After putting up a slightly hurried blog entry yesterday, I’ve spent a large part of this afternoon doing a deep dive into the sale of the license to run Chicago’s parking meters: many thank to the Parking Ticket Geek and Daniel Strauss of Gapers Block for prompting me to revisit the issue.

If you really want to get up to speed on all this, there are two main sources worth reading. The first is a long investigation by Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke of the Chicago Reader, especially part two, which was published in May of this year. The second is a 46-page report by the Chicago Inspector General, David Hoffman, also looking at whether the city got a decent deal; it dates from June. Both of them are well-written and comprehensive examinations of the deal, which are invaluable when it comes to understanding it.

Daniel asks me a few questions, via email:

Where did the city go wrong? And why isn’t there a broader consensus on what should’ve been done? (Changing things is difficult in Chicago politics but hindsight is fairly easy to come to a consensus on.)

Boiled down, what the city of Chicago did was to rush a bill selling the parking-meter concession through the city legislature without allowing lawmakers to give it a detailed reading. The city claimed it got a good deal, basing that claim on a single valuation from its own advisor. But after the fact, a number of analysts, including the Inspector General, have concluded that actually the deal wasn’t very good at all.

The one claim in the IG’s report that I find the most compelling is that the term of the deal — 75 years — is far too long. Here’s their chart:

This is the IG’s best attempt to reverse-engineer the amount paid for the concession: in order to get to the final sum of $1.16 billion, they had to assume an 11% discount rate. (Which, yes, is pretty high.) When your discount rate is that high, there’s little point in selling off a 75-year concession: you can cut the life in half and still get 93% of the value.

It’s worth pointing out at this point that another critic of the deal, Scott Waguespack, uses a valuation methodology where the discount rate is 3% and the inflation rate is also 3% — in other words, the value of a real dollar in 75 years’ time is the same as the value of that dollar today. That’s just ludicrous.

But what isn’t ludicrous is that nobody has a clue what the parking-meter industry is going to look like in the 2080s: will there even be cars parking at meters then? If someone bought a franchise in 1934 in just about any industry — even if it was heavily regulated by the government — they’d have no ability to foresee what kind of revenues that franchise might be bringing in today. As far as the purchaser is concerned, the second half of the deal basically has option value: there’s a possibility that it might be hugely lucrative, but there’s also a possibility that it’ll be worth nothing. Looking at the price, it doesn’t seem that the buyers paid anything at all for the option, so it was silly of Chicago to just give it away.

But weirdly, the length of the deal is not one of the main points that the critics bring up. Instead, the point that they return to over and over again is that Chicago would make much more money, over time, if it kept all the parking-meter revenue for itself, rather than giving it to a private-sector contractor.

That’s true. But is it relevant? I’m a believer in what the IG report calls “the impossibility argument” — that even if Chicago did manage to raise meter rates on its own, pushback from constituents would surely force it to roll back those hikes sooner rather than later. As the Parking Geek himself says,

From every report I’ve read and every city hall insider I’ve spoken to, all 50 alderman, a full year after the deal was signed, are still receiving holy hell for the rate increases from their constituents.

The only way of baking in these price hikes was for the city government to tie its own hands — which is exactly what it did. And more broadly, it’s possible that the only way it could tie its hands in this manner was precisely by pushing the bill through in a rushed and bullying manner. (It’s not the first time that’s happened in Chicago, and it won’t be the last: it’s called politics.) Maybe doing the deal in this way was the only way a deal could be done at all.

But that still leaves the question of whether Chicago should have done this deal. I’ve already said that the tenor of the deal is too long: a 30-year concession would have made much more sense. But what is the value of the deal to the purchaser? Was Chicago ripped off? Let’s say I’m auctioning off a vintage Rolls Royce which I have no use for because I can’t drive and I think it’s ugly. Even if I sell it for $100, the cash will be worth more to me than the car. But I’d be stupid to do that, because there are people who would pay a lot more, and the market value of the car is many times greater.

So was Chicago stupid in this case? Did it leave money on the table in its negotiations to sell the parking-meter concession?

My feeling, after reading the IG report, is that Chicago got a good price for the concession, if not a very good price. There’s no doubt that the price would have been much higher had the auction taken place at the height of the credit bubble, when money was almost free, rather than at the height of the credit crunch, when persuading anybody to part with over a billion dollars for anything at all was quite an impressive achievement. What’s more, the critics of the deal generally ignore the tail risk involved: there were lots of things which might go wrong for any purchaser, and as a result the reasonable market price was lower than the revenue projections might suggest.

Indeed, after the parking meters were handed over to Chicago Parking Meters, lots of things did go wrong. And that brings me to the second part of Daniel’s question, where he asks about yesterday’s story, which came out of the Chicago News Cooperative, and which prompted my blog entry:

How does this reflect on the CNC? Many Chicagoans are curious/excited/nervous about the venture but it’s run by the same Tribune people that arguably ran it into the ground. Is this story prophetic of what the venture will be like in your opinion?

The simple answer to the last question is no: it would be ridiculous and invidious to judge an ambitious new news organization by its first story, and I wish the CNC all the best.

That said, after reading a great deal of material from this summer on the subject of the parking-meter deal, I’m even less impressed by the CNC story, whose conclusion was clearly foregone. The new news in the story is about the actual revenues that the private-sector parking meters have generated — and it turns out that those revenues were significantly lower than expected. Yet the CNC story largely skates over that fact, to paint a picture of a company “piling up the profits”, in the words of its headline. To the extent that the CNC story looks at the mechanics of the deal itself, it adds nothing to the Chicago Reader’s investigation, which of course it doesn’t mention.

Going forwards, I’m hopeful that the CNC will produce good work. But I stand by my original verdict that this particular story is flawed. I neither hope nor expect that someone in Chicago is going to write a long, contrarian article explaining why the deal was magnificently good after all. But it’s worth at least examining both sides of the argument.

File under “events which don’t happen every day”: Gawker describing a newspaper article as being “real journalism” (their emphasis) and “what news alarmists say will be missing if and when we lose newspapers”.

But the fact is that the article in question, an investigation into Chicago parking-meter revenues by Dan Mihalopoulos, is contentious, one-sided, and flawed.

A bit of background: in February, a company named Chicago Parking Meters LLC paid the city $1.15 billion for the right to parking fee revenues for the next 75 years. And now? Well, the headline seems unambiguous: “Company Piles Up Profits From City’s Parking Meter Deal”. But in fact the article only gives numbers for revenues and operating profits. There’s no indication of Chicago Parking Meters’s cost of funds, or whether, after paying the interest on its debt, it’s managing to make any profit at all.

The theme of the article is that selling the rights to parking fee revenues was a mistake:

“Had we done this ourselves, it could have made a lot more money,” said Alderman Scott Waguespack…

The economist Roger Skurski calculated the current value of the deal. Mr. Skurski said his conservative estimate was that “the city could have earned about $670 million more by keeping the asset.”

But this ignores the whole point of doing the deal in the first place: that the city was politically incapable of raising the parking-meter rate itself. This was clear as far back as December, when I wrote that “this parking-meter initiative is the municipal equivalent of a CEO hiring McKinsey to come in and recommend job cuts: it’s a way of doing what needs to be done while somehow managing to blame someone else”. When the deal went through, Chicago parking meters were charging just 25 cents per hour: all the proof you’d ever need that the city, on its own, was incapable of charging a market-clearing price for on-street parking.

Mihalopoulos also ignores the question of whether higher parking-meter rates might benefit the city of Chicago in other ways, by reducing the congestion from cars circling downtown streets at a crawl, desperately seeking a Spot.

And he also buries the news that in fact Chicago Parking Meters is making less money than it had expected:

According to the meter deal’s income statement for May 2009, revenues for the month were about 20 percent below projections. At the same time, expenses were far over budget, mostly for “supplemental staffing.”…

Because the company is not writing tickets, it seems many Chicagoans are getting away with parking for free. A company audit of a section of the North Side found 41 percent of occupied spaces filled by motorists who were not paying, according to the company records.

What’s more, at the end of the story we find this:

Before entering into the parking meter deal, the city hired a consultant whose confidential report suggested the lease could generate $650 million to $1.2 billion for the city.

The report was not disclosed to the public until after the check from the winning parking meter bidder cleared. Officials say revealing a consultant’s valuation analysis before a deal closes would hurt the city’s chances of getting the best possible deal.

This datapoint comes well over 1,000 words after Mihalopoulos tells us about the $1.15 billion deal value. If you don’t remember that number from the beginning of the article, the tone of the writing makes it seem as though the city was somehow hiding a report which showed it got a bad price. Instead, the report reveals that the city got a price at the very top of the expected range.

So far, Chicago Parking Meters has made rather less money than it had hoped out of this deal. Maybe its revenues will recover, as Mihalopoulos seems to think they will; on the other hand, maybe they won’t. The risk all belongs to the company, rather than the city. The city just gets to spend a whopping great big check, and also bring the price of on-street parking up to where it should have been for years. A good deal, not a bad one.

Why was Josh Tyrangiel hired to be the new editor of BusinessWeek? One reason, the pundits agree, is that he successfully dragged Time — another weekly — onto the web. Ryan Chittum writes about “his eye-popping numbers at Time.com”, with pageviews rising from 400 million in 2006 to an estimated 1.8 billion this year, while Marion Maneker says that “he had tremendous success in building Time.com’s Web traffic over a few years”.

I’m an admirer of Tyrangiel too. But it would be depressing if Bloomberg’s brass hired him on the basis of his pageviews, because Time.com is an object lesson in how not to boost traffic. Reading Time.com is an exercise in frustration: the stories there are hugely painful to read. Barely-relevant links to other stories interrupt the flow on a regular basis; slideshows are everywhere; and in general it’s almost impossible to get through a whole story without being forced to visit multiple pages in doing so. Revealingly, no one’s talked much about Time.com’s uniques over the past few years, just its pageviews.

The last thing that Bloomberg should ever want to do with BusinessWeek.com is use such tactics. It might make sense for Time.com to operate in the CPM-driven junk-mail paradigm, where revenues rise with pageviews and therefore you maximize the latter to maximize the former. But BusinessWeek’s high-end readers won’t and shouldn’t put up with such shenanigans.

Tyrangiel’s job at BusinessWeek.com will be to build strong bonds with the readership — to make them loyal readers and to constantly exceed their expectations of what a website can deliver. That will help give Bloomberg the prestige and glory it wants from its consumer-media operations, and will also allow Bloomberg’s business-side staffers to position themselves happily at the high end of the market, selling relationships with readers rather than simply eyeballs-by-the-million. If BusinessWeek.com becomes half as annoying to read as Time.com is today, it will have failed, and Bloomberg is going to have to be careful to make sure that Tyrangiel undrinks the pageview Kool-Aid he quaffed so gluttonously at Time.

John Hudson has an interesting round-up of responses to the signs of humanity from Goldman Sachs on Tuesday: I’m definitely the outlier in a sea of commentators saying that they’re tiny, meaningless, and an attempt to deflect attention from the bigger issues surrounding the bank.

Leave it to Charlie Gasparino, then, to veer wildly in the opposite direction:

Goldman is putting aside a whopping $500 million — the largest such donation in company history — to help small businesses.

I wondered if it ever dawned on Blankfein or his partner in this charity binge Warren Buffett — also a Goldman shareholder — that this money may be theirs to do as they please. Such a major donation like this one, I am told by one prominent Wall Street CEO, should have been approved by all shareholders…

The last thing shareholders need is such overt do-gooderism… what say did the rank and file shareholder have in such a major cash layout? None, which should spark plenty of debate among shareholder rights advocates…

I think it’s about time for Lloyd Blankfein to step down and resign as CEO of Goldman, and really start doing God’s work by sparing the rest of us the stupidity of listening to his excuses.

Let’s put this in perspective, here. $500 million is less than a buck a share; Goldman, which is trading at $177, moves more than that on an average day just thanks to market noise. And a large part of the $500 million is coming from the Goldman Sachs Foundation, which already has the money: it isn’t fresh shareholder funds. Blankfein runs a bank making $3 billion a quarter, and Gasparino thinks he should resign over a commitment to spend $500 billion over five years? Very odd.

But clearly calls for resignation are in the air these days, what with Rep. Peter DeFazio calling for both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner to be fired. Maybe it’s the Palin book which is sending everybody scurrying to these corner positions. Whatever it is, it isn’t helpful.

When I wrote my blog entry on currency ETCs yesterday, I wasn’t aware of the various carry-trade products available on US exchanges. But after a very informative conversation with Morningstar’s Bradley Kay this morning, I’m now much more up to speed. And while there’s nothing in the US quite like the UK products, there are still a fair few carry-trade vehicles to choose from.

First though it’s worth looking at some well-established ETFs which are very bad ways to play the carry trade: the Currency Shares suite of ETFs which aim to mirror the performance of nine different currencies. Of those nine, six pay essentially no interest at all, and the amount of interest they pay is basically at the discretion of Currency Shares. “They should be paying interest,” says Kay, “it’s only when I run the graph and I look at them that I say wow, over periods when there should be positive carry, there’s really nothing there.”

The Currency Shares ETFs, then, are a good way to make a short-term bet on currency movements. But they’re not a good way to play the carry trade in particular, which involves taking advantage of the higher interest rates available in foreign currencies.

Then there are a couple of funds which are simply plays on the direction of the dollar. The PowerShares dollar index funds (UUP is bullish, UDN is bearish) are based on futures, and therefore do accrue local-currency interest in much the same way that the ETCs do. But they’re fundamentally trading vehicles designed to make bets on the direction of the dollar, not to use low dollar interest rates to fund investments in foreign currencies.

Finally there’s a pair of funds which specifically seek to replicate the carry trade — the PowerShares G10 Currency Harvest fund (DBV), and the iPath Optimized Currency Carry fund (ICI). Both of them use futures to capture the full local-currency returns: they’re true carry-trade plays.

There are differences between the two, most notably that DBV is a true ETF, where shareholders own shares in a trust. ICI, by contrast, is an ETN, which means that shareholders are essentially just unsecured creditors of Barclays, who don’t get paid for taking on the Barclays credit risk.

They invest in slightly different things, too: DBV takes the G10 currencies and goes long the three highest-yielding currencies while going short the three lowest-yielding currencies. As a result, it’s either 2x leveraged (if the dollar is not one of those six currencies) or 1.66x leveraged if the dollar is part of the mix. The results can be highly volatile: in the second half of 2008, the fund fell over 30% as the yen (one of the shorts) rose and the Aussie and NZ dollars (the longs) fell.

DBV then is very much a trading vehicle, rather than an investment vehicle. Over the long term it does tend to generate positive returns, and those returns tend to have a nice low correlation with most other asset classes. The problem is that when you really need diversification — when people are panicking and stocks are plunging — is likely to be exactly the same time that this strategy blows up as well, as investors flee risky smaller currencies for the safety of the low-yielding dollar.

ICI is much more conservative, carefully selecting G10 currencies to invest in so as to maximize carry while minimizing volatility. It’s also cheaper than DBV, charging 65bp rather than 75bp per year. But it’s tiny, with a market capitalization of less than $30 million, so I’d stay away for the time being.

And there’s one more fund worth mentioning: the WisdomTree Dreyfus Emerging Currency fund (CEW). It too is quite small, but it invests in all manner of exotic high-yielding currencies, and it’s performed quite well: Kay gives it credit for avoiding the zloty crash. If you really want to play the carry trade, this might be worth a look.

Remember the Jon Stewart interview of Jim Cramer where Stewart pulled out a secret weapon to unleash upon his unsuspecting guest?

Stewart repeatedly said Cramer wasn’t his target, but aired clip after clip of the CNBC pundit.

“Roll 210!” announced Stewart, like a prosecutor. “Roll 212!”

Most were from a 2006 interview not meant for TV in which Cramer spoke openly about the duplicity of the market.

No one’s entirely sure where Stewart gets his video clips. But the source for these ones has now outed himself, and it’s none other than crazy short-selling conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne.

“I supplied a certain video of Jim Cramer to a certain comedy show, that was used in revealing and exposing Jim Cramer,” said Byrne to the WSJ’s Julia Angwin in an interview.

Which is all well and good when it’s used to take down a blowhard like Cramer. But let’s hope that Stewart and his researchers are using Byrne only as a useful source of video. It wouldn’t be good if they were talking to him about the markets more generally.

(Via Weiss)

Goldman Sachs has provided Reuters with a copy of the Goldman Sachs Foundation’s 2008 tax return. Why the NYT didn’t just put it online I have no idea, but in any case here it is, all 297 pages of it.

The bottom line is that the Goldman Sachs Foundation did very badly in 2008. Here’s the way it’s all summed up:

The fund started the year with $269 million in assets, and ended with $161 million. The amount it made in charitable disbursements was $22 million (that’s the last number on line 25 of the first page), which means that the charitable disbursements aside, the fund managed to drop by $85 million. That’s 32% of the amount it started the year with, and almost four times the amount of money it actually gave to charity.

The big losses are a capital loss of $15 million on the sale of assets, and a whopping $75 million unrealized loss on investments. And then, just for good measure, we find out on page 68 of the PDF that the foundation paid Goldman Sachs Asset Management $3,864,540 for “investment management”. Gee, thanks for the service, guys.

If the Goldman Sachs Foundation put all its money in cash, earning 0%, and wrote checks over the course of the year totalling $100 million, it would have done better than this. Instead, it managed to give away less than a quarter of that, to recipients like the Foundation for Teaching Economics ($333,333) and $2,550,000 to the Institute of International Education “to support the expansion and enhancement of the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program in building a strong platform for the Program’s 10th anniversary activities in 2010.”

The Goldman Sachs Foundation also spent $230,000 on various Davos-related donations, in the form of gifts to the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and the World Economic Forum itself.

Maybe that’s what Lloyd Blankfein had in mind when he talked about doing God’s work.

Geraldine Fabrikant gets her hands on the 2008 tax filing for the Goldman Sachs Foundation today, and it’s pretty astonishing stuff:

The latest tax filing for Goldman Sachs’s foundation is as thick as a phone book. The list of trades is more than 200 pages, single spaced. Goldman, it seems, invests like no other, even for its own charity.

“I have never seen anything like it,” said Verne O. Sedlacek, president of Commonfund, when shown the 2007 filing, which was nearly three inches thick. He has a good overview from the Commonfund, which manages more than $25 billion for universities, foundations and other not-for-profit groups.

What good does all this extreme trading do? Not very much, it would seem, according to Fabrikant’s numbers:

• Goldman has given $501 million to the Goldman Sachs Foundation since 1999
• The present size of the foundation is $404 million
• The foundation gave away $12.6 million in 2007 and $22 million in 2008.

Goldman doesn’t reveal the foundation’s investment returns, but clearly they’re negative: the amount of money in the foundation is lower than the amount donated to it, even after accounting for the sums it’s given away.

What’s more, Goldman seems to be giving away only the bare minimum of the foundation’s assets each year: just 5%, the level below which the foundation would lose its charitable status.

I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that the foundation’s counterparty, on its phone-book-sized list of trades for just one year, was always or nearly always Goldman Sachs*. And when Goldman Sachs trades with anybody, be it a client or the Goldman Sachs Foundation or anybody else, Goldman Sachs makes money.

Meanwhile, the foundation itself, as we’ve seen, has been losing money.

And who are the charitable recipients of the foundation’s funds? Entities like the Asia Society, on Park Avenue, which is a talking shop where Goldman bankers can schmooze important international clients. Or big universities like Johns Hopkins and Duke, which take charitable gifts and keep them in the market by adding them to their endowments and investing them rather than spending them.

All in all, the single biggest beneficiary of the Goldman Sachs Foundation would seem to be Goldman Sachs itself, while the amount of money which trickles down from it to genuinely needy charitable cases is minuscule. Goldman should turn its foundation into an arm’s-length institution, charged with giving money where it can do the most good, and allowed to give much more than 5% of its total assets if it sees the need to do so. Because right now the foundation looks mostly like an exercise in self-dealing.

Update: One other thing: why on earth couldn’t the NYT have either linked to the tax filing, or put it online? Most annoying.

*Update 2: Goldman phones to say that the vast majority of trades at the Goldman Sachs Foundation are not with Goldman Sachs.

Ezra Klein, on what he considers a vicious cycle in credit cards:

The problem is that the people who migrate toward debit cards are the people who have enough money not to need much credit and are responsible enough to not want it. The good risks, in other words. The people left in the credit card market will be disproportionately bad risks, which means rates will go up and standards will tighten, which will in turn drive more people out of the market, starting the cycle over again.

I’m not convinced that this is a bad thing. Credit cards are useful payment devices, but atrocious borrowing devices. (Steve Waldman has a great post explaining the distinction further.) We want to move to a world where people use charge cards for transactional purposes, and personal loans for credit purposes. The way we’re going to get there is, essentially, by taxing the stuff we want less of — and that means increasing the interest rates and annual fees on credit cards.

Sometimes this is going to happen in an underhand and less-than-honest way: Odysseas Papadimitriou has a great blog entry on how Bank of America is denying that introducing a $50 annual fee constitutes a repricing of its credit cards, for instance. But the big move, away from credit cards and towards alternate means of payment and sources of credit, is surely to be welcomed.

The sad aspect to all this is that millions of people hold large credit card balances and have no ability to refinance them with personal loans, or even any particular notion that such a thing might be possible. They’re going to be harmed by this move. But over time, if things go right, their numbers will naturally dwindle, and we’ll be left with a much healthier system of consumer finance.

You remember Friday’s gruesome employment report, right? Floyd Norris has taken a second look at it, and found something quite surprising:

Unemployment rates remained steady at 9.5 percent. And the number of jobs actually rose, by 80,000. And the number of jobs for college-educated Americans rose more than in any month in the last six years.

That big hike in unemployment to 10.2%, and all the other terrible, horrible, no good, very bad jobs numbers turn out to have been entirely a function of the BLS’s seasonal adjustments. As Norris writes:

All this may be very reasonable, and there is no way I can think of to test whether the seasonal adjustments are reliable. But I suspect seasonal factors are less important this year, when the economy may be changing directions, than they normally are.

Now even the unadjusted numbers aren’t all sweetness and light, especially when it comes to those with less education. But it does make sense to think that seasonal factors aren’t going to be the same this year as they are in other years.