Ramamritham infiltrates Al Qaeda

I think we have found the way to destroy Al Qaeda, or for that matter, any terrorist organisation. Don't send the Navy Seals or the National Security Guard or Special Forces. Send in Ramamritham instead !

This post has no place in what is ostensibly a business blog, but this writer could not miss the opportunity to ridicule Ramamritham anywhere and everywhere. So , with apologies , here's the story.

When the French forces recently retook much of Mali from terrorists, the press who followed them found a detailed letter and a number of documents in a building which was a base or Al Qaeda. The letter was to a thug and hoodlum called Moktar Belmoktar. It throws light on how Ramamritham has wormed his way even into Al Qaeda.

The letter was a "warning letter" to the said terrorist castigating him for not filing expense statements !!! It also was expressing displeasure at his skipping meetings which he was to attend !! He was also castigated for pricing below Head Office instructions - apparently for release of a kidnap victim he agreed to a price of 700,000 Euros when the going rate was  3 million. He was also censured for making a "business trip" to Libya without having taken approval in advance.

Moktar was also revealed to have complained that he was not being promoted and that somebody less qualified was instead given the job. He sulked for a while , refused to take phone calls and complained in his PDP ! Still not being promoted, he then quit and started his own rival murderous gang.

If Al Qaeda monsters have to file expense statements and take prior permission for foreign travel, we have nothing more to fear from them. They are doomed.

I shall make a few more suggestions to Ramamritham to further help him in his noble quest

• Impose a detailed dress code on terrorists. They have to wear a tie between Monday and Thursday. Friday, they have to wear  T shirts to show that they are cool
• Instruct them that not displaying their ID card while carrying out a terrorist attack is an offence and if found so, they will be sent back home
• Display the pick up and drop schedule every day. Moktar has to catch Innova No S-47D. He will be dropped only at end of his road and not in front of his home
• He can browse his personal email only between 12.41 and 13.04 every day . Facebook, Twitter, etc are banned. All Jihadist sites of Al Qaeda are open, but rival sites are banned
• Moktar has not filled last month's self appraisal form, demonstrating that he has adhered to the values of Al Qaeda (with examples). Therefore he may be asked to report to the HR manager for a dressing down.

All hail Ramamritham, for helping defang Al Qaeda.

STOCK BUBBLE: WAIT FOR IT TO POP

I'm going to start off today and show you what Fed policy has given us over the last decade and a half. What the Fed has accomplished has been one bubble after another.

We are obviously in the final euphoric parabolic phase of a third stock market bubble. When viewed with the benefit of the 200 day moving average as a mean regression line, it's glaringly obvious just how dangerous this market has become. As history has shown, anytime the market stretches too far above the mean the forces of gravity eventually collapse price back to and often considerably below the mean.

Yet despite thousands of years of evidence that parabolas are never sustainable, investors invariably get suckered into buying into these moves and get caught when they inevitably crash.

This I can say with 100% certainty, this parabolic move in stocks is going to crash, just like every other parabolic move in history. 

The smart investor will wait patiently on the sidelines and once the crash occurs the low risk trade will be to go long as the Fed will attempt to reflate the market. This is a virtually guaranteed strategy to make money, although very few people will have the patience to wait for the trade to develop.

The vast majority of traders will ignore the extremely risky environment, because his emotions make him think that he is getting left behind. He will buy into the parabola assuming that it will continue indefinitely (Does this sound familiar to the tech bubble and real estate bubble?). 

History however has shown that this is never the case, and buying any asset this stretched above the 200 day moving average always turns out to be a gamble as to whether or not you can exit ahead of the crash. If you miss time the exit, and most people do, you end up paying a heavy price for following the herd into a trade that you logically know is too risky.

Once the stock market parabola collapses then the Fed's endless money machine will generate another bubble in another asset class.

I strongly believe the next bubble will be in the precious metals market.

Tax evasion is a crime. Tax avoidance is a .... ?

In the good old days, this was an easy cliche. Tax evasion (breaking the law) was a crime. Tax avoidance (minimising paying the tax within the law) was something you were duty bound to do. Whether you are an individual, company, whatever. Period. Now it isn't so clear cut an answer.  And that says something about our times.

Witness the case of Apple. It does aggressive tax planning (all within the law). It has a big subsidiary in Ireland and has done a deal with the government there for a low tax rate. It does not bring overseas profits into the US, because it is double taxed then; so it leaves all its overseas profits overseas. All very legitimate. And yet there has been a huge outcry and a Congressional hearing where Apple is accused of not paying "its fair share of taxes".

Similar accusations are levied on Amazon, Google and Starbucks in the UK and indeed in many other countries. Nowhere are the authorities claiming they broke the law. They are just angry that these companies pay a low or zero tax despite large businesses in those countries.

From a public's point of view, there is no difference between evasion and avoidance. The expectation is that all companies must pay lots of taxes irrespective of the law and facts. Equally all rich people must pay big amounts of tax even if the law does not require them to do so. But for each individual himself, it is perfectly OK to evade tax (breaking the law). Queer set of values.

Almost everybody in India breaks the law when it comes to taxes. And before you protest too much, please answer if you have disclosed your savings bank interest as income in your tax return and if you have done no cash transactions above Rs 10,000. The less said about professions like lawyers, doctors and the like, the better. The salaried class is one of the worst offenders - their salaries are caught by the taxman under the withholding tax regime. Everything else, in the eyes of the salaried man or woman is not to be disclosed as after all they are paying "lots of tax" on their salaries.

Why does this work like that. Why is it OK for us to evade tax, but not for others even to avoid it. Is it just pure jealousy against the rich ? Is it just one law for everybody else and one law for us ? What is going on ?

For corporates and rich individuals, there is an expectation of  social responsibility at play here. It is not enough to follow the law. It is now required to be seen as "being fair to society" everywhere. This is a woolly concept ; after all what is the concept of fair.  But each company has to make its own "contract" with society. The more successful you are, the more demanding the contract.

Social responsibility has gotten an altogether new meaning, A far more challenging meaning. Companies have to be seen as "good citizens, whatever that means. Notice that the public's definition of a good citizen is "I break the law, but you shall do over and above the law". "

Its a tough world out there.

How to think about the future

Nesta has just released a video (below) of the event I did in London a few weeks ago with Nate Silver and others. It's a short discussion (5 minutes from each) on prediction and forecasting, followed by 45 minutes of (good) questions from the audience. My wife's opinion is that I spoke well but radiated unnecessary waves of negativity over the audience by emphasizing the limitations of prediction and the dangers that follow from believing you can predict when in fact you cannot. Maybe so! But sometimes I do like to be cautious...

  

The economics of spot fixing

Yeah Yeah, I am that sort of a nerd. While much of India is agog with the spot fixing scandal that broke yesterday, this blogger ruminates on the economics of it. Yes, he is a weirdo !

Having got that out of the way, a few words on the scandal, for the 3 million non Indian readers this blog gets :)  There is a nonsensical game (anybody who suggests the word cricket in this connection will be personally bashed up by me) in which there is a cash machine called the Indian Premier League. Yesterday three players were caught, allegedly  hand in glove with bookies, manipulating results. That's all you really need to know.

What is baffling me is the economics of it. There are all sorts of reports, but I think it is safe to say that at least Rs 20 lakhs (some $40,000) was allegedly paid to the players to give away a minimum number of runs in an over. Let us say, for this to be profitable to the crooks who are betting on it, they must wager at least an equivalent amount at odds of say 5:1, otherwise its not worth it.  For this sort of betting to be accepted by the bookies and to remain valid, there must have been others betting at least 5 times this amount. So all in all some Rs 1.2 crores ($ Quarter a million) must have been bet.

All this simply on one over !!!!  An over, for the uninitiated, is of 6 balls and takes 3 minutes or so to complete. The way this scam seemed to have operated, there was about 2 or 3 minutes notice to the crooks that it was going to be fixed in that over.

What I want to know is who are these blokes who are prepared to gamble quarter a million dollars in 3 minutes on something as arcane as the number of runs given away in an over in an inconsequential match. And there are 40 such overs in one match and there are some 70 or so matches. The arithmetic is mind boggling.

Who are these jokers ? What do they look like and which planet do they come from ?

PS. Just for the record, the GDP per capita of India is $1,492.

Blind on purpose: equilibrium as a conceptual filter in economics

A couple of years ago, I came across this article written in The Huffington Post by economist and game theorist David Levine. It carried the provocative title "Why Economists Are Right," and argued back against all those who were then criticizing economics -- especially the rational expectations assumption -- in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Levine's article is delicately crafted and sounds superficially convincing. Indeed, it seems to make the rational expectations idea almost obvious. His argument is a masterpiece of showmanship in the manner of Milton Friedman -- its conclusion seems unavoidable, yet the logic seems somehow fishy, though in a way that is hard to pin down.

The most notable passage in this sense is the following:

In simple language what rational expectations means is "if people believe this forecast it will be true." By contrast if a theory is not one of rational expectations it means "if people believe this forecast it will not be true." Obviously such a theory has limited usefulness. Or put differently: if there is a correct theory, eventually most people will believe it, so it must necessarily be rational expectations. Any other theory has the property that people must forever disbelieve the theory regardless of overwhelming evidence -- for as soon as the theory is believed it is wrong.

Seems convincing, doesn't it? Or at least almost convincing. Is this the only claim made by the rational expectations assumption? If so, maybe it is reasonable. But there's a lot lurking in this paragraph.

When I first read this I thought -- well, he's just assuming that people will learn over time to hold rational beliefs. In other words, he simply asserts (maybe because he believes this) that the only possible outcome in our world has to be an equilibrium. If people have certain beliefs, and their actions based on these lead to a collective outcome that does not confirm those beliefs, then they'll have to adjust those beliefs. There's no equilibrium but ongoing change. From this, Levine assumes that if this goes on for a while that peoples' beliefs will adjust until they lead to actions and collective outcomes that confirm these beliefs and bring about an equilibrium. But this is simply his personal assumption, presumably because he likes game theory and has expertise in game theory and so likes to think about equilibria.

The world is much more flexible. The more general possibility is that people adjust their beliefs, act differently, and their collective behaviour leads to another outcome that against does not confirm their beliefs (at least not perfectly), so they adjust again. And there's an ongoing dance and co-evolution between beliefs and outcomes that never settles into any equilibrium.

But I've kept this essay in the back of my mind, never quite sure if my interpretation made sense, or if the hole in Levine's logic could really be this blazingly obvious. I'm now more strongly convinced that it is, in part because of a beautiful paper I came across yesterday by economist Brian Arthur. Arthur's paper is a wonderful review of the motivation behind complexity science and its application to economics. Two passages resonate in particular with Levine's argument about rational expectations:

One of the earliest insights of economics—it certainly goes back to Smith—is that aggregate patterns [in the economy] form from individual behavior, and individual behavior in turn responds to these aggregate patterns: there is a recursive loop. It is this recursive loop that connects with complexity. Complexity is not a theory but a movement in the sciences that studies how the interacting elements in a system create overall patterns, and how these overall patterns in turn cause the interacting elements to change or adapt. It might study how individual cars together act to form patterns in traffic, and how these patterns in turn cause the cars to alter their position. Complexity is about formation—the formation of structures—and how this formation affects the objects causing it.

To look at the economy, or areas within the economy, from a complexity viewpoint then would mean asking how it evolves, and this means examining in detail how individual agents’ behaviors together form some outcome and how this might in turn alter their behavior as a result. Complexity in other words asks how individual behaviors might react to the pattern they together create, and how that pattern would alter itself as a result. This is often a difficult question; we are asking how a process is created from the purposed actions of multiple agents. And so economics early in its history took a simpler approach, one more amenable to mathematical analysis. It asked not how agents’ behaviors would react to the aggregate patterns these created, but what behaviors (actions, strategies, expectations) would be upheld by—would be consistent with—the aggregate patterns these caused. It asked in other words what patterns would call for no changes in micro-behavior, and would therefore be in stasis, or equilibrium. (General equilibrium theory thus asked what prices and quantities of goods produced and consumed would be consistent with—would pose no incentives for change to—the overall pattern of prices and quantities in the economy’s markets. Classical game theory asked what strategies, moves, or allocations would be consistent with—would be the best course of action for an agent (under some criterion)—given the strategies, moves, allocations his rivals might choose. And rational expectations economics asked what expectations would be consistent with—would on average be validated by—the outcomes these expectations together created.)

This equilibrium shortcut was a natural way to examine patterns in the economy and render them open to mathematical analysis. It was an understandable—even proper—way to push economics forward. And it achieved a great deal. ...  But there has been a price for this equilibrium finesse. Economists have objected to it—to the neoclassical construction it has brought about—on the grounds that it posits an idealized, rationalized world that distorts reality, one whose underlying assumptions are often chosen for analytical convenience. I share these objections. Like many economists I admire the beauty of the neoclassical economy; but for me the construct is too pure, too brittle—too bled of reality. It lives in a Platonic world of order, stasis, knowableness, and perfection. Absent from it is the ambiguous, the messy, the real.

Here I think Arthur has perfectly described the limitation of Levine's position. Levine is happy with rational expectations because he is willing to restrict his field of interest only to those very few special cases in which peoples' expectations do correspond to collective outcomes. Anything else he thinks is uninteresting. I'm not even sure that Levine realizes he has so restricted his field of interest only to equilibrium, thereby neglecting the much larger and richer field of phenomena outside of it.

One other final comment from Arthur, with which I totally agree:

If we assume equilibrium we place a very strong filter on what we can see in the economy. Under equilibrium by definition there is no scope for improvement or further adjustment, no scope for exploration, no scope for creation, no scope for transitory phenomena, so anything in the economy that takes adjustment—adaptation, innovation, structural change, history itself—must be bypassed or dropped from theory. The result may be a beautiful structure, but it is one that lacks authenticity, aliveness, and creation.

Everybody bashes the Taxman

If you have been following the news in the US, you might have noticed an almighty hullabaloo over the the IRS (their tax man) having targeted Tea Party and Conservative groups. Much hot air and righteous indignation is being spouted and Obama has fired the IRS chief yesterday. Almost everybody on earth loves to bash the taxman (rightfully so !) and this is all good fun.

Except that I believe that in this case the bashing is wrong. Or at least much exaggerated.

What happened is this. The IRS admits that it subjected groups which bore the name tea party, or patriot to extra scrutiny. The fact that such groups are exclusively Republican and that the President is a Democrat seems to indicate political targeting. That is, of course, against the law. Hence all this noise.

But why did the IRS do this - after all, they are not fools. If you try and answer this question, a different picture emerges.

The problem all started with, in my view,  the appalling judgement by the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United case in 2010. In layman terms the Supreme Court decided that organisations were people and had the same right of free speech as you and me. Therefore there could be no curbs on their political activities and donations.

Overnight, all sorts of action groups sprung up and the money started being being poured into US elections of all kinds.  Many of these outfits do not want to disclose who really gives them money. The way to achieve this is to register as a social welfare organisation under the tax code which then grants you tax exempt status - something called Sec 501(c)(4) exemption !! You are not prohibited then from indulging in political activity - its just that the primary activity has to be social welfare in nature. The main purpose of these groups is not to avoid tax (for they do not really seek to make a profit). The primary purpose is to avoid disclosing who is giving all the money.

It is probably a safe bet to say that the majority of these groups (Republican or Democrat) have zero interest in social welfare and are primarily there for  political activity.

From 2010 to 2012, the number of such organisations doubled to some 3400. A large number of them were "tea party" or "patriots". Do you really expect the IRS to sit tight and watch all this. After all, it is their job to check whether these outfits really were primarily involved in social welfare. 

The IRS did not prosecute them or withdraw their status. All they did , in true Ramamrtiham style, is to harass them with lengthy requests for information, do audit reviews, delay decisions on their applications and commence painstaking procedures. In this my sympathies are entirely with the said groups as we all know what the incredible capabilities of Ramamritham are.

The real culprit is the political donations sloshing around consequent to that awful Supreme Court verdict.  In true US politics style, this will not be addressed - instead the IRS will be hauled over coals. Yuk !

I never thought I would ever write a post in defence of Ramamritham, but there you go ... !

The European transactions tax -- an act of pure hope?

My latest column in Bloomberg came out about a week ago. Forgot to mention it. The story is this: The European Commission has very firm plans to introduce a financial transactions tax -- a "Tobin" style tax -- on most financial transactions at the beginning of January 2014. That's just over 6 months away. I was surprised to learn they were taking this step, as I thought that very little was really known about the likely consequence of such a tax, especially introduced on such a grand scale. So, I spent a week or so looking into all the research I could find on financial transactions taxes, theoretical and empirical, and came to the conclusion that -- indeed, very little is known. But Europe is going ahead anyway!

If anyone wants to look at some of the original research, I suggest having a look at the following few things. First, the best overall review is this one by Neil McCulloch and Grazia Pacillo of the University of Sussex. Their conclusion is, in two sentences, that...

We conclude that, contrary to what is often assumed, a Tobin Tax is feasible and, if appropriately designed, could make a significant contribution to revenue without causing major distortions. However, it would be unlikely to reduce market volatility and could even increase it.

But if you read the report, you'll see that the outcome seems very likely to depend on fine details of how the tax is implemented and of the markets to which it is applied.

Other important studies are this one by Westerhoff and Pellizzari which uses an agent based market model to test how the consequences of a transactions tax might depend on market microstructure. I think this is among the most sophisticated studies done to date (although it can still be improved in many ways and represents a beginning, not an end). There's also an older review from 1993 by Schwert and Seguin that I read and which is useful (sadly, I'm not sure where the link is.... I have a pdf and found it by googling, that's all I can say). Finally, if you have the brave heart to read the original impact assessment of the EC proposal for the tax, it is here. That report doesn't actually mention any research on how the tax will likely influence markets, but only looks at how the macroeconomy might be effected.

The real worry over Europe...

What's the most important thing to worry about in Europe - or with the economic crisis more generally? I think for many people -- especially economists of the Chicago school -- the biggest concern is that we might lose a couple of percentage points of cherished growth over the next ten years, leading to a tragic loss of GDP relative to where we might have been. But the really important thing about this crisis isn't about money or wealth, but about social stability. George Soros, as usual, sees more clearly than others:

I have been very concerned about Europe. The euro is in the process of destroying the European Union. To some extent, this has already happened, in the sense that the EU was meant to be a voluntary association of equal states. The crisis has turned it into something that is radically different: a relationship between creditors and debtors. And, in a financial crisis, the creditors are in charge. It is no longer a relationship between equals. The fate of Italy, for example, is no longer determined by Italian politics – which is in a crisis of its own, I would say – but rather by the creditor/debtor relationship. That is really what dictates policies.

The point is that this European crisis is NOT JUST a financial crisis. It is much more serious than that. It's a political and social crisis. We talk about it in financial terms, but the really important thing is a massive breakdown in cooperation and political function, obviously in Europe, but elsewhere as well. A few years ago, the idea of a global financial crisis seemed pretty hard to imagine. What are we failing to imagine now?

Soros also has a few thoughts on austerity:

The evidence is growing that austerity is not working. Sooner or later, I expect a reversal of the current fiscal policy – the sooner, the better. There is a political problem, namely that the creditors dictate economic policy. And there is a financial or an economic problem, namely that the policy the creditors advocate is counter-productive. The rest of the world, in the face of excessive unemployment, is no longer trying to reduce prematurely government debt accumulated during the financial crisis. And the rest of the world engages in quantitative easing. The latest convert is Japan, where the central bank has been forced to abandon its orthodox monetary policy. So I think it is only a matter of time. Something has to give in Europe, because Europe is out of touch, out of synch, with the rest of the world.

Event coming up in Oxford... 4 June

For anyone who is interested, I will be in Oxford in two weeks speaking along with Doyne Farmer at the above public event. Should be interesting. Organized by the Institute of Physics.

New interview

Interview with Al Korelin

What has"econophysics" achieved?

Research in so-called "econophysics" -- the application of ideas and concepts from physics to problems in finance and economics -- tends to be quite controversial. Many economists in particular seem to find it fairly annoying, although quite a few others either work in the area or do work that is closely associated in conceptual terms. Physicists in the area have been criticized on various occasions for being ignorant of prior work in economics (sometimes true), of using less than rigorous statistics (I haven't seen anything convincing on this) and of employing unrealistic models.

There is plenty of uninspiring work in the field, as in any area of science. Out of politeness, and to avoid boring anyone, I won't make a list. But physicists have made quite a number of lasting contributions to a deeper understanding of finance and economics; in some cases, I think, they have helped to change the direction of research in economics. So I thought it might be worth making a short list of the things that I think have indeed been success stories. Here goes:

1. More than anything, physicists have helped to establish empirical facts about financial markets; for example, that the probability of large market returns decreases in accordance with an inverse cubic power law in many diverse markets. This seems to be a universal result, at least approximately. I've written about this work here. Work by physicists has also established other generic market patterns such as the self-similar structure of market volatility. I very nice review of these patterns is this one by Lisa Borland and colleagues.

Now, did econophysicists initiate this kind of work? Of course not. Benoit Mandelbrot found the first evidence for fat tailed distributions in the early 1960s (and Eugene Fama even wrote about that work in his first paper!). But research by physicists has made our knowledge of these empirical regularities much more precise.

2. Physicists have also identified instructive links between markets and other natural phenomena. For example, in the period following a large market crash, markets show lingering activity which follows the famous Omori law for earthquake aftershocks (events become less likely in simple inverse proportion to the time after the main shock). Such connections indicate that the explanation of such market dynamics may well not depend on facts specific to finance and economics; that more general dynamical principles may be involved.

3. Physicists have also helped develop more realistic models of markets, here mostly in collaboration with economists. In the mid-1990s, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute first demonstrated how fat-tailed dynamics could arise naturally in models representing a market as an ecology of interacting adaptive agents. Models of this kind have since become widespread and used to perform some of the most sophisticated tests of policy proposals -- for the idea of a financial transactions tax, for example, as currently planned by the European Commission. For this, econophysics deserves some credit. For a nice review, see this paper by economist Blake Lebaron (I've summarized it here). 

If you doubt that the early work at Sante Fe had a real effect on encouraging this work, pushing the study of computational models of heterogeneous adaptive interacting agents to the forefront of market modelling, take a look at this 2002 review by economist Cars Hommes. As seminal work in this area, he cites papers in the early 1990s by Alan Kirman, by Brad DeLong and colleagues and by the group at Santa Fe which involved a key collaboration between economists and physicists. This work helped kick off, as he describes it, a transformation (still ongoing) of style in modelling markets:

In the past two decades economics has witnessed an important paradigmatic change: a shift from a rational representative agent analytically tractable model of the economy to a boundedly rational, heterogeneous agents computationally oriented evolutionary framework. This change has at least three closely related aspects: (i) from representative agent to heterogeneous agent systems; (ii) from full rationality to bounded rationality; and (iii) from a mainly analytical to a more computational approach...

Hommes makes it sound here as if this transformation and paradigm shift is now widely accepted in economics. I'm not so sure about that as there still seem to be plenty of people eagerly working away on rational representative agent models.

4. Work in econophysics -- through the study of minimal models such as the minority game -- has also revealed surprising qualitative features of markets; for example, that a key determinant of market dynamics is the diversity of participants' strategic behaviour. Markets work fairly smoothly if participants act using many diverse strategies, but break down if many traders chase few opportunities and use similar strategies to do so. Strategic crowding of this kind can cause an abrupt phase transition from smooth behaviour into a regime prone to sharp, virtually discontinuous price movements. 

If this point seems esoteric, one fairly recent study found more than 18,000 instances over five years where a stock price rose or fell by roughly 1% or more in well under a tenth of a second. These "glitches" or "fractures" may signal a transition of markets into a regime dominated by fast algorithmic trading. As algorithms compete on speed, they naturally rely on simple strategies, which encourages strategic crowding. The underlying phase transition phenomenon may therefore be quite relevant to policy. I know of nothing in traditional economic analysis that describes this kind of phase transition or does anything to elucidate the kinds of conditions under which it might take place.

5. Yale economist John Geanakoplos has argued for two decades that a key variable driving major economic booms and busts is the amount of leverage used by financial institutions. It goes up in good times, down in bad. Since the financial crisis, controlling leverage has become a major new focus of financial regulators, and their work may well benefit from physics-inspired models of the dynamics of markets in which firms compete with one another through the use of leverage. A notable study by Geanakoplos and two physicists found that such a market will naturally become unstable as leverage increases beyond a threshold. This boundary of instability is not at all obvious to market participants or made evident by standard economic theories. Such models may well help improve macroeconomic policy and financial regulation (I've written a little more on this here).

6. Physicists have also helped clarify other fundamental sources of market instability. For example, standard thinking in economics holds that the sharing of risks between financial institutions -- through derivatives and other instruments -- should both make individual firms safer and the entire banking system more stable. However, a collaboration of economists and physicists recently showed that too much risk sharing in a network of institutions can decrease stability. (Some discussion of this work here.) An over-connected network makes it too easy for trouble originating in one place to spread elsewhere. Again, this work involves an important collaboration between economists and physicists.

7. On a similar theme, fundamental analysis by econophysicists has examined the relationship between market efficiency and stability. In economic theory, markets become more efficient -- more able to pool collective wisdom and price assets accurately -- as they become more "complete," i.e. equipped with such a broad range of financial instruments that essentially any trade can be undertaken. The econophysics work has shown, however, that completeness brings with it inherent market instability, a possibility never raised (to my knowledge) by standard economic analyses.

8. The complexity of today’s markets makes is essentially impossible for financial institutions to judge the risks they face, as the health of any decent-sized financial institution depends on a vast web of links to other institutions about which little may be known. To improve risk judgement, econophysicists have recently developed a network measure called DebtRank which aims to cut through network complexity and reveal the true riskyness of any particular institution. This idea may also provide a natural means for making markets more stable, for if regulators made DebtRank results public, then anyone would, at a glance, gain a much more accurate view of the true risks associated with any bank. If banks seeking to borrow funds were forced to do so from the least risky banks, systemic instability would be improved. This is, for now, a highly speculative idea, but one that clearly has promise.

So there -- a list of 8 specific areas where I think econophysics has had an important impact on economics and finance. This is, as I said, a very short list, and of course reflects only my limited view. It also reflects limitations on how much I can write in one sitting, as there are clearly other notable achievements such as recent theories of market impact -- here and here, for example -- which make significant steps toward explaining how much prices change when someone sells an asset. I haven't mentioned applications of random matrix theory which cast serious doubt over how much empirical calculations of stock correlations really imply about the true correlations between those assets (undermining Markowitz portfolio theory). Then there's an entire field of work exploring how firm growth rates scale with firm size and what might account for this.

All of which suggests, to my mind, that econophysics has been a very valuable development indeed.

You do live on another planet -- evidence from the SEC

It seems that famed hedge fund manager Philip Falcone has, in principle, agreed to terms with the SEC in the case in which he was accused of "manipulating the market, using hedge fund assets to pay his taxes and “secretly” favoring select customers at the expense of others." Not surprisingly, as this is the SEC we're talking about, the agreement included the usual weasel clause letting the defendant admit no guilt. But it gets even better.

If you want evidence that the SEC was really determined to bend over backward on this one, how about the fact that the agreement didn't even include the usual statement, by the defendant, not to commit fraud in the future:

The settlement deal... is also notable for something that it did not include: a common provision that prohibits defendants from committing future violations with fraudulent intent. The lack of a so-called fraud injunction is an unusual victory for the target of an S.E.C. action.    

You may wonder why it even makes sense to include a clause prohibiting a defendant from committing future fraudulent acts, as fraud is already illegal. And just being a citizen essentially means you've agreed to it. Apparently, this clause makes it easier to prosecute future cases (the court can hold the defendant in contempt of court, at least in principle, for violating the law even after telling the court that he wouldn't). But here we have the SEC going to extra lengths not to make Mr. Falcone make such a terrible promise.

EUPHORIA PHASE TURNS INTO PARABOLIC PHASE

The euphoria phase of the bull market that I warned about months ago is now beginning its final parabolic phase.

I'm guessing we still have another month-month and a half before this runaway move finally ends. Depending on how far above the 200 day moving average it ends up stretching, I think there's a pretty good chance we will see the entire intermediate rally wiped out in a matter of days or even hours when this house of cards finally comes tumbling down.

That is how these runaway moves terminate. They crash! Parabolas always crash.

These things can go on and on for months and months with savvy investors becoming more and more nervous the longer the move persists. The longer the trend continues the more professional traders all position right next to the exit, until finally one day everybody tries to get out the door at the same time. It's that mass exodus to lock in profits that triggers the crash. The magnitude is determined by how far and how long the market stretches above the 200 day moving average.

Markets are no different than a pendulum. They oscillate back-and-forth above and below the median line, which in this case is the 200 day moving average. Bernanke is not doing anyone any favors by stretching the market unnaturally far to the upside. All it is going to do is guarantee an exceptionally violent move to the downside once the forces of regression to the mean break the parabola.

Again I would warn traders not to try and sell short as it's virtually impossible to determine when the parabola is going to fail. My best guess is late June or early July based upon the normal timing band for the dollar index to form its next intermediate degree bottom. As I expect the crash to correspond with a dollar rally that would seem to be as good a guess as any.

For savvy traders the play isn't to sell short, it's to go long once the crash has occurred as the Fed will almost certainly double down on QE in the attempt to reflate asset prices.

Of course the real play isn't going to be in the stock market. The stock market is in the topping phase of this cyclical bull market. Yes the Fed may be able to levitate stocks back to marginal new highs, but the real money is going to be in commodities as all that excess liquidity will inevitably make its way into the undervalued commodity markets where the potential return is many multiples greater than in a very mature cyclical bull market in stocks with a weakening global economy.

Thou shall be subsidised whether you want it or not

The law is an ass. Governments are a bigger ass. Ramamritham is the chief ass. But even by those standards this takes the cake.

Those familiar with India knows that this poor country indulges in wasteful expenditure of the worst sort. Free colour TVs, grinders, etc have made the news. But the criminal, inexcusable and worst sort of government waste is the subsidy on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). If there was a word stronger than criminal, I would use it.

LPG  is supplied to all and sundry at a subsidy. It is sold at roughly half the cost - the government is supposed to pay the balance half to the oil companies , but it does so as and when it feels like it, or not at all. It is actually quite difficult to estimate how much the total subsidy is as the government hides this in different pockets but my estimate is that this monstrosity costs us some Rs 30,000 crores.

The really poor don't use any cooking fuel at all - maybe firewood. The poor use kerosene. Only the relatively rich use LPG. Its actually the middle class which is pocketing all this money.

The middle class moans about the cost of cooking gas . And yet you only have to go 1 mile near T Nagar and the gold shops in Chennai to see the amount of money the middle class has. The total "subsidy" for a  year that you can now get is Rs 3600 or so per family. Are you telling me that the middle class household cannot afford to pay Rs 3600 more per year for cooking their food. This is the same middle class which is snapping up the newest model of smartphones every year.  Its a complete farce.

The impact overall of this organised stealing is simply awful. India has made no investments at all in piped gas supply. LPG cylinders are  still being trucked all over the country. There is zero interest in any alternate fuels.  A whole bureaucracy has evolved around oil companies, agencies, transporters etc. Try getting a new cooking gas connection now - its possibly easier to learn quantum mechanics.  If you wish to do a case study on how not to treat a consumer, all you have to do is stand near a gas agency for an hour and witness the tales of woe of the people coming there.

Actually, raising the price of cooking gas cylinder by Rs 1000 per cylinder might be a good idea - it will cause Rajalakshmi to reduce her girth ! Eating less food, especially by the middle class, is a desirable social goal :)

The problem is that there is really no other choice. Private gas companies do offer unsubsidised cooking gas without all the contortions, but they are small scale and unreliable. Even then, quite a few consumers have opted to go there, simply because of the impossibility of handling Ramamritham's requirements.

Being a contentious citizen (!!!), this blogger went to his agency and asked not to be given a subsidy. He was willing to pay the full price. He was promptly told that this was not possible and he has no option but to take the subsidised price.

What sort of a place is this where a consumer offers to pay more and the seller refuses. If ever proof was needed that governments, and Ramamrithams, are an ass ..........

BUY ONE GET ONE FREE

I know a great many people have gotten discouraged during the last 6 months. Many have probably gotten knocked off the bull, and some may even buy into the end of the bull market nonsense that many analysts have been spouting lately. 

I can assure you the gold bull is not dead. Human nature hasn't changed. Bernanke's printing press hasn't stopped. The Dow:gold ratio hasn't reached 1:1 and the world hasn't solved it's ever growing debt problem.

Gold just suffered a minor manipulation event after QE4 that drove price back below $1700 and held it there until the dollar rallied out of it's intermediate cycle low. Then big money manufactured a stop run at the $1523 level to trigger a climax selling event. They used that panic to transfer I estimate somewhere between a quarter to a half  trillion dollars worth of shares in ETF's, mining stock, and physical from weak hands to strong hands.

These players now have huge positions in preparation for either another leg up, or the final bubble phase of the secular bull market. If that's the case then gold should rally for about another year and a half with a final parabolic blowoff top sometime in late 2014 or early 2015.

A top in 2015 would culminate a 14-15 year trend which is about normal for a secular bull move.

As hard as it is to do right now this is the time traders need to be positioning for the next, or the last leg up in this bull market.

For the next couple of days I'm going to make an offer to any expired subscribers, buy one get one free. Buy a one month subscription and I will give you the second month free. This should be long enough to get you through the bottoming process and far enough along to convince everyone the bull market isn't finished. At that point you can decide whether to let your subscription expire or continue.

Make sure you let me know that you are a returning subscriber when you subscribe. I will email you instructions on how to turn off auto renew and get your second month free.

OFFER EXPIRED

From those to whom much is given, much is expected

Capitalism, and more specifically markets, is the best mechanism humans have invented to pool resources from where they are available and get them to where they are needed the most.  This is true of capital. This is true of raw materials. This is also true of goods and services. This is , alas, not true of talent.

Talent is a blessing given by God to some of us. It would be vain to consider that talent is something we have earned. Yes, we may have nurtured it; yes we may have developed it; yes we may have worked extremely hard on it. But no; "we didn't build it" (with full apologies to the GOP). It was given to us.

And from those to whom much is given; much is expected too. You would expect that mankind would devise mechanisms whereby the world's best talent works on the most pressing problems facing it.  But here, mankind's mechanism to channel resources seems to fail. For sure, there is a talent market that pools talent and sends them to who is ready to pay the highest value for it.  But not necessarily to address the pressing problems humanity faces.

The best talent in the world does not work on eradicating, or at least minimising,  poverty. It does not work on preventing wars from happening and preventing the countless from being decimated by war. It does not work on the great inequities around the world. It does not work on preventing the so many preventable deaths of children dying of diseases which are eminently treatable today. It does not work in the most complex management task of all - managing countries.  It does not work in the challenge of leaving the world a better place for our children - without a crippling debt burden, without a deteriorating environment, without the hopelessness of a better world that seems to afflict the young today.

We all know, where the best talent in the world goes to. But why are markets so unable to channel talent to where it is needed the most ? For the benefit of all mankind. For future generations. For making the world a better place.

If markets fail to do this job, we have to invent another mechanism that will.  

This lament is inspired by the speech made at Harvard in 2007, by William H Gates III. He is not a great speaker, but his thoughts and ideas are truly great. The title of this post is a quote from a letter written by his mother to Melinda Gates when they were married.

Interview

Interview with Al Korelin 

STRETCHING, STRETCHING, STRETCHING

The runaway move in the stock market that we have been watching over the last few months continues to stretch higher and longer. Let me emphasize again, these things always end badly. Usually in some kind of crash, or semi crash.

I strongly advise traders not to chase this move. It's way too late  and risk is extremely high. If you don't time the exit perfectly you risk getting caught in the crash.

The way to correctly trade a runaway move like this, is to wait patiently for the crash to unfold, and then buy long as the Fed doubles down on QE in the attempt to reflate asset prices.

The crash could happen at any time, but based on the intermediate dollar cycle, which is due to bottom in late June or early July, I'm expecting the stock market swoon to correspond with the dollar rallying out of that major bottom. So my best guess is in late June or early July we will see this artificial rally come crumbling down.

Let me emphasize that while I think the crash is going to occur later this summer, there is no guarantee it can't happen sooner.

On a side note: I heard a commercial yesterday in Las Vegas for a seminar on how to get rich flipping houses. Seriously? Are we really stupid enough to go down that road again?