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Saturday, March 06, 2004

More on the 2.4 trillion dollar sure thing.
Brad notes that John Quiggen says the S-word.

Actually Brad et al said the S word a while ago discussing open market operations in the stock market in
J. Bradford De Long, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1989) "The Size and incidence of the Losses From Noise Trading," Journal of Finance vol 44 pp 681-96 (July 1989).

Now one problem with the SSTF making a killing investing in stock is that massive purchases would drive up prices eliminating the puzzling premium, that is, driving the stock premium down to a reasonable level for a representative agent or a deep pockets long lived agent like the SSTF. In particular jumps in stock prices when the plan is unsecretly discussed, proposed and passed by congress would give windfall capital gains to investors. Uncertainty about the plans prospects would add risk.

I think there should be a simple way to deal with this. bundle the plan to buy a lot of stock with a plan to penalize stock relative to bonds. This way the combined policy would have (roughly) no effect on stock prices.

So we would need a way to penalize stock relative to bonds. How about double taxation of dividends ?
Works for me.

Ah from Feldstein to creeping socialism aided by reintroducing double taxation of dividends in less than 10 posts.

Not to mention from "the Lindsey Feldstein,Samwick plan to "Clinton's proposed diversification of the social security fund".

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