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Four Issues with Miles Kimball's “Federal Lines of Credit” Policy Proposal

Jul 18, 2012Mike Konczal

Economics professor Miles Kimball has a new blog, Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal. In one of his first posts, he outlines a plan for stimulus that he calls “Federal Lines of Credit” (FLOC).

Economics professor Miles Kimball has a new blog, Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal. In one of his first posts, he outlines a plan for stimulus that he calls “Federal Lines of Credit” (FLOC). It's presented in a longer policy paper, “Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck in Fiscal Policy." This has gotten interest across the political spectrum. Bill Greider has written about it in The Nation, as has Reihan Salam in the National Review.

What's the idea? Under normal fiscal stimulus policy in a recession, we often send people checks so that they'll spend money and boost aggregate demand. Let's say we are going to, as a result of this current recession, send everyone $200. Kimball writes, "What if instead of giving each taxpayer a $200 tax rebate, each taxpayer is mailed a government-issued credit card with a $2,000 line of credit?" What's the advantage here, especially over, say, giving people $2,000? "[B]ecause taxpayers have to pay back whatever they borrow in their monthly withholding taxes, the cost to the government in the end—and therefore the ultimate addition to the national debt—should be smaller. Since the main thing holding back the size of fiscal stimulus in our current situation has been concerns about adding to the national debt, getting more stimulus per dollar added to the national debt is getting more bang for the buck."

Let's kick the tires of this policy. There's a lot to like about the proposal, particularly how it could be used after a recession is over to provide high-quality government services to the under-banked or those who find financial services yet another way in which it is expensive to be poor (modified, it turns right into Steve Waldman's Treasury Express idea). It's not clear whether this is meant to supplement or replace normal demand-based fiscal policy - at one point he proposes it could balance out a "relatively-quickly-phased-in austerity program."

As a supplement it has promise, but I think there are some major problems with this proposal, which can be grouped under four categories.

I: Isn't deleveraging the issue? Is this a solution looking for a problem? From the policy description, you'd think that a big is credit access holding the economy in check.

But taking a look at the latest Federal Reserve credit market growth by sector, you can see that credit demand has collapsed in this recession. Consumer credit drops throughout the beginning of the recession, particularly in 2009. This is true even for consumer credit by itself, which rebounds in 2011. It's not clear that these lines of credit would be used to expand demand at the macro-level; likely, given what we see, it would be used to replace other, higher-interest forms of debt (see III), a giant transfer of credit risk from credit card companies to taxpayers. But certainly some people will benefit, so let's examine why this policy is supposed to work.

II: This policy is like giving a Rorschach test to a vigilante. No, not that vigilante. I mean the bond vigilantes. Because to assume this plan would work, you need to make some curious assumptions about how bond vigilantes think, as it increases the debt by a significant amount.

Let's say our country has a balanced budget with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 50 percent and we hit a recession while at the zero-bound. As a result of less tax revenue coming in and more automatic stabilizers going out, debt-to-GDP will be 60 percent at the end of the year. We want to stimulate the economy further using fiscal stimulus.

Let's say our default is that we take three percent of GDP, divide it among the population, and mail it out. At the end of the year, the debt-to-GDP ratio will be 63 percent (I am ignoring that fiscal stimulus at the zero-bound can be largely self-financing for this example).

In Kimball's FLOC, we instead take 9 percent of GDP, divide it evenly among the population, and mail out lines of credit that add up to that 9 percent of GDP. Let's also say that perfect forecasting tells us that within the year, 6 percent of it will be utilized as a loan not yet paid back, and 3 percent is still available as credit.

What's the government's debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of the year in Kimball's example? I'm not sure how he'd account for it. I imagine it should be 69 percent (60 + 9). Perhaps it is 66 percent (60 + 6)? Either way, it is more than the 63 percent of just giving people money. His plan requires a larger debt-to-GDP ratio. If his accounting ends up with just 60 percent, I'm not sure I understand how he is doing it.

Now Kimball will say that bond vigilantes will be happy with this. Why? Because there's a built-in plan for repaying it. "[T]he fact that much of the money would ultimately be repaid would dramatically reduce the ultimate addition to the national debt...(though at a relatively attractive ratio of additional aggregate demand to addition to national debt)."

If we are guessing as to what the bond vigilantes want, it is clear they want more U.S. government debt. Ten-year Treasuries are selling at 1.5 percent, while real interest rates are negative! But for the purposes of the FOLC, we need a few assumptions about what the bond vigilantes think, which aren't clear.

First (i) it assumes that the bond market will only care about the government's long-run debt ratio instead of the short-term. I think that's correct. But much of the bond vigilante argument is predicated on the opposite, that no matter what the long-term is, the capital markets will freak on short-term deficits.

It also assumes (ii) that the repayments of these FOLC will be made easier through debt collection than just collecting the equivalent amount of money through taxation. I see no reason why that's the case, and many reasons to believe the opposite.

III: This policy will involve trying to get blood from a turnip. I very much distrust it when economists waive away bankruptcy protection. Especially for experimental, controversial debts that have never been tried in known human history.

As the paper admits, this is a machine for generating adverse selection, as the people most likely to use it are people whose credit access is cut due to the recession. High-risk users will likely transfer their balances from higher rate credit cards to their FOLC (either explicitly or implicitly over time if barred) - transferring a nice chunk of credit risk from the financial industry to taxpayers.

It's also not clear what happens a few years later when consumers start to pay off the FOLC. Could that trigger another recession, especially if the creditor (the United States) doesn't increase spending to compensate?

The issue isn't whether or not the government will be able to collect these debts at some point. It has a long time-horizon, the ability to jail debtors and use bail to pay debts, the ability to seize income, old-age pensions and a wide variety of income, and the more general ability to deploy its monopoly on violence. The question is whether this will be smoother, easier, and more predictable than just collecting the money in taxes. We have a really smooth system for collecting taxes, one at least as good as whatever debt collection agencies are out there. If that is the case, there's no reason to believe that this will satisfy the bond vigilantes or bring down our debt-to-GDP ratio in a more satisfactory way.

IV: Since we've very quickly gotten to the idea that we'll need to jettison legal protections under bankruptcy for this plan to work, it is important to emphasize that this policy is the opposite of social insurance.

I don't see a macroeconomic difference between the government borrowing 3 percent of GDP and giving it away and collecting it through taxes later versus the government borrowing 3 percent of GDP, loaning it to individuals, and collecting it later through debt collectors except in the efficiency and the distribution.

The distributional consequences of this proposal aren't addressed, but they are quite radical. Normally taxes in this country are progressive. Some people call for a flat tax. This proposal would be the equivalent of the most regressive taxation, a head tax. And it also undermines the whole idea of social insurance.

Let's assume the poorest would be the people most likely to use this to boost or maintain their spending. I think that's largely fair - certainly the top 10 percent are less likely to use this (they'll prefer to use high-end credit cards that give them money back). This means that as the bottom 50 percent of Americans borrow and pay it off themselves, they would bear all the burden for macroeconomic stability through fiscal policy. Given that the top 1 percent captured 93 percent of the income growth in the first year of this recovery, that's a pretty major transfer of wealth. One nice thing about tax policy, especially progressive tax policy, is that those who benefit the most from the economy provide more of the resources. This would be the opposite of that, especially in the context of a ""relatively-quickly-phased-in austerity program."

Efficiency is also relevant - as the economy grows, the debt-to-GDP ratio declines, making the debt easier to bear. The most likely borrowers under FOLC, the bottom 50 percent, have seen stagnant or declining wages overall, especially in recessions. A growing economy would keep their wages from falling in the medium term, but this is still a problematic issue - their income is not more likely to grow to balance out the payment burdens than if we did this at a national level, like normal tax policy.

The policy also ignores social insurance's role in macroeconomic stability, and that's insurance against low incomes. Making sure incomes don't fall below a certain threshold when times are tough makes good macroeconomic sense and also happens to be quite humane. This is not that. As friend-of-the-blog JW Mason said, when discussing this proposal, the FOLC is like "if your fire insurance simply consisted of a right to borrow money to rebuild your house if it burned down."

What else am I missing about this proposal?

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Washington Monthly on the Future of Savings

Jul 18, 2012Mike Konczal

The latest issue of Washington Monthly has several fascinating pieces on the future of savings. John Gravois has a piece on where the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau currently stands. Barry C.

The latest issue of Washington Monthly has several fascinating pieces on the future of savings. John Gravois has a piece on where the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau currently stands. Barry C. Lynn and Lina Khan have a piece on the collapse on American business start-ups. My colleague Mark Schmitt has a piece on the idea of government savings accounts, a piece which is also fascinating as a history of a policy idea. Reid Cramer of the New America Foundation has a great list summarizing some of the policies at the forefront of the movement to build savings and assets, which include universal childhood savings accounts, autoIRAs, addressing the unbanked and, a favorite around here, the Save to Win program that puts a lottery in a savings account.

For those interested in more, New America had a series of panels on the events which you can find here. The previous paradigm of an "Ownership Society" has collapsed. It seems unlikely that, with 401(k) programs looking insufficient to cover retirements, that we are going to privatize Social Security in the near future. And using housing equity in a bubble as a quick source of savings has turned out to be both a giant problem and no longer available. Given that the current recession is a crisis of over-leveraged households, having more stable and sufficient ways of saving and buiding wealth isn't just a matter that impacts individuals, but one that impacts the country as a whole. This needs to be at the front of the policy agenda and this issue will catch you up to the debate.

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The Opposite of Obama's "You Didn't Build That" Comment: Mythological Job Creators

Jul 18, 2012Mike Konczal

Conservatives are in a rage after Obama suggested we add value to the economy together. In their version, only the rich do.

Conservatives are in a rage after Obama suggested we add value to the economy together. In their version, only the rich do.

"If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own... If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive... If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that... The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

- President Barack Obama, Roanoke Fire Station #1, Roanoke, Virginia, July 13th, 2012

"The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contribute nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”

- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, required reading for Representative Paul Ryan's (R-WI) staff.

"The Zambrellis scoffed at attempts by the Democrats...to wage class warfare... 'It's not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine.'"

- Michael Zambrelli, Mitt Romney fundraiser, East Hampton, New York, July 8th, 2012, Quoted in the LA Times

What's the opposite of President Obama's view that the rich have become rich thanks to the American system that we've created together? President Obama's speech has sent the right into a furor, with Rush Limbaugh telling his audience, "I think it can now be said, without equivocation—without equivocation—that this man hates this country." But if expressing the opinion that the value of the economy is something that is created together is enough to hate America, what would it mean to have a vision of wealth creation that loves America?

Some political commentators have treated this comment and its reaction either as part of the presidential noise machine or as the dreamscape projections of the conservative id. Will Wilkinson at Democracy in America has written a post, "Taxes and the rich," addressing this. There are some problematic issues with the post [1] [2], but he describes Rush Limbaugh's reaction as being bound up in an absurd myth. He says, "Mr Obama's in-it-together point is mildly offensive in context because it is used to imply that top-earners who resist paying an even larger portion of America's tab do so only because they are in the grip of an absurd myth of self-reliance."

I'd argue that instead of self-reliance, the real idea the right is appealing to here is the idea of the "job creator." It goes beyond the person who gets by on his own without any help from the government or the public at large. It's the idea that the rich create all the value of the economy. They are, as John Paul Rollert put it in a great post wondering what Adam Smith would think of "job creators," the visible hand of the economy. The rich are, as people at the Mitt Romney fundraiser put it, "the engine of the economy" who all the other people "rely" on for their survival. (I'm assuming. I would have meant it the other way around, but I wasn't at that fundraiser.) The economy isn't something we create together. It is something the rich create for everyone else.

And, crucially, rather than being a myth or a fairy tale conservatives tell themselves, this idea of the "job creator" is the basis for current policy-making on the right. As Texas Governor Rick Perry put it during the primary, “America is not going to move forward until we remove restrictions of over-taxation, over-regulation and over-litigation on the job creators and free them so the jobs can be created.” Charles Krauthammer argues on TV that we have a capital strike that's holding back the economy. John Boehner gives speeches where he argues "private-sector job creators in particular — are rattled by what they’ve seen out of this town over the last few years. My worry is that for American job creators, all the uncertainty is turning to fear that this toxic environment for job creation is a permanent state. Job creators in America are essentially on strike."

Speeches like these diagnose the problem, and then it turns into policy. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's policy plans for job creation operate under the assumption that those at the top of the economic pyramid are being held in check. His Day One proposals include “the elimination of Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy or job creation," “revers[ing] the executive orders issued by President Obama that tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor," cutting corporate taxes, eliminating the estate tax, and a variety of other policy designed to give the "job creators" a firmer hand in controlling the economy. His education policy includes putting private actors in charge of everything, especially putting commercial banks back into the sweet spot of collecting government-insured money and expanding how easy it is for for-profit colleges to qualify for federal money. Presumably he does this because the private is always superior to the public, regardless of how much the business model appears to be a vacuum for subsidies. His tax and social safety net policy focus on boosting the earnings of those at the top of the pyramid on the backs of those at the bottom.

These policies include no hint that the economy is stuck due to inadequate demand or the weak purchasing power of the middle and working classes and the delinking of wages and productivity. There's no mention of the need to expand education and infrastructure to create the economy of the 21st century. There's absolutely no sense that the economy encourages the most innovative or entrepreneurial when there is full employment and a portable social safety net that provides economic security. And it is light-years away from the observation that society is a system of cooperation in which the value in the economy is created together.

 

[1] Wilkinson doesn't say it outright, but it seems that he is in favor of a flat, proportional tax on fairness grounds: "the facts about the portion of tax revenue contributed by the rich plausibly suggest that they pay more than their fair share for the infrastructure of capitalism..the class of people Mr Obama wants to 'give back' has already paid most of the tab, and continues to pay most of the tab, for the tax-financed public goods upon which they, and the rest of us, so crucially depend."

Why do we assume that a flat tax is fair? Given that Wilkinson's theory is about how public goods benefit society, presumably he thinks taxes should be the shadow price of purchasing those goods if they were available in a market. A flat tax would be the philosophically coherent answer for how to raise funds to pay for these benefits if and only if benefits consumed rise proportionately to income. If someone is 10^4 times as rich as I am, they need 10^4 times more garbage collected, breathe 10^4 times more clean air, require 10^4 more police protection and functioning courts, etc. That strikes me as dubious.

The best Milton Friedman could do was "proportional flat-rate-tax would involve higher absolute payments by persons with higher incomes for governmental services, which is not clearly inappropriate on grounds of benefit conferred." Not clearly inappropriate indeed. Taxes should be highly regressive in Wilkinsons' view, converging to a head tax, unless we are talking about utility gained from society, or unless we believe tax policy is a function of making the basic structures of society serve goals like benefitting the worse off, under which the progressive taxation case makes much more sense. See Barbara Fried's fantastic "The Puzzling Case for Proportionate Taxation" for more.

[2] Wilkinson: "[I]n 2008...[t]he top 5 percent earned 31.7 percent of the nation's adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes. If that's not giving something back, what is?" These numbers are juked in part due to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is kind of like a negative tax with a work requirement. Given that all the rage in Bleeding Heart Libertarian circles is a universal basic income (UBI) delivered through a negative tax, wouldn't that number be significantly higher under such a system? This is why some people think that libertarians wouldn't really pull the trigger on a UBI...

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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Why That Great Interview Didn't Land You a Job: Recruitment Intensity Rates and Mass Unemployment

Jul 9, 2012Mike Konczal

The problem with the labor market isn't that the unemployed aren't looking for work -- it's that employers aren't looking very hard for workers.

The problem with the labor market isn't that the unemployed aren't looking for work -- it's that employers aren't looking very hard for workers.

Have you, or someone you know, had a great job interview and wound up wondering why, months and months later, there's been no offer and the job remains open? The job opening is on the firm's web page, you are perfect for the spot, but you aren't getting any responses, either for an interview or for post-interview interest. I know many people this has happened to -- so many that I've been wondering if it is quantifiable and generalizable.

We have a lot of ways to observe how the unemployed behave. We have detailed information on the duration of unemployment, lots of economists fretting over whether unemployment insurance keeps people from taking jobs, sophisticated models trying to understand their search behaviors, etc. But none of that mental framework exists for employers and job openings. (A cynic might note that economics, as practiced, is a machine for observing and disciplining labor.)

Luckily, a group of economists has put something together that adds significantly to the debates over structural unemployment. Jason Faberman and Bhash Mazumder at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago put out a report last month asking "Is There a Skills Mismatch in the Labor Market?" Their answer: "we find limited evidence of skills mismatch." In other words, not really.

They reference work that looks fascinating by Steven Davis of the University of Chicago, R. Jason Faberman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland. Those researchers "find that employers were able to fill jobs relatively easily during the recession, but that their measure of recruiting intensity per vacancy, which captures a variety of efforts employers put into recruiting, remained low well after the end of the recession. One can interpret this as employers imposing relatively high hiring standards despite the abundance of available workers."

This comes out of two previous papers they've put out, "Establishment-Level Behavior of Vacancies and Hiring" and "Recruiting Intensity during and after the Great Recession: National and Industry Evidence." These papers go into micro data from JOLTS and other soruces to create an elasticity measure of how much firms fill job vacancies in respect to the hiring rate.

Recruitment intensity hovers around the 1.0 index through the 2000s, until the recession starts in 2007. In the Great Recession, the recruitment intensity collapses and never recovers going into the end of 2011. What does it mean for recruitment intensity to fall? This recruitment intensity, according to the research, "is shorthand for the other instruments employers use to influence the pace of new hires – e.g., advertising expenditures, screening methods, hiring standards, and the attractiveness of compensation packages. These instruments affect the number and quality of applicants per vacancy, the speed of applicant processing, and the acceptance rate of job offers." This margin for trying to fill jobs is ignored, or assumed away, in most of the major economic models of unemployment and hiring.

The collapse of recruitment intensity helps us understand several things. First, the issue of how job openings are increasing while wages aren't. The research notes that "[i]ncorporating a role for the recruiting intensity index also improves the stability of the Beveridge Curve and yields a better fit to data on the job-finding rate for unemployed workers." This helps us understand some small movements in job openings in the Beveridge Curve while other measures of supply-constraints in the labor market aren't going off.

The second issue it helps us understand is a common media story we see -- the story of the boss who complains about the workforce but doesn't want to raise wages. Dean Baker likes to point out these stories as lacking economic sense. This shows that employers not trying very hard to fill empty jobs, even on non-wage margins, is a general phenomenon.

Finally, it explains why you or your friends and loved ones are having such a hard time finding a job even when you see advertisements for a perfect job that never seems to be filled. It is probably not much comfort to understand that this is a national phenomenon, one we have the tools to fix but that Republicans in Congress, bank regulators, and the FOMC are not willing to address.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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How LIBOR Impacts Financial Models and Why the Scandal Matters

Jul 9, 2012Mike Konczal

If we can't rely on the accuracy of basic measurements used to set loan prices, we can't respond effectively to brewing financial crises.

If we can't rely on the accuracy of basic measurements used to set loan prices, we can't respond effectively to brewing financial crises.

Matt Taibbi asks why nobody is freaking out about the LIBOR scandal, Robert Reich calls it the scandal of all scandals, and Dylan Matthews has a great explainer of the whole thing here. Abigail Field has more at Reality Check.

This can be confusing stuff, so I want to go through a very simple example of how this impacts the markets. Here's a basic equation for the price of a loan:

The rate of a loan consists of adding the "risk-free" rate to a risk-premium. If either the risk-free rate or risk-premium goes up, then the price of a loan goes up. If you are a particularly risky borrower, you will pay more for a loan. This is because your risk-premium, compared to other borrowers, is higher, and that is added into your loan rate. If the risk-free rate is 3 percent and your risk of not paying back a mortgage requires a 2 percent premium, then your mortgage rate is 5 percent. If your risk of not paying back unsecured debt on a credit card requires an 8 percent premium, then your interest rate on your credit card is 11 percent.

More complicated models include more types of risk-premia and other things, but this basic approach is how financial markets work. They all need a measure of what money costs independent of the risks associated with any specific loan. As a result, all the most complicated models have this "risk-free" rate at their core.

Now think of some of the scandals and controversies over recent loan pricing. Here's a great Washington Post piece by Ylan Mui on African American homeowners scarred by the subprime implosion. There are cases where people with the same risk profiles were given different interest rates. Here's a report from EPI by Algernon Austin arguing that African Americans and Latinos with the same credit risks as whites were charged a higher total interest rate for mortgages even though the risk-free rate and their risk-premium rate should have been the same. The data implies that an additional, illegitimate "+ race" was added to the equation above.

There's also debates about what is appropriate to add to the risk-premium equation. The FTC alleged that credit card companies were using charges for marriage counseling or massage parlors to increase the risk-premium, and thus the total rate. Some would argue that, from the credit risk modeling point-of-view, these are appropriate measures to hedge against divorce; others would say that it looks like a cheap excuse to jack up the total rate using the risk-premium part of the equation as an excuse.

But those issues focus on how to price risk and what the total rate should look like. Running underneath all of these loans is what the "risk-free" rate should be. And by manipulating that rate, which forms the core of any financial model of how to price a loan, you manipulate every loan. Digging through some old financial engineering textbooks, it's amusing how many mathematical cartwheels are done to try and get an edge on the movement of LIBOR. Sadly. one can't model the dynamic of making an internal phone call and asking to please manipulate the numbers.

Now let's build out from a very simple model of a financial instrument to one of the more complicated ones -- the Black-Scholes PDE for pricing options and derivatives:

There's a lot of stuff going on in this equation which you can learn about here. But there's one variable you should catch. That "r" in the equation is the risk-free rate, which is usually LIBOR. One of the things Black-Scholes does is create a framework for understanding options and derivatives as owning pieces of the underlying object along with some cash, and getting the price of a derivative by understanding what it would mean to manipulate those two items. The cash in this framework, a crucial part, has its value determined by LIBOR. Which, as many are pointing out, implicates the gigantic derivatives market in this scandal.

Implicating the derivatives market makes it clear why this matters to the market. But what about the role this scandal played in the financial crisis? This brings me to part of Karl Smith's argument for why this scandal doesn't matter much. On Up with Chris Hayes he argued that both parts of the allegations shouldn't get us too upset, and in particular that the second allegation, that Barclays systemically manipulated its LIBOR rates downward (perhaps with the approval of regulators) to make it seem like it was healthier than it was, is a good thing. Why? Because it made the financial system seem healthier than it was, which was important to prevent a collapse.

In two follow-up posts (I, II) Smith clarifies his response. Smith argues that since the central banks were facing a financial crisis of epic proportions, one that would hurt many people, banks manipulating LIBOR helped keep that crisis at bay, which is a great thing. I think Smith has a theory I'm not following in which the only problem the banks had in 2008 was insufficient monetary policy, and not the fact that these banks were sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in toxic loans that were causing a repo market bank run combined with an opaque over-the-counter derivatives system designed to induce counterparty risk in a crisis.

But the reason it matters is because that tactic can't work forever. You can manipulate prices and juke government stress tests and otherwise lie to make people believe your bank's balance-sheet is healthier than it is, but eventually that system is going to collapse. And, crucially, if the primary objective is "delay," then when the crisis actually hits, it hits in an overwhelming way with no plausible way to fairly allocate losses or take other actions.

As a side-note, if Smith agrees with manipulating LIBOR to look healthier, then he must really support the actions the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was taking in March 2008 to juke Lehman Brother's stress tests: "The FRBNY developed two new stress scenarios: 'Bear Stearns' and 'Bear Stearns Light.' Lehman failed both tests. The FRBNY then developed a new set of assumptions for an additional round of stress tests, which Lehman also failed. However, Lehman ran stress tests of its own, modeled on similar assumptions, and passed." Thank god that prevented an out-of-nowhere collapse that totally surprised the entire market!

The "TED Spread" is the difference between LIBOR and U.S. Government debt, and many used it in 2008 to track the financial crisis in real time (here's Krugman with "My Friend TED" from the time). Pushing LIBOR down makes the TED Spread look better. This looking healthier than it should meant that there was less pressure by regulators and legislators to find ways to allow these firms to fail, and that the most obvious way of dealing with the crisis was with a mass bailout. If you really want to deal with the crisis, you should affect either end of it that the price is reflecting, by either making the banks healthier or making sure we can deal with the failure.

The possibility that the regulators were in on it further clarifies the "protect the health of the largest banks at all costs" approach, one that squeezes every last bit of blood out of our turnip housing market and creates mass unemployment through a balance-sheet recession. And even if they weren't, that means that future measures to adeqately monitor the health of the banks through disclosures and market information might also be manipulated without (or even with) serious jail time or penalties.

This, by Smith, is wrong: "To my knowledge no one takes out an adjustable rate mortgage saying, 'what I really want is for my mortgage rate to reflect the level of panic in the global financial system should there by a once in 75 year crisis.' No, what everyone thinks is that they are getting the rate set by Federal Reserve and the Bank of England."

No, if that was the case there would be no use for LIBOR, and people would just use those rates. As Nemo summarizes in a great post on LIBOR from his bond series from years ago, the people pricing any loans at LIBOR want the pricing of a systemic credit crisis in their model. As Nemo says, "It is impossible to overstate how fundamental LIBOR is to the bond market." These prices are supposed to mean something, and the ability to add that information is a crucial reason it has shown up in so many pricing models. It would be a better world if those numbers weren't being manipulated to the advantage of inside traders.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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Interest rate image via Shutterstock.com.
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38 Million Missing Quits, the Battle to Quit and Replacing Government with a UBI: Three Points on Workplace Coercion

Jul 7, 2012Mike Konczal

There's a lot of discussion on the workplace as a site for private coercion building out of the epic Crooked Timber post Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace, by Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch (BRG). They are responding to the worldview of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL).

There's a lot of discussion on the workplace as a site for private coercion building out of the epic Crooked Timber post Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace, by Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch (BRG). They are responding to the worldview of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL). Corey has two posts (I, II) collecting a wide variety of great responses. I'd like to make three quick points I haven't seen others mention.

I - Over 38 Million Quits Missing

If we view individuals quitting their job as a check on private coercion, which I believe the BHL crew thinks, then there's been a massive increase in private forms of coercion in the past several years. Here's JOLTS data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the number of quits that are happening in the labor force:

There are, roughly, 38.4 million quits that should have occurred that didn't since the economy went into recession. I'm assuming nobody believes that employers decided to become very nice all of a sudden in December 2007, but that instead the economy went into a deep recession. As a result of this recession, where the number of unemployed versus job openings has skyrocketed (because both the unemployed have increased and job openings shrunk), it is very difficult to find a job. This translates into declining labor share of income, as workers are left with little bargaining power in the Great Recession. If one assumes that labor management techniques are sticky, or that hysteresis creates the conditions where people who have lived through bad economic times have weaker bargaining power, this coercion is likely to cement and be long-lasting.

The academic unemployment literature goes far beyond the Economics 101 idea that wages are simply equal to contribution (marginal product). That literature now looks to bargaining over surpluses/rents that come out of the labor contract as the crucial issue for how wages are determined. If you look to Chris Pissarides' Equilibrium Unemployment Theory (a textbook summarizing the work that just won him the Nobel Prize), you see arguments such as, "We assume that the monopoly rent is shared according to the Nash solution to a bargaining problem...The way that market tightness enters the wage equation in our model is through the bargaining power that each party has...The worker's bargaining strength is then higher and the firm's lower, and this leads to a higher wage rate." Tight labor markets mean more of the surplus is captured by labor through wages. If you view workplace conditions as an extension of the wage equation, then full employment makes a giant difference even under neoclassical economic assumptions.

BHL is not an economics blog, but I find it weird that they aren't ringing the alarm as much as possible on this. They should be willing to go to some great lengths to keep the labor market at full employment as a "free market" way of mitigating abuses, which would involve accepting mass job creation programs, larger government deficits, unorthodox monetary policy, putting losses on creditors instead of debtors, and so on. For many libertarians these solutions are the real "abuses."

Macroeconomic stability, everyone having a right to employment, and labor capturing their fair share of the pie aren't the passive results of "economic liberty" or of economic contracting. They are the result of an interventionist government focused on managing the macroeconomy, one whose political compass is set by groups organized to protect the interests of workers, of which organized labor are the leaders.

II - Freedom to Quit Was Forged in Political Battle, Not Markets

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolutions wrote this: "If you think that the freedom to quit is without value bear in mind that under feudalism and into the early 19th century in the U.S. and a bit later in Britain employers and even potential employers could prevent workers from quitting and from moving. The freedom to quit was hard won. We should not disparage the liberation brought by a free market in labor."

Early 19th century? British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. Anti-enticement laws, where employers would be fined if they hired someone who was currently under contract, were popular in the sharecropping American south into the early 20th century, and upheld in courts as late as 1923.

Tabarrok draws on Robert Steinfeld's excellent work in that link, but a crucial thing to draw from that literature is that laissez-faire "economic liberty" and "freedom of contract" movements were the enemies to building the modern freedom to quit one's job. Employees faced criminal penalties for quitting and the loss of back pay if they did quit, and the common law of the time made it impossible for workers to end this. Laissez-faire advocates fought for this and against organized labor's efforts to dismantle it.

It seems like people are discussing the right to quit as if was something that just emerged out of our rich society, and something that "naturally" came out of extensive, individual, economic bargaining, when that couldn't be further from the truth. Only through the concentrated efforts of organized labor, a bloody, ugly fight, was this modern freedom able to be built. Karen Orren's book Belated Feudalism places the end of this old regime Tabarrok alludes to at the New Deal's 1935 Wagner Act, which comes after decades of union organizing and battling. Who will build the next set of contractual labor frameworks we'll take for granted, given that the freedom to quit was a political battle that never emerged from the labor market on its own?

III - How Much Does a UBI Cost, and Should We Replace the Government With Cash?

There's also a question of how much a Universal Basic Income (UBI) would cost. BRG suggested it would be 20 percent of GDP, added to the roughly 20 percent baseline of taxation that already exists to provide current government services, for a total of 40 percent. This is correct. Our GDP per capita is roughly $50,000. If you want to give everyone $10,000, that will require taxing 20 percent of GDP.

A lot of people suggested that was too high. Those people are usually, almost by definition, doing one of a few things. They are excluding some populations from the UBI (such as giving children nothing or much less), they are really discussing a negative income tax (a means-tested UBI done through the tax code), they are also removing current government services (such as unemployment insurance, or food stamps), or they are redefining "cost" to just focus on the redistribution element (associated with the negative income tax). Changing those numbers would change the final result.

Some means-test the UBI as a negative income tax, which would have significantly less cost. This has the normal "submerged state" problems any tax code program has, where people wouldn't see it as a government program. The means-tested part makes it not universal in basic sense. The negative income tax wouldn't avoid stigmatization as not everyone would receive it, and could still create poverty traps, two issues the UBI is meant to overcome. Indeed a negative income tax with a work requirement, the EITC, is ground zero for the accusation that too many people pay nothing in taxes but receive government services.

Charles Murray essentially dismantles the welfare state and the government and replaces it with a UBI in his argument. He segments 30 percent or so of the UBI to be mandated (!) for purchasing catastrophic health insurance though.

If one is going to dismantle the government to provide a UBI what parts will be left should be discussed. As many have pointed out (Anderson, Scanlon), just because you would prefer X over something Y that we believe everyone should have doesn't obligate us to provide X. If you are a rational person who would prefer to trade in your right to a fair trial for $100 to buy a fancy hat, that doesn't mean society owes you the hat over the trial, even if that right to a fair trial costs society over $100.

There are also goods where the needs are disproportionately varied and we actually need the insurance component of social insurance for risk-sharing (e.g. health care). And there are also a variety of functions through which the government can make sure a baseline of demand is met for all who need them, if the private market is unable to provide or will insufficiently allocate them (e.g. education). It's not clear that disbanding these functions and giving away a coupon is a smart idea.

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The IMF Goes All-Out on Balance-Sheet Recessions, Providing Sanity on Economic Policy

Jul 3, 2012Mike Konczal

The literature summary I just put out on balance-sheet recessions examines the recent April 2012 World Economic Report by the IMF. It is remarkable how important this report is. The relevant part is Chapter 3, Dealing with Household Debt.

The literature summary I just put out on balance-sheet recessions examines the recent April 2012 World Economic Report by the IMF. It is remarkable how important this report is. The relevant part is Chapter 3, Dealing with Household Debt. This IMF report is well to the Keynesian side of almost all major US debate, and its recommedations and observations are incredibly sensible. You should read it all, but I want to point out five few high-level arguments they make:

1. A run-up in household debt and leverage explains the economic collapse across countries.

Here's a graph they include, comparing increases in household debt-to-income ratios from 2002-2006 against consumption collapses in 2010.

Implicit here is that the problems aren't labor "inflexiblity" or whatever the latest faddish argument is. It's household leverage.

You see the same exact relationship across the states in the United States, where the biggest increases in household leverage ratios (i.e. the places with the biggest housing collapses) have the worst unemployment and consumption collapses. In the United States monetary policy and transfers help mitigate this. We send checks to Arizona and Florida, where housing is a disaster. As Paul Krugman and others have pointed out, there are no equivalent transfers across these countries, especially in the Euro.

2. Financial crises are not a driver of prolongued recessions. If anything they are a symptom.

There's a common wisdom among many elites that prolongued recessions are just what happens in the aftermath of a financial crisis. Most people who argue this derive it from Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart's This Time It's Different. These arguments have always been a bit difficult to justify. Usually people who invoke them call for inaction, as if there isn't anything to be done but let the recession run its course.

The IMF report looks at OECD data on housing busts over the past 30 years and compares housing busts with large household leverage ratios with those with low ratios. Busts with large household leverage ratios have much bigger drops in consumptions years out, just like what we see in our recession. What is important is that this holds with or without financial crises:

They don't discuss it, but this implies that the causation runs the other way; countries that have giant drops in housing values and/or increases in debt-to-income ratios probably create financial crises. But this means that having a financial crisis, like we did, doesn't change the game; it just amplifies the case for normal demand-side stimulus.

III. HAMP is a failed program.

I remember when saying that HAMP was a failed program that was making the situation worse was a controversial opinion. At the recent Netroots Nation I was chatting with David Dayen and we talked about his portrait of HAMP series from fall 2010, which included the title that HAMP "makes your financial situation worse." That was an argument that had to be built, one data dump and one blog post at a time, over Treasury trying hard to convince people otherwise.

We bloggers ringing the bell about HAMP also argued two additional points: that Treasury wasn't actually spending the money Congress told it to spend on homeowners. This was at a point where trying to find additional funding for stimulating the economy was the highest priority. And it was also well after the second round of TARP funding went out based on promises by Larry Summers of spending that allocated money on homeowners. And, secondly, that these problems weren't going away, because they were fundamental to how HAMP was designed.

Here's the IMF: "HAMP had significant ambitions but has thus far achieved far fewer modifications than envisaged....By the same token, the amount disbursed under MHA as of December 2011 was only $2.3 billion, well below the allocation of $30 billion (0.2 percent of GDP). Issues with HAMP’s design help explain this disappointing performance." All three points, taken for granted in the report.

IV. Foreclosures are a problem.

It's never been clear whether Treasury views mass foreclosures as a macroeconomic problem. Well, the IMF does:
A further negative effect on economic activity of high household debt in the presence of a shock, postulated by numerous models, comes from the forced sale of durable goods (Shleifer and Vishny, 1992; Mayer, 1995; Krishnamurthy, 2010; Lorenzoni, 2008)...The associated negative price effects in turn reduce economic activity through a number of self-reinforcing contractionary spirals.
 
The IMF staff notes that “distress sales are the main driving force behind the recent declines in house prices—in fact, excluding distress sales, house prices had stopped falling” and that “there is a risk of house price undershooting” (IMF, 2011b, p. 20)...Overall, debt overhang and the deadweight losses of foreclosures can further depress the recovery of housing prices and economic activity. These problems make a case for government involvement to lower the cost of restructuring debt, facilitate the writing down of household debt, and help prevent foreclosures (Philippon, 2009).
Couldn't put it better myself. Ironically I had first heard the theoretical financial-macroeconomic arguments about preventing the fireselling of assets into a depressed market from Shleifer/Vishny's 1992 paper that the IMF cites. Shleifer is a protégé of Larry Summers, so I assumed Summers might have gone a bit harder about preventing the mass fireselling of the largest consumer asset, an asset which just has a gigantic collapse in value, into the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Alas.
 
V. Demand demand-side stimulus. Across the board. Now.
 
One has good reason to dread hearing the policies the IMF recommends for a country in a crisis. Maximal labor "flexiblity"? Cat food for old people? Picking government functions out of a hat to privatize? What does the IMF recommend here? Ok, brace yourself:

Temporary macroeconomic policy stimulus...simulations of policy models developed at six policy institutions suggest that, in the current environment, a temporary (two-year) transfer of 1 percent of GDP to financially constrained households would raise GDP by 1.3 percent and 1.1 percent in the United States and the European Union, respectively...Monetary stimulus can also provide relief to indebted households by easing the debt service burden...A social safety net can automatically provide targeted transfers to households with distressed balance sheets and a high marginal propensity to consume, without the need for additional policy deliberation...

Support for household debt restructuring: Finally, the government may choose to tackle the problem of household debt directly by setting up frameworks for voluntary out-of-court household debt restructuring—including write-downs—or by initiating government-sponsored debt restructuring programs. Such programs can help restore the ability of borrowers to service their debt, thus preventing the contractionary effects of unnecessary foreclosures and excessive asset price declines.

There's then a major discussion about what went right in the United State's Great Depression and Iceland's recent collapse on comphrensive housing policy.

Huh. That's actually an amazing set of polices. When can we start? And can we get the IMF advising US economic policy if this is what they are suggesting?

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New Report: A Literature Summary on New Balance-Sheet Recession Research

Jul 3, 2012Mike Konczal

In the last 8 months there's been a ton of research validating the theory and arguments of the "balance-sheet recession." I wrote up a literature summary of this research as a Roosevelt Institute white paper: "How Mortgage Debt is Holding Back the Recover

In the last 8 months there's been a ton of research validating the theory and arguments of the "balance-sheet recession." I wrote up a literature summary of this research as a Roosevelt Institute white paper: "How Mortgage Debt is Holding Back the Recovery." You can download a PowerPoint presentation on the paper as well.

This paper was designed to give some background for those interested in understanding this powerful theory, backed by the latest empirical research, and needed to be caught up. I noticed that the latest Economic Report of the President and the latest IMF World Economic report were backing this theory and these researchers. It is important for activists to understand that elite opinion is moving on the conneciton of the housing bubble collapse and slow growth and mass unemployment, and this will have implications for those arguing against foreclosures and for debtor relief.

The key of the report is the following graph, which summarizes the four papers I dig into:

I'll be discussing the individual reports in the future. I had previously interviewed Amir Sufi on the first two papers last fall.

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O Christmas Tree: Why Scalia's Dissent is More Activist Than the Roberts Decision

Jul 3, 2012Mike Konczal

Roberts's decision to uphold the individual mandate as a tax was based on solid and established legal arguments, but the dissent's justification for throwing the whole law out was pure radicalism.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You're telling me they thought of it as a tax, they defended it on the tax power. Why didn't they say it was a tax?

Roberts's decision to uphold the individual mandate as a tax was based on solid and established legal arguments, but the dissent's justification for throwing the whole law out was pure radicalism.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You're telling me they thought of it as a tax, they defended it on the tax power. Why didn't they say it was a tax?

GENERAL VERRILLI: They might have thought, Your Honor, that calling it a penalty as they did would make it more effective in accomplishing its objective. But it is — in the Internal Revenue Code it is collected by the IRS on April 15th. I don't think this is a situation in which you can say -
 
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, that's the reason. They thought it might be more effective if they called it a penalty.
 
-Supreme Court arguments, March 27th, 2012 (transcript)

Last week, the Supreme Court found in a 5-4 vote that the individual mandate survives under the taxing power instead of the Commerce Clause. Here is the decision, authored by Chief Justice Roberts. I've noticed two responses from conservatives:

The first is that Roberts, by looking to the taxing power in the Constitution, found something liberals had never argued. Related is the argument that liberals took the constitutionality of the mandate for granted and never built out the framework necessary to argue for it, especially in the form of a tax.

I haven't followed health care closely, but I do try to keep up with Jack Balkin's work, and he's been on the taxing power since forever ago. Here's two amicus briefs (h/t Incidental Economist for the actual brief links, who also gives them "most influential" status) that come from the team of Jack Balkin at Yale Law School and Gillian Metzger and Trevor Morrison at Columbia Law School. Their Fourth Circuit brief covers this (Argument 1: "The minimum coverage free provision is a permissible exercise of Congress's taxing power"), as does the Supreme Court brief (Argument 1: "The minimum coverage provision falls within Congress's expansive tax power and is not an impermissible direct tax").

In "The Lawfulness of Health-Care Reform," Akhil Amar writes that Obamacare "is proper under at least six different theories, each one of which has deep roots in constitutional text and common sense." The very first one? "It is outlandish to think that [Obamacare's] provisions exceed the sweeping power that the Constitution confers upon Congress to 'lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.'" And Andrew Koppelman, in "Bad News for Mail Robbers: The Obvious Constitutionality of Health Care Reform," noted that "Even if you somehow suppose that the health care mandate exceeds the commerce power, it would be valid anyway as an exercise of the power to tax," which is now the law of the land. These thinkers are at the forefront of elite liberal legal scholarship, and they all made this argument. It showed up in the oral arguments as well, with Roberts paying particular attention to it, as Brian Beutler of TPM caught at the time.

The second response conservatives have is that Roberts found something Congress never intended. National Review's editors, immediately after the decision, argued that one "distinguishes, though, between construing a law charitably and rewriting it. The latter is what Chief Justice John Roberts has done." The dissent itself argues that "to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it."

But in terms of rewriting a bill and judicial activism, I haven't seem any conservatives deal with the "Christmas Tree" doctrine. Given that the dissenting judges found the mandate and related major parts of the bill unconstitutional, what should they do with the rest of the bill? For instance, what should be done about the student loan reform, a major and obviously constitutional provision that was included with the ACA?

The dissenting judges would overturn it. They'd overturn the entire bill, including the student loan provisions. But why? Here is their logic, from the dissent (my bold):

Such [minor] provisions validate the Senate Majority Leader’s statement, “‘I don’t know if there is a senator that doesn’t have something in this bill that was important to them. . . . [And] if they don’t have something in it important to them, then it doesn’t speak well of them.  That’s what this legislation is all about: It’s the art of compromise.’ ” [Quote from New York Times article.] Often, a minor provision will be the price paid for support of a major provision.  So, if the major provision were unconstitutional, Congress would not have passed the minor one.
 
The Court has not previously had occasion to consider severability in the context of an omnibus enactment like the ACA, which includes not only many provisions that are ancillary to its central provisions but also many that are entirely unrelated—hitched on because it was a quick way to get them passed despite opposition, or because their proponents could exact their enactment as the quid pro quo for their needed support. 
 
When we are confronted with such a so called “Christmas tree,” a law to which many nongermane ornaments have been attached, we think the proper rule must be that when the tree no longer exists the ornaments are superfluous. We have no reliable basis for knowing which pieces of the Act would have passed on their own.

Notice how this dissent comes up with an elaborate theory of how and why Congress passed the pieces of the bill they did, rewriting the history of how and why health care reform passed. With no previous case law, they turn to a quote from a New York Times article, of all things, to determine the constitutionality of things like student loan reform.

And this history strikes me as ideologically predicated on a third-rate "Public Choice" criticism, which is that all the minor provisions were "quid pro quo" bribes needed to secure passage. It reads like when Scalia brought up the Cornhusker Kickback during legal arguments. So it isn't derived from case law, or a theory of the courts or the law, but on an ideological, right-wing vision of how political actors behave.

Which is to say that the dissent took a maximal course of rewriting and assuming not only the intent but the counterfactual of congressional action and the ACA, including what it does, why it does it, and how it came to be, in their Christmas Tree doctrine. This is the very definition of judicial activism.

If Roberts was interested in minimizing his activism and rewriting of congressional action, as well as maintaining a baseline of presuming the legitmacy and constitutionality of congressional action, wouldn't he have gone with the liberals instead of the conservative dissent?

Now that CBS News has revealed that Roberts changed his vote from siding with the conservatives to siding with the liberals, everyone is trying to figure out why. I wonder if it is because the dissenters wouldn't back down from their Christmas Tree doctrine and Roberts called foul on its absurdity.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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A Note on Free Market Fairness: Is "Economic Liberty" Incoherent?

Jun 20, 2012Mike Konczal

There's a fantastic symposium on the book Free Market Fairness going on over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian website. Make sure to check out Sam Freeman and Elizabeth Anderson, as well as Tomasi's replies to both.

There's a fantastic symposium on the book Free Market Fairness going on over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian website. Make sure to check out Sam Freeman and Elizabeth Anderson, as well as Tomasi's replies to both. I'm going to add my thoughts on reading the book; note that I'm an amateur when it comes to many of these political theory debates but something strikes me as missing.

One of the core parts of Free Market Fairness' theory of "market democracy" is enshrining economic liberty at the level of basic liberties protected by the constitution, like free speech, the right to a trial or political participation.

In Rawls' formulation, it means that economic liberties would be protected by the first principle of justice. This is the principle that each "person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all." These basic liberties are “inalienable,” and “any undertakings to waive or to infringe them are void ab initio [to be treated as invalid from the outset].” Citizens cannot bargain or trade their basic liberties away.

Many on the left point out how economic liberty isn't true liberty unless it is a fair value liberty, or a liberty that isn't just formally equal but also is substantively equal. To see examples using Rawls' framework, political equality is of the substantive variety, as it matters whether you can actually vote and participate, but religion is only formally equal, as you don't have a right to an expensive church for your personal, elaborate religious ceremonies. The left says economic liberty isn't really liberty unless there's substantive equal ability to participate in the economy.

I'm all for that critique as far as it goes, but I think it is important to go a step further and argue that formulating economic liberty as a basic liberty is, practically speaking, incoherent.

The Department of Stabilization

Rawls described a stabilization branch of the state in Theory of Justice, tasked with bringing about full employment. In practice a lot of our economic debates are focused on what to do about mass unemployment in this crisis.  Let's do a quick map of economic agents in our current Great Recession and how the downturn has impacted them:

There are workers, many of whom are unemployment, and they have sluggish wage growth and low quit rates. Incumbent managers and owners are experiencing big profits and large bargaining power over their workforce. Capital owners have benefitted from disinflationary trends. Entrepreneurs find it difficult to start new businesses amidst mass unemployment. The government could lean against all these trends by doing stimulus, but taxpayers would be on the line if it didn't work out.

Now here's what I mean by incoherent: treating economic issues as a basic liberty tells us nothing about how to address stabilization one way or the other and substantially confuses our intuitions about how to approach the problem - which is one of tradeoffs. The first principle would only allows certain breaches of inalienable economic liberty in order to make the most extensive set of liberties, compatible with similar liberty for others. Now I understand that the regulation of basic liberties (like free speech) is problematic for Rawls, but it dissolves into nothingness here under market democracy.

Basic liberties can't guide us, because liberty for one comes at the expense of liberty for others. Which economic liberties are we to preserve? The one of the unemployed to work, the entrepreneur to have customers, bosses to their profits or rentiers to their capital income? All of these liberties are part of the economic realities of each agent, and these are fundamentally in tension with each other. There's no way to view them as "compatible" with each other as a sufficient condition to animate decision-making.

The only way to address them as a matter of policy is to balance them against each other according to some principle. Full employment? Price stability? Deflation and the Gold Standard? Bringing in the concept of liberty prevents the ability to discuss these in terms of tradeoffs, as the whole point of basic liberties is that groups of citizens can't have their basic liberties traded off each other.

One could say that the only system is thus one of no stabilization. But this is a policy choice, no different than emphasizing full employment at all costs. There's nothing about mass unemployment that must contain more inalienable liberty than full employment - it is just a different set of actors who benefit. And this would look suspiciously like bringing in one set of arguments for how the economy should work and whom it should work for through the courts, rather than democratically through argument in the public sphere.

This incoherence exists more broadly. For instance, uses of basic liberties aren't up for being traded. I can't sell you my vote, and I can't ask the government to enforce a contract where you've sold me your right to a fair trial. Yet economic transactions are all about trading off economic rights. When I sell you my labor I'm accepting serious limitations on what I can do with my labor - it now belongs to you.

Thus economic liberty is often, at any moment, zero-sum: a more extensive liberty for the boss comes at limiting the liberty of the worker. The same for the creditor and the debtor. One of the first big "liberty of contract" cases was Pennsylvania's state court's 1886 Godcharles v. Wigeman, which struck down a state act prohibiting payment of wages in scrip. Here the benefit of the boss (and the company) came at the expense of the worker in the form of the means of payment. This may be a pareto-optimal trade when it happens - market democracy would presume that it must be by definition of it happening - but assuming I'm giving away a liberty for my ultimate long-term benefit, as well as the benefit of the economy as a whole, is way off the reservation of how we consider the other basic liberties.

The best way to conceptualizing it is within a framework of justifying inequalities, which is what Rawls' second principle tries to do. The second principle's difference principle could be the wrong approach - we might want to maximize growth regardless of its impact on the poor - but it is the right spot on the lexical framework to approach such a question. Pushing these questions into the highest lexical position leaves us with nothing coherent to say on the matters, it disrupts our normal thinking about liberty and stops our ability to see these issues as what they fundamentally are, which is balancing private forms of power and providing rules that bend them towards the greater good of the economy. Rules that are, I'd argue, best constructed through democratic argument; but rules that are in no way clarified by referring to more abstract notions of liberty.

 

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