Obamacare Premium analysis

ObamaCare Premium Analysis

1         Executive Summary

Data analysis was performed on the recently published 2016 premium data for the healthcare policies offered over the federal exchanges under the Affordable Healthcare Act (colloquially referred to as ObamaCare).  Obamacare is a politically charged subject, has been litigated a number of times all the way to the supreme court, number of bills passed by congress trying to defund it and a lot of articles have been written in the past on its eventual failure from a death spiral event (wherein only the sickest of the sick enroll in the plan, leading to an exponential increase in premium that will make it unaffordable).  Obamacare has survived a number of challenges and has currently enrolled 13 million members (premium paying) across the US, either through state or federal exchanges.  The current data analysis tries to shine some light on the premium data and provide the general public a narrative of what the published premium data tells us.   All of the data analyses in this document were done using Tableau public and there was some amount of data shaping that was required before useful analyses could be done.  Tableau public makes data shaping and transformation easy.  The data analyses will be expanded over time as time permits and based on comments from readers. 

Good vs Bad Strategies - Why so much Bad Strategy?

1         Good vs Bad Strategies

Strategies are developed to achieve Goals.  It is not known at the outset whether the goal is an achievable goal or just a pie in the sky wishful thinking.  Knowledge about the hallmarks of good and bad strategies would allow us to steer clear of bad strategies from the outset.  Strategy development is very context dependent but the general principles of good strategies still apply.  The corporate world in general is littered with companies that have pursued both good and bad strategies to further their businesses, and have led either to their success or demise.  The discussion on good strategies vs bad strategies will give some grounding for the formulation of workable good strategies.  The document is organized into three broad sections – Hallmarks of Bad Strategies, Underpinnings of Good Strategies, Strategic tools in use to analyse businesses.  The discussion on the Good vs Bad strategies and the Strategic tools have generously borrowed content from two books: “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, The Difference and Why it matters” by Richard Rumelt and “Lords of Strategy” by Walter Kiechel.  I am not delivering any new content but just summarizing content from these books and summaries are sometimes useful as a quick guide.  I would recommend readers to go through these two books if they find the summaries interesting. 

Medicare Cost Data Analysis

Medicare Cost Data Analysis

1         Executive Summary

Data analysis was performed on the recently published Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data for (a) Physicians and Other suppliers and (b) Inpatient.  A lot of news articles have been written in the past about the huge variability in billed charges among regional hospitals and how some physicians are getting reimbursed millions of dollars by Medicare.  The current data analysis tries to shine a broader light on the data and provide the general public a narrative of what the published data tells us.   The data analyses will be expanded over time as time permits and based on comments from readers.   

• The data analysis found that at least 60 doctors have had Medicare reimbursements above $5 million in calendar year 2012.  The top doctor had $21 mil in Medicare reimbursements.  All of these reimbursements may have been legitimate but then it begs the question of how a single doctor can be so productive and efficient.  Are these the super-doctors that the medical field should emulate?  Are the taxpayers and retirees getting full value for their money at these levels of reimbursements? 
• Ophthalmology is the second highest doctor category in terms of Medicare reimbursements, after Internal Medicine.  It is even higher than Cardiology.  What are the common ophthalmological procedures done on retirees other than cataract operations?   If ophthalmological procedures are that expensive, then we are not hearing enough ads in the general society about preventive measures on eye health like the way we hear about healthy heart. 

Lords of Strategy book

I have to comment about this book as this has been one of the best books I have read in the past 4 years.  Here is the link to the amazon website for this book http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Strategy-Intellectual-History-Corporate/dp/1591397820/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326330950&sr=8-1

very engrossing, goes thru the history of all the strategy tools developed since the 60s.  gives a good perspective on how all these tools got developed, stories of consulting war along the way.  All those frameworks taught in the MBA school suddenly become much more contextual - the 7Ss, growth share matrix, five forces.  It is an unbiased treatment I would say, trashes a lot of consulting cos and academics along the way.  All these consultants pushed all these frameworks as magic bullets to grow cos and the results are spotty.   The frameworks provide a way to understand what is happening in the competitive environment but that doesn't automatically provide a way to act to your advantage.  It all depends how the info from the framework can be used to a company's advantage and execution is always a problem.  I wish I had this book when I went to the MBA school, would have given me the context to understand all the strategy tools that were taught in the courses.  The book was only published in 2010, so impossible for me to have had this book then. 

Are the Rich obstructing Job creation?

There was an article a week back by Henry Blodget on a rich American destroying the Fiction that Rich people create the Jobs http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/finally-rich-american-destroys-fiction-rich-people-create-152949393.html  The Rich american he quotes is Nick Hanauer.  "Suggesting that "rich entrepreneurs and investors" create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution."  The whole article is based on a wrong premise.  Job creation has nothing to do with the rich, middle class or the poor.  Job creation happens when there is more exchange of goods and services between people (read economic growth) and when this higher activity of exchange needs more people to support the exchange.  The whole eco system surrounding an economy matters - it is not just entrepreneurs or the customers or the govt that is solely responsible for job creation.  Everything must work together to keep the economic machine (of goods and services exchange) running smoothly.

Entrepreneurs play their part by thinking up new products or services that people may be interested in exchanging and those new products or services are necessary for the economy to grow.  The people involved in the exchange must have productive skills to make the exchange happen.  We all earn a certain amount of money based on the skills we possess and that money is used to exchange for products or services with other people.  If I need to afford to buy an iPhone, I must have provided sufficient skilled work in the economy to be able to afford the iPhone.  Ultimately the economic growth and job creating power of a nation comes down to the productivity of the people in the economy.  Productivity is measured in the amount of resources needed to create a certain product or service.  The Productivity increases as we learn to use lower amount of resources to create the same product or service - this raises the standard of living of a nation.  The reason I can't sell an iPhone to an average Bangladeshi is because that average person in Bangladesh is not productive enough to sell a service or product in exchange for an iPhone. 

Personal Savings rate of a Nation - How much is enough?

There was once again another op-ed in the New York times last week bemoaning the US's low savings rate and how other developed nations in Europe are saving a lot more.  The author pointed to a data that savings rates have recently fallen below 4 percent.  So I wondered where that info would have come and stumbled upon the data on the Bureau of economic analysis website (http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=9&step=1, abbreviated data attached below).
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/opinion/why-we-spend-why-they-save.html

[Billions of dollars] Seasonally adjusted at annual rates
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Last Revised on: November 22, 2011 - Next Release Date December 22, 2011
Line		2011
		I	II	III
27	Disposable personal income	11,481	11,559	11,565
28	Less: Personal outlays	10,902	11,003	11,131
29	Personal consumption expenditures	10,572	10,676	10,799
30	Personal interest payments /3/	160	156	160
31	Personal current transfer payments	170	171	172
32	To government	97	97	98
33	To the rest of the world (net)	74	74	74
34	Equals: Personal saving	579	557	435
35	Personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income	5.0%	4.8%	3.8%

 This is aggregate savings rate and doesn't tell us anything about the more important inter-generational savings rate.  Let's make a bullet list of why we need to save in general:

• To tide over any short-term job loss.  My rule of thumb would be 6 months of earnings.  You can't save for long-term unemployment - long-term unemployment is due to structural problems in the society and a savings rate boost won't cure it.
• To pay for a big expense in the future that can be forseen today - like kid's college education.  Again rule of thumb would be to have atleast 50% of each kid's college expense saved by the time they enter college.  
• To pay for the down-payment on a home - the 0% down-payment days are gone, but one can still get decent mortgage rates with a 10% down.  Again a savings goal could be to have the downpayment saved in say 5 years time.   
• To tide over some unexpected expenses that happen every now and then.  This could be for a hospital stay, a car repair, a home repair etc.  Rule of thumb would be like one month of pay.  You are not going to save for a Cancer care or a heart surgery - one has to have insurance coverage to pay most of those kind of high dollar expenses.   
• Save for Retirement - this is the biggie.  This topic is worth several blog articles.  One has to be reasonable on it - everybody can't retire at 55, can't retire in the Caribbean islands, can't expect a lavish lifestyle.  I see a lot of bank websites that show huge amounts of retirement money needed on their retirement calculators.   

We shouldn't expect retirees to save on the social security or the dividend checks they receive every month.  We can't expect every citizen to save and so the society needs to have safety nets to protect the basic necessities of the population that doesn't save.  People who can't save shouldn't expect to buy a home but keep renting.  There are different savings needs and so different savings rates needed for the different age groups.  There is no point bemoaning the low aggregate savings rate of a nation.  A net export nation can sustain a high savings rate but every nation can't be a net exporter (mathematically impossible).  A high aggregate savings rate in a balanced economy (that doesn't have huge trade surplus or deficit) points to large inefficiencies in exchange of goods and services.  A nation can have an aggregate savings rate close to zero and still be a vibrant society as long as there are different inter-generational savings. 

Personal Finance advice on Savings relies on Legal Ponzi scheme

I find a lot of Personal Finance advice on the net about savings - how to save, how much to save, how to kill the credit card debts etc.  The 'Latte savings' buzzword got a lot of coverage a few years back - how you can save $1000/year by skipping the $3 starbucks latte every morning.  So what if everybody takes this advice and cuts down the morning latte from Starbucks - Starbucks will eventually close down, fire all its employees.  These employees may have been buying some product that your company may be making and that would vanish as well.  The economic wheel turns by people exchanging goods and services between each other.  If that exchange slows down, it will have a negative impact on the unemployment rate and the good health of the economy.  The 'Latte savings' only works in the bigger picture if you and a few others skimp on the latte and have greater fools who will keep spending their money on the latte - same as how a Ponzi scheme works though this savings advice is a legal one. 

There are umpteen reasons to save but there has to be some specific goals for the savings.  Savings, for the sake of being frugal, is not a good enough reason.  will continue to write on this topic.   

10 Myths about Taxation

Myth #1: Higher Taxation will lead to loss of Jobs

This is an argument made by small business owners all the time. They say that they will have less money to hire people. Every business makes its decision to hire or invest capital based on the return it can expect on the investment. The investment decision is not based on the amount of money they have left over. Many businesses have cash loaded on their balance sheet as they don’t see good opportunities in this economic environment to earn a good return on their investments. A higher tax rate will not automatically increase the unemployment rate.

Myth #2: Higher Taxation will slow down consumer spending

It all depends on how the tax rates are structured. A household with higher than $100k in earnings are saving rather than spending all their disposable income. A higher tax rate is needed today to fund the deficits of the govt. The govt. in turn uses those taxes to pay the salary of all its employees and pay for the social programs and govt. infrastructure. A higher tax rate shifts some of the disposable income from the private workforce to the govt. This should also slow down the layoffs of the govt. The higher taxes won’t hit consumer spending in a big way as the upper middle class is saving, not spending their extra cash. Higher tax rates are preferable to the alternative of long-term deficit spending and govt defaults.

Myth #3: Taxes need to be fair

Taxes are usually progressive in nature, with the tax rate increasing as the taxable base amount increases. It serves to reduce income inequality in the society. It doesn’t do any good to raise taxes from minimum wage people when they spend all their income on basic life necessities. Flat tax rates are cruel to the poor and the govt. will have to come back to support them with more social programs. So it is inefficient to tax the poor.

Myth #4: Higher taxes will lead to movement of capital to other lower tax countries

Capital moves around the world based on relative net returns. A higher tax rate may reduce net returns in the USA but it may still produce greater relative returns. Capital is not going to move to Mongolia because they have zero tax rates. Companies are not going to abandon the USA because of higher tax rates – the consumers are here and they have to market their products to their consumers.

Myth #5: Lowering the Tax rate will bring in more Tax revenue dollars

This is usually called the Reganomics, referring to the economic policies promoted by the U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, also known as supply-side economics. President Reagan did actually increase taxes twice during his term. This effect is true when the top marginal tax rate is high, like 70%. The top marginal tax rate is currently only 35% and the average tax rate is more close to 15%. A 1% reduction in the tax rate would reduce taxes to the population by 0.01*2.162 trillion = $21.62 billion. The federal govt will only collect the same level of taxes if the $21.62 billion freed up for the consumers have a money multiplier factor of atleast 6.7 to the GDP (=21.62*6.7*0.15). Tax rebates during the D.W. Bush presidency were mostly saved and not spent. Tax cuts have more effect when they are lowered from very high rates.

Myth #6: Higher Income taxes are communist policies

Communist govt policies usually takeover of the assets of the individual citizens. A communist govt owns all the country’s assets. Income taxes are not about taking over the assets of individuals but taking a portion of the income realized from those productive assets to fund the govt. If an entity earns zero income from its assets, the income tax would be zero. An income tax rate greater than 50% does reduce some of the motivation to earn the income. As the famous economist Laffer pointed out – Taxes would be zero at 0% tax rate and 100% tax rate.

Myth #7: Just tax the super-rich to close the govt deficit

There isn’t enough super-rich to tax to close all the govt deficit. The US govt ran a deficit of $1.3 trillion in 2011. The top 1% of americans had an AGI of $1.685 trillion dollars in 2010 and they paid $392 million in taxes (average tax rate of 23.27%). They had an after-tax income of $1.293 trillion and we would have to tax that at 100% to close the govt deficit. The top 50% has to contribute in some fashion to close the deficit gap. It cannot be achieved by taxing the top 1% or the top 5% of the taxpayers.

Myth #8: Taxes should be simple

Taxes by their very nature become complex. The salary or revenue is easy to know. The complex part is all the deductions allowed on an individual’s income to arrive at the Taxable income. The deductions are there for various social, political and economic reasons. There is no reason to have a mortgage interest deduction but the federal govt has instituted it to raise home ownership – how much di d the home builders’ lobby have an influence on this? Now that it is there, it is very difficult to get rid of. It is the case with most of the deductions. Every politician during the presidential election season will present his/her own simplified tax policies which are never practical to implement.

Myth #9: Taxes should be abolished and there is no need to balance the budget

There is a small group of people still in the US that refuse to pay taxes based on the notion that taxes are unconstitutional. That aside, any govt should have checks and balances and one of those checks are its revenue vs spending. The govt. cannot keep spending on deficits continuously – it is not sustainable. It will lead to lack of credibility in the currency of the nation as a long-run deficit spending is equivalent to printing more paper currency. It will eventually lead to the debasement of the dollar and cause huge economic catastrophes. The loss of confidence and the subsequent economic problems don’t happen gradually but happen suddenly.

Myth #10: Deficits should always be closed by reducing govt spending

There are two issues around taxation – how to structure it (where everybody wants to tax the other guy) and what is the appropriate size of the govt. The Republican camp wants to cut the size of the govt to close the deficit and the Obama camp wants to raise taxes to close the deficit. Lost in this argument is the need for a dialogue on an appropriate size for the govt. The federal govt doesn’t operate in a competitive environment and its spending is not based on a ROI. So the question should be as to whether the govt is spending its money efficiently. The answer doesn’t lie in shrinking the govt to the size of its current revenue base. The govt does perform an important function in providing public services to our nation. Raising taxes and shrinking the govt size should both be on the table.

Occupy movement is not a bunch of cry babies

In the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of articles in the mainstream news about the occupy movement participants being a bunch of cry babies (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204485304576640962366762204.html?grcc=c55cb65a12d38771ac008972b7e6dcb1Z3&mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion) and that they are just venting their disappointments in life at Wall street. They try to portray the participants as having no practical agenda or suggestions to improve the situation but just a party mob shouting and waving placards against the 1% rich. What is getting lost in the arguments are some of the reasons behind the rise of such a movement. These people represent a voice against the unfairness we are seeing in the current society. Life is unfair and every adult recognizes this and moves on with life, sometimes bitching and moaning about it in private parties and family gatherings. But when the unfairness becomes really stark, then it galvanizes a larger group of people to take their gripes to the public arena.

We all realize that wall street told lies, sold toxic mortgages and brought the US and the world to the brink of a financial collapse and the federal govts throughout the world had to bail out the banks. I believe the bailout was necessary to stave severe depression and to save the banking institutions. but the problem is that the banks have been settling all their charges easily with the SEC - recently citibank - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/friedman-did-you-hear-the-one-about-the-bankers.html?_r=1, without admitting any guilt. On the other hand, none of mortgage relief proposals by the US adminstrn have worked - the banks have been really stingy about writing off principals on near to foreclosure mortgages. They hold the moral line as to how the borrowers need to pay in full no matter what, though there was no moral line in their bailouts. This is the unfairness you see in the society and that is what is galvanizing the people to protest.

It is ok for these occupy protesters not to have any agenda or come up with ways to solve the problem. As a sane society, we atleast need to have people protesting gross unfairness. The insititutions are not working and the financial firm lobby groups are as powerful or more than in the past. Obama has not delivered on any of the lobbying reforms he promised. What do the masses do if the institutions don't work? The african americans had to fight for civil rights to get some fairness in treatment - they got derided in a big way in the Southern US states for all their protests. The french poor probably got derided for being a bunch of lazy bums during the french revolution.

Full employment - society must provide it.

There was an article in WSJ with some paragraphs trashing the people at the OccupySF. those paras copied below. It is a baseless statement. Here is my reply to it:

I don't think we can associate the bank's collapse and rescue with the inability to get a job. yes, the banks lied, sold toxic mortgages but when they collapsed, what can you do? Just because a judicial system becomes corrupt, you can't just throw away the institution. All you can do is try to reform the institution - put more regulations, checks and balances etc. same thing with the banks. we need the banks to run the society. you can get rid of the heads but not the institutions themselves.

If studying arts, humanities or gender studies won't get you a job to sustain yourselves, why then allow those degrees to be taught at univs here. how is it then any different from some religious madrasas in pakistan? just inculcating some useless knowledge? Then the society is lying to their children. they restrict the amount of MD degrees in the US based on the demand for those doctor specialities - do it for all other courses of study as well. make art univs have the students sign a beware stmt that their probability of landing a job is very low - like a warning on the tobacco label. The society is indebted to provide jobs to its every member - if not, you don't have a stable society. Unless you can prove all the unemployed are lazy bums, the society has to figure out a way to make them employed - it can't just say that you have got lousy degrees. well, the univs, the accreditation boards, and everybody else were in cahoots to market those useless degrees then.

***********************************************************************************

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204485304576640962366762204.html?grcc=c55cb65a12d38771ac008972b7e6dcb1Z3&mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion

Maybe this is all really about disappointment. I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she'd done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can't get a job. It didn't matter. It's all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She's a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won't get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can't find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

Municipal Bonds and Fareed Zakaria

Two things I want to talk about in this blog - about a recent meltdown of municipal bonds prediction by Meredith Whitney (http://seekingalpha.com/article/243169-why-you-should-listen-to-meredith-whitney-s-municipal-bond-default-thesis?source=yahoo) and Fareed's TV interview with a bunch of CEOs on christmas day.

Meredith Whitney predicts a wave of municipal bond defaults that is about to hit the US municipal bonds. She thinks it will probably in the order of $100 to $150 billion. Again she argues based on the sagging revenue base of municipalities and their big pension obligations. But she doesn't take us thru a picture how exactly the municipalities would default. The recent experience of Vallejo,CA and Harrisburg, PA have provided a picture of how difficult, costly and messy it is to default. It is not like a homeowner defaulting on his/her home payments and the creditor can come in to foreclose and auction the property to the higher bidder. and also it is not a like a company that can be either taken over by a new management (after shedding liabilities in a bankruptcy court) or completely folded down in a organized sale of assets. A municipality is a local government entity that is there to provide services to its residents and it can't be liquidated. It is a non-profit entity. The reason they issue bonds is that they have to raise money to undertake big capital projects (like school buildings, sewer, water treatment etc) and they can pay the bondholders over a period of say 10 or 20 years thru assessing property taxes and local sales taxes. The municipalities are in a tough situation right now because their revenues are not enough to pay the annual bond payments plus the other obligations of the municipality (like salaries, pension payments, healthcare premiums, services maintenance etc. ). The economic slow down has affected their revenue base. Defaulting or renegotiating the bond payments is not easy. They have to go thru a court process to do this and it takes money to pay lawyers. The other big issue is that if a municipality does do the default, it will have a hard time raising money next time at good rates. Defaulting doesn't solve any problems for a municipality and it is much better for them to raise taxes or get support from the State govt. Which is why I believe that this wave of municipal defaults will not happen and I am slowly investing in municipal bonds (have a position in AKP that now pays 7.2% tax free yield). The bonds may go down because of default fear and I see it as a good investing opportunity to pick up some yields for the portfolio.

The other issue I want to talk about is the interview of Fareed Zakaria with some CEOs on christmas day on CNN. At the end of the interview, Fareed gave his view on why the US is stuck in this slowdown and high unemployment. His take was that our economy is powered by 70% consumer consumption and we are not investing much in the economy. We need to invest a lot more in R&D and other infrastructure. GDP of an economy powered by 70% consumption is not in and of itself a bad thing. This happens in mature economies where the need to build roads, electric grids is not that great as in developing economies. When consumer consumption is only say 40% of the economic activity, the other 60% is coming from infrastructure investments and net exports. Infrastructure investments like road building is an economic exchange between businesses and the govt and so is not part of end consumer consumption. and yes, the exports driven economy require less internal consumer consumption but as I have said before, all countries in the world cannot run a net export surplus. For long-run growth, we have to improve the skills of our people and that requires a cultural change among the population to see the importance of a high school and graduate education. It is not just building more schools and more universities - the population has to be coaxed to believe that education is a must for living. It is more the soft campaign and marketing stuff. A 70% consumption driven economy is not the problem that is dogging our economy - it is the lack of skills among the population compared to the world that is dogging it. Globalization has allowed Companies to shop around the world for the skills and that has made life a lot more difficult - the competition is not regional but global now.

Should the Fed buy more bonds or not

There were two interesting articles on Barrons this weekend - one arguing for why the Fed should shop till it drops and the other on Lessons of History about hyperinflation due to excessive borrowing. John Hatzius of Goldman Sachs argues that a relatively large percentage gain in the growth of the economy (or GDP) is required to induce a decline in the unemployment rate (Okun's Law). Quantitative easing can release the animal spirits to get the economy going again (even if it is a blunt instrument right now). For him, deflation is a much bigger threat than inflation. On the other side, Victor Sperandeo asks if a nation financing 50% of its budget expenditures in the debt market grow itself out of a collapse? He has some good data. US govt debt is now over $13.7 trillion (not including state's debt of $2.8 trillion and agencies debt of $3.0 trillion). The average rollover period for the debt is 49 months. With recent deficits running over $1 trillion a year, the Treasury issues new debt and refunds old debt at a rate of about $4.3 trillion a year. He thinks investors in US debt will begin something similar to a run on the bank, selling Treasuries, even at severe losses. The break point occurs when a government borrows an amount equal to 40% of its expenditures over an extended period of time. and when this happens, it triggers a hyperinflationary spiral. He uses the example of Zimbabwe currently and France in 1790s as an example. The US still owes most of its debt to its own citizens.

Both these guys just use numbers to justify their stance without looking at the productive capacity of the US economy. Why did Zimbabwe get into hyperinflationary situation - nobody wanted to trade with them anymore and they had killed their agricultural economy due to the land seizure program. The agricultural products and mining products was what Zimbabwe used to trade with the outside world to get other things that they couldn't make internally. Hyperinflation is more a result of losing productivity rather than just printing more money. As I have mentioned in my previous blogs, china is buying US Treasuries not to earn a good return but they have no other avenue to put the dollars to work. Yes, they can buy assets around the world but buying assets in other countries (including the US) is not easy and buying a physical asset requires active management. China could stop trading with us to reduce the flow of dollars to it and it would be more bad to China than the US. Feds buying US Treasuries is not going to trigger inflation unless the banks lend the money and the consumers trigger a demand greater than the installed capacity. The unions at manufacturing companies have a lot less leverage these days to demand big pay raises.

What are the avenues an investor has in putting saved money to work - buy into the stock market or the bond market around the world. If the economy is not growing, then the stock market is not going to give a decent return. Then the main avenue to put the money to work for a greater than zero return is to invest in govt securities and the US Treasuries still offer more protection than other govt securities around the world. If the economy did grow, then the deficit issue of the US govt will get solved and so does the unemployment issue.

Monopoly power on the producer side

I didn't know how to frame this title but still want to capture my thoughts about recent changes we see in monopolistic behaviour. The govt has usually looked at the monopolies in industries serving the consumers and they use a HHI index to assess the competitiveness of an industry and approve/disapprove mergers based on the projected HHI index after the merger. Monopolies are bad because they hold too much market share, have high pricing power and can stifle innovation in their industries because of their power. Compared to a competitive industry, a Monopoly would produce less of a product and charge a higher price for the product. and we break up Monopolies to make the industry more competitive. Basic Microecon classes at universities teaches us all this. This is not the point of my blog.

But Microeconomic theories (atleast the ones I know) have always looked at Monopolies serving the end consumer - like AT&T, Standard Oil, Microsoft etc. but what about those companies that act as monopolies to manufacturing companies - like a Walmart. Walmart almost dictates pricing terms to its suppliers and the suppliers don't have much of a say or choice to go somewhere else to sell their wares. If they don't sell to Walmart, they pretty have to shut down a large portion of their production capacity. This pressure from Walmart then pushes these companies at first to seek efficiencies in production in the US and after that they can only get those costs down by moving to a lower-cost overseas operation. But this causes these companies to lay off employees in the US. So are we increasing unemployment in the country by having these kind of Monopolies like Walmart - they may not be charging a high price to a consumer but extract low prices from their suppliers. Google is another example. They hardly charge anything from a user for e-mail or its search function from a consumer but it has almost 65% of the market share in the search space. They can dictate terms to the companies seeking to advertise on its search pages. I am just raising a question whether Monopolies should strictly be looked at from the point of view of how they behave with a consumer. Is there a potential fallout for an economy by having companies with monopolistic power with their suppliers? What we pay for something is earnings for another. Porters five forces does look at all the sources of power for an industry - should the govt only look improving the bargaining powers of a consumer in a Monopolistic industry - should they also not look at improving the bargaining power of suppliers?

exchange rate wars - continued part 2

Let me get more of my thoughts on this before I get overly influenced by the rightists or leftists views on the QE2. There was an interesting article in Barrons a few weeks back with the title 'Monetary Steroids' by Randall Forsyth. I quote a few sentences from the article. "The trade deficit is a symptom, not the cause of a complex of economic problems. To target a trade deficit is lunatic", Goldman writes on his Inner workings blog at www.atimes.com. "Roberty Mundell shoed in his Nobel Prize-winning work that trade deficits arise from an excess or deficiency of savings in a national economy; if the chinese want to save 50% of GDP, they can only do so by exporting goods, because there aren't sufficient outlets for savings inside China". For the US to increase its savings rate and stop importing goods from Japan and China would mean the US economy would have collapsed, adds Goldman.

I have made this point before in my other blogs - every country in the world can't be net exporters unless we start trading with some outer space aliens. and add to that a corollary, every country can't have a positive savings rate. The desirable equilibrium is to have minor trade deficits/surpluses and average savings rate close to zero. If the chinese or indians have a 40 ro 50% savings rate, it is unsustainable. They can only sustain it by being big net exporters, causing trade frictions and currency exchange rate wars. The govts of the big savings countries need to get their citizens to spend money internally on goods and services. That can be done by providing safety nets like social security, unemployment benefits, universal health care coverage, disability protection etc so that every citizen doesn't see the need to save a big cushion of cash for some unforseen calamity in their life. By saving a big percentage of their income, they are not driving demand for internally produced products and services and so those products & services have to be exported to keep people employed. and these countries initially have a cost advantage to export these goods but then try to sustain the same export advantage using currency manipulation. The country that is losing jobs because of this will retaliate - one tool of easy retaliation is to try to devalue their own currency, which is what the US is trying right now. This is not a solution to the problem but just a response to what the other party is doing. will talk about some solutions in my next blog.