Nick Bunker: The downside of declining domestic migration: “Over the past 30 years…
…U.S. workers have become less likely to move…. An emerging hypothesis is that migration is declining because the benefits of migration are, too… structural changes in the labor market…. Research by economists at the International Monetary Fund shows a negative side to the decline in mobility. The paper considers migration as a way for workers to respond to a job loss…. Instead of moving on, workers drop out…”
Monday DeLong Smackdown: The Wellsprings of Bad Monetary Economics in Goldbugism: “Finally! The Internet comes through with a high-quality DeLong smackdown! Hooray!…”
Alon Levy: Zoning and Market Pricing of Housing: “The question of the effects of the supply restrictions…
…in zoning on housing prices has erupted among leftist urbanist bloggers again. On the side saying that US urban housing prices are rising because of zoning…. On the side saying that zoning doesn’t matter and the problem is demand (and by implication demand needs to be curbed)…. This is not a post about why rising prices really are a matter of supply. I will briefly explain why they are, but the bulk of this post is about why, given that this is the case, cities need to apportion the bulk of their housing via market pricing and not rent controls, as a matter of good political economy. Few do, which is also explainable in terms of political economy…
Wolfgang Münchau: Draghi is running out of legal ways to fix the euro “The ECB is failing to deliver on its inflation target…
not because it has run out of instruments but because it has based its policy on a poorly performing economic model… [and so] has committed three errors…. The ECB should have embarked on large asset purchases and cut interest rates to zero early on…. Mr Draghi’s promise to buy eurozone government debt… made everybody, including the ECB itself, complacent… [and] ended all crisis resolution. The third mistake was to misjudge the dynamics of the fall in inflation rates late last year….
By pussyfooting around… the ECB has signalled that it is safe to bet against the inflation target…. To undo this would take some heavy lifting…. The ECB should start by ditching the inflation target and replacing it with a price-level target…. The ECB should starting buying equities and junk bonds. It should subsidise mortgages and consumer credit. It could fund an investment programme in transport infrastructure, energy networks and scientific research…. All these measures would be effective. Most would be illegal. The one thing the central bank can do without any legal problems would be to drop the silly macroeconomic model–known as the Smets-Wouters model, after its authors–on which it has been relying for too long. My guess is that the ECB will not do any of these…
Robert Shiller: The Mystery of Lofty Stock Market Elevations “The CAPE ratio, a stock-price measure I helped develop…
…is hovering at a worrisome level…. Above 25, a level that has been surpassed… in only… the years clustered around 1929, 1999 and 2007. Major market drops followed those peaks…. We should recognize that we are in an unusual period, and that it’s time to ask some serious questions about it…
The first question I think we should ask is: how damaging in the long run to investor portfolios were the major market drops that followed the 1929, 1999, and 2007 CAPE peaks? The CAPE is the current price of the S&P index divided by a ten-year trailing moving average of its earnings: the CAPE looks back ten years to try to get an estimate of what normal earnings are and how stock prices deviate from them. Let’s look ahead and calculate ten-year forward earnings to get a sense of what signals the CAPE sends for those of us interested in stocks for the long run.
When we do that, we find that we cannot calculate a ten-year return for the 2007 CAPE peak of 27.54–we still have three years to go. But over the past seven years the S&P has produced an average annual real return of 5.2%/year: not too shabby. The ten-year average real return from the 1929 peak of 32.56 was 3.3%/year: you were in a real world of hurt if you panicked and sold or had to sell in 1931-1934, but not if you hung on. Only the 1999 peak was followed by long-run return disaster: a ten-year average real return of -2.1%/year because you would have been selling at the bottom in 2009–but even then if you had hung on until today your average 14.5 year real return would be +2.7%/year.
If you are not an investor in the stock market for the long term, you can easily get into a world of hurt with a position in the S&P composite (and an even bigger world of hurt with an undiversified portfolio). Look at the one-month and one-year return distributions:
You can lose a fifth of your money in a month. You can lose more than half your money in a year. And you can do those things as well with a CAPE of 15 as with a CAPE of 40. If you are not in stocks for the long term, your stock portfolio should not consist of money that you cannot afford to lose.
But if you are in stocks for the long term? How big are the risks, really, and how do they correlate with the Campbell-Shiller CAPE? I like to start thinking about this by plotting the full distribution for every month from 1881 to mid2004, the last month for which we can calculate a full ten-year real return:
The left axis shows the cumulative ten-year log return: a value of 0.69 means that you have doubled your real money; a value of 1.4 that you have quadrupled your real money; and if there were a value of 2.1 there you would have octupled your real money. The S&P has never done this. But it came very close in the ten years starting in 1920.
An extremely naive take would be to assume the efficient market hypothesis: that the marginal trader and the marginal firm know what they are doing, and that the margin the earnings of the companies in the index are equally valuable if paid out or if reinvested. In that case we would expect the real return–the dividend yield plus capital gains–to be simply equal to the earnings yield. The warranted ten-year return would then be simply 10 times the permanent earning power. And if we take the moving average of earnings underlying the CAPE to be our estimate of the permanent earning power, the warranted return is simply 100 divided by the CAPE, like so:
Given the naiveté of the framework, that turns out to be not at all a bad guide to the central tendency of the distribution of future ten-year returns conditional on the CAPE. If you are going to project an expected value for an investment in the S&P over the next ten years, simply inverting the CAPE and multiplying by 10 is a very good place to start. But even at the ten-year return horizon the variability is enormous: earnings 10 years hence may be well above their current value compounded forward at the current earnings yield; but they may be well below as well; the earnings valuation multiple 10 years hence may have jumped up; or it may have crashed. The only places in the distribution where the naïve warranted return does not seem to capture the central tendency is where the CAPE was very low or very high. But we know that when the CAPE was very low there were no subsequent large downward reductions in the valuation multiple: that’s what it means when we look back and say “oh, then the CAPE was very low”. And we know that when the CAPE was very high there were no subsequent large upward leaps in the valuation multiple: that’s what it means when we look back and say “oh, then the CAPE was very high”.
The entire spread of the time series has something to tell us about expected returns and the variation around them. What does it say about the risk of loss–the possibility that we sock our money in the stock market and reinvest it for 10 years, but when we come to take it out it is not there or it is not all there? A few points:
Risk relative to what? Trying to move purchasing power from the present into the future is a hazardous activity. War and rumors of war; inflation and rumors of inflation; depression and rumors of depression; Bernie Madoffs and rumors of Bernie Madoffs; coups, confiscations, and heavy capital taxation–risks cannot be avoided but only managed and balanced off against one another.
That said, almost always ten-year returns on the S&P have been a winner.
And on average, at a ten-year horizon, for any CAPE ratio below 35 the S&P has delivered average real asset returns pretty much outclassing all other major asset classes.
There are only three historical periods during which a ten-year investment in the S&P has not at least held its real value: 1908:7-1912:3, 1964:6-1973:2, and 1998:10-2000:10–ten years before the post-World War I deflation and depression of the start of the 1920s, 10 years before the stagflation of the 1970s and the subsequent Volcker depression, and 10 years before the recent financial unpleasantness:
The outbreak of World War I and its consequences was the original Black Swan. Those who were trying to shed stock market risk around 1910 by purchasing bonds of any sort found themselves much more exposed to and damaged by the inflationary component of the World War I shock. And if you could hang on to your equity portfolio after 10 years and go double or nothing for the next decade you captured in the near-octupling which was the greatest bull market in history. And, of course, the CAPE was not notably high but rather below average as this first episode commenced.
From the early 1970s through the early 1980s the economy was hit not by a black swan but by a bunch of ugly ducklings: politicians (cough, Richard Nixon) with an excessive focus on their own reelection and Federal Reserve chairs (cough, Arthur Burns) who appear to have forgotten that they were and were supposed to be independent of both the president who appointed them and the congress that oversaw them; oil shocks; productivity slowdowns; and, ultimately, the failure to figure out any way to end stagflation and re-anchor inflation expectations at a low level other than repeatedly hitting the economy on the head with a high interest-rate brick until it collapsed. But, once again, those who were trying to shed stock market risk by purchasing bonds of any sort found themselves much more exposed to and damaged by the inflationary component of the 1970s shocks. And, of course, the CAPE was high but not notably and anomalously high as this second episode commenced.
As noted above, the first time the CAPE crossed 25 heading upward was during the last stages of the Roaring Twenties bull market that preceded the Great Depression. And–provided you held on for the full ten years–you did OK: cumulative returns were not that far from what you would have expected if you had simply inverted the CAPE and multiplied it by 10. And the same for the second time the CAPE crossed 25 heading upwards, in the years after Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” speech.
Only those who invested at the peak of the dot-com bubble which just happened to come ten years before the crash that inaugurated the Great Recession fared badly in the sense of losing any substantial component of their real wealth. Here, moreover, investing in not risky but safe bonds would have protected you: there was no inflation component to the shocks that caused the Great Recession.
Thus you can see why I am relatively unsatisfied with Shiller’s writing:
In the last century, the CAPE has fluctuated greatly, yet it has consistently reverted to its historical mean–sometimes taking a while to do so. Periods of high valuation have tended to be followed eventually by stock-price declines. Still, the ratio has been a very imprecise timing indicator…. The ratio is saying the stock market has been relatively expensive for years. And that raises a question: Are there legitimate factors behind high stock prices that might keep them elevated for decades more? Such a question has been addressed before. In 1930, just after the 1929 crash, Prof. Irving Fisher of Yale published “The Stock Market Crash — and After.” The book explained why there were “sound reasons” for the high valuations of 1929. He couldn’t have been more wrong…
Shiller’s rhetoric leads us to focus on graphs like this one of the Campbell-Shiller CAPE, and to think that what goes up must–someday–come down:
But is there any reason to think that the central tendency of the CAPE today is the same as what it was in the 1880s or the 1950s? There is no unchanging machine buried in the earth for the past 120 years throwing dice to determine the CAPE. It would be much better to say that extreme values of the CAPE are followed by reversion not to but toward the previous historical mean. And dividends and earnings shift too. A much better graph than the CAPE graph is the cumulative reinvested return graph:
And on a log scale:
It goes way up, and way down, but the dominant feature is not mean reversion but rather exponential growth. Think: 3.5 tenfold upward leaps in four generations–but with many periods of half a generation in there in which things at best plateau, and if you are forced to sell at the wrong time you will lose a good part of your shirt.
Given the large number of investors and institutions in our economy with very long time horizons that thought to be in the stock market for the long-term–insurance companies, pension funds, rich individuals with grandchildren–for me the anomaly does not seem to be a CAPE of 25 (or, given historical real returns on other asset classes and very low current yields on investments naked to inflation risk, 33) but rather the CAPEs of 14-20 that we saw in the 1980s, 1960s, 1950s, 1900s, 1890s, and 1880s that Robert Shiller appears to think of as “normal” and to which today’s CAPE should someday return. Those are associated with warranted real average returns of between 5 and 7%/year. Why ever were stocks so unpopular as to limit demand so much as to offer such returns? Is there no long-term money? And so we have arrived at the biggest mystery of macro finance: the premium return on equities.
Yet Shiller thinks 25 is an anomaly that requires some non-fundamental psychological explanation:
I have conducted questionnaire surveys of individual and institutional investors…. When the CAPE ratio reached its record high of 44 in 2000, the confidence index hit a record low…. This year, the index took a dive for individual investors, and now is at the lowest level since 2000. The confidence of professional investors has fallen, too, but not as sharply. In short, people are beginning to worry…. It’s possible that bond prices account for today’s stock market valuations. But that raises another question: Why are bond prices so high? There are short-term explanations: the role of central banks, for example. But is there a compelling reason for prices of stocks and bonds (and maybe houses, too) to remain high indefinitely?… Perhaps today’s prices have something to do with anxiety about the future…. Such anxiety might push them to try to make up for… potential shortfalls by investing in stocks and bonds–even if they worry that these assets are overvalued…. I suspect that the real answers lie largely in the realm of sociology and social psychology–in phenomena like irrational exuberance, which, eventually, has always faded before…
That is a perspective very different from mine, which regards the failure of the CAPE to spend most of its time north of 25 as a mystery.
But given that it does not, it would be very rash for anybody who is not certain that they can wait out the market to invest more than they can afford to lose. And past performance is not only not a guarantee it may not be an indicator of future results. We have had one real Black Swan–World War I–in the past 130 years.
Ethan Zuckerman: The Internet’s Original Sin: “It’s not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web….
…What we wanted to do was to build a tool that made it easy for everyone, everywhere to share knowledge, opinions, ideas and photos of cute cats. As everyone knows, we had some problems, primarily business model problems…. At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising… [the] revenue source is investor storytime: Investor storytime is when someone pays you to tell them how rich they’ll get when you finally put ads on your site…. The key part of investor storytime is persuading investors that your ads will be worth more than everyone else’s ads…. Demonstrating that you’re going to target more and better than Facebook requires moving deeper into the world of surveillance…”
Daniel Davies has unlocked his weblog. Plus: Daniel–Crooked Timber: “I’ve had a life event recently. As of today (I’m posting this from the WiFi at Geneva airport) and for the next year, I am doing less of the stockbroking, and more of the travelling round the world with my family…” | And: “The single most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was JK Galbraith’s aphorism…
…that the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been ‘the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness’. Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is ‘what I have, I keep’. Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that ‘what I have, I keep’ is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven’t yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem….
Hypocrisy doesn’t really enter into the equation with rightwing politics; you don’t (or shouldn’t) get any extra points for being sincere about being selfish. So where does that leave our students? Well, they’re young. They’re most likely insecure. They don’t actually have a lot, and it’s hardly surprising that they’re a bit precious about what they have…. People in general seem to be horribly uncomfortable with the idea that, by the standards they use to judge political situations, they themselves don’t come out as moral heroes. At base, this is a fairly childish and decidedly illiberal attitude; childish because it demands a sort of moral perfection which everyone intellectually knows can’t exist outside fairy stories (unless you count the way that parents appear to their children) and illiberal because it suggests that you’re only prepared to have normal social interactions with people who pass your own personal moral examination…
Must- and Shall-Reads:
Narayana Kocherlakota: “Congress has charged the FOMC with making monetary policy so as to promote price stability and maximum employment….Let me start with price stability. The FOMC has translated the price stability objective into an inflation rate goal of 2 percent per year. This inflation rate target refers to the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price index… [which] currently stands at 1.6 percent…. In fact, the inflation rate has averaged 1.6 percent since the start of the recession six and a half years ago, and inflation is expected to remain low for some time…. The second FOMC goal is to promote maximum employment…. Progress in the decline of the unemployment rate masks continued weakness in labor markets…. A persistently below-target inflation rate is a signal that the U.S. economy is not taking advantage of all of its available resources…. There are many people in this country who want to work more hours, and our society is deprived of their production…”
Noah Smith: Silicon Valley Can Solve the Big Problems: “I am annoyed when writers accuse Silicon Valley (by which they mean the entire tech industry) of not solving big problems. Presumably, these tech critics want venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to take us into space, solve the global energy crunch or invent new labor-saving devices. And presumably they aren’t satisfied that SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, and the Google Self-Driving Car project, among others, are working…. What critics of Silicon Valley’s vision fail to realize, though, is that the really big problems aren’t the hard ones or the spectacular ones. The really big problems are things that affect the quality of human life…. The problems of this higher rung of Maslow’s ladder are exactly the ones that tech companies like Facebook and Match.com have begun to crack. Consider the impact of dating sites on the lives of divorced people. For a young person, dating sites–OKCupid or Tinder–are a marginal improvement over the old singles scene…. But for divorced middle-aged people, who are often socially isolated and occupied with work, meeting people is a much more daunting task. For these people, dating sites are a godsend…. Most of what people in the developed world want in life has to do with other human beings, not with the physical world around us. Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, famously griped that “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” But I guarantee you that if I had a flying car, after the first few days I would stop gawking at the scenery and start tweeting. I believe that the advent of social technology is a huge step toward solving the really big, really tough problems… connect[ing] with old friends and meet[ing] romantic partners…. Mars is just a ball of rock and ice. Here on Earth, there are much vaster worlds to explore: the worlds in other people’s minds…. Those Silicon Valley nerds, with their hoodies and their silly jargon, are building us the ships to explore those universes, and in the process changing what it means to live a full and complete human life. To me, that’s a big idea.
Josh Lehner: Graph of the Week: Squaring Fed Policy “The following compares the Fed’s own forecasts for nominal GDP (actually real GDP + PCE) on a 2 year ahead basis. Most forecasters, including the Fed, have performed relatively well on a 1 year ahead basis but keep calling for an improvement “next year” which has largely not materialized at the national level. Some states, such as Oregon, have seen acceleration in job growth but others have decelerated at the same time leaving U.S. growth at consistent rates…
Jeffrey Pfeffer: Ten Tips for Building Stronger Networks in Work and Life: “Face Time Counts… Find a Mutual Connection… Create a Robust Network…Be Specific… Be Diverse… Do What You Say You Will… Be Genuine… Think Long-term… Consider Your Approach… Stay in Touch and Give Back…”
Alan Blinder and Mark Watson: Presidents and the U.S. Economy: An Econometric Exploration “The U.S. economy has grown faster—and scored higher on many other macroeconomic metrics–when the President of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican. For many measures, including real GDP growth (on which we concentrate), the performance gap is both large and statistically significant, despite the fact that postwar history includes only 16 complete presidential terms. This paper asks why. The answer is not found in technical time series matters (such as differential trends or mean reversion), nor in systematically more expansionary monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior TFP performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near- term future. Many other potential explanations are examined but fail to explain the partisan growth gap.”
Philip R. Lane and Gian-Maria Milesi-Ferretti: Global Imbalances and External Adjustment after the Crisis: “This paper… reviews the recent dynamics of global imbalances… with a special focus on the shifting position of Latin America in the global distribution… examines the cross-country variation in external adjustment over 2008-2012…. Pre-crisis external imbalances have strong predictive power for post-crisis macroeconomic outcomes, allowing for variation across different exchange rate regimes. We emphasize that the bulk of external adjustment has taken the form of ‘expenditure reduction’, with ‘expenditure switching’ only playing a limited role…”
Former Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH): Scott Brown’s Primary Opponent Blasts Fox’s Glowing Coverage Of The Former Fox Employee: “They’ve totally ignored us. They’ve shut us down. We’ve made every effort to get on any of the shows, or at least have a comment. We’ve tried with [Fox host Sean] Hannity, we’ve tried with Baier, we’ve tried with, you name it… we’ve just been totally shut down. And I mean shut down. I mean we don’t even get call backs…. I think that’s not good reporting. It’s very shoddy reporting. They’re not doing any background, they haven’t talked to me, or anybody from my team. They haven’t talked to my campaign manager…. I don’t think it’s illogical or unreasonable to include me and frankly the other candidate, Mr. Rubens, who’s been running as well for quite some time and I mean we’re both very credible candidates…. I’m a conservative Republican so when the attacks come, if it comes from The New York Times or whatever, you know, okay, I expect it. “But when it comes from your own — well I don’t want to say my own, it’s not my own media, but when it comes from what’s supposed to be conservative media, or at minimally it’s supposed to be fair and balanced, that’s my point. That it’s not fair and balanced…. I know the facts because I’m directly involved, I’m wondering how many other times are they saying something’s fair and balanced when it’s not?”
And:
Sahil Kapur: Rick Perry’s Border Ad Foreshadows Brutal GOP Primary In 2016: “Remember when Republicans wanted to woo Latino voters? It seems like an eternity ago. Far from taking party elders’ advice last year to warm up to comprehensive immigration reform, Republican presidential hopefuls are moving in the opposite direction, already competing over who would be more aggressive at cracking down on illegal immigration…”
And:
Wesley Lowery et al.: Even before Michael Brown’s slaying in Ferguson, racial questions hung over police
Should Be Aware of:
Economist: The euro-zone economy: Cyclical stagnation: “The new GDP figures are yet more evidence that the euro-zone economy is in a bad way…. It is not only that growth is evaporating; inflation is also extraordinarily low. In July it was only 0.4%, far below the target of just below 2% set by the European Central Bank (ECB)…. Deflation would be particularly grave for the euro area because both private and public debt is so high in many of the 18 countries that share the single currency…. The ECB’s critics say that this is not enough and urge the central bank to introduce quantitative easing—creating money to buy financial assets. The ECB is likely to hold off; it seems to consider QE as a weapon of last resort…”
Harold Pollack: The disparaging stranger: Kevin Williamson visits East Saint Louis: “In 2014 America, does one really have to say that you shouldn’t deploy primate metaphors to describe a nine-year-old black boy, that it’s needlessly disparaging to describe that child as ‘a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dog’, that snide comments about the coiffed-ness of a child’s hair are best avoided, particularly if that child belongs to a different cultural or ethnic group from your own? Given the National Review’s checkered history on several racial matters, its writers and editors might be a tad more careful…. What most disturbs me about this column is the lack of context and the utter psychological distance between the writer and the people he is ostensibly depicts…. His column is ostensibly concerned with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn…. If Quinn did make policy mistakes regarding East St. Louis, you wouldn’t learn about them in Williamson’s piece, which is entirely consumed with one colorful but oddly un-illuminating anecdote. Indeed Williamson has managed to experience more weird, scary, rather implausible encounters with black people than I’ve accumulated in many years of public health work in poor African-American communities…. Williamson is the disdainful stranger. He parachutes in. He has fleeting, superficial encounters with random strangers who personify pejorative, politically-incorrect stereotypes about the pathology of lower-class urban life. In East Saint Louis, as anyplace else, people have real stories to tell. You have to engage them to hear them. You have to want to hear these stories, too.”
Jonathan Chait: The Nation Denies Existence of Ukraine: “Why everybody is wrong about Russia, except Russia, which is oh so right. The highlight is… the ‘fallacies’ for which the West has fallen: ‘—Fallacy No. 2: There exists a nation called “Ukraine” and a “Ukrainian people” who yearn to escape centuries of Russian influence and to join the West. Fact: As every informed person knows, Ukraine is a country long divided by ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, economic and political differences—particularly its western and eastern regions, but not only. When the current crisis began in 2013, Ukraine had one state, but it was not a single people or a united nation. Some of these divisions were made worse after 1991 by corrupt elite, but most of them had developed over centuries.’ There are two points here. First, is there, in fact, a nation called ‘Ukraine’? Yes, there is. You can look it up. It’s right there on the U.N. member state list, between Uganda and United Arab Emirates. And that really ought to settle the question. Countries have recognized borders, and you can’t just send goons into some other country’s territory and take it for yourself because you don’t like their government. It is true that the people inhabiting Ukraine are divided linguistically, religiously, culturally, economically, and politically. That is also true of many, many other countries in the world. That does not obviate the fact that there is such a thing as ‘Ukrainian people’. And second, even if it were not the case — even if Ukraine were nothing more than a polyglot collection of individuals who had absolutely nothing in common with each other — this would not give Russia any justification for hacking off chunks of the country through the use or threat of force.”
Mark Thoma sends us to Narayana Kocherlakota: “Congress has charged the FOMC with making monetary policy so as to promote price stability and maximum employment…
…Let me start with price stability. The FOMC has translated the price stability objective into an inflation rate goal of 2 percent per year. This inflation rate target refers to the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price index… [which] currently stands at 1.6 percent…. In fact, the inflation rate has averaged 1.6 percent since the start of the recession six and a half years ago, and inflation is expected to remain low for some time…. The second FOMC goal is to promote maximum employment…. Progress in the decline of the unemployment rate masks continued weakness in labor markets…. A persistently below-target inflation rate is a signal that the U.S. economy is not taking advantage of all of its available resources…. There are many people in this country who want to work more hours, and our society is deprived of their production…
Alexander Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention: Weekend Reading: “Mr. Hamilton had been hitherto silent…
…on the business before the Convention, partly from respect to others whose superior abilities age, and experience rendered him unwilling to bring forward ideas, dissimilar to theirs; and partly from his delicate situation with respect to his own state, to whose sentiments as expressed by his colleagues he could by no means accede. The crisis, however, which now marked our affairs was too serious to permit any scruples whatever to prevail over the duty imposed on every man to contribute his efforts for the public safety and happiness. He was obliged therefore to declare himself unfriendly to both plans. READ MOAR