In the past week, the dual post coverage by Mr. Anoop Singh of the recent Regional Economic Outlook for the Asian and Pacific Region caught my attention in particular. In the first, Mr. Singh invokes among other things the puzzle of Asia's relatively sharp recovery given the notion that the region is largely dependent on exports to grow. Two reasons especially are important here. One is the simple fact that as these economies moved into the crisis with bulging coffers (especially on the reserves vis-a-vis the rest of the world), the room for fiscal manoeuvre was greater and it was used decisively. According to calculations by the IMF, the collective stimulus programs in the Asia-Pacific region added 1.75% to GDP growth in the first half of 2009 and it makes the programs even more generous than those observed in the OECD and other emerging markets. Secondly, Asian economies has benefited from the, so far, V-shaped comeback by part of the global economy and key regions who are likely to grow smartly in h02-2009.

In general, Mr. Singh's analysis appears cautiously tied to the great unknown of 2010 where it appears that we will see whether all those battered economies of the world will be able to hold their own in a world where quantitative easing from central banks and lax fiscal policies are withdrawn rather than enacted. Here, Singh's remarks echo the general discourse where the the underlying tone is one of skepticism. A long period of risky asset buoyancy coupled with upbeat economic data releases have proved before to be crying wolf of an impending recovery and policy makers are advised to take this into account.

It is hard for me to disagree with Mr. Singh that the green shoots observed in the Spring of 2009 seem way too shaky a foundation on which to build a narrative of recovery. Yet, this is exactly what has happened and the famous inflection point will be reached when we discover that the recovery observed thus has been because of and not despite monetary and fiscal stimulus which makes the enforcement of exit strategies going into 2010 a very interesting experiment in the making. Some will make it, some won't and some will inevitably fall back into recession (not just in Asia).

However, the most important part of Singh's argument and indeed the most important part of IMF's analysis in general is the question of whether Asia's economic trajectory, in a post stimulus/recovery context, will be driven by domestic demand or not? To put it in the most reductionist form. Will Asia be a provider of net capacity to the global or economy or not? If yes, it would mean that a post crisis Asia had truly emerged as something new in the form of a force of a real addition to total demand. If not, it would mean that Asia would revert to old tricks and habits of relying on exports and foreign asset income to propel growth in national income.

Now, leaving the question of the number of export dependent economies the world economy can muster neatly to the side, I am not so optimistic here on Asia's contribution to the rebalancing of global imbalances through a net expansion of domestic demand. Yet, let me also immediately qualify here that I am not very comfortable with talking about Asia/Pacific in one both because of the obvious heterogeneity amongst the economies, but more importantly; also because I am not really an expert here. I have done the analysis on Japan though and on this I can say with unequivocal certainty that we won't we seeing any provision of excess domestic demand from this side.

Ultimately of course, Japan is of little real importance here and so is the rest of Asia really. What really matters on this topic is China and all the hopes currently pinned on her shoulders in the form of the ability of the economy to pull the global economy out of the mire. Traditionally, this has boiled down to a rather technical discussion about the RMB and an almost perennial Becketian wait for the shackles to break and an appreciating RMB to solve all problems. While I concede that the RMB should rise, it won't solve any of the underlying problems inherent in China's investment driven economy. Basically, chalk it down to culture and institutional specificity in the origin, but the simple fact remains I believe that just as China may evolve to become the economy we all hope and believe her to become (say in a 2020 context) the one child policy will have done its work so to speak and China will be sporting an OECD like age structure and is likely to even surpass many of OECD's economies.

This is no recipe for an axis of rebalancing and although China will be the main story to follow for the immediate future I think we should look elsewhere to find the potential rebalancing candidates. This may indeed involve other parts of Asia (India for instance and Indonesia), but in the current discourse the likes of China, Japan (and Korea) hold little promise in terms of providing a decisive engine for rebalancing through sustainable growth in domestic demand which exceed the investment rate.

In this sense I remain cautious on the overall sustainability of the recovery in Asia mainly because of my skepticism towards the sustainability of overall global momentum where I acknowledge that I may be very wrong. Watch out for 2010 and all those exit strategies is what I say and particularly for the "post fiscal stimulus" world. This also means that I am more than a little bit skeptical on the prospects of a sustained recovery across Asia driven by domestic demand, especially in relation to Japan and China.

At least, this would be my humble argument here a murky Monday morning in Copenhagen. In any case, you might want to punch the IMFdirect blog into your RSS reader, just to make sure that you know what the IMF is up on a daily "research" basis.

At first glance, such behavior seems inexplicable and counter-intuitive.  Let’s imagine for a moment you are an investor—you may well be— you put quite a bit of money into a company to back its expansion plans. Initially, these plans prove successful, and the company makes quite a bit of money. But then the firm ran out of investment ideas. What would you expect them to do?

Surely, you would expect them to return the money you provided, for example by paying it out as dividends. But in the past, prosperous decade before the current downturn this hasn’t been happening in emerging Asia. Firms have been sitting on their profits, not investing them, but not paying them out in dividends, either. That is a puzzle, and a problem.

It’s a puzzle because it’s not obvious why firms should sit on money when they don’t have any need for it. When firms initially started doing this after the Asian crisis of the late-1990s, they had a ready rationale. They wanted to pay down their excessive levels of debt, which during the crisis had brought some of Asia’s largest companies low. But as the years went on, and debts fell, first to safe and then to low levels, it was clear that something else must be going on.

There’s a further puzzling aspect. Economic theory states that households can “pierce the corporate veil” and extract value from a company even if it doesn’t actually pay out profits as dividends. That’s because the retained earnings would increase the firm’s net worth, which would be reflected in its share price. Households could then sell the shares, or borrow against them.

Either way, they could spend more. This theory has been tested in empirical research and found to hold in advanced countries, and some emerging markets. But it doesn’t hold true in China or the rest of emerging Asia. Households simply do not consume more, despite holding valuable financial assets.

Why does this matter? It matters because Asia’s corporate savings puzzle lies at the heart of its economic imbalances. It is precisely the substantial and growing excess of savings over investment in the corporate sector, coupled with subdued household consumption, that over the past decade has produced the region’s large external current account surpluses.

We tried to analyze this mystery in Chapter III of the Asia-Pacific Regional Economic Outlook.

We discovered two vital clues:

• Corporate governance. The higher the level governance, the more shareholders are able to exercise their rights and prevent firms from hoarding cash.
• Financial sector development. The more liberalized the financial market, the less firms hoard cash, because they have easier access to funding and are less worried about being shut out of financial markets. Financial liberalization also allows households to consume against their corporate wealth, because they can borrow using their financial assets as collateral.

These finding have profound implications for policy. For example, the econometric estimates imply that if Asia were to reach the average level of corporate governance in advanced economies, it would be able to lessen corporate savings by as much as 2½ percent of GDP. Similar advances in financial sector liberalization could reduce savings by 5 percentage points.

Resolving the conundrum of firms that save but do not invest, and households that hold this wealth but cannot consume may enable Asia to finally catalyze domestic demand.  It could help to  restore rapid growth, even in a “new world” of softer advanced country demand. Improved corporate governance and further financial sector development may be two remedies worth exploring.

Opinions and comments on RGE EconoMonitors do not necessarily reflect the views of Roubini Global Economics, LLC, which encourages a free-ranging debate among its own analysts and our EconoMonitor community. RGE takes no responsibility for verifying the accuracy of any opinions expressed by outside contributors. We encourage cross-linking but must insist that no forwarding, reprinting, republication or any other redistribution of RGE content is permissible without expressed consent of RGE.   

“Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.

“For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions–that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.

“I don’t think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again.”

Productivity is the amount of output per unit of input. The productivity numbers you see quoted in the media are almost always growth in labor productivity — the rate at which the amount of output per unit of labor input (hour worked by a human being). In the long term, productivity growth is perhaps the most central component of rising material standards of living, since in aggregate it means that we get more stuff for working the same amount of time. (GDP growth on its own doesn’t have this effect, because the population could be growing, or we could be working harder and thereby losing leisure time.)

In the short term, though, productivity growth can swing all over the map. Productivity often falls during a recession because output falls faster than companies lay off workers and spikes afterward because output is growing right while companies are laying off workers (and companies put off hiring until the recovery is well underway). This time the recession lasted long enough that companies had time to lay off millions of workers and productivity growth started shooting up in the second quarter (6.9% annual rate).

One underlying issue is that not everyone in a company contributes at the same rate. When companies have layoffs, they theoretically try to lay off the less-productive people (although this often does not happen), which should cause productivity to go up. Having been a management consultant for several large companies, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that these companies could have laid off a significant number of people without any noticeable fall in output. In addition, because the rate of output today depends in a complex way on work done in previous quarters (imagine if GM laid off all its design people — the factories could keep humming for a while), sometimes you can keep output up even with less labor input in the current quarter; you don’t pay the bill until later. Then there’s the effect DeLong talks about: companies can use a bad labor market as a way to squeeze workers harder. This is why quarter-to-quarter numbers can be very noisy.

However, repeated layoffs don’t work as a long-term strategy, and at some point you reach a point where you can’t sustain output with fewer people, and companies start hiring again. So in the long term, productivity growth relies on things like improvements in technology and business processes.But in the short term it’s often just noise.

Opinions and comments on RGE EconoMonitors do not necessarily reflect the views of Roubini Global Economics, LLC, which encourages a free-ranging debate among its own analysts and our EconoMonitor community. RGE takes no responsibility for verifying the accuracy of any opinions expressed by outside contributors. We encourage cross-linking but must insist that no forwarding, reprinting, republication or any other redistribution of RGE content is permissible without expressed consent of RGE.        

But on to grayer topics.  When the US economic data for the third quarter of 2009 came out last Thursday judging by the market reaction it seemed much more mixed to me than it apparently did to others, especially as far as it relates to China.  It is true that after four quarters of negative growth, with GDP contracting 3.8% in the year to July, we finally got positive GDP growth of an annualized 3.5%.  This was above expectations, and given China’s reliance on US overconsumption, the increase certainly seemed to be good news.

Even better, much of that growth was powered by a 3.4% increase in personal consumption, which was itself powered by the rather astonishing 22% increase in durable goods consumption – or perhaps not so astonishing if we chalk it up, as most experts do, to the “cash for clunkers” program.  Americans, it seems, bought a lot of cars in the third quarter of 2009.

As I (and many others) see it, however, this surge in auto sales in the US isn’t likely to represent new and sustainable purchases, and so undermines any optimism generated by the growth in consumption.  The surge in car sales may simply be Americans taking advantage of temporary government subsidies, and to that extent represent not new purchases but rather an anticipation of future purchases.  If that is the case, whatever we get this year in new car sales will result in a reduction next year.

Why am I so negative about the good consumption numbers coming out of the US?  Because the rise in personal consumption was accompanied by a 3.4% decline in household disposable income.  If US household income declines, and this is likely to continue as unemployment rises even further, it is hard to imagine that US households are really going to splurge on new consumption.  Consumption and household income must move in the same direction over any reasonable time period to be sustainable.

As if on cue, this was at least partly confirmed by the subsequent release of September numbers.  As Friday’s Financial Times put it:

US consumer spending stalled in September after climbing in each of the prior four months, dampening spirits, as the effects of government stimulus programmes started to wane.  Personal consumption expenditures fell by 0.5 per cent, or $47.2bn, last month, commerce department figures showed on Friday. The data were in line with the predictions of Wall Street economists, who expected that the expiration of the popular “cash for clunkers” car rebate scheme would hit spending.

In September, spending on durable goods, which includes cars, fell by 7.2 per cent after jumping by 6.7 per cent the previous month.  Incomes were flat in September, slipping by just 0.1 per cent, after ticking up by 0.1 per cent in August. Companies are continuing to freeze pay or cut salaries as they wait to see the shape of the economic recovery.

So in spite of temporarily good consumption numbers, there probably has been no sustainable increase in US consumption, just in government financed spending.  Both China and the US are dealing with their imbalances either by slowing down the rebalancing or by exacerbating the very things that caused the imbalances in the first place.  Slowing down the adjustment makes good political and social sense, of course, but it shouldn’t blind us to the fact that US households cannot continue leveraging up to absorb the excess production that Chinese companies are leveraging up to produce.  We will rebalance, one way or the other.

By the way, and speaking of not rebalancing, net new lending in October might be up.  According to an article in Bloomberg:

China’s four biggest banks granted 136 billion yuan in new loans in October, higher than the previous month, Caijing magazine reported, citing industry data. Bank of China Ltd.’s new loans in October were 44 billion yuan, the most among all the banks, Caijing said. China Construction Bank Corp. lent 36 billion yuan, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. granted loans of 33 billion yuan and Agricultural Bank of China lent 23 billion yuan, the magazine said on its Web site.

Resolving the imbalances

The same day the economic numbers were released Tom Holland had an interesting piece in the South China Morning Post on two “new” proposals for solving the Asian side of the destabilizing imbalances at the heart of the global economy – one from the International Monetary Fund and one from Barclays Capital.  The first:

As the IMF points out in its regional economic outlook published yesterday, household savings have actually declined across much of Asia over the past 10 years. Even in China, the personal savings rate has remained more or less constant, which means it cannot be ordinary individuals who are responsible for the explosion in the region’s excess savings.

What’s actually happened…is that saving by Asian companies has ballooned since the crisis of the 1990s. Thanks to energy and land subsidies, cheap credit, low wage costs and lax environmental standards, Asian companies have made bumper profits in recent years.  And because of weak corporate governance, they have been able to retain a large portion of those earnings rather than paying them out to shareholders as dividends, feeding the savings glut.

The answer, according to the IMF, is to strengthen corporate financing options, so companies no longer need to hang on to earnings, while beefing up corporate governance standards to ensure a better dividend payout.  The IMF estimates that raising emerging Asia’s financial market development and corporate governance standards to rich-world levels would lower the region’s corporate savings by 7 per cent of gross domestic product, wiping out the savings glut and going a long way towards rebalancing the world economy.

I think it is widely agreed that there should be a more robust mechanism for forcing SOEs and other large corporations to disgorge their profits and return them to shareholders, including the government, but I wonder if it isn’t a little more complicated than that.  As I see it, SOE profits are not the result of their value creation but are rather more than 100% explained by various subsidies delivered from the household sector.  Without subsidized and controlled interest rates, even ignoring the other subsidies, the most important of which may be the currency undervaluation, SOE profits in the aggregate would be negative.

In that sense SOE profits are simply part of the transfer from household income to the state sector, and the most efficient way to return the money to households is likely to be to raise deposit and lending rates rather than dividend them back to shareholders.  If the shareholders gain access to those profits via increased dividend payments, as I see it we are still seeing a transfer of income from Chinese households to the state sector.

The state may spend it more wisely than the SOEs (something that I would have to see to believe), but unless that money directly or indirectly was sent back to the household sector, perhaps by paying for health care or lower taxes, it doesn’t really address the fundamental problem.  If it goes into state-favored investment projects, there will have been no rebalancing.  I am convinced that Chinese households need to receive a larger share of national income, or their consumption growth will always lag growth in production and high savings rates will persist.

The second new proposal described by Holland:

The emerging-Asia economics team at Barclays Capital have come up with a different solution to the problem. In a report also published yesterday, they argue that the way to get rid of the region’s excess savings is not for Asian countries to save less but for them to invest more. Barclays’ analysts argue that Asia’s problem is not low consumption. Across much of the region, with the exception of China, household consumption ratios are similar to those in the European Union. Instead, the source of the glut is the low level of investment, which has declined since the Asian crisis.

Given Asia’s heavy need for infrastructure, Barclays recommends that governments should use the region’s excess savings to ramp up investment in order to promote future economic development. That certainly appears to be China’s preferred solution. The problem, however, is ensuring that investment is channelled into productive projects rather than misallocated to building excess capacity.  Barclays’ answer is to finance more projects with private, rather than government, capital. That, however, would need financial reform and stronger governance in order to work.

I can’t speak for the rest of Asia, but I doubt that what China needs is a lot more investment.  We seem to have forgotten all the lessons of the overinvestment crises of the 19th and early 20th centuries (and perhaps Japan in the 1980s) in favor of the mantra that increasing investment is always a good solution to whatever the current problem is.  Although there is no question that much of the world probably invests too little (e.g. the US), the idea that there is infinite scope for additional investment is simply not true, and I worry that so much of China’s investment is already non-viable that increasing it significantly can only make matters worse.  Building yet more stuff, if it does not repay the cost of the investment, means reducing future consumption, and it is consumption growth that powers economies over the long term.

Perhaps I am sounding like a skipping CD, but for rebalancing to occur in China we need households to grab a larger share of income.  Any other solution, I think, misses the point.  China entered the crisis with the highest investment rate in history, and probably also one of the highest rates of misallocation of investment in recent times, and then grew it sharply and quickly.  This probably isn’t the solution to low Chinese consumption.

What the 1930s tell us about the coming protection

Finally, Barry Eichengreen and Douglas Irwin have a July 2009 NBER paper out with the title “The Roots of Protectionism in the Great Depression” which examines the relationship between protectionism and monetary conditions.  According to the very helpful abstract:

Previous research has shown that countries that remained on the gold standard tended to endure sharper and longer downturns than those that allowed their currencies to depreciate. Eichengreen and Irwin offer an important trade-policy corollary: without the flexibility to depreciate their currencies, many gold-standard nations turned to trade restrictions in hopes that these would boost their domestic industries and curb unemployment. Thus, the 1930s’ rush to protectionism was not so much a triumph of special-interest politics as it was a result of second-best macroeconomic policies, the authors write. Their study “suggests that had more countries been willing to abandon the gold standard and use monetary policy to counter the slump, fewer would have been driven to impose trade restrictions.”

This was a fascinating paper that covers a lot of the ground in Eichengreen’s magisterial Golden Fetters.  I think the paper (like the book, incidentally) has a lot to say about the current crisis, and the political implications are, I think, a little worrying.  When they argue that countries that were tied to, or late to abandon, the gold standard were the ones most likely to employ protectionist measures, they could also be arguing that countries whose exchange rates are forced untenably high are also more likely to use protectionist measures to achieve adjustment by other means.

In that sense the refusal of Asian central banks to permit the needed appreciation of their currencies against the dollar may end up having the same impact on the adjustment process of the overvalued currencies.  The 1930s seemed to show, according to the authors, that when their currencies could not adjust, countries became protectionist.  So if the overvalued dollar cannot adjust except against the euro, and if the already overvalued euro has to bear the brunt of any further adjustment, will American and European politicians be forced into the “second-best” option of trade protection?  No prizes for guessing what I think.  By the way the chorus of complaints over the currency regime seems to be getting louder.  After Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Times last week I saw the Financial Times had a pretty strong piecetoday by Alan Beattie called “Renminbi at heart of trade imbalances.”

By the way, Douglas Paal, Taiya Smith, Michael Swaine and I will be speaking at a Carnegie Endowment event, on President Obama’s trip, to China on Thursday, November 5 from 12:15 to 2 p.m.  I have been told that it will be live-streamed and there will be opportunities for questions.  If anyone is interested he can find it here.

It is an intriguing look at the problems of the the field of economics. It went, however, way too easy on both the profession and its practitioners. The article fails to ask some very basic questions about the soft science, and does not discuss the fundamental incompetency of many economists.

Given the failures of the profession — failing to anticipate the worst recession in decades, missing the warping effect of the housing boom, not recognizing the credit collapse until too late — a damning indictment of the dismal science might have been more appropriate.

Perhaps I can be of assistance.

There are many areas I would have liked to see the Economics Crisis article explore: The lack of Scientific Method, the mostly awful performance of economists, its misunderstanding of the value of modeling, the bias inherent in Wall Street variant of economics, and lastly, the corruption of economics by politics. I will just touch on some of these; you can fill in much of the blanks yourself.

Let’s start with the basics. Hard “science” — Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and all variants thereto — begins humbly. They try to describe the universe around us by creating theories, and then testing them. These theorems are always preliminary. Even when testing validates them, Science is always prepared — even eager — to replace them with newer theories that are proven to be even more valid.

The humility of science begins with an admission: We know nothing. We seek to learn through experiment and logic, and constantly evolve more and more accurate explanations. Scientific belief evolves gradually over time. Nothing is assumed, presumed, or hypothesized as true. Indeed, research is a presumption that current theories are inadequate or incomplete. The practice of science is a an ongoing search for better explanations, more proof, further verification — for Truth.

Science is the ultimate “show me” state.

Economics has a somewhat, shall we call it, less rigorous approach. Indeed, the arrogance of economics is that it is the polar opposite of Science. It begins with a few basic assumptions, many of which are obviously untrue; some are demonstrably false.

No, Mankind is not a rational, profit maximizing actor. No, markets are not perfectly, or even nearly, efficient. No, prices do not reflect the sum total of all that is known about a given market, sector or stock. Those of you who pretend otherwise are fools who deserve to have your 401ks cut in half. That is called just desserts. The problem is that your foolishness helped cut nearly everyone else’s 401ks in half. That is called criminal incompetence.

Where was I?  Ahhh, our sad tale of the practitioners of the dismal arts.

Starting from a false premise that fails to understand the most basic behaviors of the Human animal, economics proceeds to build an edifice of cards on a foundation of sand. (How could that possibly go astray?) Like a moonshot off by a few inches at launch, by the time the we reach further into time and space, the trajectory is off by millions of miles . . .

~~~

Economics has had a justifiable inferiority complex versus real sciences the past century. It has attempted to overcome this by throwing lots of smart mathematicians at its practice, in an attempt to make the social art seem more “sciency,” and thus  more credible. This had led to lots and lots of formulas and models. The problems is, Economics places way too much weight on these. It creates an illusion of precision where none exists. The belief in their models led to all manner of mischief, from subprime to derivatives to risk management.

Economics forgot George E. P. Box’s most basic rule:

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”

Box was a statistician who recognized the fundamental truth of all attempts to depict the universe mathematically: They are inherently flawed.

He also understood that these flawed attempts can at times have value. His insights contextualize what mathematical modelers do — and fail to achieve.

Economics fails at this often.  The belief in the validity of their models — like the theories they are based upon — is the Achilles heel of the profession.

This is not to say there are not good, even great economists (some are even friends of mine!) who foresaw the coming crisis and warned about it. Many are aghast at the rigor mortis in the academic establishment; some are horrified at how poorly the profession has done. Forget forecasting the future, too many economists cannot accurately describe what happened yesterday.

The Behaviorists have been fighting the mainstream for decades now, trying to correct the errors of the basic building blocks of the dismal science.

Previously:

The Mystery of the Awful Economists RealMoney.com, 3/2/2005 3:42 PM EST http://www.thestreet.com/p/rmoney/barryritholtz/10211333.html

Mystery of the Awful Economists, part II (April 8th, 2005) http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2005/04/mystery-of-the-awful-economists-part-2/

Mystery of the Awful Economists part III (April 13th, 2005) http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2005/04/mystery-of-the-awful-economists-part-iii/

RIP Chicago School of Economics: 1976-2008 (December 23rd, 2008) http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/12/chicago-repudiation/

Why Economists Missed the Crises (January 5th, 2009) http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/01/why-economists-suck/

The Big Picture: On the Efficient Market Hypothesis (2005-09)

The Big Picture: On Prediction Markets (2004-09)

Source: Crisis Compels Economists To Reach for New Paradigm MARK WHITEHOUSE WSJ, NOVEMBER 3, 2009 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125720159912223873.html

Excerpt:

“The past century saw two revolutions in the way economists view the world. Both required painful crises to set them in motion, but both arguably improved government’s ability to manage the economy.

The first came after the Depression, when economists built some of the first mathematical models that policy makers could use to try to manage the economy. The second came after the inflationary 1970s, when economists created new models that took into account how people’s expectations, such as about prices or income, can influence the economy over time.

During the second revolution, the U.S. economy entered a period of stability and low inflation that lasted from the 1980s through most of the 2000s, leading many economists to believe they had triumphed over business cycles. As Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, one of the intellectual fathers of the models, put it in 2003: The “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved…for many decades.”

The result was a new orthodoxy, known as “rational expectations,” that still dominates, underpinning everything from the way pension funds invest to how financial analysts put values on securities. Among its main branches is the idea that markets are “efficient,” meaning that even an uninformed investor can get a fair shake, because the price of any security tends to reflect all available information relevant to its value.”

Tax Cuts and Recoveries, by David Leonhardt, Economix: One big question about the 1983-84 economic boom (a boom I mention in my Wednesday column) is: Was it the tax cut?

Ronald Reagan signed a large tax cut in the summer of 1981, while the economy was in recession. Within a year and a half, the economy was booming. Conservatives, understandably, like to argue that the tax cut helped cause the boom.

I’m open to that argument. ... What’s unclear is how big an effect tax rates have.

In 1982, with the economy in the second part of its double-dip recession, Reagan signed a tax increase, meant to reduce the deficit. Here’s Bruce Bartlett, writing at Forbes.com:

According to a recent Treasury Department study, Ronald Reagan proposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history as part of a budget deal to get the federal deficit under control. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) ... took effect on Jan. 1, 1983.

During debate on TEFRA, many conservatives predicted economic disaster. They argued that raising taxes in the midst of a severe recession was exactly the wrong thing to do. ... Said Rep. Newt Gingrich, “I think it will make the economy sicker.” The Chamber of Commerce ... said it had “no doubt that it will curb the economic recovery everyone wants.”

Looking at the data, however, it is very hard to see any evidence that TEFRA had a negative effect on growth. Indeed, one could easily make a case that its enactment stimulated growth.

A little more than a decade later, Mr. Gingrich made the same argument about Bill Clinton’s tax increase. But ... the ... late 1990s expansion was the fastest of any in the past forty years.

Mr. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, signed a large tax cut during his first year in office — as Mr. Reagan did. But Mr. Bush never signed a tax increase to reduce the deficit. And growth in the Bush years was slower than in the Reagan years or the Clinton years, even before the financial crisis hit.

The history seems to suggest that tax cuts are not the most reliable strategy for spurring growth, at least in the United States, where top income-tax rates are not sky high.

But maybe readers can offer an analysis that explains this history and still makes the case for tax cuts as the main engine of economic recoveries. ...

Just one quick note - for those anxious about the deficit and eager to do something about it, the Reagan experience shouldn't be used as an excuse to start raising taxes too soon. The time will come when deficit spending is no longer needed to spur the economy and at that point we should reverse course, but we shouldn't make the mistake of 1937-38 when an attempt to balance the budget too soon in the recovery caused the economy to fall back into recession.

Opinions and comments on RGE EconoMonitors do not necessarily reflect the views of Roubini Global Economics, LLC, which encourages a free-ranging debate among its own analysts and our EconoMonitor community. RGE takes no responsibility for verifying the accuracy of any opinions expressed by outside contributors. We encourage cross-linking but must insist that no forwarding, reprinting, republication or any other redistribution of RGE content is permissible without expressed consent of RGE.  

Revisions

We're all tempted to make predictions on the basis of the last data point. And even more difficult to resist is the temptation to make definitive statements on the basis of data that are sure to be revised. For instance, we see this question from Casey Mulligan, "Where's the GDP Disaster?".

Last October, when we were told that spending and incomes were about to collapse, I predicted that "real GDP will not drop below $11 trillion (chained 2000 $)."

That the recession would end was never in doubt.  Indeed, the timing is almost exactly what one would expected given the steep declines in spending in the first half of 2008 that triggered the flood of job losses later in the year.  Spending, consumer spending most importantly, would not fall indefinitely, especially with the benefit of significantly lower energy costs beginning in the second half of last year.  Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal notes, rebuilding household balance sheets is not accomplished by just increased savings; a default can do the job much more quickly, quickly adding to household cash flow.  Indeed, I admit to being surprised that strategic defaults are not much higher.

The more important question is what will be the durability and sustainability of the recovery in the years ahead?  The GDP report raises some significant red flags when considering this question.  The consumer spending number was clearly goosed by the Cash for Clunker program and a much slower pace of inventory depletion than expected, which combined to add almost 2 percentage points to the headline figure.  But auto sales have slipped back under the 10 million mark in September when the Clunkers program ended, with only a slight gain expected in October.  And the slower inventory depletion suggests that firms are further along than expected in realigning stockpiles with demand, and that future improvement will need to stem from more significant improvements in underlying demand (see James Hamilton for a more positive interpretation).

Growth was further boosted by a jump in residential construction, but, as Calculated Risk points out, this sector's future contributions are likely to remain under pressure from high home and rental vacancy rate.  Moreover, the impact of fiscal stimulus will fade as we move through next year, and there appears to be little political will to offer up additional stimulus.

Finally, note that net exports subtracted 0.53 percentage points of growth as import growth exceeded import growth.  A balanced, sustainable recovery requires, in my opinion, that net exports contribute to growth.  This showing reminds us of the ongoing dependence of US consumption on overseas production - stimulating consumption spending flows in  part right out to the economy via imports.  Recall also Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's recent warning :

Another set of lessons that Asian economies took from the crisis of the 1990s may be more problematic.  Because strong export markets helped Asia recover from that crisis, and because many countries in the region were badly hurt by sharp reversals in capital flows, the crisis strengthened Asia's commitment to export-led growth, backed up with large current account surpluses and mounting foreign exchange reserves….To achieve more balanced and durable economic growth and to reduce the risks of financial instability, we must avoid ever-increasing and unsustainable imbalances in trade and capital flows.  External imbalances have already narrowed substantially as a consequence of the crisis...As the global economy recovers and trade volumes rebound, however, global imbalances may reassert themselves.  As national leaders have emphasized in recent meetings of the G-20, policymakers around the world must guard against such an outcome. 

Couple this with a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week:

For more than a year, China has kept the yuan largely unchanged against the dollar. So, like the dollar, the yuan has been falling steadily against the currencies of China's neighbors, including the Malaysian ringgit, the Indonesian rupiah and the South Korean won. That makes goods produced in those countries more expensive compared with China's.

 "If you have one large economy in Asia lock itself against the U.S. dollar, everyone feels pressure," says Frederic Neumann, Asia economist for HSBC in Hong Kong. "Even 5% in this context feels painful."

The countries that compete with China are at a critical juncture. To stem the rise of their currencies against the yuan (and the dollar), central banks around Asia have in recent months been purchasing gobs of greenbacks and building their foreign reserves. And now those reserves are back up to precrisis levels.

At the same time, Asian economies are under pressure eventually to allow their currencies to rise and reduce their emphasis on exports to fuel growth. Some economists and international policy makers fear continued intervention in currency markets would reflect an unwillingness to break old habits of export growth driven by policies that kept currencies undervalued. Intervention can also raise the risks of domestic inflation.

Note also that the Europeans are growing frustrated with recent currency movements.  From Market News International (no link):

European central bankers, worried that the soaring euro could squelch a nascent economic recovery, are increasingly pressuring U.S. authorities to put some bite into their bark(ing) about a strong dollar, well-placed monetary sources told Market News International.

European monetary officials need the active support of U.S. and Chinese authorities to help restrain the euro and stem the greenback's slide, these sources said. Some noted that with the financial system awash in cash, it would be hard to mount an effective intervention in global currency markets.

The international political dynamics on this issue bear careful attention; it is not clear that the US and Europe will be able to tolerate Chinese currency policy indefinitely.  But do they have a choice?

Add in another concern - the jobless (or perhaps job-loss) recovery.  The underlying rate of economic growth (firms look through the Clunkers boost) remains well below  rates sufficient to generate job growth.  Indeed, as David Altig notes, the jobless recovery is almost certainly upon us once again, and if anything will prod the Administration to initiate a second stimulus package, it will be the prospect of sustained double-digit unemployment - an outcome that will only be aggravated if Chinese policy is to take advantage of the recession to consolidate more productive capacity behind its borders.  Perhaps then we develop a new dependency, with Chinese saving redirected to US consumers via the US government rather than the housing market.

All of which boils down to a simply question:  Can the US and global economies rebalance to a sustained, healthy pattern of growth without the cooperation of Chinese policymakers?  In other words, can a Dollar depreciation against the Euro alone sustain a rebalancing?  I think not, which implies that global economic stability is being supported on a very vulnerable base at the moment.

How will the Fed view these numbers?  They will be relieved, but have much of the same skepticism regarding the sustainability of these numbers.  Policymakers know the economy is being push along by a wave of federal stimulus, and are uncertain of how much momentum would be left in that absence of that stimulus.  At the same time, however, the solid GDP showing will support already heightened worries that while interest rates need to be sustained at very low levels, officials may be late to the game when it comes to reversing the expansion of the balance sheet.   Note St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard: 

“It is a little disappointing that private-sector economists are thinking so much about when we are going to move our fed funds rate up,” he said. “We are at zero. We are going to be there awhile. The focus should be more on” the Fed’s asset purchase program.

Given high unemployment and ongoing disinflation, there will be no rush to raise rates.  What will comes first is the contraction in the balance sheet - and positive GDP numbers will push the discussion further in that direction.

Bottom Line:  The GDP report is confirmation that the recession has come to an end.  But I am not ready to breath easy - too many potentially unsustainable factors drove the boost, and too much remains dependent on federal stimulus.  Until the economy can stand on its own, it remains vulnerable to unsustainable, unbalanced patterns of growth.  And the negative contribution of trade to growth, especially coupled with growing tension over currency movements, is a warning sign that trade and capital flows are at risk of falling back into old and unhelpful patterns.

Opinions and comments on RGE EconoMonitors do not necessarily reflect the views of Roubini Global Economics, LLC, which encourages a free-ranging debate among its own analysts and our EconoMonitor community. RGE takes no responsibility for verifying the accuracy of any opinions expressed by outside contributors. We encourage cross-linking but must insist that no forwarding, reprinting, republication or any other redistribution of RGE content is permissible without expressed consent of RGE.    

The Bubble Economy

Wood is still cautious. He says there is some initial indication of a technical breakdown in the US. "The US market will be vulnerable early next year the US market. If it becomes clear, after this inventory cycle, that consumption, employment is not really recovering, then the market will go down. You will then get renewed stimulus in the US and measures trying to generate growth. The key variable in the West is government policy." CLSA’s best case scenario is 1,200 on the S&P 500 by year-end, he added.

I agree with Wood that underlying economic demand may indeed be weak and all we may be seeing is an inventory and stimulus induced cyclical upturn (see my July post “ISM: Is this the mother of all inventory corrections?”). Of course, the worry is about the employment cycle not turning up before these measures’ positive effect wears off.  This is the question for 2010. If this happens, we get  a double dip and a huge market-sell off. Even if the employment situation starts to improve slowly while stimulus and the inventory cycle recede, this will lead to a muddle-through scenario, again inducing a correction. This is the heart of Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt’s call about partial recoveries and stock market weakness.

For those of you who want to believe and want to load up on junk, there’s a clap for that too, via bear turned bull Richard Bernstein:

Richard Bernstein of Richard Bernstein Capital Management is a lot more bullish. "Right now, there is a blurring between the secular issues and the cyclical ones. There are people, including me, who are concerned about the secular issues, but we can’t ignore the fact that the economy is getting better, employment is improving. When that happens you will see a cyclical rebound."

Just in September, Bernstein was saying America “practically invites another catastrophe.” What happened to that guy? He better be right on his bullish turn or he is going to have a lot of egg all over his face.

Source

Chances of a deeper correction are rising: Chris Wood – CNBC TV18 India

Opinions and comments on RGE EconoMonitors do not necessarily reflect the views of Roubini Global Economics, LLC, which encourages a free-ranging debate among its own analysts and our EconoMonitor community. RGE takes no responsibility for verifying the accuracy of any opinions expressed by outside contributors. We encourage cross-linking but must insist that no forwarding, reprinting, republication or any other redistribution of RGE content is permissible without expressed consent of RGE.   

Pressure from the EU has apparently had major impact – worries about unfair competition through subsidizing “too big to fail” banks are very real within the European market place.  Also, strong voices from within the Bank of England have helped to move the consensus.

The US position on protecting everything about our largest banks is starting to look increasingly isolated and out of step with best practice in other industrialized countries.  Time to start planning for the break-up of Citigroup.

Opinions and comments on RGE EconoMonitors do not necessarily reflect the views of Roubini Global Economics, LLC, which encourages a free-ranging debate among its own analysts and our EconoMonitor community. RGE takes no responsibility for verifying the accuracy of any opinions expressed by outside contributors. We encourage cross-linking but must insist that no forwarding, reprinting, republication or any other redistribution of RGE content is permissible without expressed consent of RGE.