Tag Archives: political economy

Foolish Risks

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Great Britain has decided to let the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei—which by PRC law must cooperate with the PRC government whenever that government requires it—to play a role in Britain’s development and deployment of its 5G telecommunications network.

Great Britain says Huawei role will be limited, but in a computer network, such limits lie somewhere between chimera and pipe dream.

The Brits say that Huawei, and “high risk vendors” generally, would be excluded from the network “core.”

The Brits say they are

taking steps that would allow it “to mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat the range of threats, whether cybercriminals, or state-sponsored attacks.”

And that

high-risk vendors would be subject to a 35% cap on access to even non-sensitive parts of the network.

Thirty-five per cent. That’s a broad penetration of a network’s “non-sensitive parts,” a network’s periphery.

This is foolish.

Mitigating risks is not the same as preventing them. This isn’t a matter of the Internet going down for a bit, and our not being able to post our blog articles or do a Bing search for this or that. It’s not a matter of losing a cable connection so we can’t watch TV for a few minutes or an hour, nor is it a matter of a temporary drop of cell phone access.  This is a matter of national security, and the difference between mitigation and prevention is critical.

It takes only a single opening in a network’s outlying accesses to enable a nefarious entity to insert malware into the network. Once inserted, that malware can proliferate on its own, even penetrate the core, and then that malware is positioned to allow the entity to engage in cybercrime, cyberespionage, cyber-triggered sabotage of other infrastructure.

Even were the core adequately protected, malware in the periphery still can render the core impotent by isolating it from the periphery—much as biological damage can isolate a body’s core, its brain, from the body.

Ultrafast Trading Costs

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British regulators have studied the “tax” imposed on ordinary traders by ultrafast traders. The latter use high speed computers and powerful algorithms to

“latency arbitrage,” in which ultrafast traders seek to react to fresh, market-moving information more quickly than others can.

The latency is the ultrafast traders’ ability to act on slightly out-of-date prices that are inaccessible to the bulk of us traders because we don’t have those fancy computers running those algorithms. The “tax” metaphor is the difference between those (very—a matter of microseconds) slightly dated prices and the prices available to us in more real time.

The “tax” amounts to some $5 billion gained globally by the ultrafast compared to the rest of us. That seems like a large number, but put it in perspective.

The value of the aggregated global stock markets was around $86 trillion in 2019. The “tax” from the ultrafast’s computing/time advantage amounts to a bit under 0.006%.

That’s not to say the artificial arbitrage shouldn’t be addressed, but it does suggest that the urgency isn’t great. We have time figure out how to level this tiny bump in the playing field without moving, for purely noneconomic reasons, to restrict some traders to the advantage of others.

Big Government vs Free Market

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An economist says Apple isn’t paying its fair share of taxes. There is many things about which to criticize Apple, but this isn’t one of them.

Davos lights insist that companies are responsible to and for their employees, their suppliers, and their communities. Indeed. And the way to execute that responsibility is to be responsible first to companies’ owners. That’s what helps companies thrive so they can have, and have more, employees and suppliers—which money rotation funds those local communities.

What is Apple’s “fair share?” This economist declined to say—just that it ought to pay more.

The economist insists, instead,

the first step to being a good corporate citizen is to pay tax….

But how much? There’s that carefully undefined “fair share” bit, again. And: why should a business pay any tax at all? After all, the business might sign the tax payment check, but it’s the business’ customers who pay the tax, in the form of higher prices to cover the tax cost. Again, this is carefully unaddressed.

Instead, the economist and the lights of Davos insist that it’s somehow wrong for businesses to minimizes its costs and that it’s somehow wrong for nations to compete on tax rates in order to draw business investment so their citizens can have jobs and prosper.

This is Big Government ideology.

In a free market environment, though, nations do compete on tax rates for the benefit of their citizens. Businesses do work hard to minimize all costs so as to compete effectively on pricing, which directly benefits their customers and which indirectly benefits their communities from localities up through their nations.

In a free market environment, a good corporate citizen works to compete and so to thrive and so to take care of its employees, its suppliers, and its community.

“An Explanation of Modern Monetary Theory”

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A Tuesday Wall Street Journal Letters to the Editor writer offered one.

[I]nflation is the only reason to limit budget deficits. The national debt is never a valid reason in countries with their own currencies; they can always make payments as they come due and can never be forced to default.

In particular,

The debt can always be paid by creating money.

Here are a couple more thoughts on the matter.

Printing money is, in and of itself, inflationary if production doesn’t rise in a way that substantially keeps pace with the increase in dollars chasing those goods and services. Using printed money to pay a national debt doesn’t cut it. Otherwise, Treasury could simply declare our national debt paid off, deeming the dollars printed.

Alternatively, Treasury could execute that middle step; the money printed to pay the debt still must go somewhere after the debt instruments are retired, it won’t simply disappear into the æther—it’ll enter the economy and inflate prices.

And this claim:

Treasurys are completely marketable. If a wealthy bondholder wants to buy something, she will sell bonds.

To whom will this wealthy bondholder sell the bonds (I’ll elide questions about the per centage of outstanding bonds this “wealthy” class holds)? There must be a buyer. If the idea is that Government will use the money to buy its own debt, we’re back to the above. Failing that, it’d be interesting to see this wealthy person take one of his bonds to his grocery store to buy food. Or use one to pay his cab driver—and tip well or ask for change.

This isn’t a theoretical disagreement, either; we have the example of Zimbabwe, courtesy of another writer in his Letter:

Zimbabwe’s government, which printed so much currency that it became worthless and had to be abandoned in favor of US currency.

This writer is the proud owner of a Zimbabwe Z$100 Trillion (yes, with a “T”) note that he picked up for two bucks, US—and he says he overpaid.

“Credible Military Capabilities”

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The European Union needs some, says Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President.

In order to respond to crises, the EU needs “credible military capabilities,” the leader of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.
The bloc has already “set up the building blocks of a European defense union,” the former German defense minister said in her speech.
“It is complementary to NATO and it is different,” she added. “There is a European way to foreign policy and foreign security policy where hard power is an important tool […] but it is never the only one.”

Well, NSS.

This is much of what President Donald Trump has been saying since he began campaigning for office in 2015. It’s part of his long push (which is beginning to have some success) for NATO’s European member nations to quit freeloading off our treasure and blood and actually honor their NATO commitments with more of their own money and blood.

It’s also a clear indication that those nations, whose prosperity appeared and grew under American protection, can—and have been able to for a long time—do more for NATO than they have been. After all, it will cost much more to develop an additional defense establishment with the building blocks of a European defense union that is complementary to NATO and…is different.”

Von der Leyen says the EU can afford both.