Economics 101: Price Ceiling Causes (Water) Shortages!

Economics 101: Price Ceiling Causes (Water) Shortages!

From the Inquirer: “Consumer demand for water bigger than supply since 2016” (March 13, 2019) [bold mine]

Manila Water Co. Inc. on Tuesday said that the prevailing water shortage was due to the yearly hike in consumer demand despite the fact that its allocation of raw water from Angat Dam had remained the same.

Geodino Carpio, Manila Water chief operating officer, told reporters that while the National Water Resources Board (NWRB) had allowed the company to draw 1.6 billion liters every day — or 1,600 million liters daily (MLD) — from Angat, its customers were now using an average of 1,740 MLD.

 “Demand has been increasing yearly since we started with the concession 21 years ago,” Carpio said, adding: “In 2016,demand surpassed the volume of our daily allocation from Angat.”

He explained that demand from Manila Water customers had gone up by around three percent yearly. In terms of volume, this translated to between 40 MLD and 50 MLD.

La Mesa Dam’s own store of raw water — that which does not come from Angat via tunnels and aqueducts — provides Manila Water a buffer stock, but this amounts to only 50 MLD.

“And even if the NWRB would increase our supply of raw water from Angat, the existing conveyance could transmit only 1,600 MLD,” Carpio said.

Currently, there are three pipes and six aqueducts that transport water from Angat to La Mesa.

If rising demand signified a trend, why has supply not aligned with demand? What happened to the equilibrating role of prices? Has this been representative of a “market failure”?

First, how are water prices set?

From the MWSS:

Pursuant to the Concession Agreement (CA), a Rate Rebasing (RR) is mandatory every five (5) years. RR is a process that determines the level of rates for water and sewerage services that permits the Concessionaires to recover over the life of the concession (until 2037) its operating, capital maintenance and investment expenditures. RR is also a way to provide appropriate incentives to benefit both the Customers and the Concessionaires.

The RR looks into the historical (past 5 years) performance of the Concessionaires against established targets or commitments. It then updates a reasonable projection of all factors for the remaining concession life with a proposed Business Plan detailing the next five years. The Business Plan needs the approval of the MWSS being the principal and eventual owner of all the facilities by the end of the concession. As required in the CA, both Concessionaires submitted their respective Business Plans for 2013-2037 within the deadline of March 31, 2012.

The same applies to provinces, according to the Local Water Utilities Administration:

Water rates are implemented only after they are presented in a public hearing and after review and approval by LWUA

The crux: water rates are DETERMINED by regulators.

Next, with the politicization of water prices, the coordinating and equilibrating role of prices have been impeded or disrupted.

As such, supply has been SLOW to ADJUST to demand changes.

Besides, business plans, submitted to the government, are typically based on the past.  Complexities like abrupt changes in weather, price inflation, and others, which are typically unforeseeable, render such plans unrealistic.

Most importantly, as a basic commodity, water priced below the market rates operates in the interest of the political institutions influenced by the popular rule.

That said, to regulate water, authorities resort to an implicit price ceiling.

From Econoport.org (bold mine)

Price Ceilings are maximum prices set by the government for particular goods and services that they believe are being sold at too high of a price and thus consumers need some help purchasing them. Price ceilings only become a problem when they are set below the market equilibrium price.

When the ceiling is set below the market price, there will be excess demand or a supply shortage. Producers won't produce as much at the lower price, while consumers will demand more because the goods are cheaper.Demand will outstrip supply, so there will be a lot of people who want to buy at this lower price but can't. Still, if the demand curve is relatively elastic, then the net effect to consumer surplus will be positive. Producers are truly harmed, as their surplus is doubly hit with a reduction in the number of firms willing to take that lower price, and those who remain in the market have to take a lower price.

See, imbalances reveals how the politicization of water prices cause shortages!

Economics 101!

Video: Mark Thornton on Real Economic Growth versus Statistical Economic Growth

"Don't be fooled by GDP (3:17)...you've got to be leery of statistics (4:14)"

Cartoon of the Day: Diminishing Marginal Utility

From Graph Jam (hat tip Casey Research)

It’s The Spending, Not Debt Stupid!

In excoriating mainstream media’s miasmatic logic, author and Professor Steven Landsburg eloquently explains why government debt isn’t the problem.

Instead, government spending is.

Writes Professor Landsburg, (bold emphasis mine)

This is economic illiteracy in spades. The fact is that every single dollar of interest we pay on the national debt comes right back to the pockets of American taxpayers. If you don’t understand that, then you’re not thinking clearly about the national debt.

Suppose the government owes $100 and pays $3 a year in interest. The alternative to paying that interest is to raise current taxes by $100 and pay down the debt. If you do that, taxpayers are going to have $100 less in assets, and will therefore earn less interest on their savings. That costs them (roughly) the same $3 a year.

In other words, the damage was done back when the government spent that $100 in the first place. (Of course, if the $100 was spent wisely, the damage might have been worth doing. Or not.) Once that $100 has been spent, the taxpayers are out $3 a year forever regardless of whether the debt is ever paid off.

That’s why I say that the government’s interest payments come right back to the pockets of American taxpayers. The government pays $3 a year as an alternative to taxing you $100 and paying down the debt. The choice to do that puts an extra $100 in your savings account, which earns you $3 a year. There’s the $3 a year coming right back to you. Notice that it comes back to you regardless of whether the government makes its interest payments to Americans, Chinese or Martians. All of the benefits come back to American taxpayers.

Of course, you might choose not to save that $100 the national debt is saving you. That’s fine. Then presumably you’re spending it on something that you value more than an interest flow of $3 a year. Congratulations. You’re a winner.

Or you might grumble that you have no savings vehicle that will pay you the same rate as the government’s paying on its debt. That’s where you’re wrong. You can save by buying government bonds. That will get you exactly the same rate the government’s paying on its debt.

Bottom line

Again Professor Landsburg,

If the government borrows an extra $10 trillion dollars tomorrow in order to cut taxes by $10 trillion, it will have to make, say, an extra $300 billion a year in interest payments (for which we are collectively responsible) and at the same time, we’ll collectively earn an extra $300 billion on our savings portfolios. No favor to the taxpayers, but no harm done either.

It’s important to understand this in order not to be bamboozled by tricksters who try to misdirect every conversation about government spending into a conversation about government debt. It’s spending, not debt, that can impoverish us, and that’s what we should be talking about.

This serves as another vivid example of how the mainstream (deliberately or unwittingly) misreads the effects as the cause, and of ignoring the alternative paths or choices of action (here taxes versus borrowing). For the latter, it has been a predilection for most to focus on the tangible (debt) and dismiss the intangible (tax). Unless you are aware of it, this part of our mental heuristics.

Applied to financial market analysis, this is a fundamental reason why many celebrity gurus got it so bad—most of them misread debt as the primary driver of people’s action via the “aggregate demand” channel. They ignored or underrated money's non-neutral role and the impact of globalization.

Of course, the Landsburg lecture on borrowing and taxation is universally applicable, which means such tradeoff applies to the Philippine government as well.

To paraphrase the famous US Bill Clinton quote, It’s the spending, not the debt stupid!

Should Economics Be Left To The Economists? Is Economics Value Neutral?

At a recent assembly, I counselled a promising and youthful colleague, who had been rebuffed in trying to introduce classical liberalism to the economics departments of one of the elite schools in the Philippines, that since we eat, drink and sleep economics—where everyone engage in making and acting upon choices around the world of scarcity—that economics must not be left to the economists.

My point is since these elite schools have benefited from the current arrangement, there would be no incentive to assimilate changes that would only risk undermining their stature.

And I further added that politics is essentially economics, where politics signify no less than economics in morality’s clothing. Morality here, I am speaking of depends on whose sense of morality gets to be argued and or implemented; is it the minority, the majority, the despot, the King?

Thus, since economics is ubiquitous, it must be learned by everyone.

And for those in the know, it would be our civic duty to teach economics even in the non-traditional sense in our non-conventional way. In warfare, this is known guerrilla tactics.

As Ludwig von Mises once said,

Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.

Nevertheless the main aspect that differentiates the mainstream and classical liberalism would be the former’s emphasis on mathematical or empirical formalism vis-à-vis the latter whose analysis are based on logical deductions via praxelogical axioms or methodological individualism.

For instance, the mainstream would argue that their brand of math and statistical models based economics can be value neutral or value free when applied scientifically.

But this is would only be partly true because:

1. We are dealing with human action where every action involves subjective value preferences and ethical judgments.

As Murray N. Rothbard wrote, (bold emphasis mine)

I am not taking the position, now fashionable in many quarters, that there is no such thing as a value-free economics, that all economic analysis is inextricably shot through with value assumptions. On the contrary, I believe that the main body of economic analysis is scientific and value-free; what I am saying is that any time that economists impinge on political or policy conclusions, value-judgments have entered into their discussion. My conclusion, then, is that economists must either make their value judgments explicit and defend them with a coherent ethical system, or strictly refrain from entering, directly, or indirectly into the public policy realm.

In short, it would be inescapable for economists to fall for the value trap once they incorporate analysis based on the socio-political spectrum.

For instance, opportunity costs may not all be quantified in monetary terms as there would psychic and disutility costs. Thus, value free or value neutral can hardly be realizable except under classroom environment.

2. Economics is not the same as natural science.

Economics, as Jörg Guido Hülsmann wrote in MISES: The Last Knight of Liberalism, is a science with clear political implications, not a mere intellectual exercise.

Bottom line: Economics is human action.

The Road To Inflation

``The incorrigible inflationists will cry out against alleged deflation and will advertise again their patent medicine, inflation, rebaptising it re-deflation. What generates the evils is the expansionist policy. Its termination only makes the evils visible. This termination must at any rate come sooner or later, and the later it comes, the more severe are the damages which the artificial boom has caused. As things are now, after a long period of artificially low interest rates, the question is not how to avoid the hardships of the process of recovery altogether, but how to reduce them to a minimum. If one does not terminate the expansionist policy in time by a return to balanced budgets, by abstaining from government borrowing from the commercial banks and by letting the market determine the height of interest rates, one chooses the German way of 1923.”-Ludwig von Mises

As expected, like the dogs in Pavlov’s experiment, US markets passionately cheered on the assurances provided by the US Federal Reserve to provide support to her economy even by possibly resorting to unconventional means or by taking the nuclear option to the table.

In a speech last Friday, Chairman Ben Bernanke[1] said that the Federal Reserve ``is prepared to provide additional monetary accommodation through unconventional measures if it proves necessary, especially if the outlook were to deteriorate significantly”. (emphasis added)

US markets, of late, has been reeling from successive weekly losses giving rise to intensifying anxieties over a re-emergence of another recession or what many calls as “double dip recession”.

And for the mainstream, the prospect of another bout of ‘deflation’ has provided them with the ammunition to demand for more intervention from her government.

Unfortunately, as we have been repeatedly saying, inflationism is simply unsustainable. Like narcotics, it will always have soothing effects that are ephemeral in nature, but whose repercussions would always be nasty, adverse and baneful that would result to capital consumption or a lowered standard of living emanating from the unravelling of malinvestments or the misdirection of resources and on relative overconsumption. And at worst, persistent efforts to inflate could lead to a breakdown of the monetary system (hyperinflation). The 2007 US mortgage crisis had been a lucid example of the boom bust cycles from inflationism yet the public refuses to learn.

And since the time preferences of the masses are mostly directed towards the short term, the elixir of inflationism always sells. The illusion of free lunch policies is just too beguiling to reject.

As Ludwig von Mises once wrote[2], ``The favour of the masses and of the writers and politicians eager for applause goes to inflation.”

And such dynamics is exactly how the present environment operates.

Economic Hypochondria

Figure 1: Danske Bank[3]: Worries Are Intensifying

And as we previously noted[4],

For the mainstream, anything that goes down is DEFLATION. There never seems to be within the context of their vocabulary the terms as moderation, slowdown and reprieve. Everything has got to go like Superman, up up up and away!

The weakening of some economic indicators such as the manufacturing index has led many to envision the same scenario as in 2008 (see figure 1). But this seems more like an economic hypochondria, where the apparent infirmities today seems more like a manifestation of the countercyclical or reactive forces following a V-shape spike in 2009 (right window). The point is NO trend goes in a straight line.

And also this seems to be an extension of the Posttraumatic Stress Distorder (PTSD) which we accurately exposed on the mainstream’s false attribution on the crisis as being prompted by the lack of aggregate demand in 2009[5].

The follies from the same cognitive biases have reared their ugly heads, or perhaps have merely been used to justify government’s actions.

The main mistake of the mainstream is to ignore the interplay of relationships, in terms of stimulus-response action-reaction, between markets or the economy on the one hand and the policy actions from the government on the other.

The mainstream believes that ALL human actions are uniform and consequently discern linearly from such premises. They disregard the diversity of human actions which encapsulates the markets/economy and the political leadership, as well as the bureaucracy which incidentally government is basically run by human beings too. The difference lies in the incentives which drive their respective actions.

Inflationism To Protect The Banking Cartel and Gold’s Status

True, the US housing sector reveals renewed feebleness (left window). But this again is a manifestation of the failure of inflationism or the waning temporal positive effects, where the US government has tried to keep prices from reflecting the natural ‘market’ levels by using manifold interventions such as the manipulation or artificial suppression of the interest rates, quantitative easing (or printing of money), the tweaking of the accounting standards (Financial Standards Accounting Board reversed itself on FAS 157[6]), and the substantial exposure of GSE (Government Sponsored Enterprises) as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which currently accounts for $5.7 trillion of the $11 trillion market and provides 75% of the funds in the mortgage market[7].

In my view, whereas the official declaration (propaganda) has always been about the economy (social good), this conceals the true intent, which is to provide support and redistribute taxpayers resources to the banking cartel, whose balance sheets have been stuffed with toxic assets and thus the seeming stagnation in credit conditions.

True, the Federal Reserve has absorbed considerable part of questionable assets via the massive expansion of her balance sheets, but without the sustained redistribution from the US taxpayers to the cartel via more inflationism, this would extrapolate to the collapse of the fractional reserve banking system. Hence, the underlying economic moderation in the economy is sold to the public as requiring more inflationism.

As Murray N. Rothbard wrote[8],

It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts

And the market seems to be validating such an outlook (see Figure 2)

Figure 2: Deflation? Recession? Not Quite (from stockcharts.com)

First of all, as said above we don’t believe that the US is anywhere near a recession. The gold market seems to be saying so.

We don’t believe gold is a deflation hedge. The recession of 2008 clearly indicates this phenomenon as gold’s prices materially fell along with the bear market in the S&P 500 and the strength in the US dollar or the obverse weakness of the Euro (green circles).

So gold does not elude the forces of recession, much more the forces of deflation as signified by the collapse of prices of gold along with all the other markets as the effect of the Lehman bankruptcy rippled in October of 2008.

And those making a comparison of gold’s performance during the depression days of the 1930s have only been looking at patterns without noting of the differences in the underlying conditions.

Gold during those days had been part of the monetary system. It was a gold standard then until its temporary suspension following the enactment of the Gold Reserve Act of 1933[9]. Today gold is only part of the assets of central bank reserves. It is only now where gold has seen increasing recognition as ‘store of value’ among global central bankers as gold prices continue with its winning streak[10]. So in accordance to the reflexivity theory, prices changes have been influencing the fundamental factors surrounding gold.

And also today, we have a fiat money standard backed by nothing but empty promises of government to settle.

The Function of Market Prices

Second, those “tunnelling” or obsessively fixated at the treasury markets who scream “deflation” have been misinterpreting markets.

The treasury markets have been the one of key targets of interventionism. The other way to say it is that the prices of US treasury do NOT reflect activities of free markets in relative terms as compared with gold (main window), the Euro (XEU) and the S&P 500. This means prices represent distorted or highly skewed or artificial information.

This seems apparent with indications that small or retail investors have been fleeing the US stock markets and have been gravitating into the bond markets[11]. Yet these are likely symptoms equivalent to the Pied Piper of Hamelin[12] leading the rats to their perdition as they interpret erroneously current price signals to represent reality.

We are reminded of the unwisdom of the crowds[13] which we recently wrote about, and would quote anew Gustave Le Bon who wrote[14] ``The Masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusion is always their victim.”

The crowd has been seduced by the siren song of government propaganda called “deflation”.

Remember prices serve not only as information to account for the relative balance of demand and supply, prices are the most essential tool for economic calculation.

According to Gerard Jackson[15],

``Without market prices it is impossible to engage in economic calculation and thus have a rational allocation of resources. Now the market is a coordinating process that assembles fragments of continuously changing information from millions of people; information that can only be known to them personally and expressed as preferences. The market transforms these preferences into prices which then act as signals to producers and consumers. It is this process that enables consumers to achieve the best possible outcome. If a socialist had invented the market it would have been hailed as one of man's greatest achievements. At any time there is always a configuration of prices determined by market data each price is closely interrelated with the others. No price is independent or exists in isolation. It therefore follows that to interfere with one price means interfering with others. Another fact the significance of which ardent price controllers and their supporters cannot seem to grasp. (bold emphasis mine)

Importantly, prices represent property rights which allows for voluntary exchanges between parties to happen that leads to social cooperation.

Bettina Bien Greaves says it best[16],

``Without private property, there would be no private owners bidding for goods and services, and no exchanges among real owners. Without private owners, each guided by the desire for profits and the fear of losses, there would be no market prices to indicate what people wanted and how much they were willing to pay for it. Without market prices, there would be no competition and no profit-and-loss system. And without a profit-and-loss system, there would be no network of interrelated, consumer-directed, independent producers. Without private property, competition, market prices, and a profit-and-loss system, the planners would not know what to produce, how much to produce, or how to produce it.” (emphasis added)

Thus, marginal utility (the cardinal order of want satisfaction or the scale of values), time preferences, rationing, coordination, the dynamic process of spontaneous order in the marketplace and property rights are all jeopardized when government undertakes interventionism or inflationism.

At worst, interventionism represents an assault on private property, which consequently means an attack against civil liberty.

In addition, it is important to recognize that ALL bubbles (boom-bust) cycles have been engendered by the illusion of perpetually rising prices which mainly accounts for the massive systemic distortions built from a variation mix of interventionism channelled via interest rates or monetary policies, tax policies, administrative and legislative policies all of which may combine to encourage irrational behaviour fuelled by credit expansion.

Figure 3: St. Louis Fed: Loan Conditions of US Commercial Banks

Another, I’d be careful to listen to pay heed to experts who claim that the US credit system remains totally dysfunctional (see figure 3).

At this time when the mainstream has been audibly shouting “deflation!”, bank credit of all commercial banks (upper window) seems to be ramping up.

Moreover, while commercial and industrial loans remain depressed, on an annual rate of change basis, we seem to be seeing a bottoming phase (middle window). To add, consumer loans at all commercial banks remain buoyant (lower window).

So in my view, industrial loans still remains problematic or has been the laggard, but may have already bottomed out which could likely see some improvement over the coming months.

Now if all these credit activities advances as I had long expected them to, mainly as a function of the belated effects of the yield curve[17], all the monster excess reserves held by the commercial banks at the Federal Reserve could simply turn into massive inflation. And this would be the rude awakening for the mainstream.

Therefore, deflation, for me, is no more than political propaganda, made by the major beneficiaries—the government and their clique of institutional and academic “experts”, in order to justify inflationism or extend more government control over our lives.

It would be foolish for people to simply read through economics without comprehending the indirect implications of the actions by the incumbent political leaders.

---

[1] Bernanke, Ben The Economic Outlook and Monetary Policy, Speech Given At the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Symposium, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 27, 2010

[2] Mises, Ludwig von The Import of the Money Relation, Human Action Chapter 17 Section 10

[3] Danske Bank, Weekly Focus, August 27, 2010

[4] See Why Deflationists Are Most Likely Wrong Again, August 15, 2010

[5] See What Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Have To Do With Today’s Financial Crisis, February 1, 2009

[6] North, Gary Translation of Bernanke's Jackson Hole Speech, marketoracle.co.uk August 28, 2010

[7] Laing, Jonathan What's Ahead for Fannie and Fred? Barron’s online, August 28, 2010

[8] Rothbard, Murray N. Mystery of Banking p. 97

[9] Wikipedia.org History of the United States dollar

[10] See Is Gold In A Bubble? November 22, 2009

[11] See US Markets: What Small Investors Fleeing Stocks Means, August 23, 2010

[12] Wikipedia.org Pied Piper of Hamelin

[13] See The UNwisdom Of The Crowds, August 15, 2010

[14] Le Bon, Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd The Study of the Popular Mind, p.64 McMaster University

[15] Jackson, Gerard Are price controls on the way? Brookesnews.com December 29, 2008

[16] Greaves, Bettina Bien A Prophet Without Honor in His Own Land, Mises.org

[17] See Influences Of The Yield Curve On The Equity And Commodity Markets, March 22, 2010

9 Principles of Economics

At the Mises Blog, Art Carden lays out the 9 foundations of economics:

1. People Act.

2. Every Action Has a Cost.

3. People Respond to Incentives.

4. People make decisions at the margin.

5. Trade makes people better off.

6. People are Rational.

7. Using markets is costly, but using government can be costlier still.

8. Profits tell businesses that they are helping others, while losses tell businesses that they are wasting resources.

9. We shouldn’t ignore the long-term and unintended consequences of policies and actions.

Read Mr. Carden's explanations here.