Tag Archives: review

How can financial services serve?

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A 2010 book, Portfolios of the Poor, made a big impression on me because the researchers had taken great care to ask poor people (in Bangladesh, India and South Africa) in great detail how they managed their money and what their financial needs were. The answer was different from the enthusiasm at the time for micro-credit schemes. It turned out people with not much income need secure vehicles for saving and transactions; borrowing was a low priority, and few people will become entrepreneurs, micro or otherwise.

Jonathan Morduch, one of that team (with Daryl Collins), has now co-authored (with Rachel Schneider) a book taking a similar, detailed look at the finances of American families. They investigated (using the same method of detailed diary-keeping and interviews over an extended period) families in several parts of the country who ranged from single mothers living in poverty to nuclear families a notch or two above median income for their area. One could call them the ‘left behinds’. The results, written up in The Financial Diaries: how American families cope in a world of uncertainty, is just as illuminating.

The headline is that the volatility of income is a bigger problem for most of those interviewed than their level of income. This volatility is closely linked to the way the labour market in the US has moved toward less stable conditions, with employers shifting risks steadily onto employees. “Over half of all income volatility was due to changes in income from the same job.” Even the higher income households in the sample experienced significant earnings volatility.

When income is uncertain, or even when it isn’t but is only slightly higher than regular outgoings, then emergency expenses – healthcare above all (this is the US!), but also car repairs when the car is essential for work – mean it is difficult for people to save steadily. The juggling involved in managing their finances, and the fragility of financial security, also occupies so much mental bandwidth (as per Scarcity) that people find it hard to get off the financial treadmill by any long-term planning. Clipping coupons seems a high priority compared with saving up to pay for college, albeit there are some exceptional focused individuals.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising to learn that financial services do not serve most of these households (up to and beyind the median) at all well. Much financial advice is geared at long-term questions like retirement saving, which is an unimaginable luxury for this 50%-plus. Few products a geared at saving for short-term goals – such as saving enough for a deposit to rent a new apartment – and certainly not with a combination of commitment devices to encourage the saving but enough access or control to make the money accessible in a real emergency.

The same bias to the long term financial needs of the well-off colours comment about pay day loans or check cashing services – payday loans have ultra-high APRs but their customers are often looking at per week costs over the short term. Lisa Servon’s The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives, which includes her experience working in a check cashing service, is a great companion volume to The Financial Diaries. (There’s an excellent NPR program about it.)

Servon’s book also includes some descriptions of tech-based financial products aiming to serve low-income customers better, as does this one. None has been a stellar success yet. Morduch and Schneider suggest legal limits on the total amount a lender can recover from a borrower, enabling short term lending to take place without it turning into a permanent, even increasing, debt burden. They write: “By pushing more of the consequences of underwriting decisions on to lenders – in the form of losing their money – they [ie total loan recovery caps] make lenders more cautious and selective in how much and to whom they lend.”

The book underlines how common is the experience of being on the edge financially, citing large-scale surveys to complement their detailed work. The latest US Census showed less than 4% of the population below the poverty line for the whole of 2008-2011, but 90 million (nearly one third) experiencing poverty for two months or more of the three years. In 2011 alone, 8.3% were below the line all year but about a quarter for two or more months.

Both The Financial Diaries and The Unbanking of America are illuminating reads, above all, for paying attention to what people say, rather than just theorising about them. Even before reading the latest rash of stories about the absymal behaviour of the banks, one can only conclude that unbanking will be a good thing as long as entrepreneurs – and the regulators who make or break them – can deliver at long last on the ‘service’ part of financial services.

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Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment

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Expectations matter a great deal in the way the economy evolves. When, how and why did this come about? It must have been linked to the capitalist growth take-off, because why would the future be relevant if nothing much ever changed? Emily Nacol’s An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain links it to the British Enlightenment – specifically to the philosophy of Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Smith. She argues that they presented the future as a territory of risk in order to support their arguments about the political and economic order. What’s more, the book says, there were two sides to this: risk as a source of threat to manage and risk as an opportunity for previously unexploited profits. “When the cautious citizen acts with the future in mind, he transforms his social world in the process, now and in the future,” she writes. Hobbes created the fear, Locke introduced the tools of probabilistic calculation, Hume argues for calculated and prudent risk-taking as a path to profitable opportunities which will pay off in the long term, and Smith analyses how institutional structures can manage and mitigate – or exacerbate – risk, in Nacol’s schema.

The book is quite short but does presuppose familiarity with the four philosophers – my wider reading of their work dates back to the late 1970s and PPE, although I dip in reasonably often, so it was a bit heavy going. Having said that, the key insight about the Enlightenment as the moment when thinking about risk, an orientation toward the future, became important is interesting. Especially at what sometimes feels like a moment of anti-Enlightenment when nostalgia for an imagined (and imaginary) past has overtaken us. Time to re-read Paul Krugman’s brilliant 1991 QJE paper on history versus expectations.

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Financial crises, past, recent and future

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Very late in the day, I’ve finally read Barry Eichengreen’s Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession and the Uses – and Misuses – of History. The subtitle is a concise capsule summary. The book does a neat job weaving between the 1920s/30s and the 2000s, underlining the similarities and the significant differences. There is some nice storytelling as well, particularly in the Great Depression chapters, using colourful figures and their exploits to draw in the reader, starting with the notorious Charles Ponzi but with many others too. In fact, there’s a 20 page Dramatis Personae, so this is no abstract text but a story of actual people doing actual (bad/stupid/short-sighted) things.

Given the number of books already available about both episodes, the added value of this one needs to be in the compare and contrast, and I think it succeeds in this. The common features (apart from human frailty) lie in the dynamics of bubbles, and their roots in periods of stability and optimism; in the global character of financial market reactions and the way decisions that seem either sensible or politically necessary in one country can have immense negative externalities for others; and in the interplay between politics and economics or between democracy and technocracy. Perhaps the most important difference emphasised here is the greater scale and complexity of financial markets now. Even when people are not trying to hide misdeeds, it is not easy to identify dangerous flows or accumulations of risk.

But the book also points to the difference in policy responses: in the Great Depression the answer was more government. Given the way politics has moved, it was not the answer to the Great Financial Crisis. Eichengreen – relatively gently – points to the under-regulation of big banks and other financial institutions in key dimensions, such as the only modestly higher capital ratios and lower leverage; or the failure to reform credit ratings agencies. This gently touch, he argues, reflects the success of the monetary and fiscal policy action to avert another Great Depression: “Thus the very success with which policy makers limited the damage from the worst financial crisis in eighty years means we are likely to see another such crisis in less than eighty years.

Much less, I’d say, given how little has changed.

Anyway, I enjoyed Hall of Mirrors. I think it helps to have read other books on both episodes, as in effect half a book on each of the Great Depression and the Financial Crisis is pretty compressed. A combination of Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance and John Lanchester’s Whoops! would be perfect preparation (the latter was IOU in the US).

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Prospects for the Swedish model

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There’s an interesting new book, Digitalization, Immigration and the Welfare State, by Marten Blix of Sweden’s Research Institute of Industrial Economics. It brings together two deep trends, technology and immigration, in the context of the relatively rigid labour market structures of Sweden and some other European countries. Blix asks, what are the implications for the welfare state, the high tax, high spend social contract? He argues that the combined trends are increasing inequality, and the longstanding social support for redistribution and high taxation is eroding. Sweden has been at the forefront of both trends. It ranks high on measures of digitzation, and has taken in more refugees per capita than most other European countries. It has consequently had one of the biggest increases in income inequality in the OECD (the level of inequality is still relatively low – similar to Canada or Germany).

Ultimately, the book suggests a Swedish model of social democracy can potentially survive, thanks to the country’s high productivity and high initial levels of social capital. Sweden’s public finances are also in better shape than in many other countries. However, it certainly doesn’t look like an easy path. Absorbing the new immigrants will require a focus on enhancing their skills – and also those of the already-resident. One prescription is reducing the rigidities in the labour market and housing market. Another area where greater flexibility will be needed is in accommodating the increase in work – via digital platforms for instance – outside the traditional collective wage bargaining. Some Swedish unions are apparently working to establish employment standards on the digital platforms.

As the book concludes, however, the obstacles to the reinvention of the Swedish model – or any other social contract – are not problems of economic analysis but political obstacles. Economists often talk of the need for ‘structural reform’ when this is code for ‘politically bloody difficult.’ Immigration makes the politics harder, Blix argues: “Sweden is no longer the homogeneous country it used to be and the social contract holding people together is at risk of disintegrating.” All the more dangerous, then, he says to pretend everything is fine and nothing needs to change. The newcomers have to be brought into the fold or the future of the Swedish model looks to be in doubt.

Much of this debate is of course familiar to those of us more familiar with the UK and US economies, as is the kind of political lunge to the populist right or left that accompanies these tech and migration trends. It’s interesting to read about the challenges in the context of a country that has so long been an admired model for the centre left (and even some of the centre right). I accept that it’s essential to try the kind of policy response the book suggests, hard as that is, given the do-nothing alternative. But it’s quite hard to feel optimistic these days. Even Sweden!

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Free innovation

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I polished off Eric von Hippel’s Free Innovation on my Washington trip. It’s an interesting, short book looking at the viability and character of innovation by individuals – alone or co-operating in communities. It is free in two senses: the work involved is not paid; and the innovations – or at least their design – is not charged for, although it may subsequently be commercialised by the inventors or by other businesses. The viability of free innovation has been greatly extended by digital technology and the internet: there is more accessible useful information, it is easier and cheaper to co-ordinate among a group. The diffusion of innovations is also easier, although rarely as extensive as when a commercial business takes them up and markets them. In fact, von Hippel argues that there are some strong complementarities between free innovation and commercial vendors, as the latter can bring the scale economies of production and marketing, while the former can enhance the use case, the complementary know-how, that increase the value of whatever it is.

The book has a little theorising, some survey evidence on the wide scope of free innovation, and plenty of nice examples. It ends with a couple of chapters on how to safeguard the legal rights of free innovation and how the pehnomenon might be encouraged. The scope is what interests me particularly. I had already been thinking about phenomena such as open source software as a voluntary public good, which competes with marketed goods – compare Apache with Microsoft’s server software (as Shane Greenstein and Frank Nagle do here). There is clearly a growing amount of substitution across the production boundary going on.

The surveys reported in this book seem to indicate that millions of people are innovating (5-6% of respondents in the UK and US, Finland and Canada) – but equally, some of the innovations are minor contributors to economic welfare and one cannot imagine them ever having a wide market or competing with marketed equivalents. The question is how to get a handle on the scope and scale of all the open source, public good, innovation.

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