The NYT had a piece on the upward revision of second quarter GDP data to a growth rate of 4.2 percent from 4.0 percent in the advance report. It would have been worth reminding readers that the jump was a reversal from a weather induced plunge of 2.1 percent in the first quarter. This leaves the economy growing at annual rate of just 1.1 percent for the first half of the year. Even if the growth rate is 3.0 percent for the second half that would still leave year-round growth at just 2.0 percent. This is below almost all estimates of the economy’s potential which means that rather than making up ground lost during the recession, the economy is falling further below its potential level of output.
The piece also is a bit off in a couple of other areas. It noted the upward revision to investment and told readers:
“Since the economy emerged from the recession five years ago, companies have been hesitant to spend heavily on new capacity, but these figures and other recent data indicate that is finally changing.”
Actually the revised 8.4 percent growth rate for investment is not especially impressive. There have been many previous quarters in the recovery where investment grew more rapidly. For example, in the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2011 investment grew at 8.8 percent, 19.4 percent, and 9.5 percent annual rates, respectively. As recenly as the fourth quarter of last year it grew at a 10.4 percent annual rate, so the most recent quarterly rate is not impressive, especially since it follows growth of just 1.6 percent in the first quarter.
One area where it paints an overly pessimistic picture is in reporting the split between wages and profits:
“Despite the faster overall growth rate, businesses still seem to be benefiting more from the economy’s upward trajectory than many individual consumers are.
“The revision on Thursday, for example, lowered the estimate of workers’ wage and salary growth slightly in the first half of 2014, with income rising 5.8 percent in the second quarter. Corporate profits, on the other hand, jumped 8 percent in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said.”
The comparison with the first quarter is misleading. The profit data are always erratic and the first quarter showed a surprisingly large drop in profits. If the comparison is made with the second quarter of 2013 nominal before-tax profits are actually down by 0.3 percent. By contrast, labor compensation is up by 4.4 percent. These data are too erratic to make much of this shift, but the numbers actually suggest some redistribution from capital to labor over the last year.
The NYT had a piece on the upward revision of second quarter GDP data to a growth rate of 4.2 percent from 4.0 percent in the advance report. It would have been worth reminding readers that the jump was a reversal from a weather induced plunge of 2.1 percent in the first quarter. This leaves the economy growing at annual rate of just 1.1 percent for the first half of the year. Even if the growth rate is 3.0 percent for the second half that would still leave year-round growth at just 2.0 percent. This is below almost all estimates of the economy’s potential which means that rather than making up ground lost during the recession, the economy is falling further below its potential level of output.
The piece also is a bit off in a couple of other areas. It noted the upward revision to investment and told readers:
“Since the economy emerged from the recession five years ago, companies have been hesitant to spend heavily on new capacity, but these figures and other recent data indicate that is finally changing.”
Actually the revised 8.4 percent growth rate for investment is not especially impressive. There have been many previous quarters in the recovery where investment grew more rapidly. For example, in the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2011 investment grew at 8.8 percent, 19.4 percent, and 9.5 percent annual rates, respectively. As recenly as the fourth quarter of last year it grew at a 10.4 percent annual rate, so the most recent quarterly rate is not impressive, especially since it follows growth of just 1.6 percent in the first quarter.
One area where it paints an overly pessimistic picture is in reporting the split between wages and profits:
“Despite the faster overall growth rate, businesses still seem to be benefiting more from the economy’s upward trajectory than many individual consumers are.
“The revision on Thursday, for example, lowered the estimate of workers’ wage and salary growth slightly in the first half of 2014, with income rising 5.8 percent in the second quarter. Corporate profits, on the other hand, jumped 8 percent in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said.”
The comparison with the first quarter is misleading. The profit data are always erratic and the first quarter showed a surprisingly large drop in profits. If the comparison is made with the second quarter of 2013 nominal before-tax profits are actually down by 0.3 percent. By contrast, labor compensation is up by 4.4 percent. These data are too erratic to make much of this shift, but the numbers actually suggest some redistribution from capital to labor over the last year.
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Neil Irwin had a good post on the latest Case-Shiller house price data. he argued that the flat, or even modestly declining house prices are good news. This means that prices are now more or less following a normal pattern where they move pretty much in step with the economy.
This is right, with one important qualification. The Case-Shiller tiered price indexes show some worrying numbers in some cities for the bottom third of the housing market. Prices for the bottom tier fell by 0.7 percent in San Francisco in June. In Atlanta, the index showed a drop of 1.3 percent and in Minneapolis the decline was 4.0 percent. This may just be a monthly blip, but there is a real risk that in some areas this could be the beginning of another plunge in low-end house prices.
House prices for the bottom tier have been on a real roller coaster ride for some time. They were inflated in the bubble years by subprime loans and then plummeted when this source of lending collapsed. Then they were propped up by one of the most hare-brained policies of all-time, the first-time homebuyers tax credit. Predictably, prices in the bottom tier plummeted again when the credit ended. (Typical of the honesty people came to expect from Timothy Geithner, his book had a chart (p 304) which showed the uptick in house prices caused by the credit, but ends before the subsequent fall.)
Price recovered again and began to rise rapidly through the first half of 2013. There was a real danger of a new bubble forming, but then Bernanke’s famous taper talk took the wind out of the market. The concern now is that with investors leaving the market prices in the bottom tier in some cities will take another major hit. This is not likely to have much of an effect on the national economy but could be bad news for moderate income homeowners that bought in near a temporary peak.
Neil Irwin had a good post on the latest Case-Shiller house price data. he argued that the flat, or even modestly declining house prices are good news. This means that prices are now more or less following a normal pattern where they move pretty much in step with the economy.
This is right, with one important qualification. The Case-Shiller tiered price indexes show some worrying numbers in some cities for the bottom third of the housing market. Prices for the bottom tier fell by 0.7 percent in San Francisco in June. In Atlanta, the index showed a drop of 1.3 percent and in Minneapolis the decline was 4.0 percent. This may just be a monthly blip, but there is a real risk that in some areas this could be the beginning of another plunge in low-end house prices.
House prices for the bottom tier have been on a real roller coaster ride for some time. They were inflated in the bubble years by subprime loans and then plummeted when this source of lending collapsed. Then they were propped up by one of the most hare-brained policies of all-time, the first-time homebuyers tax credit. Predictably, prices in the bottom tier plummeted again when the credit ended. (Typical of the honesty people came to expect from Timothy Geithner, his book had a chart (p 304) which showed the uptick in house prices caused by the credit, but ends before the subsequent fall.)
Price recovered again and began to rise rapidly through the first half of 2013. There was a real danger of a new bubble forming, but then Bernanke’s famous taper talk took the wind out of the market. The concern now is that with investors leaving the market prices in the bottom tier in some cities will take another major hit. This is not likely to have much of an effect on the national economy but could be bad news for moderate income homeowners that bought in near a temporary peak.
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Jared has a few more points in response to my least post — certainly very reasonable concerns. As far as his comparison of me to Mr. Burns, I’ll just say “excellent!”
Jared has a few more points in response to my least post — certainly very reasonable concerns. As far as his comparison of me to Mr. Burns, I’ll just say “excellent!”
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The headline of the Washington Post piece on the new budget projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) told readers, “CBO: Deficit falls to $506 billion in 2014, but debt continues to rise.”
Both parts of this are wrong if the comparison is the most recent prior set of projections. The deficit projected for 2014 is actually somewhat higher in the most recent projections, $506 billion compared to $492 billion in the projections made in April. Both figures are below last year’s deficit of $680 billion. Measured as a share of GDP the deficit fell from 4.1 percent in 2013 to 2.9 percent in the most recent projections for 2014.
However the debt numbers in the new projections are lower than the debt numbers in the prior set. CBO now projects that the debt will be 77.2 percent of GDP at the end of the projection period in 2024. It previous had projected a debt to GDP ratio of 78.1 percent.
The article got both of these points right.
The headline of the Washington Post piece on the new budget projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) told readers, “CBO: Deficit falls to $506 billion in 2014, but debt continues to rise.”
Both parts of this are wrong if the comparison is the most recent prior set of projections. The deficit projected for 2014 is actually somewhat higher in the most recent projections, $506 billion compared to $492 billion in the projections made in April. Both figures are below last year’s deficit of $680 billion. Measured as a share of GDP the deficit fell from 4.1 percent in 2013 to 2.9 percent in the most recent projections for 2014.
However the debt numbers in the new projections are lower than the debt numbers in the prior set. CBO now projects that the debt will be 77.2 percent of GDP at the end of the projection period in 2024. It previous had projected a debt to GDP ratio of 78.1 percent.
The article got both of these points right.
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It’s always nice when a prominent economist and the NYT pick up on a line of work that we started at CEPR. That is why we are all happy to see David Leonhardt’s piece on a new paper by Alan Krueger, the former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
The gist of the piece is that Krueger has discovered that many people do not respond to the Current Population Survey (CPS), the main survey used to measure the unemployment rate. Krueger discovered that the unemployment rates are higher for people the first month that they are in the survey than in later months. (People are in the survey for four months, then out for eight months and then back for four months.) The implication is that people who are not responding may be more likely to be unemployed than people who are responding.
This fits well with analysis done by John Schmitt and me nine years ago. That work noted a sharp gap between the employment rates reported in the 2000 Census and the employment rates reported in the CPS for the overlapping months, with the CPS rates being much higher. (The Census has a response rate close to 99 percent, whereas the coverage rate for the CPS is under 90 percent overall. It is under 70 percent for young black men.) The analysis focused on employment rates because employment is much more well-defined than unemployment.
The analysis also noted that the gap was largest for the groups with the lowest coverage rates. In particular the gap was largest for young black men, with the CPS showing an employment rate that was 8.0 percentage points higher than the Census data for the same month. Our conclusion was that the people who respond to the survey are more likely to be employed than the people who don’t respond. It’s good to see that Krueger appears to have concurred in this finding nine years later.
Note: Link and president corrected.
It’s always nice when a prominent economist and the NYT pick up on a line of work that we started at CEPR. That is why we are all happy to see David Leonhardt’s piece on a new paper by Alan Krueger, the former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
The gist of the piece is that Krueger has discovered that many people do not respond to the Current Population Survey (CPS), the main survey used to measure the unemployment rate. Krueger discovered that the unemployment rates are higher for people the first month that they are in the survey than in later months. (People are in the survey for four months, then out for eight months and then back for four months.) The implication is that people who are not responding may be more likely to be unemployed than people who are responding.
This fits well with analysis done by John Schmitt and me nine years ago. That work noted a sharp gap between the employment rates reported in the 2000 Census and the employment rates reported in the CPS for the overlapping months, with the CPS rates being much higher. (The Census has a response rate close to 99 percent, whereas the coverage rate for the CPS is under 90 percent overall. It is under 70 percent for young black men.) The analysis focused on employment rates because employment is much more well-defined than unemployment.
The analysis also noted that the gap was largest for the groups with the lowest coverage rates. In particular the gap was largest for young black men, with the CPS showing an employment rate that was 8.0 percentage points higher than the Census data for the same month. Our conclusion was that the people who respond to the survey are more likely to be employed than the people who don’t respond. It’s good to see that Krueger appears to have concurred in this finding nine years later.
Note: Link and president corrected.
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A New York Times article on the role that the debate over the Export-Import Bank is playing in the North Carolina senate race told readers that the bank:
“says it makes a profit and supported more than 200,000 jobs with $37.4 billion in transactions last year.”
It would have been worth including the views of someone other than the bank who could have put these claims in context. If companies did not have access to the Bank’s loans at below market interest rates, most of these sales would still take place. The companies would just have lower profit margins. As a result, the number of jobs that would be lost is a fraction of the number cited here.
Furthermore, in standard models it would be expected that with fewer exports subsidized by the bank, the dollar would fall in value, which would make other exports more profitable. The net effect on jobs and GDP would be close to zero and quite possibly positive. It would be possible to construct the exact same story about any industry that is subsidized by the government with loans offered at below market interest rates.
A New York Times article on the role that the debate over the Export-Import Bank is playing in the North Carolina senate race told readers that the bank:
“says it makes a profit and supported more than 200,000 jobs with $37.4 billion in transactions last year.”
It would have been worth including the views of someone other than the bank who could have put these claims in context. If companies did not have access to the Bank’s loans at below market interest rates, most of these sales would still take place. The companies would just have lower profit margins. As a result, the number of jobs that would be lost is a fraction of the number cited here.
Furthermore, in standard models it would be expected that with fewer exports subsidized by the bank, the dollar would fall in value, which would make other exports more profitable. The net effect on jobs and GDP would be close to zero and quite possibly positive. It would be possible to construct the exact same story about any industry that is subsidized by the government with loans offered at below market interest rates.
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A Vox piece on soaring textbook prices told readers:
“And the college textbook market has changed, too. Publishers used to spread out the cost of a new edition over five years before publishing the next edition and starting the cycle over. Since the publishing industry began consolidating in the 1980s — five major publishers now control 80 percent of the market — competition has become keener, and the window before a new edition has narrowed from five years to three. That means higher prices so that publishers can recoup the costs and make a profit.”
Let’s see, competition has become keener as the industry got more concentrated, causing prices to rise? That doesn’t sound like the textbook economics I learned.
This sounds more like a story where an industry grew more oligopolistic. Rather than competing on price, textbook makers compete on quality (or the appearance of quality — to keep the analogy to the prescription drug industry used in the piece). There is an implicit agreement not to try to undercut each other on price, since the big five recognize they would all end up losers in that story.
This sounds like a case where a bit of anti-trust action might do lots of good. Alternatively, a small amount of public funding for open source textbook production may wipe out the bastards altogether.
A Vox piece on soaring textbook prices told readers:
“And the college textbook market has changed, too. Publishers used to spread out the cost of a new edition over five years before publishing the next edition and starting the cycle over. Since the publishing industry began consolidating in the 1980s — five major publishers now control 80 percent of the market — competition has become keener, and the window before a new edition has narrowed from five years to three. That means higher prices so that publishers can recoup the costs and make a profit.”
Let’s see, competition has become keener as the industry got more concentrated, causing prices to rise? That doesn’t sound like the textbook economics I learned.
This sounds more like a story where an industry grew more oligopolistic. Rather than competing on price, textbook makers compete on quality (or the appearance of quality — to keep the analogy to the prescription drug industry used in the piece). There is an implicit agreement not to try to undercut each other on price, since the big five recognize they would all end up losers in that story.
This sounds like a case where a bit of anti-trust action might do lots of good. Alternatively, a small amount of public funding for open source textbook production may wipe out the bastards altogether.
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That’s right, you might have thought there was a debate on whether the neo-liberal policies pursued by Brazil and other Latin American countries promoted or retarded growth, but the NYT settled the issue. It refers to the policies put in place by Social Democratic Party from 1994-2002 and then tells readers:
“The measures vanquished galloping inflation, opening the way for the next decade’s growth.”
This voice of authority should perhaps explain why it took seven years of moderate inflation before growth could pick up. Inflation fell back to 6.9 percent in 1997 (it had been over 1000 percent), the growth rate crossed 5.0 percent in 2004 and remained at a respectable pace until the world financial crisis led to a recession in 2009.
That’s right, you might have thought there was a debate on whether the neo-liberal policies pursued by Brazil and other Latin American countries promoted or retarded growth, but the NYT settled the issue. It refers to the policies put in place by Social Democratic Party from 1994-2002 and then tells readers:
“The measures vanquished galloping inflation, opening the way for the next decade’s growth.”
This voice of authority should perhaps explain why it took seven years of moderate inflation before growth could pick up. Inflation fell back to 6.9 percent in 1997 (it had been over 1000 percent), the growth rate crossed 5.0 percent in 2004 and remained at a respectable pace until the world financial crisis led to a recession in 2009.
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