What if we in writing had to authorize phone companies to listen to our calls, in order to have access to phones?

Brooke Masters writes: “when I link our Amazon Echo speaker to my son’s Spotify account, I have no idea whether I am violating one of the thousands of terms and conditions he agreed to with his account. Furthermore, does that act give Amazon the right to send him advertisements based on the songs we play?” “Take ownership of the sharing economy” December 29.

She is absolutely right. The rights we seem to have to give up in order to gain access to social media and alike, though defined in small letters in thousands of unreadable pages, is one of the most undefined issues of our time.

Some questions:

Should the marginal cost for social media owners to access, and waste, so much of our limited attention span, be zero?

Should we be able to copyright our own preferences so that we at least can have something to negotiate with?

How much can we allow being distracted during working hours before our employer has the right to deduct our salaries paid?

How will such working hours distractions be accounted for in employment statistics?

How is all this free or very cheap consumption paid by used attention spans be accounted for, for instance in GNP figures?

Should social media owners be allowed to impose their own rules or should that not be subject to some kind of a special arbitration panel?

How our global differences be managed? Does a government that interferes with its citizens’ rights of access to social media have access to other web sites of other nations?

@PerKurowski

High house prices, besides a function of low interest rates, is a function of senseless bank regulatory favoritism

Sir, You write: “With or without a price crash, [resulting from interest rates rising] thinking about real estate must change… A house is not, after all, a productive asset. It is a shelter.”, “When property becomes a roof and a floor again”, July 15.

With Basel II regulators allowed banks, when financing residential houses, to multiply their capital with 35.7 times the net risk adjusted margin, in order to obtain their return on equity. When lending to an unrated SME or entrepreneur, those who could help create new jobs, banks were only allowed to multiply that same margin 12.5 times.

The only reason for that senseless distortion was and is that regulators, as did and do the banks, considered financing houses something much safer than financing some risky enterprises. 

Sir, compared to the case in which such regulatory differences did not exist, what gets much more credit than it should, and what much less? Or are you among those naïve enough to believe bankers have a responsibility, for the good of society, to overlook such skewed incentive structure?

Extrapolates that, and the logical result is the future, we would all end up sitting in ample homey shelters, but with no jobs to be able to pay mortgages, utilities or food.

Sir, such is the short-termism of regulators you have cared nothing about to understand and denounce. On the contrary, you have dedicated yourself to silence my warnings.

PS. By the way if an AAA rating was present, like in the AAA rated securities backed with mortgages to the subprime sector, banks could multiply that margin by 62.5.

PS. Where do you think fiscal sustainability is heading if house prices crash and much property tax revenues vanishes?

@PerKurowski

How much of the “productivity” of robots is derived from the fact these are not burdened by as much taxes as humans?

Sir, you write: “A direct tax on robots is not the answer… It makes no sense to penalise technological innovation that raises productivity and creates wealth. Indeed, any rich country that makes automation too expensive risks driving its manufacturers away to lower wage jurisdictions”, “Robot tax, odd as it sounds, has some logic”, February 21.

Indeed, but why does it not work for you the other way around? I mean in that sense human workers are also “penalized” in many ways, like with payroll taxes, and jobs driven away to lower wage jurisdictions.

So, in order to more efficiently allocate labor/capital resources, robots and similar automation should also generate payroll taxes.

You also hold “the bigger question is how policymakers can use the tax system to ensure that growth is more evenly shared”. And there I have my doubts. If you are going to tax robots only to increase the franchise value of the redistribution profiteers, I am not with you at all.

I much prefer all those revenues to become part of the funding of the Universal Basic Income that is needed, in order to be able to better face that structural unemployment to which I referred to, in 2012, with my “We need worthy and decent unemployments”.

PS. Anyone searching on this issue for “robots” on my TeaWithFT blog should be able to determine, just like in the case of “risk weighted” capital requirements for banks, that I have de facto been censored by the Financial Times. Do you feel proud about that Sir?

@PerKurowski

FT, you have good reporters; send them to the Whitehouse to pose Trump some constructive questions on protectionism.

Sir, you write: “Forcing industrial output to return to the US is likely to create work for US-based robots rather than workers” “Take the US president’s protectionism seriously” January 25.

Precisely, that is what I have tweeted for some time now, and on which I have written some letters that you have steadfastly decided to ignore, like those on the subprime banking regulations, without thinking of it as any type of censoring, or without “without favour”.

But, without resorting to qualifying Trump’s protectionism as “profoundly retrograde” which means so little, which sounds so besserwisser, and which can only insult those who are then implied of having voted for a “retrograde”, why don’t you use your voice to send a journalist to Washington to ask of the Whitehouse, directly, some constructive questions?

For instance: “With current and future actions taken against foreign suppliers, in order to make America great again, what ratio of new employments of humans to robots do you foresee? How many robots have substituted for humans in jobs in USA during 2106?

And, if there’s a chance and a will, dare ask: Why does the Whitehouse think that trade protectionism is worse than that financial protectionism that is imbedded in the current risk weighted capital requirements for banks?

@PerKurowski

FT’s future history exam draft, leaves out questions that could question some who are not to be questioned now

Sir, Gideon Rachman tries to imagine the questions future historians will ask about today’s political events drafts a history exam for students graduating in 2066, “An exam paper from the future” September 6 

I can certainly imagine a couple of other interesting questions, the problem though is that including these, would question some who are currently active and would not like to be questioned, like perhaps the exam-drafter himself

For instance:

How come regulators, with risk weighted capital requirements, decided without any empirical analysis, that what is perceived as risky is riskier for the banking system than what is perceived as safe?

How come regulators, by allowing banks to leverage equity differently with different assets, did not understand they would be distorting the allocation of bank credit to the real economy?

How come leading financial newspapers, and its journalists, mostly ignored the thousand of letters sent to them by a reader and that were related to those two previous questions?

@PerKurowski ©

Yes! McKinsey, among others, because of the robotization of our economies, we do need "decent and worthy unemployments"

Sir, Martin Ford of writes that the impact of robotization “portends a social, economic and political disruption for which we are completely unprepared. Widespread unemployment (or even underemployment) has clear potential to tear society apart. It also carries substantial economic risks: in a world with far too few jobs, “who will have the income and confidence to purchase the products and services produced by the economy?” Where will demand come from?” “We are completely unprepared for the robot revolution” May 3.

That is precisely why in 2012 in an Op-Ed I wrote: “We need decent and worthy unemployments”. Sir, I have written several letters on you to this subject but, since you decided to censor me as effectively as the Maduro government of Venezuela has censored me, you ignored these.

And Ford also asks: “who will have the income and confidence to purchase the products and services produced by the economy?” Where will demand come from?”

On this I have also written several letters to you indicating that a Universal Basic Income, might be one way to resolve this, efficiently, while keeping the redistribution profiteers at bay.

Lucy Kellaway is my large glass of wine that keeps me suscribing to FT and writing letters to its (quite dumb) editor

Though that would clearly be highly unethical journalistic behavior, it is clear that someone somehow must have issued a strong, very strong, recommendation to ignore my letters to the Financial Times.

And obviously that should have me raving mad and cancelling my suscription to FT.

But it is when I read something so great like Lucy Kellaway’s

“The reply consisted of one word: Noted. This was the perfect passive aggressive response. It was just about polite enough for me to have no legitimate grounds for complaint. It shut down the discussion, and left me with only one sensible course of action — to pour myself a large glass of wine and see”

... that all is forgotten. That it is just the kind of my large glass of wine that keeps me suscribing to FT... and keeps me writing letters to You Dear Editor.

With my very best regards

Per Kurowski

PS. I sure hope and pray this will not create any trouble for Lucy Kellaway. Sir, I swear she’s innocent!

@PerKurowski ©

With capital buffers thin, European Banks can’t handle the higher capital requirements for small business lending.

Sir, I refer to Lex’s note on the lack demand for ECB’s TLTRO funds, “Eurozone banks: horsing around” December 12.

It holds: “You can lead a horse to water. You can put water in a tall glass, add ice, a wedge of lemon and a cute little paper umbrella. You can bring the bendy straw right up to the horse’s lips. But if the horse is not thirsty, it will not drink.”… And so “Reluctance to take cheap money gives credence to the bank’s claims that low business lending is down to a lack of demand”.

BUT, “An alternative explanation, advanced by RBS, is that the low take up highlights the bank’s lack of capital. With capital buffers thin they do not want the risk of small business lending”.

CLOSE, but not really so. The truth is that “with capital buffers thin” they cannot handle those much higher capital requirements that comes associated with the supposedly risky “small business lending”.

How many times have I explained to FT over the last few years that the current risk-weighted capital requirements for banks impede the banks to efficiently allocate bank credit? Hundreds!

PS. In my homeland, Venezuela, after 15 years of being a columnist in its most important daily newspaper, I was among the four first to be expelled without thanks, when government agents purchased that paper. That’s how it is, in a country where the government receives directly 97 percent of all the nations exports.

But how does it work in Britain? Can an editor or some other influential person, order those working in a paper, for instance in FT, to ignore the arguments of someone… for whatever reason?

FT, Sir I shiver at the thought of what you would think to be “not-light-touch” bank regulations.

Sir, I refer to your “Lloyds and lessons from past scandals” July 30.

Sir we have bank regulators who told the bank: “Here you have ultra low capital requirements for whatever is perceived ex ante as absolutely safe, so that you can make ultra high returns on your equity financing that, and so that you stay away from financing those risky SMEs and entrepreneurs, even though these need and could do the most good with bank credit”.

In other words… the mother of all capital controls.

And in “Lloyds and lessons from past scandals”, July 30, you refer to this as “the ‘light touch’ regulation that characterized the pre-crunch period”? I shiver at the thought of what you would call firm handed regulations.

PS. I was recently censored, in Venezuela. But you know Sir, that is not the first time… so thanks for the preparation :-)

When silencing my criticism of the distorting risk-weighted bank capital requirements, who were the Financial Times favouring?

Sir, Bilal Khan correctly explains in his letter some of the sad consequences of risk-weighted capital requirements, “Bank's reluctance on private lending is rational” June 11.

And Khan writes “We must ask ourselves why we continue with a regulatory system that failed to ensure any semblance of stability during the financial crisis… and now renders unorthodox monetary efforts to stimulate growth largely ineffective”

Well if Mr. Kahn would enter my blog TeaWithFT and review the several hundreds of letters that over many years I have sent the Financial Times on precisely this issue, he would have to conclude that one of the reasons we are beginning to hear about this problem only now in May-June 2014, is that the Financial Times decided to silence my voice of protest in order to favour… I do not who?

Just think of all the hundred thousands of bank loans that over this period could have been given to medium and small businesses, to entrepreneurs and start-ups, if only FT had helped me to argue on its pages about how immoral and outright stupid it is to distort the allocation of bank credit by discriminating against those whose access to bank credit is already sufficiently difficult because of being perceived as “risky”… and that even though no bank crisis ever has resulted from too much bank exposure to what was ex ante correctly or incorrectly perceived as being risky.

PS. I am sure the censuring treatment given to me must have made many of FT’s journalists quite uncomfortable.

FT, how can you learn if you do not want to listen?

Sir, in your editorial “US spring fails to spread to Europe” May 4, if it could really be called a “spring”, you write “fixing the banks to help the recovery is the lesson Britain and the eurozone must learn from the US.”

The real difference between the US banks and your banks is that the former never fully implemented Basel II and are therefore much less exposed to the distortions the capital requirements for banks based on perceived risks already cleared for elsewhere cause.

But since that is precisely what I have written you more than a thousand lettersabout, but that you have preferred to ignore, I must then ask… how are you suppose to learn if you are not even willing to listen?

Frankly... who has such silencing powers in the Financial Times?

Is John Gapper of the Financial Times now censored? If so I urge him to rebel, “without fear”

Sir, John Gapper writes “banks do not have the capital to spare but institutional investors and some wealthy countries do”, but that “such investors are not risking money on entrepreneurs”, and so “the bulk of current dealmaking has little or nothing to do with the real economy”, “Money, money everywhere – except the real economy”, February 9.

Obviously, in a world with very scarce bank capital, the result of banks having been allowed to hold very little capital against what was erroneously perceived as absolutely not risky, whatever lending which requires the banks to hold more capital, like to the “risky” the real economy, will be the most affected. As a result, more than lack of capital, it is bank regulations that are keeping banks out of the real economy.

And this can become much worse if the loony regulators, with their Basel III, are now allowed to also impose liquidity requirements on banks based on preferring “The Infallible” and avoiding “The Risky”.

What I cannot understand is how John Gapper, who must very well know of this, can write his article without even mentioning this fact of overriding importance. Might he be one way or another censored by someone in FT? If so I urge him to rebel, "without fear"

Like China, the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision censors the free speech of the market.

Sir, I agree with John Gapper’s “Censorship is making China look ridiculous” January 10.

But in that respect, I also need to remind you again, for the umpteenth time, that the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision also carries out a censorship, by means of their decree Basel II, which is equally or even more ridiculous, and, for the world at large, especially for the Western world, much more dangerous than China’s.

Basel´s censorship is clearly more subtle than China´s. Still, it includes giving to some officially designated agents, the credit rating agencies, special prerogatives by which they can influence the market, like allowing for sublime small capital requirements for bank when they engage “The Infallible”, while punishing, severely, with immensely larger capital requirements, those banks that dare lend to “The Risky”, those not favored by the regulatory establishment.

And if in China the consequences of their censorship are still to be seen, what Basel’s has caused already lies before our eyes: Preposterously large and dangerous exposures to what was ex-ante perceived as absolutely safe, and too small exposures to what is perceived as more risky, like loans to small and medium businesses and entrepreneurs.

And this Basel censorship has also our financial authorities flying blind, since they have no idea about what the real market rate for the sovereign debts would be in its absence.

And yet this Basel censorship is for all practical purposes ignored; which has led to it having been in many ways made even stricter with Basel III. Just as an example of it is all the silence of FT´s "without fear" journalists of FT.

Sir, I beg you, pardon my indiscretion, but could it really be that the journalists of FT are subject to something similar to what John Gapper describes the Chinese journalists to be suffering?

Should I have been more careful my comments were more palatable to FT’s senior egos?

Sir, in “BoE’s self-criticism” November 11, you quote Bill Winters “gently” saying “[while junior staff] are often willing to challenge their superiors… there appears to be some tendency for them to filter recommendations in such a way as to maximize the likelihood that senior staff will find the recommendation palatable”. 

What is your own take on that? I myself have sent many recommendations and comments to you over the years and though I believe many of these were important different and should not have been ignored, but they were. Did I give too much credence to your motto “Without fear and without favour”? Should I have been more careful my letters and comments were more palatable to your senior egos and their friends? Do the egos have the right of blackballing? 

I mean should not FT’s commitment to truth be the same as the Bank of England’s? I mean, as a specialized media with a lot of readers, is not FT’s voice on critical issues as important or even more than BoE’s?

And what about conceit in journalism?

Sir, Gillian Tett writes correctly that “Libor affair exposes big conceit at the heart of banking” June 29, but there might equally be some big conceit going on at the heart of journalism. 

Two questions: What is the most important dollar reference rate… the risk free US Treasury rate or Libor? And, who has effectively manipulated those rates the most, Barclays the Libor rate, or the bank regulators the US Treasury rate by means of allowing the banks to hold these instruments with less capital than other assets? 

Clearly, in terms of its significance, the manipulation of the US Treasury “risk free” rate has been much more significant than whatever Barclays can have done to Libor but that, Gillian and her colleagues at FT decided to ignore, with much conceit.


Should not an anthropologist be about the most humble of all professionals? 

My timely warning about Jo!

Sir, as the final book of the Harry Potter is about o be released, just in case anything dark happens, let me remind you all that at least I did my civic duty by including the following warning in my book Voice and Noise in 2006.

“As the books about Harry Potter have meant so much for the upcoming generation and sometimes they even represent the only books it has read, there can be no doubt that the last Potter instalment can actually seal this world’s fate for a long time to come. J. K. Rowlings, or Jo as we are instructed to call her in her Web page, is someone to watch, very closely. Not that I distrust her, but we should perhaps think about censoring her (discreetly). What will be the lessons she will imprint on her young and not so young and even quite old (like me) readers’ minds with her final book? What if she goes haywire? I guess I’ll manage it, I hope, but will the young ones?”