Daily
March 31, 2023
Jan Hatzius @GoldmanSachs thinks the credit contraction increases the odds of a recession inside of the next 12 months to 35%, well below the consensus of 60%.
We have estimated the impact of tighter credit in three ways. The first is an accounting exercise that makes judgmental assumptions about new credit extension by banks with less than $250bn in assets and suggests a 0.25pp hit to growth. The second is an extension of our financial conditions impulse model that adds a role for bank lending standards and delivers a 0.5pp hit to growth. The third is a review of the academic literature on the effects of declines in both bank stock prices and accounting measures of equity capital on loan growth and GDP, which implies a 0.3-0.5pp hit to growth. On the back of these estimates, we have reduced our Q4/Q4 growth forecast by 0.4pp (from 1.5% to 1.1%).
.@Nouriel argues that that the Fed “must not delude themselves into thinking they can still achieve both price and financial stability.” He concludes, “everyone should be preparing for the coming stagflationary debt crisis.”
The credit crunch caused by today’s banking stress will create a harder landing for the real economy, owing to the key role that regional banks play in financing small and medium-size enterprises and households. Borrowers are facing rising rates – and thus much higher capital costs – on new borrowing and on existing liabilities that have matured and need to be rolled over. But the increase in long-term rates is also leading to massive losses for creditors holding long-duration assets. As a result, the economy is falling into a “debt trap,” with high public deficits and debt causing “fiscal dominance” over monetary policy, and high private debts causing “financial dominance” over monetary and regulatory authorities. In a debt trap, higher policy rates will fuel systemic debt crises that liquidity support will be insufficient to resolve. Since liquidity support cannot prevent this systemic doom loop, everyone should be preparing for the coming stagflationary debt crisis.
Citing the 20% fall in US’s ratio of the market value of public debt to nominal GDP, @adam_tooze argues we are living through one of the “most powerful episodes of financial repression ever.”
The truly systemic question is how we see our financial institutions through this giant trillion-dollar rebalancing. That is what will define this historical episode. Though debtors benefit from inflation and the revaluation of debts, they need to brace for the surging costs of debt service. Those who did not stretch the maturity of their obligations in the era of low rates now face an interest rate cliff. But if we can adjust to higher debt service and avoid a rash of bank crises, the one-off shock to the price level opens up unexpected fiscal space. We must use this wisely. We need public investment so as to escape the reactive cycle we are locked in and to begin anticipating the challenges of the polycrisis, whether in public health, climate change or destabilising geopolitics.
One in 25 or 4% of American 5-year-olds today will not live to 40; these deaths are largely due to drug overdoses, gun violence, and driving related deaths. @jburnmurdoch
America’s mortality problem is driven primarily by deaths among the young. One statistic in particular stood out: one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. No parent should ever have to bury their child, but in the US one set of parents from every kindergarten class most likely will. These young deaths are caused overwhelmingly by external causes—overdoses, gun violence, dangerous driving and such—which are deeply embedded social problems involving groups with opposing interests.
.@LeaRendell argues the labor force is 700,000 workers below expectations based on changing demographics and pre-pandemic trends. She attributes these workers’ absence to fear of COVID and long COVID.
The labor market has changed significantly since the start of the pandemic. Over the 12 months ending December 2022, the labor force participation rate was about 0.9 percentage points below the 12-month average ending in February 2020. This is a shortfall of close to 2.4 million workers. The 0.6 hour reduction in the moving average level of average weekly hours over the same period contributed an additional labor supply shortfall that is the equivalent of about another 2.4 million workers. As shown in the table, much of the decline in labor force participation over the past three years should have been anticipated even absent the pandemic
March 30, 2023
Citing measures of trade, capital flows, and immigration, @PennyG_Yale argues there is evidence of a slowdown but not a reversal of globalization.
First, it is clear that the growth of trade as percent of GDP has stalled since the financial crisis, and even declined in some cases. However, trends in capital and labor markets tell a different story. Taken together, these trends suggest that it is premature to talk of “deglobalization” – the slowdown of global trade seems a natural development following its earlier, fast growth and reflects partly the growth of the domestic markets of two large, formerly low-income countries, China and India. Second, deglobalization trends are highly heterogeneous across countries. While the United States and China – the world’s two largest economies which by virtue of their economic size drive aggregate trends – seem to be gradually decreasing their reliance on global markets, this is not true for the rest of the world.
.@TaxFoundation analysis finds that for every dollar earned by the lowest quintile of American households, they receive an additional $1.27 from the government. @tevermeer @ericadyork @alex_durante_ @JaredWalczak
The U.S. system of taxes and transfers is highly progressive. The lowest quintile experienced a combined tax and transfer rate of negative 127.0 percent, meaning that for each dollar they earned, they received an additional $1.27 from the government, netting transfers (gains) and taxes (losses), while the top quintile had a rate of positive 30.7 percent, meaning on net they paid just under $0.31 for every dollar earned. The top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019. For each dollar of taxes paid, the top quintile received $0.11 in gross government transfers. Government transfers account for 59 percent of the bottom quintile’s comprehensive income. For each dollar of taxes paid by the bottom quintile, they received $6.17 in gross government transfers.
Banks with less than $120B in deposits have lost over $108B in deposits since SVB’s collapse, which should restrict credit availability. Banks with <$10B in deposits account for almost 43% of small business loans. @WSJ
The 25 biggest U.S. banks gained $120 billion in deposits in the days after SVB collapsed, according to Federal Reserve data. All the U.S. banks below that level lost $108 billion over the same period. It was the largest weekly decline in smaller banks’ deposits in dollar terms on record. Meanwhile, more than $220 billion has flowed into money-market funds over the past two weeks, according to data from Refinitiv Lipper. Banks with less than $10 billion in assets accounted for nearly 43% of small loans to businesses outstanding at the end of 2022, according to Prof. Cole’s analysis of federal banking data. The 13 largest banks, by contrast, accounted for less than 23% of small- business loans, much of which represents credit-card balances, he said.
Back of the envelope math suggests banks should be able to weather the decline in offices values; small banks face losses of $140B on offices, which is only 10% of their equity capital. @TheEconomist
At the end of 2022, the commercial-property industry owed $5.6trn in debt to investors and financial institutions. According to Trepp, a data provider, half of this was to banks. Brookfield and funds of its size might need to repay big institutions, but the vast majority are on the hook to lenders with below $250bn in assets—ones which are already under severe stress after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Even the worst-case scenario would have limited impact. Roughly a quarter of the $2.2trn of commercial-property loans owed to small banks are office loans. Imagine thatlandlords hand back the keys on half these loans this year—some $280bn in total. If banks could recover just half the value of the loans by selling off the assets at deep discounts (say, a third of their value three years ago) they would be wearing losses of $140bn. That is just 10% of the equity capital that small banks hold. The blow would be unevenly distributed, however, and could imperil some institutions.
Suburbs of big and medium sized cities are driving the US’s population growth while the flight from big cities slowed. @WSJ
The suburbs of big cities and small and medium-size metropolitan areas continued to claim most of the country’s growth, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of population estimates released Thursday for the year that ended June 30. Rural areas and small towns collectively remained nearly flat. The core counties of large metro areas had an estimated net loss of more than 800,000 movers to the rest of the country, but that was an improvement from a 1.2 million drop in the preceding year, the Journal analysis shows. After a sharp falloff in immigration at the peak of the pandemic, the latest data shows a revival that has helped bolster large urban counties, with about 500,000 net arrivals from abroad last year. A rise in births and fewer deaths also helped offset moves out of urban counties, leaving their collective population little changed for the year.
An analysis from the @NewYorkFed shows that adjusting the labor force participation rate for population aging and excess retirements raises “the LFPR by 1.1 percentage point from 62.5% to 63.6%, more than making up for the participation gap.”
The gold line in the chart below shows this age-adjusted participation rate. Removing the effect of aging can explain the entire participation gap, lifting LFPR by 0.9 percentage point in February 2023. This big effect arises because the large baby boomer cohort is right at the retirement cutoff. As the chart above shows, the retirement share rises dramatically with age around the age of 65. Consequently, the aging of the baby boomers between 2020 and 2022 led to a significant rise in retirements, reducing participation. We analyze the effect of excess retirements on participation, in addition to the effect of aging. To do so, we analyze how the overall age-adjusted retirement share would change if we went back to the retirement shares in each age group of 2018-19. Overall, our results imply that undoing the effects of population aging and excess retirements would raise the LFPR by 1.1 percentage point from 62.5 percent to 63.6 percent, more than making up for the participation gap.
John Fernald @sffed argues that slower total factor productivity growth is likely not a function of the business cycle or scarring due to the crisis, as growth slowed in advance of 2008 across advanced economies.
TFP is the main factor accounting for differences in labor productivity growth across countries and over time. Since the mid-2000s, TFP growth has been lackluster across the large economies we analyze here. At the level of the market economy, productivity slowed because the productivity frontier (the U.S.) slowed, with similar slowdowns elsewhere. At a more disaggregated level, the frontier economy is sometimes different, but the pattern of slow TFP growth since the mid-2000s is evident in both manufacturing and market services. Qualitatively as well as statistically, the evidence suggests that, following that mid-1990s pickup, U.S. TFP growth slowed before the Great Recession.
.@JonHaidt reports the deterioration in teens mental health across the Anglosphere is seemingly following the same basic pattern which he suspects is being driven by smartphones and social media.
n sum, all five Anglosphere countries exhibit the same basic pattern: A) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s. B) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalizations begins in the early 2010s. C) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms). D) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms). At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time: the rapid global movement from flip phones (where you can’t do social media) to smartphones and the phone-based childhood. The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010, just as teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones in large numbers. (Few teens owned an iPhone in its first few years). Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, which gave the platform a huge boost in publicity and users.
Ruy Teixeira @AEI notes that “Republicans are, in a strict quantitative sense, the party of the American working class. That is, they currently get more working-class (noncollege) votes than the Democrats”
Republicans are, in a strict quantitative sense, the party of the American working class. That is, they currently get more working-class (noncollege) votes than the Democrats. That was true in 2022 when Republicans carried the nationwide working-class House vote by 13 points. That was true in 2020, when Trump carried the nationwide working-class presidential vote by 4 points over Biden. Moreover, modeled estimates by the States of Change project indicate that Trump carried the working-class vote in 35 out of 50 states, including in critical states for the Democrats like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as in states that are slipping away from the party like Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Texas.
.@WhiteHouseCEA draws a connection between fiscal policy in 2020 and the uptick in inflation in 2021.
Figure 2-15 plots the Hutchins Center’s Fiscal Impact Measure (FIM), which uses information on the Federal Government’s spending on goods and services, sate and local government spending on goods and services, and taxes and benefit programs to approximate the contribution of fiscal policy to total real GDP growth each quarter. A positive fiscal impulse means that the contribution of fiscal policy to real GDP is larger than it was the quarter before. Figure 2-15 shows that the FIM spiked in 2020:Q2, mainly due to an expansion of transfer programs, and was positive for two of the next three quarters, but was a significant drag throughout 2022 and is projected to remain negative in 2023 and 2024, using projections for fiscal policy by the Congressional Budget Office in its current baseline.
March 29, 2023
.@pkedrosky argues that Goldman’s new AI report understates potential for productivity-enhancing software development that was previously too expensive to develop, which implies lots of “low-hanging economic fruit.”
We caution that Goldman’s approach is fairly traditional, in that it treats the prospective productivity gains across various disciplines as a function of the ease of applying these generative AI technologies, as opposed to the availability of low-hanging economic fruit. We think the gains from making it easier to produce presentations and documents and emails are much less than touted. On other hand, we stand by our argument that the gains of generative AI in other occupations are large and larger than Goldman anticipates in this report. Again, and more specifically, we think that the gains from producing software are very large, given that, as we’ve argued, we have underproduced for decades, and software sits in the sweet spot with respect to its combination of a clean grammar and logical structure, and given that it has been too costly to produce for most of its existence, hence why it’s been so slow to “eat the world,” as has sometimes been said is happening.
.@greg_ip argues that small and medium sized banks could face a “prolonged period of pressure on their deposits” that could reduce the supply of credit to the economy.
Compared with the past, the bigger problem for banks isn’t the asset side of their balance sheets but the liability side. That is in part due to the fiscal and monetary-policy response to the pandemic. The Federal Reserve restarted purchases of bonds, and the Treasury sent big stimulus and other relief payments directly to household bank accounts. As a result, deposits ballooned. The ratio of bank loans to deposits fell to a 50-year low of around 60% in September 2021, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report. While a growing share of banks’ deposits were uninsured, they were assumed to be relatively “sticky,” or less prone to flee than other types of wholesale funding. But social media and smartphone banking apps seem to have changed that. Small and medium-size banks could be in for a prolonged period of pressure on their deposits, which could in turn force them to be acquired, or limit their lending.
Commercial real estate (CRE) fundamentals are, outside of offices, “sturdy enough.” Loan-to-value ratios are relatively low, meaning that falling prices aren’t likely to translate into defaults. @rbrtrmstrng @EthanYWu
Valuations look very stretched and a reversion to the mean suggests a harsh correction. Falling prices, however, are not nearly as worrisome as defaults. And outside of offices, fundamentals seem sturdy enough. Distress remains rare. Unlike in the CRE bust of the early 1990s, when loan-to-value ratios were treacherously high, regional banks’ CRE loans have an average LTV around 66 per cent, according to MSCI Real Assets. Offices’ soaring vacancy rates are not showing up elsewhere. With the possible exception of recession-exposed retail, net operating income growth looks healthy (though this is somewhat exaggerated by inflation).
Protests directed at Macron’s pension reform proposal were smaller Tuesday with the CGT labour union estimating 450,000 people protested in Paris down from 800,000 Thursday. @FinancialTimes
Smaller crowds turned out across France on Tuesday in the tenth nationwide protest held by labour unions against President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular plan to raise the retirement age, while strikes disrupted transportation and shut down the Eiffel Tower and the palace of Versailles. The CGT labour union estimated that 450,000 people had turned out in Paris compared with 800,000 at the previous union-led demonstration on Thursday, with declines also reported in Marseille, Rennes and Toulouse. Police figures put the nationwide crowds at 740,000 people compared with more than a million last week. The lower turnout is a boost for Macron’s government, which has rejected union attempts at mediation to ease the crisis and vowed to hold firm on finalising the reform by mid-April once it has been reviewed by the constitutional court. But unions are also maintaining their position: another nationwide protest is set for April 6.
A review of shareholder letters from 1955 and 2020 finds that corporations “pick and choose the stakeholders they want to focus attention on, while emphasizing long-term shareholder value, especially in how they compensate.” @zingales
In spite of the proliferation of corporate goals, we find that executive compensation remains overwhelmingly focused on shareholder value, as measured by stock prices and financial performance. While we do observe an increase in the use of environmental and social metrics in compensation, especially by firms that announce such goals, the magnitude of this relationship is still small. We also find corporate statements of ESG goals are associated with policies and programs that favor those goals, but there is little evidence that it improves the firm’s measurable ESG outcomes. These findings cast doubt on the hope that self-regulation would suffice to undertake a green transition. Firms seem very responsive to the public mood in words and programs. Better outcomes? Not yet! There is no evidence that a focus on shareholder value is detrimental (or beneficial) to the long-term health of a corporation, whether that health is measured with profits, dividends, or stock market returns.
Weekly
Week of March 27, 2023
.@TaxFoundation analysis finds that for every dollar earned by the lowest quintile of American households, they receive an additional $1.27 from the government. @tevermeer @ericadyork @alex_durante_ @JaredWalczak
The U.S. system of taxes and transfers is highly progressive. The lowest quintile experienced a combined tax and transfer rate of negative 127.0 percent, meaning that for each dollar they earned, they received an additional $1.27 from the government, netting transfers (gains) and taxes (losses), while the top quintile had a rate of positive 30.7 percent, meaning on net they paid just under $0.31 for every dollar earned. The top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019. For each dollar of taxes paid, the top quintile received $0.11 in gross government transfers. Government transfers account for 59 percent of the bottom quintile’s comprehensive income. For each dollar of taxes paid by the bottom quintile, they received $6.17 in gross government transfers.
John Fernald @sffed argues that slower total factor productivity growth is likely not a function of the business cycle or scarring due to the crisis, as growth slowed in advance of 2008 across advanced economies.
TFP is the main factor accounting for differences in labor productivity growth across countries and over time. Since the mid-2000s, TFP growth has been lackluster across the large economies we analyze here. At the level of the market economy, productivity slowed because the productivity frontier (the U.S.) slowed, with similar slowdowns elsewhere. At a more disaggregated level, the frontier economy is sometimes different, but the pattern of slow TFP growth since the mid-2000s is evident in both manufacturing and market services. Qualitatively as well as statistically, the evidence suggests that, following that mid-1990s pickup, U.S. TFP growth slowed before the Great Recession.
Michael Cembalest @jpmorgan argues that effective load carrying capacity (ELCC) is a better metric than the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) since this metric reflects the intermittent availability of wind and solar power.
One example: assume that California builds a deeply decarbonized system with 20 GW of wind, 150 GW of solar and 75 GW of storage. This system would only have 50 GW of reliable load with which to meet demand (ELCC=50 GW). Alternatively stated: if this system needed 50 GW of reliable power and was designed with renewables only, it would need 245 GW of wind, solar and storage to make it work. The marginal ELCC of wind, solar and storage are at their highest when renewables are first added to the system; their contribution to system reliability falls rapidly after that. LCOE reflects none of these realities, which is why the ISOs and utilities shown in the text box look at ELCC instead.
Over the past 25 years the number of Americans reporting “patriotism” was “very important” to them declined from 70% to 38% and “having children” declined from 59% to 30%. The number reporting “money” climbed from 31% to 43%. @WSJ
Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds. Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion. The only priority the Journal tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money, which was cited as very important by 43% in the new survey, up from 31% in 1998.
Week of March 20, 2023
A Spanish antipoverty program that gave recipients a cash transfer equivalent to almost 50% of the national minimum wage had strong negative labor market effects, with primary recipients 20% less likely to work relative to the control group. @iza_bonn
In this paper, we studied the employment effects of an antipoverty program that does not include any such conditions. The two-year program, implemented in Barcelona (Spain), consisted of a monthly cash transfer to households with income below the subsistence level. The benefit level depended on the household income, size, and composition. On average, households received roughly e500 ($792 PPP) per month, equivalent to nearly 50 percent of the national minimum wage. Although the benefit was household-based, transfers were made to the account of a designated household member, the main recipient. Our findings for overall impacts can be summarized in four parts. First, we find strong evidence for sizeable negative labor supply effects. After two years, households assigned to the cash transfer were 14 percent less likely to have at least one member working compared to households assigned to the control group; main recipients were 20 percent less likely to work. Second, negative employment effects persisted until at least six months after the last payment. Third, we find tentative evidence that effects are mainly driven by households with care responsibilities. Fourth, there is no evidence of effects on social participation and education-related activities.
Nicholas Eberstadt and Peter Van Ness @AEIecon find significant variation in labor force participation across metropolitan areas. Notably, they find no correlation between local LFP and the change in manufacturing jobs’ share of employment since 2000.
For many years, a stylized fact floating in the economic policy ether (on both the left and the right) has been the now widely accepted notion that deindustrialization has driven down post-war LFPRs for American men. The figure above squarely challenges that assumption. Less ephemerally, careful studies by David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have detailed the devastating impact of the "China shock" — the shift in worldwide trade patterns that followed China's accession into the World Trade Organization in 2001 — on the U.S. manufacturing sector. That immediate shock was, alas, very real, but our chart suggests it was also temporary. This figure, we believe, should be taken as an invitation to reexamine a matter many scholars and policymakers consider settled.
.@samquinones7 argues that the drug cartels’ shift to synthetics such as fentanyl and methamphetamine is allowing them to drive down prices, which has led to increased usage.
"Two-thirds of the 107,000 overdose deaths in 2021 involved fentanyl or synthetic opioids like it. Agents seized more than 50 million fentanyl-laced pills in 2022, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced in December, and over 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder — enough to kill a quarter of the world’s entire population. The quantities of meth coming out of Mexico, spurred by easy access to ingredients from world chemical markets, have driven prices for the drug to historic lows. In Fresno, Calif., a wholesale pound of meth went for $20,000 in 2008; now it goes for $800. In Nashville six years ago, a pound wholesale sold for $16,000; today, it’s $2,000.
.@pkedrosky argues that AI like ChatGPT is going to bend the cost curve on software production allowing us to run off “immense, society-wide technical debt,” resulting in significant consumer surplus as better software diffuses through the economy.
There is immense hyperbole about recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT. Observers are missing two very important things. Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste. Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt. This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation What if the cost of software production is following similar curves, perhaps even steeper curves, and is on its way to falling to something like zero?
New @BankofAmerica research shows 7% fewer customers were spending money on child care relative to the start of 2020 suggesting the higher cost of childcare is keeping lower earning workers out of labor force.
Caregiving responsibilities have prevented some from returning to the workforce. In the latest Household Pulse Survey with data as of January 17, 2023, a combined 7% of respondents not working reported caregiving as the reason. This was broken down further: 5% were looking after children and 2% elderly relatives. The lack of affordable and quality childcare has forced some parents to stay at home instead of returning to work. According to the Consumer Price Index, daycare and preschool costs have increased by more than 10% since the start of the pandemic. This is an even bigger burden for lower-income households, which could partly explain the larger labor force exits at the lower end of the income spectrum. However, across the board, it seems that fewer parents are sending their kids to daycare relative to prepandemic days. Bank of America internal data shows that the number of customers making childcare payments as of December 2022 was 7% lower than at the beginning of 2020
Week of March 13, 2023
Labor force participation for workers aged 25-54 hit 83% in Feb, surpassing its pre-pandemic peak. However, participation for those aged 20-24 remains well below pre-pandemic levels, with 400k Americans missing from the labor force. @foxjust
In February, the labor-force participation rate for Americans ages 25 to 54 hit 83.1%, surpassing its pre-pandemic, pre-recession peak — which never happened during the past two economic expansions. The 25-to-54 age group is the core of the labor force, often referred to as “prime age.” But there are 58 million working Americans outside of it, 21 million younger and 37 million older. Teenagers are now substantially more likely to be in the labor force than before the pandemic, so they’re not the issue. But participation rates for those ages 20 to 24 and above 55 are still well short of where they were in February 2020. The decline among young adults is a different story. As the second chart above makes clear, it’s not just the 20-to-24 group that’s affected, with those in their late 20s seeing even bigger declines in participation and employment. There haven’t been big shifts in the age distribution within either group, so composition effects aren’t to blame. It’s simply more than 400,000 Americans in their 20s missing from the labor force, people who should be at the beginning of long careers, not fading into the sunset.
Migrants, including a sharp increase in Chinese, are surging into Panama as they seek entry into the United States. Border Patrol agents have arrested 4,271 Chinese nationals since Oct, a 12-fold increase from the same period a year earlier. @WSJ
The number of migrants crossing into Panama after trudging through the treacherous Darien Gap jungle reached record levels in the first two months of the year, data from Panama showed, posing a fresh challenge to their destination country, the U.S. In January and February, 49,291 people from as near as Haiti and as far away as China have crossed the Darien, a span of rainforest separating Panama from Colombia. That is more than a fivefold increase from the 8,964 migrants in the same period last year, according to Panama’s immigration office. About 2,200 Chinese migrants were among those crossing the Darien Gap in the first two months of 2023, a sharp increase in a group that usually has made up a much smaller proportion of migrants through the area. During the same period last year, 71 Chinese migrants were recorded passing through Panama.
.@paulkrugman argues that higher marginal taxes rates won’t be enough to close the long-run fiscal gap. “We’ll eventually have to raise taxes, at least somewhat, on people making less than $400,000.”
Very high marginal tax rates create problematic incentives. Conservatives emphasize how taxes reduce the incentive to work and create wealth; this effect is surely overrated, but it does exist. More important, high tax rates encourage extraordinary efforts to avoid taxes (which is legal) or evade them (which isn’t). Estimates of the revenue-maximizing top tax rate tend to be in the range of 70 percent to 80 percent, well above the federal maximum of 37 percent — but bear in mind that many high earners also face state and local taxes that raise their effective marginal rate to something like 50 percent. So, the amount of additional revenue we can raise from taxing the rich, while substantial, is considerably less than their remaining untaxed income.
Week of March 6, 2023
An increase in time spent on social media is associated with a decline in mental health, with the gradient steepest for girls. @jburnmurdoch.
Something is going very wrong for teenagers. Between 1994 and 2010, the share of British teens who do not consider themselves likable fell slightly from 6% to 4%; since 2010 it has more than doubled. The share who think of themselves as a failure, who worry a lot, and who are dissatisfied with their lives also kicked up sharply. The same trends are visible across the Atlantic. The number of US high school students who say their life often feels meaningless has rocketed in the past 12 years. And it’s not just the anglosphere. In France, rates of depression among 15- to 24-year-olds have quadrupled in the past decade. The more time teens spend on social media, the worse their mental health is. The gradient is steepest for girls, who also spend much more time on social media than boys, explaining the sharper deterioration among girls’ mental health than boys’.
Persistently loose monetary policies are associated with financial crises. A 1pp lower mean in a five-year window increases the probability of a financial crisis in the next 5 to 7 years by 5.5pp and by 15.5 in the following 7-9 years. @MSchularick @sffed
We are the first to show that, as a causal matter, a loose stance has strong implications for medium-term financial instability. The sample consists of 18 advanced economies over the period from 1870 until 2020. Since the unconditional probability of experiencing a crisis in a 3-year window is 10.5%, these effects are big. Moreover, these results are robust to alternative measures of stance and alternative definitions of financial stability. Lower interest rates in general and loose monetary policy in particular imply, ceteris paribus, higher asset valuations. This opens the door for collateral-driven credit booms. Such credit and asset price booms, in turn, have been identified by the literature as harbingers of financial turmoil.
Week of February 27, 2023
.@seba_hill documents that almost all the decline in real interest rates since 1980 occurred in a 3-day window around Fed announcements.
A narrow window around Fed meetings fully captures the secular decline in U.S. Treasury yields since 1980. By contrast, yield movements outside this window are transitory and wash out over time. This is surprising because the forces behind the secular decline are thought to be independent of monetary policy. Why did the secular decline in interest rates occur around FOMC meetings? While the Fed might have no direct control of long-term yields, it seems possible that the Fed provides information to the market about the long-run level of interest rates. This long-run Fed information effect might therefore explain why long-term interest rates move around FOMC meetings. In recent decades, this would imply that the market learned about secular interest rate decline – including the trend in r∗– from the Fed.
A new @ChicagoBooth paper suggests that “raising the inflation target today would be a serious mistake.” The authors estimate that sustaining a disinflation will require unemployment to rise to 5% from January’s 3.4%.
We start by analyzing the large disinflations that occurred since 1950 in the United States and several other major economies. We estimate and simulate a standard model over several time periods, using various linear and nonlinear measures of labor market slack. We draw three main lessons from the analysis: (1) there is no post-1950 precedent for a sizable central-bank-induced disinflation that does not entail substantial economic sacrifice or recession; (2) regardless of the Phillips curve specification, models estimated over a historical period that includes episodes of high and variable inflation do a better job of predicting the post-pandemic inflation surge than those estimated over the stable inflation period from 1985 to 2019; and (3) simulations of our baseline model suggest that the Fed will need to tighten policy significantly further to achieve its inflation objective by the end of 2025. We see that the model using the full historical period (1962-2022; red line in the graphic above,) implies that inflation will fall only gradually to 3.7 percent by the end of 2025. By contrast, the model estimated over the stable inflation period (1985-2019; blue line in the graphic above,) has inflation falling quickly to the 2 percent target in the first quarter of 2024.
A strong rebound in immigration in 2022 helped offset tight U.S. labor markets, contributing to a 6-percentage point reduction in the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers. @sffed
Immigration flows into the United States slowed significantly following immigration policy changes from 2017 to 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of state-level data shows that this migration slowdown tightened local labor markets modestly, raising the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers (V-U) 5.5 percentage points between 2017 and 2021. More recent data show immigration has rebounded strongly, helping to close the shortfall in foreign-born labor and ease tight labor markets. Data for 2022 show a strong rebound in immigration that has helped offset tight U.S. labor markets by contributing a 6-percentage point reduction in the V–U ratio.
As American energy exports to Europe surge, @DanielYergin notes that, “America is back in the most predominant position it has been in world energy since the 1950s.” @WSJ
Since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, average monthly seaborne cargoes to the continent jumped 38% compared with the previous 12-month period, according to ship-tracking firm Kpler. According to the White House, U.S. natural gas shipments to Europe more than doubled last year, cushioning the continent’s households and manufacturers after Russia throttled supplies. A fleet of skyscraper-size tankers carried more crude to Germany, France and Italy—the European Union’s largest economies—as well as Spain, which alone boosted purchases by about 88% over the period. The pull of oil shipments from the Gulf Coast to Europe, which Kpler pegged at 1.53 million barrels a day in January, has in recent months made the continent a larger destination for U.S. crude than Asia.
Money flowing into startups globally fell by a third in 2022 as valuations declined; however, there is still $300B of VC dry powder in the US alone. @TheEconomist
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell by a third in 2022, making it one of the worst years on record and drawing comparisons with the dotcom bust of 2000-01. According to the Silicon Valley Bank, a tech-focused lender, between the fourth quarters of 2021 and 2022, the average value of recently listed tech stocks in America dropped by 63%. And the plunging public valuations dragged down private ones. The value of older, larger private firms (“late-stage” in the lingo) fell by 56% after funds marked down their assets or the firms raised new capital at lower valuations. What new VC funding there is increasingly flows into mega-funds. Data from PitchBook, a research firm, show that in America in 2022 funds worth more than $1bn accounted for 57% of all capital, up from 20% in 2018.
Week of February 20, 2023
.@DailyMail reports that 8% of very wealthy New Yorkers (those earning >$25 million per year) left the state during 2021.
The number of those earning more than $25 million that fled the state in 2021 is 1,453, just 520 less than the amount that left at the height of lockdowns and intense social distancing [implying 17% of this cohort over two years]. The top one percent of earners in New York account for close to half of the state's income tax revenue. Between 2019 and 2020, New York City lost six percent of those earning between $150,000 and $750,000. EJ McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy claimed the data showed a 1.3 percent decline in the number of New Yorkers with adjusted gross annual income of more than $1 million. The precise figure fell from 55,100 to 54,370 - 730 individuals, while the national number climbed from 554,340 to 608,549 - a nearly 10 percent jump. According to new Census Bureau data, New York experienced the largest population decline of any US state this year - losing 0.9 percent of its residents.
Database
Week of March 27, 2023
.@TaxFoundation analysis finds that for every dollar earned by the lowest quintile of American households, they receive an additional $1.27 from the government. @tevermeer @ericadyork @alex_durante_ @JaredWalczak
The U.S. system of taxes and transfers is highly progressive. The lowest quintile experienced a combined tax and transfer rate of negative 127.0 percent, meaning that for each dollar they earned, they received an additional $1.27 from the government, netting transfers (gains) and taxes (losses), while the top quintile had a rate of positive 30.7 percent, meaning on net they paid just under $0.31 for every dollar earned. The top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019. For each dollar of taxes paid, the top quintile received $0.11 in gross government transfers. Government transfers account for 59 percent of the bottom quintile’s comprehensive income. For each dollar of taxes paid by the bottom quintile, they received $6.17 in gross government transfers.
John Fernald @sffed argues that slower total factor productivity growth is likely not a function of the business cycle or scarring due to the crisis, as growth slowed in advance of 2008 across advanced economies.
TFP is the main factor accounting for differences in labor productivity growth across countries and over time. Since the mid-2000s, TFP growth has been lackluster across the large economies we analyze here. At the level of the market economy, productivity slowed because the productivity frontier (the U.S.) slowed, with similar slowdowns elsewhere. At a more disaggregated level, the frontier economy is sometimes different, but the pattern of slow TFP growth since the mid-2000s is evident in both manufacturing and market services. Qualitatively as well as statistically, the evidence suggests that, following that mid-1990s pickup, U.S. TFP growth slowed before the Great Recession.
Week of March 20, 2023
A Spanish antipoverty program that gave recipients a cash transfer equivalent to almost 50% of the national minimum wage had strong negative labor market effects, with primary recipients 20% less likely to work relative to the control group. @iza_bonn
In this paper, we studied the employment effects of an antipoverty program that does not include any such conditions. The two-year program, implemented in Barcelona (Spain), consisted of a monthly cash transfer to households with income below the subsistence level. The benefit level depended on the household income, size, and composition. On average, households received roughly e500 ($792 PPP) per month, equivalent to nearly 50 percent of the national minimum wage. Although the benefit was household-based, transfers were made to the account of a designated household member, the main recipient. Our findings for overall impacts can be summarized in four parts. First, we find strong evidence for sizeable negative labor supply effects. After two years, households assigned to the cash transfer were 14 percent less likely to have at least one member working compared to households assigned to the control group; main recipients were 20 percent less likely to work. Second, negative employment effects persisted until at least six months after the last payment. Third, we find tentative evidence that effects are mainly driven by households with care responsibilities. Fourth, there is no evidence of effects on social participation and education-related activities.
Nicholas Eberstadt and Peter Van Ness @AEIecon find significant variation in labor force participation across metropolitan areas. Notably, they find no correlation between local LFP and the change in manufacturing jobs’ share of employment since 2000.
For many years, a stylized fact floating in the economic policy ether (on both the left and the right) has been the now widely accepted notion that deindustrialization has driven down post-war LFPRs for American men. The figure above squarely challenges that assumption. Less ephemerally, careful studies by David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have detailed the devastating impact of the "China shock" — the shift in worldwide trade patterns that followed China's accession into the World Trade Organization in 2001 — on the U.S. manufacturing sector. That immediate shock was, alas, very real, but our chart suggests it was also temporary. This figure, we believe, should be taken as an invitation to reexamine a matter many scholars and policymakers consider settled.
.@mtkonczal updates @Mark_J_Perry price changes graph and argues the implication isn’t government regulation drives price shifts but that goods have deflated and services have inflated.
In our version of the AEI chart the number one item isn’t health care but ‘delivery services,’ which is “fees for delivery of items such as letters, documents, and packages at non-US Postal Services facilities.” Think UPS or FedEx. This is pretty far from a government monopoly, indeed it’s the private sector alternative to a government program. But it is services and it is labor intensive. The biggest thing, to me, isn’t “regulations” but whether it’s a service or a good. This is academically well known, check out The Missing Inflation Puzzle: The Role of the Wage-Price Pass-Through, which finds that the low inflation of pre-pandemic era “can be traced to a growing disconnect between unemployment and core goods inflation” and that “increased import competition and rising market concentration reduce pass-through from wages to prices” when it comes to goods.
Week of March 13, 2023
Robert Hall argues that a substantial rise in the volatility of costs can free the prices of a significant fraction of goods and services prices from the grip of New Keynesian “zone of inaction.” @NBERpubs
The basic idea of this paper is that a substantial rise in the volatility of costs and other determinants of prices can completely free the prices of a significant fraction of goods and services from the grip of New Keynesian stickiness, when the volatility of cost rises. There is a critical configuration of the model such that at lower values of the of the cost volatility, the price is a constant over time—resetting never occurs, except possibly to bring the price into the zone of indifference at the beginning of time. The surprising implication of this investigation is that an increase in the volatility of cost that leaves the average level of cost unchanged can trigger a near collapse of price stickiness. The next section of the paper presents an empirical analysis demonstrating a large increase in cost volatility around the time of a burst of inflation during and after the pandemic, followed by a reversal.
.@paulkrugman argues that higher marginal taxes rates won’t be enough to close the long-run fiscal gap. “We’ll eventually have to raise taxes, at least somewhat, on people making less than $400,000.”
Very high marginal tax rates create problematic incentives. Conservatives emphasize how taxes reduce the incentive to work and create wealth; this effect is surely overrated, but it does exist. More important, high tax rates encourage extraordinary efforts to avoid taxes (which is legal) or evade them (which isn’t). Estimates of the revenue-maximizing top tax rate tend to be in the range of 70 percent to 80 percent, well above the federal maximum of 37 percent — but bear in mind that many high earners also face state and local taxes that raise their effective marginal rate to something like 50 percent. So, the amount of additional revenue we can raise from taxing the rich, while substantial, is considerably less than their remaining untaxed income.
Week of March 6, 2023
The wave of murders associated with the pandemic has seemingly crested. Homicide rates are still well above the pre-pandemic level, but 2022 homicides were down 5% from 2021. @foxjust
The shocking rise in murders that began in the summer of 2020 looks as if it may have played out. In the nearly complete tally of 2022 homicide statistics from 93 US cities compiled by AH Datalytics, murder and non-negligent manslaughter was down 5% from the year before. There were still many more people murdered in the US in 2022 than before the pandemic in 2019 — going by the AH Datalytics estimates it was 4,764, or 28.7%, more. Murder rates are also much, much higher in the US than in other wealthy nations. But with weekly crime statistics from the three biggest US cities showing a continuing and possibly accelerating murder decline so far in 2023, it does look as if a return to the awful conditions of the 1970s through early 1990s probably isn’t in the cards.
Persistently loose monetary policies are associated with financial crises. A 1pp lower mean in a five-year window increases the probability of a financial crisis in the next 5 to 7 years by 5.5pp and by 15.5 in the following 7-9 years. @MSchularick @sffed
We are the first to show that, as a causal matter, a loose stance has strong implications for medium-term financial instability. The sample consists of 18 advanced economies over the period from 1870 until 2020. Since the unconditional probability of experiencing a crisis in a 3-year window is 10.5%, these effects are big. Moreover, these results are robust to alternative measures of stance and alternative definitions of financial stability. Lower interest rates in general and loose monetary policy in particular imply, ceteris paribus, higher asset valuations. This opens the door for collateral-driven credit booms. Such credit and asset price booms, in turn, have been identified by the literature as harbingers of financial turmoil.
Week of February 27, 2023
.@seba_hill documents that almost all the decline in real interest rates since 1980 occurred in a 3-day window around Fed announcements.
A narrow window around Fed meetings fully captures the secular decline in U.S. Treasury yields since 1980. By contrast, yield movements outside this window are transitory and wash out over time. This is surprising because the forces behind the secular decline are thought to be independent of monetary policy. Why did the secular decline in interest rates occur around FOMC meetings? While the Fed might have no direct control of long-term yields, it seems possible that the Fed provides information to the market about the long-run level of interest rates. This long-run Fed information effect might therefore explain why long-term interest rates move around FOMC meetings. In recent decades, this would imply that the market learned about secular interest rate decline – including the trend in r∗– from the Fed.
A strong rebound in immigration in 2022 helped offset tight U.S. labor markets, contributing to a 6-percentage point reduction in the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers. @sffed
Immigration flows into the United States slowed significantly following immigration policy changes from 2017 to 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of state-level data shows that this migration slowdown tightened local labor markets modestly, raising the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers (V-U) 5.5 percentage points between 2017 and 2021. More recent data show immigration has rebounded strongly, helping to close the shortfall in foreign-born labor and ease tight labor markets. Data for 2022 show a strong rebound in immigration that has helped offset tight U.S. labor markets by contributing a 6-percentage point reduction in the V–U ratio.
As American energy exports to Europe surge, @DanielYergin notes that, “America is back in the most predominant position it has been in world energy since the 1950s.” @WSJ
Since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, average monthly seaborne cargoes to the continent jumped 38% compared with the previous 12-month period, according to ship-tracking firm Kpler. According to the White House, U.S. natural gas shipments to Europe more than doubled last year, cushioning the continent’s households and manufacturers after Russia throttled supplies. A fleet of skyscraper-size tankers carried more crude to Germany, France and Italy—the European Union’s largest economies—as well as Spain, which alone boosted purchases by about 88% over the period. The pull of oil shipments from the Gulf Coast to Europe, which Kpler pegged at 1.53 million barrels a day in January, has in recent months made the continent a larger destination for U.S. crude than Asia.
Money flowing into startups globally fell by a third in 2022 as valuations declined; however, there is still $300B of VC dry powder in the US alone. @TheEconomist
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell by a third in 2022, making it one of the worst years on record and drawing comparisons with the dotcom bust of 2000-01. According to the Silicon Valley Bank, a tech-focused lender, between the fourth quarters of 2021 and 2022, the average value of recently listed tech stocks in America dropped by 63%. And the plunging public valuations dragged down private ones. The value of older, larger private firms (“late-stage” in the lingo) fell by 56% after funds marked down their assets or the firms raised new capital at lower valuations. What new VC funding there is increasingly flows into mega-funds. Data from PitchBook, a research firm, show that in America in 2022 funds worth more than $1bn accounted for 57% of all capital, up from 20% in 2018.
China’s household savings rate was 33% in 2022, 3pp above the pre-pandemic trend, and big industrial companies added $1.1 trillion in liquid assets on average each year, more than double the $467 billion annual increase in the five years before Covid. @WSJ
Chinese families, constrained by Covid lockdowns, hoarded cash and pushed up the country’s household saving rate to a multiyear high of 33% in 2022. Economists from HSBC and Morgan Stanley say the end of China’s strict zero-Covid policies will at minimum fuel a strong recovery in services spending, lifting consumption growth to at least its prepandemic rate of around 8% a year. A large portion of new deposits accumulated by Chinese households last year was locked up in three-year to five-year deposit instruments, which can’t as easily be converted into spending as short-term deposits can, according to a study by research firm Rhodium Group.
Week of February 20, 2023
.@DailyMail reports that 8% of very wealthy New Yorkers (those earning >$25 million per year) left the state during 2021.
The number of those earning more than $25 million that fled the state in 2021 is 1,453, just 520 less than the amount that left at the height of lockdowns and intense social distancing [implying 17% of this cohort over two years]. The top one percent of earners in New York account for close to half of the state's income tax revenue. Between 2019 and 2020, New York City lost six percent of those earning between $150,000 and $750,000. EJ McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy claimed the data showed a 1.3 percent decline in the number of New Yorkers with adjusted gross annual income of more than $1 million. The precise figure fell from 55,100 to 54,370 - 730 individuals, while the national number climbed from 554,340 to 608,549 - a nearly 10 percent jump. According to new Census Bureau data, New York experienced the largest population decline of any US state this year - losing 0.9 percent of its residents.
A new @NBERpubs paper shows that newer firms have more earnings dispersion than older firms, and that this pattern accounts for a large fraction of the aggregate rise in between-firm earnings inequality. @WallskogMelanie
We plot the between-firm variance of earnings within a cohort over time. We find two striking patterns. First, within a cohort, between-firm earnings inequality declines as the cohort ages. Second, each subsequent cohort of firms enters with a higher level of between-firm earnings inequality before declining on a path approximately parallel to previous cohorts. We find that between-firm pay dispersion declines within a cohort. Second, there are striking cohort patterns: more recent cohorts are more dispersed than older cohorts. This pattern accounts for a large fraction of the aggregate rise in between-firm earnings inequality. As older cohorts are replaced with cohorts with inequality “technology” of the more recent vintage, we expect inequality to continue to rise, even without a change in that underlying technology.
.@paulkrugman argues that Medicare financing is on stable ground as health spending is leveling off: “since 2010 we’ve already done quite a lot to ‘bend the curve.’”
Historically health spending has risen faster than GDP. Excess cost growth has slowed considerably since around 2010 the leveling off is unmistakable. Here’s national health spending as a percent of G.D.P. C.B.O. projections now show social insurance spending as a percentage of G.D.P. eventually rising by about 5 points, which is still a lot but not unimaginably large. And here’s the thing: Half of that is still the assumed rise in health care costs. Since 2010 we’ve already done quite a lot to “bend the curve.” It’s not at all hard to imagine that improving the incentives to focus on medically effective care could limit cost growth to well below what the C.B.O. is projecting, even now.
.@Birdyword reports that Asian alternatives to China (including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam) have larger working age populations and exported more goods to the United States in the 12 months ending Q3 ‘22: $634B vs. China’s $614B.
Chinese labor is no longer that cheap: between 2013 and 2022 manufacturing wages doubled, to an average of $8.27 per hour. More important, the deepening techno-decoupling between Beijing and Washington is forcing manufacturers of high-tech products, especially those involving advanced semiconductors, to reconsider their reliance on China. Alternative Asian supply chain—call it Altasia—looks evenly matched with China in heft, or better. Its collective working-age population of 1.4bn dwarfs even China’s 980m. Altasia is home to 154m people aged between 25 and 54 with a tertiary education, compared with 145m in China—and, in contrast to ageing China, their ranks look poised to expand. In many parts of Altasia wages are considerably lower than in China: hourly manufacturing wages in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam are below $3.
A “demand reallocation shock” associated with the pandemic was responsible for 3.5 percentage points of the rise in inflation. @FedResearch
Our main finding is that the shift in consumption demand from services towards goods can explain a large proportion of the rise in U.S. inflation between 2019:Q4 and 2021:Q4. This demand reallocation shock is inflationary due to the costs of increasing production in goods-producing sectors and because such sectors tend to have more flexible prices than those producing services. The aggregate labor supply shock provides a smaller inflationary impulse, despite the fact that it explains the majority of the decline in employment. The sectoral productivity shocks actually lower inflation slightly, as average productivity grew strongly over this period. Our confidence in the model and its predictions is boosted by the fact that it provides an excellent description of cross-sectional developments in prices and quantities
Week of February 13, 2023
The median return on capital for an American firm in January 2023 is 7.4%, which is above the 5.6% cost of capital at the start of 2022, but below the 9.6% cost of capital at the start of 2023. @AswathDamodaran
The after-tax returns on capital, at least in the aggregate, are unimpressive, with the median return on capital of a US (global) firm being 7.44% (5.19%). There are a significant number of outliers in both directions, with about 10% of all firms having returns on capital that exceed 50% and 10% of all firms delivering returns that are worse than -50%. A combination of rising risk-free rates and surging risk premiums (equity risk premiums and default spreads) has conspired to push the cost of capital of both US and global companies more than any year in my recorded history (which goes back to 1960). A company generating a 7.44% return on capital (the median value at the start of 2023) in the US, would have comfortably cleared the 5.60% cost of capital that prevailed at the start of 2022, but not the 9.63% cost of capital at the start of 2023.