Martin Wolf, we sure don’t need a Basel Committee for Large Technological Companies Supervision

Sir, Martin Wolf ends his discussions about the monstrously large technological companies (Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent and Samsung) with: “What are the implications? They are that our futures are too important to be left to the mercies of the technology industry alone. It has done magical things. Yet nobody elected it master of the universe. Policymakers must get an intellectual grip on what is happening.” “Taming the masters of the tech universe” November 15.

Does Wolf really believe some probably self appointed technocrats should be able and capable enough to stand in for the current masters of the tech universe, for all these to work more smoothly and safer without any unexpected consequences?

I am reminded of AEI’s Alex J. Pollock’s 2015 article “Martin Wolf’s childlike regulatory faith”. That article referred to Wolf’s “naïve faith in the future superior knowledge and future ability of central bankers and other bureaucrats successfully to tell other people what to do”.

Sir, just look at what those who appointed themselves as the Regulation Masters of the Universe of Banks have done:

They have allowed banks to leverage differently with different assets. As a consequence banks have different capability to obtain risk-adjusted returns on equity with different assets. This has dangerously distorted the allocation of bank credit to the real economy, in favor of what could be leveraged the most. Now instead of banks wanting savvy loan officers to maximize their ROE, they look mostly for equity minimizers to do that.

And, by considering the risk of the banks assets per se, and not the risk those assets represent to the banks, they got their whole risk-weighting totally wrong. A clear example of that is Basel II’s risk weight of only 20% for the dangerous AAA rated and of 150% for the so innocous below BB- rated. Sir, have you ever seen more inept Masters of the Universe?

Would the banks left alone to the markets be able to leverage 62.5 times to 1 only because an AAA to AA rating was present? No!

Would the banks left alone to the markets be able to lend to sovereigns without any capital at all as Basel II’s 0% risk weighting of sovereigns implies? No!

Would we have suffered to 2007-08 crisis had it not been for these regulations? No!

Do I suggest we should leave the tech monsters to do what they want? No, but I don’t think markets will allow them to reign alone and do what they want forever either… things do change, just look at GEs and Siemens.

For instance I can feel some ad-blockers around the corner that could help us users to charge Google and Facebook something for them using our own preferences to earn their advertising revenues.

And I can also smell additional taxes coming up in the future, like for instance a minuscule cost for each advertising connection in social media, which would make sure the marginal cost of exploiting our limited attention span is not zero. But these taxes will hopefully be shared out to all by means of universal basic income mechanisms instead of increasing the franchise value of the redistribution profiteers.

And to combat “people of ill” engaging in “deliberate dissemination of dangerous falsehoods”, much could be helped just by means of having an independent credible register that guarantees us who do not want to engage with unknown strangers, that behind a communication stands a correctly identified and not hacked real person.

PS. Here are some questions I have on tweets and tweeting etiquette that I tweeted.

If without any bad intentions I have re-tweeted a tweet that turns out to be fake news or fake and damning accusations, could I be sued?

If I re-tweet a tweet that I know or should know contains fake news or fake damning accusations, should I be sued?

Don’t we need a sort of ISO quality standard on tweeting that we can adhere to?

Don’t we need somebody to guarantee us that a tweeter is a real identifiable person that has not been hacked?

@PerKurowski

According to FT’s research, how much do minimum wages and absence of payroll taxes favour robots?

Sir, Vanessa Houlder writes: “When you book an Airbnb room in London, around a third of the $100 saving you make over the price of an average hotel room is due to tax advantages which favour Airbnb’s business model, according to research by the Financial Times” “Airbnb makes most of legal wiggle room to beat hotels” January 3.

Houlder goes on with: “Research from Morgan reported a higher than expected “cannibalisation of traditional hotels” over the past year, citing survey findings that 49 per cent of Airbnb users in the US, UK, France, and Germany had replaced a hotel stay with a stay booked through the online group.”

Indeed, since it is a human owner of an apartment eating up the opportunity from a human owner of a hotel room, it could be described as “cannibalization”. But, how should we describe when for instance a robot or a driverless car takes away a job opportunity from humans? If, for instance, that happens only because of minimum wages and absence of payroll taxes, is that more like human-offerings at the altar of automation and technology?

@PerKurowski

How do you build a wall against the robots, the biggest threat for manufacturing workers here and there?

Sir, Martin Wolf quotes Richard Baldwin, author of the “The Great Convergence”, with that workers in South Carolina “are not competing with Mexican labour, Mexican capital and Mexican technology as they did in the 1970s. They are competing with a nearly unbeatable combination of US know-how and Mexican wages.” “Trump faces the reality of world trade” November 22.

That has an element to truth in it but, in many ways, the worst competition both Mexican and American manufacturing workers face in the future will come from technology, like robots.

How do you build a wall against job-stealing robots? No matter how that wall was built, your own consuming citizens would end up paying for it by paying higher prices.

One idea I have been toying with lately goes someway along the line of placing some type of payroll taxes on robots; first so as to permit us humans to be able to compete with these on a more level ground; and second so that with those revenues we could partially fund a Universal Basic Income, a Societal Dividend, which could provide us with a step-ladder to easier reach up to the growing gig-economy. 

That said, with respect to Trump and trade-deals I would just remind him of that no nation can be kept strong by cuddling up in comforting isolation and that probably the last legacy any President would want to leave behind him, is that of having weakened the Home of the Brave.

To top that up, quite gently, I would also point out to Trump that USA’s Declaration of Independence clearly states as one of its justifications, the need to stand up to “the present King of England… For cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World”.

PS. In this context only as curiosa, the Declaration of Independence also mentions as a justification that “the present King of England…has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States… obstructing the Laws of naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither” 

@PerKurowski

“What technology can do for your health”, besides very good things, might also include some very bad things

Sir, I refer to Gillian Tett’s “What technology can do for your health” October 3.

The only problem I have with the article is how she brushes over the problem of privacy: “To be sure there are issues of data privacy; and sometimes records get lost. But…”

In March 2000 I wrote an Op-Ed in Venezuela titled “Human genetics made inhuman” and in which I expressed concerns about how medical data could be used to make it more difficult for some to obtain health insurance.

That was before I really began to understand how data was so massively been put to use in so many aspects of our lives… and not always even correct data.

What would Gillian Tett say if one of her health record entrepreneurs, by means of an innocent mistake, entered a data that for instance hindered one of her children to enter a university that had decided that the expected longevity of students was good for its funding drives?

@PerKurowski

Does Le Pen want a patent?

Sir, once when reading an analysis of the cash flows derived from the sale of a music CD went, I was surprised to see how much went to the record company, how much to the taxman and how relatively little to the musicians and composer, being these last ones those you really think of in terms of being defended by the intellectual property rights. I mention this because when reading Krishna Guha’s “IMF says workers’ share of income pie is shrinking” April 5, we are presented with only two possible culprits, globalization (in terms of placing productions where salaries are lower) or technological change, while perhaps the intensified award and enforcement of intellectual property rights that has lead to the creation of so many non-regulated monopolies might have a lot to do with the salaries being less and less of the cake. Hearing about the possibility that patents could be awarded on such exotics as tax saving strategies and also reading, in the same FT, a headline that states “Rivals are stealing my ideas, says Le Pen”, I guess that we who live on salaries better have a much closer look on this issue than what the IMF has done.

Sir, excuse me! I just read your editorial of today “Capital versus labour” where you as the cause for the growing share of profits also mention “globalization and technological innovation” and where you with globalization limit yourself to "competition in labour markets” and so I guess my previous comments of intellectual property rights that might have gone berserk, applies to your editorial too.