NewGeography.com blogs

The big news in finance this week is that Goldman Sachs got busted – finally – for fraud related to those mortgage-backed bonds. At the heart of the Securities and Exchange Commission charges is the accusation that Goldman Sachs failed to disclose conflicts of interest it had on some mortgage investments. One of the charges that Michael Milken plead guilty to in the 1980s was the failure to disclose. “This type of non-disclosure has [not since] been the subject of a criminal prosecution,” according to his website. The charges against Goldman are for civil fraud. The difference between civil and criminal cases is that civil cases are usually disagreements between private parties; criminal cases are considered to be harmful to society as a whole. The judge in the Milken case found that his failure to disclose resulted in $318,082 of financial damage. The SEC is charging that Goldman’s failure to disclose resulted in a $1 billion loss to investors. The former resulted in criminal charges, the later in civil. One has to wonder, given Milken’s 10-year sentence for a relatively small dollar-valued infraction, what would be appropriate in this case.

The only criminal case related to the financial crisis that has been brought against any Wall Street executive so far was against two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers. They were found not guilty in November of “falsely inflating the value of their portfolios.” Theirs was a crime of commission not omission – they were charged with actively lying to investors and not with failing to disclose information. The closest situation that might result in criminal fraud charges for failure to disclose will be if the Justice Department pursues charges against Joseph Cassano, the AIG accountant who failed to disclose information about the magnitude of the losses AIG had insured. Federal prosecutors have been investigating this since at least April 2009 – information about investigations is not made public, including if the investigation has been dropped, so we don’t know for sure that there aren’t charges in the pipeline.

All this Wall Street activity that resulted in the US taxpayers forking over $3.8 trillion in bailout money – it’s really hard to imagine that some good-guy-with-a- badge somewhere can’t figure out who harmed our society as a whole.

There are few downtown areas in the nation that are more attractive than Seattle. Downtown Seattle is a dream of spontaneous order and a fascinating place well worth exploring. It is one of the nation's great walkable downtown areas, with a mixture of older and newer buildings, hills, Ivars Acres of Clams and the Chief Seattle fire boat on Elliot Bay, Pioneer Square, the Pike Place Market (itself the home of the first Starbuck's coffee) and a hyper-dense 100,000 jobs per square mile.

Downtown boasts the L. C. Smith Tower, which from 1914 to 1966 was the tallest office tower in the west, at 42 floors and nearly 500 feet. Now Smith Tower ranks no better than 35th tallest downtown. Seattle has built so aggressively that a visitor to the observation deck would see more looking up than down. Smith Tower is dwarfed by a skyline containing some of the nation's most impressive office architecture, such as Columbia Center and the Washington Mutual Building, which was named for the subprime mortgage lending champion.

Downtown has many more historic landmarks, such as the Olympic Hotel and the Washington Athletic Club. The art-deco Northern Life Tower was the second tallest until the building boom of the 1960s and would have been the pride of more downtown areas than not. The 1970s Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson federal building is a rare gem of its age, while the Rainier Bank Building is perched on a tapered base that begs the question as to whether it will collapse before the Alaskan Way Viaduct in the great Cascadian subduction zone earthquake (which is due to strike sometime between now and the end of time).

The Condominium Bust: Downtown Seattle has experienced one of the nation's strongest central city condominium booms, though its success (and that of others) has long been drowned out by the high pitched chorus of the Portland missionary society. As in Portland, Atlanta, San Diego, Los Angeles and other newly resurgent downtown areas, Seattle's condominium boom is now a bust as resembling that of a subprime-baby remote desert exurb halfway between San Bernardino and Las Vegas. Even so, the condominium neighborhoods of downtown Seattle are more attractive than what they replaced. Eventually, the large inventory of empty units will be sold or converted into rental units.

The Office Bust: Downtown's condominium bust has spread to its office market as well. The vacancy rate is now over 20%.

The Employment Bust: Data from the Puget Sound Regional Council of Governments (PSRG) indicates the depth of the problem. From 2000 to 2009, employment in the downtown core declined more than 12%, with a loss of 20,000 jobs. But it would be a mistake to conclude that downtown Seattle's employment decline stems from the Great Recession. The losses occurred before. In 2007, the last year before the recession, employment had fallen nearly 18,000 from 2000.

Downtown Seattle's employment decline mirrors trends around the nation and around the world. Now, downtown Seattle accounts for only 8.4% of employment in the four county area, something that would surprise an airline passenger looking at its verticalness from above.

The balance of the city of Seattle has done somewhat better, having lost 3% of its employment since 2000.

Suburban Job Ascendancy: All of the employment growth in the Seattle area has been in the suburbs. While the city, including downtown, was losing nearly 30,000 jobs, the suburbs of King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap counties added 90,000 jobs (Table). Suburban Redmond, home of Microsoft, added 19,000 jobs all by itself. Even Tacoma, the old second central city and long since defeated challenger to Seattle added a modest number of jobs between 2000 and 2009.

If You Built it, They Must be Going: With these trends, it might be expected that local transportation agencies would be rushing to provide sufficient infrastructure to the growing suburbs. Not so. Planners are scurrying about to build one of the nation's most expensive light rail systems with lines converging on downtown, to feed 20,000 fewer jobs today and perhaps 30,000 or 40,000 fewer in the future. Perhaps this is the train "got a whole city moving again" as the television commercials put it?

What about growing Redmond? It's on the map. The line is scheduled to reach Redmond sometime between now and the end of time.

There was a popular book in 1973 – A Random Walk Down Wall Street. (by Burton Malkiel, now in its 9th edition, 2007) – that pooh-pooh’ed the idea that one investor’s stock picks could always be better than another investor’s stock picks. The punch line is that you could randomly throw darts at the Wall Street Journal financial pages and do just as well as anyone else investing in the stock market. I first read it in 1980, while taking Investment 101 in business school at night and editing economic research documents for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco during the day. I had a very memorable argument with John P. Judd, then senior research economist and more recently special advisor to the Bank president and CEO Janet Yellen.

John thought the Wall Street brokers were crazy for thinking they could make more than average returns on investment. I thought the Federal Reserve was crazy for thinking they could control the money supply. John was already a PhD economist; I was still working on my Bachelor degree in business administration.

Twenty years later I also have a PhD in economics, but there are still two camps pulling in different directions in their dangerous tug-of-war on the economy. There are the double-dip pessimists led by Yale Economist Bob Shiller and most recently discouraged by Paul Ferrell of MarketWatch. And there are the “Mad Money” optimists who believe that Jim Cramer will tell them everything they need to know to get and stay rich, while Ben Bernanke consoles them with sound bites like “increased optimism among consumers … should aid the recovery.”

At the heart of the problem is the same, original argument I had with John Judd – “is there a way to beat the averages” – except that this time around Wall Street is in bed with the Federal Reserve. You can no longer tell the crazies apart.

Which brings me back to the Random Walk. If Wall Street has their way, they will inflate the market just enough to induce you to put your money back in. Don’t forget the Weenie Roast of 2008. If the government – either Congress or Treasury or the Federal Reserve – has their way, they will let it crash again, too. Don’t forget that it was only Wall Street that got bailed out the last time. I think the chances are 50-50 either way.

Queensland might be thought of as the Florida of Australia. Like Florida, Queensland is the "Sunshine state." For years, Queensland has been the fastest growing state in the nation, just as Florida has been the fastest growing large state in the United States. The Gold Coast in Southeast Queensland might be characterized as Miami Beach on steroids.

Both states have also faced housing difficulties. With its smart growth land rationing policies, house prices escalated wildly in Florida and then collapsed as America's "drunken sailor" lending policies came home to roost. Queensland has had similar "urban consolidation" land rationing policies and the same house price escalation has occurred. However, the price bust did not follow, because lending standards were more strict. This is because adults were in charge of finance in Australia instead of the cartoon characters that drove policy in the United States. Australian lenders at least asked borrowers if they had a job and checked their pulse.

But there are still housing problems in Queensland. The Urban Development Institute of Australia Queensland has just released its two Richardson reports that, among other things, suggest that restrictions on housing are increasing household sizes. In recent years, only one new house has been produced for each new resident, which compares to an average household size of 2.5. Presumably younger people are living longer with their parents and perhaps, with the strong foreign immigration to Australia, there is substantial "doubling up," as houses are shared by people who would not otherwise live together, such as multiple families (internationally, census authorities define a household as all of the people living in a single house).

Median lot prices and median house prices have risen strongly in Queensland, which has led to a decline in housing construction and a loss of construction jobs. The report recommends allowing more housing development on greenfield sites and developing additional infrastructure on the urban fringe where more housing would be developed. Finally, the report urges that the state establish benchmarks for the time it takes to approve and build greenfield developments.

The Richardson reports are just another indication that the severity of the housing crisis and its causes is more broadly understood in Australia. Queensland would do well to follow its recommendations.

Photo: Gold Coast

In a city notorious for its vast gap between rich and poor and the involvement of children in gang activity and drug trafficking, a music school is providing an opportunity for the young people of the favelas to put their energies to better use in performing for themselves and their communities. The school's band has now toured the world and received visits from heads of state. This documentary tells the story of Sao Paulo's Meninos Do Morumbi and how it has affected the lives of its students.