Jere­my Grantham pricked, if not the hous­ing bub­ble itself, then at least the bub­ble that prop­er­ty mar­ket spruik­ers live in, with the quip that:

“Bub­bles have quite a few things in com­mon but hous­ing bub­bles have a spec­tac­u­lar thing in com­mon, and that is every one of them is con­sid­ered unique and dif­fer­ent.” (Hous­ing mar­ket a ‘time bomb’, says invest­ment leg­end: The Aus­tralian June 16, 2010)

Preliminary Remarks

As not­ed in Debt­watch No. 44, I have stopped writ­ing the month­ly Debt­watch Report to focus on my more long term research. I’m still post­ing occa­sion­al blog posts when I feel the need—like the two recent­ly on Aus­trali­a’s new resources tax—but gen­er­al­ly I’ll be work­ing on more tech­ni­cal mat­ters, and post­ing entries based on those here in lieu of the more top­i­cal Debt­watch. This post is a halfway post between the two: it’s a paper that I have just sub­mit­ted to the 2010 Aus­tralian Con­fer­ence of Econ­o­mists, which will be held in Syd­ney in Sep­tem­ber. I have writ­ten it large­ly as a brief­ing paper for main­stream econ­o­mists who would not have come across the analy­sis that I present here before, let alone the vast vol­ume of lit­er­a­ture in Post Key­ne­sian and Aus­tri­an eco­nom­ics.

I will be in Boston and New York soon, either side of the Hyman Min­sky Con­fer­ence that I’m speak­ing at at the Levy Insti­tute.

I am com­mit­ted to meet­ings on Tues­day-Wednes­day June 22–23 (and pos­si­bly Fri­day June 25), to the Levy con­fer­ence June 27–29, and there may be a sem­i­nar joint­ly organ­ised with Eric Jan­szen of iTulip on July 2. I will be free at oth­er times, and open to sug­ges­tions for meet­ings or sem­i­nars. If you’d like to arrange some­thing, please con­tact me via my gmail email address (debunk­ing at gmail.com) or via a com­ment to this blog entry.

As I explained in my last post, the cost curve in the Trea­sury’s mod­el of the RSPT is based on a fan­ta­sy. The sit­u­a­tion is even worse when we turn to the oth­er side of the mod­el, the demand curve: it is based not mere­ly on a fan­ta­sy, but an out­right fal­la­cy.

Legions of econ­o­mists believe that the demand curve for a com­pet­i­tive firm is hor­i­zon­tal, but their belief is based on the most fun­da­men­tal of math­e­mat­i­cal errors: con­fus­ing a very small amount (an infin­i­tes­i­mal) with zero. The Trea­sury repeats this fallacy—without know­ing it is one—in its expla­na­tion of why a roy­al­ty reduces out­put lev­els but the RSPT won’t.

I sup­port the idea that min­ing com­pa­nies should pay a tax that dis­trib­utes some of the prof­its from min­ing to the wider Aus­tralian com­mu­ni­ty, and that this tax should be based on prices, rather than mere­ly on vol­umes sold. The min­ers have clear­ly made wind­fall prof­its in the last few years as prices for min­er­als have sky­rock­et­ed, and those prof­its should be shared with the wider com­mu­ni­ty since it, and not the min­ers, is the ulti­mate own­er of Aus­trali­a’s min­er­al resources.

How­ev­er I can’t go along with the Resource Super Prof­its Tax (RSPT) as it has been designed, and pre­cise­ly for the rea­son giv­en by Ross Git­tins in the SMH:

Chan­nel 7’s Today Tonight is doing an item on “Inter­est Only Mortgages”–like the prod­uct that ING has recent­ly promoted–and the whole hous­ing bub­ble issue.

They are look­ing for any­one who has been “burnt” by either an inter­est-only loan, or a loan that was pred­i­cat­ed on the expec­ta­tion that house prices would always rise–as is ING’s new product–who is will­ing to be inter­viewed about the expe­ri­ence on cam­era.

The item is being put togeth­er by James Thomas, who did the excellent–and yes, I do mean excel­lent!–“Chang­ing Times” on debt defla­tion in Feb­ru­ary of last year (unfor­tu­nate­ly the clip is no longer avail­able online). I can vouch for James’s pro­fes­sion­al­ism and tact: the item will be well con­struct­ed, and inter­vie­wees will be treat­ed well.

Mar­ket econ­o­mists have spent the past few months search­ing each major data release for con­fir­ma­tion of their hope that the econ­o­my is return­ing to growth and that a ‘sus­tain­able recov­ery’ is under­way.

Most cur­rent­ly argue that the fun­da­men­tals in Aus­tralia are good – low unem­ploy­ment, a strong recov­ery in equi­ty mar­kets (notwith­stand­ing the 14 per cent sell-off in the past month), a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of com­pa­nies’ results beat­ing expec­ta­tions and so on.

This pre­sen­ta­tion was not­ed by a blog mem­ber today. Take par­tic­u­lar note of slides 21–20 which com­pare the bal­ance sheets of US and UK banks to that of one Aus­tralian bank, the Com­mon­wealth.

How to Prof­it From the Com­ing Aussie Prop­er­ty Crash (and Bank­ing Cri­sis)

Also a quick note that the site’s serv­er crashed this morn­ing and had to be restored from back­ups. Sev­er­al blog com­ments were lost, includ­ing some from new mem­bers. These records of these new mem­bers might also have been lost, so if that applies to you, please rejoin and resend your com­ment.

A month ago some extra­or­di­nary head­lines appeared in the Fair­fax new­pa­pers. The Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald ran with: “House prices to plateau as buy­ers flee in droves”.

Alan Kohler wrote at the time in Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor that ‘flee’ was too strong a word for what was hap­pen­ing – hous­ing lend­ing was con­tin­u­ing to fall in both num­ber and val­ue terms, but investors were con­tin­u­ing to bor­row strong­ly and prop up the mar­ket. How­ev­er, he did sug­gest that a price plateau in hous­ing looked like­ly.

Jim Stan­ford, the author of the pop­u­lar  Eco­nom­ics for Every­one (from which the car­toon to the left is tak­en), and I spoke at a dou­ble bill on the glob­al debt cri­sis for the ven­er­a­ble Syd­ney insti­tu­tion “Pol­i­tics in the Pub” last night.

We had a full house for an provoca­tive evening on why the Dis­mal Sci­ence is nei­ther nec­es­sar­i­ly Dis­mal, nor any­thing close to a Sci­ence, and why the debt cri­sis is still with us.

Jim, as well as being an out­stand­ing non-ortho­dox econ­o­mist, is also a very engag­ing speaker–as I whis­pered to the Chair (Pro­fes­sor Frank Stil­well, from Syd­ney Uni­ver­si­ty’s Depart­ment of Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my) while Jim spoke, he was a very hard act to fol­low!