Streetwise Professor

For 5+ years I have been calling oil-linked LNG contracts a “barbarous relic” (echoing Keynes and the gold standard). This opinion was widely castigated when I first voiced it, but I had a strong basis for it: oil and LNG prices are driven by totally different fundamentals, and as a result oil prices are almost always disconnected with gas market fundamentals.

My presentations include a graphic and some statistics to make the point: correlations between oil and gas prices (measured by the Japan-Korea Marker, or JKM) are about zero, and so are the correlations between gold and gas prices. So it makes about as much sense to index LNG contracts to gold as it does to index them to oil.

Platts has released a report making the same point:

Asian utilities buying liquefied natural gas under rigid long-term contracts linked to oil prices risk paying an average of $20bn more each year up to 2022 than if they bought the superchilled fuel directly in the market.

S&P Global Platts, which sets the benchmark LNG price for the region, said there was a “huge disconnect” between the of cost oil-linked contracts and prices in the so-called “spot market” for LNG.

Nice of you to catch up, Platts. This “huge disconnect”–the exact phrase I’ve used in public presentations for years–has been evident in the data . . . for years. Indeed, since the beginning of the JKM index.

Platts spins this as utilities paying too much. It wouldn’t be any better if they paid too little. The point is that divergences between contract prices and product values cause misallocations of resources, including transactions costs associated with trying to circumvent contracts with prices that are misaligned with fundamentals.

There are still some who are in the thrall to the barbarous relic:

Jera, the world’s biggest buyer of LNG, said that oil-linked contracts still often made sense. The spot market was still small and vulnerable to volatile spikes as seen in early 2014, it said, while long-term contracts offered “stable procurement for buyers”, as well as providing a guarantee of demand needed by developers to launch new LNG projects.

This is a jumble of sloppy thinking.

Volatile spikes? If the spikes are driven by gas market supply and demand conditions, tying contract prices to gas prices rather than oil is a feature not a bug. You want prices that reflect fundamentals, and if fundamentals are jiggy, so be it. And, er, last time I checked, the oil market was subject to “volatile spikes” despite its greater size. And this is a bug, not a feature, when it comes to LNG because these oil price spikes are almost always unrelated to gas supply and demand conditions.

That is, it is better to tie LNG contract prices to markets with jumps that reflect gas fundamentals, than it is to tie prices to markets with jumps that don’t.

There can be a role for long term contracts, though the transactions cost (“opportunism”) related reasons for such contracts become less important as the short-term market becomes more liquid. Furthermore, even to the extent that long term contracts facilitate investment, it is a non sequitur to conclude that these long term contracts should be indexed to oil, rather than a gas price (be it JKM, or Henry Hub, or TTF, or whatever). The contracts will perform better–transactions costs will be lower–the lower the likelihood that pricing terms become misaligned with fundamentals. Gas indexing results in lower probability of misalignment than oil indexing.

For years, the mantras in the LNG market have been “security of supply” and “security of demand”, and that long term contracts are the only way to secure it:

David Thomas, an independent adviser with experience at Vitol and BP, said that Japanese utilities “value security of supply and there’s a strong relationship between buyers and sellers” but that was changing as the LNG market became more liquid and Japan’s gas and power markets liberalize.

The oil and refined product markets rely on markets for security of supply and demand. A big refinery or a major oil development are as, or more, capital intensive than an LNG product. But these things get created without long term contracts because liquid markets allow transactions at prices that reflect supply-demand fundamentals.

Long term contracts play a role when spot markets aren’t “thick” enough: under these conditions, opportunism (“holdup”) is a problem, and long term contracts can mitigate that problem. The evolution of spot markets in LNG will progressively mitigate the potential for holdup problems. And as I’ve noted, this is a virtuous cycle: as spot markets become more liquid, the need for long term contracts will decline, which will contribute to greater spot market liquidity, which will vitiate further the need for long term contracts.

As the producer of the JKM index, Platts is obviously talking its book here. But that’s not to say that it’s wrong. It isn’t. And economic reality will inevitably push contracting practices in the LNG market away from the barbarous past. Or perhaps I have the tense wrong there: is pushing would be a better way of putting it.

The first post I wrote almost 14 years ago was about an electronic trading system (in Japan) being overwhelmed by a avalanche of orders. The main conclusions I drew were: (a) since communications capacity is costly, it is uneconomic to build so much capacity as to make such outages impossible, and (b) pricing of capacity is the best way to ensure that it is utilized efficiently.

What is old is new again. A few weeks ago the CME was strained by a deluge of message traffic in the Eurodollar futures market. The surge was in part the result of something only dimly–if that–grasped 14 years ago: algorithmic trading. More specifically, algorithmic trading combined with the order matching and confirmation protocols of the CME and Eurodollar markets. Eurodollar futures utilize a pro rata secondary priority rule in the absence of a “TOP” order, i.e., an order that improves the best bid or offer. Moreover, the biggest order at the inside market gets informed of executions slightly before smaller orders. This advantage (on the order of 10-20 millionths of a second) provides a valuable edge.

This institutional setup provided incentives for two algorithmic traders to attempt to get a slight edge in quote size. Thus, each would send a message to increase its size when the other had the edge, which induced the prior leader to send a message to increase its size to regain the lead, which induced the other to send a message to send a message to regain the lead . . . which continued until the maximum quote size was reached. This race for priority in the book led to a surge in message traffic which put stress on the CME system.

Matt Levine wondered why the two algos didn’t just keep their orders at the maximum size. My surmise is risk: the larger size you show, the greater the risk. Furthermore, if someone else improved the price and became the TOP order, size didn’t confer an edge, so it makes sense to cut size.

The CME has responded by announcing fines of $10,000, with the threat of cutting off a violator’s trading connection altogether, for violations of a message traffic threshold. This is a rough form of pricing, so why call it a fine? Why not just call it a non-linear message pricing schedule?

I guarantee that a variant on this story will recur. Because capacity is costly, exchanges don’t price it, and rules adopted for other reasons (e.g., priority rules intended to promote quoting in size) provide an incentive to use this unpriced resource.

As I argued years ago, it’s odd that institutions–exchanges–that specialize in providing the platform to allow the pricing of scarce resources don’t find a better way to price their own scarce platform resources.

Gazprom has recently sold two blocks of treasury shares, amounting to 6.5 percent of its equity, at substantial discounts. The most recent sale, of a 3.6 percent stake, was at a whopping 11 percent discount.

The sale was to a single buyer. Had to be a pretty well-heeled dude to come up with the mere $3 billion purchase price. (Was it all cash? Or did some accommodating state bank fund a big chunk of the deal?)

The lucky single buyer’s name has not been disclosed, but rumor has it that it is Putin’s longtime friend and judo buddy, Arkady Rotenberg. He would definitely count as well-heeled.

As I’ve said for years, folks: judo is the path to riches. At least in Russia.

The behavior of Gazprom’s stock price has been rather strange. Yes, it dropped about 2.5 percent on the news of the discounted sale, but this drop mirrors almost exactly the rise in price on the day prior to the announcement.

While looking at the stock price, I noted that Gazprom’s market cap is now . . . . drum roll, please . . . . $85 billion. LOL. I remember they halcyon days of 2007 and 2008 when Gazprom management bragged it would be the first trillion dollar company.

Only off by two orders of magnitude. Could happen to anyone.

But it’s not surprising it happened in Russia, where the to-my-friends-everything-and-to-my-enemies-the-law essence of the Putinism has succeeded only in consigning the country to becoming an increasingly irrelevant blip on the world economy.

Vladimir Putin is deeply concerned about the environment, especially about the environmental ravages of evil American technology, notably fracking:

Speaking of the United States, Putin had plenty of words for them as well, accusing the U.S. of ignoring the negative environmental externalities of the nation’s mass-scale shale oil and gas production (fair enough) calling the process “barbaric” and proclaiming that Russia will never use fracking as a means of oil and gas extraction. “We will never frack,” Putin told a representative from Total SA during Moscow’s Russia Calling! conference on Wednesday. “We don’t need to develop shale oil at all. First, we don’t need to increase the supply of oil to world markets, and we have enough oil we can get from the Arctic shelf.” He added, “In spite of all of the economic benefits, we do not need it and we will never do this.”

Well, Putin does have a (rather mysterious) candidate degree in “economic science” from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, so perhaps he is qualified to give disquisitions on externalities (never mind the plagiarized thesis!). But the externalities lingo was no doubt put into Putin’s mouth by Charles Kennedy (whoever the-F he is). If Putin’s reference to barbarism had anything to do with the environmental impacts of fracking, he was merely blowing smoke up the you-know-what of the environmental movement in the West.

No, if Putin thinks that anything about shale and fracking are barbaric, it is the fact that they have raped and pillaged the oil price on which he and Russia are so dependent, and have created the US LNG industry which constrains Russian market power in European gas markets.

In other words, if there is anything green behind what Putin said, it’s greenbacks, not nature.

As for environmental impact, drilling and producing in the Arctic Shelf is far more environmentally problematic than shale production via fracking.

Putin’s anti-fracking jeremiad is also undermined by Gazprom Neft’s endeavors in this area. It’s also worth nothing that Russia’s Bazhenov layer (which Gazprom Neft is focused on) is arguably the largest shale resource in the world. The impediment has been technology, a problem exacerbated by sanctions, now going on their 6th year.

You can bet that Putin would not be lamenting the barbarities of fracking if Russia had the capability to do it. He is merely trying to rationalize Russia’s technological inability to exploit its shale resources, an inability exacerbated by the consequences of his foreign policy adventurism.

Elizabeth Warren, among other Democratic candidates, have promised to eliminate fracking in the US. The WSJ has a dialog between pro-ban and anti-ban advocates. It demonstrates just how unmoored from reality the fracking ban side is.

The anti-ban participant, Sam Ori, executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, points out that as a result of the fracking revolution, US production accounts for 8 percent of the world total, and eliminating this would dramatically increase prices:

One year after the implementation of a ban, shale-oil production would be down by more than a third. After two years, production would be down 55%. You’re talking about triple-digit oil prices and a possible global economic shock

To which the ban supporter, Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, replied: What? Me worry? My magical thinking will save the day!

I think an oil-price prediction is largely a red herring, because I am not talking about banning fracking in a vacuum. My organization and others propose a fracking ban along with other smartly designed programs to speed the development and deployment of clean technologies, support local communities, and offset oil and gas price increases. Government policies that drive a rapid just transition to clean-energy technology can create the largest economic stimulus since World War II.

I’m talking about policies like accelerated clean car and truck standards that rapidly decrease oil consumption in the transport sector and moving the power sector to 100% renewable energy. Other policies like reinstating the crude-oil export ban would also counteract price increases from banning fracking and restricting the supply of oil and gas.

Well-designed government policy in other areas, like tobacco and asbestos, addresses both supply and demand. Climate policy must do the same. The barrier to this is opposition from the fossil-fuel industry, not any insurmountable economic or policy problem.

And don’t you think we need to be a little bit skeptical of anyone’s ability to accurately predict oil prices?

Unpacking this idiocy in its entirety would exhaust my time and my patience. So just a few comments.

“Well-designed government policy” and “smartly designed programs.” Such a comedian! Because we know government programs are always well-designed and smartly designed. Did I say “always”? Sorry. I meant “never.”

Case in point. The brilliant European strategy to reduce CO2 by forcing the replacement of gasoline engines with diesel. Whoops! Not only was it colossally expensive, it was a major mistake because (a) it barely affected emissions of CO2, and (b) greatly increased auto emissions of harmful particulates.

Further, since China is the largest emitter, and the largest growing emitter, of CO2, Ms. Siegel is relying upon the wise beneficence of the CCP to achieve her goals.

Need I say more?

“Accelerated clean car and truck standards that rapidly decrease oil consumption in the transport sector.” First, this is costly, not just directly in terms of replacing a huge stock of existing capital, but indirectly by forcing people to drive lower-quality automobiles. How do we know they are lower quality? Because people don’t buy them voluntarily: they have to be compelled.

Second, auto emissions are a drop in the CO2 bucket.

“Moving the power sector to 100% renewable energy.”

Excuse me a minute. I have to walk my unicorn.

OK. I’m back. One-hundred percent renewables is utterly unrealistic and enormously costly, including in terms of reliability and transmission–and fires started (in places by California) by transmission needed to support renewables generation. Fires which, by the way, emit massive amounts of CO2.

Look at Germany, which I wrote about a few days ago. They are running into a renewables wall well short of 100 percent, and have incurred massive costs (imposed on energy consumers) to get this far.

I note that Ms. Siegel doesn’t mention cement, or steel, or other industrial emitters (which put autos in the shade, btw).

Not to mention that fracking oil has f-all to do with power generation, and fracking gas that supplants coal reduces CO2 emissions.

“Other policies like reinstating the crude-oil export ban would also counteract price increases from banning fracking and restricting the supply of oil and gas.”

Yo. Einstein. We have oil and gas to export because of fracking. If we ban fracking, we’ll have no exports, and the export ban will have zero, zip, nada impact on prices.

Further, export bans reduce the price in the exporting country, but raise prices in the importing country. So I guess Ms. Siegel is an economic nationalist. I bet she looks stunning in her MAGA hat.

“And don’t you think we need to be a little bit skeptical of anyone’s ability to accurately predict oil prices?”

Yo. Von Neuman. This has nothing to do with predicting the level of oil prices. Demand curves slope down. You reduce production, prices go up. In fact, oil demand curves slope very steeply, so if you reduce production a little prices go up a lot.

Not rocket science. Just the law of demand.

And these are the brainiacs who are going to make sure that we have “well-designed” and “smartly designed” government policies.

God save us.

Germany, under Angela Merkel, has pursued with monomaniacal fervor an agenda of “decarbonizing” the German economy. This has been driven by a monocausal view of what constitutes “green” policies, one that begins and ends with greenhouse gasses.

In pursuit of this objective, Germany has embarked on a hugely expensive endeavor–“Energiewende“–that looks to replace virtually all fossil-fuel generation with renewables, notably wind and solar. The foolishness of this campaign was evident from the onset (as I wrote about some years ago), but Merkel and the German ruling class ignored it: but now reality is rearing its ugly head.

Where to begin?

For one thing, for those who do not have a view of environmentalism that begins and ends with carbon, many in Germany are finding wind power in particular to be visual pollution, sonic pollution, a major threat to bird and insect life, and a threat to some of the few remaining forested parts of the country. As a result, expansion of windpower is facing increased opposition on environmental grounds.

Expansion of offshore wind is sharply limited by the need for vastly expanded transmission capacity (to bring power from the windy northern coast to the central and southern regions of the country that consume the power). This is expensive, and also faces substantial local opposition on environmental grounds.

In a truly amazing fit of stupidity, Germany decided to terminate a large and reliable–and carbon free–source of electricity when Merkel ordered the shutdown of the country’s nuclear plants post-Fukushima. Let’s see: a coastal nuclear plant is hit by a tsunami, so let’s close down all nuclear plants in a seismically stable country with no zero risk of a tsunami. Yeah, that makes sense.

Now Germany is planning to decommission all its coal plants, because global warming. It is not intending to replace them with gas-fueled ones, despite their lower carbon emissions. Because global warming.

So . . . no nukes, no coal, no gas to replace them, severe constraints on increased renewables output. Which leads to . . . looming shortages of power. Which means that Germany’s already incredibly expensive power will become even more expensive. Hardly great for German consumers, or German industry.

But no worries, Germany will just export less!

Germany is counting on its status as a net exporter of power to help it brace it for potential shortfalls as nuclear and coal power wind down in stages. It transmitted about 53 terawatt-hours of power to its European partners in the nine months through September, compared with 31 terrawatt-hours of imports, monitoring group AG Energiebilanzen reported Monday.

Screw the neighbors! How German of them! La plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Er, that’s not very “European” of them, is it? “European partners.” Ha!

How any European can listen to Merkel’s lectures about “more Europe” without vomiting is beyond my comprehension.

It also demonstrates the failure to think through the effects of their actions. If the Germans export less, will those who currently import from them say: “Well OK then! We’ll just sit in the dark and freeze!”? As if. They will build generating capacity. And it won’t be largely renewable. Meaning that Germany closing coal plants will not lead to an equivalent reduction in the number of coal plants, but a displacement of those plants to other countries, or the building of gas plants outside Germany. So the amount of global emissions reduction will be a fraction of the amount of German emissions reduction.

The virtue signaling aspect of this is also absurd. For all of the contortions and coercion that Merkel will employ to reach her decarbonization goal, the reduction in CO2 emissions will be a drop in the bucket, given that China is opening a coal plant per week, and Chinese and Indian emissions already dwarf those of the US, let alone Germany. So the impact of this on CO2 emissions, and on temperature, will be de minimis.

Germany is a great example of the fallacy of composition. It has an incredibly intelligent and well-educated population. Arguably the most intelligent and well-educated population in the world. Yet, Germans collectively have a history of making the worst decisions of any nation on earth.

Perhaps this reflects their obsession with grand theories (as opposed to say, the more practically minded British and Americans). As a result, they tend to embark on grandiose missions that end in disaster. (Adam Smith’s remark about “the man of system” comes to mind. So does Adenauer’s remark about Prussians being Belgians with megalomania.)

In the past, tens of millions have died of German theories–most of them non-Germans. Not many will likely die of Energiewende, so in that way it is not comparable to the great debacles of German history. But it is a debacle nonetheless, and one with its roots in a grand theory, and which will produce virtually no environmental gain despite imposing a massive cost on Germans (and other Europeans who consume German electricity).

How very German.

Standard no-arbitrage derivatives pricing theory rules out certain trading strategies because they are seemingly unrealistic. For example, if the set of trading strategies is unrestricted, the following strategy is guaranteed to make any arbitrarily large profit (pick a number, any number! e.g., $10 quadrillion) prior to some finite time T almost surely–and don’t call me Shirley!: specifically, at time s, hold 1/(T–s) shares of stock in your trading portfolio, and cash out when you’ve made $10 quadrillion.

Obviously, this requires you to hold an arbitrarily large–and arbitrarily expensive–position in the stock. No problem: just borrow! Further, this obviously exposes you to risk of infinite loss: the variance of your portfolio value goes to infinity as you approach T. Again, no problem!: just borrow! The self-financing constraint is satisfied, so dream of how you’ll spend your immense riches.

Well, borrowing infinite sums seems a tad unrealistic, so it is standard to rule out such doubling strategies. One good explanation is in the very good book by J. Michael Steele, Stochastic Calculus and Financial Applications:

Nothing is wrong with the model or with the verification of the self-financing property, yet something has gone wrong. The problem is that our model diverges from the real world in a way that any decent banker would spot in an instant. Just consider what happens as the time gets nearer to T if the investor in charge of the portfolio V(t) has not yet reached his goal. In that case, the investor borrows more and more heavily, and he pours the borrowed funds into the risky asset. Any banker worth his salt who observes such investment behavior will pull the investor’s credit line immediately. The simplest rules of lending practice are enough to prohibit the management of a portfolio by any strategy [a(t), b(t)] like that defined by equations (14.36) and (14.38).

But maybe not, thanks to the miracles of fintech! Apparently a glitch in the Robinhood app has given users in the know “infinite leverage”:

The cheat code was being shared on social media site Reddit, with one trader claiming he took a $1,000,000 position in stock using only a $4,000 deposit. Through Robinhood Gold, the start-up’s subscription service, users can borrow money from the company to make trades. The backdoor was essentially free money and was being called “infinite leverage” and the “infinite money cheat code” by Reddit users who discovered it.

Looks like we can’t rule out “doubling” strategies, and impose a credit constraint restrict trading strategies to what Steele denotes the set SF+ (“self-financing plus”). I guess Robinhood isn’t “a decent banker.” LOL.

This is what happens when you make coders bankers. They blow no-arbitrage pricing theory all to hell.

Looks like imma gonna haveta rework my lecture notes for my PhD derivatives pricing course.

In the ongoing evaluation of what has been happening in the repo market, market participants have identified post-crisis regulations as a potential source of the problem. In particular, these regulations (including the Liquidity Coverage Ratio) require behemoth banks like JP Morgan and Citi to hold large amounts of reserves, and makes them reluctant to lend them out even when repo rates spike.

Having long said that the various liquidity regulations intended to prevent a recurrence of the last crisis could be the cause of a new one, I am certainly quite sympathetic to this view. However, information that is coming out now suggests another potentially complementary and aggravating factor.

In particular, reserve holdings are very concentrated:

Fed data show large banks are keeping a disproportionate amount in reserves, relative to their assets. The 25 largest US banks held an average of 8 per cent of their total assets in reserves at the end of the second quarter, versus 6 per cent for all other banks. 

Meanwhile, the four largest US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — together held $377bn in cash reserves at the end of the second quarter this year, far more than the remaining 21 banks in the top 25

Moreover, the big banks have been reducing their reserves:

Analysts and bank rivals said big changes JPMorgan made in its balance sheet played a role in the spike in the repo market, which is an important adjunct to the Fed Funds market and used by the Fed to influence interest rates.
Without reliable sources of loans through the repo market, the financial system risks losing a valuable source of liquidity. Hedge funds, for example, use it to finance investments in U.S. Treasury securities and banks turn to it as option for raising suddenly-needed cash for clients.
Publicly-filed data shows JPMorgan reduced the cash it has on deposit at the Federal Reserve, from which it might have lent, by $158 billion in the year through June, a 57% decline.

Although JPMorgan’s moves appear to have been logical responses to interest rate trends and post-crisis banking regulations, which have limited it more than other banks, the data shows its switch accounted for about a third of the drop in all banking reserves at the Fed during the period.
“It was a very big move,” said one person who watches bank positions at the Fed but did not want to be named. An executive at a competing bank called the shift “massive”.
Other banks brought down their cash, too, but by only half the percentage, on average.
For example, Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, with a $2.4 trillion balance sheet, took down 30% of its deposits, a $29 billion reduction.

So . . . substantial concentrations of reserves, and declining levels of reserves. Yes, these are all potential consequences of Frankendodd. But they also are potentially symptomatic of market power and the exercise thereof.

This triggered a synapse, which led me to recall a 1993 article from the Journal of Monetary Economics by R. Glen Donaldson. Donaldson’s article was motivated by a study of the Panic of 1907, when a “cash syndicate” (led by . . . J.P. Morgan, in person and through his eponymous bank) lent to cash strapped trust companies facing depositor runs at very high rates.

Donaldson presents a model in which a spike in the need for cash by a set of market participants (trust companies facing depositor outflow, in his model) makes the funds held by a group of other institutions pivotal: these institutions face a downward sloping demand curve for their funds because of constraints on competitive suppliers of funds. The pivotal institutions supply funds (through a repo-like transaction in which they buy securities from the trusts) at a supercompetitive price (by buying the trusts’ securities at subcompetitive prices). In his model, collusion between the pivotal institutions exacerbates the rate spike.

The main implication of the model is that spikes in the demand for funds lead to spikes in interest rates that are bigger than would prevail in competitive conditions.

There is an element of non-linearity in the model, because the big suppliers’ funds are not pivotal in normal conditions, but become so when the demand becomes sufficiently large. This leads to a switch from competitive to monopoly pricing, which in turn causes a spike in rates.

I should note that the regulatory and market power stories are not mutually exclusive, and are indeed complementary. Regulatory constraints can increase the demand for funds (making it more likely that the big suppliers will be pivotal) and can reduce the supply of funds from the smaller suppliers (which lowers the threshold for the switch from competitive to monopoly pricing, and makes the demand curves for the big suppliers funds steeper, leading to a higher monopoly rate).

I therefore consider it a plausible hypothesis that market power contributed to the repo market spike, and that one channel by which regulations contributed to the spike was through its effect on market power.

How can this hypothesis be tested? Conceptually, if regulatory constraints alone caused the spike, then those in possession of large quantities of reserves (e.g., Morgan) were absolutely constrained in their ability to lend additional reserves: the difference between the repo rate and the Fed Funds rate would represent the shadow price on this regulatory constraint.

If a big bank or banks exercised market power, this constraint would not be binding.

Operationalizing this test is likely to be complex, however. Big holders of reserves will inevitably make all sorts of arguments to say that they couldn’t have lent more.

This brings to mind the California electricity crisis in 1999-2000, when generators operated below various capacity measures, but pleaded that constraints (by unplanned outages, or NOX regulations, etc.) reduced their effective capacity below these nominal capacity measures. Given the complexity of operating a power plant, it was very difficult to determine whether the generators were withholding capacity, or in fact offered as much as they were capable of doing.

Despite the difficulty of operationalizing the test, I think it is something for regulators to attempt. There is a colorable case that the repo rate rise was exacerbated by market power, and given the importance of this market, this possibility should be investigated rigorously.

As an aside, the Donaldson model appeared only a few months before my Journal of Business article on market power manipulation. The two articles have a lot in common, despite the fact that they were developed totally independently, and seemingly involve completely unrelated markets (money vs. physical commodities). However, the core arguments are similar: economic frictions can periodically create market power in markets that are usually competitive.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that “one of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elite in the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.” This quote came to mind when reading Matt Stoller’s hit piece on Aaron Director on the Stigler Center’s Pro-Market blog.

Director was one of the major moving forces behind the Chicago revolution in antitrust scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s. Although he published little himself, through his teaching, and his interactions with other faculty in economics, law, and business at Chicago, Director challenged the consensus on antitrust, especially in areas like vertical restraints. The challenge that he inspired pretty much overturned this consensus, and it is fair to say that the Chicago became the replacement paradigm. A good portion of the industrial organization and antitrust scholarship of the past 50 years has been aimed at challenging the Chicago view, but nonetheless, many of its key insights remain regnant.

Stoller does not mount a serious attempt to critique Director’s actual contributions, or to explain them, as Sam Peltzman does in his two posts on Director. Rather than challenging Director and his followers on the facts, or on the analysis, Stoller instead questions Director’s motives. It is attack by ad hominem.

In Stoller’s telling, for much of his life, Director was a good progressive, and a devotee of Henry Simons. As such, he was an antimonopolist who favored aggressive antitrust enforcement. But then Simons died, and Director “suddenly” converted to a right-wing pro-business fanatic in order to appease a major funder who according to Stoller was an “extreme right-wing[er]” and quasi-fascist:

Director suddenly decided that conservative ideas were compatible with corporatism after all. Monopolies, apparently, were always created by government. At this moment, Director broke with the conservative tradition and birthed neoliberalism, the anti-government, pro-monopoly philosophy that now dominates policymaking globally. Director convinced George Stigler and Milton Friedman of the new creed. Both had opposed corporate monopolies, but flipped to support Director’s new movement. The Chicago School was born.

Thus, Director was nothing but an intellectual Judas, who sold out his firm convictions for a few pieces of silver.

This begs so many questions it isn’t funny. Take Stoller’s premise as fact. How, pray tell, did Director convince such notoriously strong minded people like Stigler and Friedman? Did he pay them off? No really–how did he persuade them?

And how did he persuade others, such as Bork, who was a major force in reshaping antitrust law? And how did the Chicago school antitrust/industrial organization ideas midwifed by Director have such a profound effect on the economics and legal academy outside of Hyde Park, and then the courts? Especially since they were initially so contrary to the professional consensus, and indeed attracted substantial (and often hysterical) opposition?

There must have been something to the ideas, eh? But not in Stoller’s telling. Instead, according to him, Harold Luhnow got his money’s worth by getting Director to turn from anti-monopolist to pro-monopolist, and somehow (mesmerism?) Director convinced myriad intellectuals (and judges) to go along.

The closest that Stoller comes to addressing any of the scholarship that Director inspired is a drive by shooting on John McGee’s Journal of Law and Economics (1958) paper that contended that, contrary to the overwhelming conventional wisdom, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil did NOT engage in predatory pricing.

Stoller refers to a paper which disputes McGee’s findings. Fine. But he is presented with the problem that, as shown by Joshua Wright, McGee’s article had far less of an impact on academic and legal thinking on predatory pricing than the 1975 Areeda-Turner article. But no problem! Just turn this question of fact into one of motive: “It didn’t hurt [Areeda-Turner’s] motivations, of course, that they were both on the payroll of IBM, which was at that moment in a bitter series of antitrust lawsuits which included, you guessed it, predatory pricing claims.”

Disgusting.

Stoller writes: “With support on the right and the left, courts soon accepted Director’s ideas, laundered through McGee, Turner, and Areeda.” Again: through what powers of mind control did Director get “liberal Democrats” from Harvard to launder his dirty ideas? Inquiring minds want to know!

But Stoller’s distortion of history doesn’t end here. His explanation for the rationality of predatory pricing goes like this:

Contra Director’s logic, predatory pricing is quite rational. A competitor to a corporate goliath can’t borrow an infinite amount of money to lose until prices come back, nor can a competitor just shut down until prices go back up. No bank would lend to a competitor of Standard Oil, just as no one today will lend to a retailer competing to lose money against Amazon. 

Wow. That logic sounds familiar! Yes, I remember now: in 1966 one of my thesis advisors, Lester Telser (a contemporary of McGee’s in the PhD program at Chicago), published an article titled “Cutthroat Competition and the Long Purse” which explored that very same logic.

It gets better.

Lester’s article was published in what Stoller portrays as the main vehicle for Director’s malign influence: the Journal of Law and Economics. Better yet, Telser thanks Director for his input. Better yet: Telser’s article was published in an issue honoring Director, on the occasion of his retirement from Chicago and editorship of the JLE.

Of course, you would never know this, if you read Stoller. Stoller also fails to mention that Sam Peltzman told an anecdote regarding Director and predatory pricing in a JLE article on “Aaron Director’s Influence on Antitrust Policy,” published as a sort of obituary at the time of Director’s death in 2004. In Sam’s telling, Director, in his typical Socratic style, led his students through an analysis of predatory pricing . . . in which he concluded that the defendant in a predatory pricing case “most likely was guilty as charged.”

It is particularly astounding that Stoller should overlook this anecdote, given that it was republished on the very same Pro-Market website. So it’s not like Stoller had to, I dunno, get onto JStor and do some real research on whom he was supposedly analyzing.

Stoller also fails to acknowledge that Director’s alleged ability to mesmerize did not even extend to nearby offices at the University of Chicago Law School: Richard Posner, for example, acknowledged that predation could occur.

Stoller also evidently has no clue as to how academia works. Provocative articles like McGee’s inevitably spur others to challenge it. And indeed, there have been numerous articles over the years that identify conditions in which predation can work. As it turns out, however, the conditions are much more fragile than Stoller lets on.

In sum, Stoller’s post on Director is an appalling piece of work. It fails to join Director’s actual work, and relies on vicious ad hominem to discredit the work which he does not like by attempting to discredit the motives of the person.

I don’t really give a damn about Matt Stoller. What I do find especially disgusting is that the Stigler Center at the Booth School of Business would lend its imprimatur to a piece that violates the fundamental norms and ethics of scholarship. If Pro-Market wanted to provide a critical view of Director, the Chicago School of antitrust has a lot of serious critics who could analyze his work and the work that he inspired. Instead, Pro-Market provides a platform for an intellectually disreputable attack on alleged motives, and one that provides no substantial evidence for its central claim, and which begs so many questions as to be self-refuting.

Appalling, and an affront to the long tradition of economics and law at Chicago.

The most contentious battle in American securities markets right now is being waged over exchange pricing of data, in particular over proprietary order book feeds. The battle pits the exchanges against market users (e.g., HFT firms, institutional traders) with the latter claiming that the prices charged by the former border on the extortionate.

The critics actually have a very good point. The economics of the situation imply that the prices the competing exchanges charge are ABOVE the price a monopoly would charge.

No. Really.

So how could competing firms charge a supra-monopoly, let alone supra-competitive, price? The answer to this question is something pointed out by the first true mathematical economist, Augustin Cournot, in his Principes Mathematique, published in 1838. In that book, Cournot laid out “the problem of complements.” Cournot showed that imperfectly competitive firms overprice complementary goods. (Cournot’s example involved zinc and copper in the production of brass. They are complements used in fixed proportion.)

The basic issue is that when goods are complements, if firm A raises its price firm B that produces a complement to A’s good cannot steal sales from A by cutting its price (as would be the case of A’s and B’s goods were substitutes). This reduces the incentive to cut price, and actually provides an incentive to increase prices in order to get a bigger piece of the surplus that is generated when the consumer buys both goods.

This situation fits the stock market case perfectly. Execution services on US exchanges (e.g., NYSE, BATS) are substitutes, but data services are complements.

Consider an HFT firm. One source of profits for this firm is to exploit price discrepancies across exchanges. This requires having near immediate and simultaneous access to prices across all exchanges. Or consider a buyside firm that is trying to minimize execution costs by a clever order routing strategy. Optimizing the allocation of orders across exchanges requires knowing the order book on all the exchanges.

In other words, there are many market participants who have to collect the entire set (of exchange data). This makes the data provided by competing exchanges complements, which by the Cournot logic, forces prices above the competitive level, and indeed, above the monopoly level.

Furthermore, the problem becomes worse, the larger number of exchanges. This is a situation in which lower concentration leads to less competitive outcomes. (Robin Hansen made a similar point recently.)

This is yet another example of the only law that is never repealed: the law of unintended consequences. The intent of RegNMS was to increase competition in the execution of stock trades, and it has done a marvelous job of that. However, the unintended effect of this “fragmentation” (i.e., the increase in the number of execution venues and decline in concentration across exchanges) has been to create and exacerbate a complements problem in data.

A couple of final points. Perhaps one could make a second-best argument here: low execution fees and high data fees may be a good way of covering the fixed costs of operating exchanges (a la Ramsey pricing). Perhaps, but unproven.

What is the right regulatory response? Not clear. I addressed similar conundrums in my 2002 Market Macrostructure article. Natural monopoly-style/pricing regulation could mitigate the overpricing problem, but entails its own costs (e.g., undermining incentives to innovate). The issue is particularly challenging here because efficiency-enhancing competition on one dimension (execution) leads to inefficient problems-of-complements competition on another (data).

As I argued in Market Macrostructure, it really comes down to an issue of property rights. Should exchanges have exclusive ownership of their data? Should this ownership be attenuated in some way, such as limitation on prices, or a required pooling of data that would be sold by a monopolist, with revenues shared by the exchanges? Here is a case where a monopoly would actually improve outcomes.

Maybe that is the way to split the baby, politically. Exchanges would get rents, but efficiency would be improved. Not a first-best solution, but maybe a second best one, and one that could represent a Coasean bargain between exchanges and their customers. And perhaps the regulator–the SEC–could help facilitate and coordinate that deal.