past ten days. It came and went like a summer thunderstorm — passing over the global financial landscape quickly and violently. But unlike meteorological events that inflict actual harm, the sharp gyrations of financial markets have increasingly less relationship to real-world economies and exist in their own never-never land of self-fulfilling prophecies and conventional wisdom.

The proximate cause of the swoon was June’s monthly statement from the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke’s comments that the Fed might taper its purchases of bonds sooner than many market players had anticipated. The exact quote wasn’t exactly dramatic (so few Fed quotes are!):

“The Committee currently anticipates that it would be appropriate to moderate the monthly pace of purchases later this year. And if the subsequent data remain broadly aligned with our current expectations for the economy, we would continue to reduce the pace of purchases in measured steps through the first half of next year, ending purchases around midyear.”

The hint that the Fed would slow or even halt its monthly purchases of $85 billion of government and mortgage bonds was enough to send bond yields substantially higher and stocks substantially lower. It also made market bears substantially cockier. The most notable example was the ever-opinionated Rick Santelli on CNBC whose weekly rant took Bernanke to task not just for how he communicates, but for soft-pedaling the weak and tenuous U.S. and global financial system.

The bond market response was particularly dramatic. Yields on U.S. 10-year Treasuries went from just over 2 percent to 2.6 percent, still historically low but a substantial move in a short time. Emerging market bonds were even more eviscerated, and the ripple effects for pension funds and retirement accounts will be felt for some time as the value of supposedly safe bond holdings declined as much or more than supposedly riskier stocks.

As the week continues, so does the furor over the government’s electronic and big data surveillance. It’s largely framed in the terms that President Obama described on June 7th: “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” That observation may be true, but we are approaching this issue 100 percent wrong.

We should all “welcome” a healthy debate — as the president says he does — on vital questions of freedom versus security, safety versus privacy, and which is our priority. Such debate is a hallmark of a functional democracy. We should not accept, however, that what’s at issue here is American freedom versus potential Big Brother government tyranny. That’s too narrow a parameter. What’s really evident: we’re willing to give private corporations data, but we refuse to offer government agencies the same courtesy. That contradiction highlights a muddled, overwrought and inconsistent attitude towards privacy and freedom.

Privacy has rarely existed; it doesn’t now, and it didn’t way back when. It is more of a Platonic ideal than a lived reality. Most of human history lived in small communities. There was no Internet, no electronic surveillance of communications, no Big Brother fears of an all-seeing digital eye scanning our private lives. But there were still neighbors, who were right there, and family, and shared, cramped living. Not much privacy there or room for behavior that deviated much from whatever the norm was. Remember The Scarlet Letter? The Crucible? Think there was much privacy in Massachusetts Bay in 1650?

This weekend, President Obama and China’s new leader Xi Jinping will meet at a retreat outside of Los Angeles. The two men are scheduled to spend six to seven hours covering a range of issues that confront the two countries, from the increasingly fraught issue of hacking and cybersecurity to what to do about an evermore unpredictable and rogue North Korea. The summit was arranged only recently, almost impromptu and more casual and low-key than the pomp and circumstances state visits of the past decade. That should in no way, however, obscure just how important the meeting is.

Rarely in history has an emerging power met an existing power without mayhem and conflict ensuing. China today is clearly emerging, with an economy that will soon be larger than the U.S.’s, though the income of Chinese citizens will remain far behind their U.S. counterparts for many years to come. In spite of recent stumbles, the U.S. remains the only country with global reach both economically and militarily.

Yet tensions notwithstanding, by any historical standard, the U.S.-China relationship has been managed remarkably well, and this casual but symbolically significant summit between the two leaders is yet another indication of that. We focus habitually on all that is going wrong in the world, yet for now at least, the China-U.S. relationship is going right. That’s not because either country and its people like the other or trust the other, but it is because we need each other.

This week the government released yet another revision of first-quarter economic growth showing that the U.S. economy grew a tad less than initially reported ‑- 2.4 percent rather than 2.5 percent. This revision was hardly consequential, but over the summer the Bureau of Economic Analysis will unveil a new way to calculate the overall output of the United States. And that revision will be dramatic.

Over the past few decades, gross domestic product (GDP) has become the prima inter pares of economic statistics. It is not only a measure of national economic output, it is a proxy for “the economy.” The number exerts substantial influence on what we spend collectively and individually, not just in the United States but throughout the world. China has five-year plans with GDP targets, and the European Union has rigid – albeit loosely enforced – rules about how much debt a government can take on relative to its GDP. It is, in short, a big-deal number.

And it is treated as an accurate gauge of economic activity. That would have come as something of a surprise to its inventors. Simon Kuznets, the economist most responsible in the 1930s for the formation of the national accounts that provide the data for GDP, was always disturbed that domestic work, volunteer work and, of course, transactions in cash are invisible in GDP. The choice to leave those out may have made sense – after all, what is the market price of preparing a family meal? – but it underscores that GDP is not a complete measure.

The national conversation of late has revolved around a trio of Washington scandals, a weather disaster, and the seesaw views in financial markets about whether crisis looms. Yet for all their prominence, none are as tied to trends that will shape our collective future as the myriad of events that took place this week in New York City under the banner of “Internet Week.”

Now in its sixth year, Internet Week is a loosely coordinated series of gatherings ranging from daylong symposiums to open houses of tech companies large and small to the Webby Awards, which is the online version of the Oscars. Topics cover the gamut from healthcare in the digital age to marketing your startup to crowd funding. The attendees are young and at times terminally hip. The whole thing is, quite frankly, fun.

The events are filled with strivers and startups. Some may be bought in a few short years, at massive multiples, as Tumblr just was by Yahoo; some may soar higher and become the next Yahoo or Facebook; many will fail. But the collective outcome points resoundingly toward creativity, innovation and continually morphing modes of commerce and connectivity. Half of it may be frivolous, but what matters more is that half of it is serious about changing the world.

The United States has a problem: rapidly rising student debt. It also has a solution: online education. The primary reason for spiraling student debt is the soaring costs of a college education at a physical college. Online education strips away all of those expenses except for the cost of the professor’s time and experience. It sounds perfect, an alignment of technology, social need and limited resources. So why do so many people believe that it is a deeply flawed solution?

Because it means massive swaths of higher education is about to change. Technology has disrupted many industries; now it’s about to do the same to higher ed.

But it is the students who need aid, and not the financial kind. They have too much of that as it is. The amount of student debt is large and getting larger. It will top $1.1 trillion this year; two-thirds of college students will graduate with debt. The average debt burden is $27,000, though that is skewed higher by a small percentage who owe a lot more. Forty percent of students owe less than $10,000. The amount of student debt has doubled since 2007, tripled since 2004, and many economists believe that the effect on the overall economy is negative.

On Monday, by a comfortable 69-27 majority, the U.S. Senate passed a controversial bill that will require online retailers with annual sales of more than $1 million to collect state sales taxes. Said Republican Mike Enzi of Wyoming: “This bill is about fairness. It’s about leveling the playing field between the brick-and-mortar and online companies, and it’s about collecting a tax that’s already due. It’s not about raising taxes.”

Wait, isn’t it? Leaving aside the anomaly in today’s world of a Republican sponsoring a bill that raises revenue, the proposed law is entirely about raising taxes. The question, then, is whether these are taxes that ought to be raised, and if this is the way to raise them.

The short answers: yes to the first, no to the second. This bill is precisely the wrong way to raise revenue from a growing stream of business. It applies a tax designed for physical entities to new commerce and does so in ways that will do little to help states or to reinvigorate small businesses that are hurting.

Over the past month, America’s largest companies reported their earnings for the first quarter of the year. These quarterly reports provide as much insight into our economy as any of our leading indicators. And these results, if read correctly, highlight once again the bifurcated world we live in. Our gross domestic product is growing about 2.5 percent a year for now, but that masks a vast divergence, not between the 1 percent and the 99 but between what works and what does not. What this earnings season demonstrates is that capital and companies are thriving, along with tens of millions of people connected to those worlds, while labor and wages are not. But that is not how it is being interpreted.

The consensus among investors and the financial media is that the quarter was something of a bust, as company after company reported only modest – and in many cases, non-existent – revenue growth. “Revenue still missing as companies beat earnings,” blared a USA Today headline, and that encapsulates what most have said.

The uber-bearish economist Gary Schilling, cited by the widely-read uber-gloomy blog Zero Hedge, put it bluntly: “Pricing power has been non-existent [and] sales volume increases have been very limited so the only route to profit has been cutting costs. That has pushed profit margins to all-time highs.” Enjoy it now, says Schilling, because profit without revenue growth is “unsustainable.” The only reason markets are doing well and corporations aren’t panicking, the thinking goes, is because central banks are flooding the world with money.

Events unfolded rapidly in Boston this week, from the bombing on Monday to release of photos of the suspects on Thursday to the citywide manhunt for one brother and the killing of the other. While we now know that the two young men are ethnic Chechens who spent time in Kyrgyzstan, we know nothing as yet about why they did what they did.

But perhaps less important than whatever their rationale turns out to have been is how the United States is reacting to the events of this week. On that score, the initial reactions here suggest that we may have turned a post-9/11 corner, still shocked, still pained, but no longer so fearful, so ready to blame religious zealots, and so willing to discard the freedoms that give us such strengths and yet can, at times, leave us so vulnerable.

There will always be people who find some reason to wreak havoc and inflict pain. Yes, such attacks can kill and maim, and thankfully, the Boston Marathon bombing, horrible though it was, did only limited physical harm considering the number of runners and the size of the crowds. It’s what comes after that shapes our lives even more. It’s how society reacts that affects not the hundreds directly harmed and the three killed, not the thousands of friends and loved ones, but the millions and hundreds of millions who were touched only through their sympathy.

In a world increasingly framed by economic debates, the phrase “the laws of economics” has become ever more prevalent. As the U.S. Senate prepares to unveil a new immigration bill, much of the discussion centers on the economics of illegal immigration and the incentives for employers to hire undocumented workers. Said a recent Barron’s article: “Immigration policy is a game governed by classic economic rules, especially by Say’s Law, which says supply creates its own demand … Whether the new applicants are seeking stoop-labor jobs in California’s Central Valley or high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, the laws of economics dictate the outcome: more immigration.”

How about the war on drugs? Said one recent analysis: “We’re losing the war on drugs because it’s a war that defies the laws of economics. We might as well be fighting a war on gravity.”

And how about what history can tell us about our current policies? Said one recent review of Amity Shlaes’ biography of Calvin Coolidge, which makes the case for Coolidge as an exemplar of responsible economic policy:  “Our current political leadership ‑ and we who elect them ‑ are spending the country into ruin. The laws of man can be bent and broken; the laws of economics can not.”