A note on the Hillary-Sanders Twitter wars

The main reasons those of us on the Sanders side support him is because

1. His policies match our policies most closely, and
2. He has an amazing record of sticking by those policies even when they were unpopular or he was one of the few dissenting votes (e.g. the Patriot Act, Iraq war, surveillance state, etc.).

Now that (finally) issues like wealth inequality and financialization are becoming mainstream and the triangulation of the DLC has been largely discredited, it’s a no brainer to support the lone candidate that has been advocating for these issues for over 30 years and not the candidate closely associated with the DLC. I don’t want to vote for a candidate that supported NSA spying, that personally signed off on hundreds of extra-judicial assassinations while serving as Secretary of State, that supported the TPP, supported welfare reform, supported DOMA, supported the Patriot Act, supported CISA, was a cheerleader of liberalizing capital flows, supported the Iraq war, supported tax cuts on capital income, supported draconian crime bills, and is willing to compromise on entitlements.

The other side of the debate is that Hillary is smarter, she is a much better political knife fighter. She can form unlikely coalitions, out-think, out-fox, and triangulate her way to achieving key goals, albeit at the expense of compromising on other issues.

But in this case, it becomes more critical to know what her red lines are. But the verdict so far is pretty bleak. It’s one thing to sacrifice the steel industry for the tech industry, or to side with older voters at the expense of younger voters. But in Clinton’s compromising, the group being thrown overboard has too often been the poor and low wage workers. And that, combined with the increasing intransigence of the Republican Party, guarantees that the Overton window will keep shifting to the right, and the middle class will keep being whittled away, one compromise after the next.

Few Hillary supporters are able to identify any foundational principles that are at the core of her being — principles that she would refuse to triangulate away. Yet Clinton supporters are willing to trust her, believing that those principles are there — apparently hidden to the public, hidden from her voting record — or, what is more likely, merely assume that she shares their priorities because they think she is like them. This is the main foundational error that Clinton supporters are making. Identity politics covers over a multitude of bad votes.

My job as a voter is not to support the chosen career path of a particular politician, nor is it to identify with that politician, but to support a candidate that I believe will most likely serve my interests in the current political climate. The wealthiest Americans are waging a brutal class war that is hurting economic growth and investment.  What is needed is a Democratic Party that is not going to let itself get pulled to the right, but will stage a showdown with the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth. We don’t need a brilliant legislative affairs staffer, we need an uncompromising, galvanizing leader. We need a big public debate about a new social compact in this nation, now that one side has defected on its obligations to the other.  We don’t need a Clay, we need a Lincoln.

The Margins of Investment and Price Inertia

J.W. Mason has another excellent blog pointing out that even though risk-free rates are very low, the hurdle rate for new investment remains high, creating a situation in which there is insufficient investment when firms at least appear to respond to revealed shareholder preferences.

I think there are two factors at play here.

First, it’s not the passive investor that prices the firm. The investor that buys the market basket explicitly removes himself from the decision to price the earnings of the firm relative to the earnings of the market basket. It is only someone who takes an outsized position in the firm that is able to price it relative to the market return.  Not everyone can be a passive investor.

That means that if you are sending price signals to the firm, then you are an activist investor that is is shorting the firm and going long the market, or shorting the market and going long the firm. Therefore you can send a signal to the firm or you can be on the efficient frontier, but not both. It is as if signaling the firm is inherently expensive — and you need the firm to earn an excess return just to break even between spending the money to send the price signal or not caring about the price of the firm at all. But the firm only pays attention to those investors who care about its price. This gives rise to inertia, in which a reduction in the market return does not correspond to a reduction in the hurdle rate as signaled to the firm by investors. It also means that in many cases it is more efficient for the firm to ignore investors over the short run. The first factor is the cost of sending price signals or information inertia.

The second effect would be that entering new markets or creating new products is more risky than replacing depreciated capital in established markets. Think, for example, of the risks that Apple took with the introduction of the Apple Watch. At present, it is an enormous risk. What do you think is the chance that the risk pays off? 50/50? Once we know what the demand is, we have new information, and the cost of supplying capital for the Apple watch will decline, but by that time, investments on the margin will be dominated by other risky ventures. So the second effect is that the acquisition of information is expensive, and these costs dominate the risk free rate in forming a barrier to investment on the margin.

SUNG TO THE TUNE OF “THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKIN'”

You keep saying you’ve got something for me.
something you call fastballs, but confess.

You’ve been tearin’ somethin’ you shouldn’t be tearin’
ya know it’s the Ulnar Collateral Ligament.

This dirt is made for rubbing, and that’s just what we’ll do
one of these days we’ll rub our gritty dirt all over you.

You keep hangin’ when you oughta be sliding
and you keep losin’ velocity as well.

You keep slurvin’ when you oughta be curving.
Not even a week for your ligament to rest.

This dirt is made for rubbing, and that’s just what we’ll do
one of these days we’ll rub our gritty dirt all over you.

You keep throwin’ when you shouldn’t be throwing
and you keep thinkin’ that you’ll never get hurt.

Ha! I just found me a brand new gritty lunch pail YEAH
and I’m rubbin’ all over your UCL with dirt.

Are you ready dirt? Start rubbin’!

Brief note on Lack of Land in “Models of Secular Stagnation”

I see there is a kerfuffle about not including land in the Eggertson and Mehrotra’s “Models of Secular Stagnation“, which should raise the equilibrium rate to be negative. I want to make two comments here as a sticky:

Money Financed Deficits Have the Same Future Tax Obligations As Bond Financed Deficits

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Nick Rowe wonders how much of a deficit would need to be money-financed as opposed to bond-financed. I say it doesn’t matter how you finance the deficit, what matters is the time path of interest rates (which is independent of how the deficit is financed).

The next 100 years

I was guided by SRW’s tweet to Charlie Stross’ “A Different Cluetrain“. It’s worth a read, and many have been feeling the same things, although expressions of these anxieties are different among the left and right. Here is my response.

The Forgotten Single Quote

This is a blog describing something very trivial — lack of proper escaping of the single quote (U+0027) in many commonly used string escaping libraries — with very serious side effects (potential for cross site scripting).

Links!

• Kudos to JW Mason for describing the regime change in corporate behavior. But I wonder how much of the borrowing is just tax arbitrage (e.g. borrowing to pay a dividend when the firm really earned the extra cash but is hiding it overseas).
• No other way to describe Lenovo’s behavior than this.
• Javascript has a unicode problem, but it’s not the only one.
• Discussion of Keynesian labor demand

A Little Bit of Treason

Like the public, I am conflicted about Snowden.

Clearly he’s a whistleblower, what he did required courage, and I have no reason to question his beliefs or motivations. Moreover, his revelations about government surveillance are very important and in some ways necessary for an informed debate about what our government is doing. I am better off knowing what I know. At the same time, we can’t have insiders scooping up mass documents and taking them out of security controls whenever they personally believe that they are serving the public’s interest.

Key Heist Questions (UPDATED)

I’ve been reading about the purported GCHQ theft of SIM card keys. The more I read, the more I’m confused as to what was stolen and why.

UPDATE: Here is a better document describing what was stolen. It appears to be large volumes of the K_i, not any master key or other keys.