Guest Contribution by Rachel Beach

Microcredit and property rights reforms, how do they connect? The Panel Group was first asked to connect the dots between financial services to the poor and security of property in discussions with organizations such as the World Bank, Gates Foundation and International Trade Agency (ITA). The exercise brought to light a multiplicity of connections, and in the process we discovered that this is actually a very relevant and necessary discussion to promote. Indeed, it is a relationship whose identity is increasingly touched upon in current development debates.

An increasing number of articles and platforms address the importance of securing wealth bound up in physical real estate, small entrepreneurial activity and intellectual property as incentive for further investment and economic growth.  In a recent profiling by Fast Company, June Arunga – celebrated by the magazine as one of this year’s 100 Most Creative People – is asking a very common question but coming up with an answer at once banal and profound:

‘Why is Africa so poor?’ says the Kenyan, from her current home in Ghana… ‘What should be encouraged is the fundamental right of people to own land and the products of their labor, which are then recognized by courts, and can be exchanged at the market.” Asking for aid, she says, is part of the problem. “I doubt there is a parent that raises their child to become a beggar,” she says. “Gain respect. Keep your promises.”

Security and legal recognition of property for the poor is something development agencies are slowly waking up to. It is something De Soto recognized and has been both praised and vilified for – tapping into the wealth of the poor. One side criticizes him for finding another brilliant way to extort the poor, “formalizing their wealth” so it can be taxed by the government and their property sold to developers. The other side recognizes something elemental in development: access to credit and securing of property (i.e. not simply physical real estate but all forms of wealth) are essential. Between these two elements are a host of incentives. And their interplay entertains many fields of study: the psychologies of security and self-improvement, incentive to invest, the dynamic of trust and credibility between a State and its citizens, hope.

The connection between the credit-access and property-security is not merely curious, it is fundamental to development. In fact, it is a symbiotic relationship. Without a reasonable guarantee that property will be protected both from expropriation or theft, the acquisition and maintenance of investments and other assets in a given economy is illogical, as many an African dictator’s holding of properties abroad (read: securer states) and Swiss bank accounts will attest to. On the other side, without access to credit, the ability to invest is severely restricted.

Capitalism has struggled to find meaningful ways to bring the poorest brackets of society (and those operating in the “extra-legal” sectors due to any number of structural and financial barriers) into the market economy. Financial services for the poorer sectors look very different than the services to the wealthy. However, the risks they face, the way they operate, and types of basic services needed should not be treated as an exception to the standard middle-class or wealthy citizen’s fundamentals of wealth management and financial services. Indeed, the middle-class and wealthy are the minority in this world we live in.

Micro-credit is not simply a well-meaning, social business enterprise that should be patted on the back and politely applauded while we go about our business in the real world. Micro-credit is the type of financial service needed for a great majority of the world’s population. It is more than finding creative ways to “help the poor”. Micro-credit allows the impoverished to slowly rise out of a cycle of poverty. Securing of property rights for these small enterprises and private citizens gives owners legal, socially-recognized protection of their newly acquired parcels of wealth, however minute. Any high-school lecture about compound interest will attest to the benefits of savings and investment, however small one’s start. This creation of wealth then slowly builds on itself.

Neither Peru nor Bangladesh are anecdotes (as Peter Shaefer seems eager to claim in his Foreign Policy article). Yunus’ Grameen bank is expanding operations on five continents, including successful start-ups in the United States and the birth of one in Italy. Our work at Panel Group explores insecurity of property rights around the world – as Elena did in Peru during the 1990s – partnering with municipalities and governments to strengthen, streamline, and even create socially, legally recognizable ownership of physical property (i.e. real estate) where none existed before. Without the dual-expansion of financial services for the poor and security of their assets, the poor will remain in a cycle of poverty.

Guest Contribution by Rachel Beach

Judge Sonya Sotomayor may be sailing through the senate hearings given her highly qualified track record, a White House and Senate majority in her favor, and appeal as the first Latina judge, but one might find some relief in the expression of a few well-placed reservations.  In paradox to her background of civil rights service and concern for the constitutional protections afforded to all citizens, Sotomayor’s track record on property rights should register concern among the underprivileged and  politically weak.  Her highly controversial decision in the 2006 case of Didden v. Village of Port Chester ruled against land owners Bart Didden and Dominick Bologna whose property was condemned after they refused to pay a local developer’s extortion demands. Sotomayor’s decision went beyond the procedural grounds of the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut, allowing the expropriation of private property for the benefit of other private interests.

Should Sotomayor reach the Supreme Court, it appears that expropriation and extortion for personal gain – if the party in question is politically-connected and affluent – can hope for federal backing.  If a developer can convince the city to rezone an area for redevelopment, and has legal ground to request condemnation of private property for his own gain then the disenfranchised should have great reason to fear her decisions.  Sotomayor’s decision exacerbates problems of the insecurity of property, and those whose property is most likely to be expropriated inhabit the lowest strata of American renters and home-owners: tenants in the ghettos.  They suffer from semi-“unreal estate”.

Here is the account of a lady who went from poor tenant to homeless to middle-class lady in Washington D.C. after struggling with the mayor’s office for years to gain the rights to purchase the condemned apartment she was renting.  Deborah was once one of those who inhabited “unreal estate”.  Her’s is one of the rare stories of the poor successfully fighting for their rights (using the right-of-first-refusal under D.C. property laws regarding tenants) and gaining ownership.  However, Sotomayer’s ruling would make  the struggles of homeowners like Deborah more difficult.  The logic of the ruling suggests that developers have the power to deny rights to tenants, not for public gain, but for the private gain of the developer over tenants.  Granted, we do not know all the details of the ruling or the case, but as the most probable soon-to-be Justice of the Supreme Court, Sotomayor’s decision seems rather discouraging,.

The current economic crisis is a property right issues (i.e. an unstable valuation of the real estate market), but a clear and established property right system especially for private individuals can be a way out of this current mess and prevents further crisis. Like in the case of Deborah, ownership of property motivates investment and entrepreneurial ingenuity which is much needed in today’s economy. Sotomayer’s ruling is indeed a red flag to such success stories as that of Deborah’s.

http://www.finreg21.com/homeTHE U.S. PROPERTY RIGHTS SYSTEM IS SEVERELY BROKEN: We need to treat this crisis as an opportunity not only to install a more rigorous regulatory regime for the financial sector…we need to overhaul the way property rights and property values are established in this country. We need a structural reform that establishes standards for how property is evaluated and how it is offered to the market.
Elena Panaritis, author, Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust

I recently returned from a whirlwind weekend at the FreedomFest in Las Vegas.  It is increasingly evident that Prosperity Unbound appeals to a larger and wider range of audiences, especially after the housing market collapse. Given the 1.5 million foreclosures in the United States in the first half of this year alone, with one in eight Americans either late on their payments or already facing foreclosure, many people are wondering how we got there. Many others ask whether the stimulus packages and administration’s approaches are really confronting the root of the problem. There seems to be no end in sight, and a great number (29%) of credit-worthy borrowers with fixed-rate home loans are among those suffering from the downward pressure on house prices. If ever there was a time to establish a more secure valuation of the underlying asset, the time is now.

Walking around Las Vegas, I saw some of the grandiose edifices under construction and left over from the real estate boom now bowing to the economy’s will. Cranes were scattered across the landscape like giant herons frozen in time. Then I discovered a side story. Scattered throughout the opulence and malls were little shops, independently owned and operated. They had been established decades ago, selling their wares and $1 bottles of water (versus $4 at posh cafés). Many resisted pressure from real estate developers and kept their specks of territory among giants. The big real-estate dollar signs that had drawn speculators to the city five years ago who are now fleeing with tails between their legs.

FreedomFest, a celebrated venue for open-market debate and thinking (with over 1,500 attendees) also seemed this year to be a popular place for talking about illiquid real estate. I presented my book and talked about my formula for prosperity for the worlds’ poor and its success rate. Michael Strong, CEO of FLOW, graciously introduced me and my work. I also expounded further on my methodology and how I apply it as a private social entrepreneur with Panel Group.  The broad interest from diverse attendees, highlighted the relevance of the methodology outlined at Prosperity Unbound, beginning with institutional economics, finance, and practically explaining how the social contract and property markets evolve as well as how we can reduce the risk for property becoming illiquid.

I had the opportunity to engage in stimulating conversations with Richard Rahn senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, John Fund from the Wall Street Journal, Barrons’ economics editor Gene Epstein, and venture capitalist Jo Pihl.

Topics ranged from evolution of mankind to evolution of markets.  Michael Shermer, a scientist, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society and a columnist for Scientific American, delved into the evolution of humankind and societies honoring Darwin and his personal journey. Others addressed how people choose to handle their wealth, drifting into an ongoing debate about how much governance is needed for effective enforcement of contracts. Ironically, in my mind, it is the proponents of a “hands-off government” who (recognizing it or not) most desire effective government for the purpose of ensuring the security of their private wealth, property, and person … both from government expropriation and from the abuse of other citizens. The logic leads us into the arena of policy-making, in relation to the management of private wealth and property. Julian Morris of the International Policy Network, Steve Forbes of Forbes Magazine, John Mackey of Whole Foods, and others presented ways policy-making can harm markets and discussed their outlook for the Global Economy.

Then, of course, there was Yoga every morning with Gurucharan Khalsa and dancing to the Beatles at the closing gala of FF.  All in all, a good weekend.

The Bank of Oliver Twist was posted by: lettrist on: June 26, 2009

URL: http://utopiaorbust.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/the-bank-of-oliver-twist/

Guest Contributor: Rachel Beach

Following the logic of Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom, individual property rights in a transparent system is a fundamental means as well as an end to development.  The Lettrist (blogger) is right to remind us that “the poor have always had ‘sizeable amount of assets’”.  The point is to find a way to secure their assets for their own benefit.  For many, one of their most valuable assets, land, is not secure.  Unable to use it as collateral, the poor lose one of their only means to access credit.  Mohammed Yunus, founder of the ever growing micro-credit banking movement, realized how critical access to credit is to upward mobility of the poor.  Just imagine your life without credit cards, access to loans, or any other means of credit. 

There is a plethora of property titling and land reform regimes gone wrong.  Think Zimbabwe.  In the wake of Peru’s achievements, the World Bank and many other well-meaning development agencies have bungled property titling projects by seeing property rights as a panacea for all ills. 

The problem, as Lettrist was right to point out, is looking at “titling” as a solution in a vacuum … a problem that pervades much development work today.  He cannot, however deny the unique successes of Peru.  I understand that advocates such as DeSoto invite strong criticism, but strong property rights is a cornerstone of development.  This is what Elena Panaritis, when at the World Bank and together with the Peruvian government carried out and proved in Peru (as outlined in her book Prosperity Unbound).  The reforms have been noted world wide for a specific reason.  They were not carried out in a vacuum.  Panaritis studied the political institutions, social motivations, and historical backdrop of the property titling mess, using a method she calls Reality Check Analysis.  Elena and her team went door-to-door surveying potential participants and proscribed a complete overhaul the agencies responsible for registering property.  Under a succession of presidents and parliaments, reforms responded to growing public demands for recognition of property.  It was not something foisted upon them, nor was it gentrification.  The reforms followed a specific sequencing of policy and events designed to address problems unique to Peru’s history, regulation, institutions.  This generated their rare success in property rights reform. 

Lettrist must not be aware of the actual benefits a properly-enacted property rights reform given his statement that “no one can be sure if land titling would benefit the poor at all”.  The results spoke for themselves in Peru.  The reforms were designed to cater not to large scale developers, but the poor and middle class who had experienced long-term insecurity of property.  Within three years the markets welcomed seven million new players.  Security of private ownership increased by 94%, initial property values increased by 42%, personal investment [i.e. home improvements, extensions] increased by more than 72%, the probability of child labor among participants decreased by more than 28%.  These are the positive elements of a reform designed to bring excluded sections of a society into the formal market. 

On the other hand the Lettrist was very right in saying that “capitalism has no serious strategy for reaching the poor in the extra-legal sector”.  Those in the extra-legal sector are entrepreneurs.  They simply lack access to formal markets and capital, and create their own informal markets.  Security of property rights is the fundamental bridge to the formal sector.  It provides a capitalist answer for bringing informal activity into the formal economy.

Appropriate community-based property rights systems empower citizens.  Rather than being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, they give both citizens a restored trust and mutual gain: the government gains revenue streams, but in return has a responsibility to provide public goods which citizens had previously been deprived of such as access to water, electricity, and roads.  Entrepreneurs can register businesses and invest in the formal economy.  They can secure loans and improve their lives and livelihood, assured that all their efforts will not be swept away by arbitrary expropriation.  Entrepreneurs in the informal sector function, but not efficiently.  Panaritis was not primarily concerned with preventing extra-legals from “bringing down the game” but bringing excluded entrepreneurs into the game.  The point being that as the percentage of citizens forced to live in a semi-informal state (parts of their daily lives secured in the legal sector, and parts outside where they cannot find access) increases, the legitimacy of a government decreases.  If the current government has not found a way to secure the property and person of a large portion of its citizens, nor provide public services to them, nor include them in formal market structures, it has failed to fulfill its role.  It is only expected that citizens would seek an alternative governing body i.e. Abimael Guzman, founder of the Sendero Luminoso aka The Shining Path.

Useless finance, harmful finance and useful finance

http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/04/useless-finance-harmful-finance-and-useful-finance/#more-1357

April 12, 2009 6:31pm

Useless finance

A derivative is a contingent claim whose payoff depends on the performance of some other financial instrument or security.  For instance, an American equity call option gives the purchaser of the call the right (but not the obligation) to buy a share of equity from the issuer or writer of the call option at or before some future date at a price determined today.  A credit default swap (CDS) is a credit derivative contract between two (counter)parties in which the holder makes periodic payments to the issuer in return for a payoff if the underlying financial instrument specified in the contract defaults.

A derivative contract is formally identical to a lottery, a (simple or compound) bet or gamble.  Like any financial claim, any derivative is  an ‘inside asset’ – it is in zero net supply.  Because pay-offs associated with a derivative contract are functions of observable properties of other financial claims (prices, interest rates, default states), the derivative contract either re-packages existing underlying uncertainty or creates additional ‘artificial’ uncertainty.  It would create additional extraneous uncertainty if it added some noise of its own to the fundamental, exogenous uncertainty that is presumably reflected in the features of the underlying security that determine the pay-offs of the derivative contract.

If the creation and trading of derivatives were costless, derivatives result in zero-sum redistributions of wealth between the issuers and the owners of the derivative contracts.  Costless derivatives would be redundant if markets were complete.  When markets are incomplete, as they are in our unfortunate universe, introducing derivatives can either lead to an increase or to a reduction in efficiency and social welfare. Lower efficiency and social welfare are possible even if creating and trading derivatives were costless.  Derivatives may improve the allocation of risk, but there is no guarantee that they will.  It is my contention that the unbridled explosion of certain categories of derivatives has done considerable harm, and that it is necessary to regulate all derivatives trading.

How can creating lotteries, even if they only mirror fundamental underlying uncertainty, be welfare increasing?  The usual argument involves examples where there is a given quantum of ‘objective’ or ‘exogenous’ uncertainty in the world, e.g. uncertainty about endowments, technology and tastes (all assumed exogenous – only economists would treat technology and taste as exogenous, of course!).  Markets for risk trading are incomplete and creating derivatives markets does not alter the objective/exogenous uncertainty in the world.  Creating and trading derivatives is costless.

In such a world one can imagine a pension fund that wishes to hold default risk-free 10 year government securities, but unable to find them in the market, instead holding 10 year AAA corporate bonds and CDS to cover the default risk of these corporate securities.  Provided the writer of the CDS is creditworthy, the pension fund could achieve its preferred portfolio mix.  If the writer of the CDS has the appropriate capital structure and balance sheet, it could be both willing and able to bear the default risk on the corporate bonds than the pension fund.  For the lottery created by a derivative contract to be welfare-increasing, it will have to produce a positive monetary pay-off for the purchaser of the derivative in exactly those ‘states of nature’ where the purchaser will be worst off, while at the same time ensuring that the corresponding negative monetary pay-off for the writer of the derivative does not hurt the writer of the derivative too badly.

It would of course be more direct to draw up contracts contingent on the exogenous uncertainty directly.  If the pension fund’s ‘endowment’ were to be negatively correlated with that of some other legal entity, and if the two endowments could be observed and verified, an endowment-sharing rule could be specified that would make both parties better off.  You would not start looking for contracts specifying payments that are contingent on endogenous risk, such as default risk or the behaviour of some price or interest rate.

Derivatives, insurance and gambling

Consider the CDS.  The purchaser pays a premium to the writer of a CDS.  That is the price of the lottery ticket, or the price of the betting slip.  If the underlying security specified in the contract defaults, the writer of the CDS pays the owner of the CDS a specified amount of money.  That’s the lottery prize, or the winnings of the bet.  In the UK where there are more legal forms of gambling than in most other countries, many conventional financial instruments or securities have been ‘re-engineered’ as formal bets.  Spread betting on exchange rates, interest rates, stock prices and now also house price indices is a popular form of investment.  The reason is that earnings from gambling are not taxed.  The government presumably does not tax the gains and losses from gambling because (ignoring the value added of the gambling industry) gambling winnings equal gambling losses, so if the tax code allows loss offsets, there is not much point (ignoring progressivity of taxation & other complications) in taxing the gains and losses from gambling.

Derivatives can be used to provide insurance (paying a premium to buy protection against a possible loss) or to gamble (paying a premium to acquire the opportunity to benefit from a possible gain).   CDS can provide either insurance against loss or an opportunity to gamble.  This is because the buyer of a CDS does not need to own the underlying security or other form of credit exposure.  The buyer does not have to suffer any loss from the default event and may in fact benefit from it.

When purchasing an insurance contract, the insured party is generally expected to have an insurable interest in the event against which he takes out insurance.  This simply means that he cannot be better off if the insured against event occurs than if it does not occur.  Determining what constitutes an insurable interest is often complicated in practice, but simple in principle: you have an insurable interest if, when (a) the future contingency you insure against occurs and (b) the insurance contract performs (something you cannot necessarily count on, without assistance from the tax payer, if you buy your CDS from AIG), you are not better off than you would be if the insured-against future contingency did not occur.

Clearly, CDS contracts don’t require an insurable interest to be present.  Many other derivatives likewise don’t require an insurable interest to be present.  Short selling a share of common stock in the hope/expectation of a fall in the price of the equity without either owning or borrowing the stock (naked short selling) is an example of a derivative contract without an insurable interest.

Why should the state care about gambling through derivative contracts?

Harmful finance

(1) Gambling is addictive

Like all forms of gambling (deliberate risk-seeking), gambling in the derivatives markets can be addictive.  This may create a paternalism-based argument for regulating, restricting or even banning the activity.  Having observed derivatives writers, purchasers and traders in action, it is clear that the thrill of the gamble is part of the motivation behind this activity.  The monetary gains and losses figure prominently, of course, but the bungee-jumping, sky-diving, tight-rope-walking-without-a-net dimensions of derivatives trading definitely play a role.  It cannot be a coincidence that there are so many more male than female traders and other operators in the financial markets.  Testosterone is not underrepresented in the trading room.  And the thrill of taking a wide-open position can be addictive.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Gamblers Anonymous had a special chapter for derivatives gambling.

I am generically underwhelmed by arguments for protecting compos mentis adults against themselves based on paternalism, but the list of arguments would not be complete without it.

(2) Moral hazard or micro-level endogenous risk.

This is the familiar argument already mentioned before, that if the insured party (the purchaser of a CDS, for instance) can influence the likelihood of the insured-against contingency (the default of the underlying security) occurring without the writer of the insurance contract (the issuer of the CDS) being aware of this, there is an obvious case of market failure and potential source of inefficiency.  It’s also likely to be an illegal form of market manipulation.

(3) Derivative contracts as “bearer lottery tickets”

Unlike most conventional lotteries, the lottery tickets created as part of many derivatives contracts are traded in secondary markets, sometimes over the counter (OTC markets), sometimes on organised exchanges.  These lottery tickets or betting slips are not just traded after they are issued (sold by the writer in the ‘primary issue market’), most of these derivative contracts are bearer securities: their ownership is not registered.  The owner is anonymous.  Listed common stock, by contrast, is an example of what I have called a ‘registered security’.  There is an ownership register, which is, at least in principle, in the public domain.  Clearly, establishing the beneficial ownership of an equity share may not be a simple matter of looking in the shareowners register in the jurisdiction where stock is listed, but with bearer securities the task is hopeless.

The writer of the derivative contract does not in general know the identity of the current owner of the contract.  If the writer does not know this, the supervisor and regulator, or the state agency in charge of macro-prudential supervision (typically the central bank) does not know it either.  There is therefore absolutely no way to determine whether the current distribution of the ownership of derivative contracts is systemically stabilising or destabilising, whether it is too concentrated or too dispersed.  When a notional gross $60 trillion worth of CDS outstanding at the peak (yes, I know it’s ‘only’ $30 trillion now and much of it is ‘offsetting’ in some ill-defined way) and possibly around $400 trillion gross outstanding of total derivatives, we are talking ignorance on a cosmic scale.

(4) Risk-seeking by the over-confident

Even if the secondary markets for derivatives functioned properly (no bubbles, no liquidity seizures, no wide-spread defaults), these secondary markets can, like the primary issue market, redistribute the additional risk represented by any derivative either in a way that improves the ultimate allocation and sharing of risk or worsens it.  Once a new derivative market is created, this market can either be used to hedge existing risk or to take on additional risk. I have seen no reliable statistics on the identities of the counterparties in the leading derivatives markets.  My best guess is that most of the activity is not between households and financial intermediaries or between non-financial enterprises and financial intermediaries, but among financial intermediaries, mainly among different banking or shadow-banking player. Much of this trading appears to be driven by overconfidence and hubris.  I have yet to meet a trader who did not believe that he or she could not beat the market.  Because collectively these traders effectively are the market, they are collectively irrational, as they cannot beat themselves.  So the risk ends up being concentrated not among those most capable of bearing it, but among those most willing to bear it – those most confident of being able to bear it and profit from it.

(5) Churning

The collective hubris of the banking sector (broadly defined to include all the shadow-banking sector institutions like hedge funds, private equity funds, SIVs, conduits, other investment funds, AIG-style insurance companies etc.) means that enormous volumes of bets are placed on the behaviour of endogenous variables.  The first consequence of this is that, since derivatives trading is not costless, scarce skilled resources are diverted to what are not even games of pure redistribution.  Instead these resources are diverted towards games involving the redistribution of a social pie that shrinks as more players enter the game.

The inefficient redistribution of risk that can be the by-product of the creation of new derivatives markets and their inadequate regulation can also affect the real economy through an increase in the scope and severity of defaults.  Defaults, insolvency and bankruptcy are key components of a market economy based on property rights.  There involve more than a redistribution of property rights (both income and control rights).  They also destroy real resources.  The zero-sum redistribution characteristic of derivatives contracts in a frictionless world becomes a negative-sum redistribution when default and insolvency is involved.  There is a fundamental asymmetry in the market game between winners and losers: there is no such thing as super-solvency for winners.  But there is such a thing as insolvency for losers, if the losses are large enough.

The easiest solution to this churning problem would be to restrict derivatives trading to insurance, pure and simple.  The party purchasing the insurance should be able to demonstrate an insurable interest.  CDS could only be bought and sold in combination with a matching amount of the underlying security.  Ideally, it ought to be possible to for me to buy a CDS by demonstrating an insurable interest in terms of my “utility”, i.e. by demonstrating that, should the underlying security default, I would be worse off in one way or other, not necessarily because I own the underlying security.  In practice, this would be wide open to abuse and manipulation.

(6) Macro-endogenous risk

Financial markets are inefficient in any of the ways specified by James Tobin in a great 1984 paper – information arbitrage efficiency, fundamental valuation efficiency, functional efficiency or Arrow-Debreu full insurance efficiency.[1] Financial markets even often are technically inefficient. A market is technically or trading efficient if it is liquid and competitive, that is, it is possible to buy or sell large quantities with very low transaction costs, at little or no notice and without a significant impact on the market price.  We have seen many examples, from the ABS markets and the commercial paper markets to the interbank markets of massive and persistent failures of technical or trading efficiency.

Even in those financial markets that are reasonably technically efficient, like the US stock market, the foreign exchange markets and the government debt markets, Tobin saw frequent departures from efficiency in the less restricted senses of the word.  He accepted that financial markets possessed what he called ‘information arbitrage efficiency’ that is, that they were informationally efficient in the weak and semi-strong sense. You cannot systematically make money trading on the basis of generally available public information. Clearly, however, trading profitably on the basis of insider information is possible.

He did not believe that financial markets consistently possessed ‘fundamental valuation efficiency’: financial asset prices do not necessarily reflect the rational expectations of the future payments to which the asset gives title.  Key financial markets, including the stock market, the long-term debt market and the foreign exchange market are characterised both by excess volatility and persistent misalignments, that is, prices deviating persistently from fundamental valuations.

Tobin also contested the notion that the financial markets delivered ‘value for money’ in the social sense. “the services of the system do not come cheap. An immense amount of activity takes place, and considerable resources are devoted to it.” (Tobin [1984, p. 284]). Tobin referred to this aspect of efficiency as ‘functional efficiency’. Finally, the system of financial markets can be efficient in the technical, information arbitrage, fundamental valuation and functional senses without possessing what Tobin called Arrow-Debreu full insurance efficiency, that is, without supporting Pareto-efficient economy-wide outcomes.  The reason is that real world financial markets interact with labour and goods markets that are inefficient in every sense of the word.

When financial markets are inefficient, the distinction between fundamental, exogenous variables and endogenous variables disappears.  CDS prices can become quasi-autonomous drivers of the bond prices.  The tail can wag the dog.  The redistributions of wealth associated with the execution of derivatives contracts can trigger margin calls, mark-to-market revaluations of assets and liabilities, forced liquidations of illiquid asset holdings through fire-sales in dysfunctional markets, defaults and bankruptcies.  Activities in derivatives markets, including futures markets, can feed back on sport markets and real production, consumption and storage decisions.

Unbridled derivatives markets may be liquid, but the question is, to what purpose?  If, as I believe, there is no economic rationale for ‘naked’ CDS positions (that is, CDS that do not insure an open default position in the underlying security), then liquidity of the CDS market only serves those who want to trade naked CDS.  This, in my view, only wastes real resources through (a) churning and (b) unnecessary bankruptcies.

Useful finance

I want to end on an upbeat note.  I believe that effective and efficient financial intermediation is a necessary condition for prosperity.  To those who doubt this, I recommend a reading of two books about the true microfoundations of financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto’s, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York: Basic Books (2000) Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, by Elena Panaritis (Palgrave MacMillan 2007).  If you have only time for one, read the shorter work by Elena Panaritis.  It describes the fascinating story of how personal possessions (characterised through informal, insecure property rights) were turned into secure property rights and thence into productive capital through a World Bank project in Peru.  The book shows the importance of local knowledge and of a deep understanding of the institutional prerequisites for a successful market economy based on collateralisable wealth (especially real estate).  To raise the quality of the rule of law in the property sector to the point small businesses can credibly offer land and other real estate as collateral for formal sector finance requires a formal titling authority, a state capable of reliably maintaining property records, a functional judicial system, corruption levels bounded from above etc.

The world described in these books, where the foundations of a productive market economy are being put in place, appears light years removed from the world of Wall Street and the City of London.  In Peru, access to formal sector finance on reasonable terms thanks to the newly created ability to offer collateral and perfect security interest, has lifted many out of grinding poverty.  In Wall Street and the City of London, massive resources and lobbying power were devoted to turning complex, long-term relationships into tradable securities – preferably into tradable bearer securities, even when the informational preconditions for this transformation to be effective were not satisfied.  Increasingly, as in the case of bearer instruments like mortgage-backed securities for instance, the ultimate issuer and the current owner of the instrument knew nothing about each other.  And even with simpler bearer securities, most of the time no-one knows who the current owner is, not even the supervisor and regulator.

The endless churning of contingent claims, including derivatives, when the purchaser has no identifiable insurable interest, turns financial intermediation into a market-mediated betting shop.  Then the betting slips become bearer securities and are themselves traded, either OTC or on organised exchanges, and the derivative transactions volumes expand to dwarf the transactions in the markets for the underlying financial claims (let alone the markets for the underlying real resources).  At that point, the betting tip of the financial tail of the real economy dog does all the wagging.   It does not create value but redistributes it in a way that consumes real resources and exposes the real economy to unnecessary risk.  It’s time to tame the tiger.

The property rights problem

Bailing-out banks won’t fix the US economy. We need to stabilise home prices and standardise the way we value property.

Have we analysed the roots of the current economic crisis or started at the middle? Is it really just the unregulated financial markets and over-liquidity, or have these factors compounded an already broken system? How can we say our securities are “secure” when they are valued incorrectly, are now priced negatively and the bottoming-out point is unknown?

America got into the crisis initially because real estate – and thus the mortgages on it – was valued incorrectly. No one knows the true worth of property in the US. In fact, there is often uncertainty about the actual physical boundaries, as well as other characteristics, of many properties – hence the entire antiquated industry of title insurance.

Think about when you buy a new or used car: no lender requires title insurance. Why not? Because there’s no doubt about the car’s provenance and ownership. US homeowners, though, are required to purchase this insurance to indemnify themselves against loss if the title is defective. Every time a house changes hands, there again are the surveyors out to check the property lines for the umpteenth time so title insurance can be written.

How, then, did today’s crisis unfold? Incorrectly valued mortgages became speculative financial instruments for trading, which makes it possible to drive prices up or down seemingly without limit. And, as they traded downwards, they of course took the price of real estate down with them. Meanwhile, lending banks went over, the precipice of insolvency because the liquidity on which they depend dried up, all because their asset-backed securities have little or no value or even negative value.

Remember, a mortgage is called a “security” because it is secured with a tangible asset. But if its value isn’t real, it can’t really be secure. That’s the starting point for a toxic mix. Throw in excess liquidity (from 2000 to 2006) and housing demand, misvaluations and subprime mortgages to an already overstretched housing and real estate market, and it begins to be deadly unstabilising. Price becomes dependent on speculation, rather than on the actual value of the home and land.

Giving money to the banks is not going to fix this problem. Home values will still be driven by speculation. What we need are deep regulatory changes to the current system that can help establish a secure and true market value of land and real estate and will help stabilise prices for today and the future. That can happen only when the rights on property are recorded in a standardised, transparent and trustworthy manner. Anything short of this is an invitation for more speculation.

The antiquated US system is ridiculously wasteful and does little to provide the full protection of property rights, and title insurance is a poor substitute for the property rights system American property owners need and deserve. The title insurance process is, of course a moneymaking proposition, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a major culprit in the incorrect valuation of real estate that has brought America and the world to the current crisis. It also slows the transfer of deeds, adds to the expense and thus makes the property market less liquid.

It’s no accident that the root of the crisis is in America. Other countries with sophisticated economies have reliable property rights systems that establish correct mortgage valuation. For example, there is rarely a question about the value of the underlying assets in Canada and Australia, two other countries where mortgages are traded as financial instruments. And the rest of the world hardly knows title insurance. In most countries, public registries keep records of property transfers over time and whether there have been other parties with interest (eg, laying claim to ownership) in a transparent and standardised manner. These registries have the final word, and if they make a genuine error there is a system of remediation.

One key to how things work beyond the US is the public nature of information about property. At the registry, part of that public information includes characteristics of real estate (legal, financial, boundaries, etc) that makes transparent the establishment of a price – that is, the property’s value. There is very little room for speculators to drive the valuation process into the toilet.

As the US government shells out additional hundreds of billions in bank bail-out money, and whatever other hundreds of billions are to come, it needs to make sure some of it is spent on providing citizen property owners and markets with real security over their property – their full money’s worth. It’s time to stop America’s wasteful and risky process. The first step: use some of the bail-out money to establish a regulatory infrastructure for real estate valuation in the form of a nationwide property registry system where titles are well established and transparent to everyone.

If your sinks started to overflow and your pipes were bursting, you’d call a plumber. What if he showed up with towels, threw them on the floor to sop up the water and handed you a bill for $700bn? You’d be flabbergasted.

America needs to fix the plumbing, not just throw towels on the floor. That will take replacing some of the old pipes, like the non-transparent property rights registration process, with ones that will protect property rights at much lower costs today. The US government owes this to its citizens and to the rest of the world who are suffering downstream from the American crisis. Surely it makes sense to invest some of that bailout money to address one of the root problems that has brought all of us to the brink?

It’s time for a structural reform of the system that secures rights on property and real estate – even in the least-secure neighbourhoods – and hence leads to correct valuation. Now is a great opportunity for the new president to make the “ownership society” into something more than a hollow phrase.

First 100 days:  A fix for the housing crisis

In his speech to Congress, President Obama spoke of how the proper response to the economic crisis is not just a matter of immediate fixes, but also an opportunity to make investments that will serve the nation’s long-term interests. The same idea should govern the housing recovery plan. Otherwise, we get nothing more than a crutch when we need a cure.

As much as short-term help is needed to keep more people from foreclosure, there is a big opportunity to get to the end of the crisis by starting at the beginning of the problem. The conventional wisdom is that subprime mortgages represent the beginning. In fact, the beginning goes back much further. The current crisis stems from the absence of a system that provides stability to the value of properties in the United States.

Instead, real estate “value” in the United States continues to be set through speculation, and that undermines the security – that is, the underlying asset – when mortgages are traded as part of complex financial instruments. We cannot ignore a simple truth of economics: if we are going to treat mortgages as securities, then they must be secured by the tangible asset: namely, land and buildings. To do otherwise has proven to be a recipe for disaster.

The opportunity before the U.S. government with a housing recovery plan is to set up a new system that will keep us from ever getting to this crisis point again. How? The devil is in the details.

It’s no accident that other countries, even those that trade mortgages as financial instruments (such as Australia and Canada) have avoided the levels of off-the-cuff valuation of property we’ve seen in the United States. The reason is that other countries have standardized the information needed to determine the genuine value of real estate and hence mortgage valuation.

This information – actual boundaries, property transfers, claims, liens, and so on – is made available to everyone. The system is sound and transparent. And where do they keep this information? In national property registries, which maintain all the data, in a standardized format, that buyers and sellers need to undertake transactions related to real property.

The United States has a broken registry system, and instead of ever fixing it allowed a title insurance industry to arise as a substitute. Title insurance is non-transparent and (at best) inconsistently regulated, yet it is the main system through which information about property valuation flows. Plus, you have to pay for the information. This leads to all sorts of problems, and fuels speculation.

The Obama Administration’s housing recovery plan ought to look forward. Help people facing foreclosure today, yes, but also establish a national, standardized property registry responsible for the collection of all titles and all information about characteristics of property. Even statewide registries would be a tremendous improvement.

The first step is to mandate an agency to gather whatever exists in state and local registries and title insurance companies around the country, no matter how inadequate, and centralize and standardize that information. Then, establish a mechanism for making this information available to all. Further, figure out how to fill in the missing information. Finally, create a system for the registry to provide remediation in the case of errors.

It is critical that we correct how the value of real estate is established. By finally securing the asset, we can guarantee long-term price stability and rid the system of the speculation that has put us in this crisis. Let’s look at the current housing crisis as an opportunity to make this long-term fix.

This isn’t about setting property prices now and letting them remain static. Rather, it’s about letting a dynamic property market flourish in a way that protects Americans from having to bail out banks or themselves in the future.

Bailouts; fragile confidence; falling stock markets; talking heads; criticism; applause; more criticism; Republicans; Democrats; Latvia’s economy collapsed; Citibank stock down to less than $3; fear; nationalizations; hope; speeches; uncertainty; and more bailouts. What is going on? How can we get out of this mess?

What is going on is exactly what everyone is trying to figure out. There is so much uncertainty out there that I would not be surprised if people started asking astrologists what will happen to their pensions and savings. So much effort is being put into reversing this crisis, yet things still look gloomy.

As I was writing my book and comparing the robustness of property markets and property rights systems in the United States and other countries I realized early on that the United States has a rather weak system for defining and stabilizing property rights. In such a context speculation is almost certain and of course can lead to destabilizing prices and push the entire market beyond its limits.

I strongly believe that the key challenge in our current crisis is to stabilize home and real estate prices. But no one seems to be attacking it head on.

Unfortunately, the weak U.S. property rights system is complemented with some private-sector risk management tools that seem only to increase the uncertainty as they muddle the supply. I talked about this topic 2 days ago on Radio http://www.archive.org/details/RadioInterviewFebruary242009

What needs to happen to stabilize home prices now and for the future? The first step is to reverse the trend toward property being a speculative entity. That will require consolidating in a standardized manner all information about the asset in a single property registry system. We can get the information to begin from the existing (less than ineffective) public registries and from title insurance companies.
This would be a better approach than one that concentrates only on the effects of the crisis, rather than the impacts. Instead of a focus on nationalizing the banking sector, let’s take the more effective – and less expensive – route of undertaking a deep reform of the public registry system and fix the valuation method of every home out there.

You may be interested in reading the following articles:

Nationalizing America’s Banks  (The Economist February 26)

The risks of a bust-up in Europe (The Economist February 26)

No “magic bullet” in Obama housing relief plan.  ( February 18)

Last December, I presented my book at the World Bank sponsored by the World Bank Institute. That talk was special not only because Francis Fukuyama was on the panel and presented a historic development of property rights in economies around the world, and not only because the auditorium was filled to standing room only, but also because Deborah Thomas was there. I wrote about Deborah in my book (chapter 5)
She is a woman from the old segregated and distressed neighborhoods of DC whose financial worth equaled a welfare check … back in the day. She lived with her five children in a housing project, and her mother lived in similar conditions (rent-controlled housing). This living arrangement was all that was offered in the market for people like Deborah: social housing; never owning her own home or apartment, but instead a government- controlled subsidized rental.
One night, Deborah’s home caught fire. She was seriously injured as she tried to rescue her children, one of whom was blinded that same night. After her house was burned she was then officially declared homeless. She had no choice but to move into her mother’s apartment at 14th and W Streets, NW, in DC (across from today’s well-known bookstore/café “Bus Boys and Poets”) – the same apartment she had been raised in as a child, in a building that had been rent-controlled since the 1970s.
But her mother’s building was “Condemned.” A notice glued on the front door of the building declared that it was unsatisfactory for living purposes and that the 150 units had to be vacated in 30 days, with families bussed to shelters.
Deborah and her family were victims of what I call “Unreal Estate” – property so burdened with regulations and unclear rights about usage and responsibilities that it render the asset illiquid.
Unlike so many people who feel powerless to do anything but accept this fate, Deborah researched the regulations, looking for ways the law might allow the tenants to have a choice to purchase and become proud owners of their apartments. She learned that the tenants had the right of first refusal. With her leading the way, the tenants exercised that right. Today, their building and each apartment are valued so much higher, now that they have been pulled out from under public housing regulation and have renovated.
Deborah is no longer on welfare. Instead, she is a proud Middle Class lady in a community that she cares about and to which she belongs. Ownership of her apartment provides a reason to strive, work, save, and invest, and offers a better future for her and her kids.
Deborah’s story is one of HOPE that became REAL CHOICE and has led to a new PROSPERITY.

Last week I gave a presentation to the IMF on how property rights issues have contributed to the current housing market crisis right here in the US.  Below I share with you a review by the IMF of the presentation and some of my thoughts on the subject:

“Elena Panaritis gave us a different perspective today, by analyzing institutional aspects of property markets. Her seminar covered a wide range of institutional problems in property rights, including often hard to anticipate property disputes that could turn real estate into what she called “unreal” or illiquid estate, and reforms to address them based on a recently published book (Prosperity Unbound: How To Transform Unreal Estate and Build Property Markets with Trust). Elena used examples from Latin America and Emerging Europe and discussed the reform program that she led with her team in Peru, as well as reforms currently in progress in Bulgaria.

Elena argued about the presence of problems with property rights even in developed countries, including in the US and in Europe. In the case of the US, some of these problems have come to the forefront during the current crisis, primarily in the so called “up and coming neighborhoods,” where many of the subprime mortgages were given.

She described in detail what she called “reality check analysis,” which is the first step of the reform process to create reliable property markets and includes: understanding the origins of the problem at hand and the institutions and organizations involved, analyzing the distortions at each break of the property rights system going as far back in history as needed, determining the players involved and their incentives, and finding out who are the winners and losers of the reform.

Elena, could you help us better understand the implications of your analysis for the current housing market crisis and its origins?”

Elena: “In brief, I believe this crisis thus far has been analyzed from the middle, leaving out the needed scrutiny of its origins. This leads to misunderstandings that make the crisis worse.

We have repeatedly heard about problems from over-leveraging and loose banking and lending regulation, all justified; we ought, however, to look at the original assets (property – real estate) and try to understand the characteristics of property markets and why we had faulty valuations that have led to negative real estate prices (banks demolishing foreclosed homes), as well as to have over 7 million US real estate owners whose mortgage values are higher than the actual values of their houses.

My analysis focuses precisely on defining “why” we got to such a miss-valuation.

Doing a review of the property market behavior throughout recent history, I have observed that the US has a rather weak institutional infrastructure when it comes to securing the tradability risk of real estate. Property rights in the US are not always as solid as many of us think they are, which distorts incentives and relative prices. There can always be considerable risk regarding boundaries, usage, eminent domain etc. Not all information is registered in the county registries, and so one has to do a long search and also purchase title insurance to accompany the final transaction. The end result is that some of the characteristics of real estate assets allow speculative bubbles. Property (being a tangible and finite asset, with the basic parameters transparent to the market players) usually functions as a catalytic asset in the financial markets, because of its relative stability and thus its valuation.

In the case of the US though, the valuation of property is very much based on the information provided by the private title insurance and not by the public registry. This is because the public registry is not able to provide such information, because its data is not complete enough to produce relative price analysis – plus the registry operates mainly as an archive. Multiple transactions on the same property and neighborhoods (in a highly mobile economy as the US) help the title insurance to operate as a proxy to a very weak registry system. Working in new areas with no previous transactions (undervalued neighborhoods because of housing project regulations etc) makes valuation relatively arbitrary. The liquidity surge of the early part of the 2000’s produced a speculative rise of prices in such neighborhoods, as there was no basis for objective valuations and relative prices were very much distorted (and continue to be).

Title insurance is not an ideal solution for a problematic property rights system, as it does not really secure property rights. A well functioning property rights system, such as the ones in Canada, New Zeland, and Australia, would do a better job.”