Felix Salmon

Many thanks to Scotty Barber for putting this chart together for me. It shows the extraordinarily high correlations that we saw within the S&P 100 at the height of the Lehman crisis; at the height of the Greece crisis; and then, again, for pretty much the entire second half of 2011. At that point, high correlations really did look as though they were the new normal.

Obviously, correlations within and across different asset classes don’t always move in tandem with each other. But in general, the RORO trade, as it’s known, (risk-on, risk-off) tends to send correlations soaring across the board. And I can’t help but wonder whether that huge plunge in correlations that we see at the beginning of 2012 was related to the way in which JP Morgan’s CIO blew up.

Remember that the CIO’s main job was to make hedges: buy buying or selling one thing, the idea was that the bank would protect itself against losses on some other thing. So in order for hedges to work, those two things need to continue to be highly correlated.

But if you look at this chart, the period when Bruno Iksikl was putting on his huge CDS index trade was also the period when correlations were falling at an almost unprecedented pace.

Jamie Dimon, from the day he revealed the losses, has had nothing but the harshest possible words for the hedges in question, saying that they were flawed and should never have been put on. But that’s easy to say in hindsight. Maybe they were really great hedges, in a high-correlation world — and then correlations fell apart, and the trades started moving against JP Morgan, and they had to get bigger and bigger in order to retain any hint of actual hedging capability. Obviously we don’t know for sure that’s what happened. But it’s certainly consistent with movements in correlations this year.

In March 2010, the unemployment rate for high-school graduates 25 years or older peaked at 11.9%. Since then, it has dropped 4.2 percentage points — a pretty impressive showing, in just two years — and now stands at 7.7%.

In the same period, the unemployment rate for college dropouts 25 years or older also fell, from 9.5% to 8.0%. But that drop, of 1.5 percentage points, is much smaller. And now college dropouts have a higher unemployment rate than their friends who never went to college at all.

And these two series are very comparable: both sets include about 34 million people.

Now these numbers aren’t seasonally adjusted, and you can see that the unemployment rate for high-school graduates is pretty bumpy. As a result, it might well rise again soon. But the big picture is clear: unemployment among college dropouts is proving much more stubborn than it is among most of the rest of the population.

Jed Graham lists a number of reasons why that might be the case. For one thing, with the majority of Americans now attending college, even if they don’t all graduate, college is less of a destination for the elite than it used to be. The elite will always get jobs, but as students become less elite, they’re  less assured of having great careers once they graduate.

And for another thing, college dropouts are still significantly more likely than high-school graduates to have a job: their employment rate is higher, even if their unemployment rate is lower, since they have a significantly higher labor force participation rate. On the other hand, the reason for the higher labor force participation rate is just that fewer people used to go to college, which means that among people 68 years or older, high-school graduates vastly outnumber people who went to college. And once you’re over 68, you can be excused for no longer being in the labor force.

So what’s going on? Graham’s convinced there’s something real here:

Labor Department data show that while the jobless-rate advantage of college dropouts over high school finishers has disappeared and turned negative, the advantage of two-year-degree holders over college dropouts is way above the historical norm.

Meanwhile, the jobless rate differential between high school finishers and two-year-degree holders is right in line with its historical average. This suggests that the principal mover is a decline in employment outcomes among dropouts.

I suspect that the conjoined forces of for-profit colleges and student loans are a significant contributory factor here. College dropouts certainly have more debt than they used to, and although indebtedness doesn’t directly lead to higher unemployment rates, it does at the margin act as a constraint on the massive life option that everybody has when they leave college. If high debts force you into some crappy job when you drop out of college, your chances of getting a good long-term career diminish.

And more generally, college is slowly moving from the “things which are bought” column into the “things which are sold” column — for-profit colleges, in particular, recruit aggressively in ways that would have been unthinkable to an earlier generation of tertiary educators. As a result, people drop out of college not just because it’s statistically certain that in any college class there will be some students who drop out, but increasingly because a lot of students, especially in courses offered by for-profit colleges, really can’t and shouldn’t be in those classes in the first place.

Besides, it makes conceptual sense that if you’re going to drop out of college, you’d be better off not going to college at all. Say you drop out after two years: you could have been working hard at the beginnings of a career during those two years, earning money to get yourself started on some well-defined course. Instead, people who drop out of college (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a handful of other exceptions notwithstanding) generally have little idea of what they want to do next, and are well behind their high-school peers in terms of building an economically-productive life.

All of which is to say that while it’s still indubitably a good idea to go to college, the “go to college” advice has to be added to, these days, with further admonitions not to take on too much debt, and certainly not to drop out. Because as far as employability is concerned, it seems that college dropouts have never had it so bad.

Many thanks to Ben Walsh for putting this chart together for me. What you’re seeing is JP Morgan’s excess deposits — the size of the bank’s deposit base, minus the amount of its loans — both in absolute terms and as a ratio. Either way, it’s going up and to the right.

JP Morgan clearly has a certain amount of control over the amount of deposits it takes in. What you’re looking at here isn’t entirely a flight-to-quality trade: JP Morgan’s total deposits actually fell in the two years following the financial crisis. They were just over $1 trillion at the end of 2008, they dropped to $940 billion at the end of 2009, and then they fell again to $930 billion at the end of 2010.

But then, in 2011, they shot straight back up — and now they’re at a record high of $1.13 trillion, with JP Morgan having failed to lend out more than $400 billion of that amount. That’s a record not only in absolute terms but also in relative terms: for every dollar that JP Morgan has on deposit, it has managed to lend out just 64 cents.

To put it another way, JP Morgan has $9,900 on deposit per US household — and of that, $3,600 per US household is “excess deposits” which are mostly being farmed off to London rather than being invested in helping US individuals and businesses grow.

The ostensible purpose of JP Morgan’s Chief Investment Office is to take the bank’s excess deposits and invest them in a way which manages to hedge the rest of the bank’s exposures. But if you’re spending 57 cents on hedging operations for every dollar you’re making in original loans, which is the case here, then something’s clearly very wrong. JP Morgan’s loan book isn’t that risky, or difficult to hedge. And if it is, JP Morgan needs some new loan officers.

The real story here, of course, has nothing to do with the difficulty of hedging JP Morgan’s loan exposures. Rather, the hotshot CIO traders in London were managing to get a higher return on their “hedging” operations than the loan officers were getting on their bread-and-butter loans. And so Jamie Dimon started taking in all the deposits he could find, and sending them straight to London, where they could be “hedged” to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits.

It’s easy for JP Morgan to bring in huge amounts of deposits, of course: corporate balance sheets are bloated with cash, and those corporations want to deposit their funds with a too-big-to-fail institution. But if those deposits are being attracted by JP Morgan’s implicit government backstop, then it’s incumbent upon JP Morgan to lend them out into the US economy, to get it moving again. Rather than sending them off to London to be gambled away by the likes of Bruno Iksil, even as JP Morgan’s total loan base remains lower today than it was in 2008.

Here’s the chart you’ve all been waiting for, courtesy of Reuters’s very own Scotty Barber: the spread on the CDX NA IG 9 index — the synthetic index on which JP Morgan’s Bruno Iskil was selling enormous amounts of protection — minus the spread on the index’s constituent bonds.

Three things jump out here. Firstly, the basis is negative, not positive. That means that the obvious trade was to buy the underlying bonds and hedge by buying protection on the index. That obvious trade, if held to maturity, should always make money. Iksil was funding that trade, by selling protection on the index.

Secondly, the chart is going up and to the right. Since Iksil was selling protection, that means the market was moving against him. Or, to put it another way, the obvious trade makes money when it expires at zero, and as the chart moves towards zero, Iksil loses money on a mark-to-market basis.

Finally, the move doesn’t seem to be all that huge — only about 30bp in this quarter. Which doesn’t seem remotely enough to cause a $2 billion loss. Still, Iksil managed it somehow.

Update: Many thanks to Sally Kohn for making the chart infinitely better by putting whales on it.

The Epicurean Dealmaker has been watching global equity markets metastasize:

Over the past few decades, the public equity markets have evolved from a relatively staid and selective backwater, a playground for pension funds, insurance companies, and the idiot sons of wealthy men, into a gigantic global pool of capital, driven and supported by huge amounts of money from literally everybody… I will leave it to an enterprising PhD student to research the data, but I suspect the aggregate amount of equity market capitalization as a percentage of GDP has swelled tremendously over the past three decades. Equities have gone mainstream, and as they did, the size of equity markets ballooned.

To illustrate his point, TED talks of a fund manager who invests in no more than 100 stocks at a time. When he was managing $100 million in the 1980s, he could easily invest $1 million in a company; by the time his portfolio had grown to $10 billion in the 1990s, his average investment was north of $100 million per stock. That, in turn, makes it very hard for institutional investors to buy small-cap stocks, and helps to explain why small companies can’t IPO any more.

But that’s just anecdote; I wanted data. So I found an enterprising PhD student Ben Walsh, and asked him what’s happened to equity market capitalization as a percentage of GDP. And he, in turn, found Google:

There’s definitely an up-and-to-the-right trend here, but it’s very noisy, and we’re not talking orders of magnitude: global equity capitalization is probably about 50% higher now, relative to the size of the global economy, than it was in the 1980s. That’s an interesting trend, and a welcome one. But I don’t think it explains much about the IPO market. After all, the effective minimum size for IPOs has gone up much more than 50% since the 1980s.

I do think that maybe the distribution arms of the big sell-side equity underwriters have reached the point at which it just isn’t worth it any more for them to deal with any but the biggest accounts; I have a feeling that retail investors had much more access to IPOs in the 1980s and even during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s than they do now. But this is much more a function of the consolidation of the investment-banking industry than it is a function of the size of the equity markets as a whole.

Which opens up an intriguing possibility: is there some way in which the internet might be able to spawn a small, light broker-dealer which could underwrite IPOs aimed at retail, rather than institutional, investors? Think of it as fully SEC-compliant crowdfunding, without any need for a JOBS act. And if not, why not?

I was hoping someone would do this — and now The Daily Stag Hunt has come to the rescue. All I can say is, thank you. It turns out that if you’re on the FOMC, then being in a credit bubble is really funny!

(h/t Elfenbein)

This is a chart of corporate income tax as a percentage of total corporate profits, and it’s the main thing you should bear in mind when people start saying that the US corporate income tax is too high. And while you’re at it, you should remember this chart, too, showing corporate income tax as a percentage of GDP.

Once upon a time, the corporate income tax generated a significant share of tax revenues; now, it’s bumping along in the 2%-of-GDP range. Yes, the marginal rate of corporate income tax is high, at 35%. But US companies are extremely good at not paying that.

But at least we know the aggregate amount that corporations pay in taxes. What we don’t know — because they won’t say, and no one’s forcing them to say — is how much any given public company pays.

Allan Sloan has a very good column on this today. Companies already report 16 different tax metrics; they should simply be required to add a 17th — the amount they pay the IRS in taxes — which in many ways is most important. The companies already file tax returns; the number’s right there, on lines 31 and 32. They just refuse to say what it is.

Here’s Sloan:

During the past few months I’ve repeatedly asked three big companies in the tax-wars cross hairs — GE, Verizon, and Exxon Mobil — to voluntarily disclose information that would refute allegations that they incurred no U.S. federal income tax for 2010. All have refused, saying they won’t disclose anything not legally required. They still manage to complain about the allegations, however. I suspect that if I called the rest of the Fortune 500, I’d get 497 similar responses.

As a society, we need the “taxes incurred” information to inform our current tax debate. Investors, too, would benefit; knowing the tax that companies actually incur would be a useful analytical tool.

Once the taxes-paid number was public, we could start dividing it into the company’s GAAP profits, to get an idea of what kind of tax rate companies are really paying right now. And of course, companies would be more than welcome, if they were so inclined, to reveal how much tax they were paying in other jurisdictions as well. But for the time being, all we can do is look at the aggregate numbers. Which are showing, very clearly, that corporate income taxes in America are very low and falling.

Update: Kevin Drum creates the chart I should have led with: corporate taxes as a percentage of pretax profit.

The world officially hit 7 billion people today, and so to celebrate I decided to take a look at what’s happened to poverty in the world as its population has increased — many, many thanks to Nick Rizzo and to Laurence Chandy and Homi Kharas at Brookings, two Englishmen who provided him with unpublished data and were extremely generous with their time.

The big picture can be seen in the chart at left: the number of poor people hasn’t been growing nearly as fast as the number of people. And indeed over the past 24 years, as the world’s population increased by 40% from 5 billion to 7 billion, the total number of people living in poverty has actually gone down. (One small note I should make about these charts: the dollar-a-day figures from 1987 onwards actually measure the population living on less than $1.25 a day, so a jump in the absolute-poverty numbers between 1974 and 1987 is partially a function of the fact that we’re raising the bar from $1 to $1.25.)

In fact, there’s pretty much the same number of people living in absolute poverty today — about 890 million, or 12.7% of the global population — as there were all the way back in 1804, when the world’s population hit 1 billion and 84% of them were living in absolute poverty.

Indeed, back in 1804, only 5% of the world was living on more than $2 a day. (All these numbers, of course, are real, and adjusted for purchasing power.) Today, that number is 4.7 billion, or 67% of the world’s population. The number of people in the world living out of poverty has been growing faster than the world’s population as a whole for pretty much all of recorded history.

And the “global middle” — people living on somewhere between $10 and $100 per day — is growing particularly fast. It was 1.14 billion in 1987; it’s 1.96 billion today. That’s an increase of 72%, even as the population of the world as a whole has gone up by just 40%.

A huge amount of what we’re seeing here is the effect of China, of course. Here’s what’s happened in East Asia over the past 24 years:

Absolute poverty in East Asia has gone down to 142 million today from 822 million in 1987, even as the population as a whole has risen from 1.5 billion to 1.9 billion. 24 years ago, more than half of East Asia lived in absolute poverty; today, it’s just 7%.
The other big global population center is South Asia, which includes India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; its history of poverty reduction is less heartening but still substantial.

There’s a lot of work to be done, here, with two thirds of the South Asian population still living in poverty. But absolute poverty has declined quite dramatically in the past dozen years, which is certainly a start.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the most depressing story is in AIDS-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa.

Even here, however, the percentage of the population living in poverty is no higher than it is in South Asia, and the number of people living in absolute poverty hasn’t actually gone up over the past 12 years.
Here are the other regions:

It should be noted that all of these figures, and especially the African ones, come with massive error bars and caveats; Shanta Devarajan is very good on this. But the big picture is clear: there’s nothing Malthusian going on here. As the world’s population grows, we’re taking people out of poverty, rather than consigning them to it. Which is heartening news in a world of limited resources.

Jacob Harris is absolutely right to hate word clouds. You take a long and complex text, and then you boil it down to a group of individual words, with the most-used words being the biggest? That’s just silly. “Reporters sidestepping their limited knowledge of the subject material by peering for patterns in a word cloud,” he says, is “like reading tea leaves at the bottom of a cup”. Word clouds are crude, inaccurate, misapplied, and place the onus of understanding onto the reader.

But there’s one place where word clouds are I think both useful and accurate — and that’s when a pollster has asked a group of people to say the one word they would use to describe X. Here, for instance, is the word cloud generated when a Reuters/Ipsos poll asked Republican voters for the first word that came to mind after watching the weird Herman Cain “smoking ad”:

And here’s the word cloud from the latest Kauffman poll of econobloggers:

Here the size of the words is interesting, but more germane is the overwhelming negativity of the vast majority of words used. There’s a couple of tiny good ones in there — “rebounding” us up by the Canadian border, and “bounceback” is in the Bay Area somewhere — but they’re in a distinct minority.

Incidentally, that Kauffman poll has some fascinating responses elsewhere, too. Check out the sudden enormous popularity of NGDP targeting:

There’s also a very high degree of skepticism when it comes to how good colleges are at teaching kids useful stuff.

The bar charts here are again an effective way of communicating information. Things like chart types and word clouds are tools, and you have to know which tools are best used in various different circumstances. And while word clouds are usually stupid, sometimes they can be exactly right.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage gets made — it’s yesterday’s eurozone rescue plan, as presented by an unidentified adviser to one of the European Union governments involved in the negotiations.

Frankly, there’s lots of it I don’t understand. (Although the little map of the PIIGS in the top-left-hand corner is clear, and quite adorable.) At the top you have the €440 billion EFSF, with €150 billion already having been spent on those PIIGS. The remaining €250 billion (let’s not worry about these numbers not adding up precisely) gets leveraged, somehow, into €1 trillion — with a special-purpose vehicle in there somewhere for private sector investors to put money into. (The private sector, I’m pretty sure, is represented by that big “PS” box.) The leveraged EFSF then spends its money on the PIIGS as well, with some of that money going to recapitalize banks in those countries.

Meanwhile, the IMF and the Eurozone are also helping out the PIIGS. And Europe’s banks are being recapitalized by June 30, 2012, which will cost €106 billion; it seems that some of that money is coming from the private sector and some of it is coming from the leveraged EFSF. The IMF and the Eurozone are also helping to partially guarantee the new Greek bonds which will go to the banks tendering their old Greek bonds. (I think the tender of the old bonds is that “Greek bonds 100%” line, but I’m unclear on that.)

At the bottom of the sheet we have the sequencing. First comes Greece, which gets its debt written down by the banks, and gets a new loan from the IMF and the Eurozone. Then comes the bank recapitalization, which has to be done by June. Third up are the non-Greek PIIGS. And finally there’s that wonderful question mark at the end.

The main thing which worries me about this plan is the sequencing: it seems that everything else is contingent on Greece getting its writedown first. And I’m highly skeptical that a 50% writedown from the banks is practicable or likely any time soon. I know the IIF has agreed in principle, but that doesn’t mean the banks are actually going to tender their bonds in practice. And if they don’t, does that mean the whole deal falls apart? We need a lot more details on this, I think. Or, maybe, we don’t. Trying to extract details could mean forcing players to confront the fact that they all think they’ve agreed to something slightly different. And that might not be a good idea right now.

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.)

This chart was put together by Jialan Wang, and it shows the degree to which companies’ reported assets and revenues deviate from a Benford’s Law prediction over time. (If you want some good background on Benford’s Law and how it can uncover dodgy numbers from eg the Greek government, Tim Harford had a great column last month on the subject.)

Writes Wang:

Deviations from Benford’s law have increased substantially over time, such that today the empirical distribution of each digit is about 3 percentage points off from what Benford’s law would predict. The deviation increased sharply between 1982-1986 before leveling off, then zoomed up again from 1998 to 2002. Notably, the deviation from Benford dropped off very slightly in 2003-2004 after the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform act in 2002, but this was very tiny and the deviation resumed its increase up to an all-time peak in 2009.

So according to Benford’s law, accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what’s really going on inside of companies. The major reform that was passed after Enron and other major accounting standards barely made a dent.

This doesn’t necessarily mean fraud, per se; it could just be a chart of the degree to which companies are managing and massaging their quarterly figures over time. The kind of fraud that’s so respectable, Jack Welch got lionized for it. Once you start down that road, it’s easy to go further and further forwards, while it’s almost impossible to reverse course. So I can easily see how the natural tendency in this chart would be up and to the right.

Still, it’s worrying; all the more so because I can’t think of any way of reversing the trend. If Sarbox can’t do it, nothing will.

Why has no one thought to do this before? Every month, the Current Population Survey goes out to a nationally representative sample of more than 50,000 interviewed households and their members. And in one of the questions, those households — or at least the households who didn’t answer the same question the previous month — are asked how much money they made, in total, over the past 12 months. That question has now been asked in 138 successive months, since January 2000. Which means that with a bit of clever analysis, it’s possible to put together an apples-to-apples comparison of what has happened to household income every month.

And when you do that, the results are very scary indeed.

The red line, here, is median real household income, as gleaned from the CPS, indexed to January 2000=100. It’s now at 89.4, which means that real incomes are more than 10% lower today than they were over a decade ago.

More striking still is the huge erosion in incomes over the course of the supposed “recovery” — the most recent two years, since the Great Recession ended. From January 2000 through the end of the recession, household incomes fluctuated, but basically stayed in a band within 2 percentage points either side of the 98 level. Once it had fallen to 96 when the recession ended, it would have been reasonable to assume some mean reversion at that point — that with the recovery it would fight its way back up towards 98 or even 100.

Instead, it fell off a cliff, and is now below 90.

In dollar terms, median household income is now $49,909, down $3,609 — or 6.7% — in the two years since the recession ended. It was as high as $55,309 in December 2007, when the recession began.

Some of this decline has been hard to see because nominal incomes have been holding very steady: before taking inflation into account, median household income was $51,465 in December 2007, and $51,140 in June 2009. But even then, over the past two years, nominal incomes have shrunk significantly to the current level of $49,909.

All of these numbers come from Gordon Green and John Coder, economists who both worked at the Census Bureau for more than 25 years. They’ve now set up a private company, Sentier Research, to collate these household income figures every month; the full report costs a reasonable $20.

Why is this work being outsourced to private-sector economists, rather than being done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and published officially? I’m having dinner with a government statistics wonk on Wednesday, and will be sure to ask him.

But in the absence of any good reason to discount the reliability of these numbers, it’s definitely worth taking them seriously, and asking why incomes have eroded so quickly and dramatically over the past two years. We’ve known for years that America has a huge unemployment problem. But I had no idea that the plight of the employed was this bad.

Many thanks to the wonderful Silvio DaSilva for putting this chart together; I think it explains a lot of what happened with Apple over the years.

During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, before he was fired in 1985, he was making consumer products which were far out of the reach of most consumers. The Apple II cost $1,298 in 1977, and that was the bare-bones version with 4K of RAM; if you wanted a more powerful version with a whopping 48K of RAM, that would cost you $2,638. Or $9,862 in today’s dollars.

The Macintosh, when it came out in 1984, was even more expensive. $2,495 was a lot of money, back then. (And never mind the LaserWriter: that had a list price of $6,995.)

When Jobs was fired, then, Apple was trying to sell consumer products to people who simply couldn’t afford them.

But when Jobs returned, in 1996, it was a different story. His first big product launch, the iMac, was priced at $1,300 — or just about $1,800 in today’s dollars. Not cheap, but at least somewhere in the ballpark of mass-market. Today, the entry-level MacBook Air — arguably the most gorgeous computer Apple has ever produced — is $999, just 55% of the real price of 1998′s iMac. And you can get a Mac Mini for $600.

And the non-Macintosh products are cheaper still. Here’s what you see when you visit the Apple Store online today:

This is a range of hugely powerful computers — the iPad 2 has the same computing power as a 1980s Cray supercomputer — at prices which are accessible to hundreds of millions of people around the world. The iPhone 4S — the first computer in the world to be able to have some approximation of a natural-language conversation — starts at just $199. And the iPhone I’m using right now is being given away for free. (With a two-year contract, but still.)

Jobs, of course, can’t take credit for the fact that technology becomes steadily cheaper over time. In fact, his technology has always sold at a premium; given the choice between making the entry-level Apple computer cheaper and making it better, Jobs always chose the latter option.

But Jobs can take credit for always being a step or two ahead of the technology curve, for seeing where the technology puck was going, and skating to that point before anybody else. Both in terms of what was possible, and in terms of what wasn’t needed any more. He saw, when he returned to Apple in 1996, that technology had improved to the point at which he could basically put his NeXT workstation ($6,500 in 1990, or $11,267 in 2011 dollars) on the desks of millions of people in the US and around the world. There was a basic level of quality he had to have, in any computer. And by the time that he launched OS X in 2001, he had built a company capable of delivering that quality at a price accessible to the broad non-geek middle classes.

The rest is history.

Update: I forgot the Lisa! $10,000 in 1983. That’s $22,745 in today’s dollars.

This was originally posted at Rortybomb

For the next few posts I need to allude to an ongoing battle of ideas about what is troubling our economy and what solutions are available. I figured it might be a good idea to try and create some sort of topological map of the various clustering of ideas and policies that constitute these arguments as well as the overlap among them. This is a preliminary version of this map: I’d really appreciate your input about what is missing and how to make this better.

From those who think that the problem is related to demand and Keynesian ideas, there tends to be three areas of focus: fiscal policy, monetary policy and the debt hangover in the broken housing market. One can think all three are important – I certainly do – but most think one has priority over the others. Many will think one of the three isn’t in play or particularly useful as a focus of policy and energy. Here’s a rough map. Quotations are ideas, non-quotes are policies and parentheses are people associated with each:

This war of ideas is being fought in white papers and articles, and at academic institutions, policy shops and the blogosphere. As a general resources, here are the best one-stop resources online for most of the bulletpoints above:

Fiscal Policy as Expectation Channel: Woodford on Monetary and Fiscal Policy, Paul Krugman.

Quantatitive Easing: The World Needs Further Monetary Ease, Not an Early Exit, Joe Gagnon.

NGDP Targeting: The Case for NGDP Targeting: Lessons from the Great Recession, Scott Sumner.

Mass Refinancing: Economic Stimulus Through Refinancing — Frequently Asked Questions, R. Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer.

Inflation to help Deleveraging: U.S. Needs More Inflation to Speed Recovery, Say Mankiw, Rogoff, Bloomberg. Overcoming America’s Debt Overhang: The Case for Inflation, Chris Hayes.

Higher Inflation Target: A 2% Inflation Target Is too Low, Brad Delong.

Bankruptcy Reform/Cramdown: January 22nd, 2008 Testimony, Adam Levitin.

Foreclosure Spillovers: Foreclosures, house prices, and the real economy, Atif Mian, Amir Sufi and Francesco Trebbi.

Balance Sheet Recession: U.S. Economy in Balance Sheet Recession: What the U.S. Can Learn from Japan’s Experience in 1990–2005, Richard Koo.

Housing Backlog: There is a Boom Out There Somewhere, Karl Smith. Yes, Virginia, Our Housing Stock Is Now Way, Way Below Trend, Brad Delong.

Debt-for-Equity Swaps: Why Paulson is Wrong, Luigi Zingales.

Debt, Deleveraging, and the Liquidity Trap: Debt, deleveraging, and the liquidity trap, Paul Krugman. Sam, Janet and Fiscal Policy, Paul Krugman.

The flip-side to a demand crisis is a supply crisis, and there’s been a large effort to explain our high unemployment and below-trend growth as the result of supply-side factors. Having surveyed the arguments, I’ve split them into two categories. There are those who think that the government has created an increase in uncertainty. This is from a combination of deficits that scare bond vigilantes/job creators, new regulations that have killed all the potential new jobs as well as the government creating disincentives to work. The second area of focuses is on the productivity of the labor force, with special emphasis on skills mismatch, the characteristics of the long-term unemployed and the idea that something has changed fundamentally in our economy that will keep so many unemployed for the foreseeable future.

I’m making the productivity circle conceptually expansive enough to include “recalculation” stories, though I suppose I could add a third circle in the next version. I tend not to find these arguments convincing, but here are the arguments made in full as best as I could find them online:

European Policies: The U.S. Recession of 2007-201?, Robert Lucas. The classical view of the global recession, Gavyn Davies.

Expansionary Austerity: A Guide for Deficit Reduction in the United States Based on Historical Consolidations That Worked, AEI. Large changes in fiscal policy: taxes versus spending, Alesina and Ardagna.

Liquidate the Homeowners: Are Delays to the Foreclosure Process a Good Thing? Charles Calomiris and Eric Higgins.

Stimulus is Sugar: Geithner Finds His Footing: Zachary Goldfarb.

Two-Deficit Problem, Bond Vigilanties: Spend and Save, Noam Scheiber.

Great Vacation: Compassionate, But Inefficient, Casey Mulligan. The Dirty Secret of Unemployment, Reihan Salam.

Long-Term Unemployed: Potential Causes and Implications of the Rise in Long-Term Unemployment, Andreas Hornstein, Thomas A. Lubik, and Jessie Romero. 10 Percent Unemployment Forever?, Tyler Cowen, Jayme Lemke.

Great Stagnation: The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen.

Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade (PSST): PSST vs. the Aggregate Production Function, Arnold Kling.

Labor Mobility: Housing Lock is not a Major Part of this Crisis, Plus Scatterplots of Deleveraging!, Mike Konczal.

So what did I miss? What should go in the next version of this chart?

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