In answer to my question about economic issues…. by guestblogger Robert Arvanitis

In an earlier post, I asked several questions about economic issues that confuse me.  Robert Arvanitis wrote a comprehensive reply, but then couldn’t get the Word Press comment system to accept it.  Because it is so comprehensive and informative, I’m putting it up here as an independent post.  All that I ask of the rest of you is that you don’t let its length and depth dissuade you from chiming in with your own two cents (or, with inflation, four cents) on the subject.  There’s a lot to be said here.

And now . . . Robert Arvanitis:

Why, if the economy is contracting and the labor market is flat-lined, has the stock market gone up?

Will the stock market stay up (long-term and short-term predictions, please)?

In normal times, the stock market is a reflection of true economic activity; stocks typically trade at multiples of earnings from 10 to 14 times. So the yield is the inverse of that — if you pay $10 for $1 yield, that’s a 10% return. Likewise if you invest $14 to get $1 then that’s like a 7% return. That’s the norm, 7-10% for “risky” equities in contrast to the “safe” bond yields of 3-4% or “really safe” bank accounts at 2-3%.

Alas, we are not in a yield-trading market. Rather, we are seeing the impact of inflation caused by printing of money at the Fed. Our GDP, the value of everything we produce, is like $16 trillion. But if we suddenly doubled our money supply, then the GDP would be, nominally, $32 trillion. Same loaves of bread and haircuts, but now “worth” twice as many dollars. Kinda like the story of the boy who sold his dog for a million dollars. Dad asks how he got so much money. Boy replies “No, I got two, $500,000 cats…”

Same with our stock market. Right now up to 14,000 on the Dow, but that’s not any more loaves of bread that the 10,000 Dow of just a few years ago.

Bad news — wealth effect makes people falsely confident, so they go spend and do other stupid things. Good news — at least it’s something of a hedge against inflation. You can still get the same number of (now more expensive) loaves of bread when you’re hungry.

The IRS says that families will be paying $20,000 for health insurance. It also says that the top penalty for failing to buy insurance is less than $3,000. Medical insurance companies can no longer turn away people with pre-existing conditions. This means that people can avoid the $20,000 fee, pay the small penalty, and buy “insurance” only at the time they need it. (Or, more accurately, buy “cost shifting” when they need it.) Can the insurance companies stay solvent under these circumstances?

If insurance companies cannot stay in business with this non-insurance fee structure imposed upon them from above, how will they change? Most are diversified. Will they simply abandon health insurance? They cannot refuse to pay onerous fees, because payments are forced upon them by law.

Will the death of insurance companies create a medical black market, where people pay cash for services? In a way, this wouldn’t be so bad, because it would do away with the moral hazard that comes from both huge insurance companies and government interference. With those huge systems, people have no incentive to shop around for better or more affordable treatment.

Take a step back. We must separate the various functions. First is health care provision. Doctors, nurses, drugs, hospitals, equipment… That is a service sector that will rise with demand and shrink with price-controls. Obamacare = less service, fewer doctors, worse outcomes.

Second is true insurance. You have a one in a hundred risk of losing 100,000 (car crash, home fire, serious illness). Being rationally risk averse you’ll gladly pay $1,000 (expected value of 1% times 100,000) as a premium. Heck, you’ll even pay like $1,500, just to be safe. That extra $500 pays for agents, and underwriters, and insurers’ capital, and all the rest.

Third is what we have today — redistribution masquerading as insurance. Young/healthy should pay a fair premium of like $4,000. Old/ill should properly pay $20,000. But Obamacare, to hide redistribution, says everyone will pay $12,000 each, the average of the high and the low. Insurers wouldn’t care how they get paid, EXCEPT the young/healthy aren’t stupid. They won’t pay $12,000 for insurance worth (to them!) a mere $4,000. Hence the unconstitutional (shut up Roberts!) mandate.

(Side note — this use of phony insurance to hide redistribution is just the latest iteration of the continuing fraud. It starts with “tax Peter to pay Paul.” Steps then include high rates with unfair deductions, borrowing to tax the unborn, inflation to rob lenders and the poor, unfunded mandates, and finally scams like Social Security and Obamacare. Details on request.)

Ok, that’s the real economics. Now the politics. Even with all the arm-twisting, and bribing, and parliamentary cheats, and brief supermajority, Obamacare could NOT pass with anything close to the necessary punitive taxes needed to get the young/healthy. That’s why the penalty is so foolishly low.

But to the left, that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s OK if insurers get squeezed out of health insurance. They’re just capitalist parasites anyway, and we’re one day closer to single-payer, that is, a government-monopoly on when you die.

Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is forcing banks to give unsecured, low-interest home loans again. These loans, and the machinations into which the financial industry entered in order to protect itself from the downside risk of such loans, triggered the 2008 recession. What will happen this time around? Will banks go out of business? Will they come up with some grand new scheme? I assume that, if they do the latter, it will implode. The last time, it took around two decades before the Ponzi scheme collapsed. How long will it take this time?

We have a problem that banks got “too big to fail” because of government distortions of the credit markets. The Fed taught markets that serious losses get “socialized” (fall on taxpayers, not the true failures).

We also have a problem that government misallocated credit via the “Community Reinvestment Act.”

So what does government do? Makes an utterly irrelevant move into more controls. Plus an additional misdirection of credit.

We do not learn from our mistakes. We simply make new and more subtle errors.

It’s like this. A hippo gets into the bathtub. Water overflows everywhere. Hippos declares an emergency and nationalizes all the towels…v