Author: Scott Buchanan

Where Does Money Come From?

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Money can be simplistically defined as “A medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market, and/or a liquifiable asset which can readily be converted to the medium of exchange”.  Earlier we described the amounts of various classes of “money” in the U.S.      Here is a chart showing the amount of currency in circulation (coins and bills; lowest line on the chart) for 2005-2020, and also M1 (green), M2 (upper curve, purple) and “monetary base” (currency plus reserves at the Fed; red line).

To recap what M1 and M2 are:

M1: Physical currency circulating outside of the Fed and private banking system, plus the amount of demand deposits, travelers’ checks and other checkable deposits. This is highly “liquid” money, i.e. accepted and used for transactions in the private economy.

M2: M1 + most savings accounts, money market accounts, retail money market mutual funds, and small denomination time deposits (certificates of deposit of under $100,000).

 The funds in these additional savings and money market accounts can in general be easily transferred to checkable accounts, and thus could go towards making purchases if desired.

Physical currency is made and put into circulation by the government or quasi-governmental agencies (the Treasury mints coins, and the Federal Reserve prints bills). But what about all the other money (M1, M2, etc.), which dwarfs the physical currency? How does it grow?

Without getting into all the weeds, it turns out that the major driver of money creation in modern economies is the process of bank loans.  The vast majority of money in countries like the U.S. is not created directly by government or central bank operations, but is created in the private sector when commercial banks make loans.   When individuals or companies decide to take out more loans (including loans for cars, houses, or business investment), the effective money supply in the nation increases. This is true for other modern economies. For instance, the Bank of England states:

There are three types of money in the UK economy:

3% Notes and coins

18% Reserves

79% Bank deposits

A typical scenario of how bank lending increases money might go something like this: Fred would like to add an enclosed back porch to his house, but doesn’t have the money in hand to pay a carpenter to build it for him. So the base case is no payment to the carpenter and no porch for Fred. However, Fred realizes he can go the bank and get a loan to pay for the porch. So he obtains a $20,000 loan from the bank, which first shows up as a $20,000 credit to Fred’s checking account. The bank credits Fred’s account, and in exchange obtains a contract from Fred promising that Fred will pay it back, with interest.

Fred writes a check for $20,000 to the carpenter, who in turn pays $10,000 to a lumberyard for materials and keeps the other $10,000 as his fee. The lumberyard is able to pay its workers for that day, and order replacement lumber from a mill. The workers spent their pay on various items.  The carpenter puts $5000 of his $10,000 fee in a savings account, and pays the rest to a car dealer for a used car.

The initial loan to Fred set off a chain of spending and economic activity, which would not have otherwise occurred. Fred has his porch, the lumberyard workers continue to be employed and supporting their local merchants, the carpenter gets a second car, and this money keeps ricocheting around until it gets drained away into stagnant savings, or is used to pay down prior debt. Although they are not aware of it, part of the lumberyard workers’ pay for that day came out of the debt incurred by Fred.

The granting of that loan created $20,000 of spending capability, i.e. money.  As far as the economy is concerned, that $20,000 did not exist as effective money prior to the loan. Thus, the money came into existence simultaneously with the debt associated with the loan. Fred received the capacity to spend $20,000 today, but in turn accepted the obligation to pay back this money, with interest. It is assumed that Fred had a stable income, such that he would in fact be able to pay back the loan in the future.

In general, increasing debt increases the money supply, and paying down debt extinguishes money. For simplicity, suppose Fred repays the $20,000 loan (with $2000 interest added) in one big lump, two years later. In that year, he will presumably spend into the economy something like $22,000 less than he would have otherwise. Thus, his paying down of his debt will act as a decrease in the circulating money.

In normal times, as one person is paying down his loan (and thereby shrinking the money supply), someone else is taking out a new and even larger loan, so total debt and the amount of money in circulation stays about the same, or grows somewhat. A feature of the 2008-2009 recession, however, was a big drop in consumer demand for credit; folks decided to pay down debts and not borrow so much money to buy stuff. The effect was a big drop in spending and thus in overall economic activity (GDP) and in employment.

Where was that $20,000 before Fred borrowed it? We might think that it was sitting unused in the bank vaults, just waiting to be borrowed. That turns out to be an incorrect picture of the lending process.

Bank loans differ in key ways from, say, an interpersonal loan. If I lend you money, I might draw down my checking deposit and give you a check which you would deposit in your bank account. No new money is created. You may hand me an I.O.U. slip stating when you will pay me back and with what interest, but that would still be just the same funds being traded back and forth between the two of us. I would have to have the money in my account to start with before I could loan it to you.

Bank lending is different. A bank can lend money and hence create a new deposit, which amounts to brand-new money, even if the bank does not have that money to start with.  This is counterintuitive. In a later post we may flesh out this seemingly magical aspect of bank lending. See  Overview of the U. S. Monetary System for a more complete discussion.

“Rapid Uncontrolled Disassembly”: Musk’s Positive Take on Rocket Explosion

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If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably saw at least one image of Elon Musk’s “Starship” rocket blowing up last week. This is a really big rocket, some 165 ft high, which Musk intends to use to ferry humans to Mars, as early as 2026. And before that, paying passengers like you and I are to climb aboard for brief tourist excursions to outer space.

The rocket is designed to land back on its launchpad, to be ready for its next flight. That part is what went wrong last Wednesday. I snagged three screenshots from the live-streamed SpaceX video on YouTube to show what happened. The first image shows the vessel descending on its rocket jets, obviously dropping way too fast as it neared the ground.

This is what happened upon impact:

Ouch.  It turns out that not enough fuel was getting to the rocket engines to slow the vessel’s descent.

Here are the smoking ruins:

Another man may have been chagrined over this outcome, but not the indomitable Musk. He had given this flight only one in three odds of landing intact, and he was ecstatic over the vast majority of things that went right, and the useful data collected. After all, the rocket did successfully take off, ascend to 40,000 ft (12 km), and mainly descend in the desired horizontal orientation to minimize overheating. Right after the blast he tweeted:

“Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!”

 When you are Elon Musk, a little RUD (Rapid Uncontrolled Disassembly) is all in a day’s work. Which may be partly why he accomplishes so much more than most of us.

Thanks for the Patent System

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Although I write on a variety of subjects, my main professional training (through the PhD level) is as a chemical engineer. Chemical engineering is one of the broader technical disciplines. It bridges between chemistry, which is mainly associated with academic-type laboratory work, and huge chemical plant equipment. One year I was making and testing catalysts in the lab, then next I was calculating fluid flows and designing internals for a 100 ft high distillation tower (and climbing around inside that tower to insure the parts were being properly welded in place):

In my work in industrial research, I have been paid to develop technical improvements which could have economic value. A key incentive my company had for investing in this research was the expectation that if we came up with a novel improvement, that we could have exclusive rights to practice that improvement. There would have been little point in paying for research if our competitors could immediately make use of our hard-won insights. A snip of one of my patents is shown below.

For the world, and for most large groupings such as nations, the average income per capital is roughly equal to the average production per capita. The way to get more “stuff” (goods and services, and all their benefits) is to make more stuff. The way to make more stuff (per capita, and for fixed a workweek) is to make workers more productive. A key factor in productivity is technology. Two hundred years ago, nearly everyone in the U.S. had to be out in the sun and cold, working the soil, sowing by hand and plowing with the aid of animals, to grow enough food to feed everyone. Now I believe we are fed by only 2% of the workforce, using artificial fertilizers, improved seeds, huge tractors and combines, and satellite-aided computer scheduling. Most of the rest of us get to work in air-conditioned offices (or homes, in a pandemic year) and eat as much food as we want.

The patent system of the U.S. and other nations is designed to promote progress in productive technology. Early on, the newborn U.S. Congress passed the Patent Act of 1790, titled “An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts”.  Without getting into all the legal details, a valid U.S. patent allows the inventor to exclude any other party from practicing their invention, for a period of twenty years. However, one of the requirement for a patent application is to clearly explain to the public how the invention works. When the twenty years is over, anyone can take advantage of the technology which the inventor has disclosed, which hopefully leads to widespread practice of technical improvements. While we can always ponder improvements to our system of patents, readers can thank it in part for many medical advances, and for delivering them from trudging behind a plow.

Peering Inside the Balance Sheet of the Fed

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A balance sheet gives a snapshot of a corporation’s assets and liabilities. The difference between total assets and total liabilities is (by definition) the value of the equity owned by the owners or shareholders of the company.

With, say, a manufacturing firm, the assets would include tangible items such as buildings and equipment and inventory, and intangibles such as cash, bank accounts, and accounts receivable. Liabilities may include mortgages and other loans, and accounts payable such as taxes, wages, pensions, and bills for purchased goods.

The balance sheet for a bank is different. The “Assets” are mainly loans that the bank has made, plus some securities (such as US Treasury bonds) that the bank has purchased. These assets pay interest to the bank. The money the bank used to make these loans and purchase these securities came mainly from customer deposits or other borrowings by the bank (which are considered “Liabilities” of the bank), and also from paid-in capital from the bank owners/shareholders. [1]  As usual, the current equity of the bank is assets minus liabilities. Thus:

Source:  BBVA

The Federal Reserve System is a complex beast. We will not delve into all the components and moving parts, but just take a look at the overall balance sheet.

Unlike other banks, the Fed has the magical power of being able to create money out of thin air. Technically, what the Fed can do with that money is mainly make loans, i.e. buy interest-bearing securities such as government bonds. The Fed makes its transactions through affiliated banks, so it credits a bank’s reserve account with a million dollars, if it buys from that bank a million dollars’ worth of bonds. Those bonds then become part of the Fed’s “assets”, while the reserve account of the bank at the Fed (which is a liability of the Fed) becomes larger by a million dollars. Since the Fed is not a for-profit bank, the “Equity” entry on its balance sheet is nearly zero. Thus, total assets are essentially equal to total liabilities.

The Fed also has the power of literally printing money, in the form of Federal Reserve Notes (printed dollar bills). These, too, are classified as liabilities. Thus, you are probably carrying in your wallet right now some of the liabilities of the central bank of the United States.

Before 2008, the balance sheet of the Fed was under a trillion dollars. Nearly all the “Liabilities” were the Federal Reserve Notes and nearly all the “Assets” were US Treasury securities. The reserve accounts of the affiliated Depository Institutions was minuscule. All that changed with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009. To help stabilize the financial system, the Fed started buying lots of various types of securities, including mortgage-backed securities (MBS) [2]. The Fed thus propped up the value of these securities, and injected cash (liquidity) into the system.

Here is a plot of how the assets of the Fed ballooned in the wake of the GFC, from about $ 0.9 trillion to over $ 4 trillion:

Source: Investopedia

The initial purchases in 2008 were US Treasuries, which the Fed had prior authorization to do. To buy other securities, especially the mortgage products, required congressional authorization. The increased liabilities of the Fed which offset these purchases were mainly in the form of larger reserve accounts of the affiliated banks. The Fed started paying interest on these reserve accounts, to keep short term interest rates above zero at all times (otherwise the whole money market in the U.S. might implode).

 With the Fed relentlessly buying the mortgage and bond products, the interest rates on long-term mortgages and bonds was kept low. This was deemed good for economic growth. The Fed tried to sell off some securities to taper down its balance sheet in 2018, but that effort blew up in its face – – the stock market started crashing in response in late 2018, and so the Fed backtracked . You can look at weekly tables of the Fed balance sheet here.

Anyway, the GFC and its aftermath provided the precedent for massive purchases of “stuff” by the Fed. When the Covid shutdown of the economy hit in March of this year, the Fed very quickly went into high gear. Its balance sheet shot up from $4 trillion to $7 trillion in just a few months. It bought not only Treasuries and MBS, but corporate bonds. This was way outside the Fed’s original charter, but the crisis was so intense that nobody seemed to care whether these actions were legal or not. And now, to finance the huge deficit spending of the federal government in the wake of the shutdowns, the Fed has been buying up nearly the entire issuance of Treasury bonds and notes.

These actions may have long term consequences we will explore in later posts [3]. For now, the Fed has made it clear that it will keep interests rates near zero for at least the next couple of years. Invest accordingly.

ENDNOTES

[1] Huge caveat: This statement gives the impression that a bank must first receive say a thousand dollar deposit before it can make a thousand dollar loan. That is not the case. The reality is just the opposite: the act of making a thousand dollar loan actually CREATES a corresponding thousand dollar deposit. This is very counterintuitive, and I won’t try to explain or justify this point here.

[2] Technically, the Fed is not “buying” the mortgage-backed security (MBS). Rather, it is making a “loan” to the bank, and holding the MBS as collateral against that loan.

[3] It is now harder to take the federal deficit seriously as a constraint on spending:  the government can issue unlimited bonds to fund deficits, which the Fed will purchase to keep interest rates low. Yes, the government has to pay interest on those bonds, but the Fed has to return most of that interest to the Treasury, so the real cost to the government of that extra debt is low.

Financial Alchemy: Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) Transform Junk Loans into Investment Grade Securities

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A week ago, we described commercial loans in general, and how they differ from bonds. Companies nearly always need money to make money, and thus have to borrow money in addition to selling stock shares. Companies that are new or smaller or doing poorly or have already borrowed a lot can still get loans, but these loans typically come with stringent conditions and require paying relatively high interest. These “leveraged loans” are the loan equivalent of “junk” bonds. When a bank lends money as a “Senior Secured Loan”, this entails agreements (“covenants”) which may specify that in event of default, this loan gets paid off ahead of any other creditor, and also that some specific asset held by the company, such as a building or an oil field, will be given over to the bank.

Financial institutions like insurance companies and pension funds are hungry for “investment grade” securities like bonds rated BBB or higher. Normally, these institutions would not consider buying into the senior loan marketplace, since these instruments are not considered investment grade.

Enter “Collateralized Loan Obligations” (CLOs). With a CLO, 200 or so loans which have been made by banks and then sold off into the market are bundled together, and then the cash flow from the interest paid on these loans plus the principal paid back is repackaged into slices or “tranches”. The highest level tranches get first dibs on being paid from the overall CLO cash flow, then the lower and lower tranches. The majority of bank loans today end up being packaged into CLOs.  CLOs are an example of a lucrative operation known as “securitization”:   “Securitization is the process of taking an illiquid asset or group of assets and, through financial engineering, transforming it (or them) into a security” (per Investopedia).

The rate of loan defaults in recent years has been only 3-4%, and on average the recovery on a given defaulted senior secured loan has been around 80%. So the actual losses (e.g. 4% x 20%, or 0.8% net) have been quite low. The highest annual default rate in recent memory was about 10%, in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009.

The theory is that, although any particular loan has a nontrivial chance of defaulting, it is unthinkable that more than say 20% of all loans would default; and even if a full 20% of the loans did default, we would expect that the actual losses after liquidating the pledged collateral would be more like 4% of the entire loan portfolio (i.e. 20% defaults x 20% loss per default). This means that the top 95% or so of CLO cash flow should be considered very secure, and the top 60-70% are utterly secure.

Thus, the top 60-65% of the CLO cash flow is packaged as super secure, relatively low-yielding AAA rated debt, and as such is bought up by conservative financial institutions, including banks. This arrangement keeps those institutions happy, and also facilitates the making of loans to the needy companies who are taking out the underlying loans.

The figure below from an Eagle Point Investment Company presentation depicts typical CLO tranches:

The lower the position in the CLO cash flow “waterfall”, the higher the yield and the higher the risk of non-payment. The AA, A, and BBB debt tranches are all considered investment grade, though with higher risk and higher yields than the AAA tranche. The Eagle Point Investment Company happens to buy into the BB-rated debt tranche, which is just below investment grade. You, the public, can buy shares Eagle Point Investment (stock symbol EIC). These shares pay about 7% yield, after hefty management fees have been subtracted.

The equity tranche lies at the very bottom of the CLO heap. If there were, say, 20% loan defaults with only 50% recovery of the loans, the equity tranche might get completely wiped out. So these are more risky investments. As usual, there is high reward along with the risk. Oxford Lane Capital (OXLC) deals in CLO equity, and it will pay you about 15% per year, which is huge in today’s low-interest world. But….you need to be prepared to have the stock value cut in half every ten years or so, whenever there is a big hiccup in the financial world.

Anyone who was an economics-savvy adult during the GFC should be asking, “But, but, but…aren’t these CLOs essentially the same thing as the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that blew up the world in 2008?”  The answer is partly yes, in that in both cases a bunch of loans get bundled together and then resliced into tranches. That said, we hope that the underlying loans in today’s CLOs are more robust than the massively shady home mortgage loans of 2003-2008 that fed into those CDOs. Back then, unscrupulous banks and mortgage companies handed out thousands of housing loans to ill-informed private individuals who did not remotely qualify for them, and then the banks dumped these loans out into the broader financial markets via CDOs. The bank loans behind today’s CLOs are more sober, serious, vetted affairs than those ridiculous subprime home mortgages.

This past summer, in the thick of the Covid shutdowns which have stressed small businesses,  The Atlantic published a dire assessment of the potential for CLOs to sink the system, with the catchy title The Looming Banks Collapse . The article noted, fairly enough, that there has been a trend in the past few years to weaken the covenants on loans which would normally protect the lender against losses. Most loans these days are considered “covenant-lite”, compared to several years ago. There is genuine concern that the recovery on these loans might be more like 40-50%, instead of the historic 70-80%. On the other hand, the looser requirements on these loans may mean that fewer of them will technically violate these looser covenants and thus fewer companies will actually default. A recent survey estimates that the default rate in the $ 1.2 trillion dollar leveraged loan universe will peak at only 6.6% in 2021.

Also, today’s CLOs seem to be rated by the major ratings agencies more responsibly than the notoriously optimistic ratings given to CDO’s back in 2008.  “CLOs are usually rated by two of the three major ratings agencies and impose a series of covenant tests on collateral managers, including minimum rating, industry diversification, and maximum default basket”, according to an article by S&P Global Market Intelligence. That article has a good description of CLOs, including a brief tutorial video on the nuts and bolts of how they work.

Raising Cash: Corporate Bonds versus Corporate Loans

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Corporations raise money in various ways to invest in their operation. A company may sell common stock to the public; the shareholders are not guaranteed any particular return on their investment, but if the company does well, the share price and the dividends paid by the stock can be expected to go up.

Preferred stock falls in between common stock and bonds. Investors mainly buy preferred stock for its dividends. Typically, the price of the preferred stock doesn’t go up like common stock can, but the company cannot pay any dividends on the common unless all of the promised dividends on the preferred are paid up.

CORPORATE BONDS: INVESTMENT GRADE AND JUNK

Companies can sell bonds to raise money. Bonds are somewhat standardized securities, which are marketed to the broad investing community. The company is legally bound to pay the interest, and eventually the principal, of a bond. Bonds are senior to stocks in case of extracting value from a company that has gone bankrupt. Some bonds are more senior than others, depending on the “covenants” in the fine print of the bond description (debenture). For smaller, less stable companies, the only way they may get someone to buy their bonds is to agree to certain conditions that make it more likely the bond will be repaid. For instance, the company selling the bond might be restricted from issuing more than a certain amount of total debt relative to its earnings, or from taking on additional debt which might be senior to its existing debt.

Bonds are rated by agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s. Large, stable companies get high ratings (e.g. AA), and can pay lower interest. You, the public, can buy into investment grade bonds through funds such as iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF (LQD). This fund currently pays about 2.6%, but most of the returns in the past several years have been from an increase in the price of the fund shares. (For longer term bonds, the market price of a previously-issued bond increases as market interest falls, which it has in recent years).

The lowest investment grade is BBB. The bonds of shakier companies are rated at BB or lower, and have pay higher interest. This is called high yield debt or junk bonds. You can invest in junk bonds through funds such as JNK and HYG.

CORPORATE BANK LOANS

Companies also obtain loans from banks. Banks scrutinize the operations of the company to decide whether they want to risk their money in making a loan. Banks usually demand restrictions and guarantees to help ensure the loan will paid back. These restrictions are called covenants. Sometimes the payback of the loan is tied to a specified asset. For instance, if the income of a company falls below a certain level (which might imperil paying off the loan), the covenant may require the company to give ownership of some asset, like a building or a set of oil wells, to the bank, so the bank can sell it to pay back the loan immediately, before economic conditions worsen.

This graphic shows some of the conditions a company might have to sign to in order to get a loan from a bank:

Source: https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/debt-covenants-bond/

Here is a summary of the differences between bonds and loans, courtesy of WallStreetMojo (slightly edited):

  • The main difference is that a bond is highly tradeable. If you purchase a bond, there is usually a market place where you can trade it. It means you can even sell the bond, rather than waiting for the end of the thirty years. In practice, people purchase bonds when they wish to increase their portfolio in that way. Loans tend to be the agreements between borrowers and the banks. Loans are generally non-tradeable, and the bank will be obliged to see out the entire term of the loan.
  • In the case of repayments, bonds tend to be only repaid in full at the maturity of the bond – e.g., 10, 20, or 30 years. With bank loans, both principal and interest are paid down during the repayment period at regular intervals (like a home mortgage).
  • Issuing bonds give the corporations significantly greater freedom to operate as they deem fit because it frees them from the restrictions that are often attached to the loans that are lent by the banks. Consider, for example, that lenders or the creditors often require corporates to agree to a variety of limitations, such as not to issue more debt or not to make corporate acquisitions until their loans are repaid entirely.
  • The rate of interest that the companies pay the bond investors is often less than the rate of interest that they would be required to pay to obtain the loan from the bank. Sometimes the interest on the loan is not a fixed percent, but “floats” with general short-term interest rates.
  • A bond that is traded in the market possesses a credit rating, which is issued by the credit rating agencies, which starts from investment grade to speculative grade, where investment-grade bonds are considered to be of low risk and usually have low yields. On the contrary, a loan don’t have any such concept; instead, the creditworthiness is checked by the creditor.

LEVERAGED LOANS

The rough equivalent of a junk bond in the world of corporate loans is called a “leveraged loan”. A leveraged loan is a type of loan that is extended to companies or individuals that already have considerable amounts of debt or poor credit history. Lenders consider leveraged loans to carry a higher risk of default, and so they demand higher interest on the loan. Leveraged loans and junk bonds play a key role in helping smaller or struggling companies achieve their financial goals. Leveraged loans are widely used to fund mergers and acquisitions.

Because the company itself is considered shaky, creditors typically require that the company offers some specific asset for collateral to “secure” the loan. Also, the loan is typically written to be “senior” to other debt, including bonds, in case of bankruptcy. Historically, the recovery rate for such senior secured loans has been about 80%, as compared to a recovery of about 40% for unsecured bonds, if the company goes bankrupt.

Typically, a bank would not want to take all the risk of such a loan upon itself. Therefore, for a leveraged loan, the bank arranges for a syndicate of multiple banks or other financial institutions to own pieces of the loan. You, too, can get a piece of this action by buying shares of the fund Invesco Senior Loan ETF (BKLN), which is currently yielding 3.2%.

S&P Global Market Intelligence offers a primer on leveraged loans, complete with tutorial videos. As shown below, the market for leveraged loans in the U.S. is now over $ 1 trillion:

Source: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/pages/toc-primer/lcd-primer#sec2

Huge Prison Population in the U.S.

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During some general reading on finance, I ran across the following two information-rich graphics from Hoya Capital on the U.S. prison population. On the first graph, the blue areas show the absolute numbers, and the green line shows the percent incarceration rate. A rate of 0.5% comes to 500 prisoners per 100,000 population.

This graph shows a huge rise in the state and federal prison population between 1980 and 2000. There seems general agreement that much of that increase in the prison population is due to mandatory sentencing laws, which require relatively long sentences. In particular, “three strikes and you’re out” laws may demand a life sentence for three felony convictions, if at least one of them is for a serious violent crime. Another factor was the increased criminalization of drug use (possession), in addition to drug dealing.

The graphic below shows the particular classes of crimes of which inmates of the state and federal prison systems have been convicted. The largest single category is violent crimes, but other types are significant, such as drug and property crimes, and “public order” crimes. Public order crimes include activities such as prostitution, gambling, alcohol, child pornography, and some drug charges. This graphic also includes the large number of people in local jails, most of whom are imprisoned awaiting trial or sentencing.

The total number of people under legal supervision in the U.S., including probation and parole, is over 6 million:

Source: Wikipedia

The U.S. has by far the largest official prison population in the world, and the highest incarceration rate. The following graph from Wikipedia depicts incarceration rates for several countries or regions as of 2009:

Most developed countries have incarceration rates of around 100-200 per 100,000, which is where the U.S. was in about 1970. The relatively high rate for Russia is attributed in large part to strict “zero tolerance” laws on drugs.

Again, the main driver for the high rates in the U.S. is the long sentences, driven by mandates. Wikipedia notes that there are other countries, including some in Europe, which have higher annual admissions to prison per capita than in the U.S. However, “The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail… The average burglary sentence in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.” 

Policy debates on this topic continue. Obviously, we want to protect society from dangerous predators, but the direct and indirect costs to society for this level of incarceration are high. It seems like an area which is ripe for reform of some kind, though I do not claim to have a novel proposal.

Brighten Your Day with a Light Therapy Lamp

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

It is that time of year in the Northern Hemisphere when the days are getting shorter, the nights longer, and the sun hangs lower in the sky. Seasonal Affect Disorder (SAD) probably affects all of us to some extent. What to do?

Well, I understand that studies have shown that exposing your retinas to bright light, in the sunlight wavelengths, can improve mood and functioning. A variety of therapeutic lamps are available. Some of the least expensive ones sit on your table or desk, and shine up at a slight angle while you read or watch a movie. An example of this type is the Nature Bright SunTouch Plus ( $49 ), shown below. The lamp is ideally positioned quite close to your eyes, say 12 inches (30 cm), in order to get the recommended photons into them.

Our family has gotten a lot of mileage out of a somewhat more expensive but more versatile lamp. This is the Day-Light Sky lamp  ($113).

It has joints at the top and the bottom of its support arm, so you can use it like a desk lamp, to give strong lighting to some project you are working on, or have it therapeutically shine into your eyes, like this happy camper:

In that mode, you’d want to keep your gaze level or only slightly downward, since not much light would get into your pupils if you had your head down reading. Our family uses this on the counter or table whilst preparing or eating breakfast (it is best to get your photons in early in the day). It also works well positioned beside your shoulder as a cheery reading light.

Camping in Style in an “Instant Cabin” Tent

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

This is the time of year when we often think of gifts to give to others, or for others to give to us, if they are so moved. So I will share an item which took a bit of research to lock in on, and which has worked out very well in practice.

When I was in my teens, I was content to throw a sleeping bag on a tarp right on the ground when camping. In my 20s, I used a half inch thick dense foam pad, a classic Ridge Rest. I wanted a little more cushion under me in my 30s, and so graduated to a 1.5 inch thick self-inflating sleeping pad like this Stansport. For backpacking in my 40s and 50s, I craved yet more air space underneath me, especially for curling up on my side, and got good usage out of a narrow, 2.5 inch thick inflatable sleeping pad.

Now my wife and I are pretty much done with roughing it. We still enjoy the great outdoors, but find we enjoy it even more when we have essentially all the comforts of home, which includes a full size queen air mattress. It takes a pretty big tent to accommodate that plus all our other gear, without feeling squashed.

I have had some large tents in the past, which were very tedious to set up. So I was pleased to find a huge, airy tent, which almost erects itself. This is the Ozark Trails 9-Person Instant Cabin.

Image from Amazon website

The main room is 9 x 14 ft, which is plenty big for glamor-camping (glamping) for two people. In huddled masses mode, probably 8 bodies would fit comfortably. The tent has a screen room across the front, for a bug-free place to sit. The fly over the screen room provides a roof over the door to the main room, keeping out rain even when the tent door is opened.  Here are two views from within on our latest camping trip, first looking out the door through the screen room, and then looking straight up through the roof before we put the fly over the tent at the end of the day.

As an engineer, I am tickled by the clever joints that allow you to make the structure arise with just a few strategic tugs. Going from stage 2 to stage 3 in the photo below takes all of fifteen seconds. Taking the tent down for storage simply involves doing all these motions in reverse. The tent itself stays always attached to the poles.

Image from Amazon website

The only major drawback is the price, about $300, which is a lot for a tent. Considering our wants at this stage, for us that is a fair exchange. It gives us much of the space and utility of a small pop-up camper trailer, for a fraction of the cost.

Review of: “How the Scots Invented the Modern World”, by Arthur Herman

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

This book describes the development of intellectual life and related events in Scotland from about 1700 onward. Scotland in 1700 was a small, poor, largely agrarian independent nation, still characterized in large part by feudalism. In much of the country, clansmen in their kilts constantly robbed and fought each other. By 1800, it was an economically thriving section of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and a huge contributor to modern thought on many levels. The subtitle on the front jacket of the book expansively portrays its contents as: “The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It”.

A key event which helped launch this flowering was an economic one. The 1690’s were an unusually cold decade, leading to famine and poverty in the more northern European countries like Scotland. Scottish trade and industry were constricted by the policies of England, their more powerful neighbor to the south. Other nations of Western Europe in the 1600’s had colonies in the Americas, which seemed to be a source of national wealth and influence. Scotland tried to found her own colony, called Darien, on the coast of the Isthmus of Panama. A huge fraction of the wealth of Scotland was invested in this venture. It failed, for various reasons, which was an economic disaster for the country.

This led to a willingness on the part of the Scottish elite to surrender their independence in return for the chance to participate in commerce on the same terms as the English and under the protection of the Royal Navy. An Act of Union between the two kingdoms was approved in 1707. This led to a rise in prosperity and helped set in motion various influences of modernization.

A lively intellectual life in the burgeoning cities of the Scottish lowlands put Scotland at the forefront of the 18th century enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment was more practical and aligned with common sense than was the Enlightenment of the French philosophes.  David Hume and Adam Smith are just two of the significant Scottish thinkers of this era. The works of Hume and of Smith (e.g. The Wealth of Nations) are still required reading today in the fields of philosophy and of economics.

Scots likewise made great contributions to science and technology. Today we measure power in terms of “watts”, a tribute to James Watt, whose improvements to steam engines made them finally practical for widespread use. We drive on “macadam” roads, initially developed by John McAdam.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World weaves all these themes together, going into enough detail with key actors to make them come alive as real persons. Since there are so many books and so little time, I rarely go back and reread a book. Also, I ruthlessly pruned my collection as part of our recent household interstate move. But I have found myself picking up this volume from time to time, and so it survived the cut. I recommend it as an entertaining and enlightening read.