The Stock Market Bubble and Investing Social Security in the Stock Market
By Dean Baker[1]
July 22, 2002
Executive Summary
There has been a prolonged policy debate over the last decade over the merits of investing Social Security funds in the stock market, either indirectly through individual accounts or directly through the trust fund. In debating this issue, there has been almost no attention paid to the question of the timing of the proposed investment. Since the stock market was experiencing an unsustainable bubble over much of this period, the failure to consider this timing could have produced large losses to workers or the trust fund.
This paper calculates the potential losses if varying fractions of Social Security funds, as proposed by advocates, had been placed in the stock market in each of the last four years (rather than the government bonds currently held by the trust fund). Assuming that half of the money in individual accounts would have been placed in the stock market, it finds that based on market values as of June 30th, 2002:
The paper concludes by noting the importance of the timing of investment in the stock market, since markets do occasionally experience bubbles. The most notable recent example outside of the United States is the Japanese market, which in 2002 is hovering at a level that is less than one-third of its 1989 peak. This means that people who placed their money in the Japanese stock market in 1989 would have lost more than two-thirds of their investment.
The Stock Market Bubble and Investing in Social Security
Over the last six years, there has been a prolonged policy debate over
the merits of replacing a portion of the Social Security system with individual
accounts. The main argument given by proponents of individual accounts is that
such accounts will provide workers with a higher rate of return. The higher
return would be a result of the fact that workers could invest a portion of
these accounts in stocks rather than the government bonds held by the Social
Security trust fund. Since stocks have historically provided a higher rate of
return than bonds, proponents of individual accounts argued that these accounts
would have higher returns than if the money were left in the Social Security
trust fund (e.g. The President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security,
2001 or Feldstein and Samwick, 1997).
Opponents of individual accounts have pointed to the additional risk that
workers would incur in what is supposed to be their core retirement income. They
have also pointed to the fact that the administrative costs of these accounts
will be several times larger than the cost of operating the existing system, and
that these costs are a pure waste of resources from an economic standpoint. They
have also noted that the returns to workers can be raised within the existing
system by investing a portion of the trust fund in stocks, for example, or by
adding funds from general revenue to the Social Security trust fund (e.g. Aaron
and Reischauer, 2001 or Eisner, 1998).
It is also important to recognize that investing
Social Security money in the stock market does not create new wealth. Insofar as
stocks draw a higher return than government bonds, the gains from having Social
Security in the market would come at the expense of other stock holders, who
would get a lower return, and at the expense of the general budget, as the
government would now be paying higher interest rates on its bonds. The lower
return to stockholders can be thought of as a tax on capital income, whereas the
higher interest payments on government bonds can be viewed as a transfer of
general revenue. If taxing capital and transferring money from general revenue
are considered desirable ways to increase the returns to Social Security, this
can be accomplished without actually placing Social Security money in the stock
market.
While all of
these issues are important to the debate over individual accounts, there is a
separate issue which has been almost completely overlooked—the timing of a
switch to individual accounts. In other words, it is possible to argue that
individual accounts are in principle desirable, but that it is not appropriate
to make the switch at a specific point in time, because the stock market is
seriously over-valued.
Since the stock market experienced a bubble during
the last five years, it would have been quite appropriate to raise the issue of
timing. Had plans for individual accounts actually been adopted during this
period, they would have resulted in large losses to workers. (This would also be
the case if a portion of the trust fund had been invested in the stock market.)
Table 1 shows the losses, as of 2002, that workers would have incurred had such
a plan been adopted in the years from 1998 to 2001. (The construction of the
table is explained in the appendix.)
Table
1 – Potential Losses Due to Investing in Stock Bubble
|
|
Column A |
Column B |
Column C |
Column D |
Column E |
Column F |
Year of |
|
2 Percent |
|
|
5 Percent |
|
|
Carve Out |
|
Carve Out |
|
|
Carve Out |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Billions
of 2002 dollars. |
|
Net Loss |
|
|
Net Loss |
|
|
|
Bonds |
Stock |
to Fund |
Bonds |
Stock |
to Fund |
1998 |
|
$191.5 |
$160.3 |
$31.3 |
$478.8 |
$400.7 |
$78.1 |
1999 |
|
158.3 |
129.3 |
29.0 |
395.9 |
323.3 |
72.6 |
2000 |
|
122.7 |
102.6 |
20.2 |
306.8 |
256.4 |
50.4 |
2001 |
|
84.6 |
76.3 |
8.3 |
211.5 |
190.7 |
20.9 |
Source:
Social Security Trustees Report 2002, Economic
Report of the President, 2002, and author’s calculations. See appendix.
The table shows the accumulations
in both the bond portion and the stock portion of 2.0 percent and 5.0 percent
carve-outs, under the assumption that individual accounts are divided equally
between stock and bond deposits. The net loss is the difference between the
accumulation on the bond side and the accumulation on the stock side, since all
the money would be invested in government bonds if there were no carve-out.
The table shows that if a 2
percentage point carve-out had been adopted in 1998, workers would have lost
$31.3 billion as a result of putting a portion of their Social Security money in
the stock market, as shown in column C. If a 5 percentage point carve out had
been adopted in that year, as advocated by many proponents of individual
accounts, then the losses to workers would have been $78.1 billion as of 2002,
as is shown in column F. The losses would have been somewhat lower had the
carve-out been initiated in 1999 or 2000. Even though workers would have missed
virtually all of the upside of the market had the carve-out been started in
these years, the loss would not be as great, since they would have less money
invested in the stock market.
The money that workers would have lost as a result of
investing in the stock market would have been transferred to the individuals who
held stock at the time. Since stock ownership is extremely concentrated, with
the richest 1 percent of stockholders owning 37 percent of all shares of stock
and the richest 5 percent holding 65 percent, this would have amounted to a
large upward transfer of wealth (Poterba, 2000).
It is difficult to explain the
fact that advocates of investing Social Security money in the stock market never
considered the issue of timing even when it was quite apparent that the stock
market was experiencing a bubble. At its peak in 2000, the price to earnings
ratio of U.S. corporate equities exceeded 30 to 1, more than twice its historic
average. It was easy to show that either stock returns would remain very low
indefinitely—not much higher than the return on government bonds—or that
stock prices would fall to bring returns closer to their historic average.[2]
In either scenario, there was little argument for investing Social Security
money in the stock market at the time.
This fact would have been apparent
to everyone in the policy debate if the Social Security Administration had
derived its assumptions on stock returns from projections for the components of
returns—dividends and capital gains—which were in turn constructed to be
consistent with the other projections used in the Social Security trustees'
report. Such projections would have shown the impossibility of substantially
increasing the returns to Social Security through investing in the stock market,
given the high valuations that existed at the time. Table 2 shows a set of
projections that was derived in this manner in May of 1999, near the peak of the
bubble.[3]
Table 2 – Projected Stock Returns
Dividend Yield
Capital Gain
Total Return
2000-2010
1.6
2.0
3.6
2010-2020
1.9
1.6
3.5
2020-2030
2.0
1.4
3.4
2030-2040
2.0
1.5
3.5
2040-2050
2.0
1.4
3.4
2050-2060
2.0
1.4
3.4
2060-2070
2.0
1.4
3.4
2070-2075
2.0
1.4
3.4
Source:
Baker 1999.
The 3.5
percent real return shown in the table is only slightly higher than the 3.0
percent real return that the trustees assume for government bonds. The
difference would barely be sufficient to cover the administrative costs of
individual accounts.[4]
While the stock bubble has
deflated substantially from its peak levels, price to earnings ratios in the
stock market remain significantly above their historic average. If the future
return on stocks will be comparable to its past return, then the price to
earnings ratio will have to decline much further.[5]
In fact, since the Social Security trustees assume that profits will grow much
more slowly in the future than they have in the past, the price to earnings
ratio will have to fall below its historic average if stocks are to provide the
same return in the future as in the past.
It is remarkable that the Social
Security Administration has yet to provide a set of projections of stock returns
that could inform the debate over individual accounts. Since Social Security
works from a fixed set of projections where there is an assumed path for profit
growth, the process of deriving projections of stock returns from the components
is quite straightforward, as has been shown.[6]
Because markets do occasionally experience bubbles, refusing to consider the
timing of a switch to individual accounts could lead to enormous unnecessary
costs. In 1989, the Nikkei, Japan's main market index, hit 39,000. Thirteen
years later the Nikkei is hovering near 13,000, implying that investors would
have lost more than two thirds of any money put into the market at its peak. The
losses implied by the collapse of the U.S. stock market bubble would not be
quite as large, but these workers should nonetheless not be subjected to the
risk of investing in a bubble simply because of the failure of the Social
Security Administration to do its job.
The first three columns of Table 1
assume that 2 percentage points of the payroll tax are carved out to create
individual accounts, with half of the money invested in stocks and half in
bonds. The second three columns assume that 5 percentage points of the payroll
tax are carved out for these accounts. The amount of money implied by this carve
out is taken from the 2002 Social Security Trustees Report. (The 2002 figure is
an estimate.) The bond funds are assumed to earn the average yield on ten-year
government bonds in the year that they were invested (Economic
Report of the President, 2002, table B-73). (This means money invested in
1998 always earns the average interest rate in 1998 on ten year bonds.) The
return on stocks is set equal to the average dividend yield for the S&P 500
for each year, plus the change in the average value of the S&P 500 over the
course of the year (Economic Report of the
President, 2002, table B-95). For 2002, it is assumed that the market stays
at its value as of June 30th. For all years, it assumed that funds
are invested equally over the course of the year, so that half of the annual
investment draws interest or dividends for the year.
Aaron, H. and R. Reischauer, 2001. Countdown to Reform: The Great Social Security Debate. New York:
Century Foundation.
Baker, D. 1997. Saving
Social Security With Stocks: The Promises Don’t Add Up.
Baker, D. 1999. “Letter to Martin Feldstein,” May 15,
1999, Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research,
[http://www.cepr.net/Social_Security/letter_to_feldstein2.htm].
Diamond, P. 2000. [1]
“What Stock Market Returns to Expect for the Future” Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 63, No 2, 2000.
Eisner, R., 1998. Social
Security: More Not Less. New York: Century Foundation. New York: Century
Foundation.
Feldstein, M. and A. Samwick, 1997, “The Economics of
Prefunding Social Security and Medicare Benefits.” Cambridge, MA: National
Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper # 6055.
Goss, S. 2001. “Equity Yield Assumptions Used by the
Office of the Chief Actuary, Social Security Administration, to Develop
Estimates for Proposals with Trust Fund and/or Individual Account
Investments,” in Estimating
the Real Rate of Return on Stocks Over the Long Term: Papers Presented to the
Social Security Advisory Board. Washington, D.C.: Social Security Advisory
Board, pp 55-57.
The President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security,
2001. Strengthening Social Security and
Creating Personal Wealth For All Americans. Washington, D.C.: The
President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security [http://www.ssa.gov/commission/Final_report.pdf].
Poterba, J. 2000. “Stock Market Wealth and Consumption,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14 (Spring 2000), pp 99-118.
[1] Dean Baker is co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
[2] See Baker 1997 or 1999.
[3] This table appears in Baker 1999, where a full explanation of the construction of these projections is available.
[4] President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security assumed that the administrative cost for individual accounts would be 0.3 percent of their holdings. If stocks provided a 3.5 percent return, then an account that held 50 percent in stocks and 50 percent in bonds would provide a 3.3 percent real return before deducting the 0.3 percentage point administrative cost.
[5] In fact, the Social Security Administration appears to have assumed that stock prices will drop substantially when it discussed its basis for the projection that the long-term return on stocks will be 6.5 percent; but it did not factor in the impact of this decline on the value of workers accounts (see Goss 2001, p 57).
[6] See also Diamond 2000.