How Vail changed the economics of skiing

WSJ:

Ski resorts used to be weather-dependent businesses — essentially farmers who grew snow. Bad snow year, bad revenue. In 2008, Vail CEO Rob Katz asked a different question: what if we could sell skiing in advance, before anyone knew how good the conditions would be? The Epic Pass was the answer.

The business model is textbook: bundle access to dozens of resorts onto a single pass, price it attractively, sell it in the offseason, and collect nearly $1 billion in revenue before a single lift spins. Weather risk transfers from the firm to the customer. Cash flow becomes predictable. Vail can now plan capital investments, acquire more resorts, and grow — all without watching the sky.

The tradeoff is equally textbook. To make the pass look cheap, you make day tickets look expensive — some now top $300. That's not accidental; it's price discrimination by design, nudging committed skiers toward the bundle. The side effect is crowded slopes and squeezed independent resorts that can't compete with a bundle their customers already bought.

What happens if we raise our capital gains tax?

Senate Democrats want to raise the top federal capital gains tax rate to 35.8% — which, combined with state taxes, would hit nearly 50% for investors in California or Maryland. That would be the highest rate since 1978. For comparison:

• China has a 20% rate. 
• The European average capital gains tax is 17.9%.

The higher rate will have two effects: 

• Less investment: A higher tax on the returns to investment means that fewer US investments would have a positive NPV.
• Lock-in: since the tax only triggers when assets are sold, investors would hold appreciated assets longer than they should, freezing capital in old uses instead of letting it flow to better ones. 

BOTTOM LINE: Investment and the resulting growth double our standard of living every 40 years.  This tax would change that.    

Benefit-Cost Analysis of California's electric only mandate

Ted Stroll: The Bay Area Air Quality Management District wants to mandate electric water heaters and says it “will avoid an estimated 37 to 85 premature deaths per year.”

The Santa Clara County Association of Realtors surveyed contractors who estimated costs per home at $43,950 to $224,000. Its figures rely on replacing stoves and dryers as well as water heaters and furnaces.

Let’s pick a random lower figure and assume the Bay Area Air Quality Management District ban will cost each home $12,000. If 120,000 homes need a new water heater annually, the cost will be about $1.5 billion every year. That is a lot of money to “avoid an estimated 37 to 85 premature deaths,” assuming there’s a basis for that claim.

What could we do instead with that amount of money?

One answer would be to spend $1.5 billion annually to remediate homeless encampments. Encampment fires are ubiquitous in Santa Clara County. San José Spotlight reported in February that “over the past year thousands of non-structural fires have been sparked by homeless camps, causing toxic fumes and safety problems for people and property.”

Stroll correctly points out that the opportunity cost of the mandates is whether there are better uses for the money.

QUESTION: Why have mortgage interest rates gone up?

CalculatedRisk

CCMBS/Treasury spreads, in contrast, widened significantly last month

One reason CCMBS/Treasury spreads have widened since January is that implied and actual interest rate volatility [a measure of risk] has increased ... Below is a chart of the MOVE index, a measure of implied interest rate volatility from options on Treasury securities across the curve.

Voluntary transactions create wealth, but in Canada there are not enough of them

The Free Press quotes Carleton University economist Vivek Dehejia:

... Canada has long been “the socialist neighbor to the north—an overtaxed, overregulated, overcontrolled economy,” resulting in low productivity and weak growth. ... the prescription is straightforward: lower taxes, less spending, and deregulation.

Why are cancer patients more likely to commit crime?

Economist: "When your future may suddenly be cut short by illness, prison is less of a threat."

European Tech is growing

Economist:

Jolted by the deterioration of Europe’s relationship with America, policymakers are redoubling efforts to strengthen its technology ecosystem. At the same time, America and China have made decisions that make Europe relatively more attractive to tech workers and investors. The continent’s established tech companies, though few in number, are now nurturing a new generation of startups. ...

Europe is also getting over its reluctance to let techies make lots of money. ...Now European tech companies are giving out more options...

Mr Trump’s demand that Europe (including Ukraine) do more to defend itself is also spurring high-tech arms-making in a region that had little of it. ...

China, too, is helping inadvertently. Its model of state-directed innovation has crowded out private investment and shrunk VC spending, pushing some towards Europe.

The Rise of Prediction Markets

The idea of prediction markets may have begun as a small research tool in Iowa in the 1980s with trading volumes measured in the thousands of dollars. After a few decades, monthly dollar volume for private prediction markets had reached millions of dollars. Recently, prediction markets have hit the big time. The WSJ reports that Polymarket and Kalshi now do about $3-4 billion of volume in a month. To be sure, this is still three orders of magnitude smaller than the volume of the NYSE or NASDAQ of $2-3 trillion. But this impressive growth indicates broad acceptance. 

The idea is simple. If a contract will pay $1 if an event occurs and I think the event will occur with probability P, my expected value of owning the contract is $1 x P or $P. If it is currently trading for less (more) than $P, I can expect to make money buying (selling) the contract. With enough  potential traders, the price being quoted is "the market's" best estimate of the probability of the event. Traders' profit motives drive the price to the "the market's" expectation.

Non-traders, perhaps ignorant of how new information will affect the probability, need only look at how much the price has changed to infer what more knowledgeable individuals think of the information. Prediction markets harness "the wisdom of the crowd." The growth of these markets is an indicator of how valuable this information can be.

Economist: the world is more equal than you think.

 Economist:  

[in 2000], the rich spent about 40 times more than the poor; today the figure is closer to 18. ...

But in many countries where populist politicians lament that poor folk have been left behind, consumption gaps have more recently narrowed—suggesting that lower-income households are catching up. This has happened quickly in Spain and Greece, and also in Britain and France. Inequality can be gauged in different ways. On consumption, it’s mostly good news.■

 

If we tax the rich, ...

...they will leave, work less, and there are not enough of them to raise much money. 

The Economist: 

The “Robin Hood” state, which takes from the rich to give to the poor, has obvious appeal. Governments across the developed world are strapped for cash. Budgets are burdened by legacy debts, ageing populations and the need to spend more on defence. 

INSTEAD ...

The limited revenue-raising power of the rich is why European governments have to fund their big spending with broad-based levies, such as taxes on consumption. By contrast, America, with its low overall tax burden, can get by with one of the world’s most progressive tax systems.

Broad-based taxes do not only raise much more money. They are also politically healthier. A society where the many pay tax and benefit from spending is stronger than one where the few have to pay for the many.

BOTTOM LINE: lower rates on a broader base typically produce more tax revenue ... than high rates on a narrow base. ...

HOWEVER, if progress on artificial intelligence concentrates incomes at the top, as almost everyone in Silicon Valley expects, then the tax system will require fresh thinking:  ... we may have to figure out how to redistribute wealth without destroying too much of it.