Cato At Liberty

The estimated number of above-average “excess deaths” in Puerto Rico attributed to Hurricane Maria (Sept 20, 2017) is a difficult figure to estimate objectively.  Puerto Rico’s official figure of 64 deaths by December 9, 2017 (which the President remembered) counted only those deaths directly attributed to the storm and confirmed by medical examiners.  Most of the direct deaths from Katrina were from drowning – which is much easier to attribute to the storm than many other causes of death. Studies of Puerto Rican deaths from Maria aspire to account for a wide range of indirect effects that are presumed (not proven) to be consequences of the storm such as suicides and heart attacks, infectious diseases, and damage to electricity and therefore to dialysis and respirator equipment.

Among at least eight major studies of direct and indirect effects on mortality attributed to Maria, two outliers stand out as being 3-5 times larger than the others, which all cluster around 1000. The first big number was from Harvard. On September 13, Time said, “Harvard’s report, which was based on systematic household surveys throughout Puerto Rico, reached an estimate of 4,645 storm-related deaths between September and December 2017, many as a result of ‘delayed or interrupted health care.’”  Nonsense. The Harvard study extrapolated from only 15 deaths reported in a survey of 3299 households to estimate that “between 793 and 8498 people died … up to the end of 2017.” By adding 793 and 8498 and dividing the result by 2, Time and others came up with a totally meaningless “average” which were widely reported with predictable sensationalism: “The hurricane that struck Puerto Rico in September was responsible for more deaths than the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina combined,” exclaimed The Daily Beast.” In reality, these “estimates of death from people who were interviewed” are little better than an opinion poll, and finding 15 deaths out of a sample of 3299 can’t plausibly be multiplied into 4645 for the whole island.

The latest sensational estimate of 2,975 excess deaths over six months is from an August 28 report from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University  (GWU) commissioned by the Government of Puerto Rico. The study mentions two “scenarios” (census and displacement) yet only publicized the one with the biggest number: “Total excess mortality post-hurricane using the migration displacement scenario is estimated to be 2,975 (2,658-3,290) for the total study period of September 2017 through February 2018.” 

The 2,975 estimate only applies to the “displacement scenario.”  That is, the study “estimates cumulative excess net migration from Puerto Rico in the months from September 2017 through February 2018 and subtracts this from the census population estimates in these months.”  The population fell by about 8%, mainly due to migration rather than death, so the fact that there were more deaths than average after the hurricane means the death rate (deaths per thousand) rose more than the unadjusted statistics would suggest because the population is smaller.  But this issue is the number of deaths, not the death rate, and displacement (migration) did not make that number any higher than half a dozen other studies found (about 1000) much less three times higher.  

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The existence of government infrastructure deters or “crowds out” private investment. Many airports, bridges, and urban transit systems in the United States used to be private, but during the mid-20th century entrepreneurs were squeezed out by governments.

The provision of federal aid or subsidies to government-owned airports, bridges, and transit facilities was a key factor in pushing out private enterprise. That is one reason why I favor repealing federal aid for transportation.

AIRPORTS

In the early years of commercial aviation, private airports served many American cities. For example, the main airports in Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. were for-profit business ventures in the 1930s.

The airports were generally successful and innovative, but they lost ground over time due to unfair government competition:

• City governments were often eager to set up their own airports, even if private airports already served an area.
• Cities issued tax-exempt bonds to finance their airports, giving them a financial edge over private airports.
• Private airports pay taxes. Government airports do not, giving them another financial edge.
• The U.S. military and the Post Office promoted government airports over private ones.
• Federal New Deal programs provided aid to government airports, not private ones.
• Congress provided aid to government airports for national defense purposes during World War II.
• The federal Surplus Property Act after the war transferred excess military bases to the states for government airport use.
• The federal Airport Act of 1946 began regular federal aid to government airports, not private ones.
• The new Federal Aviation Administration in 1958 “prohibited private airports from offering commercial service.”

So governments banished entrepreneurs from a major part of America’s aviation industry. In the early 1930s, about half of the nation’s more than 1,100 airports were private, but by the 1960s, private commercial airports had mainly disappeared. Very sad, as I discuss here.

However, there is good news about airports. A privatized commercial airport industry is booming abroad, particularly in Europe. U.S. policymakers should let entrepreneurs take another crack at our airport industry.

BRIDGES

Bob Poole discusses government crowd out of private bridges in his new book Rethinking America’s Highways. In the 1920s, four main bridges built in the San Francisco area were private toll facilities. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge and Oakland Bay Bridge were built as government toll facilities.

Poole picks up the story:

All six of these bridges suffered declines in traffic and revenue due to the Depression, but the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate opened closer to its end and were therefore less affected. Their financing costs were also lower, with the Bay Bridge getting low-cost financing from the New Deal’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the Golden Gate being able to issue tax-exempt toll revenue bonds, rather than the taxable bonds issued by the toll bridge companies.

In addition, the California legislature voted in 1933 to relieve the Bay Bridge of having to cover operating and maintenance costs out of toll revenues, allocating state highway fund (gas tax) monies to cover those costs. The four private toll bridges all went into receivership by 1940. Unlike the Ambassador Bridge (in Michigan), they were unable to work out refinancing plans and were eventually acquired by the state, with the Dumbarton and San Mateo transfers not taking place until the early 1950s; their shares traded on the Pacific Coast Exchange until then.

A similar fate befell many of the other 200-odd private toll bridges during the Depression. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation provided low-cost loans to public-sector toll bridges, but not to investor-owned ones. Relatively new government toll agencies offered buyouts to struggling bridge owners during those years. The New York State Bridge Commission bought four private toll bridges over the Hudson River; the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission acquired at least six private toll bridges; and the city of Dallas bought the toll bridge on the Trinity River in order to eliminate tolls.

By 1940, the Public Roads Administration (the former Bureau of Public Roads, now part of the Federal Works Agency) reported that the number of US toll bridges had declined to 241, of which 142 were still investor-owned. But nearly all the bridges had been bought out by toll agencies or state and local governments by the mid-1950s.

URBAN TRANSIT

The early history of urban transit in America is one of private-sector funding and innovation, as Randal O’Toole discusses in this study. Hundreds of cities had private streetcar and bus companies moving people in downtowns and the growing suburbs in the early 20th century.

As the century progressed, however, the rise of automobiles undermined the demand for transit. At the same time, transit firms had difficulty cutting costs because their workforces were dominated by labor unions and governments resisted allowing them to cut services on unprofitable routes.

The nail in the coffin for private transit was the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, which provided federal aid to government-owned bus and rail systems. The act encouraged state and local governments to take over private systems, and a century of private transit investment came to a close.

This Transportation Research Board study discusses the decline of private transit:

As the declining fortunes of America’s cities gained national recognition during the 1960s, Congress passed legislation that for the first time gave the federal government a prominent role in the provision of urban transit. The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 (later redesignated the Federal Transit Act) provided loans and grants for transit capital acquisition, construction, and planning activities.

… Notably, only public entities could apply for the federal grants. Given the availability of federal aid, many cities, states, and counties purchased or otherwise took over their local rail and bus systems. Thus by the 1970s, a largely new model of transit provision—public ownership—had become increasingly prevalent in the United States. Many jurisdictions consolidated the operations of smaller private and public systems under the auspices of regional transit authorities. A few states, such as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, formed statewide transit agencies.

… In 1940, only 20 transit systems in the country were publicly owned, and they accounted for just 2 percent of ridership. By 1960, although the vast majority of all systems were still in private ownership, properties in public ownership accounted for nearly half of all transit ridership, mainly because the country’s very largest systems were publicly owned. By 1980, more than 500 systems were publicly owned, accounting for 95 percent of ridership nationally.

In sum, the bad news is that when the government advances, the private sector retreats. But the good news we have seen around the world in recent decades is that when the government gets out of the way, the private sector steps in to provide better services at lower costs.

Further reading:

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/transportation

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/infrastructure-investment

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/privatization

In my last post I wrote about the lawsuit TNB USA Inc has filed against the New York Fed, which has refused to grant the would-be bank a Master Account. I argued that, despite its name (TNB stands for “The Narrow Bank”), and despite what some commentators (now including, alas, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff) seem to think, TNB isn’t meant to supply ordinary persons with a safer alternative to deposits at ordinary banks. Instead, TNB’s purpose is to receive deposits from non-bank financial institutions only, to allow them to take advantage, indirectly, of the Fed’s policy of paying interest on bank reserves — thereby potentially earning more than they might either by investing directly in securities or by taking advantage of the Fed’s reverse repo program, which is open to them but which presently offers a rate 20 basis points lower than the Fed’s IOER rate.

A Hollow Victory?

Yet for all the controversy TNB’s lawsuit has generated, its outcome may no longer matter as much as it might once have. For one thing, TNB’s success can no longer undermine the Fed’s ON-RRP program, which is designed to implement the Fed’s target interest rate lower bound, for the simple reason that that program is already moribund. Commenting on my post, J.P. Koning observed that, while the Fed’s ON-RRP facility, first established in December 2013, once supplied non-bank financial institutions with an attractive investment alternative, it ceased being so this year. As the chart below, reproduced from J.P.’s comment, shows, the facility — which once accommodated hundreds of billions of dollars in bids — is now completely inactive:

The decline on ON-RRP activity since the beginning of this year is a byproduct of the general increase in market rates of interest, both absolutely and relative to the Fed’s ON-RRP offer rate, that has made the program both less attractive to potential participants and unnecessary as a means for establishing a lower-bound for the effective fed funds rate. But that decline is but one symptom of a more general development, to wit: the tendency of the Fed’s policy rate settings to lag further and further behind increases in market-determined interest rates, thanks in no small part to the Trump administration’s fiscal profligacy. Here, for example, is a FRED chart comparing the Fed’s policy rate settings to the yield on 1-month Treasury bills:

In the figure the “Lower Limit” of the Fed’s federal funds target range is also the Fed’s ON-RRP facility offer rate, while the “Upper Limit” is the same as the Fed’s IOER rate until mid-June 2018, and 5 basis points above the IOER rate afterwards.

Although an overnight repurchase agreement is a more liquid investment than a one-month Treasury bill, its easy to appreciate how that difference ceased, in the last year or so, to compensate for the gap between the ON-RRP rate and other money market rates. But those rates have also increased relative to the IOER rate, with the Fed’s June decision to reduce the IOER – ON-RRP rate spread from 25 to 20 basis points, reducing the attractiveness of IOER relative to money market rates by another 5 bps. Consequently, bank reserves are also much less attractive relative to money market instruments, and especially to shorter-term Treasury bills, than they were a year ago.

All of which means that TNB’s efforts could end up being in vain even if the Fed ends up granting it an account. As J.P. Koning points out in his own post concerning the TNB case, “even if TNB succeeds in its lawsuit, there is a larger threat. The gap the bank is trying to exploit is shrinking.” In contrast, when the TNB plan was originally developed in 2016, that gap was about 25 basis points.

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