1/Today's @bopinion post is about Trump's taxes, and what they show about how America allocates capital.

We appear to have some big problems.

2/Trump has a bunch of businesses that lose money. Our financial system has lent him money to throw into unsuccessful golf courses, hotels, and so on.

https://t.co/mgWQbsFQGN
3/A lot of these loans are loans that Trump hasn't even paid back yet, using loopholes in the tax system to avoid paying taxes on those unpaid debts.

Why would creditors give money to a guy who wastes the money on bad businesses and doesn't even pay them back?
4/One seemingly obvious answer is that capital is just really cheap these days. Companies are able to borrow more easily than at any time in the last few decades.
5/But this presents us with a mystery.

Why hasn't an abundance of cheap capital caused the return on financial capital to fall? Interest rates are low, but stock returns have held up strongly.
6/Standard economic theory says this isn't supposed to happen.

When you increase the supply of loanable funds, prices are supposed to go down. In other words, cheap capital should fund a lot of marginal businesses that compete away profits...
7/But far from being competed away, profits have risen to unprecedented levels!!
8/Economists are starting to notice that capital markets aren't working like an Econ 101 textbook says they're supposed to work.

Simcha Barkai and Matt Rognlie have both written about this:

1. https://t.co/OLln8npr8b

2. https://t.co/BY1EWyluD7
9/One possible explanation -- which Barkai prefers -- is that market power is growing in the economy. Meaning that big profitable quasi-monopolies are sucking up all the cheap capital, while all the little guys starve.

https://t.co/xNzE9SO8nY
10/But Rognlie doubts this explanation.
https://t.co/BY1EWyluD7

And it doesn't really explain Trump, does it? He's not a monopolist, and he doesn't even make profit. He's just a huckster who can borrow cheaply because he's famous.
11/An alternative idea is that capital is being RATIONED in the U.S., rather than priced.

Financiers are willing to throw tons of cheap money at big powerful companies or at famous hucksters like Trump, but charge inordinate prices to fund new entrants or marginal businesses.
12/If this is true, it means lots of perfectly good companies are probably struggling to get the capital they need, leaving the playing field to the big boys who can borrow cheaply. As a side effect, crappy borrowers like Trump waste some of our nation's savings.
13/Our financial system isn't working the way it's supposed to. Cheap capital should be reducing the return on financial capital, increasing business entry, and competing down profits.

We need to figure out what's going wrong, and fix it!

(end)

https://t.co/dHVCEQGa9q

More from Noah Smith 🐇

Time for panel #3: Big Tech and regulation!

I will be live-tweeting again, and you can also watch video at either the Twitter or Facebook links below!


Kaissar: Every industry gets regulated when it gets big. The question is what kind of regulation Big Tech will get,and whether the companies will be proactive in shaping it.

Kaissar: More profitable companies have higher returns. Why? Maybe it's a risk factor, because more profit = higher risk of getting regulated.

Bershidskyis showing a diagram of GDPR complaince pop-ups. What a massive ill-conceived bureaucratic mess.

Ritholtz: It's 2018 and we're still talking about Facebook privacy settings?! If you're still giving your personal data to Facebook, you just don't care about privacy!
"Competitive wokeness", like "virtue signaling" and "preference falsification", seems to be something people on the right say in order to pretend that people on the left don't really believe what they claim to believe.


Basically we have a whole bunch of ways of saying "You can't possibly believe that!!". Which helps us avoid the terrifying fact that yes, people generally do believe it.

Of course, "believe" doesn't mean what it means in econ class. It means that people get a warm feeling from asserting something, even if they don't know what it means. "God is omnipotent", etc.

A lot of times we believe extreme things, simply because asserting those things all together in a group gives us a warm feeling of having an army on our side.

It's not competitive wokeness. It's COOPERATIVE wokeness.

"Virtue signaling" isn't fake or pretend. It's real.

"Virtue", when it comes right down to it, means membership on a team.

Sometimes, to prove you're on a team, it helps to say something people on the other team could never bring themselves to say.

More from Trump

OK, #Squidigation fans, I think we need to talk about the new Wisconsin suit Donald Trump filed - personally - in Federal Court last night. The suit is (as usual) meritless. But it's meritless in new and disturbing ways. This thread will be


Not, I hope, Seth Abramson long. But will see.

I apologize in advance to my wife, who would very much prefer I be billing time (today's a light day, though) and to my assistant, to whom I owe some administrative stuff this will likely keep me from 😃

First, some background. Trump's suit essentially tries to Federalize the Wisconsin Supreme Court complaint his campaign filed, which we discussed here.


If you haven't already, go read that thread. I'm not going to be re-doing the same analysis, and I'm not going to be cross-linking to that discussion as we go. (Sorry, I like you guys, and I see this as public service, but there are limits)

Also, @5DollarFeminist has a good stand-alone thread analyzing the new Federal complaint - it's worth reading as well, though some of the analysis will overlap.

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A THREAD ON @SarangSood

Decoded his way of analysis/logics for everyone to easily understand.

Have covered:
1. Analysis of volatility, how to foresee/signs.
2. Workbook
3. When to sell options
4. Diff category of days
5. How movement of option prices tell us what will happen

1. Keeps following volatility super closely.

Makes 7-8 different strategies to give him a sense of what's going on.

Whichever gives highest profit he trades in.


2. Theta falls when market moves.
Falls where market is headed towards not on our original position.


3. If you're an options seller then sell only when volatility is dropping, there is a high probability of you making the right trade and getting profit as a result

He believes in a market operator, if market mover sells volatility Sarang Sir joins him.


4. Theta decay vs Fall in vega

Sell when Vega is falling rather than for theta decay. You won't be trapped and higher probability of making profit.