Perspective
Brookings – White, still: The American upper middle class – Richard Reeves and Nathan Joo 10/4
Economist – A new study details the wealth hidden in tax havens 10/7
- “…A new study by Annette Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman, three economists, (using Bank for International Settlements data) concludes that tax havens hoard wealth equivalent to about 10% of global GDP. This average masks big variations. Russian assets worth 50% of GDP are held offshore; countries such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates climb into the 60-70% range. Britain and continental Europe come in at 15%, but Scandinavia at only a few per cent.”
- “One conclusion is that high tax rates, like those in Denmark or Sweden, do not drive people offshore. Rather, higher offshore wealth is correlated with factors such as political and economic instability and an abundance of natural resources.”
- “Accounting for offshore holdings suggests wealth inequality is even greater than was thought. In Britain, France, and Spain the top 0.01% of households stash 30-40% of their wealth in tax havens. In Russia, most of it goes there. In America, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.01% is as high today as in early 20th-century Europe. Including offshore data increases the wealth share of the super-rich.”
- “Yet plenty of data are still missing. A few big centers, including Panama and Singapore, still do not disclose these statistics. The BIS data also cover only bank deposits, not the securities in which most offshore wealth is held. Researchers made estimates to plug the gap, but their figures are likely to be conservative.”
Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice
Economist – The bull market in everything – Leaders 10/7
Economist – Chiang Kai-shek’s former homes are open to tourists 10/5
Markets / Economy
Economist – From Uber to kinder 10/7
Economist – American public pensions suffer from a gaping hole 10/5
- “Schools in Pennsylvania ought to be celebrating. The state gave them a $125m budget increase for 2017-18—enough for plenty of extra books and equipment. But John Callahan of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association says all the increase and more will be eaten up by pension costs, which will rise by $164m this year. The same happened in each of the previous five years; cumulatively the shortfall adds up to $586m. The pupil-teacher ratio is higher than in 2010. Nearly 85% of the state’s school boards said pensions were their biggest source of budget pressure.”
- “A similar squeeze is happening all over America. Sarah Anzia, at the University of California, Berkeley, examined 219 cities between 2005 and 2014 and found that the mean increase in their real pension costs was 69%; higher pension costs in those cities were associated with falls in public-sector employment and capital spending.”
- “The problem is likely to get worse. Moody’s, a rating agency, puts the total shortfall of American public-sector pension plans at around $4trn. That gap does not have to be closed at once, but it does mean that contributions by employers (and hence taxpayers) will increase even more than they already have (see chart).”
- “Higher costs are the result of improved longevity, poor investment returns and inadequate past contributions.”
- As to making plans…
- “Experts can differ, it seems. But small changes in assumptions can make a huge difference to the amount employers need to contribute. According to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, cutting the return assumption by a quarter of a percentage point increases the required contribution rate (as a proportion of payroll) by two to three points.”
- “In consequence, it is in no one’s interest to make more realistic assumptions about future returns. Workers (and their unions) fear it might generate calls for their benefits to be cut; states worry it would require them to raise taxes. Don Boyd, the director of fiscal studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a think-tank, reckons that with a 5% assumed rate of return, states would have to stump up an extra $120bn a year just to tread water—i.e., to fund their pensions without making any progress on closing the deficit. So the game of ‘extend and pretend’ continues.”
- “As years go by, voters and legislators across the country will have to make a trade-off. They can pay more taxes and cut services; or they can reduce the benefits they pay people who teach their children, police their streets and rescue them from fires. There will be no easy answers.”
Real Estate
WSJ – Daily Shot: John Burns RE Consulting – Home Refinancing 10/11
Health / Medicine
FT – Global childhood obesity rises 10-fold in 40 years – Clive Cookson 10/10
- “The number of obese children and teenagers across the world has increased 10-fold over the past four decades and is about to overtake the number who are underweight, according to the most extensive analysis of body weight ever undertaken.”
- “The study, led by Imperial College London and the World Health Organization, used data on 31.5m children and adolescents worldwide to estimate trends in body mass index (BMI) from 1975 to 2016. The results are published in the Lancet.”
- “Over this period the number of obese girls, aged 5 to 19, rose from 5m to 50m, while the total for boys increased from 6m to 74m.”
- “The world’s highest childhood obesity levels are in the Pacific islands of Polynesia and Micronesia. Nauru has the highest prevalence for girls and the Cook Islands for boys: both above 33%.”
- “Among wealthy countries, the US has the highest obesity rates for girls and boys of about 20%. Levels in most of western Europe are in the 7% to 10% range.”
- “A further 213m children are overweight but not sufficiently so to meet the WHO’s obesity criteria, which vary by age. Forty years ago, 0.8% of the world’s children were obese; now the prevalence is close to 7%.”
- “The study also looked at adult obesity, which increased from 100m people in 1975 to 671m in 2016. A further 1.3bn adults were overweight (with a BMI above 25) but below the threshold for obesity (BMI above 30).”
- “But the authors are most concerned about the findings about childhood obesity, because of their implications for public health many decades into the future.”
Construction
WSJ – Daily Shot: NFIB Labor Quality 10/10
- “Anecdotal evidence suggests that in some areas of the country, finding workers who can pass a drug test has been challenging.”
WSJ – Daily Shot: John Burns RE Consulting – Builder Labor Shortages 10/11
- “Skilled (and drug-free) worker shortages in construction are especially acute.”
- This will only get tighter in the continental U.S. as natural disasters continue to rack up, resulting in acute demand for labor in the affected areas. Harvey, Irma, Maria, Nate, and now wildfires in Northern California. Of course, this will have effects on the neighboring regional labor pools.
Shipping
Economist – How protectionism sank America’s entire merchant fleet 10/5
- “In April 1956 the world’s first container ship—the Ideal X—set sail from New Jersey. A year later in Seattle the world’s first commercially successful airliner, Boeing’s 707, made its maiden flight. Both developments slashed the cost of moving cargo and people. Boeing still makes half the world’s airliners. But America’s shipping fleet, 17% of the global total in 1960, accounts for just 0.4% today.”
- “Blame a 1920 law known as the Jones Act, which decrees that trade between domestic ports be carried by American-flagged and -built ships, at least 75% owned and crewed by American citizens. After Hurricane Irma, a shortage of Jones-Act ships led President Donald Trump on September 28th to waive the rules for ten days to resupply Puerto Rico. This fueled calls to repeal the law completely.”
- “Like most forms of protectionism, the Jones Act hits consumers hard. A lack of foreign competition drives up the cost of coastal transport. Building a cargo ship in America can cost five times as much as in China or Korea, says Basil Karatzas, a shipping consultant. And the cost of operating an American-flagged and -crewed vessel is double that of foreign ones, reckons America’s Department of Transportation.”
- “Inflated sea-freight rates push most cargo onto lorries, trains and aircraft, even though these are pricier and produce up to 145 times as many carbon emissions. So whereas 40% of Europe’s domestic freight goes by sea, just 2% does in America. Lacking overland routes, Alaska, Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico are hardest hit. Hawaiian cattle ranchers, for instance, regularly fly their animals to mainland America. A recent report by the Government Development Bank for Puerto Rico found that the Jones Act inflated transport costs for imports to twice the level of nearby islands.”
- “Jones-Act shipowners retort that the rules are to help producers, not consumers. Rail firms lobbied for the 1920 law, out of fear that an excess of foreign ships from the first world war was flooding the market. National security was also cited. German submarine warfare, it was argued, showed the need for a merchant fleet built and crewed by Americans. But the law has virtually wiped out American shipping. Between 2000 and 2016 the fleet of private-sector Jones-Act ships fell from 193 to 91. Britain binned its Jones-Act equivalent in 1849. Its fleet today has over three times the tonnage of America’s. Marc Levinson, an economic historian (and former journalist at The Economist ) notes that the laws also made American container lines less able to compete on international routes. Drawn by profits at home they underinvested in their foreign operations, and fell behind their foreign rivals because they lacked the same scale.”
- “Recognizing the harm to their domestic fleets, countries from Australia to China are loosening the rules protecting their fleets. Not America.”
Africa
Economist – The birthplaces of African leaders receive an awful lot of aid 10/7
- “Scholars have long had a hunch that Chinese aid could be more easily manipulated than the Western sort, which often comes with strings attached. A Chinese white paper in 2014 stated that the government would not impose any ‘political conditions’ on countries asking for help. The commerce ministry, China’s lead aid agency, says most projects are initiated by recipient states. This approach makes aid more vulnerable to misuse by local leaders, say critics.”
- “In a working paper, the pundits show that China’s official transfers to a leader’s birth region nearly triple after he or she assumes power. Even when using a stricter definition of aid provided by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, an increase of 75% was found. They got similar results when looking at the birthplaces of presidential spouses. Crucially, they found no such effect with aid doled out by the World Bank, their benchmark for Western assistance. ‘We believe Chinese aid is special,’ says Andreas Fuchs, a co-author of the study.”
- “China’s approach to aid has other side-effects. In a paper released earlier this year, Diego Hernandez, an economist, showed that China’s rise as a development financier has increased competition between donors. This, in turn, has strengthened recipients’ bargaining power, says Mr Hernandez. Traditional donors have responded by lowering conditionality, or the number of strings attached to aid. Using data from 1980 to 2013, he finds that African countries have received 15% fewer conditions from the World Bank for every 1% increase in Chinese aid.”