Felix Salmon

Here’s what I don’t get about the NYT’s silly nastygram targeting HuffPo’s new Parentlode blog. It ends like this:

If I have not received a response to these demands within three (3) business days of receipt of this letter, we will have no choice but to pursue all available legal remedies.

This, it seems, puts the NYT, and its legal office, in something of a bind. It’s extremely unlikely that they’re going to get a response to their demands within three (3) business days, or, frankly, ever. Which means that the NYT will have two choices. Either it does nothing — and implicitly admit that its nastygrams are all bark and no bite. Or else it launches a spectacularly pointless and expensive trademark-infringement lawsuit against a blog with a really stupid name, on the grounds that the stupid name (“Parentlode”) is designed “to create an association in the minds of readers” with the NYT’s old Motherlode blog.

Of course the Parentlode name is designed to create that association. As is the rather more germane fact that Parentlode is being written by Lisa Belkin, who founded Motherlode.

Blog names do, of course, have a tendency to follow their authors around. Adam Clark Estes makes a very good point:

Learning the digital ropes, building a devoted audience, tending your personal brand: these are all the sorts of things that journalists are supposed to be doing to adapt to the new news climate. It’s exactly what Andrew Sullivan, who had moved his Daily Dish brand from Time to The Atlantic to The Daily Beast, has done. So too Mickey Kaus who’s ported his Kausfiles moniker from Slate to Newsweek and now The Daily Caller. If Belkin made a mistake it was not initially insisting that she could take “Motherlode” with her if she ever left The Times, as the Freakonomics guys did when they moved their branded blog from The Times to their own site.

We’ve even done it here at Reuters: Matt Goldstein has a blog called Unstructured Finance, which is the same as the name of his old blog at Businessweek; I’m quite sure we’re not going to get sued by Bloomberg as a result.

The NYT lawsuit, then, is pure peevishness — and I don’t understand why that’s an attitude they’re interested in communicating to the world. What’s more, it’s a clear sign that the NYT is still very uncomfortable with helping to build personal brands. Here’s a bit more of the C&D:

Amazingly, Ms. Belkin explicitly draws attention to the connection to the NYTimes.com blog in her first posting today and encourages the false impression that the HuffPo blog is a continuation of the Motherlode blog, albeit with a new name.

False impression? I’d say that’s a true impression. If a blogger moves her blog from one publication to another, then it’s reasonable to consider the new blog a continuation of the old one. This blog, for instance, is very much a continuation of my old blog at Portfolio.com. It features a bunch of cross-posts from when I was at Portfolio, and Portfolio ran a bunch of cross-posts from here after I moved. Even as they hired Ryan Avent to continue to blog at my old home over there.

Obviously, the NYT and HuffPo aren’t nearly as collegial as Portfolio and Reuters were. But there’s a deeper difference: Portfolio was owned by Conde Nast, which is deeply invested in creating individual brands and turning its writers and bloggers into stars. Conde understands that if you want to keep and attract stars, you do that by treating them very well. The NYT, by contrast, seems to think that it’s a good idea to punish its erstwhile blog stars by threatening their new employer with lawsuits. It’s a strategy which can’t help but damage the NYT’s reputation as a great home for writers. Which is yet another reason why it’s so stupid.

You won’t be surprised to hear that shareholders in Allied Irish Banks have not done very well for themselves in the past five years. It did go bust, after all, and had to be nationalized; the share-price chart is above. But recently, as part of the recapitalization of the bank, the number of shares outstanding rose dramatically. Here’s the announcement, which doesn’t quite spell things out:

The Capital Raising will comprise an equity placing (the “Placing”) of ordinary share capital of €5 billion to the NPRFC and an issue of up to €1.6 billion of contingent capital convertible notes (the “Contingent Capital Notes Issue”) to the Minister. The Placing will comprise an issue of new Ordinary Shares for cash at a price of €0.01 per share.

If you do the math, you can see that injecting €5 billion of capital at €0.01 per share means that 500 billion new shares were created. And ever since those shares were created, if you multiply the shares outstanding by the share price, you can see that technically the market capitalization of AIB is somewhere north of €30 billion! Here’s the same stock, only this time charting market cap rather than share price:

Even when a bank has been nationalized, there are good reasons for the shares to continue to be traded. For one thing, it’s helpful when you’re handing out equity to senior management; for another, it’s very useful if and when the time comes to try to privatize the bank and take it off the government’s hands. So at some point there’s going to have to be a reverse stock split, with the shares trading for some sensible amount.

But right now, the shares are genuinely trading at somewhere over €0.06 a piece — and indeed have risen in value quite dramatically over the past three weeks. I have no idea what the mechanism is here, or who’s buying these shares, but if you want proof that markets aren’t always efficient price-discovery mechanisms, this has got to be Exhibit A. It would help of course if these shares could be shorted, but that still doesn’t explain why people are buying at these levels.

(Thanks very much to Patrick Brun for the tip and the data.)

The latest CBO report on income trends says nothing particularly surprising, although it does underline quite emphatically what we already knew about the 99% and the 1%. In particular, the key message, both in charts and text, is all about the 1% and how they’ve torn away from the rest of the population in the past 30 years.

And in the wake of the 99% getting tear-gassed in Oakland by their own municipal government, I’m going to get personal for a minute here: I am the 99%. I have an absolutely wonderful life in my favorite city in the world, protected by a large and prosperous centuries-old democracy. I have enough money to eat and to travel just about anywhere I want. My home is filled with fabulous art and features a small collection of equally fabulous wine; I suspect it might even be worth more than I paid for it. I love my job, which pays extremely well, and affords me a huge degree of professional freedom. I have the kind of transferable skills which are in demand by multiple potential employers. I get to wonk out with some of the most interesting people in the world, and I also get to ignore the bores. I have a gorgeous wife, we’re both in good health, and we’re blessed with wonderful friends. In short, I have the kind of life which would be the envy of well over 99% of anybody who’s ever lived, and well over 99% of anybody alive today.

And yet — I’m still in the (upper quintile of the) 99%, and if you boil things down to just their income and wealth numbers, the 1% is as far away from me as I am from a struggling working family with an onerous mortgage and a highly uncertain employment outlook. And there’s no need for them to shower themselves with that kind of money. From me on out, it’s pure avarice. Which is human, and natural, and probably even helps in terms of economic growth. But given the amount of misery and poverty in America, it’s simply unconscionable that I and the people earning vastly more than me — including all of the 1% — are getting such an enormous share of the income and wealth so desperately needed elsewhere.

All of which is to say that my taxes are too low. If my taxes went up and the money was used to reduce poverty and unemployment in America, my standard of living would still be glorious — and millions of lives would be improved. And as for the 1%, their taxes could double and they would still be fabulously well off. I’m not proposing that as a policy solution. But I am trying to put things in perspective here. I’m not in the 1%, and I can and should be giving back much more to the society which is supporting me and making my lifestyle possible. The people who are in the 1% are the most fortunate of the fortunate. The least they can do is pay as much in taxes as, say, I do.

Some of today’s favorite links from Counterparties.com:

The IMF is considering getting involved with the EU’s bailout investment vehicle — Reuters

Treasury may soon offer floating-rate bonds — Bloomberg

This chart will be handy in the event the supercommittee fails — Washington Post WonkBlog

Could this tweak to CEO pay have prevented the financial crisis? — The Economist

US consumer confidence is at recessionary levels, whether we’re in one or not — FT Alphaville

A very smart profile of Mitt Romney, focusing on his time at Bain — New York

And a giant Legoman has washed ashore in Florida. No word on what was being explained — BoingBoing

Harold Bradley and Bob Litan made some very good points about ETFs in their Congressional testimony last week — testimony which Paul Amery today greets as “a mixed bag”. But it’s hard to argue with this:

We have enough history with financial innovations to at least raise questions when we see an innovation growing at very rapid rates. ETFs are no exception. We believe that these instruments may now be undermining the fundamental role of equities markets in pricing securities to ensure that capital is efficiently allocated to growing businesses. When individual common stocks increasingly behave as if they are derivatives of frequently traded and interlinked ETF baskets, then it is trading in the ETFs that is driving the prices of the underlying stocks rather than the other way around.

There’s a tragedy of the commons going on here: for any given individual investor, ETFs make a huge amount of sense. But if individual investors — and a lot of institutions, too — all pile into ETFs en masse, then stocks lose their price-discovery role, and large deleterious effects can start emerging.

For instance, one big reason to buy a market index rather than a handful of individual stocks is that the index provides diversification. But that diversification is disappearing as people pile into ETFs:

High co-movement of securities is not new, often occurring when markets reflect crowd panic or euphoria. What is new, however, is how ETFs decrease diversification benefits, with stocks and sectors worldwide moving together, even when there is no panic. Stocks move together today more than at any time in modern market history with recent data indicating that individual common stock prices that make up the S&P 500 index now move with the index 86% of the time.

Here’s one particularly striking chart:

This isn’t the S&P 500, which has even higher correlations. It’s just large-cap stocks. Which are all moving together in lockstep — much more than they were even in 1987, and more even than they were in the Great Depression.

Amery comments:

It’s common sense that the more investors buy and sell equities via index trackers like ETFs and futures, the higher you’d expect internal index correlations to be. And since ETFs have been growing in importance, the greater you’d expect their impact on index stocks’ co-movements to be.

Researchers at JP Morgan came to similar conclusions last year, arguing that high-frequency trading is also playing a role in boosting internal index correlations.

There’s nothing forcing investors, by the way, to purchase those index trackers where such herd effects are most prominent. You don’t have to buy the S&P 500—you could easily choose an index put together in different ways and featuring different stocks. Arguably, avoiding “overowned” indices should be near the top of a list of any investor’s priorities.

This I find a bit less convincing. As the above chart shows, there are very high co-movements even outside the S&P 500, it’d be hard to find any kind of broad stock index without a high correlation. And if you only get a small benefit in terms of extra diversification, then the costs, in terms of higher ETF fees for unusual instruments, are likely to be higher than the benefits from diversification.

That said, there are lots of people who make money from the huge amounts of cash sloshing into ETFs, and especially from the way in which the S&P 500 ETFs have to rebalance every time the index changes. And the more popular S&P 500 ETFs become, the more we’re all just funneling cash — some 30bp per year, it’s estimated — to those rebalancing arbs.

What is to be done? At the margin, Bradley and Litan’s idea that ETFs should have tighter circuit breakers than individual stocks is a good one. Amery reckons that “it’s important not to leave loopholes where trading in the ETF is stopped, but that in most of the underlying stocks can carry on” — but I don’t see that. If you want to keep on trading individual stocks, that’s fine — just stop the ETF driving their movement.

But fiddling around with circuit breakers won’t make any difference on a day-to-day basis. And cracking down on ETFs more generally risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My feeling is that the best thing to do here is simply adopt the kind of financial-transactions tax that the Europeans are talking about — a 0.1% Tobin tax on all ETF trades. That would drive away the day-traders and rebalancing-arbs from the ETF market, leaving it to the buy-and-hold investors that ETFs are very good for. It can’t do much harm, and it could well do quite a lot of good, from a systemic-risk perspective.

Daniel Indiviglio looks at the impressive plunge in Netflix’s stock price, both today and over the past three months or so, and wonders what on earth could have happened in the real world to justify such a plunge.

Even if its stock was overvalued at its July peak, a 74% drop in a little over three months is enormous. Was it really that overvalued? The company may now be undervalued: investors may be overreacting.

Indiviglio’s main point is well taken. The standard view of stock markets is that they’re some kind of objective collective judgment on the fundamental outlook of a company. The company does whatever it does, generating revenues and profits and cashflows and the like, and then the stock market places a present value on those fundamentals.

Under that model, the price action in Netflix makes no sense.

But that model doesn’t reflect the real world. In the real world, many companies — especially ones with high-flying stock prices — become self-fulfilling stock-price-appreciation machines, at least until the party stops.

And what’s happening to Netflix’s stock price has everything to do with Netflix’s stock price, and very little to do with Netflix itself.

Whitney Tilson, famously, was one of many people who went short Netflix at about $180 per share and busted out when it just kept on rising. Netflix, as the chart above quite clearly indicates, was for a very long time a steamroller which would just flatten anybody who tried to short it. And so the shorts went away, bruised, bloodied, and beaten.

Without short interest, there was almost nothing keeping Netflix stock in the realm of sanity. If you wanted to buy it, you needed to find somebody willing to sell it. And with the stock going ever upwards, such people were very hard to find. The stock had its own dynamics, which became increasingly divorced from any corporate fundamentals.

Or, more accurately, the stock dynamics became entrenched within Netflix’s corporate fundamentals. The deals I wrote about yesterday — like paying $30 million per movie for the right to stream DreamWorks’s animated films months after they’re available on DVD — were cheap when they were essentially being paid for with bubblicious Netflix equity. Indeed, insofar as they caused the stock price to rise, they had negative cost to Netflix: the more deals like this that Netflix did, the more valuable Netflix became.

But then the stock started falling, and all those dynamics were reversed. In a normal company with some kind of short interest, a falling stock price is met with shorts taking profits and supporting the price. In this case, the shorts were few and far between, and they too were enjoying the momentum trade. They weren’t covering.

Indeed, short interest started going up, rather than down: all the momentum traders who were happy making money on the way up were equally happy to try to make even more money on the way down.

And suddenly investors started looking at corporate fundamentals, and asking questions about whether streaming operations could ever be hugely profitable for Netflix — or even profitable at all. The dynamics of the rising share price were clear: every time that Netflix looked as though it was making lots of money, the price of the next streaming deal would only go up. Netflix has to buy streaming rights from big-media companies, and those companies are going to extract as much money as they can from Netflix, up to and possibly even beyond the point at which it declares bankruptcy. It’s the big-media companies which have the pricing power here, and now that Netflix has set eye-watering precedents for things like DreamWorks Animation and House of Cards, it’s going to find it difficult to pay more reasonable rates going forwards.

So people with equity in Netflix are in a difficult place. Their company is locked into a model where it pays billions of dollars for streaming rights, while keeping the price to subscribers dirt-cheap. That’s a model which on its face looks much more attractive to the content creators than it does to Netflix. And it’s very hard to place a value on the permanent equity of Netflix in that kind of dynamic. When it was going up, it was going up. But now it’s crashed so dramatically, no one has a clue where Netflix stock should be trading, or even whether Netflix — having largely abandoned its DVDs-by-mail business model — even has a viable model at all.

Shelly Banjo’s article about the multi-year waiting lists for parking spots at Connecticut train stations is going somewhat viral, for good reason:

The waiting list for a Fairfield Parking Authority permit has 4,200 people and stretches past six years…

“It’s like season tickets to the Giants—even when you’re dead they get passed down to your children,” said Jim Cameron, head of the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council…

Connecticut’s parking crunch is, in large part, a problem of supply and demand: More than 60,000 commuters head toward Manhattan on Metro-North’s New Haven train line on weekdays, but transportation officials say stations have public parking for nearly 20,000…

John Eck, a former television executive from Fairfield, kept his permit after he left his job last spring—”just in case” he needed to start commuting again.

“You hear horror stories of people missing the renewal deadline and losing the permit in other towns,” Mr. Eck said. “I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”

Eugene Colonese, the transportation department’s rail administrator, said the task force “came to a certain point and well, stopped its work for a little while.”

He said the department is still “looking for the best way to get commuters to stations, a balance we think will be between building more transit-oriented development, looking at shuttles and other public transportation, as well as parking improvements.”

The parking lot at Fairfield train station is big enough for 1,053 cars; the station sees 2,942 people, on average, ride in to NYC, and the waiting list now has 4,278 names on it. These are all big numbers. The price for a spot, however, is low: just $340 per year. Obviously, that’s well below market, and causing all manner of problems. But there’s another number that’s lower still:

We recently spoke to Director of the Fairfield Parking Authority, Cynthia Placko…

Placko told us there isn’t room for many more than the 24 bike lockers that are already there, and those are totally filled.

My guess is that it really isn’t all that hard to take the space given over to 1,053 parking spots and use it effectively to house transportation for 2,942 people. Unless, that is, those people are all taking up the space of some enormous SUV.

In a place like Fairfield, it’s hard to raise the price of parking so much that you start to incentivize car-sharing directly. So here’s my proposal: rip out a bunch of car spaces, and replace them with covered, secure parking for bicycles and scooters. Maybe motorbikes, too. Surely that’s an obviously better way of getting commuters to stations than giving them each a couple of hundred square feet of massively underpriced prime Connecticut real estate, and then acting shocked when they flock to the opportunity.

Update: Fairfield could even buy back parking slots for more than they were sold for, and convert them to two-wheeled parking. Continue to do that until there’s one empty two-wheeled parking space. And then auction off the rest to the highest bidders.

Most Greek bailout money has gone to pay bondholders — The Washington Post

The EFSF could become more or less an insurance company — The New Yorker

“If you can show correlation [of greater than zero] then you can buy sovereign CDS” — IFR

Roubini: European policy makers are “hell bent to commit growth harakiri” — CNBC

Sarko to Cameron: “You have lost a good opportunity to shut up.” — The Guardian

The moral case for NGDP targeting — Interfluidity

Already lean US manufacturers could cut further — WSJ

Rhode Island: tiny state, huge debt problem — NYT

Parking passes are an alternative asset class in Connecticut’s Gold Coast — WSJ

Netflix released its third-quarter results this afternoon, showing net income of $62 million, down slightly from the second quarter’s $68 million. And things are going to get much worse before they get better: “We expect to report a global consolidated net loss,” the company said, in the first quarter of 2012. Maybe the company shouldn’t have spent $40 million, over the course of the third quarter, buying back 182,000 shares at an average price of $218 apiece. (In the wake of today’s results, they’re trading in the $80s.)

In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings let the bubblicious stock price — it briefly topped $300/share at the beginning of the quarter — go to his head. The company was swimming in money! And so, in September, Hastings signed a deal to pay $30 million per movie for everything that DreamWorks creates, in return for the right to stream those movies a few months after they’re released on DVD. It’s known as the “pay-TV window”, and in order to wrest those rights from HBO, Netflix had to outbid HBO, which was reportedly paying something in the neighborhood of $20 million per movie.

It wasn’t even the first time that Netflix went head-to-head against HBO in a bidding war: Hastings says that HBO was an underbidder back in March, when Netflix won the exclusive rights to TV series House of Cards. And in the case of the DreamWorks deal, remember that Netflix already gets all those DVDs the day they come out, long before streaming will be allowed. The $30 million per movie was just for the Netflix customers who have streaming and who either don’t have the DVD service, or who want to watch the movie but haven’t got around to watching it on DVD yet.

A lot of ink has been spilled over Netflix’s decision to separate its DVD and streaming businesses, and to increase its prices sharply. Those decisions are, surely, the proximate cause for its torrid present. But the big-money deals show the same amount of arrogance, with even less business justification. It’s obvious why companies raise prices: they think they’re going to make more money that way. But why would Netflix spend hundreds of millions of dollars preventing movies and TV shows from being shown on HBO? That’s much less obvious.

When he’s on the record, Hastings loves to say that his core market is simply people who want “unlimited streaming for $8 a month and a vast catalog”. Movies and TV shows are nonrival: if all he’s interested in doing is maximizing the size of his catalog, then there’s no need for Hastings to exclude HBO from running the exact same content. But flush with a soaring stock price, Hastings decided that he was willing to pay eye-popping sums of money to turn his nonrival good into an excludable good: if he has it, then HBO can’t have it too.

I can see why people might want to spend small amounts of money to do that. A certain part of Netflix’s actual and potential subscriber base has HBO, and some of those people will decide that HBO is good enough for them and that they don’t need Netflix as well, and maybe if Netflix keeps House of Cards from HBO then some of that subset will decide to subscribe to both, and Netflix will get extra subscribers. But there’s no way the economics can be worth the kind of sums being bandied about here.

Indeed, the whole DreamWorks deal, in particular, seems Pareto sub-optimal for all concerned. Wouldn’t all three parties have been better off if DreamWorks had agreed to license its movies in the pay-TV window to both HBO and Netflix? If Dreamworks got, say, $15 million from HBO and $25 million from Netflix, then DreamWorks would have made an extra $10 million per movie, while both HBO and Netflix would have gotten the movies for $5 million less each than they were willing to pay.

My guess is that it’s HBO which prevented such a deal from happening — it’s owned by Time Warner, which has its own interest in preserving big-media monopolies as a matter of principle. But I doubt that Netflix fought very hard to abolish the exclusivity provision — no matter how much money it was spending on content, its market capitalization was rising even faster, so the market was saying that it was doing something right.

Now, however, things are different. The market doesn’t trust Netflix to run itself efficiently and effectively any more, and deals like these are going to be scrutinized a lot more closely. As a result, I suspect Netflix will be much more open to sharing content with Time Warner than it has been up until now. Whether Time Warner is in any mood to reciprocate, however, remains to be seen.

HARP II is being announced with great fanfare today:

Across the country, nearly 11 million owe more than their property is worth.

Millions of these people have done everything right. They’ve paid all their bills and kept current on their home loans. But right now, they’re stuck with higher payments because their mortgages are underwater. They’re not eligible to refinance because the decline in home prices have made their property worth less than what they owe. And that’s a problem President Obama knows must be addressed…

Today, President Obama is taking action.

Sounds impressive, eh? It is, until you read the official FHFA press release. At which point you learn that

• If you’re a homeowner whose mortgage isn’t owned or guaranteed by Frannie, you’re out of luck.
• If your mortgage was sold to Frannie after May 31, 2009, you’re out of luck.
• If you want to get out of negative-equity hell by doing a principal reduction, you’re out of luck.
• If your bank doesn’t feel like participating, for whatever reason, you’re out of luck.

All of which is likely to result in not-very-much, as the FHFA itself concedes:

For many reasons it is very difficult to project the number of mortgages that may be refinanced under the enhancements to HARP, including the future path of interest rates, borrower willingness to undertake a refinance transaction and the number of lenders and servicers who choose to offer the program. Given current market interest rates, our best estimate is that by the end of 2013 HARP refinances may roughly double or more from their current amount but such forward-looking projections are inherently uncertain.

First, by the end of 2013? Never mind mortgage relief now, we’ll try and get you mortgage relief in two years’ time?

Secondly, the current pace of HARP refinancings is pathetic. This chart comes from the FHFA press release, and it shows that over the most recent four months for which we have data, we’ve been managing to do less than 30,000 HARP refinancings a month. And in the 28-month history of HARP, we’ve managed a grand total of 894,000 HARP refinancings, which works out to about 32,000 per month. Interestingly, the chart ends at August 2011, which means it represents exactly half of the total timeframe from the beginning of HARP to the end of 2013.

In other words, the FHFA is projecting that the pace of HARP refinancings won’t increase at all as a result of this plan. We’ll still average out at about 30,000 per month — maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, but you’re never going to make a dent in the mountain of 11 million underwater mortgages at that rate.

This whole exercise is so obviously pathetic that even above-the-fray central bankers are sneering at its inadequacy. Here’s NY Fed president Bill Dudley, today:

Problems in the housing market are a serious impediment to a stronger economic recovery…

Obstacles to refinancing and access to credit for home purchases are limiting the support provided by low rates to house prices and consumption. Meanwhile, the large supply of foreclosed homes for sale—and the prospect that unemployment and negative equity will continue to feed the foreclosure pipeline—continues to put downward pressure on home values. The risk of further house price declines in turn discourages would-be buyers from entering the market.

Continued house price declines could lead to even more defaults, foreclosures and distressed sales, undermining wealth, confidence and spending. Breaking this vicious cycle is one of the most pressing issues facing policymakers…

Stabilizing the housing sector is particularly important because housing equity is an important part of household wealth. This calls for a comprehensive approach to housing policy, starting with an urgent effort to remove the obstacles that make it difficult for all borrowers to refinance at today’s low mortgage rates, but extending beyond this to tackle other problems weighing on housing.

The best that Dudley can bring himself to say about HARP II is basically that it’s a start. Most importantly, it doesn’t do principal reductions — if you’re underwater when you get your HARP refinance, you’ll be underwater afterwards, too. The FHFA itself, in its press release, helpfully points out that for someone with a loan worth 25% more than their house, they won’t start building equity in their home for ten years if they refinance into a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.

But the sad fact is that anything more substantive than this is likely to require Congressional approval, and therefore be a political non-starter between now and November 2012. The government’s done almost nothing to address the housing mess, and will continue to do almost nothing for the foreseeable future. Which, as Dudley says, bodes very ill for the economy as a whole.

Jared Bernstein has the wonky version in the NYT, but Jim Surowiecki has the soundbite:

Small businesses are, on the whole, less productive than big businesses, and though they do create most jobs, they also destroy most jobs.

Both of them are making the important point that high-flying rhetoric about the importance of small business is much better politics than it is policy. We’ve been hearing a lot about the individual 99% of late; here’s the corporate 99%, from Bernstein.

New research by the Treasury Department finds that small businesses — defined as those with income between $10,000 and $10 million, or about 99 percent of all businesses — account for just 17 percent of business income, and only 23 percent of them pay any wages at all.

The facts of the matter are stark: larger businesses are more productive (this will come as a shock to anybody who spends most of their life in meetings, but it seems to be true), and they even create more jobs, once you control for firm age. Or, to put it another way: it’s not small businesses which create jobs, it’s startups. Here’s the chart, from this paper by Haltiwanger, Jarmin, and Miranda (HJM):

The statistic that small companies create the most jobs comes from the purple line. But firms mean-revert when it comes to size: as they fluctuate in size over time, they tend to add jobs when they’re smaller, and lose jobs when they’re bigger, and even if they add no jobs overall, that still makes it look as though smaller companies add more jobs.

If you control for mean-reversion effects and look at a firm’s average size, the effect seen in the purple line becomes much less pronounced, and you get the green line instead.

And then look what happens when you add age controls — that is, when you control for the fact that younger companies are more likely to create jobs than older companies. A small family business which has been around for decades is unlikely to be an engine of job growth; meanwhile, large young companies (think Groupon) can hire extremely quickly.

Once you adjust for company age, you get the blue line in the chart — small companies actually lose jobs, on average, and it’s not until you get to about 500 employees that they manage to create any jobs at all.

Here’s Bernstein:

The big story here is that startups—which can only grow at first but which also have high death rates—play an important role in these dynamics. They’re small at first, and many perish—about 40% of the startups’ jobs are lost through firm death after five years. But if they survive, they will generate significant job growth (HJM: “conditional on survival, young firms grow more rapidly than their more mature counterparts”).

This finding and the flip of the lines in the figure when the proper controls are applied have important policy implications. Once we account for the startup effects, small businesses, per se, are not the engines of job growth they claim to be.

The policy implication here is that if you want to create jobs, you’re much better off encouraging startups than you are bending over backwards for small businesses, most of which are reasonably long in the tooth. And the interests here do diverge, although of course there are overlaps.

For me, the most important difference is the degree to which the two groups are reliant on a social safety net. Precisely because most startups fail, the founders and employees at such shops need to be able to know there’ll be someone to catch them if they fall. The success of Silicon Valley can be attributed in large part to a culture where people who have worked and failed at a startup are extremely employable. But on a national level, there are good reasons why we would want to move towards the Norwegian model.

Finally, it’s worth resuscitating this classic Kinsley column from 2008: the fact is that some of the richest members of the 1% are small business owners, while many of the hard-working 99% are in fact large business owners.

Big businesses are not owned by big people, and small businesses aren’t necessarily owned by small people. The typical shareholder in a big business is a worker in some other big business whose pension fund has chosen to invest in that company. Or a retiree who has bought this stock as his or her nest egg. Or it’s somebody’s 401(k).

So the next time a politician lionizes small business owners, remember that you are in fact a large business owner. And that small business, while it sounds romantic, isn’t nearly as important as the political rhetoric tends to make it out to be.

Who’s ready for six days of EU debt bickering? — Bloomberg

German newspapers: not such big fans of a leveraged EFSF — Der Spiegel

France could definitely lose its S&P AAA rating. Welcome to the club — Bloomberg

Gordon Brown’s plan to fix the EU. Because he’s exactly who we want in a crisis — Reuters

The Fed might once again buy those mortgage-backed securities no one wants — WSJ

Physicists graph 1300 “super-connected” companies that dominate the world — NewScientist

Steven Schwarzman gives a surprisingly funny speech — Dealbook

A glorious, very very long Bess Levin headline — Dealbreaker

All these links, and many more, can be found at Counterparties.com

I’ve been saying for a while that blogs are dead — certainly the one-person, one-voice blog, and also the big splashy expensive blog launched by a new or old-media company. Both I think had their heyday a few years ago. But as bloggish tendencies get incorporated into the broader news business, and as the sharing-and-linking part of the blogosphere moves to social media, something quite encouraging is happening: media organizations are finding it easy to set up small, light blogs which they’re not particularly invested in.

On the basis of 2=trend, I present to you: Overheard, the new blog from the WSJ’s Heard on the Street team; and Occupy Wall Street: The Wealth Debate, from Bloomberg Businessweek. Both are places where shorter-form quick hits can get published without laborious editing; neither are particularly important strategically; but both fill an empty niche in terms of their organization’s coverage in a cheap and effective manner.

This is a lot easier than having to re-architect the broader news outlet to make it more amenable to such materials. All websites have some kind of blog content, so if you need something fast, adding a new blog should be pretty easy. And it doesn’t involve lots of unreliable technology from outside vendors, either, which is always an advantage.

Well done, then, to the WSJ and Businessweek for seeing how blog technology is a good way of powering things which don’t need to last forever, or get lots of traffic — they’re just another part of the big package which the newsroom provides.

I doubt many people will bookmark either of these blogs, but that’s fine — individual posts will get shared socially and placed on the home page, the news will get covered effectively, and that’s all that’s needed. These aren’t throwaway microsites — they’re important to the broader function of the newsroom. But they’re also small enough to experiment and push the envelope with respect to voice and content type. And if certain ideas work well on these blogs, they can always percolate up to the rest of the site over time.

I got some very interesting responses to my post on Wednesday about the total amount of student loans outstanding — and I’ve learned a lot about the limitations of official statistics as a result.

The first thing to say is that the New York Fed figures I published for total student loans are not accurate — they understate the truth of the matter. The New York Fed is aware of this fact, and will revise its numbers for Q2 2011 in coming weeks; when it releases the Q3 numbers, they will reflect the new methodology and will be substantially higher than what we’re seeing right now.

And yes, the new numbers will show that student-loan debt exceeds credit-card debt.

But they won’t show student-loan debt at $1 trillion.

It turns out that the $1 trillion number is not new — it appeared in the lede of a NYT story back in April, which attributed the number to Mark Kantrowitz. Kantrowitz, who runs the websites FinAid.org and Fastweb.com. Kantrowitz, described by the Richmond Fed as “a leading resource on student financial aid”, has been pushing his own estimates of student-loan debt for a while; he supplied the data for the chart which accompanied the NYT story, and indeed published a very similar chart back in August 2010.

The USA Today story I criticized on Wednesday was interesting because it’s the first story to come up with the $1 trillion number which doesn’t attribute it to Kantrowitz. Instead, it attributed the number to the New York Fed — but the New York Fed has never published a figure for student loans anywhere near $1 trillion.

Kantrowitz claimed in an email to Reuters that “the US Department of Education has confirmed total federal education debt in NSLDS at over $800 billion”. NSLDS is the National Student Loan Data System, but the Department of Education doesn’t publish numbers for the total amount of debt in that system, and it’s unclear where or when this confirmation happened. Kantrowitz also pointed us to the numbers in the president’s budget for FY 2012. If you want to be daunted, go to this page and check it out: it’s absolutely enormous.

I got Nick Rizzo to try to pull out the line items for the cumulative balance of student loans outstanding. There are two main sources for federal student loans — the Federal Family Educational Loan Program, or FFELP, which is being phased out, and the Federal Direct Student Loan Program, or FDSLP. The FFELP has about $390 billion in total loans outstanding –$77 billion in Stafford loans, $81 billion in unsubsidized Stafford loans, $21 billion in PLUS loans, and $211 billion in consolidation loans. PLUS loans are actually loans to parents, rather than to students, but they still count as education debt.

The FDSLP is up to $220 billion in loans outstanding at this point — $58 billion in Stafford, $59 billion in unsubsidized Stafford, $20 billion in PLUS, and $83 billion in consolidation loans.

Add the two together, and you get to $610 billion. There are a few tiny other loan programs in there as well, but nothing which really moves the needle much past that point.

Still, this is just federal loans. These numbers don’t include private-sector student loans at all, and already they’re above the $550 billion that the Fed claimed was the total of all student loans outstanding in the country.

The Fed knew this — Kantrowitz is no shrinking violet when it comes to sharing his findings — and so they embarked on a quest to find out why their student-loan number was so small.

Now it turns out that the data feeding the NY Fed’s household debt and credit report is bought in — the Fed has a contract with Experian Equifax, the credit-report company. Experian Equifax takes a nationally representative random sample of the credit reports that it runs, breaks out the various different forms of debt in those reports (mortgage, home equity lines, auto loans, credit cards, student loans), and passes that information on to the NY Fed, which compiles the report by extrapolating that data to the nation as a whole. And although Experian Equifax has provided data going back to 1999, the New York Fed has only actually published this data series for less than two years — the first release came for the first quarter of 2010.

When it became obvious that the student-loan totals were too low, the NY Fed and Experian Equifax started looking at the data again. And eventually the culprit was found. There was a bucket of random obligations called “Miscellaneous”, which included things like utility bills, child support, and alimony. And it turns out that if you went burrowing in that miscellaneous debt, there was actually a pile of weirdly-categorized student loans in there.

When the NY Fed restates the Q2 figures, and from Q3 onwards, that pile of student loans will get included in the bigger student-loan figure, where it belongs. And the number will rise, probably by a couple of hundred billion dollars. Not enough to bring it to $1 trillion, but enough to make it bigger than total credit-card debt.

The problem is that when the new numbers are restated, the old numbers won’t be. There’s a lot of digging into formerly-miscellaneous line items involved here, and a lot of very old data which was never provided to the NY Fed which needs to be resuscitated and disaggregated. That’s a laborious process, and one which will cost a lot of money. The NY Fed wants to be able to publish the full series in an accurate manner, but it won’t be able to do that for a while, if ever. For the time being, we’re just going to have a spike in the series at Q2 2011, when it stops being inaccurate and starts being accurate. We won’t be able to tell, for instance, how fast student-loan debt has been growing. Which is a bad thing.

And more generally, it’s probably suboptimal that the best public data series for student-loan debt comes from a sample of credit reports from Experian Equifax. Since the government owns the vast majority of student loans, why can’t it just publish accurate data for total federal student loans outstanding? That would certainly be easier than having to piece such things together from dozens of disparate line items in the annual budget. I suspect, too, that the government also has pretty good data on private student loans, as well. But putting a data series together is a big undertaking: you have to find the data going back quite a ways, and then you have to commit to updating it on a regular basis. I suppose that no one really cares enough to have made that happen, ever — with the result that no one really knows for sure just how much America owes in student loans.

But when the NY Fed releases its new numbers, those will probably be the best we’ve got. Even if they’re flawed.

What on earth is going on with the price of taxi medallions in NYC? Two of them just sold for $1 million apiece — that’s a 42% increase just since August, when conventional wisdom had it that $705,000 was a top tick and that medallions would soon plunge in value.

Derek Thompson reckons that this is a sign of how great New York’s economy is doing:

It’s all about supply and demand. The tailwind behind medallion inflation is a cap on taxi cab licenses. Even as the economy of New York City grew at a furious pace across three decades, the number of taxi plates stayed basically constant, despite wage growth and population growth and rising demands for cross-town transportation. As a result, their value rose tremendously.

One problem with this theory is that if you look at the chart of medallion prices, it doesn’t seem to bear much relation to the strength of New York’s economy. The majority of the rise in price has happened over the past ten years, which haven’t been particularly great, economy-wise. And certainly there hasn’t been any citywide boom in the past two and a half months.

Jacob Goldstein has a similar theory.

Every cab in New York City has to have a medallion. And the city strictly limits the number — currently just over 13,000. So as New York has prospered over the past few decades, the price of medallions has gone through the roof.

The economics of this, however, don’t make a lot of sense. Cabs might get a little bit busier when economic activity picks up, but most of that extra income is taken home by drivers, rather than the owners of corporate medallions. (Corporate medallions are the ones where the owners don’t drive the car; they’re the ones being charted here.) The income from a corporate medallion is pretty steady, and was spelled out in the comments to this post:

The maximum amount a cab leased out to drivers can earn over a year is $82,524. This assumes that the cab had a driver every day and every night and that it never breaks down. The day shift maximum charge is $105. The maximum night shift charge is $129 and that is only for Thursday-Saturday. Sunday-Tuesday is $115 and Wednesday is $120.

You’ve also left out of your calcultions the cost of the car. Let’s call it $27,000 and you are required by law to buy a new one every 3 years.

This is the real reason why medallions are so expensive: good old-fashioned interest-rate calculations.

We’re basically talking about a real income stream, here, of about $75,000 per year. (Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the income from a taxi medallion rises at the same rate as inflation.) That’s a real yield of 7.5% on a $1 million investment — which isn’t half bad at today’s interest rates.

Put it this way: how much would a bond paying a real yield of $75,000 a year cost? At the most recent auction, the 29-year TIPS cleared at an interest rate of 0.999%. At a 1% real yield, an income stream of $75,000 a year would cost you $7.5 million.

Now you don’t actually get $75,000 a year if you own a medallion. You have to pay for maintenance, insurance, and workers comp; you also have to pay someone to manage your drivers. But even if you bring the income down to $50,000 a year, that’s still a pleasant 5% yield on your money, and what’s more it’s a yield which behaves much more like a real yield than a nominal yield. Paying $1 million for such a thing doesn’t seem silly to me, especially when there’s a lot of room for capital gains as well.

Of course, there’s risk here too. Any time you see a chart like the ones above, you have to worry that there’s a bubble. Plus, there’s political risk: the mayor can print new medallions, making the existing ones worth a little less (but not a lot less, given that the income from medallions is largely fixed).

That said, medallion owners have a lot of political clout, and historically they’ve been good at making sure that their income is maximized, rather than suffering anything which might reduce it. And when Goldstein starts dreaming of taxi deregulation, he quickly enters cloud-cuckoo land:

The medallions create a textbook example of what economists call rent-seeking behavior: Basically, gaining extra profits without providing extra benefits. If the number of taxis were allowed to increase (and if cab fares were unregulated), the number of taxis would increase and the price of a cab ride would fall.

No! if the number of taxis were allowed to increase, then the number of taxis would increase. Of course. That’s just a tautology. But the price of a cab ride would not fall, because that’s a separate piece of legislation — the price of a cab rate is set at a predetermined rate, and indeed has to be set at a predetermined rate. If you deregulated cab fares, utter chaos would result — New Yorkers would basically have to haggle over the cost of a fare every time they got into a cab.

Goldstein’s not the first person to have this cockamamie idea: Jim Surowiecki said the same thing in 1999. But in order to have a market where prices are set by supply and demand, people need to be able to choose how much they’re willing to pay to take a cab. And you can’t do that when you’re standing on the sidewalk (not in the bike lane, please!) sticking your arm out and trying to hail the first cab to turn up. In order to make that transaction work, the fare schedule has to be set, in advance, by the municipal government.

But I do worry that the way fares are set, too much money ends up going to medallion owners. If fares were brought down, the amount that medallion owners could charge drivers would also come down, and medallion prices would — finally — start to fall. Why does NYC ever raise taxi fares, when the income from those fares ends up going overwhelmingly to a handful of millionaire medallion owners? These medallions, right now, are licenses to print money. That’s why they’re getting extremely expensive. But it doesn’t need to be that way.