The Pin Factory Blog

This will sound a little odd, for we nromally say around here that we want to remove distortions in the tax system. One obvious such distortion being that capital gains and income are taxed at different rates, leading to everyone who can manage it shifting income over into capital gains. However, we don't want to rush off and try to equalise those rates. The reason being the following:

What we mean by "integrated" here is the combination of the corporation tax and the capital gains tax. A share goes up in value as the company makes more profits. But it's post tax profits that do this, not pre tax. So the higher the corporation tax the less the share price will rise: thus the lower the capital gain that the shareholder will receive.

We should thus look at the interplay of both taxes on the amount that the shareholder receives for putting their money at risk. Which is exactly what this "integrated" rate is. And that's with CGT at the current rate of 28%, not the income tax rate of 45% (the tippy top rate that is). So, if we moved CGT up to the marginal income tax rate then capital gains would be more heavily taxed than income because of that bite already taken by corporation tax. And that's absolutely not what we want to happen at all: for we know that capital taxation has higher deadweight costs than income tax anyway.

There is one way to do it though. If we abolish corporation tax altogether and simply tax dividends and capital gains as the income they are then we will indeed have equal rates for all types of income. Plus, what joys, all the spivs trying to dodge taxes through manipulation of the corporate tax system go out of business. And tens of thousands of our most highly paid lawyers and accountants have to do something productive with their lives.

What's not to like? Abolish corporation tax and then tax all income as income?

Twenty and thirty years ago the general consensus was that pretty much nothing was going to help Africa. Sunk in Malthusian destitution as the various countries were, people really just couldn't see any manner in which the place could develop. Then there was this bright idea: hey, what if we told people and governments just to stop doing stupid things?

No, not some grand plan for how to develop, not earnest Fabians planning how the groundnut industry should work. But just, you know, stop doing the things that we know deter economic growth? And so was the Washington Consensus born. It's not actually a prescription, it's a series of rules of thumb. It's not even from Washington: if's from the experiences of various Latin American states. And it really is just a list of stupid things that you shouldn't so. Or perhaps the opposite of those stupid things that many had been doing. Have market determined exchange and interest rates, not purely invented ones. If you're going to have import restrictions make them general tariffs, not licenses or permits. Tax everything just a little bit, not one thing hugely. Public spending should be on those things that it does well: public health and primary school education. Protect property rights, allow foreigners to send their lovely capital in, regulate on environmental or safety grounds but not others. Essentially, just the basic Government Economics 101 stuff.

That consensus isn't anything official but it's just roughly what everyone thought the general advice should be around and about 1989. It gradually got implemented though the 90s in Africa (barring some horrors like Congo and Rwanda). So, what's the general outcome of governments not doing economically stupid things?

Hmm, that's pretty good actually:

As a starting point, Africa's economic growth sped up around 2000, and for the decade from 2000-2010, it was the second-fastest growing region of the world. If one counts a "consuming household" as a household with over $5000 per year in income, the number of African households in this category rose from about 59 million to 90 million over this decade.

In fact, given the deep despondency about even the possibility of development in Africa that's very good.

And it's an important lesson for us too. Indeed, I would argue that it contains the most important economic lesson it's necessary for us in hte rich world to understand, for our own sakes.

Yes, it's entirely possible that there are some bright ideas that government could do to make us wealthier. But much more important for our future wealth is not allowing the government to do the stupid things that will stop us ourselves making ourselves wealthier. And we can go through that list and see people already camapigning to do stupid things: exchange rates, what's the euro is not an invented and fixed rate? On interest rates we've endless fools stating that the government should just print money to "invest" at artificial rates. Capital controls are coming back into vogue: that'll stop the foreigners investing for a start,  as well as give us an artificial exchange rate. Everyone wants to tax the rich hugely, apparently crucial public spending in the UK now includes Newcastle's arts scene. And as Twain pointed out, while the legislature's in session no man's property is safe (there really are calls for the confiscation of second and empty houses for example, the forcible renting of them to social tenants through the local council is another idea out there).

Of course good ideas to make things better should be promoted. But the real battle is to stop them, as we've seen in Africa, doing the stupid things.

The Parliamentary Commission on Banking has reported this morning and, like most of the talk leading up to and since the Vickers Report, is pre-occupied by ring fencing.  Vickers, as you will recall, dealt with the demands for separating retail and investment banking by proposing that those banking groups involved in both should have separate subsidiaries for those sectors with no links between them.

Government discussions since then have been seen by some as, under pressure from the bankers, watering down the Vickers proposals.  The Parliamentary Commission, au contraire, claims that Vickers did not go far enough and the fences should be “electrified”, i.e. any infringement would lead immediately to full separation.  Sir John Vickers himself, in an email to the Today programme, quickly responded by saying that full separation would be an own goal.

What is weird about all this is that the financial crisis had little if anything to do with the lack of such separation.  Retail banks, like Northern Rock, and building societies created a bubble of huge unrepayable debts and, quite separately, banks packaged up those “assets” to conceal their true nature and then played pass the parcel with the packages.  Lehman Brothers was purely an investment bank.  The entities that created the crash were already separated and separating the other groups would do nothing to prevent a future crash.

What is even weirder is the failure to recognise that banking today is an international, if not fully global, market.  Financial solutions have to be found internationally.  The Basel group are doing their best to achieve that and we now have three “Accords”. They focus, quite sensibly, on ensuring banks are adequately capitalised for the businesses they run.  One can, and I have, criticised their proposals as an over-reaction which will penalise small businesses, but the point here is that the rest of world’s top regulators are not worrying at all about ring-fences.

Another part of the international dimension which the Parliamentary Commission fails to recognise is the EU involvement.  Uncertainty about that undoubtedly contributed to the Northern Rock crash as Professor Tim Congden and others, including Sir Mervyn King, have pointed out.  The UK is in course of handing financial regulation over to Brussels but what is for us to do and what for Brussels is unclear.  The only thing that is clear is that the EU’s interventions will damage the competitiveness of UK banks and increase the costs for taxpayers.

So, not unusually, British chattering classes are dancing around playing ring-a-ring-a-ring-fence when the rest of the world gets on with regulating the real financial market.  It is truly astonishing that this Commission should choose to focus its entire attention on the area that matters least.  The consequence of adopting their suggestions, as Vickers himself seems to be pointing out, can only be that we will hobble our own financial sector at great cost to the economy and the British taxpayer.

The US has a high corporation tax rate. The US also doesn't charge that tax to profits made outside the US and kept outside the US. Therefore, obviously, US corporations keep the profits they make outside the US outside the US. You know, that first great secret of economics, incentives matter?

Back a few years a temporary solution was suggestedL bring back the profits and we'll charge you only a teensie rate: many did. Again, incentives matter. Now there's vast mountains of money sitting offshore and perhaps that low tax trick might be tried again. Mebbe: but a common argument against it is the following:

ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the impact of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings and thereby reduced the cost to U.S. multinationals of accessing a source of internal capital. Lawmakers and lobbyists justified its passage by arguing that it would alleviate financial constraints. This paper’s results indicate that repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, domestic employment or R&D—even for the firms that appeared to be financially constrained or lobbied for the holiday. Instead, estimates indicate that a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with a $0.60-$0.92 increase in payouts to shareholders—despite regulations stating that such expenditures were not a permitted use of repatriations qualifying for the tax holiday. The results indicate that U.S. multinationals were not financially constrained and were reasonably well-governed. The fungibility of money appears to have undermined the effectiveness of the regulations.

Note that this is used as an argument against the tax holiday, not in favour of it. when obviously it's an argument in favour of it.

The basic error is to think that investment is something only done by companies with the money that they have internally: thus the shock at the idea that shareholders might get some of their own money back. When in fact, all the really important investment in hte economy is actually done by individuals in new businesses: not by old ones ploughing back in their profits.

No, obviously, the amount of new investment is very much smaller than the amount of reinvestment. But that's not what I mean. The things that really change economies, that bring in the new disruptive technologies, are the entry and exit from the marketplace of firms. Which by definition means the creation of new firms able to do the entering (and exit of those going bust of course). And who are the people most likely to invest in a business from the outside? Clearly, those who have already shown that they will do so by virtue of the fact that they hold equity in a business or two.

At present there's some vast amount of money offshore in those corporations. $1.2 trillion, $1.7, estimates vary. Assuming that it is a good idea that this money leaves the Bahamas or wherever and gets injected into the US economy (which I think it probably is) then this argument about dividends is piffle. The very fact that it is likely to be paid out in dividends is the very reason why it's a good idea. For putting it into the hands of investors increases the chances that it will be invested in new businesses: the long run lifeblood of economic growth.

Now we all know that the past 30 years has been the triumph of neoliberlaism, where we who own capital get to trample the faces of the workers into the dust. Stealing the bread from the mouths of children and cackling gleefully as we do so. Something which the TUC would like to bring to our attention in this report. Where they use this little chart.

Which is interesting, don't you think? The profit share has risen, the wage share fallen, QED, we're screwing the workers.

Except, except, those numbers don't actually look right to me. For this is something that has been looked at repeatedly in recent months. Here's a different attempt at protraying the same information:

As you can see, the decline in the labour share is the same. But instead of a rise in the profit share being the cause we've a rise in mixed income (essentially, the self-employed and as there's more of them why not) and a rise in taxes minus subsidies: that's largely I believe the rise in VAT over the time period.

It's actually quite important for us to work this out of course. If the labour share has fallen because us capitalists are stealing it all then that's one thing. Perhaps Hurrah! and perhaps Boo! depending which side you see yourself on. If it's simply a result of a rise in self-employment then it doesn't really matter either way. And if it's as a result of a rise in taxes well, the prescription will obviously be to lower taxes. So we'd really rather like to know which of these two sets of numbers is correct.

There's definitely something hinky going on between the two sets of numbers. Both do sum to 100, as they must. My problem is that the TUC's numbers just refer to "ONS figures from the Blue Book" while the second set actually tell us which specific figures are being used (The relevant series used here are CGBZ, DTWM, CGBX, CMVL and YBHA.). And I'm afraid I'm not enough of an economist (nor statistician) to work out what hinkiness is being perpetrated here.

So I throw it open to you: what is it that the TUC has done to give us this decidedly non-standard view of how income shares have changed over the decades?

George Monbiot has cannily saved himself a few quid by flagging up his intention to scrimp on Christmas presents this year. Conveniently dropping the narrative of Austerity Britain for a moment, Monbiot has gone back to his ‘Bring on the Recession’ phase, complaining that since our “every conceivable want and need has been met” we shouldn’t waste our money buying our nearest and dearest Terry the Swearing Turtle for Christmas. “Bake them a cake,” he suggests, “write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for God's sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care.”

So it’s a satsuma in a stocking for poor Mrs Monbiot and all the little Monbiots, as they gather environmentally sustainable winter fuel for their socialist household. But perhaps the anti-consumerism miserablists have a point. Christmas is a time when resources are misallocated and unwanted tat is exchanged. According to one study, the average recipient values their gifts at ten per cent less than their market price. That may be an underestimate. Of the roughly £8.5 billion spent on yuletide gifts in Britain last year, £2.4 billion’s worth—more than a quarter—were unwanted.

In strict economic terms, the most efficient gift is cold, hard cash, but exchanging equivalent sums of money lacks festive spirit and so people take their chance on the high street. This is where the market fails. Buyers have sub-optimal information about your wants and less incentive than you to maximise utility. They cannot always be sure that you do not already have the gift they have in mind, nor do they know if someone else is planning to give you the same thing. And since the joy is in the giving, they might be more interested in eliciting a fleeting sense of amusement when the present is opened than in providing lasting satisfaction. This is where Billy Bass comes in.

But note the reason for this inefficient spending. Resources are misallocated because one person has to decide what someone else wants without having the knowledge or incentive to spend as carefully as they would if buying for themselves. The market failure of Christmas is therefore an example of what happens when other people spend money on our behalf. The best person to buy things for you is you. Your friends and family might make a decent stab at it. Distant bureaucrats who have never met us - and who are spending other people’s money - perhaps can’t.

So when you open your presents next week and find yourself with another garish tie or an awful bottle of perfume, consider this: If your loved ones don’t know you well enough to make spending choices for you, what chance does the government have?

Housing benefit is a national industry, says Preston Byrne. In this article he argues that it sustains a national minimum rent and drives up rental costs for everyone.

Anyone following the progress of the government's “Universal Credit” welfare reform program will know that (1) its signature provision is the creation of the so-called Benefit Cap limiting the amount of benefits that any one person or family can claim in a given week to £350 or £500, respectively.

Lesser known is (2) that “under Universal Credit, the default position will be that all housing costs for both social and private sector tenants” – currently paid out as a single, discrete benefit but soon to be subsumed within the benefit cap – are to be paid directly to claimants, whereas previously it was paid directly to claimants' landlords.

That the second of these proposals should be controversial is a little surprising, considering the fact that paying one's rent is the sort of thing most people will do for a substantial majority of their working lives. So I was puzzled to see Mark Easton, BBC News' Home Editor, excoriating the government, and accusing it of being “secretive*... on a matter that affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in Britain”: the proposal to, in his words, “force social housing tenants to pay their own rent”.

Read this article.

There's a rather sad misunderstanding about corporation tax in the UK at the moment. Everyone seems to think that we've got a low corporation tax here. When we don't in fact: we've got rather a high one. Oh, sure, we've a low headline rate: but that's very much the smallest part of corporation tax. The much more important part is what are the reliefs, the allowances, what can you claim back, what is actually taxable. Which gives us the effective rate:

It's very difficult indeed to describe the highest EU corporation tax rate as "low". The difference is, while we've a low headline rate, we also allow many fewer exemptions from having to pay that low rate (largely Nigel Lawson's work I believe).

And the importance of this is this:

This isn't just a theory: It appears to be true for that most economistic of organizations, the multinational corporation.  When multinationals are deciding which country to invest in, they don't pay that much attention to marginal tax rates.  According to Glenn Hubbard, 

...investment location decisions are more closely related to average rather than marginal tax rates. 

When making the go/no-go decision, corporations care more about their long run tax bill.  That's because the marginal decision is the go/no-go decision.

Yes, average and effective tax rates are the same thing.

It's not good enough our just having a low or competitive headline corporation tax rate. We also need to have a low effective rate. Good grief, at the moment we're twice Ireland's rate.

A little story from the annals of my corner of the weird metals industry. You'll recall all those stories of how the Chinese had cornered the market in rare earth metals. Then the wily Orientals rather scrutably decided to, once they were 97% of the supply, restrict exports, reduce production and rub their hands with glee as they collected monopoly profits. All in all an example of how they had got it right through industrial planning and we in our free market foolishness had got it wrong.

So let me bring you up to date with what's happening:

The shares and rare earth prices plunged in 2011 as buyers pursued alternative raw materials and used stockpiles. Lanthanum oxide, a rare earth used to refine gasoline, has dropped 53 percent this year, according to Shanghai Steelhome Information data. Cerium oxide, used in glass polishing, has declined 56 percent and neodymium oxide, used in magnets, has fallen 46 percent, the data show.

Prices have indeed done that. But not particularly for the reasons mentioned, although they play a part. The real reason is this:

Molycorp and Australia's Lynas Corp (LYC.AX), some of the few rare earth producers outside of China, are ramping up production even as prices have dropped sharply since early 2011, dragging shares of other producers as well. "We remain very concerned about what will happen as new supplies from Molycorp and Lynas totaling 57k tonnes hit up against a ROW (rest of the world) demand estimated at 40k tonnes in 2011 ...," J.P. Morgan analyst Michael Gambardella said in a note to clients.

Here's what really happened. China did indeed end up with a production monopoly on rare earths. For they were willing to sell as much as anyone wanted at a price they were willing to pay. (A small personal note, the one rare earth that I really deal with I used to import into China, as it was the only one they didn't in fact produce in quantity.) Oooh! A monopoly, that's bad!

But as soon as they tried to exploit that monopoly then, given that rare earths aren't rare (nor earths), people started to contest that exercise of monopoly power. To the point that prices are falling, we're looking at over supply at current price levels. In fact, Bayan Obo, the largest Chinese mine (and the world's) was closed for November in a bid to keep prices up. There's even more. Another of the Chinese producers, Jiangxi, is largely owned by the family of the incoming Chinese President, Ji Xinping. And there's been quite a lot of rules and regulations trying to put some of the smaller operations out of business: on purely environmental grounds you understand.

And yet global prices continue to fall as global supply rises.

Which brings us to an interesting observation. Monopoly, purely and simply as monopoly, is neither a bad nor a good thing. If someone's the lowest cost producer and can supply total demand then why the heck not leave it as a monopoly? The difficulty comes if someone attempts to exercise those monopoly powers, to gouge consumers in some manner. And for many to most monopolies the exercise of such power leads to competition and the breaking of that monopoly power.

This isn't always true: and we should most certainly take action when that competition cannot, for whatever reason, arise. But as long as a monopoly is contestable then there's usually pretty much nothing wrong with the existence of said monopoly. As the Great Rare Earths Scare of the last few years shows us. As soon as anyone tried to rook consumers by exercising that monopoly the monopoly disappeared.

Free markets beat central planners once again. Oh Dear, such a shame, eh?