Morning Edition engaged in ritualistic praise of Stanley Fischer, in discussing his prospects for approval as President Obama’s pick to be vice-chair of the Federal Reserve Board. It accurately reported that economists on both the left and right of the political mainstream respect Fischer and see him as central to shaping the current state of macroeconomics.
The small point left out of this discussion is that this macroeconomics led us into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, giving the country and the world a slump from which we have not yet recovered. Tens of millions of people have seen their lives ruined as a result of failed economic management.
Fischer personally played a direct role in creating the imbalances that led to the crisis. As first managing director at the I.M.F., he played a central role in directing the bailout from the East Asian financial crisis. The harsh conditions imposed by the I.M.F. led the countries of the region, along with countries throughout the developing world, to begin to accumulate massive amounts of reserves (dollars) in order to avoid ever being in the same situation as the East Asian countries.
This led to a huge rise in the value of the dollar and an explosion in the size of the U.S. trade deficit. The trade deficit created a huge gap in demand. This gap in demand was filled in the late 1990s with the demand generated by the stock bubble. The demand gap was filled in the last decade by the housing bubble. This is not a stable mechanism for generating demand.
In standard textbook economics capital is supposed to flow from rich countries to poor countries where in principle it will derive a higher rate of return. Fischer’s policies at the I.M.F. led to a reversal of this pattern in a very big way. The consequences for the world economy have been disastrous. This point could have been made to NPR’s audience if it had spoken to anyone who was not complicit in this momentous mistake.
Morning Edition engaged in ritualistic praise of Stanley Fischer, in discussing his prospects for approval as President Obama’s pick to be vice-chair of the Federal Reserve Board. It accurately reported that economists on both the left and right of the political mainstream respect Fischer and see him as central to shaping the current state of macroeconomics.
The small point left out of this discussion is that this macroeconomics led us into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, giving the country and the world a slump from which we have not yet recovered. Tens of millions of people have seen their lives ruined as a result of failed economic management.
Fischer personally played a direct role in creating the imbalances that led to the crisis. As first managing director at the I.M.F., he played a central role in directing the bailout from the East Asian financial crisis. The harsh conditions imposed by the I.M.F. led the countries of the region, along with countries throughout the developing world, to begin to accumulate massive amounts of reserves (dollars) in order to avoid ever being in the same situation as the East Asian countries.
This led to a huge rise in the value of the dollar and an explosion in the size of the U.S. trade deficit. The trade deficit created a huge gap in demand. This gap in demand was filled in the late 1990s with the demand generated by the stock bubble. The demand gap was filled in the last decade by the housing bubble. This is not a stable mechanism for generating demand.
In standard textbook economics capital is supposed to flow from rich countries to poor countries where in principle it will derive a higher rate of return. Fischer’s policies at the I.M.F. led to a reversal of this pattern in a very big way. The consequences for the world economy have been disastrous. This point could have been made to NPR’s audience if it had spoken to anyone who was not complicit in this momentous mistake.
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Evan Soltas has responded to me and others who don’t quite see us as bumping up against full employment and capacity constraints any time soon. Fortunately, he clearly lays out his argument so it is easy to see the error in his ways. He notes the unemployment rate has fallen by 0.8 percentage points annually the last three years and assumes that we will continue on this path.
That one doesn’t seem very likely unless Evan is either way more optimistic about growth than almost anyone else or way more pessimistic about productivity. The basic story is that unemployment has fallen more than most economists (including me) expected in the last three years. The reason is that productivity growth has slowed to a crawl. The average rate of productivity growth over this period has been less than 0.9 percent.
There is considerable debate about what sort of rate of productivity growth we should see going forward, but you won’t find many estimates under 1.5 percent, and most would be around 2.0 percent. The average from 1995 to 2007 was 2.7 percent. If we use a 2.0 percent productivity number and assume 0.4 percent annual growth in the labor force (600,000 jobs a year), that gets 2.4 percent growth in potential GDP.
Most forecasts put GDP growth at the next three years around 3.0 percent. If we get productivity growth rebounding to its normal pace then we would be exceeding potential GDP growth by around 0.6 percentage points. Using historic relationships, this translates into a drop in the unemployment rate of roughly 0.3 percentage points a year. If our target is 5.0 percent unemployment (I’d shoot for lower, remembering the good old days of 2000 and 4.0 percent unemployment), we would get there in 2019.
This is why I and others are not anxious to see the Fed slam on the brakes any time soon. For what it’s worth, any movement toward tightening any time soon would be seriously out of line with what the Fed did following the last downturn. It left the federal funds rate at 1.0 percent until the summer of 2004 when the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent and the economy was growing at almost a 4.0 percent annual rate. (Yes, they deserve to be strung up for allowing the housing bubble to grow to such dangerous levels, but that was a question of regulatory policy and targeting the bubble, not interest rates that were too low.)
Evan Soltas has responded to me and others who don’t quite see us as bumping up against full employment and capacity constraints any time soon. Fortunately, he clearly lays out his argument so it is easy to see the error in his ways. He notes the unemployment rate has fallen by 0.8 percentage points annually the last three years and assumes that we will continue on this path.
That one doesn’t seem very likely unless Evan is either way more optimistic about growth than almost anyone else or way more pessimistic about productivity. The basic story is that unemployment has fallen more than most economists (including me) expected in the last three years. The reason is that productivity growth has slowed to a crawl. The average rate of productivity growth over this period has been less than 0.9 percent.
There is considerable debate about what sort of rate of productivity growth we should see going forward, but you won’t find many estimates under 1.5 percent, and most would be around 2.0 percent. The average from 1995 to 2007 was 2.7 percent. If we use a 2.0 percent productivity number and assume 0.4 percent annual growth in the labor force (600,000 jobs a year), that gets 2.4 percent growth in potential GDP.
Most forecasts put GDP growth at the next three years around 3.0 percent. If we get productivity growth rebounding to its normal pace then we would be exceeding potential GDP growth by around 0.6 percentage points. Using historic relationships, this translates into a drop in the unemployment rate of roughly 0.3 percentage points a year. If our target is 5.0 percent unemployment (I’d shoot for lower, remembering the good old days of 2000 and 4.0 percent unemployment), we would get there in 2019.
This is why I and others are not anxious to see the Fed slam on the brakes any time soon. For what it’s worth, any movement toward tightening any time soon would be seriously out of line with what the Fed did following the last downturn. It left the federal funds rate at 1.0 percent until the summer of 2004 when the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent and the economy was growing at almost a 4.0 percent annual rate. (Yes, they deserve to be strung up for allowing the housing bubble to grow to such dangerous levels, but that was a question of regulatory policy and targeting the bubble, not interest rates that were too low.)
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Here we go again. The NYT told readers:
“A quarter of private plan enrollees are ages 18 to 34, who tend to have lower medical costs and their premiums are needed to help pay for the higher costs of insuring older and sicker consumers.”
In the real world outside of wonkville wisdom the age of enrollees makes little difference to the finances of the program. It will matter if there is a skewing by health conditions. The logic is simple and straightforward. A healthy 60-year old and a healthy 25-year old both cost the system almost nothing. The healthy 60-year old will on average pay premiums that are three times as high. This is why the system needs healthy 60-year olds at least as much as it needs healthy 25-year olds.
A short analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation goes through the arithmetic, but apparently they don’t have access at the NYT.
Here we go again. The NYT told readers:
“A quarter of private plan enrollees are ages 18 to 34, who tend to have lower medical costs and their premiums are needed to help pay for the higher costs of insuring older and sicker consumers.”
In the real world outside of wonkville wisdom the age of enrollees makes little difference to the finances of the program. It will matter if there is a skewing by health conditions. The logic is simple and straightforward. A healthy 60-year old and a healthy 25-year old both cost the system almost nothing. The healthy 60-year old will on average pay premiums that are three times as high. This is why the system needs healthy 60-year olds at least as much as it needs healthy 25-year olds.
A short analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation goes through the arithmetic, but apparently they don’t have access at the NYT.
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A Washington Post article on plans to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac likely misled many readers about their role in the housing bubble and the nature of the new system of housing finance being pushed in Congress. The piece told readers;
“The companies [Fannie and Freddie], which were seized by the federal government in 2008, were widely blamed with exacerbating the financial crisis by buying millions of risky loans and passing on the risk to consumers.”
While Fannie and Freddie did help to inflate the bubble and got stuck ensuring many bad loans, the worst mortgages were securitized by private investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. This point is important not only as a matter of historical accuracy, but it also is central to the problem with the new system being proposed.
In effect the new system would allow Goldman and Citi to issue subprime mortgage backed securities (MBS) with a government guarantee. They obviously had no problem selling MBS composed of junk mortgages with no guarantee. Under the new system they would be able to tell investors that in a worse case scenario they would lose no more than 10 percent of their investment.
This creates a moral hazard problem that virtually guarantees future problems. As happened in the bubble years, the issuers can make large profits by securitizing garbage and then leaving the government with the overwhelming majority of the risk.
At one point the piece quotes Senator Tim Johnson, the chair of the banking committee:
“There is near unanimous agreement that our current housing finance system is not sustainable in the long term and reform is necessary.”
It would have been worth pointing out that such an agreement reflects the politics on the issue, not the economics. The United States saw a boom in homeownership over the three decades from when Fannie Mae was created in 1938 to when it was privatized in 1968. There is no economic reason that Fannie and Freddie could not be run as public companies indefinitely. However the financial industry sees securitizing mortgages as a huge source of potential profits. The fact that the financial industry is a powerful political force and a large contributor to political campaigns is the basis for the near unanimous agreement on privatizing Fannie and Freddie, it has little to do with the merits of the new system.
A Washington Post article on plans to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac likely misled many readers about their role in the housing bubble and the nature of the new system of housing finance being pushed in Congress. The piece told readers;
“The companies [Fannie and Freddie], which were seized by the federal government in 2008, were widely blamed with exacerbating the financial crisis by buying millions of risky loans and passing on the risk to consumers.”
While Fannie and Freddie did help to inflate the bubble and got stuck ensuring many bad loans, the worst mortgages were securitized by private investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. This point is important not only as a matter of historical accuracy, but it also is central to the problem with the new system being proposed.
In effect the new system would allow Goldman and Citi to issue subprime mortgage backed securities (MBS) with a government guarantee. They obviously had no problem selling MBS composed of junk mortgages with no guarantee. Under the new system they would be able to tell investors that in a worse case scenario they would lose no more than 10 percent of their investment.
This creates a moral hazard problem that virtually guarantees future problems. As happened in the bubble years, the issuers can make large profits by securitizing garbage and then leaving the government with the overwhelming majority of the risk.
At one point the piece quotes Senator Tim Johnson, the chair of the banking committee:
“There is near unanimous agreement that our current housing finance system is not sustainable in the long term and reform is necessary.”
It would have been worth pointing out that such an agreement reflects the politics on the issue, not the economics. The United States saw a boom in homeownership over the three decades from when Fannie Mae was created in 1938 to when it was privatized in 1968. There is no economic reason that Fannie and Freddie could not be run as public companies indefinitely. However the financial industry sees securitizing mortgages as a huge source of potential profits. The fact that the financial industry is a powerful political force and a large contributor to political campaigns is the basis for the near unanimous agreement on privatizing Fannie and Freddie, it has little to do with the merits of the new system.
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Eduardo Porter picks up on the fashion book of the week, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The punchline, which Porter accurately conveys, is that we are on a path of ever greater concentration of wealth and income. Piketty’s isn’t happy about this and recommends wealth and inheritance taxes as remedies, but since these taxes don’t sound very likely, the picture looks pretty bleak.
While the book has much useful information and is well worth reading, folks can feel justified in taking its conclusion with more than a grain of salt. There is a lot about the determinism that doesn’t seem quite so determined. For example, the greater concentration of income is most apparent in the U.S. and U.K.. There is nothing really to talk about in the case of France, not too much in the case in Germany, and pretty much zero in Sweden if we pull out the 70s when there was a sharp reduction in the concentration of income.
Much of the concentration of income hinges on policies that could easily be altered without overturning capitalism. For example, shorter and less stringent patent protection would go far towards reducing the concentration of income as would a return to the old fashioned view that monopolies like cable companies and Internet providers should be subject to regulation. (This is the topic of my book, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.)
I have a longer list of items in my review of the book. I won’t repeat everything here, but I will just say that anyone who gives Bill Gates credit for inventing the mouse can reasonably be accused of paying insufficient attention to institutional detail. I will also add that the figure accompanying the Porter piece, which projects [mistakenly] the ratio of private capital to income through the year 3000 certainly looks a bit overly deterministic.
Note: corrections made, thanks TK421.
Eduardo Porter picks up on the fashion book of the week, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The punchline, which Porter accurately conveys, is that we are on a path of ever greater concentration of wealth and income. Piketty’s isn’t happy about this and recommends wealth and inheritance taxes as remedies, but since these taxes don’t sound very likely, the picture looks pretty bleak.
While the book has much useful information and is well worth reading, folks can feel justified in taking its conclusion with more than a grain of salt. There is a lot about the determinism that doesn’t seem quite so determined. For example, the greater concentration of income is most apparent in the U.S. and U.K.. There is nothing really to talk about in the case of France, not too much in the case in Germany, and pretty much zero in Sweden if we pull out the 70s when there was a sharp reduction in the concentration of income.
Much of the concentration of income hinges on policies that could easily be altered without overturning capitalism. For example, shorter and less stringent patent protection would go far towards reducing the concentration of income as would a return to the old fashioned view that monopolies like cable companies and Internet providers should be subject to regulation. (This is the topic of my book, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.)
I have a longer list of items in my review of the book. I won’t repeat everything here, but I will just say that anyone who gives Bill Gates credit for inventing the mouse can reasonably be accused of paying insufficient attention to institutional detail. I will also add that the figure accompanying the Porter piece, which projects [mistakenly] the ratio of private capital to income through the year 3000 certainly looks a bit overly deterministic.
Note: corrections made, thanks TK421.
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The folks controlling economic policy are apparently getting frustrated with their inability to restore the economy to full employment. So it seems that their answer is to redefine full employment to make the task easier, or so Evan Soltas tells us in a Bloomberg View piece today.
Soltas notes that the quit rate is not obviously out of line with the unemployment rate, which he adds is “close to most estimates of unemployment’s natural level.” It’s worth noting that the quit rate used to be much higher in the years before the recession, and that was not a period associated with accelerating inflation, the normal indicator for an unemployment rate that is lower than can be sustained.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In fact, at no point in the 2001 recession or subsequent period of weak employment growth did the quit rate ever fall as low as it is now. So it would take some heavy duty re-defintion to get us to be near full employment with the current labor market situation.
The folks controlling economic policy are apparently getting frustrated with their inability to restore the economy to full employment. So it seems that their answer is to redefine full employment to make the task easier, or so Evan Soltas tells us in a Bloomberg View piece today.
Soltas notes that the quit rate is not obviously out of line with the unemployment rate, which he adds is “close to most estimates of unemployment’s natural level.” It’s worth noting that the quit rate used to be much higher in the years before the recession, and that was not a period associated with accelerating inflation, the normal indicator for an unemployment rate that is lower than can be sustained.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In fact, at no point in the 2001 recession or subsequent period of weak employment growth did the quit rate ever fall as low as it is now. So it would take some heavy duty re-defintion to get us to be near full employment with the current labor market situation.
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The NYT ran a piece that implied that Japan’s policy of deliberately trying to raise the rate of inflation is not working when in fact most of the evidence cited in the piece showed the opposite. For example, at one point it tells readers;
“Rather than start an economic revival, this “cost-push” inflation, as economists call it, could become a rising threat to Japanese stuck in a deflationary mind-set. Such people could see their hard-earned savings eroded by rising prices, warned Yukio Sakurai, a housing analyst based in Tokyo.”
The point of the policy is to give businesses and individuals more incentive to spend now, since inflation will reduce the value of pools of idle savings. (The notion of “cost-push inflation” is ill-defined, since someone must be ending up with the money that represent higher costs.) Contrary to what is implied in the piece, the policy has led to a turnaround in prices, with core inflation at 0.7 percent over the last year according to the OECD. In prior years prices had been falling at roughly this pace.
The NYT ran a piece that implied that Japan’s policy of deliberately trying to raise the rate of inflation is not working when in fact most of the evidence cited in the piece showed the opposite. For example, at one point it tells readers;
“Rather than start an economic revival, this “cost-push” inflation, as economists call it, could become a rising threat to Japanese stuck in a deflationary mind-set. Such people could see their hard-earned savings eroded by rising prices, warned Yukio Sakurai, a housing analyst based in Tokyo.”
The point of the policy is to give businesses and individuals more incentive to spend now, since inflation will reduce the value of pools of idle savings. (The notion of “cost-push inflation” is ill-defined, since someone must be ending up with the money that represent higher costs.) Contrary to what is implied in the piece, the policy has led to a turnaround in prices, with core inflation at 0.7 percent over the last year according to the OECD. In prior years prices had been falling at roughly this pace.
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The NYT has a lengthy article on the decision by hedge fund billionaire William Ackman to do a large short of Herbalife, a nutritional supplement company,and then use political influence to undermine the company. While Ackman’s efforts to manipulate the Securities and Exchange Commission are at least improper, if not actually illegal, they are not qualitatively different from the actions companies take all the time to advance their cause.
There seems to be a view that shorting a company, implying that its market price is over-valued, is somehow less legitimate than buying into a company. This is not true. There are many companies whose stock price is grossly over-valued.
For example, in the late 1990s many Internet companies had stock prices that had no basis in reality. In the last decade, the banks pushing bad loans in the housing bubble had grossly over-valued stock prices. In both cases, people shorting the companies would be a public service. It would make it more difficult for them to raise capital to use for counter-productive purposes.
In effect, shorting is comparable to exposing the existence of counterfeit money. Until it is exposed, people are prepared to assign the counterfeit currency real value. By calling attention to the false value, capital can instead be directed to more productive purposes.
This doesn’t mean Ackman is correct in his assessment of Herbalife (I haven’t a clue) or that it’s good that rich people can manipulate government agencies. The point is that what he’s doing is not different from what major companies and rich people do all the time to advance their companies.
The NYT has a lengthy article on the decision by hedge fund billionaire William Ackman to do a large short of Herbalife, a nutritional supplement company,and then use political influence to undermine the company. While Ackman’s efforts to manipulate the Securities and Exchange Commission are at least improper, if not actually illegal, they are not qualitatively different from the actions companies take all the time to advance their cause.
There seems to be a view that shorting a company, implying that its market price is over-valued, is somehow less legitimate than buying into a company. This is not true. There are many companies whose stock price is grossly over-valued.
For example, in the late 1990s many Internet companies had stock prices that had no basis in reality. In the last decade, the banks pushing bad loans in the housing bubble had grossly over-valued stock prices. In both cases, people shorting the companies would be a public service. It would make it more difficult for them to raise capital to use for counter-productive purposes.
In effect, shorting is comparable to exposing the existence of counterfeit money. Until it is exposed, people are prepared to assign the counterfeit currency real value. By calling attention to the false value, capital can instead be directed to more productive purposes.
This doesn’t mean Ackman is correct in his assessment of Herbalife (I haven’t a clue) or that it’s good that rich people can manipulate government agencies. The point is that what he’s doing is not different from what major companies and rich people do all the time to advance their companies.
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Lydia DePillis has a good piece in the WaPo on the increasing use of contract labor in manufacturing, focusing on the Nissan plant in Smyna, Tennessee. The piece points out that contract workers get lower pay and benefits and lack the security of workers employed directly by the company.
Lydia DePillis has a good piece in the WaPo on the increasing use of contract labor in manufacturing, focusing on the Nissan plant in Smyna, Tennessee. The piece points out that contract workers get lower pay and benefits and lack the security of workers employed directly by the company.
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The Washington Post had a piece explaining the seeming anomaly that cash-out refinancing is still well below bubble levels even though house prices have recovered much of their ground. The piece explains this gap by the fact that homeowners are a wealthier group on average than they were in the bubble years and therefore less likely to tap equity for spending.
While this is in part true, the more obvious explanation that is that inflation adjusted house prices are still almost 30 percent below the peak of the bubble, which is a good thing. It is also likely that homeowners do not expect continually rising house prices as they did in the bubble years which would make them less likely to withdraw equity from their homes.
As a practical matter, it is not plausible that the decline in moderate income homeowners could explain much of the $200 billion drop in annual cash-out refinancing between the bubble peaks and 2013. The homeownership rate has fallen by a bit less than 4 percentage points from its bubble peaks, translating into roughly 4 million fewer homeowners. For a $200 billion drop in annual cash-out financing to be explained by this loss of moderate income homeowners, we would have to believe that these moderate income homeowners had been cashing out $50,000 a year on average from their homes.
Given that this group would have had limited equity in their homes and their homes would have been lower priced than the average, it is implausible that on average they would have been cashing out even one-fifth of this amount. But hey, why mess up a good story with arithmetic?
The Washington Post had a piece explaining the seeming anomaly that cash-out refinancing is still well below bubble levels even though house prices have recovered much of their ground. The piece explains this gap by the fact that homeowners are a wealthier group on average than they were in the bubble years and therefore less likely to tap equity for spending.
While this is in part true, the more obvious explanation that is that inflation adjusted house prices are still almost 30 percent below the peak of the bubble, which is a good thing. It is also likely that homeowners do not expect continually rising house prices as they did in the bubble years which would make them less likely to withdraw equity from their homes.
As a practical matter, it is not plausible that the decline in moderate income homeowners could explain much of the $200 billion drop in annual cash-out refinancing between the bubble peaks and 2013. The homeownership rate has fallen by a bit less than 4 percentage points from its bubble peaks, translating into roughly 4 million fewer homeowners. For a $200 billion drop in annual cash-out financing to be explained by this loss of moderate income homeowners, we would have to believe that these moderate income homeowners had been cashing out $50,000 a year on average from their homes.
Given that this group would have had limited equity in their homes and their homes would have been lower priced than the average, it is implausible that on average they would have been cashing out even one-fifth of this amount. But hey, why mess up a good story with arithmetic?
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