Should the government play the markets?

A recent report from the National Audit Office found that the government could have made £750m more from the sale of Royal Mail if it had sold at the highest price the shares reached on its first day. This has led many to blame the government for selling off the family silver at the bottom of the market. Others have pointed outthat the reason for privatising Royal Mail was to subject it to the disciplines of the market, not to raise money. And that no one knows in advance what a share will be worth. Grey markets undervalued the share as well—and of course some advisers said it would rise higher, just as others said it wouldn't. Perhaps government politicking prior to the sale caused some of the problems. In any case, the value has not disappeared, it has just been distributed differently. There may be weak reasons to question the profile of the distribution (e.g. will it be spent more progressively or efficiently by government?) but realistically we're talking a small amount of the budget and bear in mind that investors who ordered more than £10,000 of shares were shut out completely. But one interesting angle is whether this is like Gordon Brown's gold "sell-off" of 1999-2002. As everyone remembers, Brown, as chancellor of the exchequer, sold off the government's gold at what turned out to be the bottom of the market, losing out on potential gains easily ten times more than available with Royal Mail. He is widely criticised for this, but I can't quite see why. I can't think of any good reason why the government should hold any assets whatsoever. On top of this, there are at least four reasons why the state should not hold any specific assets:

1. The government is not well placed to play asset markets. So there's an interesting question as to whether the government should hold net wealth. Maybe there are shocks where easy sources of income will evaporate and the government will need to instantly liquidate some assets in order to pay its normal bills, defend the country against external aggressors, enforce the law etc. This might suggest the government needs to hold net wealth. But we know that even very smart and knowledgeable fund managers with all the right incentives only consistently outperform the market due to luck. So what would make us think, outside of one issue I'll deal with later, that the government's agents, so universally derided for competence in most contexts, could succeed in this either impossible or just really really really hard task? The UK government's Royal Mail and gold holdings were vastly out of proportion to those assets' size in relation to all wealth. If the government wants to hold wealth we know that it should hold a low cost exchange-tracker, as broad-based as possible. Otherwise it will effectively be handing over taxpayer wealth to traders in the markets.

2. Playing asset markets may directly distort those markets. If governments hold given assets (e.g. Royal Mail shares or gold) then it might be because there are social welfare reasons for doing so. It's at least possible that people have the specific desire for the equity of companies to not be held privately or to be held by the state and this something worth at least factoring in. When it comes to gold then individuals might be glad the government has it as a backstop. And of course the state could just be holding these assets on behalf of its citizens, perhaps because there are economies of scale in so doing. Even if there aren't benefits to the state holding assets on behalf of citizens, individuals may take these holdings into account as if they were their own, thus causing only small inefficiencies. But I take most of these considerations to be of minuscule empirical importance. Mainly the government's holdings of assets cannot be justified by these reasons. But since the market will be influenced by their holdings, they will reduce the supply of certain sorts of assets for the market to hold, leading to price shifts and portfolio rebalancing. Since this will be away from the ideal portfolio firms would have held (I can imagine exceptions but none of them are relevant here) this reduces social welfare.

3. Government holding assets means they're unlikely to be used with allocative efficiency. This depends on some of the considerations in 2, but again they're very very unlikely to have empirically large impacts. By contrast, there are probably some very empirically large impacts from the fact that few of the government's assets—totting up to about £600bn, according to a recent ASI report—are ever marketed. As we know from Friedrich A. Hayek's most important work, market pricing is how we rationally allocate resources in society. This was why Hayek and Ludwig von Mises won the socialist calculation debate as even noted Marxist G.A. Cohen agreed. What this means for assets is that we don't know whether they are properly used unless we trade for them. An illustration: if the government sold off all its army barracks the army might then rent the selfsame barracks from their private owners. But it's possible that they would rent somewhere else, and someone might set up a factory or a farm or a theme park on the original site. Without the market competition process we have no idea what would happen and we have no idea what the best use of the land and buildings would be. This applies to big nebulous assets like Royal Mail just as it applies to land and as it applies to gold.

4. If the government holds assets it may have incentives that distort its policy-making decisions. Why does the UK have such an appallingly tight planning regime even though basically all economists think it's extremely inefficient and damaging? It's probably because lots of people own houses and these groups tend to be disproportionately likely to vote and are otherwise politically well-connected. If these groups rented their house and owned the same amount of wealth spread across a wide range of assets it's very unlikely we'd see such economically unjustifiable policies. The same goes, potentially, for government-held assets. After all, the government will be blamed not to mention having less ability to achieve its policy goals if assets it holds lose value. It's not so much that they're likely to directly pursue policies designed to boost the value of state assets. But acts of commission are treated differently to those of omission. It seems highly likely that the government will treat policy changes that affect these particular assets' value differently, just like housing.

So maybe the government should hold some wealth, I can see the arguments for and I can imagine some arguments against. But if it holds wealth it ought hold assets as broadly as possible: because it's not placed to take gambles on particular assets; because doing so may distort markets directly; because holding assets takes them off the market and reduces allocative efficiency; and because holding particular assets may distort the incentives facing policymakers. Thus we should praise Gordon Brown for selling off gold just as we should praise Vince Cable and George Osborne for selling off the Royal Mail.