In a funny line uttered at the Republican National Convention California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger accused pessimists of being economic girlie men.
To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don’t be economic girlie men! The U.S. economy remains the envy of the world. We have the highest economic growth of any of the world’s major industrialized nations.
Of course we have a much lower economic growth rate than China. But the Chinese are playing catch-up and that is easier to do than it is to develop new technology that raises maximum possible productivity even higher.
Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach defends the pessimistic views of the "economic girlie men".
By depicting those of us who worry about the state of the US economy as “economic girlie-men,” the Governor offered new meaning to the debate that is currently raging in financial markets. Far be it for me to take this characterization personally. But in the interest of fair play, it deserves a response.
Forget about politics -- at least for the moment -- and consider the facts: This economic recovery, by most conventional measures, has been amazingly lousy. Annualized growth in real GDP has averaged 3.4% over the first ten quarters of this upturn, far below the 5% norm of the previous six business cycles. Nonfarm payroll employment is up only 0.1%, on average, over the past ten quarters -- hugely deficient when compared with the 2.7% record of the past six recoveries. Real wage and salary disbursements -- the essence of the economy’s organic, or internal, income-generating capacity -- is up at only a 0.8% average annual rate over the past ten quarters versus the 3.9% norm of the previous six upturns. The federal government budget is out of control, having swung from surplus to deficit by six percentage points of GDP from 2000 to 2003. This was key in pushing the net national saving rate down to its all time low of 0.4% of GNP in early 2003. Lacking in domestic saving, the US has had to import foreign saving in order to keep the economy growing; that has given rise to a record current account deficit of 5.1% of GDP. All this speaks of a vulnerable and exceedingly low-quality recovery in the US. If that makes me an economic girlie boy, so be it.
Roach makes a convincing argument that the US economy has structural problems (e.g. a large trade deficit, a low domestic savings rate, and unfunded retirement liabilities) of long standing that are not the cause of any one politician's or party's policies. He thinks the blame game in Washington DC prevents the underlying problems from being rationally discussed and addressed.
Motley Fool editor Bill Mann bravely claims that he too is an economic girlie man.
I am concerned that low interest rates have been used to entice the American consumer to clean up a recession borne by an irresponsible corporate spending binge by going on one of his own. I'm afraid that the $200 billion-plus that Americans have cashed out of their houses has been spent, and the next drop in interest rates won't be concomitant with a rise in prices; rather, it will be because of a full-fledged financial emergency
Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson cites Brookings Institution economist Charles Schultze to argue that the biggest reason for slow jobs growth during the economic recovery is higher than typical productivity growth.
From late 1995 to late 2000, productivity (output per hour worked) grew 2.6 percent annually. During the next three years, annual growth averaged 4.1 percent. If it had stayed at the lower level, there'd be 2 million more jobs, Schultze estimates. Unemployment would be about 5 percent.
Rapid productivity growth would be a better cause of high unemployment than other possible causes. Though if that is a major cause it brings with it the possibility that the economy is going to become so productive that an growing fraction of the population will beome permanently unemployed.
Another less frequently mentioned cause of the current unemployment rate is immigration. Count on leading figures in both political parties to avoid mentioning that in the election debates.
The economy is not in George W. Bush's favor for reelection. But he's not running on its economic record. He is running on attacks on Kerry's character and ability. Plus, he's wrapping the war in Iraq together with the war against terrorists to argue that the Iraq war was necessary in spite of the aftermath. His argument doesn't sound reasonable to me.
But I'm guessing at this point that Bush's argument is going to convince a majority of voters. One reason for this is that John Kerry is a weak candidate. Bush only has to seem better than Kerry to a lot of voters who do not understand the fallacies at the base of in Bush's foreign policy. Kerry is not going to try to argue against those fallacies (e.g. the supposedly universal desire for liberal democracy) because some of those fallacies are part of liberal mythology as well.
The August 19, 2004 oil price peak of $48.70 per barrel may be cheap compared to even higher prices which may be in store.
No market goes up forever. But Philip Verleger, a respected energy economist, warns that over the next several years, the price pressure will probably get worse. "Prices may rise to $50 per barrel, or $60 per barrel, or even $70 per barrel," he writes in a recent report to clients. "They will likely remain there until growth in petroleum demand slows down enough to match available refining, logistical and productive capacity."
Note that in inflation-adjusted terms during the Iranian hostage crisis the price of oil hit $75 per barrel in 2004 dollars.
Higher oil prices cut economic growth.
High Frequency Economics says that every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil lowers its GDP growth expectations by six tenths of a percentage point. All of which feeds back into increased nervousness on Wall Street--and perhaps at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not all economists agree on how much smaller the GDP will be for each additional $10 per barrel increase in oil prices. David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor's, sees the economic threat to the economy from high oil prices as being exaggerated by others.
Every $10-per-barrel hike in oil prices reduces economic growth for the next year by about 0.25% to 0.35%, largely by reducing real consumer disposable income. At S&P, we have lowered our consumer disposable income forecast for 2005 to 3.6% from the 3.9% we projected last month, largely because of costlier oil.
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Even if oil rose to $75, it wouldn't cause a recession. It would merely lower growth, to 2.4%, from the 3.6% expected in our baseline projection.
But Stephen Roach thinks just $50 per barrel oil may be sufficient to cause a recession.
"The oil price is firmly in the danger zone," Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley in New York, wrote in a note to clients. Should prices reach $50 and stay there for several months, this would be "in the ballpark with full-blown oil shocks of the past" that have caused recessions, he said.
Roach doesn't see this economic recovery as being particularly strong and in his writings he repeatedly points to jobs figures, consumer debt, the trade deficit, and the federal deficit as factors that weigh against a robust recovery. So part of his pessimism on the potential effects of higher oil prices may be a consequence of his view of the weakness of the current economic recovery.
China is now the world's second-largest oil consumer, and its imports are up 40 percent year-on-year to the end of July, according to recent data.
Before the latest round of violence in Najaf, Iraq had been exporting roughly 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, although volumes have fallen recently to about 900,000 barrels per day, according to a source within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries who spoke on condition of anonymity.
One of the arguments for the war in Iraq was that it would allow Iraqi oil field production to be scaled up tremendously. Well, even before the latest intensification of fighting in Iraq the Iraqi oil fields were still poducing less than they were in Saddam Hussein's final days. The political stability needed to enable substantial investment in Iraqi oil fields remains a distant prospect.
Energy ecnomist Philip Verleger mentioned above has an article on his web site making his argument that current US energy policy undermines US attempts to stop terrorists. (PDF format)
However, the United States and other countries have taken a different approach to the problem. In lieu of adopting energy policies that support the war on terrorism, they have fallen back on other plans that have been tried before and failed. One of these programs involves attacking terrorist financing. This approach echoes the unsuccessful attempt to cut off funding for Colombian drug lords, where international cash flows were scrutinized, bank deposits seized, and organizations closed down. This kind of effort disrupts but clearly does not stop the flow of funds. In the end, Americans, Europeans, and Asians are as vulnerable as ever to attack.
Meanwhile, the energy policy pursued by the United States has contributed to an increase in world oil prices, likely boosting the cash flow to the terrorists. A policy of aggressive ly acquiring crude for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, directed by the Department of Energy, has raised oil prices by between $3 and $6 per barrel, thus augmenting Saudi Arabia’s income. At the same time, policies that provide tax subsid ies to anyone who buys an SUV weighing more than 6,000 pounds have contributed to the 1.8 percent per annum increase in gasoline consumption. Lastly, in considering the energy bill now awaiting final passage, Congress has refused to adopt any measures that would encourage greater fuel economy in automobiles or SUVs. This situation sends a very clear message to the world : US Energy Policy Supports Terrorists and Opposes the War on Terrorism.
Verleger makes arguments very similar to arguments I've made here repeatedly. For my own arguments on energy policy and terrorism see my previous posts Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, Democracy Promotion, And Energy Policy, China Energy Consumption Growth Complicates Anti-Terrorist Efforts, Energy Policy, Islamic Terrorism, And Grand Strategy, and Luft And Korin On China's Rising Demand For Oil And Saudi Arabia.
The National Association of Business Economists (NABE) Economic Policy Survey polled 172 members to rank their views on the most important issues for the US President to address in the next presidential term. The business economists see terrorism as the biggest short term threat to the economy.
Terrorism remains the biggest short-term problem facing the U.S. economy this year, according to 40% of respondents, up from 19% in March. The deficit was chosen by 23% of respondents.
We separated long-term from short-term concerns for this survey. In the longer run, the rising elderly population and related health care costs are the primary problems. The rising elderly population and the concomitant rise in the dependency ratio were the prime long-term worries for 23% of panelists (down from 27%), while 22% focused on health care costs (up from 19%). The federal deficit was chosen by 17% (down from 24%) as a significant long-term problem.
The Bush Administration has failed in their handling of the terrorist threat in an important way: weak border control policy. Far better border control policies must be part of a complete response aimed at reducing the threat to terrorism. If policies make it harder for terrorists to enter the country on visas then the terrorists will just come over land borders from Mexico and Canada illegally or jump off of ships in ports. The border with Mexico is the biggest threat on this score. But Bush's pandering for Hispanic votes prevents him from closing the border. A barrier on the US-Mexico border is affordable and would pay for itself every year just for reduced costs for health care provided by US taxpayers.
Another way of looking at the concerns of the economists is a look at how they think the next US President should spend his time.
The new president should concentrate one-quarter of his time on terrorism. We asked what percentage of his time and energy should be spent on different issues. The panel recommended that 25% of his time be spent on the Middle East and terrorism. He should spend 17% on reducing the deficit, 16% on health-care reform, and 14% on social security reform. Energy policy should account for 11% of his attention, trade 8%, and education 6%. No other problem should account for more than 1% of his time.
I would reduce the amount of time allocated to reducing the immediate deficit and on social security reform to shift more attention to old age health care. The unfunded liabilities for Medicare are in the range of tens of trillions of dollars. In particular, I would look at formulating policies to achieve the following goals:
Science policy could play a much more productive role in reducing unfunded future liabilities. Better science policy and higher research funding would also increase our life expectancies and allow us to enjoy better health for longer periods of time. So it is an especially appealing tool to use in tackling the financial problems posed by an aging population.
In a stunningly weak performance, the American economy effectively ceased creating jobs last month, the government reported Friday, saying just 32,000 positions were added in July.
Put that in perspective. Imagine that the economy added 12 times that number of jobs in a year. That would be 384,000 jobs. With the econoy employing about 139 million workers that number would lower the unemployment rate by less than three tenths of a percentage point if that growth rate in employment was sustained for a whole year.
Wall Street economists were forecasting much larger jobs growth for July.
Mr Bush's treasury secretary, John Snow, reflected the administration's disappointment that the gain in jobs last month had failed to match Wall Street's 228,000 forecast.
Using the payroll survey measure there are still fewer people working now than at the beginning of Bush's term of office.
Payroll jobs remain 1.5 million short of where last winter the White House said they would be by now. To avoid being the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net job loss, Bush must hope for 372,000 new jobs a month in August, September and October.
Analysts with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, said that the economy has lost 1.1million jobs since Bush took office in January 2001 and that job growth has not kept pace with the 150,000 new jobs that are needed each month to keep up with growth in the workforce population.
Note, however, that the payroll survey is only one of two major methods used to measure employment. The household survey provides a separate independent way to measure employment and the household survey is also the source of the unemployment rate.
The unemployment rate, based on the household survey paints a rosier picture of declining unemployment rates.
The unemployment rate, however, dipped to 5.5 per cent last month, from 5.6 per cent in June. The new rate was the lowest since October 2001.
The household survey paints a rosier picture.
The Labor Department said its survey of households — which includes agriculture workers and the self-employed — again showed a picture vastly different from the employers' payroll survey, with a whopping 629,000 jobs being added in July, to 139.7 million.
From the standpoint of the Presidential election what is very important is who is getting the new jobs. Are the new jobs going to voters or non-voters? Here the news looks worse for Bush's reelection prospects. See my previous posts Black Male Labor Market Participation Declines In Face Of Immigrant Influx, Non-Citizens And Illegals Getting Over A Quarter Of New Jobs, and Foreign Employment Rises In US As Native Employment Declines.
For reasons that make no sense to me Tyler Cowen thinks China's demand for oil is not a net cost to the United States. (correct me if I'm wrong in my interpretation Tyler)
Oil just hit $40 a barrel. Many analysts, such as Paul Krugman have noted the Chinese role in pushing up commodity and natural resource prices:
Lately we've been hearing a lot about competition from Chinese manufacturing and Indian call centers. But a different kind of competition — the scramble for oil and other resources — poses a much bigger threat to our prosperity.I am surprised to see Krugman so qualifying his former belief in the virtues of free trade. Keep in mind that the core theory of international theory is a barter theory. "The Chinese buying oil" and "the Chinese selling bicycles" are just two sides of the same coin. If you don't think one can harm the U.S., you shouldn't, in general, think the other will harm the U.S. either. (Of course if your vision of free trade is we get the bicycles but give up nothing in return, we are worse off relative to that state of affairs!)
Here is another way to think of the logic. If the Chinese are bidding up the price of oil, they have found good uses for that resource. If they have a comparative advantage in buying oil, that benefits the rest of the world. Comparative advantage in production also will mean comparative advantage in buying certain inputs. The U.S. still has access to its previous production possibilities frontier. It must now decide whether it would rather spend its money on oil, or on something else, perhaps the outputs of the Chinese.
Tyler is surprised by Paul Krugman? Well, I'm surprised by Tyler. Or wait, no, I take that back. This is the sort of argument I expect Tyler to make. I also disagree with it.
Okay, what is wrong with Tyler's argument? The higher price for oil reduces the amount of oil the US will buy. The oil that the US will buy will cost more. The rising Chinese demand for oil makes us worse off. The Saudis and other oil producing nations will get more money for producing the same stuff and therefore can buy more stuff with the same amount of oil sold. The Saudis will not need to work harder or more efficiently. They didn't even have to do anything to get the oil in the first place. They just got lucky to have oil under their deserts. They didn't even have to develop the technology to extract, process, and ship it. Yet they make the bulk of the money from its sale.
Rising demand for natural resources as a result of the industrialization of more of the world is going to shift more wealth from manufacturers to the possessors of natural resources. The United States will have to lower the prices at which it sells goods in order to generate more sales to get the revenue to pay for the higher price for oil imports. It is hard to see how this is a gain for the USA. The same holds for other existing big buyers of natural resources. They will pay more for inputs and at the same time will have to sell a larger fraction of their outputs abroad to earn the revenue to pay for the inputs.
Tyler mentions the environmental cost to the US and other countries from the increased energy consumption of China. Yes, Chinese air pollution does cross the Pacific to reach the United States.
The contributions to Western US air pollution are sometimes substantial.
Based on air quality measurements at Cheeka Peak at the westernmost tip of Washington state and later airplane-based measurements, Jaffe's research group has shown that a steady trickle of air pollution comes across the Pacific from Asia -- at least in the spring -- punctuated by a surge of pollutants once or twice a month.
These surges are presumably due to the wholesale movement of air from Asian urban areas across the Pacific. This prevents the pollutants from being diluted by mixing with cleaner air. During these surges, the air entering the West Coast can have pollution concentrations as high as 75 percent of federal air quality standards, Jaffe said.
China is going to surpass the United States in carbon dioxide emissions.
China will surpass the United States in annual emissions of CO2 within a decade and, in a few decades, in total cumulative emissions of CO2 since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Chinese sulfur dioxide emissions have skyrocketed.
Between 1990 and 2000, annual releases of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in the United States dropped from about 20 million tons to 13 million tons, but in China they have climbed to about 45 million tons.
But pollution is not the biggest cost to the rest of the world coming from increased Chinese oil purchases and increased Chinese coal burning. Nor is the biggest cost the higher price the US has to pay for oil (though, contra Tyler, that really is a net loss for the United States). The biggest cost for the United States from Chinese economic growth is in the realm of national security. The rising demand for oil from China and other industrializing countries is going to make the Middle East even more problematic.
To the extent that China becomes a military rival they will of course also cost us a lot more in increased military spending. How that plays out remains to be seen. But we certainly are faced with both higher energy prices and a more intractable Middle East as a result of China's economic growth.
Update As Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley argues, the US government ought to spend an additional $10 billion per year on energy research. Energy research is a much cheaper way to avoid with the potential costs (assuming there really are net costs) of climate warming too.
The Punjab government says it stopped traders in 18 out of 34 districts from selling wheat in a bid to prevent hoarding and ensure prices were not inflated, but the move has angered officials of Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Sindh. The government imposed a similar ban last year but lifted it after protests from the other provinces. Punjab Food Secretary Shahid Hassan Raja explains, "The other provinces should support Punjab's decision because it is in their best interests. Otherwise, they will have to buy wheat for US $206.9 to US $241 per metric ton, but now the Punjab government will be able to provide them wheat for around $151 per metric ton."
A recent decision by Pakistan's central government to prevent the import of Australian wheat may have been motivated by a desire to make profits from the resulting price run-up.
KARACHI: The rejection of 15 lakh tonnes of Australian wheat by the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock (MINFAL) — a decision that skyrocketed the flour prices in Sindh to Rs 20 per kg and earned at least Rs three billion profit to wheat black marketers in late February — is now shaping into a major scandal for the Jamali government, according to interviews with related officials, informed sources and documents available with this correspondent.
PESHAWAR, May 1: The Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (F) has held Punjab responsible for wheat crisis in the country and asked the Centre to meet the NWFP flour requirement on propriety basis.
Nearly half of the NWFP flour mills have stopped operating due to lack of wheat.
NWFP also grows wheat but its total produce can hardly meet even 25 percent of its requirement. It is therefore showing signs of extreme nervousness over Punjab’s policy of not allowing its wheat to be exported out of the province. One NWFP minister is so angry at this that he has threatened to stop the supply of hydel power to the Punjab if the latter does not lift the ban. Out of a total of 260 flourmills in the NWFP, 100 have closed down because of insufficient inflows of wheat. The NWFP government has tried to assure Punjab that it will not allow the smuggling or hoarding of wheat if Punjab allows it to buy wheat. Balochistan, too, is up in arms. Nawab Akbar Bugti has also threatened to cut off gas supply to the Punjab if it persists in its refusal to supply wheat to Balochistan.
Note that the Punjab government is afraid that if it allows unrestricted selling of wheat to NWFP then at least some of that wheat will be exported to Afghanistan. Of course if that happened it would generate more money for Pakistani farmers giving them an incentive to invest to increase production. Well, can't have that. At the same time the federal government is trying to block import of foreign wheat. In the minds of central planners both imports and exports can be bad at the same time.
Some commentators in Pakistan claim that the central goverment needs to tame those pesky market forces.
Analysts say that a harvest of 20 million tonnes is sufficient for the country’s requirement provided the government can plug smuggling through porous borders with Afghanistan and central Asia. It is also required to evolve a strategy aimed at countering the moves of ‘market forces’ in an effective and meaningful way.
How many other countries mess up their agricultural markets in this fashion so routinely and so drastically? It sounds like the farmers of Pakistan can grow enough wheat to satisfy their markets. But the government intervention surely must be holding back the modernization of Pakistani agriculture. The uncertainty and price fiddling caused by government intervention has to serve as a disincentive for investment in agricultural modernization.
The United States has an assortment of agricultural barriers that seem pretty mild by comparison. For instance,milk products regional markets are structured around subsidies. But it is my understanding that shortages in one region can be met by shipments from another region. There are not barriers to trade so much as barriers to production and subsidies for production. Ditto for the US and peanut growers.
When very left-leaning Bernie Sanders and the most consistently libertarian Republican in the House of Representatives Ron Paul co-sponsor legislation havng to do with exporting of jobs abroad we are not in Kansas any more Toto.
About 50 U.S. House members plan to introduce a bill Wednesday that would deny U.S. companies federal financing and loan guarantees if they shift U.S. jobs overseas.
The proposed Defending American Jobs Act was written by Rep. Bernard Sanders, Independent of Vermont, and will be co-sponsored by about 50 other representatives, including Republicans Ron Paul of Texas and Virgil Goode of Virginia.
Likely Ron Paul saw this as an opportunity to reduce government loan hand-outs and he'd probably be as equally willing to vote for a bill that denied government loans to companies on for any other reason that presented itself as a politically viable reason to restrict some government hand-out. Paul supports free trade so much that he favors the reimportation of price-controlled drugs from Canada (though Sanders may support this as well for different reasons). By contrast, Sanders links to an article on the decline in popular support for free trade.
The Treasurer of the federal government of Australia, Peter Costello, is proposing to encourage Australians to work more years in order to avoid large tax increases to pay for a larger elderly population.
The Australian Treasurer, Peter Costello, will warn today that Australia faces higher taxes, deep Government spending cuts or massive budget deficits unless more mothers and older people stay in the workforce.
Mr Costello will use a speech in Sydney to unveil far-reaching measures to tackle the challenges of Australia's ageing population.
The reforms include changes to make the superannuation system more flexible and encouraging older workers to extend their working lives.
Among Costello's proposals is one to to allow more flexible access to the Australian tax-free savings accounts in order to discourage complete retirement in order to get access to it.
Federal Treasurer Peter Costello today unveiled plans to keep older people in the workforce longer and encourage retirees to take their superannuation savings as a pension rather than as a lump sum.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard agrees.
The Government wanted to cut the eligibility test back so anyone who could work at least 15 hours a week would no longer qualify but the Senate blocked the move.
Yesterday, Mr Howard described the discussion paper's subject as among the most critical facing Australia.
He said Australians should be encouraged to stay in the workforce instead of assuming they had to retire at a certain time of life.
Costello wants a finer granularity test of when retired people are retired or working.
Additional work rules apply to people aged 65 and over. The work test is consistent with superannuation’s intended role as a retirement income vehicle. The rules apply to when a person can make superannuation contributions and when a superannuation fund must pay out benefits. People aged 65 to 74 must work at least 10 hours in each week to be eligible to make contributions; a superannuation fund must also pay out a member’s benefits if they fail this test.
Work opportunities for people over 65 are likely to increase as the population ages. However, the current weekly work test is too stringent and does not accommodate more flexible working arrangements, such as seasonal and irregular part-time work. It also imposes an administrative burden on individuals and superannuation funds.
From 1 July 2004 the Government will change the contribution and cashing rules for people aged 65 to 74 to an annual work test so these rules are consistent with current and future work trends. The Government will consult with the industry and community on an appropriate work test.
One doesn't have to understand the details of Australian retirement tax laws to see the thrust of what Costello is trying to do. He wants people to have more incentives to keep working and paying taxes in order to delay the date when retirees become net burdens to the government. He also wants to reduce the size of the burden by allowing retirees to more advantageously to work in a partially retired status and to switch back and forth between being completely retired and working.
Costello is also proposing changes in the rules for eligibility for complete disability so that some who are currently categorized as totally disabled will instead for part time and provide for some of their support.
Costello says longer work lives are necessary in order to avoid higher taxes.
Keeping taxes at low levels is not only a personal imperative but a national economic imperative as well. Citizens rightly demand that taxes be restrained so that their own financial freedom and prosperity can be improved.
But it is also vital for the economy that taxes are kept as low as possible. High personal taxes stifle incentive and enterprise and high corporate taxes will drive businesses offshore.
We need a tax system that will raise the required revenue to pay for our national defence, our health, our education, our aged.
The United States faces the same problem. The United States also needs to change tax laws, labor laws, and the rules of eligibility for entitlements programs to encourage people to spend more time in the workforce. Currently American politicians are ignoring the problem. By contrast, Australia's top leaders are discussing the problem publically and making substantial proposals to address it.
Update: US Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan says the retirement age must be raised.
"It's a problem for the U.S. budget," said John Shoven, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "Economists of all political stripes are worried about this." To Greenspan, the response is inescapable. "We will eventually have no choice but to make significant structural adjustments in the major retirement programs," he said in a statement delivered before the House Budget Committee. He urged several actions to reduce payouts, including raising the age of eligibility for full benefits, now scheduled to rise to 67.
Greenspan says we can not afford to pay for all the commitments we have to retirees.
"We have been making commitments without focusing on our capability of meeting them," Greenspan said. "And I think it is terribly important to make certain that we communicate to the people who are about to retire what it is they are going to have to live with. And if we promise more than we can actually physically deliver, I think it will be a major blot on our whole fiscal process." Greenspan did not buy into Democratic plans to repeal some of Bush's tax cuts. Instead, he urged reducing the deficit mainly through spending cuts.
Read the links and you will see that John Kerry, John Edwards, and other Democrats reacted far more harshly to the proposal than the Republicans did.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post examines why the Bush Admnistration has repeatedly overestimated both jobs growth and government tax collection revenue.
Figures released by the White House show that its overestimate of job creation in 2003 was the largest forecast error made in at least 15 years, and its 2002 underestimate of the deficit was the largest in at least 21 years. But the statistics show that forecast errors began to increase considerably around 1997, under the Clinton administration. By contrast, the Bush administration's GDP forecasts have been relatively accurate, indicating job growth and tax receipts have shed their historical correlation to GDP growth.
If the economists she is quoting are correct then many people and/or companies are finding new ways to shelter their income from the tax man. I haven't seen this written about anywhere. Does anyone have any idea how and why this is happening? Are more people self-employed and hence in a position to write off more expenses against taxes? Or is a larger fraction of all stock and other assets being held in tax free retirement accounts and hence out of the reach of the tax man?
If anyone can find some relevant links please post them in the comments.
Robert Samuelson points out that 70% of the projected fiscal 2004 budget deficit is not due to Bush's tax cut of 2001.
Democrats commit the same sin. They're gleefully denouncing Bush's tax cuts for the super-rich as creating reckless deficits. This is not exactly true. For fiscal 2004, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the causes of the swing from a once-predicted surplus to today's deficit as follows: 40 percent, a weaker economy and "technical re-estimates" of spending and taxes; 30 percent, higher spending (mostly for defense and homeland security); and 30 percent, tax cuts. Even without tax cuts -- which also benefit the middle class -- there'd be big deficits.
Samuelson argues that both parties are failing to deal with the long term financial problem that the US government faces. The biggest cause of the financial problem is the growth of the entitlements programs for old age.
In a Business Week article Christopher Farrell say the long-term gap between obligations and tax revenue is in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Taking into account the funds that need to be spent on this demographic time bomb lifts the long-term fiscal gap to $44 trillion. That's the "optimistic" calculation made by sober economists and green-eyeshade budget experts drawn from the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Management & Budget, and the Congressional Budget Office during the tenure of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
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The leaders of the study, Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters, estimate that restoring fiscal sanity requires either hiking federal income tax collections by 69% or raising payroll taxes by 95%. Don't want to raise taxes? Well, Social Security and Medicare benefits could be slashed by 56%. Another alternative is to cut federal discretionary spending by more than 100% (although that's impossible).
I am skeptical of Farrell's claim that the Bush Administration's restrictions on education spending are going to make matters worse. The whole education industry is incredibly inefficient. It cries out for automation and great reforms to accelerate the rate of education. In fact, one of my favorite policy suggestions to help deal with the declining ratio of net taxpaying workers to retirees and other recipients of government benefits is to acclerate education of the young to put them into the labor market at earlier ages. People who go to college and graduate school and do not enter the labor market until their mid to late 20s are a source of costs rather than sources of tax revenue and production. If children went to school all year around and went to college sooner they'd get into the labor market sooner and become net assets to the economy sooner. This would lower the cost of raising children while simultaneously increasing tax revenues and the proportion of the population that is working.
The CBO projected last summer that the growth in the number of Medicare beneficiaries will rise from about 1 1/2 percent a year between 2005 and 2008. Between 2009 and 2013 that growth doubles to 3 percent. In the years thereafter we see the steady retirement of the baby boom generation.
Medicare and Social Security spending will double by the year 2030.
In his written testimony, he noted that increased demand for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will rise significantly as a percentage of GDP. Social Security and Medicare cost $745 billion in 2003, about one-third of government spending and 6.9 percent of GDP.
By 2014, Social Security and Medicare spending is expected to rise to $1.5 trillion, or 42 percent of federal spending and 8.4 percent of GDP. The CBO estimates that this number could rise to more than 14 percent of GDP by 2030.
A Winter 2003 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) examines the effects of existing retirement programs in incentivizing late middle aged people into retiring early in a publication entitled Social Security and Retirement Around the World.
The United States and many other developed countries around the world face looming financial crises in their social security programs. For example, member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are projected to experience a roughly 50% increase in the share of GDP devoted to old age pension expenditures over the next fifty years, from 7.4% of GDP to 10.8% of GDP. (1) The aging of the population is widely recognized as one important cause of these financial crises - most countries' programs are financed on a "pay as you go" basis, and a rising fraction of the population will be retired and collecting benefits as the population ages, causing program expenditures to swell. Less attention has been paid, however, to the fact that the provisions of social security programs often penalize work beyond the first age of benefit eligibility. If workers are induced to retire earlier as a result of these incentives, this will magnify the financial burden caused by population aging.
We need changes in public policy to give people greater incentives to work more years into their early old age. The longer people work the longer they will pay taxes and the less they will receive in benefits from all the other taxpayers. At the same time, the point of entry into the labor force needs to happen sooner in life so that people become taxpayers sooner. But neither political party wants to be the first to tell the public news they are going to be unhappy to hear. Do not expect leadership on this issue to come from elected officials.
Update: In a December 2002 Tech Central Station article Arnold Kling focuses in on the expected growth in Medicare spending and the need to gradually raise the age for Medicare eligibility.
As large as Social Security looms when the Baby Boom retires, it will be smaller as a proportion of GDP than Medicare. An analysis for the Concord Coalition reports that starting from a current ratio of 2.2 percent of GDP and making some conservative assumptions "just the increase in Medicare spending over the next forty years - 4.5 percent of GDP - would be greater than everything we spend today on Social Security."
Arnold is correct. People are going to have to continue under private medical insurance and stay in the workforce longer or the United States is going to become like Europe with long term slow growth rates. The US is in danger of entering a period of economic stagnation if old age spending is allowed to grow to the point where taxes to fund it choke off economic growth.
In a BusinessWeek article Paul Magnusson reports that while partially protected by tariffs from foreign competition the US steel industry moved vigorously to merge and restructure in order to cut costs.
Even steel executives acknowledge that the temporary tariffs helped the industry get back on its feet. Thomas Usher, chairman and CEO of United States Steel (SXX ), says the tariffs stabilized prices, allowed the U.S. industry to consolidate, stopped the flood of bankruptcies and layoffs, and encouraged a wave of productivity-enhancing investment.
More than half of steel-production capacity today is owned by companies that have merged or restructured, Bush Administration figures show. Usher's company can now produce a ton of steel with just two man-hours, down from two-and-a-half before the tariffs were imposed, he says. And the company's stock, at $27.65 as of Dec. 4, is within spitting distance of its 52-week high.
Contrary to the impression you might get from listening to the many critics of Bush Administration steel tariffs, Magnusson points out that the other steel-producing nations are far from highly principled free marketeers when it comes to the steel industry:
There's no free market in steel because most nations -- other than the U.S. -- either massively subsidize or own outright their nation's steel plants, totally distorting the market.
Ron Scherer and Adam Parker of The Christian Science Monitor report that major changes have recently happened on the shop floor of US steel plants.
Yet probably the biggest change is on the shop floor. In an industry that has a history of difficult union-management relations, much of the animosity in the hot and noisy mills is dissipating. For example, here at Sparrows Point, ISG eliminated 200 overseers, reducing seven layers of management to three. "There are less people looking over their shoulders," says Joe Rosel, a United Steelworkers contract coordinator who helped negotiate the new contract.
Now, the workers are basically running the plant, making many of the day-to-day operating decisions. "We were 50 years coming to this point," says Jim Huber, a union trainer.
The workers are quick to point out that they are working harder too: Sometimes one hard hat is doing the work that used to be done by two or more. Some 165 different job descriptions - with all the union ramifications - have been trimmed to five. "It's been hard to get used to in the last six months," says Mr. Huber, "but a lot of growing pains have eased."
So the tariffs did not cause the steel industry to become incredibly complacent.
My own reaction to the steel tariffs brouhaha is that it has been a tempest in a teacup. The United States has such low barriers to imports that it is running a half trillion dollar trade deficit of about 5% of GDP. In the face of this massive deficit assorted economists and free market advocates have found far more time to castigate the Bush Administration for tariffs than they have to discuss what is doing far more harm to the long term health of the US economy: the gradual build-up of huge debts owed to other nations and the loss of sales by US businesses to foreign competitors. Some argue that the deficit is there because the US government is running a large budget deficit and therefore is sucking in foreign money to buy bonds. There are two facts that, at the very least, have to be reconciled with that explanation:
There is an aspect of the focus of economists on things like tariffs where they have a model that predicts that a certain policy is bad and they are sort of like someone in possession of a hammer who wants to knock away at nails. Meanwhile there are all sorts of nuts and bolts that need attending to (e.g. the overvalued dollar and the huge trade deficit) and most economists do not have nearly as much to say about these other very real economic problems.
To his credit in a recent Tech Central Station essay Arnold Kling took a stab at explaining the US trade deficit problem and argues that the US might be able to shrink the trade deficit by shifting taxes from income to consumption.
The best idea from supply-side economics is to use tax policy to encourage work and thrift rather than as a tool to redistribute income. We should change the mix of taxes to favor saving rather than consumption. That would increase private saving.
In another Tech Central Station essay Kling argues that the overvalued dollar is caused by a desire of people around the world to invest in a safe haven.
Why do foreign investors invest so heavily in dollar-denominated assets and bear the risk of a decline in the dollar? Personally, I think it is because they are stupid. But that is not an appropriate answer for an economist to give.
If I were forced to pick an economic theory to explain the dollar bubble, it would be the theory of the safe haven. In a world of political and economic turmoil, America's securities represent a stable store of value. Are you a Saudi worried about the viability of the regime? Buy U.S. securities. Are you a citizen of a former Soviet republic trying to keep the criminals and kleptocrats away from your savings? Buy U.S. securities. Are you a European who is pessimistic about the prospects for the welfare state? You get the idea.
That flow of money to buy US securities, by driving up the value of the dollar, effectively reduces the demand for actual real American products and services. So one way to explain the US trade deficit is that the rest of the world has enough fear about the stability of their own societies that they want too much in the way of US financial assets. Is this argument correct? There are reasons to be skeptical. For instance, private Japanese investors have ceased to be net purchasers of US securities and yet the Japanese government is buying US treasuries in order to prop up the dollar against the Yen in order to increase Japanese exports to the US while simultaneously decreasing US exports to Japan (and probably do to the same for Japanese trade for other countries since, for instance, China's currency is fixed against the dollar).
Suppose Arnold Kling's argument is correct. This means that foreign people in massive numbers make decisions that cause the US market to become highly distorted. Is it wrong for the US government to try to pursue policies that compensate for this distortion? Or are such policies anti-free market and therefore automatically wrong? The latter position strikes me as ideological. Economists who argue that it is wrong for governments to attempt to compensate for the madness of the crowd are clinging to an incorrect model in the face of enormous evidence that humans do not behave like highly rational homo economicus. Attempts to make policy prescriptions based on false assumptions about human nature have got to lead to bad policy choices.
In the real world foreign investors went through a period of irrational exuberance about the US economy and then when that irrational exuberance finally started to wane other governments stepped in to keep the currency market thoroughly distorted. For example, when Japanese investors lost their enthusiasm for US securities the Japanese government stepped in to replace them.
Foreign investors are growing wary. According to Dr. Rob Van de Wijngaert, a strategist at ABN AMRO in Amsterdam, U.S. Treasury numbers show that "apparently there is not a single institutional fund in Japan which is willing to buy U.S. Treasuries and instead the Bank of Japan purchased no less that $150bn this year" According to Van de Wijngaert, the latest numbers show that foreign "demand for U.S. Treasuries, bonds and stocks is plummeting."
For example, the Bank of Japan has already spent 18 trillion yen (S$283 billion) slowing US dollar losses against the yen this year, and the strongest signals on our charts are for further euro, Sterling pound and Australian dollar gains versus the yen.
In descending order Japan, Britain, and China are the three biggest holders of U.S. Treasuries. It would be very interesting to know in each case what percentage of those Treasures are held by central banks and by private entities.
For example, in financial services, the Labor Department tells us that the average workweek has been unchanged, at 35.5 hours, since 1988. That's patently absurd. Courtesy of a profusion of portable information appliances (laptops, cell phones, personal digital assistants, etc.), along with near ubiquitous connectivity (hard-wired and now increasingly wireless), most information workers can toil around the clock. The official data don't come close to capturing this cultural shift.
As a result, we are woefully underestimating the time actually spent on the job. It follows, therefore, that we are equally guilty of overestimating white-collar productivity. Productivity is not about working longer. It's about getting more value from each unit of work time. The official productivity numbers are, in effect, mistaking work time for leisure time.
His argument correlates with what we see happening around us. Lots of people talk on their cell phones about work-related matters while doing their driving commutes. E-mails about work matters flow at all hours of the day and night. People go on vacation and keep track of business events using cell phones. Faxes flow in to home fax machines. Though these changes do not affect all kinds of work. Still, there are plenty of people who do all their work and work-related communications while at the office. Roach's own position as a chief economist at a major brokerage firm is untypical. Some types of jobs require that by their very nature. In other cases where people interact with computers the employers do not allow access to corporate database access applications from off-premises sites.
How much has your own work bled over into your non-work life as a result of advances in communications and computing technology? How much of that change is voluntary on your part and how much is being pushed on you by your employer, customers or vendors?
By the end of the 1990's boom, this invisible unemployment seemed to have stabilized. With the arrival of this recession, it has exploded. From 1999 to 2003, applications for disability payments rose more than 50 percent and the number of people enrolled has grown by one million. Therefore, if you correctly accounted for all of these people, the peak unemployment rate in this recession would have probably pushed 8 percent.
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Unfortunately, underreporting unemployment has served the interests of both political parties. Democrats were able to claim unemployment fell in the 1990's to the lowest level in 40 years, happy to ignore the invisible unemployed. Republicans have eagerly embraced the view that the recession of 2001 was the mildest on record.
Keep in mind, though, that a lot of loafers on disability payments who are not really disabled would be working if they were not able to receive the payments. So while the argument by Austan Goolsbee that disability payments cause an underestimate of official unemployment not all those who are unemployed and on disability are unemployed as a result of worsening economic conditions.
The need for reform is clear. OECD countries spend at least twice as much on disability-related programmes as they spend on unemployment programmes. Disability benefits on average account for more than 10 percent of total social spending. In the Netherlands, Norway and Poland they reach as much as 20 percent of social expenditure.
The Netherlands has a low unemployment rate by European standards. But about one seventh of the Netherlands working age population lives on disability payments.
The absurdly generous disability scheme, the WAO, has nearly 1 million people on its rolls out of a total working-age population of 7 million.
In Sweden the misclassification of unemployed workers as disabled occurs on an even greater scale.
By October more than 800,000 people, or a fifth of the workforce, were on sick leave or had been pensioned off early, according to the National Insurance Board. The cost from January to October was 86.5 billion crowns ($11.45 billion) or 15 percent of spending.
Those rates are the worst in the EU and have doubled in two years, despite the healthy lifestyle of a people who smoke and drink less than other Europeans, do more sport and have the world's third highest standard of living in U.N. rankings.
The populations of the Western democracies are aging. The burden of supporting the swelling ranks of the elderly looks set to grow substantially. The Western countries need to push the able-bodied among their populations out into the workforce to work, produce goods and services, and pay taxes to support those who really can not work.
It has become popular to argue that First World subsidized food dumping harms Third World countries. Is this argument correct? Let me present a contrarian view. I'm not sure I believe it but it is presented for your consideration:
Urban workers (and some of them are self-employed) who can pay less for food can buy more food and that is a real benefit to them. If they have enough money after that they can buy other stuff as well and accumulate capital to start their own businesses. Accumulation of capital in non-farming economic activity is essential for the development of the poorest countries.
Agricultural workers: Some are subsistence farmers who eat everything they grow. Lower import prices do not hurt them if they are not even able to sell surplus food. Others are hurt if the imports drive down the price of local food. But they are only hurt for that portion of the food they grow that they sell.
Imagine responding to this argument by driving up world food prices to some high level. Think that thru. Why not, in the name of helping Third World farmers, triple the price of internationally traded food? What do you think the effect of doing that would be? My guess is that the total amount of hunger and poverty would rise. Third World countries would have to pay more to import food and therefore would have less money (or no money) to spend to import other things. Granted, local production might rise as a result. But the money available even to invest in local agriculture would be less.
Take the other extreme: imagine that the price of food dropped to zero. Well, everyone would have enough to eat and they'd have more time to engage in economic activity that produces other kinds of goods and services.
This focus on the Third World farmers and the prices they get for their crops seems misplaced. The way forward for the Third Worlders is for them to get work that is off the farm. The benefits of lower tariffs for textiles and other low tech manufacturing products are far more certain than the supposed benefits of having developed countries raise the prices of their agricultural exports. Low food prices help some while hurting others. But the ones that are helped are the very ones who are doing the kinds of work that will lift the Third World out of subsistence farming. Lower food prices will probably accelerate their accumulation of capital. If Third Worlders to spend less on food they will have more more money on other things such as, say, a sewing machine or a hand tool or a cart for transportation.
Plus, even low prices for some types of food are beneficial for some forms of agriculture. Consider that cattle and chicken farmers use grains to feed their cattle. Lower the price of corn and their costs go down.
In a nutshell: Human living standards rise because humans find ways to spend less time doing what they used to do so that they can spend more time creating new kinds of goods and services. The fact that so many people in less developed countries spend so much time working on farms is not an argument for protecting the farm economies of the Third World. It is an argument for reducing the need for Third Worlders to work on the farm so that they can spend more time creating other kinds of goods and services. The real problem is not that farmers can not get enough money for their crops. The problem is that people in poor countries have to spend so much time farming and hence do not have enough time to do other work.
Anything that frees the world's poor from having to farm should cause living standards to rise if the local economies allow those people to move into other work. If there is a problem in the Third World with the move off the farm then the problem must come in the form of obstacles to developing other kinds of work activities.
Update: A couple of arguments against the proposition above could be advanced.
First, a rapid collapse in food prices could be too disruptive to a society. Societies are made up of webs of relationships and if too many relationships are disrupted at once then the resulting chaos will unleash wars, crime waves, and other disruptions that cause net harm and destruction.
Another argument is that people in poor countries know how to farm. They don't know how to do other things. But think about that. They may plow fields but they also make their own clothing and implements for working the fields. They do have other skills. They also can be taught other skills by those who are already working in other industries. Plus, a lot of low-tech manufacturing is incredibly low skill work. One big barrier to engaging in other kinds of work is that so much time has to be spent farming. Free people up from having to farm and they will have more time to do other work.
Offshore outsourcing seen as an even bigger threat than previously predicted.
Berkeley, October 29, 2003 – A ferocious new wave of outsourcing of white-collar jobs is sweeping the United States, according to a new study published by University of California, Berkeley, researchers, who say the trend could leave as many as 14 million service jobs in the United States vulnerable.
Study authors Ashok Deo Bardhan and Cynthia Kroll, both researchers at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics housed at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, say that not all of the at-risk jobs are likely to be lost. But, they note, jobs remaining in the United States could be subject to pressures to lower wages, and the jobs that leave may slow the nation’s job growth or generate losses in related activities.
Jobs most vulnerable to the new wave of outsourcing, the researchers say, include medical transcriptions services, stock market research for financial firms, customer service call centers, legal online database research, payroll and other “back office” activities. Altogether, the positions feature vulnerability-producing attributes such as a lack of face-to-face customer service, work processes that enable telecommuting and Internet work, high wage differentials between countries, a high information content, low social networking requirements, and low set-up costs.
Bardhan and Kroll say that the widely quoted Forrester Research (an independent technology research company) report issued in 2002 that 3.3 million jobs would be lost to outsourcing by 2015 already seems conservative. They point to the rate of outsourcing over the past few years to India – 25,000 to 30,000 jobs in June 2003 alone.
Even face-to-face customer service will be affected as companies compare the costs of, say, face-to-face customer contacts versus phone contacts and other electronic ways of interacting with customers.
In the face of all this intensifying competition from abroad the United States should not have an immigration policy to bring in millions of unskilled workers with less than 9th grade educations. We need an immigration policy designed with knowledge worker competition in mind. We could improve our educational system in ways that increase the number of sharp knowledge workers we have as well. See the post Accelerate Education To Increase Tax Revenue, Reduce Costs.
University of Maryland professor Peter Morici, in testimony at an October 30, 2003 hearing of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, argues that the large US trade deficit is slowing US economic growth.
Given rapid productivity growth and foreign investments in China, we would expect the dollar value of the Chinese currency to rise with its development progress. However, since 1995 the Chinese government has maintained a policy of pegging the yuan at 8.3 per dollar.
Since 1995, the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown from $38 billion to $140 billion, and the overall U.S. current account deficit has grown from $105 billion to $555 billion. In contrast, when China was granted most-favored-nation status by the Congress in 1980, the U.S. bilateral trade and global current accounts were in surplus at $2.8 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively.
Consequently, reduced sales and layoffs in U.S. import-competing industries caused by Chinese competition have not been matched by increased sales and new jobs in U.S. export industries at the scale a market driven outcome would require. The free trade benefits of higher income and consumption to the U.S. economy have been frustrated by currency market intervention.
Morici claims the US economy would be much larger today if the US was not running such a large trade deficit for so many years.
Chronic trade deficits with China, Japan and other countries, which emerged in the 1980s, have reduced U.S. productivity growth and the trend rate of GDP growth by lowering U.S. value added per employee and investments in R&D.
In a nutshell, increased trade with China and other Asian economies should shift U.S. employment from import-competing to export industries. Since the latter create more value added per employee and undertake more R&D, this process would be expected to immediately raise U.S incomes and consumption and boost long-term productivity and GDP growth.
Instead, growing trade deficits with China and other Asian economies have shifted U.S. employment from import-competing and export industries to nontradeable service producing activities. The import-competing and export industries create about 150 percent more value added per employee, and spend more than three times as much R&D per dollar of value added, than the private business sector as a whole.
By reducing investments in R&D, an econometric model constructed for the Economic Strategy Institute indicates the overvalued dollar and resulting trade deficits are reducing U.S. economic growth by at least one percentage point a year—or about 20 percent of potential GDP growth. [1] China accounts for almost half of this lost growth.
Importantly, this one percentage point of growth has not been lost for just one year. The trade deficit has been taxing growth for most of the last two decades, and the cumulative consequences are enormous. Had foreign currency-market intervention and large trade deficits not robbed this growth, U.S. GDP would likely be at least 10 percent greater, and perhaps 20 percent greater, than it is today. GDP and tax revenues would be higher, and the Congress would not be facing large federal deficits. We would not be enduring a crisis in manufacturing and a jobless recovery, and the Congress would not be facing the difficult task of trimming Medicare benefits.
This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. US companies faced by lower cost competitors are not going to invest in research, development, and capital spending in the United States if they have no chance of competing against such lower cost producers. Also, a deficit represents large amounts of sales not made to companies in the US. Those companies that lost sales to foreign competitors did not pay US salaries and taxes to produce goods and services domestically. Those companies had less revenue to use to develop new products and improvements in manufacturing processes.
Free trade advocates would argue that lower cost imports force domestic producers to innovate. But if the imported products were incredibly successful in making domestic companies more efficient then the importers would not continue to be so successful selling in the United States. Yet, as evidenced by the huge trade deficit, the foreign makers are very successful. Plus, trade conducted with a fixed currency peg is does not constitute free trade anyway. It is trade which is being manipulated by the country maintaining the currency peg.
Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute mentioned above, sees the exchange rates as less important than other factors in explaining the US trade deficit.
As long as the United States runs federal budget deficits and has low domestic savings rates, it will have a current account deficit and will be dependent on capital inflow from abroad, mostly from China and Japan. And that's not to mention the fact that we also want those countries to help us with North Korea and Iraq. Which is why no American treasury secretary or president is going to mean it when he talks about getting tough with either China or Japan.
But the problem with this argument is that the US still had high and rising trade deficits during the later Clinton Administration years when the US federal government was running a large budget surplus. Therefore the argument that a budget deficit causes a trade deficit doesn't seem to work.
In spite of his views about the cause of the US trade deficit Prestowitz still sees a very big reason to make China drop the Renminbi-Dollar currency peg: Latin American economies.
CLYDE PRESTOWITZ: Cheap labor has made China a trade powerhouse. Combine that with an undervalued yaun, kept down by pegging China's currency to the dollar, and you have a magnet for factories that produce everything from toys and tech to textiles. That's been great for China, but it's often been a great cost to other countries struggling to develop. Look at Mexico. Every day now factories that once lined the corridor just south of our border are closing up shop and moving. You guessed it: Off to China.
He is exactly right about this. The US would face less of a problem with illegal alien immigrants if jobs were not getting shipped wholesale from Mexico to China. Those illegal aliens who come to the US looking for pay little in US taxes while generating large costs for citizen taxpayers of the United States.
But to get back to the original issue, the US trade deficit: A long sustained US trade current account deficit has negative effects on the long term health of the US economy. Debts to foreigners have to be paid off some day. When US companies lose sales to foreign companies the domestic companies do not pay American citizens to build capital plant, to make consumer products, or to do design and we are worse off in the long run.
Businessweek sees the pressures building on China to devalue its currency.
The G7's Dubai declaration echoed the group's Plaza Accord of Sept. 22, 1985. That agreement also sought to bring the greenback down from its then-lofty heights. And it succeeded beyond the group's wildest expectations, as the dollar lost more than a third of its value vs. major currencies. Dubai suggests that history may be about to repeat itself, albeit to a more muted extent.
George W. Bush wants to get reelected. The job market continues to be weak while China's trade deficit with the United States continues at record highs.
Jasper Becker also sees devaluation of the Renminbi as inevitable because China can't keep buying up US government debt in order to prop up the exchange rate with the US dollar.
In June China had foreign currency reserves of $365bn. In order to keep the renminbi stable at about 8.28 to the dollar, China's central bank has to keep buying up surplus dollars and reinvesting them abroad. In practice this means buying US Treasury bonds. China's holdings of US Treasury bonds rose to a record $122.5bn last month, far more than any other country apart from Japan. Together Japan and China hold 41.9 per cent of the $1.35 trillion debt the US government owes the world.
Of course, a decline in the demand for US government debt combined with a decline in the value of the US dollar could unleash higher prices and higher interest rates in the face of an already weak labor market.
U.S. investors are worried that too rapid a decline in the dollar would kick up interest rates and could spell a sudden end to the recovery
A US dollar decline would boost the demand for US exports and at the same time it will reduce foreign competition for domestically produced goods and services. But that effect takes a while to play out.
The problem with the US economy at this point is that while while layoffs have declined hiring has not picked up.
The new numbers portray an economy stuck in neutral, with workers no longer losing their jobs at the rapid pace of 2001 but with relatively few new job opportunities popping up. In the last three months of 2002, 7.8 million jobs were eliminated, while 7.7 million were created, according to company records studied by the bureau.
My own suspicion is that US corporations are net hirers abroad but not in the US labor market.
Health insurance premium costs are rising rapidly.
Health insurance premiums for American employees rose 13.9 percent during the past year, the biggest annual jump since 1990, according to a survey of employers released today in Washington.
As employers cut medical benefits in response to cost increases people are more worried about becoming uninsured than being attacked by terrorists.
The poll found that 33 percent of the insured worry that their income might not keep up with health premiums, while just 8 percent said they fear being a victim of a terror attack.
Dick Morris explains George W. Bush's declining approval rating in polls as a result of a declining concern about terrorism along with a rising concern about other issues.
Why is Bush falling so badly? The superficial reasons are the Iraq casualties, the failure to find WMDs and the continuing inability to round up Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But the real reason is that terror is receding as an issue, largely due to Bush's success.
While the terrorist issue is receding people are continuing to feel bad for economic reasons. Discouraged workers are abandoning the job search and causing a lower reported unemployment rate.
Nonfarm business payrolls declined by 93,000 last month, raising the total of job losses since the start of the year to 431,000. The job cuts were the deepest in five months. Still, the unemployment rate fell a tenth of a percentage point to 6.1% as more discouraged workers dropped out of the labor force.
Probably the biggest threat to George W. Bush's reelection is the so-far jobless economic recovery caused in part by rapidly rising productivity.
Production is rising even faster this quarter than last, according to many forecasters, while yesterday's report showed that the number of hours worked nationally fell at a faster rate in July and August than it did in the April-June period. That combination points to another huge gain in productivity, several analysts said.
Whether personal economic assessments will remain as important as they are now come the date of the November 2004 vote is hard to say. A big terrorist attack could shift people's thinking away from economics even as a large attack would have enormous costs. But at this point Bush really needs an economic recovery that starts generating jobs.
If Bush wasn't so intent upon his foolish and futile pursuit of the Hispanic vote he could strengthen his support among lower class blacks and whites by reducing the competition they face in the labor market from illegal immigrants. If he announced support for a massive fence to keep out illegals and initiated mass deportations of illegal aliens this would decrease the amount of competition that low income Americans face in the labor market. Doing that alone would probably get him reelected. The Steve Sailer strategy for California could work nationally.
Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach argues it is not the fault of China that it is running a huge trade surplus.
This argument makes no sense. Roach correctly argues that it is foreign investment in China that is responsible for most of the factories that make the surging amounts of goods being exported from China. He thinks that just because foreign rather than domestic investors are responsible for China's surging exports that the Chinese government should not have to respond to demands for a revaluation of the Chinese Renminbi (RMB). But the nationalities of the owners of the capital invested in China are largely irrelevant to whether China should float its currency. Is he going to argue that it is wrong for foreign investors to invest in China since the result is large trade imbalances? I think not. The real issue here is whether changes in currency valuations should be used to balance trade. Well, why shouldn't this mechanism be allowed to work?A second argument in support of China’s currency peg is the nature of the nation’s competitive prowess. Contrary to widespread perception, China does not compete on the basis of an undervalued currency. It competes mainly in terms of labor costs, technology, quality control, infrastructure, the improved human capital of its work force, and a passion for and commitment to reform. I honestly believe that if China were to revalue the RMB upward by 10% -- a change I do not expect nor advise -- its exports would suffer minimal loss of market share.
He notes, correctly, that the peg of the RMB to the US dollar (USD) is causing the RMB to decline in value along with the USD. But this is contributing to the huge surge in exports from China. Why should one currency, in this case the RMB, be pegged? He blames foreign companies for shifting production to China. But take some other country, fix its currency to the dollar at a rate that makes exports from that country very cheap, and foriegn investors who are assured that the currency peg will be maintained will invest in factories to export from that country.
The only other way to fix trade imbalances is to impose trade barriers. Surely Roach is not advocating that option. Therefore he's essentially arguing for a continuation of large scale trade imbalances that he has argued in other essays are unsustainable.
Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach sees continued decline in the US net national savings rate. (my emphasis added)
This is a story of arithmetic. The accounting identity is often the most powerful of economic constraints. Such a framework is not subject to theoretical interpretations -- the identities simply have to add up, year in and year out. For any nation, saving must always equal investment. Unfortunately, America’s national saving rate is plunging into the danger zone. In the first quarter of 2003, gross national saving -- households, businesses, and government units, combined -- fell to 14.0% of gross national product; that’s down 1.5 percentage points from the year-earlier rate and fully 4.8 percentage points below the post-1960 norm of 18.8%. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The problem is that most of America’s national saving now shows up in the form of depreciation -- funds that are earmarked for the replacement of worn-out physical assets. In the first quarter of 2003, such depreciation accounted for fully 94% of total saving. That means that the net national saving rate -- that portion of national saving that is available to fund the actual expansion of productive capacity -- fell to a record low of 0.7% of gross national product in the first period of this year. That’s off sharply from the year-earlier reading of 2.3% and is well short of the nearly 5% average of the 1990s and the 11% norm of the 1960s. There are few macro gauges that tell us more about an economy’s internally generated growth capacity. Sadly, America has all but depleted its reservoir of net saving -- the sustenance of longer-term economic growth.
The savings rate is only part of the structural problem in the US economy. Think intuitively about what it means for the US to be running a 5% trade deficit. We are consuming 5% more than we are making. Now, there may be services trade that is hidden that makes that deficit smaller than it seems. But it is not sustainable. American living standards will effectively have to fall (or grow more slowly for a while) in order to bring that back into balance.
Roach thinks that the US net national savings rate may shrink to zero or even go negative while the trade deficit simultaneously widens. Roach expects further declines in the trade-weighted value of the dollar by as much as an additional 30%. Only a decline in the dollar can reduce US demand for imported goods and increase world demand for US goods enough to bring US trade back into balance with the world. That would have an inflationary effect on prices in the US and deflationary effects on much of the rest of the world.
British farmers are heading to Russia to farm fertile land that is now sitting idle.
More than 30 British farmers have signed up for leases on Russian land in a move to tap the potential of Russian agriculture and escape the doldrums of British farming.
Recent agricultural reforms and an improving outlook for Russian farming have encouraged certain British farmers to consider the potential of investing in Russian agriculture.
Over half of Russia's arable land is idle and the country has to import basic foodstuffs. The British farmers will find a large domestic Russian market for the crops they grow in Russia.
A large amount of Russian farmland is sitting idle due to a lack of ability of local farmers to raise the needed capital to work it.
British farmers entangled in the European Union's red tape are aiming to break free by moving to Russia to cultivate land being offered to foreigners in a fertile region.
Almost a million acres of prime arable land are lying idle in the Penza region, 400 miles south-east of Moscow, because local farmers cannot raise sufficient money to buy the machinery, fertiliser and seeds needed to work it.
The ability of foreign farmers to enter into lease agreements to farm Russian land was made possible by a land reform law change passed in June 2002.
After six hours of half-hearted debate, the State Duma approved a bill in the crucial second reading allowing Russians to buy and sell farmland and restricting foreigners to 49-year leases. Liberals slammed the limitation on foreigners. The only protest from the Communists, who oppose the sale of farmland altogether, came from a crowd of about 200 people rallying outside the Duma building. Most lawmakers appeared to be more interested in following two World Cup soccer games that were being played, and the Duma hall was all but empty during the debate.
Update: Dutch dairy farmers are being wooed to move to Iowa.
There are nearly 1,000 people per square mile in the Netherlands. In Iowa there are 50. Dutch dairy farmers -- also burdened by strict government regulations on land use -- are looking for alternatives, and Iowa's Butler, Mitchell, and Poweshiek counties are looking to take advantage. Along with two advocacy groups, Iowa Extension and the Dutch National Extension, the counties are trying to facilitate a wave of agricultural emigration under the Iowa New Farm Family Project.
The Dutch National Extension Service estimates around 7,000 farmers will resettle in the US over the next decade. Iowa wants and needs many of them. Butler County, for example, had 176 farms with dairy operations in 1982. Fifteen years later that number was down to 44.
Stelzer says the short duration of a large chunk of the tax cut will be extended.
The net result will be to pump some $210 billion in purchasing power into the economy over the next sixteen months—a non-trivial 1.4 percent of GDP. The neo-Keynesians in the White House—yes, such there be—believe that it is necessary to stimulate demand in order to sop up the excess capacity that is deterring new investment in several key industries. Moreover, everyone is underestimating the size of the tax cut. Congress halved the president’s request, and approved $350 billion in tax relief over the next ten years. But Congress managed to keep the figure so low by assuming that taxes will be allowed to return to their prior, higher levels on January 1, 2005. That, say the politicians who have experience with such things, is highly unlikely: congressmen are not about to campaign in November of 2003 on promises to raise taxes shortly after taking office. So the reductions won’t expire, and total tax relief is likely to approach the figure the president originally requested.
David Greenlaw of Morgan Stanley agrees.
The debate over the size of the package -- $350 billion versus $550 billion versus $726 billion -- is essentially meaningless. These amounts represent the total impact over the 2003-2013 period and can be greatly affected by altering the phase-out dates. Under the theory that it is much harder to raise taxes than it is to cut them, there is a strong likelihood that most of the changes contained in this bill will be made permanent at some point. Indeed, there are dozens of provisions of the tax code that are slated to expire every single year and routinely wind up being renewed. So, even though it is being advertised as "only" a $350 billion tax bill, the enactment of this legislation appears to be a major victory for the White House.
Is this tax cut big enough to make a difference to the US and world economies? The problem is that US can no longer serve as the demand source for economic growth. American consumers are saving too little. They have too much consumer debt. The US trade deficit can not continue to grow and the fall in the dollar is finally beginning to reflect that.
Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach runs thru some of the numbers that demonstrate why the US must go thru a wrenching economic readjustment.
America’s net national saving rate -- the combined savings of households, businesses and the government sector (net of depreciation) -- fell from about 5% of GDP in the mid-1990s to just 1.3% in the second half of 2002. Lacking in domestic saving, the United States has no choice other than to import increased flows of foreign saving -- running ever-widening current account deficits in order to attract that capital. As a result, the world’s dependence on dollar-denominated assets is now at extremes. Currently, about 75% of the world’s total foreign exchange reserves are held in the form of dollar-denominated assets -- more than twice America’s 32% share of world GDP (at market exchange rates). At the same time, foreign investors hold about 45% of the outstanding volume of US Treasury indebtedness, 35% of US corporate debt, and 12% of US equities. All of these ratios are at or near record highs. Never before has the world put more stock in America -- both as an engine of growth and as a store of financial value.
The problem is that the math gets exceedingly tenuous if it is projected into the future. And yet the die is now cast for additional widening of an already massive US current account deficit (a record 5.2% of GDP in 4Q02), suggesting that all of these ratios will have to rise sharply further on the years ahead.
The rise in the Euro and drop in the dollar is effectively exporting US deflation to Europe. The problem is that Germany is already experiencing deflation and this will only make deflation a worse problem in Europe. Yet the US dollar really does have to fall to decrease US demand for imports and to increase world demand for US exports.
The decline in the US dollar against the Euro is limited in terms of how much it can cause a necessary rebalancing of the world economy. One reason for that is that the important growing US-China trade is conducted at a fixed exchange rate.
China has kept the yuan (its official name is the renminbi) fixed at about 8.3 yuan to the dollar since the mid-1990s. For any other big exporter, keeping this peg would be a near-impossible task. Last year, China sold $125 billion in goods directly to the United States, according to the Commerce Department, a big shift up from 2000, when China's U.S. exports came to just $82 billion. Meanwh