Happy New Year 2013

Okay, help me out here, informed readers.

The 112th Congress formally comes to an end on January 3, when the new session's members will be sworn in.

Whatever the Senate has done, if the House hasn't done likewise, won't count once the 112th session expires.

So ... the possibility of the big 'compromise' every one is talking about turns on a 2 day difference between two different deadlines.

We've already gone off the 'cliff.' The Bush tax cuts have expired, we are living in 2013 with the pre-Bush tax rates formally back in force.

So, the Senators, by acting on Dec. 31, before the cliff, were able -- and will always be able -- to describe their action as raising taxes on 'those fat cats' (relative to 2012 law).

But members of the House, by acting on the 1st or 2d of 2013, will be able to describe their actions as a tax cut, relative to the new/resurrected/Clinton-era rates, if they pass the same bill. So of course they haven't violated any pledge they may have signed not to raise taxes, because the tax increase took place automatically, not by their vote, and they will then have voted to lessen it slightly, i.e. to decrease taxes.

Is that it?

If it isn't brilliant, it is insane. I can't decide which.

Working on Caro Review

Robert Caro has been working on a multi-volume life of the 36^th President, called The Years of Lyndon Johnson, for more than forty of his and our years now. The first volume of the set, The Path to Power, appeared in 1982, when Caro’s professional reputation as historian and biographer turned on his work on the New York parks-and-highways maven Robert Moses. Important as Moses was for that metro area: this was bigger game.

The Path to Power related the first thirty-three years of Johnson’s life, including his first election to the House of Representatives in 1937. In that period, Johnson was at least on the surface a devotee of the New Deal, and was in particular associated with rural electrification. But Caro sees all of Johnson’s devotions during the Roosevelt years through the lens of his protagonist's overweening ambition. In this 1982 volume, Caro stressed that a close tie to the REA gave Johnson an instrument, one that he could and did use to build his own political machine in Texas.

The second volume, Means of Ascent (1990), focused on Johnson’s elevation to the U.S. Senate in 1948. The key votes, in the Texas of that time, were those cast in the Democratic primary, since the defeat of the Republican was a mere formality. Johnson’s primary election opponent in 1948 was former Governor Coke Stevenson. Caro argues that Johnson’s defeat of Stevenson was blatant theft. Nonetheless, the Democratic state convention upheld Johnson’s victory, and he prevailed in the resulting litigation with some help from attorney Abe Fortas, a man he would in the fullness of time put on the U.S. Supreme Court.

TESTING:  DO I HAVE THE SAME TROUBLES here as with the other blog?  If not, one plausible hypothesis is that there is just too much in the other blog, and it may make sense to start from scratch.

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The IRS Code permits the owner of mineral rights to account for the reduction of the available value as reserves are brought to the surface and exploited. This is not on its face a glaring “loophole;” it is closely analogous to the depreciation of the value of machinery.

Whatever the factual rate of depletion might be, the statutory (?) rate of depletion in the case of oil and gas is 15 percent of the gross income from the property, based on average daily production, up to the depletable quantity.   

The review in the form in which I sent it to Henry did not contain any material about Johnson's role in depletion allowance controversy.  Hey. This is neat.  I can type at will in this blog. So the problem must be overcrowding.

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LBJ told Weisl that "your folks (his clients in the securities business, presumably) should take the hint that"this thing ... this assassin may ... have a lot more complications that you know about....It may lie deeper than you think."

The message clearly was that Wall Street should show its own faith in and solidarity with Johnson, because he was going to save the system from the shadowy forces represented by the assassin.

Euro/Dollar

That is my own clumsy graphing, assisted by XE.com and an educational website.

The subject of the graph is the fluctuations of the euro against the dollar over the last crisis-ridden year.

I've used an arbitrary date in the middle of each covered month (the 12th) as that month's data point.

How does this correlate with some of the events of the unfolding crises regarding Euro sovereign debt during this period?

Last May and June, when the euro was circa .70, saw German politicians in particular taking a hard stand against assistance for Greece. That stance began to soften a bit in late June, when Merkel agreed to work with the ECB to line up the participation on private investors in a restructuring. It appears that this helped the euro's value, which reached .73 that September.

The markets' attentions shifted to Italy by September, though. That month S&P downgraded seven Italian banks, and there was some fall-back. Then in November, the Italians managed to rid themselves of Silvio Berlusconi and  Mario Monti became the new PM there. Europe's bankers have confidence in Monti, who has a reputation as a competent, boring, technocrat, a good reputation to have at such times, and the value of the euro climbed through December and into January of this year.

The most recent fall-off, since the January peak, may represent more a strengthening of the US dollar than a weakening of the euro.

Just a Data Dump

Now this graph is illuminating. And a bit scary. It tells us the stages by which the remaining ivestment banks became 2 Big 2 Fail.

Wow

Suspension

I will not be adding new posts to Proxy Partisans for some time now.

It has been fun and a privilege, and I hope to resume when the time is right.

Thank you to all readers.

Posen's speech

Adam Posen is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics , and you can click on that link to learn more about him. Heavy-duty important economist with trans-Atlantic influence. Member of the monetary policy committee of the Bank of England, etc.

Posen spoke on September 28 to the Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce, and laid out "the case for doing more." See the whole speech here.

For more of what? by whom? Central bankers "in the UK and beyond," should be doing more to promote recovery, and should not concern themselves with the risk of inflation that this creates.

"[P]olicymakers should not settle for weak growth out of misplaced fear of inflation. If price stability is at risk over the medium-term, meaning over the two- to three-year time horizon ... it is on the downside."

That just sounds insane to me. It seems that our economics gurus have uterly lost sight of the most basic facts about the business cycle. Maybe this video will help. Surely recent events have vindicated Hayek's concern about the boom and bust cycle? Those responsible for the bust are always those who stoked the preceding boom.

We're suffering from the hangover from the last boom-bust, and we're reaching for a hair of the dog. Breaking the addiction would be a better plan.

Dividend policy

Let's put some links together on the broad subject -- one of great relevance to all the themes of this blog -- of corporate dividend policy. How do companies decide how much cash their stockholders get on a regular basis?

Here's a pdf from Deutsche Bank on the theory and practice.

And here are a few words from scholars at UPenn.

One piece of the puzzle is the fact that individuals in the US are generally taxed more for dividends than for the capital gain on the sale of stock. The dividends are "ordinary income." So, shouldn't a rational investor want the company to keep reinvesting its cash, building up that strike price, and earning him that capital gain? Why does anyone even want a dividend?

On the other hand, a stock that doesn't pay dividends has a Madoff-like air to it. I'm holding on to it so I can sell it at a higher price to someone else, you say? Well, why would he want it? Because he expects to sell it to a yet greater fool further down the road? Somewhere, somebody has to receive a stream of income/cash in order to anchor those capital gains. That, at any rate is one common sensical take on the issue.

At any rate, once a company has a history, a track record as to the quantity of dividends it pays, there is a good deal of pressure to keep it up. The dividend level is "sticky." Why? Because any departure can be taken as a signal. A cut in dividends can be considered proof the company is in trouble and desperately needs to hold onto its cash. An increase in dividends can also be taken as a signal that the company is in trouble, specifically that it is making a desperate move to perfume that fact!

Consider that Lehman Brothers, the broker-dealer that famously declared bankruptcy in September 2008 and set off that autumnal crisis, had increased its own dividends by 13% earlier in the year. You may as well give that some consideration -- if you are the member of a board of directors that institutes such a cut, signalling theorists will consider it for you!

Finally, if you are an investor, you might want to consider a dividend reinvestment plan. Especially because it goes by such a neat acronym. Such a plan is known as a DRIP.