Search Results

Most people are interested in hedging risk of claims on long‐term income flows, rather than on the risk of the next month's or next year's income, and this means that any market that allows hedgers to protect themselves from information that is adverse to their income over the indefinite future must be a market in the present value (capital value) of this income stream, not a conventional futures or options market in the income itself. This chapter considers two ways in which such new markets, where the information about income flows is so intangible, could be created. One way is to create a sort of derivative market, based on an index of observed prices in other (relatively illiquid) markets for claims on the same income stream (settlement based on cash‐market asset price). Liquid markets in residential real estate might be set up this way (this example is pursued in the chapter), and such a method of insuring against adverse information is analogous to that used to provide fire insurance, where the income stream is the flow of rents (or imputed rents) on the property, and the maximum insurance is the present value of this stream inferred from the sale prices of comparable properties. The other way is to create a market for perpetual, or at least long‐horizon, claims on an income flow itself, making no use of prices of claims on the flow in any other market; the income flow can be a theoretical construct of statisticians, not the dividend on any tradable asset, and liquid markets in national incomes might be set up in this way (settlement based on measures of income rather then price, achieved either through perpetual claims or perpetual futures markets).

For the purpose of hedging risks to standards of living, the logical place to look first would be to markets for claims on total income; but such markets do not exist, and they have apparently never even been proposed. By making it possible to hedge the capital value of a stream of aggregate income, markets in perpetual claims or perpetual futures, long‐term swap markets, or retail analogues of these would facilitate management of the kind of longer‐run income risk that really matters to individuals and organizations; nations or other groupings of people could also use such markets to insure themselves against the prospect of a declining standard of living or the prospect of relative poverty. By hedging such risks, these macro markets would allow the natural tendency for convergence of incomes to reduce inequality of incomes, and might make significant progress toward equalizing wealth across nations, regions, categories of people, and individuals. There could be markets for hedging the risk of fluctuations in aggregate income, national income, or aggregate labour income for each country (or even region) of the world, and these could be divided up in different ways—although since most people's income is labour income, creating markets for claims on total income means for the most part creating markets for claims on labour income. The different sections of the chapter consider possible hedging arrangements in perpetual claims or perpetual futures markets for national incomes (market structures and associated institutions), whether income markets should be in actual or full‐employment income, and various measurement issues associated with incomes (including uncertainty).

In proposing macro markets, this book describes a substantial array of new markets, and attempts to indicate ways around some of the major barriers to the establishment and success of these markets. These important barriers to the establishment of macro markets—perpetual claims, perpetual futures, options, swaps, and analogous markets—are the subject of most of the book. This introduction aims to give an idea of where the book is heading, what kinds of markets might be established, and a broad sense of whether such markets are in the realm of possibility. The different sections of the chapter are: The ideal: A world market for major income risks; Hedging income risk in today's markets; Markets as inventions; and Markets as accidents of history.

When creating indices intended for use in cash settlement of futures contracts (or perpetual claims or options, or swaps, or other over‐the‐counter forward contracts or retail insurance contracts), it is critical that that each index represents value associated with a standard claim on future income (or services). The contract settlement must reflect the price of claims on income streams, so that the market can be used to hedge the risk associated with the claims, but the problem is that the available observations on prices or incomes may apply to dissimilar claims, and that standardization in the indices used to settle contracts is essential to liquidity in these markets. This chapter first reviews some existing index number methods, and then extends these methods to deal with the problems described. Chain index and hedonic index number methods are reviewed, and ordinary repeated‐measures indices (like the repeat sales indices) are shown to be in a sense a special case of these, and to have strong parallels to some existing indices used to settle contracts. The last part of the chapter introduces the hedonic repeated‐measures index to allow for control of changing price of quality variables, while retaining the repeated‐measures design.