Economy – Page 3 – Donald Marron

Getting Better But a Long Way to Go

Friday’s jobs data confirmed that labor markets are getting better, but slowly. Payrolls expanded by 200,000, the unemployment rate fell again to 8.5%, weekly hours ticked up from 34.3 to 34.4, and hourly earnings rose by 0.2%.

Of course, there is still a long, long way to go. Unemployment and underemployment both remain very high, but they’ve been moving in the right direction. After peaking at 10% in October 2009, the unemployment rate has declined by 1.5 percentage points. The U-6 measure of underemployment, meanwhile, peaked at 17.2% and now stands at 15.2%:

(The U-6 measures includes the officially unemployed, marginally attached workers, and those who are working part-time but want full-time work.)

The Twelve Days of Christmas for Our Weak Economy

With apologies to Christmas carol purists, my latest Christian Science Monitor column offers up the twelve days of Christmas for our weak economy. I am no Jeff Foxworthy, so please forgive the poetic license and imprecise scanning. Oh, and kudos to my editor for letting me keep in the reference to Festivus.

As the folks in the streets of Oakland and the halls of Congress remind us, we don’t lack for challenges this holiday season.

Despite glimmers of improvement, the US economy remains lackluster and Washington seems unable to get anything passed to help, even a payroll tax extension that all sides want. Things are worse in Europe. Japan still struggles to recover from two decades of weak growth and the shock of this year’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. Even highflying China and Brazil find their economies slowing.

But it is the season of hope. So rather than gather around the Festivus pole to air grievances, let’s visualize a better world. Here are the gifts I would bestow on the world economy for the 12 days of Christmas:

12 AAA nations. At this writing, 12 European nations have a triple-A credit rating from Standard & Poor’s, but those top-notch ratings are in jeopardy. Thanks to the European financial crisis, S&P put 15 eurozone nations on credit watch, with a real risk of downgrades. It would be a remarkable gift if a year from now, all 12 AAA nations remain so.

11 percent Dow gain. A so-called Santa rally would buoy investor spirits globally.

10 more Steve Jobses. In October, America lost its most iconic entrepreneur. We could use many more of him to drive new economic activity.

9 percent BRIC growth. As late as April, forecasters were calling for Brazil and Russia (the first two of the BRIC nations) to grow by about 4 percent through 2014, while India was to speed ahead at slightly over 8 percent and China at 9.5 percent. That forecast now looks optimistic, but these emerging economies have the size and dynamism to reenergize the world economy.

8 percent EU jobless. The unemployment rate is already above 10 percent in the European Union (compared with 8.6 percent in the United States). Europe’s financial crisis and economic contraction threaten to push it higher still. The faster its job growth, the easier its debt problems can be solved.

7 Fed governors. In the face of political gridlock, the Federal Reserve has been the one Washington institution able to take action to contain crises. But it has been understaffed throughout the financial crisis. Only five of seven governors are in place. The president and the Senate should fill the vacancies.

6 million home sales. Existing home sales have been running at a 5 million annual clip* with new sales around 300,000. Once the housing market hits bottom, perhaps combined sales can move back to a healthier combined level of 6 million.

5 percent growth. Growth is essential for creating jobs and easing Washington’s budget strains. But the tepid 2 percent growth of recent quarters isn’t enough to trim the rolls of the unemployed.

4 million jobs. A stretch goal to be sure – the US hasn’t created 4 million jobs in a single year since 1994. But even that miraculous growth would leave payroll employment more than 2 million below its peak before the worst of the financial crisis.

$3 trillion cuts. Despite all the hype, the super committee failed to make any headway on America’s fiscal challenges. Budget experts, myself included, had encouraged the panel to “go big” with $4 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade. That proved a bridge too far. With $1 trillion in budget cuts already baked in the cake, let’s hope that the presidential candidates offer plans to get to at least $3 trillion more.

2 new currencies. The euro doesn’t make sense for Greece – and probably at least one other debt-laden nation on Europe’s periphery.

And a fundamental tax reform.

* The home sales goal has gotten much harder. Yesterday, the National Association of Realtors revised down the annual pace of existing home sales by almost a million units. Oops.

The Most Important Economic Chart of the Year

Ezra Klein surveyed 18 economists for their charts of the year. Here’s my candidate, courtesy of Spiegel Online:

This chart illustrates the end of euro complacency. Investors once acted as though the euro eliminated not just currency risk but sovereign credit risk. All nations–from Greece to Germany–could borrow at the same low rates. No longer. As the financial crisis enters its fifth year, markets are again distinguishing between strong nations and weak.

I subsequently discovered that I am not alone in choosing this chart. The BBC has a version of this as the first entry in its survey of top graphs of the year (with commentary by Vicky Pryce of FTI Consulting), and Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute included it in Derek Thompson’s survey of top graphs over at the Atlantic.

P.S. For the United States, I think Brad DeLong is right: behold the shortfall in nominal U.S. GDP.

A Great Introduction to Economic Inequality

Over at the Browser, Sophie Roell interviews MIT economist Daron Acemoglu on the economics of inequality. In the course of discussing five books on the topic (one of which is actually a research paper), Acemoglu hits many of the high points — technology, skills, and education; the increase in income at the tippy-top of the wage distribution in the United States (and elsewhere); and the importance of politics, power, and rent-seeking.

Well worth your time.

The U.S. Economy is Weak, Uncertain, and Fragile

At least according to the latest Kauffman survey of economics bloggers by Tim Kane. Here’s the word cloud of responses when the bloggers (including me) were asked for up to five adjectives to describe the U.S. economy in Q4 2011:

Comparing this to the last survey in July, the good news is that “vulnerable” has gotten smaller. The bad news is that “recovering” has disappeared (at least I couldn’t find it):

Is Our Luck Running Out on Oil Supplies?

In an excellent new paper, Jim Hamilton asks whether the “phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half” reflects technological progress or good fortune in finding new reserves. The two aren’t completely distinct, of course. Better technology helps find more resources. But the heart of the question remains: have we been lucky or good?

Based on a careful reading of production patterns in the United States and around the world, Jim concludes that we’ve been both and worries that the luck part may be coming to an end:

My reading of the historical evidence is as follows. (1) For much of the history of the industry, oil has been priced essentially as if it were an inexhaustible resource. (2) Although technological progress and enhanced recovery techniques can temporarily boost production flows from mature fields, it is not reasonable to view these factors as the primary determinants of annual production rates from a given field. (3) The historical source of increasing global oil production is exploitation of new geographical areas, a process whose promise at the global level is obviously limited.

…

Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource that was extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It is not clear how easy it will be to adapt to the end of that era of good fortune.

These arguments should be familiar to anyone who’s followed the peak oil debate, but Jim brings a welcome rigor to the discussion.

He also includes some charts illustrating how various states and regions have passed their production peaks. Here, for example, are the United States, North Sea, and Mexico:

And he discusses how oil prices affect the economy. All in all, a great survey.

P.S. If you are interested in the details, Jim’s post over at Econbrowser sparked some thoughtful comments.

Unemployment, Small Business, Quantitative Easing, and More

The Fed’s quantitative easing programs did indeed lower interest rates, but more so for Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities than for other kinds of debt. Small businesses are overrated as job creators. Extended unemployment insurance does increase unemployment rates, but not that much.

Those are just a few of the findings from papers presented today at the Brookings Institution’s twice-yearly conference, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.

Courtesy of a Brookings release, here are brief summaries of five papers discussed today:

In Recession and the Costs of Lost Jobs, authors Steve Davis of the University of Chicago and Til von Wachter of Columbia University find that when mass-layoffs occur in good economic times, men with 3 or more years of job tenure suffer a $65,000 loss in the lifetime value of their earnings (a fall of about 10%), relative to otherwise similar workers who retain their jobs. But in a recession, a similar shock causes workers to lose $112,000 in the lifetime value of their future earnings (or about 19%). The authors also track worker perceptions about layoff risks, job-finding prospects, and the likelihood of wage cuts, finding a tremendous increase in worker anxieties about their labor market prospects after the financial crisis of 2008. This heightened anxiety continues today, they find. Davis and von Wachter also show that prior economic employment models have been unable to address the facts about the earnings losses associated with job loss, yet those earnings impacts appear to be one of the main reasons that individuals and policymakers are so concerned with recessions and unemployment. Finally, they note that pro-growth policies may be the most efficient and cost-effective means available to policymakers to alleviate the hardships experienced by displaced workers.

In What Do Small Businesses Do authors Erik Hurst and Benjamin Wild Pugsley of the University of Chicago overturn the conventional wisdom about the role of small business, finding that they aren’t the job engine most believe them to be. Most small business owners neither expect nor desire to grow or innovate, but rather intend to provide an existing service to an existing customer base. Analyzing new survey data, the authors find that, instead, it is non-financial reasons — such as work flexibility and the desire to be one’s own boss – that are the most common reason that entrepreneurs start their own business. Hurst and Pugsley note this behavior is consistent with the industry characteristics of the majority of small businesses, which are concentrated among skilled craftsmen, lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, small shopkeepers, and restaurateurs. They conclude that standard theories of entrepreneurship may be misguided and result in sub-optimal public policy, suggesting that subsidies for small businesses may be better spent if they are targeted to businesses that expect to grow and innovate, rather than small businesses in general. They laud the partnership between the US Small Business Administration and venture capital firms as an example of strong targeted public policy.

In Unemployment Insurance and Job Search in the Great Recession, Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley finds that recent extensions to the period in which the unemployed can draw unemployment benefits had a significant but small negative effect on the probability that eligible unemployed would exit unemployment, and that the effect is mainly concentrated among the long-term unemployed. Rothstein calculates that without those extensions, the unemployment rate would have been about 0.2-0.6 percentage points lower—a much smaller impact than implied by previous analyses, and that the long-term unemployment rate would have been even lower. He finds that half or more of these impacts are due to the unemployed remaining in the labor force rather than reductions in the chances of finding employment. As a result, Rothstein suggests that a generous extension of UI benefit in deep recessions should last until the labor market is strong again, thus giving displaced workers a realistic chance of finding new employment before their benefits expire.

In The Effects of Quantitative Easing on Interest Rates, Arvind Krishnamurthy and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen of Northwestern University show that the Federal Reserve’s recent quantitative easing (QE) programs (“QE1” and “QE2”) did in fact significantly lower interest rates on Treasury securities, as well as GSE bonds and highly rated corporate bonds. They also find that such programs affect interest rates differently depending on which assets are purchased: QE1, which involved the purchase of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in addition to Treasury securities, significantly lowered MBS rates, whereas QE2, which focused exclusively on Treasury securities, had little effect on MBS rates. The authors identify several channels through which QE affects interest rates: first, QE increases the premium paid for assets with low-default risk (and thus lowers rates on these assets), by reducing the supply of such assets available to investors; second, QE drives down interest rates broadly by signaling a commitment by the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low for a long period; and third, when QE involves purchases of mortgage-related assets, it lowers rates on such assets by affecting the price of mortgage-specific risk. Because QE does not affect all long-term interest rates equally, examining the impact of a QE policy that focuses on purchases of Treasury securities on long-term Treasury rates is likely to overstate the program’s impact on the long-term corporate and mortgage interest rates that all relevant to investment and housing demand. Interestingly, the results about having the Fed use its communication channel alone – that is, signaling its intentions – might be having a significant impact on rates without having the Fed actually take on the risks associated with increasing its balance sheet. The authors also conclude that expected inflation increased substantially due to QE1 and modestly due to QE2, implying that reductions in real rates were larger than reductions in nominal rates.

In Practical Monetary Policy: Examples from Sweden and the United States, Lars E.O. Svensson, the Deputy Governor of the Swedish Central Bank (Sveriges Riksbank) analyzes the actions of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Swedish Riksbank during and after the summer of 2010, looking for evidence that perhaps central banks make mistakes. In that time period, both the Fed and Riksbank forecasts for inflation were below their target and their forecasts for unemployment were above the sustainable unemployment rate, suggesting that more expansionary policy was warranted. However, the Riksbank tightened policy while the Federal Reserve held rates steady. Although the Swedish economy developed better than expected, and the U.S. economy developed worse than anticipated, Svensson argues that these developments were the result of external factors — not, in fact, the nations’ respective monetary policies. The Riksbank benefited from higher-than-anticipated domestic and export demand, upward revisions of GDP data, and a lack of structural problems. On the other hand, the Fed had to contend with fiscal policy problems, a slower housing market recovery, and substantial downward revisions of GDP data. The author concludes that the Riksbank’s decision to tighten policy is difficult to justify, while the Federal Reserve’s decision not to tighten was appropriate, although there is also a case to be made that they should have eased more.

Regulatory Uncertainty and Our Weak Economy

Over at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog, Grep Ip offers an excellent, balanced analysis of regulatory uncertainty and our weak economy. Here’s a short excerpt:

How much of our economic malaise can be blamed on regulatory uncertainty? Conservatives argue that a wave of Obama administration regulations and the threat of more to come are the primary hindrance to business confidence and hiring. Liberals say that the weak economy is far more important and that any regulations being enacted more than pay for themselves in economic terms.

I’ve been struggling with this question for months and have found the debate frustrating: the terminology is wrong and the subject poorly framed, the evidence fragmentary and unhelpful, and generalisations are rampant. So what follows are a few thoughts that I think clarify the debate, though without necessarily resolving it.

First, it is not “uncertainty” per se that bothers business. Whether uncertainty is unwelcome depends entirely on what’s at stake. What would you prefer: 100% probability of dying next year, or 50%? Most of us would choose the latter. Similarly, business would prefer zero probability of a burdensome new rule, but if that’s not possible, would certainly take 50% probability over 100%. The administration’s decision to delay implementation of a new ozone standard perpetuates uncertainty. Business welcomed it nonetheless because now they do not have to spend money to meet it for at least two years, and perhaps forever if in the interim a new president chooses never to implement it. Does the Federal Reserve create some uncertainty when it undertakes quantitative easing? Probably, but in the process it makes the stability of inflation around 2% much more certain, and that, most businesses would say, is a reasonable trade-off.

Second, “regulation” doesn’t capture the breadth of government activity that affects business confidence, investment and hiring. The threat that America might default must surely have been one of the most toxic sources of uncertainty America’s political classes have yet inflicted on the economy, something you’ll see mentioned in the Federal Reserve’s latest beige book. This speaks to a more deep-rooted alienation between business and Washington.

Read the whole thing, it’s the best treatment I’ve seen.

A Synchronized Slowdown in Developed Economies

Which of the following nations recorded the strongest economic growth in the second quarter? France, Germany, Italy, Japan, or the United States?

This nice chart from today’s Wall Street Journal provides the answer (click for larger version):

The U.S. expanded at a tepid 1.3% annual pace in Q2, but that was still better than many other developed economies. Italy grew at a 1% pace, Germany at 0.5%, and France at 0.0%. And then there’s Japan, which contracted at a 1.3% pace.

The chart also nicely illustrates just how sharp the GDP declines were in late 2008 and early 2009. Both Germany and Japan, for example, had quarters in which economic activity contracted at a 15% annual pace or more. By contrast, the worst U.S. quarter saw declines at “only” a 8.9% pace.

Another Record Low for Homes Under Construction

Today’s housing data showed that the number of single-family homes under construction hit another record low in July:

Ten years ago, America’s home builders were in the midst of constructing 689,000 single-family homes. Five years ago, they were building 913,000 homes. Last year, they were building 278,000. And now that figure is down to a mere 243,000.