Category Archives: Uncategorized

Anemic Growth and Why Only Non-Fed Policy Can Boost It

October 15, 2012 ,

The central economic problem — one that exacerbates all our other serious challenges, from debt to entitlements to persistently low employment — is a sluggish rate of economic growth. Worse than sluggish, really. At less than 2% per annum real growth, the economy is barely limping along. We are growing at perhaps just a third or a fourth the speed (or worse!) compared to previous recoveries from recessions of similar severity.

One school of thought, however, says that there’s not much we can do about it. The nature of the panic — with housing and financial institutions at its core — makes stagnation all but certain. Nonsense, says John Taylor of Stanford, in this new video (part 2 of 3) hosted by the Hoover Institution’s Russ Roberts:

In the next video, Yale’s Robert Shiller reinforces the point about housing. The author of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index questions whether the Fed can reflate home prices with “one button” and whether its zero-rates-forever policy might not do more harm than good. It’s more about “animal spirits,” Shiller says, which means housing is more a function of economic growth than growth is a function of housing.

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged: , , ,

Possible progress on spectrum expansion

September 25, 2012 ,

For years we’ve been highlighting the need for policies that encourage communications infrastructure investment. Fiber, cell towers, data centers — these are the foundation of our growing digital economy, the tools of which are increasingly integral components of every business in every industry. One of the most crucial inputs that makes the digital economy go, however, is invisible. It’s wireless spectrum, and today we don’t have the right spectrum allocation to ensure continued wireless growth and innovation.

So it was good news to hear that former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein is the new CEO of the Personal Communications Industry Association, also known as the “Wireless Infrastructure Association.” The companies he will represent are the mobile service providers, cell tower operators, and associated service companies that build these often unseen networks.

“The ultimate goal for consumers and the economy is to accommodate the need for more wireless data,” Adelstein told Communications Daily.  “More spectrum is sort of the effective means for getting there . . . As more spectrum comes online it will ultimately require new infrastructure to accomplish the goal of meeting the data crunch.”

This gives a boost to the prospects for better spectrum policy.

Posted in: Uncategorized

Money, Inflation, the Euro – Most of What You Hear Is Wrong

September 12, 2012 ,

Here’s a good interview with Chicago’s John Cochrane, who offers incisive contrarian views on money, inflation, “stimulus,” Greece, the euro, economic growth, and Milton Friedman’s “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” meme. I wrote about these topics here.

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged: , , , ,

The $3 trillion opportunity for 2022

August 17, 2012 ,

There’s more to life than economics, but almost nothing matters more to more people than the rate of long-term economic growth. It completely changes the life possibilities for individuals and families and determines the prospects of nations. It also happens to be the central factor in governmental budgets.

We’ve been saying for the last few years that growth is our biggest problem — but also our biggest opportunity. Faster growth would not only put Americans back to work but also help resolve budget impasses and assist in the long-overdue transformations of our entitlement programs. The current recovery, however, is worse than mediocre. It is dangerously feeble. With every passing day, we fall further behind. Investments aren’t made. Risks aren’t taken. Business ideas are shelved. Joblessness persists, and millions of Americans drop out of the labor force altogether. Continued stagnation would of course exacerbate an already dire long-term unemployment problem. It would also, however, turn America’s unattractive habitual overspending into a possible catastrophe of debt.

John Cochrane of the University of Chicago shows, in the chart below, just how far we’ve slipped from our historical growth path. The red line is the 1965-2007 trend line growth of 3.07%, and the thin black line shows the recession and weak recovery.

Recessions are of course downward deviations from a trend line of growth. Trendlines, however, include recessions, and recoveries thus usually exhibit faster-than-trend growth that catches up to trend. To be sure, trends may not continue forever. Historical performance, as they say, is not a guarantee of future results. Perhaps structural factors in the U.S. and world economies have lowered our “potential” growth rate. This possibility is shown in the blue “CBO Potential” line, which depicts the “new normal” of diminished expectations. Yet the current recovery cannot even catch up to this anemic trend line, which supposedly reflects the downgraded potential of the U.S. economy.

Here is another way to visualize today’s stagnation, from Scott Grannis:

Economies are built on expectations. If the “new normal” of 2.35% growth is correct, then we’ve got problems. All our individual, family, business, and government plans will have to downshift. If growth is even lower than that, tomorrow’s problems will tower over today’s. If, on the other hand, we can reignite the American growth engine, then we’ve got a shot to not only reverse today’s decline but also to open the door to a new era of renewed optimism and, yes, rising expectations.

Faster compounding growth over time makes all the difference. One new paper shows how, with a fundamentally new policy direction on taxes and regulation, real GDP in the U.S. could be “between $2.1 and $3.1 trillion higher in 2022 than it would be under a continuation of current slow growth.” Think of that — an American economy perhaps trillions of dollars larger in a single year a decade from now, with better pro-growth policies. That’s a lot of jobs, a lot of higher incomes, a lot of new businesses, and — whether your preference is more or less government spending — much healthier government budgets . . . summed up in one last chart.

Posted in: Uncategorized

The Who-What-Where-Why-How of Economic Growth

July 24, 2012 ,

In all the recent debates over deficits, debt, unemployment, entitlements, bond markets, the euro, housing, etc., the absolutely central factor has too often been ignored. A new book, however, deals with nothing but this central factor — economic growth. If we’re going to improve the economic discussion, and the economy itself, The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs is likely to serve as a good foundation.

The book contains chapters by five Nobel economists, including the modern dean of economic growth Robert Lucas, Ed Prescott on marginal tax rates, and Myron Scholes on true innovation; also Bob Litan on “home run” start-up firms, Nick Schulz on intangible assets, David Malpass on monetary policy, and others on entrepreneurs, immigration, debt, and budgets.

I’ve only skimmed many of the chapters, but one thing that jumped out is an important point about the links, and distinctions, between supply and demand. When economic growth has been discussed these last few years, the cause/cure usually cited is a drop in aggregate demand and the “stimulus” measures needed to boost it. It’s of course true that the housing bust and banking troubles caused lots of deleveraging and that government spending and interest rate cuts may help tide over certain consumers and businesses during temporary tough times. Despite substantial Keynesian fiscal and monetary “stimulus,” however — wild deficit spending, four years of zero-interest-rates, and a tripling of the Fed’s balance sheet — businesses, consumers, and the economy-at-large have not responded as hoped. Even if you believe in the efficacy of short term Keynesian growth policies, you ignore at great forecasting peril the array of countervailing anti-growth policies.

Here is how I put it in a Forbes online column last December:

the real problem with demand is supply. Consumption is partly based on current income and needs, sure, but more importantly it is a function of the expected future. Milton Friedman’s version of this idea was the permanent income hypothesis. More generally, we might ask, what are the prospects for prosperity?

We live in a complex, uncertain world. But it’s not unreasonable to believe, even after the Great Recession, that America and the globe still have prodigious potential to create new wealth. It’s also not unreasonable to believe that Washington has severely impaired America’s innovative capacity and our ability to grow.

If you think ObamaCare reinforces and expands many of the worst features of our overpriced, government-heavy health system, then you worry we might not get the productivity revolution we need in one of the largest sectors of our economy. If you think Dodd-Frank and other post-crisis ideas will discourage true financial innovation while preserving “too big to fail,”  then you worry more financial disruptions are in store. If you think tax rates on capital and entrepreneurship are going up, then you might downgrade your estimates of the amount of investment and dynamism — and thus good jobs — America will enjoy.

A downgrade of expected long term growth impairs growth today.

In the new book, Lucas makes a similar argument:

imagine that households and businesses were somehow convinced that the United States would soon move toward a European-level welfare state, financed by a European tax structure. These beliefs would naturally be translated into beliefs that labor costs would soon increase and returns on investment decrease. Beliefs of a future GDP reduction of 30% would be brought forward into the present even before these beliefs could be realized (or refuted).

This is just hypothetical, of course, but it is a hypothesis that is entirely consistent with the way that we know economies work, everyone basing current decisions on expectations about future returns. What I have called recovery growth has happened after previous U.S. recessions and depressions and is certainly a worthy and attainable objective for economic policy today, but it would be foolish to take it as a foregone conclusion.

In the next chapter, Ed Prescott reinforces the point:

what people expect policies to be in the future determines what happens now. Bad policies can and often do depress the economy even before they are implemented. Peoples actions now depend on what they think policy will be — not what it was.

. . .

The disturbing fact is that, as of the beginning of 2012, the economy has not even partially recovered from the this recession. When it will recover is a political question and not an economic question. Only if the Americans making personal economic decisions knew what future policy would be could economists predict when recovery would occur.

This is one reason long term growth policies are often more important, even in the short term, than most short term “growth” policies.

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged:

U.S. Internet Growth – Another Way to Visualize

February 27, 2012 ,

We’ve published a lot of linear and log-scale line charts of Internet traffic growth. Here’s just another way to visualize what’s been happening since 1990. The first image shows 1990-2004.

The second image scales down the first to make room for the next period.

The third image, using the same scale as image 2, shows 2005-2011.

These images use data compiled by MINTS, with our own further analysis and estimations. Other estimates from Cisco and Arbor/Labovitz — and our own analysis based on those studies — show even higher traffic levels, though roughly similar growth rates.

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged:

R.H. Stands for Regulatory Hubris

February 1, 2012 ,

“It is the single worst telecom bill that I have ever seen.”

— Reed Hundt, Jan. 31, 2012

Isn’t this rich?

One of the most zealous regulators America has known says Congress is overstepping its bounds because it wants to unleash lots of new wireless spectrum but also wants to erect a few guardrails so that FCC regulators don’t run roughshod over the booming mobile broadband market.

At a New America Foundation event yesterday, former FCC chairman Reed Hundt said Congress shouldn’t micromanage the FCC’s ability to micromanage the wireless industry. Mr. Congressman, you don’t know anything about how the FCC should regulate the Internet. But the FCC does know how to build networks, run mobile Internet businesses, and perfectly structure a wildly tumultuous economic sector. It’s just the latest remarkable example of the growing hubris of the regulatory state.

In his book, You Say You Want a Revolution, Hundt famously recounted his staff’s interpretation and implementation of the 1996 Telecom Act.

The passage of the new law placed me on a far more public stage. But I felt Congress — in the constitutional sense — had asked me to exercise the full power of all ideas I could summon. And I believed that I and my team had learned, through many failures, how to succeed. Later, I realized that we knew almost nothing of the complexity and importance of the tasks in front of the FCC.

…

Meeting in several overlapping groups of about a dozen people each . . . we dedicated almost three weeks to studying the possible readings of each word in the 150-page statute. The conference committee compromises had produced a mountain of ambiguity that was generally tilted toward the local phone companies’ advantage. But under the principles of statutory interpretation, we had broad authority to exercise our discretion in writing the implementing regulations. Indeed, like the modern engineers trying to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa, we could aspire to provide the new entrants to the local telephone markets a fairer chance to compete than they might find in any explicit provision of the law. In addition, the law gave almost no guidance about how to treat the Internet, data networks, . . . and many other critical issues. (Three years later, Justice Antonin Scalia agreed, on behalf of the Supreme Court, that the law was profoundly ambiguous.)

…

The more my team studied the law, the more we realized our decisions could determine the winners and losers of the new economy. We did not want to confer advantage on particular companies; that seemed inequitable. But inevitably

wink, wink,

a decision that promoted entry into the local market would benefit a company that followed such a strategy.

There are so many angles here.

(1) Hundt says he and his team basically stretched the statute to mean whatever they wanted. The law may have been ambiguous — and it was, I’m not going to defend the ’96 Act — yet the Supreme Court still found in a series of early-2000s cases that Hundt’s FCC had wildly overstepped even these flimsy bounds. That’s how aggressive and unconstrained Hundt was.

(2) Hundt’s rules helped crash the tech and telecom sectors in 2000-2002. His rules were so complex and intrusive that, whatever your views about the CLEC wars, the PCS C block spectrum debacle, and other battles, it’s hard to deny that the paralysis caused by the rules hurt broadband and the nascent Net.

(3) Is it surprising that, given the FCC’s poor record of reaching way past its granted powers, some in Congress want to circumscribe FCC regulators by giving them less-than-omnipotent authority? Is the new view of elite regulators that Congress should pass laws, the full text of which might read: “§1. Congress grants to the Internet Agency the authority to regulate the Internet. Go forth and regulate.”

(4) On the other hand, it’s not clear why Hundt would care particularly what Congress says in any new spectrum statute. He didn’t care much for the words or intent of the ’96 Act, and he thinks regulators should “aspire” to grand self-appointed projects. Who knows, maybe all those Supreme Court smack downs in the early 2000s made an impression.

(5) Hundt says he and his team later realized, in effect, how naive they were about “the complexity and importance of the tasks in front of the FCC.” So he’s acknowledging after things didn’t go so well that his FCC underestimated the complexity and thus overestimated their own expertise . . . yet he says today’s FCC deserves comprehensive power to structure the mobile Internet as it sees fit?

(6) Hundt admitted his FCC relished its capacity to pick winners and losers. Not particular companies, mind you — that would be improper — merely the types of companies who win and lose. A distinction without very much of a difference.

(7) We don’t argue that Congress, instead of the FCC, should impose intrusive regulation through statute. We don’t advocate long and complex laws. That’s not the point. Laws should be clear and simple, but stating the boundaries of a regulator’s authority is not a controversial act. No one should be imposing intrusive regulation or overdetermining the structure of an industry. And that’s what Congress — perhaps in a rare case! — is protecting against here.

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged: , ,

Roam, roam on the range. Will Washington’s new intrusions discourage wireless expansion?

January 26, 2012 ,

The U.S. wireless sector has been only mildly regulated over the last decade. We’d argue this is a key reason for its success. But this presumption of mostly unfettered experimentation and dynamism may be changing.

Consider Sprint’s apparent decision to use “roaming” in Oklahoma and Kansas instead of building its own network. Now, roaming is a standard feature of mobile networks worldwide. Company A might not have as much capacity as it would like in some geography, so it pays company B, who does have capacity there, for access. Company A’s customers therefore get wider coverage, and Company B is paid for use of its network.

The problem comes with the FCC’s 2011 “digital roaming” order. Last spring three FCC commissioners decided that private mobile services — which the Communications Act says “shall not . . . be treated as a common carrier” — are a common carrier. Only D.C. lawyers smarter than you and me can figure out how to transfigure “shall not” into “may.” Anyway, the possible effect is to subject mobile data — one of the fastest growing sectors anywhere on earth — to all sorts of forced access mandates and price controls.

We warned here and here that turning competitive broadband infrastructure into a “common carrier” could discourage all players in the market from building more capacity and covering wider geographies. If company A can piggyback on company B’s network at below market rates, why would it build its own expensive network? And if company B’s network capacity is going to company A’s customers, instead of its own customers, do we think company B is likely to build yet more cell sites and purchase more spectrum?

With 37 million iPhones and 15million iPads sold last quarter, we need more spectrum, more cell towers, more capacity. This isn’t the way to get it. And what we are seeing with Sprint’s decision to roam instead of build in Oklahoma and Kansas may be the tip of this anti-investment iceberg.

Last spring when the data roaming order came down we began wondering about a possible “slow walk to a reregulated communications market.” Among other items, we cited net neutrality, possible new price controls for Special Access links to cell sites, and a host of proposed regulations affecting things like behavioral advertising and intellectual property (see, PIPA/SOPA). Since then we’ve seen the government block the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. And the FCC is now holding up its own important push for more wireless spectrum because it wants the right to micromanage who gets what spectrum and how mobile carriers can use it.

Many of these items can be thoughtfully debated. But the number of new encroachments onto the communications sector threatens to slow its growth. Many of these encroachments, moreover, are taking place outside any basic legislative authority. In the digital roaming and net neutrality cases, for example, the FCC appeared clearly to grant itself extra- if not il-legal authority. These new regulations are now being challenged in court.

We need some restraint across the board on these matters. The Internet is too important. We can’t allow a quiet, gradual reregulation of the sector to slow down our chief engine of economic growth.

— Bret Swanson

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged: , , , ,

Quote of the Day

January 17, 2012 ,

“One solution is giving back to bank creditors the job of policing bank risk-taking. Roll back deposit insurance, for instance. We may not be able to see the future, but we can incentivize caution as a general matter. And we can improve the odds that, when banks make mistakes, they won’t all make the same mistake at the same time.”

— Holman Jenkins, The Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2011

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged: , ,

Quote of the Day

December 23, 2011 ,

“If the Greeks had skimped on the olive oil in a liter bottle, that wouldn’t threaten the metric system.”

— John Cochrane, Bloomberg View, December 21, 2011

Posted in: Uncategorized

Another blow to U.S. economic growth

December 20, 2011 ,

More bad news for U.S. economic growth. In the face of multiplying obstacles deployed by Washington regulators, AT&T today abandoned its pursuit of T-Mobile. The most important outcome of the merger would have been a quicker and broader roll-out of 4G mobile broadband services. Now AT&T will have to find other paths to the wireless radio spectrum (and cell towers) it needs to meet growing demand and build tomorrow’s networks. T-Mobile is left in purgatory, short of the spectrum and long-term financial wherewithal to effectively compete.

Some say, don’t worry, assuming that another U.S. mobile provider will pick up T-Mobile. Not so fast. If Washington disallowed AT&T, it would do the same for Verizon. Sprint was pursuing T-Mobile before AT&T swooped in, but a Sprint-TMo combo makes much less sense. The spectrum-technology-tower infrastructure positions of AT&T and TMo were almost perfectly complementary. Not so for Sprint, who uses mostly higher frequencies, has always been a CDMA company (as opposed to WCDMA), and is already finding it challenging to raise the funds to build its own LTE network, given rocky times with partner Clearwire.

The U.S. mobile industry has been a shining star in an otherwise dark U.S. economy. But with Washington nixing the AT&T- T-Mobile merger, and given recent struggles at Clearwire and engineering disputes with upstart LightSquared, it’s not clear mobile will continue on its steep ascent. The FCC “staff report” opposing the AT&T-TMo deal didn’t even address the elephant in the room – spectrum. It’s odd. The FCC declared a spectrum crisis two years ago and repeatedly emphasized the urgent need for broadband expansion. Then, poof, not hardly a mention of either in its report. Not a good sign when the expert agency has taken its eye off the ball.

The industry is still full of potential, but there will be near-term disruptions as companies sort out new spectrum, business, and technology strategies. And as millions of un- and underemployed Americans know, time is money. Regulatory impediments and foot-dragging are especially harmful – and even infuriating – for an industry that desperately wants to grow. For an industry that is in many ways the bedrock of the 21st century American knowledge economy.

Beyond the disquieting roller-coaster in the mobile industry, one wonders more broadly about the American economy. Just what kind of business are we allowed to conduct? What investments are preferred – by whom? How far will the tilt of decision-making from private entities to public bureaucracies go?

— Bret Swanson

Posted in: Uncategorized

What Mobile, Video, Big Data, and Cloud mean for network traffic

November 21, 2011 ,

See our new report “Into the Exacloud” . . . including analysis of:

> Why cloud computing requires a major expansion of wireless spectrum and investment

> An exaflood update: what Mobile, Video, Big Data, and Cloud mean for network traffic

> Plus, a new paradigm for online games, Web video, and cloud software


Posted in: Uncategorized

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

October 6, 2011 ,

Posted in: Uncategorized

Damming the Digital River: Netflix, Spectrum, and Info Dynamism

September 20, 2011 ,

After the decision to separate its online streaming and DVD-in-the mail services, Wall St. Cheat Sheet asked, “Is Netflix the new Research In Motion?”

Translation: Will Netflix be just the latest technology titan to suffer a parabolic plunge? We don’t know ourselves. Netflix’s streaming-DVD split is a reaction to the overwhelming popularity of its streaming service. CEO Reed Hastings is trying to avoid complacency and stay ahead of the curve. Maybe he is panicking. Maybe he’s a genius. But that is just the point: the digital curve these days is shifting and steepening faster than ever.

Which makes the government’s attempted damming of this digital river all the more harmful. Wireless spectrum is a central resource in the digital economy, and a chief enabler of services like Netflix. Yet Washington hogs the best airwaves – at last count the government owned 61%, the mobile service providers just 10%. So AT&T, its pipes bursting with iPhone and iPad traffic, tries to add capacity by merging with T-Mobile. Nope. The Department of Justice won’t allow that either.

Something, however, has got to give. New data from wireless infrastructure maker Ericsson shows that mobile data traffic jumped 130% in the first quarter of 2011 from 2010. Just four years ago, mobile data traffic was perhaps 1/15th of mobile voice traffic. Today, mobile data is likely three times voice. Credit Suisse, meanwhile, reports that U.S. mobile networks are running at 80% of capacity, meaning many network nodes are tapped out.

More mobile traffic drivers are on the way, like mass adoption of video chat apps and Apple’s imminent iCloud service. iCloud will create an environment of pervasive computing, where all your computers and devices are in continuous communication, integrating your digital life through a virtual presence in the cloud. No doubt too, software app downloads and the rich content they unleash will only grow. As of July, 425,000 distinct Apple apps had been downloaded 15 billion times on 200 million devices. The Android ecosystem of devices and apps has been growing even faster.

Perhaps the iCloud service in particular won’t succeed, but no doubt others like it will, not to mention all the apps and services we haven’t thought of. We do know that more bandwidth and connectivity will encourage more new ideas, and thus more traffic. In all, IDC estimates that by 2015 we will create or replicate around 8 zettabytes (8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of new data each year.

Big Data, in turn, will yield large economic benefits, from medical research to retail. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that Big Data – the sophisticated exploitation of large sets of fine-grained information – could boost annual economic value in the U.S. health care sector by $300 billion. McKinsey thinks personal geolocation services could expand annual consumer surplus by $600 billion globally.

The wide array of Big Data techniques and services is crucially dependent on robust and capacious networks.  U.S. service providers invested $26 billion in 2010 – and $232 billion over the last decade – on wireless infrastructure alone. Total info-tech investment in the U.S. last year was $488 billion. We’ll need more of the same to spur and accommodate Big Data, Cloud, Mobile, Netflix, and the rest. But without more spectrum, the whole enterprise of building the digital infrastructure could slow.

Picocells and femtocells – smaller network nodes that cover less area – can effectively expand capacity for some users by reusing existing wireless spectrum. These mini cells work together as HetNets (heterogeneous networks) and will be a central feature in the next decade of wireless expansion. But the new 4G mobile standard, called LTE, gets the biggest bang for the buck in wider spectrum bands. LTE also is by far the most powerful and flexible standard to manage the complexities and unlock the big potential of HetNets. So we see a virtuous complementarity: more, better spectrum will boost spectrum reuse efficiencies. In other words, spectrum reuse and more spectrum are not either-or alternatives but are mutually helpful and reinforcing.

We don’t know whether the new Netflix strategy will fly, whether iCloud will succeed, how HetNets will evolve, or exactly what the mobile ecosystem will look like. But in such an arena, we do know that maximum flexibility – and LOTS more spectrum – will give a beneficial tilt toward innovation and growth.

— Bret Swanson

Posted in: Uncategorized

Gross or Net Jobs on the Mobile Net?

September 1, 2011 ,

A paper out today challenges the assertion that the AT&T-T-Mobile merger will create jobs. AT&T has said it would invest an additional $8 billion in wireless network infrastructure, above and beyond its usual $8-10 billion per year, and the Economic Policy Institute estimated this would result in between 55,000 and 96,000 job-years. The Communication Workers of America has cited the EPI study as one reason it supports the mobile union.

In a study prepared for Sprint, however, professor David Neumark says the EPI estimate fails to account for the fact that T-Mobile will no longer be investing its normal couple billion dollars per year after it is subsumed by AT&T. He says EPI is only looking at AT&T’s gross increase, not the net industry effect. He thinks the net effect will be negative and will thus cost jobs.

This is a fair point. We should analyze these things in as dynamic and realistic a way as possible. But the Sprint study appears to be relying on its own static, simplistic view of the world. Namely, it assumes an independent T-Mobile would keep investing billions a year on network infrastructure. Even though T-Mobile says it has neither the spectrum nor the financial resources from its parent Deutche Telekom to continue as an effective competitor in the highly dynamic mobile market where companies must constantly upgrade their networks to exploit all the good stuff offered by Moore’s law. In other words, it’s unlikely T-Mobile will continue investing several billion per year as a stand-alone company.

Another point that needs clarification: Some smart people think the AT&T estimate of $8 billion in additional capex is specific to the merger — connecting the two networks, expanding LTE beyond its previous plans, etc. But if these people are right, it’s still the case that AT&T will have to adopt at least some portion of network upgrades and maintenance that T-Mobile does every day on its own network. So AT&T’s capex spend is likely to go up beyond this additional $8 billion. In a merger scenario, therefore, not all, perhaps not even most, of the existing T-Mobile network investment “goes away.”

Another scenario in which a non-AT&T carrier acquired T-Mobile would result in whatever similar loss of T-Mobile specific investment that Sprint claims under the AT&T-T-Mobile scenario. But it doesn’t account for this possibility either.

So it seems the new Neumark-Sprint analysis also is not really a net estimate, just another form of gross estimate.

Ultimately, no one knows exactly what will happen in an ever-changing economy in our ever-changing world. But it is pretty safe to say that a healthy, growing, vibrant mobile industry will support more sustainable jobs than an unhealthy industry. The Sprint paper correctly acknowledges that efficiencies from mergers can result in all sorts of economic welfare gains, both for consumers and for workers who move into higher-value jobs.

A stand-alone T-Mobile is not a healthy company, and without T-Mobile, AT&T, although healthy, doesn’t have the spectrum or cell towers it needs to match current growth and fuel new growth. The proposed merger would result in a major supplier of next gen 4G broadband mobile services across most of the U.S. The benefits of this go far beyond the capex it takes to build the network (though very important) and extend to every citizen and industry that will enjoy ubiquitous go-anywhere broadband. These jobs created across the economy are incalculable but are likely to be substantial.

Posted in: Uncategorized

The DoJ Anti-Jobs Division

August 31, 2011 ,

Where to begin. The economy is still in the doldrums some three years after an historic crash, the Administration is having a tough time boosting output and job growth, and so its Justice Department thinks it would be a good idea to discourage one of the nation’s biggest investors and employers from building yet more high-tech infrastructure in a sector of the economy that is manifestly healthy and which serves as a productivity platform for the rest of the economy.

It’s hard to believe, but that’s exactly what’s happening with the DoJ’s attempt to block AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile.

AT&T wants T-Mobile’s wireless spectrum and compatible cell-tower infrastructure so it can more quickly roll out next generation 4G mobile broadband services. It can’t wait for much needed spectrum auctions that will hopefully occur over the next several years. Meanwhile, T-Mobile doesn’t have the spectrum or financial wherewithal (through its parent Deutche Telekom) to build its own 4G network. Perfect fit, right? Join forces to rapidly deploy new network capacity and coverage for the next iteration of iPads, Androids, Thunderbolts, Galaxy Tabs, and broadband everywhere.

The Communication Workers of America union thinks the union is a good idea, estimating the merger will create 96,000 jobs. AT&T even this morning sweetened the pot by announcing – before DoJ’s surprise announcement – that on completion of the merger it would bring back 5,000 call center jobs from overseas and guarantee no job cuts for T-Mobile call center employees.

DoJ says a combination will hurt competition, but T-Mobile itself says it can’t really compete in the next generation of 4G. And DoJ ignores the fact, reported by the FCC, that 90% of the U.S. population has five or more mobile service provider choices, with brand new entrants like Clearwire, LightSquared, and Dish Network coming online and expanding every day. DoJ relies on indirect evidence of current market share to infer that bad things might happen in the future even as it ignores direct evidence of low prices, wild innovation, and widespread consumer choice in networks and devices.

This July 11 paper from economists Gerald Faulhaber, Robert Hahn, and Hal Singer really says it all.

With the economy in crisis, you’d think someone with a bit of business sense would be seeking every way to expand investment and employment, not find creative ways to quash it. Antitrust lawyers imagine themselves guardians of the public good, but there’s a big problem: they usually see the world through a rear-view mirror, wearing blinders, while experiencing tunnel vision.

Was it antitrust that saved the world from big, bad Microsoft. No, the Internet, Google, and Apple, among hundreds of other innovators, diluted Microsoft’s very temporary dominance. Did the AOL-TimeWarner merger kill competition in the online content or broadband markets? No. To remember the alarmism over that merger is to laugh. DoJ did block WorldCom’s bid for Sprint, and of course WorldCom went bankrupt. Did Verizon’s acquisition of Alltel kill innovation in the mobile market? What? Who’s Alltel?

There’s just no way a few attorneys in Washington can decree the proper organization of an industry that is so exceedingly dynamic. Meanwhile, the economy shuffles along slowly, very slowly.

— Bret Swanson

Posted in: Uncategorized

Banning Risk Is Our Biggest Risk

August 30, 2011 ,

See our new column in Forbes:

As we entered August, a time of family vacations and corporate retreats, a CEO friend, who is a director of several companies, made a darkly humorous observation. “I’m impressed,” he said. “At our upcoming retreat, the CEO is dedicating an entire day to talk about . . . the business.”

This was a break from the new normal, where management is consumed with compliance, legality, accounting, risk mitigation, and political prognostication and manipulation. Carving time out of a business retreat to talk strategy, execution, product, and sales was a welcome novelty. It also revealed a chief challenge of our times – the obsession with and aversion to risk.

Update: Steve Lohr, the excellent New York Times technology reporter, offers his own take on risk-taking through the lens of Steve Jobs. Lohr and I picked the same great quote from Jobs’ Stanford commencement address.

Posted in: Uncategorized

Broadband Bridges to Rural America

July 29, 2011 ,

A host of telecom and cable companies today announced a new plan to reform the Universal Service Fund and extend broadband further into rural America. I’ve spent years only partially understanding how USF works. Or how it doesn’t work, as seems the case. I think even in the old days, when it may have made some kind of sense, USF probably retarded investment and new technology in the areas it aimed to support. Unsubsidized potential entrants sporting new technologies couldn’t hope to compete with heavily subsidized incumbents. Even incumbents effectively couldn’t deploy newer, more efficient unsubsidized technologies. The result was probably some extension of phone service in the early days but lots of stagnation for decades after that. In today’s communications market, however, where many companies and many technologies supply many wholesale, commercial, and consumer services — and where broadband, Internet cloud, and wireless complement, compete, and overlap — USF has really broken down. Reform is long overdue, and this consensus industry plan should finally help move USF into the Internet age.

The new proposal — called America’s Broadband Connectivity Plan — also reforms the antiquated and broken Inter Carrier Compensation system, which sets the terms for traffic exchange among communications companies. In a broadband-mobile-Internet world, ICC, like USF, no longer works and is often exploited with arbitrage schemes that add no value but shuffle money via clever manipulation of the rules.

For too long wrangling and indecision between industry and government — and among industry players themselves — has delayed action. We now have a good consensus leap on the road to modernization.

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged: , ,

The Growth Imperative

May 26, 2011 ,

I’m no in-the-weeds budget expert — not even close — but it seemed to me that among all the important debates over deficits, entitlements, and debt ceilings, the biggest factor of all is being mostly ignored. That factor is the compound rate of economic growth, and I made the case for “The Growth Imperative” at a Tuesday meeting of the National Chamber Foundation Fellows. Here’s my column at Forbes. See the slides below:

Posted in: Uncategorized

Budget Blow-Out

February 20, 2011 ,

“Over the 10-year budget window, the president plans for Washington to extract $39 trillion in taxes and spend $46 trillion. The debt limit, currently $14.3 trillion, would have to grow to over $26 trillion.

“Making matters worse, these horrendous spending, taxing and debt numbers would be even grimmer if not for the budget’s rosy assumptions. The budget assumes that real growth will climb from an already wishful 4% in 2012 to 4.5% in 2013 and 4.2% in 2014 — despite plans for sweeping tax increases. The assumed GDP growth is well over any growth rate achieved in the Bush expansion. The budget also reflects the unrealistic assumption that the Federal Reserve will be able to keep interest rates very low and generate $476 billion in profits through highly leveraged financial speculation.”

— David Malpass, The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2011

Posted in: Uncategorized
« Previous Page — Next Page »