Various teaching links

1. Opponents of capitalism tell you that the market system promotes greed. selfishness and rapacious behaviour by firms.  Proponents say no: its the opposite as firms have to understand what consumers want. A view from Tim Harford's great book Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy" http://amzn.eu/aWaeGcn. about the founder of Selfridges, Mr. Selfridge

"He saw that female customers offered profitable opportunities that other retailers were bungling, and made a point of trying to understand what they wanted. One of his quietly revolutionary moves: Selfridge’s featured a ladies’ lavatory. Strange as it may sound to modern ears, this was a facility London’s shopkeepers had hitherto neglected to provide. Selfridge saw, as other men apparently had not, that women might want to stay in town all day, without having to use an insalubrious public convenience or retreat to a respectable hotel for tea whenever they wanted to relieve themselves. "

File as well under innovation.

2.  Via Tim Taylor, this is a very good review:§ "Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets," by Giovanni Peri

3.  Do our banks still need fixing? yes they very much do says Martin Sandbu. 

 Some points

"

A rather worrying consensus emerged in a recent conference held by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, in which top names from the economics profession (their presentation materials are available on the conference web page) assessed the state of the financial system 10 years after the crisis.

The consensus was that we still fall far short from what would be a safe financial system."

For as John Vickers pointed out, “the general . . . opinion among economists outside the financial sector is that banks should be required to have at least twice as much equity capital . . . as the prevailing regulatory settlement”, but “regulators, not just banks, [think] that reform since 2008 has got us to about the right place”.

Martin Wolf sums up the economists’ consensus in a recent op-ed, where he advocates equity requirements four to five times higher than today’s rules.

..... Vickers has strongly criticised the Bank of England for its judgment that the required push for more equity funding in banks is largely completed. (To be fair, the BoE is also adding requirements for non-equity funding that can be “bailed in” to bear losses in a crisis.) Across the Atlantic, the US Treasury has plans under way to weaken rather than strengthen capital requirements — plans that, in William Cline’s analysis, could cost the US economy $2.7tn in increased risks over 10 years

 Vickers and Tucker are critical of equity measures (something for intangible reserachers to bear in mind) 

Second, the way it [equity] is constructed means the inherent instability of measured bank equity is unstable in just the wrong way. Paul Tucker, the former BoE deputy governor, has explained this in a rather chilling, if technical, speech. Before the crisis, he says, “‘common equity’ was measured without adjustments for items recorded by accountants as assets but which don’t — can’t — help in a crisis”, such as “goodwill” (the assumed extra value acquired when assets are taken over for more than their prior accounting value) or future tax credits.

That means improvements in regulations made to sound impressive — Vickers highlights BoE governor Mark Carney’s point that equity requirements are 10 times higher than before the crisis — are true only because of how absurdly low the requirements were then.

Here's a key calculation: 

In Tucker’s calculation, “when tangible common equity is measured in a way that is more fit for purpose, the minimum risk-asset ratio requirement was about 1 per cent” and even less when not discounting supposedly safe assets with low risk-weights (which has its own problems). Consequently, the ability of banks today to have assets 25-30 times as large as the equity intended to absorb losses on them is only 10 times stricter than before the crisis because they could then get away with gearing up their own (their shareholders’) money by three-digit multiples. Vickers is surely right that “10 times better than hopelessly lax is not a useful measure”.

 4. Related, here is Catherine Mann on how the wrong type of lending distorts growth.
Catherine L. Mann (OECD) Slides