The Reverse-Bill-of-Materials conundrum

This is a reverse-bill-of-materials moment for the economy. A BOM is usually intended to show what one needs to Build something, and often a BOM is largely composed of many 'kits' - sub-assemblies, and that recursion can go many layers down to arrive at the ultimate content. That's what makes such a nonsense of trying to, for example, derive a 'carbon footprint' for a finished product of any complexity - too many ultimate components and thus far too many assumptions needed.

A dis-assembling economy. OTOH, crucially has no BOM's which specify the componentry which will ultimately be affected. So the unravelling of entire sectors (events, festivals, tourism) is inherently unable to be predicted in the precision needed to direct remediable action or arrange substitutions.

That's what makes this whole thing so not-amenable to ordinary economic modelling. Because BOM's only work during Assembly, not for Demolition. Hence the headless-chicken circling seen from prognosticators of all stripes, and from not a few commenters right here on Interest.....

As a thought experiment, imagine an AirNZ engineer, a barista, and an RE salesbot (sorry, Personage). 

1. The engineer has two mortgages, two cars on HP, an overdraft and significant CC debt, but owns two residential rentals and is now jobless. 
2. The barista has zero mortgage and moderate CC debt, but a student loan and a small overdraft - little to no other assets beyond a motorscooter, and her boss has just announced a 3-day week. 
3. The RE bot has a thumping mortgage, no rentals, a large Amex balance, two leased vehicles and a few other toys/assets, and the firm has just cut the commission rate by 50%. 

Now, kindly predict the economic effects of this small sample's situation. Then multiply that by a million.....

And here's the real kicker. It's far, far easier to Demolish than to Build.....

A Fool speaks out

The Left Honorable Sir Larry Fool, president-for-life of the Small-Nation Association For Urbanista (SNAFU), has taken strong exception to Wild Bill Dipton's recent pronouncements about the role of Councils in causing various social woes.
 
The Fool notes, in protest, that Councils cannot be expected to take into account the economic consequences of activities such as planning, subdividing, consenting, building, or inspection.
 
'Our duty is quite clear', he said, hands visibly trembling and ashen faced.
 
'It's to minimise anything - Anything - that falls into the 'Rates Required' bucket in our LTP's.  Our democratically elected masters - Councillors - have made this consistently clear.  And who are We - mere unelected Minions - to subvert Democracy by thinking about anything else?'
 
'And, so there,  it isn't as though we have any economic expertise anyway.  Why, the sight of anyone with Economic Credentials throughout Local Gubmint, is as rare as Rocking-horse Poo.  (Which, by the way and let me be Perfectly Clear, is banned from deposit on Roads, Verges and Public Parks, anyway in the interests of Public Health and Safety - have you any idea how slippery that stuff is?)'
 
' Until such time as we have a better understanding of such arcane things as why it happens that land one side of a squiggle on a map is ten times the value of that on the Other side - a subject that will take a great deal of expert assessment, public consultation, numerous reports, and finally a considered decision to find the nearest carpet edge and sweep the whole stinking mess under it - '
'Hey, wait - is that mike ON?  Right, boyo, I'm outta here, and one word, ONE WORD in the Media, and , and, - well I'll never give You another interview again.'

Four Thoughts re First Homes

The interlocked factors (I ranted aboot this yesterday here) are just too hard to tackle, even individually.
One alternative (which may happen anyway) is letting the whole schemozzle run into the inevitable immovable object. Tempting as that is to those with apocalyptic/Malthusian tendencies, it would cause a lotta grief to a lotta bystanders. Collaterla damage.
I see (feeling more optimistic today, y'see) four aspects which can, together, make a bit of a breakthrough.

1 - wipe the zoning nonsense. MUL's etc cause price differentials, which firstly crystallize as CG to the lucky owners, then propagate to all and sundry (who, after all, would sell their hoose for an agricultural land price when your despised but now cashed-up neighbour has just made a cool $300K cf his original purchase price?). Luvverly free CG all around - after all - we didn't buy the house to Sell it! - but of course paid for by you-know-who. Guibmint by fiat could accomplish this by lunchtime tomorrow if it put its mind to it. What Constitution?

2 - Factory builds. Proper QC, can be erected in hours not months on site, will standardise foundations etc (one of the beefs in Chch is the continuing dither over TC3 founds, which need individual geotech to establish), and being built to tight tolerances and under cover, are a generally superior product to yer average chippie-hammered together set of frames (one of which, just down my street, has been sitting out in the weather for six weeks now with no roof and no wrap - nice.)

3 - GST exemption to factory builds from accredited suppliers. This avoids the obvious problem with a blanket 'GST exemption for new builds' which will be an easy route to no-GST decks, pergolas, baches, new rooms and re-roofs - because as GST has to be taken on raw materials, who can police what they are used for? No such issue with factory builds, which will have a BOM, a nationally valid type certificate of compliance, and a serial number.

4 - The cultural attitudes and legal provisions which make such builds acceptable to buyers (who, let's face it, have wildly inflated expectations of first homes, fed by TV house pron, and egged on by the usual bevy of marketeers), and to developers who are rather fond of placing CCR's (covenants, constraints and restrictions) on their conditions of sale. If we are serious aboot FHB's, then fer crying in the sink, let them set up next to You.

Housing yet again

Housing affordability has five components:

1 - cost of land.

2 - cost of building - and as NZ is well under scale, and hence has hopelessly overpriced materials: it's still worth going to the States and filling a 40' container and paying GST plus duty on the contents: most materials are around 20% of the NZ converted cost.

3 - time taken - as time=money - the 'carry' can be significant even for a single build.

4 - credit availability and terms.

5 - Household income levels

The stoopid Councils contribute directly to #1 and #3, the craft nature of building in NZ and the lack of scale accounts for #2, and Gummint policy affects #4 and #5.

In 2001, in Christchurch, it was possible to buy a doer-upper for well south of $50K, in the non-leafy suburbs. By 2003, the same house was x3. What changed?

In 2002 the Labour Gummint, trying to be nice to the hopeless, introduced a guaranteed $100K credit line. Qualification for this was simple: 'can you fog a mirror?'.

Instant result in Chch - every single price in shall we say the structurally challenged house class went up overnight by, spookily enough, that same amount.

So there's the Gummint's little push to unaffordability. #4 shows that easing credit adds to prices. Whodathunk?

And finally #5: the rise of credentialism, soft degrees like media, art and music, and the constant repetition of the mantra 'education gets you up in the world', have all lead to a situation of inflated expectations, but same old employment choices. And now the GFC has commenced a winnowing of the crop: only the truly useful souls can look forward to even a moderate income: the hopeless are condemned to menial jobs or the dole, and as has been the case throughout human history, the well-off are quite capable of looking after themselves. Average incomes are static in nominal terms, and falling in real. As Glenn Reynolds notes:



"The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay in, the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. One might as well try to promote basketball skills by distributing expensive sneakers."



Oh, and there is no political way out of this, because there are more Tax Consumers than Tax Producers, and the Consumers can, have and will outvote the Producers when push comes to shove. The middle class vote has been purchased by WFF, and despite their occasional unease, they'll stay bought.

So there in a nutshell is the bind we're in. And as any solution involves a choice between the hard way out, and the really hard way out, I don't see much will move until it has to. As the saying goes: what cannot go on forever, won't.

Urban Land prices in GodZone

A word about Development Contributions.

I'm an old grizzled ex-County Treasurer who actually used to administer these babies in the good old days before the dopey Sandra Lee LG Act 2002 injected 'Social and Cultural Wellbeings' into Councils spending arena.

DC's were really about public open space: land, reserves and the like. A simple cash amount, which was held in trust and applied only to reserves, was the norm, and/or a parcel or three of land set aside.

Nowadays, DC's have an incredibly complex calculation: Household Unit Equivalents (bit like the the Twenty' Equivalent Unit (TEU) measure for shipping container space) for almost everything a Council could conceivably dream up cost requirements for.

Recall that every legal human activity can fit within 'Social and Cultural Wellbeing', so naturally, there are Community Development Organisers, Events Planners, Reserves Consultators and dont even get me started on spatial planners, zonerators and other failed architects - all to be fed, housed, and their reports to each other and to the Council to be read and discussed with a straight face. All to be 'contributed' to....and then there are 'hard' spends like roading/water/sewer/drainage incremental impacts to be funded

The net impact of DC's (e.g. for an upcoming major Chch subdivision) is huge - $70K/section. And this impact is upfront - pay now, and this adds at the earliest stage, almost, to the hapless developer's carrying costs ('the carry').

At a commercial credit line rate (making the maths easy) of 10%pa, and a conception-to-first-sale time of 7 years, the rule-of-72 says that that $70K is now $140K. Yup, it has doubled.

See now why land prices in urban subdivisions are sky-high? Add everything together, recalling that those costs earliest on the list generate the highest carrying costs:

- land purchase
- 'carry' on land purchase cost
- survey and consents
- 'carry' on survey/consenting costs
- DC
- 'carry' on DC
- physical land development - civil works
- 'carry' on civil works
- sales and marketing costs
- developer margin
- and I've probably left a few cost items out....

and then ask:

1 - why anyone would be in this game?
2 - And for those brave enough to be there, why section prices are where they are?

The answer to 2 is - because of zoning (original purchase price inflated), the Social and Cultural well-beings (DC's inflated) , and the fact that Council staff have no concept of time=money ('carry' inflated)

After all, the Council staff don't have to carry the 'carry'.....so why not let that consent dawdle in the in-box for another month or six?

Now if the Wellbeings were deep-sixed, yer jest might have yerself a whole new ball game....keep watching!

Christchurch - Strangled by CCC staff

The old, traditional delivery areas of Local Government - roads, bridges, hard services such as drainage, sewers, water - are doing just fine.

But the regulatory areas such as planning and consents are simply getting in the way of everything. Spatial Planning is a failed concept - the RMA was meant to gauge proposals by reference to their effects, not their zoning. But it was captured early on by the zonerators and old-school town planners, and has never recovered.

Arguably, this crew have, by strangling land supply and imposing lengthy, adversarial processes on developers, designers and builders, added multiple layers of cost to homes, businesses and the local economy.

And the tightening of residential construction certification (DBH's Licensed Building Practitioner scheme) is another well intentioned but costly exercise: consider that of the 90% of Chch houses which are fine to carry on living in, fully 2/3 were put up by (shock, horror) completely uncertified people! Gadzooks! How can they now live with themselves?

Against this background of staff who blindly pursue failed techniques, causing cost wherever they cast their gaze, impervious to the time value of money, secure in their little fiefdoms, and protected by layers of certification, professional guilds and stroppy unions, how is a call to 'unity' amongst Councillors going to make the slightest scrap of difference?

We're living 'Yes, Minister' - and compulsorily paying through the nose to fund this incredible debacle.

And folk wonder why the pedestrian option - vote with yer feet and escape the CCC and its parasitic staff - is increasingly attractive?

Housing and the New Normal

A good site for US housing bubbular info is Dr Housing Bubble. A few of the noobs here could do with a click over there, methinks.

And yes, LTV's of 110% were creeping in here - I do recall a Westpac marketing pamphlet for 'professionals' which offered just that.

But y'all are missing an important aspect of the whole puzzle.

You Cannot expect useful, current or relevant info from the MSM or indeed any organ which depends on ad revenues or continued access to the Corridors of Power, wherever they may be, in a time of transition.

Put simply, they are all too invested in the status quo to be trusted. Hence the predominance of what in t'old days were called 'puff pieces', RE types talking their book, and 'analysis' by reporters which Whaleoil correctly labels 'repeaters'. Nobody there is about to pull the house down on their own heads, so the happy-clappy talk continues.

What we Do have is a transition to the New Normal - consumption around 10-15% less permanently (about the extent to which it was debt-funded), the air going out of bubbles, and reversion to the age-old means of house prices 2.8-3.2 times household incomes, PE ratios in low-mid teens, and savings rates north of 10%.

All this was predicted by numerous authors around the 1990-1993 mark, sensed by artists - try reading the cover notes for Dylan's 'World Gone Wrong' (1993) and say it ain't so, and it is a tribute indeed to the capacity for human self-delusion that so many bubbles have been inflated to keep the Good Times Rollin' since then. Which is precisely the theme of Matt Taibbi's GS piece.

Events in funky li'l NZ are skewed by three factors which y'all can assess fer yerselves:

1 - NZ is a 'haven' destination, and this gives a Lot of insulation, as haven seekers arrive and bring their loot with them. This is an obvious factor in house prices, if little recognised.

2 - NZ can feed itself many times over, and has a wealth of mineral and fuel riches. There won't be the Peak Oil stuff here - the transition can be considerably smoothed thereby, and we won't starve either. Ye cannae say that aboot, e.g. Britain.

3 - There is a strong conversative/conservation streak in NZ (same root, differing implications) which, despite the usual underclass provocations, will see us through in relatively harmonious shape. Ye cannae say that aboot most of Europe.

The glass is, in fact, half full.....

This Mess We're In (with apologies to Polly Jean)

This (Gummint discovers that taxing property won't raise the dosh needed for tax cuts) all neatly illustrates the unfortunate corner that most western democracies have knowingly painted themselves into.

In handing out entitlements, perqs and goodies, in an implicit intent to buy their recipients’ votes, they have triggered the ‘endowment effect’.

Simply put, this means that you may not miss something you never had, but you’ll fight tooth and nail to preserve something you Do have, no matter how dodgy or corrupt the process of acquiring it was.

This ‘ratchet’ has now jacked most people’s hopes of continued income up, way, way past the point of sustainability. That is, we’re running out of Other People’s Money (the taxes paid by actual tax-producing enterprises and people).

I frankly don’t see any easy way out of this sort of boondoggle. The political way is blocked by the ‘entitled’, who will simply vote for the More Goodies Party if given the chance – what Mancur Olson calls ‘distributional coalitions’.

We see this oh so clearly by the Grey Mob’s fury over a few trips to Waiheke. ‘How Dare They!’ is the cry.

Bill E’s sober estimate of less-than-sufficient tax revenues is also no doubt an outcome of a ‘John Galt’ effect: you cannot force people who can control their net income, and therefore their tax liability, to Produce and be Taxed if they don’t agree with the uses to which said Tax is being put.

They will quietly arrange their production to suit their own need for income.

E.g. in most farming situations, the distinction between living expenses and small luxuries is quite invisible, and you can go fishing on the King Quad.

They will minimise the net income externally reported.

E.g. by a doctor not doing those few extra surgeries, or a consultant deciding that 24 billed hours/week @ $150 is enough, ta very much, and going golfing the other two days.

And of course in all these scenarios the tax liability (and national tax revenue) falls sharply.

Or, being smart, ambitious and mobile, they simply up stakes and leave.

I reckon that the Greek outcome is the most likely: as internal economic arrangements are so incestuous – a Gordian Knot, indeed – only the cold eye of external parties – bondholders spring to mind – has any power to force the needed changes.

Which changes are of course bleedingly obvious:

- arrange tax matters to minimise tax arbitrage
- remove welfare traps such as WFF and roll these into a finer-grained tax structure
- means-test universal benefits
- work for dole
- less Gumnut overhead

Then, and only then, does John Galt shuffle back to the pages of badly written if expository novels, because it would only then be clear to all Producers that their hard-earned Tax is not being misapplied to produce more underclass infestations, unintended outcomes, and perverse incentives.

The depressing if logical outcome of my estimate of the situation (and I see Mark H’s comment as a John Galt moment, too), is this:

There is no political way out of this. Because the distributional coalitions and the voices of the ‘entitled!’ are, taken together, a massive majority. And because (as I recall an ex Nat pollie telling us at an MBA briefing a decade and a half ago) MMP is a recipe for stasis – nothing much will change, because nothing much Can change.

So, chaps and chapesses (BH, you owe me a royalty for that term, BTW), don’t be going looking to Politicians of any stripe, to solve the pressing issues of our quirky little Isle.

And the follow-up, from comments which suggest marvellous ways to restructure tax:

JK and crew are castigated for an incremental/pragmatic approach, but political realities and the structures of MMP rule out anything else.

The change process, crudely put, is Unfreeze Existing/Change/Refreeze New.

Your proposals are for the middle bit.

Hitting a wall of some kind (bond-buyer revolt, sovereign debt default, Repo Man, bankruptcy) would seem now to be our best hope for getting the Unfreeze. After that, Change can happen.

But wishing this in public on all of us is, shall we say, Not a Good Look.

So we carry on, just kicking the can down the road. And, some of us, quietly preparing for a harsher, colder world.

Bearing up

Great thread here, where the comments throw up all the usual suspects. And the lead paragraph is just it: what Were they thinking? Scapegoat time, methinks....

My own take on things is that of a Bear of Very Little Brain:

Sadly for conspiracy theorists, the US debacle is much simpler, much more widespread, and much more worrying. There are four underlying causes:

1 - the US has for many years spent rather more than it has earned, hence a continuing and chronic deficit which must be funded with Other Peoples Money.
2 - the Greenspan years encouraged cheap credit, with a built-in 'buy now, pay later' incentive, which has become entrenched in consumers' minds, especially as they figured out that there was an ATM bolted to their house value, and kept going and punching its buttons. And cheap credit = price bubbles.
3 - financial institutions have re-discovered leverage (but in a new way, because it's Different this time), and have used it to unprecedented heights (or widths, or depths, pick your metaphor). Bear's book assets supported a 32x multiple of business...and the variety of option and Adjustable Rate mortgage products was all too tempting.
4 - accounting leniency (especially the Qualifying Special Purpose Entities - QSPE's) allowed most or all of this financial wizardry to exist outside conventional balance sheets, reporting requirements and other regulatory safeguards. The mess was out of sight, out of mind.

So this Ponzi (meaning, dependent on new suckers coming in and paying cash) edifice is what's coming apart before our eyes. There are a lot of 'unknown unknowns':

- because of the opacity of the QSPE's, and of how to value the cross-linking chains of financial instruments, no-one has any real grasp of where the financial bodies are buried, or how many there are. And most everyone has a cellar. Thus when another cellar is excavated and another crop of recently deceased is uncovered, the vital element of mutual trust is further eroded. 'Who's next?' is the whisper.

- the Fed is out of ammo: it's treating this whole thing as a liquidity issue, and pumping in money. That merely fuels inflation, while leaving untouched the real issue: solvency. The off-balance-sheet junk is coming back On.

- real assets such as houses, which have become well overpriced in traditional household-income-to-phouse-price multiples, are returning to the safe zone of 2.5-3.5. Rather suddenly.

- there is a flight to 'safe' havens such as Treasuries and commodities. Unfortunately, as money floods in to commodities such as wheat, gold and oil, which are all highly supply-inelastic, the old rule of supply and demand kicks in and prices rise. And as oil and wheat etc are our grocery bills in raw form, guess what's happening to them...

If you can recognise li'l ol' NZ in some of these conditions (the chronic deficit BH rightly fingers above) then, yes, we should be worried, too. But we are a commodities maker (food, gold and to some extent oil and gas) so may be well placed to take advantage. And we have some of the best accounting reporting in the world (yes, don't laugh). So we can probably say that our cellars are relatively safe. Maybe a mummified rat or hedgehog. Nothing real bad. Pity 'bout those houses, but.

There has to be a marketing slogan in here, surely?

"NZ - Home of the Lowest Level 3 Asset ratio in the World!"

Black-Scholes = Black Hole

My math is far too weak to follow Black-Scholes, but it's been the standard paradigm for pricing of exotic financial instruments for a quarter of a century.

No longer.

Ever since I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'Black Swan', and bought/read his 'Fooled by Randomness' I've had this intuition that there was a big soft spot right underneath the main pillar of the financial establishment. The article notes that, in supplying a plausible mechanism for pricing exotica, Black-Scholes also prompted a massive surge in their supply. Now, we know it was all based on a mirage.....

The fool's bandag-ed finger goes wabbling back to the fire.

The VooDoo Bucket - Level 3 assets under FAS-157

It all sounds very technical, but it is quite important.

Find out (if you're a shareholder in a bank, financial instituion or even a pension fund of any description, and with KiwiSaver, that's most of us) what value of institutions' assets are in the Voodoo bucket.

There's a most useful primer here, and a bearish article from Asia Times online here.

Because until we know (a) where the financial bodies are buried and (b) that they're really dead, and cannot rise up and, like zombies, cause further mayhem (recall that all these toxic products are highly leveraged, so the risk of chain or domino effects is very real), the uncertainty and the negative sentiments will persist.

Capitalism is nothing if not sentimental, y'know.

Housing Bubble

A useful post here from another bubbular location: Southern California (SoCal, for short).

What can happen there can happen here, too. The post is quite good on the accelerated effects of information flow about housing, and the relationship between credit card debt and higher mortgage payments as fixed-rate or sweetheart deals reset to mrket levels.

In the '80's, Muldoon borrowed and hoped. We have lived through what it took to get us out of that hole: the best part of 20 years of work and better productivity.

And now, two aspects of the zeitgeist are putting us back in a similar hole:

1 - a Gummint hell-bent on buying enough votes for the next election, via various income redistribution schemes. Personal Tax cuts? Nah, Nanny knows best, you lot will simply add demand to the economy if we let you actually keep your own money. Speak for yourself, Michael bloody Cullen: I would pay down what minor debt I may have, and put the rest into Aussie shares and another super fund.

H L Mencken had it right in the '20's: an election is 'an advanced auction of stolen goods'.

And we are about to find out the hard way, yet again, that you cannot redistribute yourself rich.

2 - There is undoubtedly a local housing bubble. When it corrects, from a point where house price to income levels are around 5-7 i.e. unsustainable, to a level of say 4, look out below. 4/5 is $100,000 on a $500,000 home: a $100K loss. But 4/7 is $300,000 on a $700,000 home, and there's plenty of those just along my own street. So if you are one of the Feckless Many who have ratcheted up their debt anywhere north of 75% of current house valuation, you're gonna be hurting soon.

In effect, in the '80's, Muldoon borrowed and hoped at a public-sector level.
But in the aughties, borrowing and hoping is a private-sector pursuit.

And as the poster points out, in an environment where news and sentiment get around at the speed of light, that 'when', as in when the correction happens, might be a lot sooner than you would like.

SoCal catches the flu, we all cough.