Category: Economy

U.S. Economy Word Cloud

Tim Kane at the Kauffman Foundation is out with his latest survey of economics bloggers (full disclosure: I am both an adviser to the survey and a participant in it).

My favorite feature this quarter is a word cloud of adjectives (and some adverbs) that the respondents offered to an open-ended question about the U.S. economy:

Uncertain, sluggish, weak, and fragile sound about right to me, but I think growing should be a bit bigger. After all, the problem we have is slow, as-yet-unimpressive growth. (I forget what I answered, but I bet uncertain and fragile were on the list.)

Among the more amusing responses from other bloggers: taupe and flirtatious.

You can find the full survey results here.

Home Construction Hits Yet Another Low

Housing starts and permits usually dominate the headlines on residential construction data day. In September, for example, single-family starts increased a healthy 4.4% (total starts increased 0.3%), and single-family permits rose 0.5% (but total permits declined 5.6%).

Those are certainly important measures, but I also like to look at a third measure of residential activity in the report: the number of single-family houses under construction.

That measure suggests that the housing market has continued to deteriorate in recent months:

The number of single-family homes under construction at the end of September fell to just 269,000, down about 14% from a year ago. I had once hoped that the housing market was putting in a bottom, with homes under construction plateauing at about 300,000. But we’ve now witnessed five straight months of declines.

August Rail Traffic, An Upbeat Economic Indicator

August was a busy month for America’s railroads, according to the Association for American Railroads. Traffic spiked up, as often happens during the month. More importantly, August traffic was 11% higher than a year ago (the same gain as reported in July):

Carloads (think bulk materials like coal, grains, minerals, and chemicals plus autos) are up about 6% over 2009:

Intermodal traffic (think trailers and containers) is up almost 20%, thus returning to 2008 levels:

Underemployment Moves Up in August

Friday’s job report was decidedly mixed. Private employers added 67,000 jobs–more than expected, but still tepid. Meanwhile the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6%, and the U-6 measure of underemployment moved up to 16.7%:

(As you may recall, the U-6 measure includes the officially unemployed, marginally attached workers, and those who are working part-time but want full-time work.)

Both the headline unemployment rate (U-3) and the underemployment rate (U-6) are below their peaks of late 2009, but have basically been moving sideways. That’s much better than the sharp increases in 2008 and most of 2009. But we have a very long way to go.

Further Signs of a Slowdown

As expected, BEA’s second stab at GDP growth for the second quarter was even less inspiring than the first. Headline growth was a tepid 1.6%, down from the 2.4% previously reported. Consumer spending and business spending on equipment and software were actually stronger than earlier estimates, but business structures, inventories, and exports all weakened, while imports (which deduct from GDP the way BEA calculates it) grew faster than previously expected.

Last month I pointed out one, small silver lining in the original GDP report: every major category of demand had increased. That is still true in the revised data, although structures just squeaked by with a miniscule 0.01 percentage point contribution to overall growth:

Investment showed particular strength. Business investment in equipment and software (E&S) grew at a 25% pace, thus adding about 1.5 percentage points to overall GDP growth. Boosted by the end (hopefully permanent) of the new homebuyer tax credit, housing investment grew at a bubble-like 27% pace (adding about 0.6 percentage points to GDP).

Despite solid growth in disposable incomes–up 4.4% adjusted for inflation–consumer spending grew at only a 2.0% pace.  As a result, the saving rate increased to 6.1%, compared with 5.5% in the first quarter.

And then there are imports. As I’ve discussed before, BEA calculates GDP by adding up all the components of demand for U.S. products–consumers, businesses, governments, and export markets–and then subtracting the portion of that demand that is supplied by imports. That means that any growth in imports appears as though it subtracts from overall economic growth.

That happened in a big way in the second quarter. Imports grew at a brisk 32% pace, thus subtracting (using BEA’s accounting approach) 4.5 percentage points from overall growth. Which is why all those blue bars in the graph net out to only 1.6% GDP growth.

I should also note that BEA’s calculation of contributions to GDP growth, which I graphed above, is subject to the same criticism that I’ve leveled at the claim that consumer spending is 70% of the economy. In a perfect world, an appropriate share of the imports (the red bar) would be netted against each of the components of demand (the blue bars). The result would be a graph of contributions that would truly illustrate how much each category of demand actually contributed to U.S. GDP growth. I hope to take a crack at that in the future (but I said that last month, too).

Fiscal Policy in Interesting Times

Back on August 5, I gave a speech at the Retirement Research Consortium’s annual conference “Retirement, Planning, and Social Security in Interesting Times.” I’ve been saving up the link to the C-Span video to share during my vacation.

Here it is. (I hope the link still works; if not, I will fix it once I get back on the grid.)

Keeping with the spirit of the event, I spoke about “Fiscal Policy in Interesting Times.” And with that title, I simply had to mention the famous curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

As the helpful folks at Wikipedia point out, chances are good that this curse originated in England or the United States not, as often alleged, China. Regardless of its origin, it’s still an excellent curse, which I remember my mom invoking often in my childhood (rhetorically, I should note, not at me). For an audience of policy researchers, however, it’s a curse with a silver lining. We may not want interesting things to happen (financial crises, trillion-dollar deficits, 9.5% unemployment, etc.), but they do increase the odds that policymakers, journalists, and the public will pay attention to what we are saying (whether they should is a separate question …).

What makes today particularly interesting is that we face lots of uncertainty and major challenges. That a potent mix. We know less about what’s going on than usual, but we are playing for bigger stakes. Case in point: Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s recent statement about the outlook being “unusually uncertain” while the economy still struggles to heal from the financial crisis. Is it a rebound or a relapse? I fear it may be the latter, but we just don’t know.

The meat of the speech considers the economic and fiscal uncertainties and challenges we face. For example, I lament the ridiculous uncertainty in our tax system. Not only do we not know what will happen in 2011, after the scheduled expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, we don’t even know what the tax code is in 2010. Will there be an AMT patch? A retroactive change to the temporarily extinct estate tax? What about the (in)famous tax extenders?

I wrap up by sharing one other thing I learned from Wikipedia. The “interesting times” curse is apparently the mildest of a trio of curses.

If you are feeling really mad, the appropriate curse is “May you come to the attention of people in authority.” Which again is rather a mixed curse for policy researchers who want policymkaers to pay attention.

And if you are really, really mad, then you should bring out the worst of the curses: “May you find what you are looking for.”

P.S. At the moment, I am looking for puffins, humpback whales, glaciers, and grizzly bears.

“Tracking” the Economy

The fine folks at the Association of American Railroads are out with their latest edition of Rail Time Indicators. Total traffic (carloads plus intermodal) in July was about 11% higher than the dismal levels of a year ago, but remains about 10% below earlier years:

The rebound has been weaker in carloads (think bulk materials like coal, grains, minerals, and chemicals plus autos); they are up about 4% over 2009:

And stronger in intermodal (think trailers and containers), which are up about 17%:

We’re Still #1 (Unfortunately)

The Bureau of Economic Analysis rewrote history on Friday. Along with GDP data for the second quarter, BEA also published revisions to its GDP estimates since the start of 2007.

Bottom line: The recession was worse than originally thought. The economy contracted by 4.1% from peak to trough (Q2 2008 to Q2 2009), up from the 3.9% previously estimated.

The Great Recession has thus solidified its position as the worst downturn since World War II:

As painful as it has been, the recession remains a far cry from the Great Depression, when economic activity plummeted almost 27%:

Which raises an important question: Just how close did the Great Recession get to being the Great Depression 2.0?

Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder took a crack at that question in a paper released last week.  Their answer: If it weren’t for aggressive monetary and fiscal policy responses, the U.S. economy would have contracted more than 12% during 2008, 2009, and 2010 — about half a Great Depression (and arithmetically, but not economically, comparable to the demobilization after WW II).

A Silver Lining in Second Quarter GDP?

Last Friday the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its first look at GDP growth in the second quarter. BEA estimates that the economy grew at a moderate 2.4% annual pace in the quarter, notably slower than the 3.7% pace in the first quarter and the 5.0% pace in the fourth quarter of 2009 (both those figures were revised in this release).

As usual, I think it’s helpful to break down economic growth into its key components. The following chart illustrates how much various types of economic activity contributed to (or subtracted from) second quarter growth:

The chart illustrates the silver lining in an otherwise tepid GDP report: every major category of domestic demand expanded in the second quarter. Consumers, businesses, export markets, and governments all increased their purchases. That’s a good sign. Indeed, you have to go back more than five years, to the first quarter of 2005, for the last time that happened.

Investment showed particular strength. Business investment in equipment and software (E&S) grew at a 22% pace, thus adding about 1.4 percentage points to overall GDP growth. Boosted by the end (hopefully permanent) of the new homebuyer tax credit, housing investment grew at a bubble-like 28% pace (adding about 0.6 percentage points to GDP). And business investment in new structures recorded its first gain in two years

Despite solid growth in disposable incomes–up 4.4% adjusted for inflation–consumer spending grew at only a 1.6% pace.  As a result, the saving rate increased to 6.2%, compared with 5.5% in the first quarter.

And then there are imports. As I’ve discussed before, BEA calculates GDP by adding up all the components of demand for U.S. products–consumers, businesses, governments, and export markets–and then subtracting the portion of that demand that is supplied by imports. That means that any growth in imports appears as though it subtracts from overall economic growth.

That’s what happened in the second quarter. Imports grew at a brisk 29% pace, thus subtracting (using BEA’s accounting approach) 4.0 percentage points from overall growth. Which is why all those blue bars in the graph net out to only 2.4% growth in GDP.

I should hasten to add that this does not actually mean that imports are bad for growth. The big red bar is an accounting convention, not a measure of economic impact. Indeed, many imports are essential to our economy, at least in the foreseeable future (think oil for transportation and coffee for Starbucks).

I should also note that BEA’s calculation of contributions to GDP growth, which I graphed above, is subject to the same criticism that I’ve leveled at the claim that consumer spending is 70% of the economy. In a perfect world, an appropriate share of the imports (the red bar) would be netted against each of the components of demand (the blue bars). The result would be a graph of contributions that would truly illustrate how much each category of demand actually contributed to U.S. GDP growth. I will take a crack at that in the future.

A New Low in Home Construction

Yesterday’s housing data were suitably glum, with single-family starts and permits both down (0.7% and 3.4%, respectively).

And what about my favorite metric, the number of houses under construction? It fell a hefty 5.3%. Which puts the number of single-family homes under construction at its lowest level in decades:

After the expiration of the new home buyer tax credit, only 286,000 single-family homes were under construction at the end of June. That’s down modestly from the 298,000 to 318,000 levels of the past year, when it looked construction was trying to put in a bottom. Just one more sign of continued weakness in housing markets.