Figure 1 shows that the median forecast of professional economists for one-year-ahead consumer price index (CPI) inflation has become less sensitive to actual CPI inflation. The figure shows the results of regressions measuring the strength of the relationship between one-year-ahead expected CPI inflation (vertical axis) and the contemporaneous four-quarter CPI inflation rate (horizontal axis). For the period from 1949 through the end of 1998, the blue line indicates a strong relationship with a slope of 0.71, implying that the median inflation forecast adjusts nearly one-for-one with actual inflation. The regression yields a much smaller slope of 0.18 for the period from 1999 through the second quarter of 2023 (red line), implying very little forecast adjustment in response to actual inflation.
Related: What We’ve Learned About Inflation
Commercial real-estate insurance costs have risen 7.6% annually on average since 2017, according to Moody’s Analytics. Costs to insure rental-apartment buildings rose 14.4% annually on average in Dallas, 13% in Los Angeles and 12.6% in Houston. Some owners struggle to find anyone willing to insure their buildings, Moody’s said. Intensifying natural disasters are a big reason for the increase, particularly in cities vulnerable to wildfires, floods or storms. The cost of reinsurance has also increased, trickling down to higher property insurance rates. Meanwhile, inflation has pushed up the cost of repairing or rebuilding damaged properties.
Related: Analyzing State Resilience to Weather and Climate Disasters and Rising Insurance Costs Start to Hit Home Sales and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters
The 5.3 point shift between 2016 and 2020–just enough to tilt the state to Biden—was driven by three factors: 2016 third-party voters switching to Biden in 2020, Black population growth and white population decline, and persuasion, primarily among high-income, high-education voters. The total shift in Georgia due to persuasion is about 3.1 points—and 2.2 points comes from the changes in the composition of the electorate. Georgia as a whole is not demographically favorable to Donald Trump: unlike the upper Midwest, there are fewer white working-class voters left for him to flip, and a lot of cross pressured college-educated white Republicans. If Trump’s path with suburban whites is closed off, Trump has another option: continuing to chip away at Democratic margins among African Americans, as current polls suggest he might. Trump would likely need a bigger breakthrough with Black voters than he’s gotten to date to fully counteract the effect of the state’s Black population growth.
Related: The Road to A Political Realignment in American Politics and Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support
The Pentagon’s goal must contend with booming demand in the commercial aerospace market that has left a shortage of skilled labor, raw materials, and parts such as advanced electronics and fasteners. The Pentagon wants to buy thousands of cheap drones in as little as 18 months, and as many as 2,000 larger uncrewed jets. By contrast, one of its primary drone suppliers, Shield AI, produced 38 of the aircraft last year. The emerging air taxi makers present another challenge. Roughly a dozen companies are vying to develop propeller-driven vehicles that can take off and land like helicopters, potentially cutting journey times in New York City, Los Angeles, and other big urban areas. Flush with cash from venture capital, stock offerings, and military contracts, the sector is moving closer to large-scale production.
Related: Pentagon Plans Vast AI Fleet to Counter China Threat and Rocket Motor Shortage Curbs Weapons for Ukraine and Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity
Every five to 10 years, the World Values Survey asks people in dozens of countries where they would place themselves on a scale from the zero-sum belief that “people can only get rich at the expense of others”, to the positive-sum view that “wealth can grow so there’s enough for everyone”. The average response among those in high-income countries has become 20% more zero-sum over the last century. Moreover, two distinct rises in the prevalence of zero-sum attitudes have coincided with two slowdowns in gross domestic product growth, one in the 1970s and another in the past two decades. The same pattern holds within individual countries. Britons and Americans have become significantly more likely to believe that success is a matter of luck rather than effort precisely as income growth has slowed.
Related: Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides and Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal? and Millennials are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics
Zero-sum thinking is associated with more preference for liberal economic policies in general and with stronger political alignment with the Democratic Party and weaker alignment with the Republican Party. We also find that zero-sum thinking is linked empirically to important political crises experienced in the United States. Specifically, we find that individuals who view the world in zero-sum terms are more likely to believe that the conspiracy theory QAnon holds some truth for U.S. politics. We also find that zero-sum thinking is linked with empathy and understanding for the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, an act that is more justifiable and seen as being less harmful if one presumes the world is zero-sum (rather than positive/negative sum).
Related: Are We Destined For A Zero-Sum Future? and Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal? and Millennials are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics
This paper hypothesizes that the decline of the Rust Belt was due in large part to the persistent labor market conflict that was prevalent throughout the region’s main industries. [Labor conflict] results in lower investment and productivity growth, which causes employment to move from the Rust Belt to the rest of the country. The model also features rising foreign competition as an alternative source of the Rust Belt’s decline. Quantitatively, labor conflict accounts for around half of the decline in the Rust Belt’s share of manufacturing employment. Consistent with the data, the model predicts that the Rust Belt’s employment share stabilizes by the mid 1980s, once labor conflict subsides. Rising foreign competition plays a more modest role quantitatively, and its effects are concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s, after most of the Rust Belt’s decline had already occurred.
Related: Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough and EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South
As measured in the CES data, manufacturing average hourly wages for all employees were 3% above wages in the private sector in 2006, a difference commonly known as the manufacturing wage premium. Since then, manufacturing wages have averaged gains of 2.3% per year, while wages in the private sector have risen 2.6% per year. While manufacturing workers used to receive a premium relative to workers in other sectors, that premium has disappeared in recent years for most manufacturing jobs. Our results indicate that the decline in unionization rates is responsible for more than 70% of the drop in the manufacturing wage premium. Notably, the unionization effect remains significant even after accounting for a large set of worker and sectoral characteristics.
Related: American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough and The World Is In The Grip Of A Manufacturing Delusion and Unpacking the Boom in U.S. Construction of Manufacturing Facilities
The Treasury market may be entering a period of volatility as leveraged investors have stalled in their purchases and the next marginal buyer has not yet arrived. When the Fed and commercial banks stepped away from the Treasury market, hedge funds stepped in and bought cash Treasuries in size as part of a cash futures basis trade. The financing for that trade is sourced through dealer repo, which grew rapidly and then stalled. While dealers themselves have access to virtually unlimited financing from the Fed, the size of their activity is constrained by balance sheet costs. If the leveraged buyers are reaching financing limits, then a new marginal Treasury buyer must emerge to absorb the sizable upcoming issuance.
Related: Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Who Has Been Buying U.S. Treasury Debt? and Raising Anchor
US equities account for nearly 70% of the MSCI World index; the next five largest — in Japan, UK, France, Canada, and Germany — total less than 20%. The top 10 constituent equities of the MSCI World index, which are all US companies including Apple at number one and ExxonMobil at number 10, aggregate to more than 20%. To put it bluntly, the 10 most valuable US equities are larger than the market capitalisations of Japan, UK, France, Canada, and Germany combined. In effect, the US has scaled up the largest companies in the world in its own public markets, creating a colossal pool of recyclable equity capital residing in domestic and non-US investor portfolios. This has created a virtuous cycle of new listings from US and overseas issuers attracted by the depth and liquidity of that equity pool.
Related: Europe Has Fallen Behind America and the Gap is Growing and Why Europe’s Stock Markets Are Failing to Challenge the US and From Strength To Strength
Stabilizing the federal debt at 100% of GDP over the long term—which would far exceed the post-1960 average of 45% of GDP—would require non-interest savings beginning at 2% of GDP and ramping up to 5% of GDP over the next three decades. (The resulting interest savings from a smaller debt would provide the rest of the savings.) These figures assume the renewal of the 2017 tax cuts (as there is strong bipartisan support for extending the tax cuts for the bottom-earning 98% of earners) but do not assume any additional spending expansions, tax cuts, or economic crises—all of which would also have to be fully offset to meet this debt target. In short, the non-interest savings required to stabilize the debt will almost surely rise past 5% of GDP when accounting for additional spending and tax-cut legislation. Taxing the rich cannot close more than a small fraction of this gap.
Related: Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy and American Gothic and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Treasury 10-year yields rose above 4.5% for the first time since 2007 as a more hawkish Federal Reserve adds to concern the bonds face a toxic mix of large US fiscal deficits and persistent inflation. Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management says he remains short bonds because he expects long-term rates to rise further. “The long-term inflation rate plus the real rate of interest plus term premium suggests that 5.5% is an appropriate yield for 30-year Treasurys.” The yield on 30-year debt climbed as much as one basis point Friday to 4.59%, adding to the 13 basis-point jump on Thursday that took it to the highest since 2011.
Related: 31% of All US Government Debt Outstanding Matures within 12 Months and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem
Even if wage growth did normalize, it is not clear why interest rates would need to fall much, if at all, in a world of 2% real growth, 2% inflation, and healthy private sector balance sheets. Real yields on 5-year Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) are currently about 0.5 percentage point higher than 5-year real yields starting five years from now. But from 2003 until the pandemic, spot 5-year real rates were about 1pp lower than forward rates. (This includes the flat curve years of 2006-7 and 2018-2019, when the spread was more or less zero.) If further-forward real yields were poised to revert to this longer-term average, then that would have implications for a range of asset prices.
Related: In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments! and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and BIS Quarterly Review
Since the Fed started hiking rates last year, US households have bought $1.5 trillion in Treasuries, and over the past six months, US pension and insurance have also emerged as a buyer. Over the same period, the Fed has been doing QT and been a net seller of Treasuries. The bottom line is that US households and real money are finding current levels of US yields attractive.
Related: Demand for Treasuries and Trapped Liquidity and Raising Anchor
Real interest rates have risen across the yield curve after stalling out between late 2022 and the first half of 2023. Importantly, the real yield curve remains relatively flat—implying that real interest rates are slated to remain at roughly their near-term levels for the foreseeable future. For real interest rates to stay around their current levels of about 2% and inflation to remain at the target of 2% would imply a long-run natural rate of between 4 and 4.5% (after accounting for the difference between CPI and the Fed’s preferred PCE inflation adjustments). Again, that is higher than even the highest estimate put forward by a FOMC participant yesterday.
Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 and In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments!
This year, average monthly growth in the foreign-born labor force is about 65,000 higher compared with 2022 on a seasonally adjusted basis, a Goldman Sachs analysis found. After plunging at the start of the pandemic, the size of the foreign-born labor force has rebounded, nearing 32 million people in August. Foreign-born workers’ share of the labor force—those working or looking for work—reached 18% in 2022, the highest level on record going back to 1996, according to the Labor Department. It has climbed further this year to an average of 18.5% through August, not adjusted for seasonal variation.
Related: Immigrants & Their Kids Were 70% of U.S. Labor Force Growth Since 1995 and Immigration Playing a Key Role in the Labor Market and Immigration and U.S. Labor Market Tightness: Is There a Link?
In Florida the average home insurance premium in 2023 is around $6,000, more than three times the national average and up 42% year-on-year. Yet rather than drooling over juicy profits, insurers are fleeing. With 1.3m policies, the state-backed insurer of last resort now has the highest market share in Florida and is insuring assets worth $608bn. The Golden State is following the Sunshine State into market failure, but for different reasons. Though California is a pricey place to live, property insurance is relatively cheap thanks to strict consumer-protection laws. Regulations prevent insurers from raising premiums high enough to cover inflation, increasing wildfire risk and rising reinsurance rates.
Related: Analyzing State Resilience to Weather and Climate Disasters and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters and Rising Insurance Costs Start to Hit Home Sales
There is no good evidence that China has reduced its exposure to the dollar. In fact, if you account for the higher dollar share of China's hidden reserves, its USD likely has increased since 2014. I am pretty sure that over the last year China hasn't shifted its reserves out of the dollar. It has shifted from US custodied Treasuries to offshore custodians and risk assets (Agencies, equities). When China stops targeting 60% for the dollar share of its formal reserves, we will know. The interesting question is what is the dollar share of China's shadow reserves -- and I think the answer is that it is a lot higher than the dollar share of China's formal reserves.
Related: Shadow Reserves — How China Hides Trillions of Dollars of Hard Currency and Great Power Conflict Puts the Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege Under Threat and Pettis On Pozsar
Almost 90% of surveyed Americans say people shouldn’t be judged for moving back home, according to Harris Poll in an exclusive survey for Bloomberg News. It’s seen as a pragmatic way to get ahead, the survey of 4,106 adults in August showed. Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 drove the share of young adults living with parents or grandparents to nearly 50%, a record high. These days, about 23 million, or 45%, of all Americans ages 18 to 29 are living with family, roughly the same level as the 1940s, a time when women were more likely to remain at home until marriage and men too were lingering on family farms in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
Related: Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year and Young Adults in the U.S. Are Reaching Key Life Milestones Later Than in the Past and Americans’ Ideal Family Size Is Larger Than the Birthrate Suggests
Democrats have been posting special-election overperformances of that magnitude all year long, in all kinds of districts. And on average, they have won by margins 11 points higher than the weighted relative partisanship of their districts. The types of people who vote in low-turnout special elections tend to be different from the types of people who vote in regularly scheduled elections: Lower turnout generally means a more college-educated electorate, and college graduates have gotten more Democratic in recent years. That could be why special-election overperformance has consistently been a couple of points more Democratic than the House popular vote over the past three cycles. However, college graduates were disproportionately Democratic in 2020 and 2022 too, and Democrats didn’t consistently do this well in special elections in those cycles. So something seems to be different this time that the education realignment doesn’t fully explain.
Related: Is a Trump-Biden Rematch Inevitable? and Trump’s Electoral College Edge Seems to Be Fading and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support
The hype around the “Magnificent 7” stocks [Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla] that have driven the stock market this year is reminiscent of the dot.com era, which ended with a spectacular crash. However, there are two reasons why today’s developments seem less worrying: The rise of hyped stocks was more extreme in the Dot.com era, as was the rise of the rest of the market. While today’s situation is exceptional, with seven stocks accounting for nearly 30% of the total value of the S&P 500, the rule in the past has been that only a few stocks generated most of the value creation of the stock market in the US and internationally.
Related: 7 or 493 Stocks: What Matters for the S&P 500? and Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs
We calculate net global stock market wealth creation of $US 75.7 trillion btw 1990 and 2020. Wealth creation is highly concentrated. Five firms (0.008% of the total) with the largest wealth creation during the January 1990 to December 2020 period (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tencent) accounted for 10.3% of global net wealth creation. The best-performing 159 firms (0.25% of total) accounted for half of global net wealth creation. The best-performing 1,526 firms (2.39% of the total) can account for all net global wealth creation. Skewness in compound returns is even stronger outside the U.S. The present sample includes 46,723 non-U.S. stocks. Of these, 42.6% generated buy-and-hold returns measured in U.S. dollars that exceed one-month U.S. Treasury bill returns over matched horizons. By comparison, 44.8% of the 17,776 U.S. stocks in the present sample outperformed Treasury bills.
Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and More Bang for Your Buck and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Using a debt accounting exercise, we show that periods of sustained debt reduction are typically driven by strong primary balances and above-average growth. Following 1980, inflation has played little role in debt reductions. Current fiscal projections and current market interest rates on average do not point to declines in debt-to-GDP ratios across developed markets. We estimate that market implied r - g, the difference between real interest rates and growth rates, is now positive for many countries. Japan provides an example of high debt peaceably coexisting with low interest rates. However, given current high inflation, wider deficits, and rising interest costs, we think it unlikely that we return to the era of structurally low interest rates in the US, UK, or Europe. As a result, we see the risks to term premia skewed higher as fiscal risks simmer.
Related: Living with High Public Debt and American Gothic and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible?
Using a measure of nonfinancial corporate profits from the national income accounts [before tax profits with capital consumption adjustment] we find that nonfinancial corporate profit margins, or profits over gross value added, increased sharply to about 19% in 2021 Q2 and slipped back to 15% in 2022 Q4, compared to about 13% in 2019 Q4. Our analysis shows that much of the increase in aggregate profit margins following the COVID-19 pandemic can be attributed to (i) the unprecedented large and direct government intervention to support U.S. small and medium-sized businesses and (ii) a large reduction in net interest expenses due to accommodative monetary policy. Without the historically outsized government fiscal intervention and accommodative monetary policy, non-financial profit margins during 2020-2021 would have been more in line with past episodes of large economic downturns.
Related: The Curious Incident of the Elevated Profit Margins and "Greedflation" and the Profits Equation
The federal deficit for the first 3/4 of the fiscal year 2023 was almost 3x as high as a year before. Very little of it was the result of new spending programs (although money is starting to flow out the door under the Biden administration’s industrial policies). It was mainly about two things: a sharp fall in tax receipts and rising interest payments. What’s happening on taxes is that the federal government in effect got a windfall from stock prices and inflation, which is now going away. We’re not looking at any fundamental deterioration. The U.S. government really shouldn’t be running budget deficits this big at full employment. Yet we don’t want to reduce deficits by cutting essential spending. America collects a lower share of its income in taxes than other major economies, so more revenue — partly from the rich, but also from the middle class — would be a reasonable policy.
Related: Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and American Gothic and Living with High Public Debt
Americans’ inflation-adjusted median household income fell to $74,580 in 2022, declining 2.3% from the 2021 estimate of $76,330, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. The amount has dropped 4.7% since its peak in 2019. Wage growth for the typical worker outstripped inflation starting in December 2022, with inflation-adjusted wages rising about 3% in July, according to data from the Atlanta Fed Wage Tracker and the Labor Department.
Related: Jason Furman On Employment Cost Index and Real Wage Growth at the Individual Level in 2022 and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Economy
China is set to become the world’s biggest car exporter this year, overtaking Japan. Driving China’s global ascendancy are deep structural problems in the domestic auto industry, which threaten to upend car markets across the world. A stark mismatch between production at Chinese factories and local demand has been caused, in part, by industry executives mis-forecasting three key trends: the rapid decline of internal combustion engine car sales, the explosion in popularity of electric vehicles and the declining need for privately owned vehicles as shared mobility booms among an increasingly urbanised Chinese population. The result has been “massive overcapacity” in the number of vehicles produced in factories across the country, said Bill Russo, former head of Chrysler in China and founder of advisory firm Automobility. “We have an overhang of 25mn units not being used.”
Related: China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s and Can Volkswagen Win Back China? and How China Became A Car-Exporting Juggernaut
Brussels will launch an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric vehicles that are “distorting” the EU market. The probe could constitute one of the largest trade cases launched as the EU tries to prevent a replay of what happened to its solar industry in the early 2010s when photovoltaic manufacturers undercut by cheap Chinese imports went into insolvency. If found to be in breach of trade rules, manufacturers could be hit with punitive tariffs.
Related: China Set to Overtake Japan as World’s Biggest Car Exporter and China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s
The decline in marriage and the rise in the share of children being raised in a one-parent home has happened predominantly outside the college-educated class. Over the past 40 years, while college-educated men and women have experienced rising earnings, they continue to get married, often to one another, and to raise their children in a home with married parents. Meanwhile at the same time, the earnings among adults without a college degree have stagnated or risen only a bit. And these groups have become much less likely to marry and more likely to set up households by themselves.So just mechanically, these divergent trends in marriage and family structure mean that household inequality has widened by more than it would have just from the rise in earnings inequality.
Related: US Births Are Down Again, After the COVID Baby Bust and Rebound and Wage Inequality and the Rise in Labor Force Exit: The Case of US Prime-Age Men and Bringing Home the Bacon: Have Trends in Men’s Pay Weakened the Traditional Family?
When the core inflation rate averages above 4%, the stock-bond correlation has been positive with few exceptions. Core inflation has averaged 4.5% for the past three years and is currently 4.7%. Even in periods of high stock-bond correlations, stocks, and bonds can be negatively correlated over shorter periods. In fact, over the first eight months of this year, stocks and bonds moved opposite one another in May, June, and July. This also helps explain how in the 1970s during a period of sustained positive stock-bond correlations, Treasurys still had positive returns in recessions. The stock-bond correlation can be seen as an indicator of what is the dominant risk—inflation or growth—and how it is changing.
Related: Stock-Bond Correlations and Do Stocks Always Outperform Bonds?
Unexpected changes in monetary policy can slow the pace of economic activity much more persistently than is commonly believed. In response to a 1% increase in interest rates, output would be about 5% lower after 12 years than it would otherwise be. To provide some context for these numbers, consider some data for the United States. In response to a similar 1% increase in interest rates, after 12 years TFP would be about 3% lower and capital would be about 4% lower. When we separate our interest rate experiments into those that resulted in rate hikes versus those that resulted in lower interest rates, we see that there is no free lunch. The blue line shows that lower interest rates have mostly temporary effects that vanish after a few years, as traditional theories predict.
Related: Loose Monetary Policy and Financial Instability and Monetary Policy and Innovation
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget the federal deficit is projected to roughly double this year, as bigger interest payments and lower tax receipts widen the nation’s spending imbalance despite robust overall economic growth. After the government’s record spending in 2020 and 2021 to combat the impact of covid-19, the deficit dropped by the greatest amount ever in 2022, falling from close to $3 trillion to roughly $1 trillion. But rather than continue to fall to its pre-pandemic levels, the deficit then shot upward. Budget experts now project that it will probably rise to about $2 trillion for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Jason Furman said the current jump in the deficit is only surpassed by “major crises,” such as World War II, the 2008 financial meltdown or the coronavirus pandemic.
Related: Living with High Public Debt and There Is No "Stealth Fiscal Stimulus" and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem
Spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade. The trend can be a little hard to see because, as baby boomers have aged, the number of people using Medicare has grown. The reason for the per-person slowdown is a bit of a mystery. Some of the reductions are easy to explain. The Affordable Care Act in 2010 reduced Medicare’s payments to hospitals and to health insurers that offered private Medicare Advantage plans. Congress also cut Medicare payments as part of a budget deal in 2011. But most of the savings can’t be attributed to any obvious policy shift. Economists at the Congressional Budget Office described the huge reductions in its Medicare forecasts between 2010 and 2020. Most of those reductions came from a category the budget office calls “technical adjustments,” which it uses to describe changes to public health and the practice of medicine itself.
Related: America’s Entitlement Programmes Are Rapidly Approaching Insolvency and Why Medicare and Social Security Are Sustainable and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years
During the past 20 years, the inflation-adjusted average hourly wage of non-management US workers, also known as production and nonsupervisory employees, has risen 13%. That’s not exactly a rip-roaring pace — 0.6% a year. Then again, real hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory employees fell in the 1970s and 1980s and rose at only a 0.3% annual pace in the 1990s. The average hourly wage for autoworkers on the production line has dropped 30% since 2003. GM, Ford and Stellantis are all profitable, with a combined net income of $42B for the 12 months ended in June and the amount coming from their US operations probably adding up to somewhat less than $30B. Bloomberg reported last month that Ford and GM’s internal estimates of the costs of the UAW’s demands peg them at $80B per company over the next four years, which would wipe out all those profits and then some.
Related: EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South and Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers
Even after a planned rise in October, the minimum wage in Tokyo will be the equivalent of just $7.65, compared with $15 in New York City. Median household income in Japan in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, was equivalent to about $29,000 at the current exchange rate, compared with $70,784 in the U.S. that year, according to government statistics in the two countries. The typical Asian-American household brought in just over $100,000—more than triple what the typical Japanese family made.
Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Japan Demographic Woes Deepen as Birthrate Hits Record Low and From Strength To Strength
Nationally, the real cost of [weather and climate] disasters has risen from $20B per year in the 1980s to nearly $95B per year during the period 2010–19. In 2021, damages increased to about $153B. Costs were absorbed by four entities: property insurers (48%), uninsured or underinsured homeowners, businesses, and agricultural entities (37%), the federal government (11%), and state and local governments (4%). If property insurers were to exit certain markets or decrease coverage in states with greater exposure to physical risks due to decreased profitability, a larger share of damages would not be fully insured. Two major insurers recently announced that they will no longer accept new applications for business and personal property insurance coverage in California, citing increasing wildfire risk as a key factor in that decision. In addition, several major hurricanes during 2020-22 forced numerous insurance companies into bankruptcy in Louisiana and Florida.
Related: Home Insurers Are Charging More and Insuring Less and Why California and Florida Have Become Almost Uninsurable and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters
We’ve found reasons to think more highly of Europe and Japan. Notably, we find that value stocks in Europe and Japan are more profitable, with Europe being particularly impressive. Among firms that trade at a discount to book value, Europe has a Gross Profit/Assets ratio of 18.5%, which is 1.5x the profitability of North American value firms. The differences are even more stark in terms of EBITDA/Assets, with Europe’s value firms delivering a 6.4% return on assets, almost 3x higher than North America’s profitability among value firms. We believe that the combination of historically wide valuation spreads in Europe and higher levels of profitability among Europe’s value stocks bolster the case for upward mean reversion going forward. Historically, mean reversion in multiples has supported significant outperformance of value relative to growth.
Related: Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’ and From Strength To Strength and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters is broad, spanning virtually every demographic category and racial group, including a 72-11 lead among Black voters and a 47-35 lead among Hispanic registrants. The sample of Asian voters is not large enough to report, though nonwhite voters who aren’t Black or Hispanic — whether Asian, Native American, multiracial or something else — back Mr. Biden by just 40-39. In all three cases, Mr. Biden’s tallies are well beneath his standing in the last election. The survey finds evidence that a modest but important 5% of nonwhite Biden voters now support Mr. Trump, including 8% of Hispanic voters who say they backed Mr. Biden in 2020.
Related: Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs? and The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory and Five Reasons Why Biden Might Lose in 2024
The essence of fiscal dominance is the need for the government to fund its deficits on the margin with non-interest-bearing debts. Inflation taxation has two components: expected and unexpected inflation taxation. Both are limited in their ability to fund real government expenditures. The expected component of inflation taxation (per period) is the product of the nominal interest rate and the inflation tax base, which consists of all non-interest bearing government debt. Unexpected inflation taxation occurs when the nominal value of outstanding government debt falls unexpectedly (thereby taxing government debtholders), and this component is also limited by the ability of government to surprise markets by creating unanticipated inflation. It is quite possible that a fiscal dominance episode in the US would result in not only the end of the policy of paying interest on reserves, but also a return to requiring banks to hold a large fraction of their deposit liabilities as zero-interest reserves.
Related: The Return of Quantitative Easing and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook
Large, persistent primary budget surpluses are not in the political cards. It is difficult to imagine more favorable interest-rate-growth-rate differentials (favorable interest-rate-growth-rate differentials reducing debt ratios in an accounting sense). Real interest rates have trended downward to very low levels. It is hard to foresee them falling still lower. Faster global growth is pleasant to imagine but difficult to engineer. Inflation is not a sustainable route to reducing high public debts. Statutory ceilings on interest rates and related measures of financial repression are less feasible than in the past. Investors opposed to the widespread application of repressive policies are a more powerful lobby. Financial liberalization, internal and external, is an economic fact of life. The genie is out of the bottle. All of which is to say that, for better or worse, high public debts are here to stay.
Related: American Gothic and Did the U.S. Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt?
The decline in marriage and the rise in the share of children being raised in a one-parent home has happened predominantly outside the college-educated class. Over the past 40 years, while college-educated men and women have experienced rising earnings, they continue to get married, often to one another, and to raise their children in a home with married parents. Meanwhile at the same time, the earnings among adults without a college degree have stagnated or risen only a bit. And these groups have become much less likely to marry and more likely to set up households by themselves.So just mechanically, these divergent trends in marriage and family structure mean that household inequality has widened by more than it would have just from the rise in earnings inequality.
Related: US Births Are Down Again, After the COVID Baby Bust and Rebound and Wage Inequality and the Rise in Labor Force Exit: The Case of US Prime-Age Men and Bringing Home the Bacon: Have Trends in Men’s Pay Weakened the Traditional Family?
The chart shows the % of Black families that are in three income groups, using total money income data. The data is adjusted for inflation. The progress is dramatic. In 1967, the first year available, half of Black families had incomes under $35,000. By 2022 that number had been cut in half to just one quarter of families (the 2022 number is the lowest on record, even beating 2019). Twenty-five percent is still very high, especially when compared to White, Non-Hispanics (it’s about 12 percent), but it’s still massive progress. It’s even a 10-percentage point drop from just 10 years ago. And Black families haven’t just moved up a little bit: the “middle class” group (between $35,000 and $100,000) has been pretty stable in the mid-40 percentages, while the number of rich (over $100,000) Black families has grown dramatically, from just 5% to over 30%.
Related: U.S. Incomes Fall for Third Straight Year and Who Won the Cold War? Part I
Recent studies from the US, Sweden, and Finland all demonstrate that although most people who move directly into new unsubsidised housing may come from the top half of earners, the chain of moves triggered by their purchase frees up housing in the same cities for people on lower incomes. The US study found that building 100 new market-rate dwellings ultimately leads to up to 70 people moving out of below-median income neighbourhoods, and up to 40 moving out of the poorest fifth. Those numbers don’t budge even if the new housing is priced towards the top end of the market. It’s a similar story in the American Midwest, where Minneapolis has been building more housing than any other large city in the region for years, and has abolished zones that limited construction to single-family housing. Adjusted for local earnings, average rents in the city are down more than 20% since 2017, while rising in the five other similarly large and growing cities.
Related: On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South and Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic
Sweden, which has applied for Nato membership, announced on Monday that it planned to raise defense spending by more than 25% to meet the military alliance’s target of 2% of GDP. Currently, only 11 of 31 members do. Persuading voters of the sacrifices required to make such commitments a reality represents a seismic reordering of the budget and electoral priorities. In Denmark, the government opted to fund its increase in public spending by cancelling a public holiday — to much chagrin from voters. "Leaders have signed up to a generational shift in defence policy. But I do wonder if they fully understand, or have told their finance ministers,” a senior Nato official said.
Related: The Age-Old Question: How Do Governments Pay For Wars? and The Cost of the Global Arms Race and Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget the federal deficit is projected to roughly double this year, as bigger interest payments and lower tax receipts widen the nation’s spending imbalance despite robust overall economic growth. After the government’s record spending in 2020 and 2021 to combat the impact of covid-19, the deficit dropped by the greatest amount ever in 2022, falling from close to $3 trillion to roughly $1 trillion. But rather than continue to fall to its pre-pandemic levels, the deficit then shot upward. Budget experts now project that it will probably rise to about $2 trillion for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Jason Furman said the current jump in the deficit is only surpassed by “major crises,” such as World War II, the 2008 financial meltdown or the coronavirus pandemic.
Related: Living with High Public Debt and There Is No "Stealth Fiscal Stimulus" and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem
Unexpected changes in monetary policy can slow the pace of economic activity much more persistently than is commonly believed. In response to a 1% increase in interest rates, output would be about 5% lower after 12 years than it would otherwise be. To provide some context for these numbers, consider some data for the United States. In response to a similar 1% increase in interest rates, after 12 years TFP would be about 3% lower and capital would be about 4% lower. When we separate our interest rate experiments into those that resulted in rate hikes versus those that resulted in lower interest rates, we see that there is no free lunch. The blue line shows that lower interest rates have mostly temporary effects that vanish after a few years, as traditional theories predict.
Related: Loose Monetary Policy and Financial Instability and Monetary Policy and Innovation
Spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade. The trend can be a little hard to see because, as baby boomers have aged, the number of people using Medicare has grown. The reason for the per-person slowdown is a bit of a mystery. Some of the reductions are easy to explain. The Affordable Care Act in 2010 reduced Medicare’s payments to hospitals and to health insurers that offered private Medicare Advantage plans. Congress also cut Medicare payments as part of a budget deal in 2011. But most of the savings can’t be attributed to any obvious policy shift. Economists at the Congressional Budget Office described the huge reductions in its Medicare forecasts between 2010 and 2020. Most of those reductions came from a category the budget office calls “technical adjustments,” which it uses to describe changes to public health and the practice of medicine itself.
Related: America’s Entitlement Programmes Are Rapidly Approaching Insolvency and Why Medicare and Social Security Are Sustainable and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years
During the past 20 years, the inflation-adjusted average hourly wage of non-management US workers, also known as production and nonsupervisory employees, has risen 13%. That’s not exactly a rip-roaring pace — 0.6% a year. Then again, real hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory employees fell in the 1970s and 1980s and rose at only a 0.3% annual pace in the 1990s. The average hourly wage for autoworkers on the production line has dropped 30% since 2003. GM, Ford and Stellantis are all profitable, with a combined net income of $42B for the 12 months ended in June and the amount coming from their US operations probably adding up to somewhat less than $30B. Bloomberg reported last month that Ford and GM’s internal estimates of the costs of the UAW’s demands peg them at $80B per company over the next four years, which would wipe out all those profits and then some.
Related: EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South and Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers
Even after a planned rise in October, the minimum wage in Tokyo will be the equivalent of just $7.65, compared with $15 in New York City. Median household income in Japan in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, was equivalent to about $29,000 at the current exchange rate, compared with $70,784 in the U.S. that year, according to government statistics in the two countries. The typical Asian-American household brought in just over $100,000—more than triple what the typical Japanese family made.
Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Japan Demographic Woes Deepen as Birthrate Hits Record Low and From Strength To Strength
We’ve found reasons to think more highly of Europe and Japan. Notably, we find that value stocks in Europe and Japan are more profitable, with Europe being particularly impressive. Among firms that trade at a discount to book value, Europe has a Gross Profit/Assets ratio of 18.5%, which is 1.5x the profitability of North American value firms. The differences are even more stark in terms of EBITDA/Assets, with Europe’s value firms delivering a 6.4% return on assets, almost 3x higher than North America’s profitability among value firms. We believe that the combination of historically wide valuation spreads in Europe and higher levels of profitability among Europe’s value stocks bolster the case for upward mean reversion going forward. Historically, mean reversion in multiples has supported significant outperformance of value relative to growth.
Related: Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’ and From Strength To Strength and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters is broad, spanning virtually every demographic category and racial group, including a 72-11 lead among Black voters and a 47-35 lead among Hispanic registrants. The sample of Asian voters is not large enough to report, though nonwhite voters who aren’t Black or Hispanic — whether Asian, Native American, multiracial or something else — back Mr. Biden by just 40-39. In all three cases, Mr. Biden’s tallies are well beneath his standing in the last election. The survey finds evidence that a modest but important 5% of nonwhite Biden voters now support Mr. Trump, including 8% of Hispanic voters who say they backed Mr. Biden in 2020.
Related: Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs? and The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory and Five Reasons Why Biden Might Lose in 2024
Looking back over the last few decades, there’s a clear relationship between the racial turnout gap — the difference between white and Black turnout — and the proportion of Black registered voters who back Democrats in pre-election polls since 1980. Or put differently: When Black voters don’t support Democrats, they tend not to vote. It’s possible that the Black voters who back Mr. Trump in the polls today will ultimately show up for him next November. But for now, when I see Mr. Biden’s share among Black voters slip into the 60s and 70s in the polls, I mostly see yet another decline in the Black share of the electorate, at least “if the election were held today.” If there’s any good news for Mr. Biden here, it’s that the election is still 14 months away.
Related: Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden
The essence of fiscal dominance is the need for the government to fund its deficits on the margin with non-interest-bearing debts. Inflation taxation has two components: expected and unexpected inflation taxation. Both are limited in their ability to fund real government expenditures. The expected component of inflation taxation (per period) is the product of the nominal interest rate and the inflation tax base, which consists of all non-interest bearing government debt. Unexpected inflation taxation occurs when the nominal value of outstanding government debt falls unexpectedly (thereby taxing government debtholders), and this component is also limited by the ability of government to surprise markets by creating unanticipated inflation. It is quite possible that a fiscal dominance episode in the US would result in not only the end of the policy of paying interest on reserves, but also a return to requiring banks to hold a large fraction of their deposit liabilities as zero-interest reserves.
Related: The Return of Quantitative Easing and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook
Large, persistent primary budget surpluses are not in the political cards. It is difficult to imagine more favorable interest-rate-growth-rate differentials (favorable interest-rate-growth-rate differentials reducing debt ratios in an accounting sense). Real interest rates have trended downward to very low levels. It is hard to foresee them falling still lower. Faster global growth is pleasant to imagine but difficult to engineer. Inflation is not a sustainable route to reducing high public debts. Statutory ceilings on interest rates and related measures of financial repression are less feasible than in the past. Investors opposed to the widespread application of repressive policies are a more powerful lobby. Financial liberalization, internal and external, is an economic fact of life. The genie is out of the bottle. All of which is to say that, for better or worse, high public debts are here to stay.
Related: American Gothic and Did the U.S. Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt?
The total amount of Treasuries outstanding will continue to grow rapidly relative to the intermediation capacity of the market because of large and persistent US fiscal deficits and the limited flexibility of dealer balance sheets, unless there are significant improvements in market structure. Broad central clearing and all-to-all trade have the potential to add importantly to market capacity and resilience. Additional improvements in intermediation capacity can likely be achieved with real-time post-trade transaction reporting and improvements in the form of capital regulation, especially the Supplementary Leverage Ratio. Backstopping the liquidity of this market with transparent official-sector purchase programs will further buttress market resilience.
Related: JPMorgan Says Treasuries Coping Amid Worst Liquidity Since 2020 and Raising Anchor
There has been no major increase in the US capital-output ratio, nor has there been a major decline in the US marginal product of capital – the economy’s real return to capital. The US capital-output ratio remains close to its postwar average and capital’s real return has remained roughly constant -- around 6%. During the 2000s the marginal product of U.S. capital (MPK) was a healthy 5.84%. In the 2010s it was even higher at 6.42%. The market return to capital would show a decline if there were a capital glut and investors expected lower rates of return, It shows no such decline. The market return to capital’s real return averaged 5.52% between 1950 and 1989. Btw 1990 and 2019 it averaged 6.95. Hence, the broadest market-based real return data shows a rise, not a fall in returns in the recent decades during which capital has allegedly been in vast oversupply. The real return to US wealth between 2010 and 2019 averaged 8.25% – the highest average return of any postwar decade.
Related: In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments! and Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates
A 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” documents the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years. The total number of individual donors grew from 5.2mm in 2006 to 195mm in 2020. The appeal of extreme candidates can be seen in the OpenSecrets listing of the top members of the House and Senate ranked by the percentage of contributions they have received from small donors in the 2021-22 election cycle: Bernie Sanders raised $38.3mm, of which 70%, came from small donors; Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $12.5mm, of which 68% came from small donors; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $12.3mm, of which 68%, came from small donors. House Republicans who backed Trump and voted to reject the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 received an average of $140,000 in small contributions, while House Republicans who opposed Trump and voted to accept Biden’s victory received far less in small donations, an average of $40,000.
Related: Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal? and What Happened In 2022 and Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout Advantage
Since February 2023, the labor force participation rate for prime-age women––those between the ages of 25 and 54––has exceeded its all-time high. As of the most recent jobs report, prime-age women had a labor force participation rate of 77.8%. We find that those who have contributed most to the rebound in overall labor force participation in April and May of 2023, three years after the nadir of pandemic-era participation, are in fact prime-age women. Moreover, among prime-age women and indeed among all groups, women whose youngest child is under the age of five are powering the pack’s upward trajectory.
Related: “The Great Retirement Boom”: The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation and The Labor Supply Rebound from the Pandemic and Retirements, Net Worth, and the Fall and Rise of Labor Force Participation
Germany will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, with even sanctioned Russia experiencing growth, according to the International Monetary Fund. China was for years a major driver of Germany’s export boom. A rapidly industrializing China bought up all the capital goods that Germany could make. But China’s investment-heavy growth model has been approaching its limits for years. Growth and demand for imports have faltered. Energy prices in Europe have declined from last year’s peak as EU countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but German industry still faces higher costs than competitors in the U.S. and Asia.
Related: Germany's Industrial Slowdown and Europe's Imbalances in Pandemic and War and Can Volkswagen Win Back China?
Auto companies have announced more than $110 billion in EV-related investments in the U.S. since 2018, with about half that sum destined for Southern states, according to the Center for Automotive Research. The rest is mostly planned for states in the Great Lakes region, including Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. Auto employment in the Great Lakes region, while still nearly double that of southern states, has slid 34% in the last two decades to 382,000 workers as of 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Full-time unionized jobs in the industry currently range between $18 to $32 an hour. There is no guarantee the [southern] Ford plants will be unionized, and the company has said this decision is up to its workers. The United Auto Workers union is currently in talks with the Detroit automakers and is prioritizing organizing these joint-venture battery plants.
Related: Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers and Republican Districts Dominate US Clean Technology Investment Boom and Small Towns Chase America’s $3 Trillion Climate Gold Rush