Economy – Page 11 – Donald Marron

Tracking the Stimulus: Update

Good news: The Recovery.gov website now includes information about the tax components of the stimulus, not just the spending components:

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According to the chart, an estimated $62.5 billion made its way out the door in tax reductions through the end of August. The corresponding spending data indicate that $88.8 billion in federal spending made its way out the door by August 28.

Putting these together, you get an estimated $151.3 billion in combined tax reductions and spending increases through the end of August.

Continue reading “Tracking the Stimulus: Update”

Dodging the Resource Curse

Over the weekend, the Financial Times had a fascinating piece about Farouk al-Kasim, an Iraqi who is credited with saving Norway from the resource curse:

Poor countries dream of finding oil like poor people fantasise about winning the lottery. But the dream often turns into a nightmare as new oil exporters realise that their treasure brings more trouble than help. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, one time Venezuelan oil minister, likened oil to “the devil’s excrement”. Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, his Saudi Arabian counterpart, reportedly said: “I wish we had found water.”

Such resignation reflects bitter experience of the way that dependency on natural resources can poison a country’s economic and political system. Inflows of hard currency push up prices, squeezing the competitiveness of non-oil businesses and starving them of capital. As a result, productivity growth withers (a phenomenon known as “Dutch disease” after the negative effects of North Sea gas production on the Netherlands). Meanwhile, the state institutions in charge of oil often become corrupt and evade democratic control. And oil-rich states almost invariably waste the income it brings, many ending their oil booms deeper in debt than when they started.

al-Kasim is credited with designing a system that struck a balance among a state-owned oil company, private oil companies, and an independent regulator:

The real achievement, in other words, was not finding oil but coping with its discovery. Norway faced the same dilemma as every other new oil producer with no experience of the industry: if you rely too much on private foreign companies, too little of the oil wealth benefits the country in the form of government revenue or economic development; if you go too far in the other direction, you risk a bloated, politicised oil sector that evades both accountability to the people and competitive pressures to be efficient.

The economic question is fascinating — how can you avoid the resource curse? — but you should also read the article for his unique personal journey (involving a child with cerebral palsy and one of the easiest job hunts in history).

P.S. Other coverage at Curious Capitalist and Kottke.

Positive, Normative, and … ?

Am I the only one who feels unfulfilled by the standard distinction between positive and normative economics?

I am gearing up to return to the classroom next week, to teach microeconomics to incoming masters students at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Anyone who’s experienced the first day of micro class knows what’s coming. After introducing myself and talking about the wonders of economics (which is, indeed, fun, useful, and enlightening), I will launch into the great positive vs. normative distinction.

In brief:

Positive is the science side of economics: understanding and predicting the behavior of individuals, firms, markets, economies, etc. In short, the part of economics in which we try to be physicists (or, sometimes, biologists).

Normative is the side of economics where we make value judgments, identifying policies as good or bad. In short, the part of economics in which we try to be philosopher-kings.

Both styles of economics are important, particularly in a public policy program. And drawing a careful distinction is vital, not least because of the many people in Washington (both economists and non-economists) who try to dress up their value judgments as science.

I have one problem with this distinction, however: it overlooks a great deal of what economists actually do.

Continue reading “Positive, Normative, and … ?”

More Stimulus Spending Than Originally Projected

Lots of budget news this morning, with the release of the newest projections from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office.

One headline is that spending on the stimulus will be higher than expected. As reported by Lori Montgomery at the Washington Post (ht EconomistMom):

The $787 billion economic stimulus package President Obama signed earlier this year is likely to cost “tens of billions of dollars” more than expected, helping to drive projections for next year’s budget deficit to $1.5 trillion, White House budget director Peter Orszag told reporters.

With unemployment climbing, costs for a variety of stimulus programs are running higher than anticipated, Orszag said, including expanded unemployment benefits, food stamps and energy grants. In an interview embargoed for release Tuesday morning, Orszag said he could not estimate the overall cost of the package, but he called Republican estimates of $900 billion “slightly high.”

The $900 billion estimate that Peter mentions is reported in this letter from former CBO Director Doug Holtz-Eakin to Republican House Leader John Boehner.

The CBO also addresses this issue in its report (box on pp. 10-11). The box discusses lots of pesky nuances about budget accounting and the timing of payments. Perhaps the most interesting observation, consistent with the OMB quote above, is that:

The higher-than-expected unemployment rate has led CBO to raise its estimates of spending in 2009 for ARRA [i.e., stimulus] provisions that affect unemployment compensation (by $7 billion) and Medicaid (by $1 billion).

In other words, the weaker economy has added $8 billion to stimulus spending in fiscal 2009 alone with, presumably, more to come in fiscal 2010.

These developments further complicate the challenging task of tracking the stimulus.

President Obama Makes A Great Decision

David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal reports that President Obama will re-appoint Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Excellent decision.

P.S. Don’t let this good news distract you from the much-less-good economic news on Tuesday: CBO and OMB are releasing new budget projections that will show trillions upon trillions of coming deficits.

Step Two of a Housing Bottom?

Yesterday’s report on residential construction provided more evidence that step one of a housing bottom is underway — and that step two may be beginning.

Total housing starts fell slightly in July because of weakness in multi-family. But starts of single-family homes increased to 490 thousand (at an annual rate), the fifth straight monthly increase and the highest level since last October.

As the chart shows, this rebound is off of extremely low levels, so we shouldn’t get too excited. But it does appear that single-family starts bottomed last January and February (at 357 thousand).

That’s the first step of a housing bottom.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, however, that isn’t enough to declare a bottom in housing activity. Housing activity depends on the number of houses under construction, which depends on both housing starts and housing completions. Completions have exceeded starts for more than three years. As a result, the number of houses under construction has fallen for 41 straight months.

For me, the big news in the July data is that this decline may be ending.

Continue reading “Step Two of a Housing Bottom?”

The Charming World of Las Vegas Real Estate

Over at Time Magazine, Joel Stein has an amusing / troubling article (“Less Vegas: The Casino Town Bets on a Comeback“) about the perils of Las Vegas real estate (ht Anne Canfield).

The juiciest part of the article recounts how real estate agent Brooke Boemio advises clients to exploit the realities of the collapsed housing market:

Boemio specializes in short selling, in a particularly Vegas way. Basically, she finds clients who owe more on their house than the house is worth (and that’s about 60% of homeowners in Las Vegas) and sells them a new house similar to the one they’ve been living in at half the price they paid for their old house. Then she tells them to stop paying the mortgage on their old place until the bank becomes so fed up that it’s willing to let the owner sell the house at a huge loss rather than dragging everyone through foreclosure. Since that takes about nine months, many of the owners even rent out their old house in the interim, pocketing a profit.

In short, homo economicus is again stalking the Vegas housing market.

Stein notes that the renters often suffer from this ploy, since they can be evicted when a foreclosed property finally changes hands. In a nice illustration of how markets work, he then describes how renters are adjusting to this reality:

People are now paying a premium to live [i.e., rent] in apartment buildings, which in Vegas are almost always owned by a corporation.

Klein’s story has lots of other fun anecdotes from the front line of real estate crisis, including this immortal line from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, whose wealth has reportedly declined by more than $35 billion:

A billion dollars doesn’t buy what it used to. So it’s not as tragic as one would assume.”

The 50 Most Important Economic Theories

Be sure to read the follow-up post in July 2010

What are the 50 most important economic theories of the last century? That’s the question a publisher recently asked me to ponder for a book they are developing.

I’ve noodled on this over the past week and have some initial ideas. But I would be remiss if I didn’t solicit suggestions from my insightful readers.

So, what do you think have been the most important economic theories over the past century?

To spark your thinking, here are some very preliminary ideas, albeit without much respect for the publisher’s century limitation. (Apologies for the higher-than-usual amount of jargon and economic short-hand.)

Continue reading “The 50 Most Important Economic Theories”

Tracking the Stimulus

In her recent speech about the impact of the stimulus effort, Christina Romer, Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, noted that “as of the end of June, more than $100 billion had been spent.”

If you visit the government web site tracking the stimulus (Recovery.gov), however, it will tell you that the government had paid out only about $60 billion by July 3. (You can find this figure in the chart at the lower right hand corner of the home page.)

Why does Christi report a figure so much larger than the one reported on the official website? Because Recovery.gov isn’t tracking all of the budget effects of the stimulus.

Christi’s figure includes the $60 billion of spending reported on Recovery.gov plus an internal estimate, prepared by Treasury, of the tax reductions resulting from the stimulus effort through June 24. Those tax reductions are obviously a big deal, totaling $40 billion or slightly more through the end of June.

Based on conversations with friends and journalists, I get the sense that some users of Recovery.gov do not realize that its figures cover only the spending side of the stimulus story, not the tax side.

As a result, I think Recovery.gov is (unintentionally) confusing people into thinking that the stimulus effort to date is smaller than it has actually been.

I have two suggestions for how to fix this:

Step 1: Reduce Confusion: Recovery.gov should slap a warning label on the home page chart (and everywhere else it reports aggregate figures) that says something like: “These figures reflect only the new Federal spending that has resulted from the recovery act. The act also included significant tax reductions that aren’t reflected here.”

Step 2: Provide the Information: Of course, it would be even better if Treasury would release official estimates of the week-by-week or month-by-month tax reductions flowing from the recovery act. These figures would obviously be estimates — and thus not able to be audited to the same degree as the spending programs — but would be invaluable to analysts trying to track the impact of the stimulus effort.

P.S. As I noted last week, the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the total budget impact of the stimulus effort reached about $125 billion through the end of July.

Google Is Still Wrong About Unemployment

Everyone who follows the U.S. economy closely knows that the unemployment rate was 9.4% in July, down 0.1% from June.

Everyone, that is, except Google.

If you ask Google (by searching for “unemployment rate United States“), it will tell you the unemployment rate in July was 9.7%.

What’s going on? Well, it turns out that Google is directing users to the wrong data series. As I discussed last month, almost everyone who talks about unemployment is using (whether they know it or not) data that have been adjusted to remove known seasonal patterns in hiring and layoffs (e.g., many school teachers become unemployed in June and reemployed in August or September). Adjusting for such seasonal patterns is standard protocol because it makes it easier for data users to extract signals from the noisy movements in data over time.

For unknown reasons, Google has chosen not to direct users to these data. Instead, Google reports data that haven’t been seasonally adjusted and thus do not match what most of the world is using.

This is troubling, since I have high hopes for Google’s vision of bringing the power of search to data sets. The ability of users to find and access data lags far behind their ability to find and access text. I am hopeful that Google will solve part of this problem.

But data search is not about mindlessly pointing users to data series. You need to make sure that users get directed to the right data series. So far, Google is failing on that front, at least with unemployment data.

P.S. As I discussed in a follow-up post last month, Wofram Alpha has an even more ambitious vision for making data — and computation — available through search. I like many of the things Alpha is trying to do, but they are lagging behind Google in several ways. For example, as I write this, they haven’t updated the unemployment data yet to reflect the new July data. (Click here for Alpha results.)

Bing isn’t trying yet.