September 26, 2014
The NYT ran an article celebrating the recent run-up in the dollar. The headline is “buoyant dollar recovers its luster, underlines rebound in U.S. economy.” The headline could have with at least as much accuracy substituted “undermines” for “underlines.” While the piece attributes the rise in the dollar to all sorts of good things about the U.S. economy, there actually is a much simpler explanation. Interest rates are higher in the United States than elsewhere.
Relative interest rates determine where investors choose to park their money. They are not assigning gold stars to economies for good behavior. There is some relationship between interest rates and growth, but it is the former that matters for investors, not the latter.
The piece gets many other points wrong. For example, after the dollar has risen, investment in developing countries becomes more attractive, not less attractive. But the big point left out of this story is that the over-valued dollar is the main cause of what has become known as “secular stagnation.”
Fans of national income accounting everywhere (i.e. anyone who knows economics) know that a trade deficit creates a gap in demand that must be filled through some other source. Currently the trade deficit is running at more than a $500 billion annual pace or around 3.0 percent of GDP. For the economy to be at its potential, this gap in demand must be fill by higher consumption, investment, housing, or government spending.
The reason the economy is still more than $600 billion below its potential level of output is that it doesn’t have a source of demand to fill this gap. It is not easy to make any of the other components of GDP rise, with the exception of government spending, but that is ruled out for political reasons. We could do it with a stock or housing bubble, but those stories don’t have happy endings.
So the rise in the dollar translates into slower growth and fewer jobs. Goldman Sachs estimates that the 3.0 percent rise in the dollar we have seen to date will shave 0.1 to 0.15 percentage points off GDP growth in each of the next two years (sorry, no link). That is a pretty good size hit in an economy that is only growing at a 2.0 percent annual rate.
It also translates into lost jobs. If the economy is 0.25 percent smaller in 2016 due to the higher dollar that would imply a loss of roughly 350,000 jobs. So, does the NYT have any more good news for us today?
Comments