Daily
May 24, 2023
Globally the mortality rate in the aftermath of the pandemic is running 5% above the 2019 baseline, or 3M excess deaths a year. @TheEconomist
Because data on total mortality is scant outside the rich world, our model’s estimates have become less precise over time. Its confidence interval for the world’s current excess-death rate stretches from near zero all the way up to the estimated levels of mid-2020. However, excluding the recent surge in China, its best guess for the past year is around one of every 1M people per day. As a share of people aged at least 65, excess-death rates in rich countries are three times lower than elsewhere. But because such places have older populations, their overall mortality rate is similar. Covid may not be the sole cause of this change. Some countries’ health-care systems remain strained, and cases of other diseases that went untreated in 2020-21 could be raising death rates today. But if covid were indeed responsible for the full increase, it would be tied for the world’s fourth-leading cause of death. At current rates, it would kill more people in the next eight years than in the past three.
Central Banks love gold. Nominal gold prices are close to reaching a nominal high as in 2022 central banks bought 1,079 tonnes of bullion, the most since records began in 1950.
Last year central banks bought 1,079 tonnes of bullion—the most since records began in 1950. As a result, gold has been hovering close to its nominal all-time high of $2,072 per troy ounce—the traditional unit for precious metals—since late March. There is a geopolitical factor, as developing countries grow wary of the strength of the US dollar. As the west imposed sanctions on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, the US and its allies froze $300bn of foreign exchange holdings denominated in dollars, euros and sterling. That alarmed many countries with US dollar holdings, whose central banks have been racing to diversify their holdings and buy more gold.
.@martinwolf_ suggests that the G7 is losing relevance as its share of global GDP declines. He notes that China is a larger trade partner than the G7 for many emerging markets.
Moreover, both the “unipolar” moment of the US and the economic dominance of the G7 are history. True, the latter is still the most powerful and cohesive economic bloc in the world. It continues, for example, to produce all the world’s leading reserve currencies. Yet, between 2000 and 2023, its share in global output (at purchasing power) will have fallen from 44 to 30 percent, while that of all high-income countries will have fallen from 57 to 41 percent. Meanwhile, China’s share will have risen from 7 to 19 percent. For some emerging and developing countries, China is a more important economic partner than the G7: Brazil is one example. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may have attended the G7, but he cannot sensibly ignore China’s heft.
.@WSJ reports that in Q1 2023 China overtook Japan as world’s largest auto exporter.
China overtook Japan as the largest auto exporter in the world last quarter. Surging exports to Russia gave the country’s car exports a big bump. But the strength of China’s electric vehicle ecosystem is also an important factor driving the trend. China exported 1.07 million vehicles in the first quarter of this year, a 58% increase from a year earlier, according to official figures. In comparison, Japan shipped 950,000 vehicles abroad during the quarter, according to the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association. China is the largest exporter of EVs, and its lead appears to be growing: Around 35% of EVs exported globally came from China last year, compared with 25% in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency.
Cultural events across China ranging from musical performances to comedy shows have been cancelled after a stand-up comic was fined $2M for making a joke which authorities in Beijing felt was at the expense of the Chinese military.
The cancellations rippled across the country: A Japanese choral band touring China, stand-up comedy shows in several cities, jazz shows in Beijing. In the span of a few days, the performances were among more than a dozen that were abruptly called off — some just minutes before they were supposed to begin — with virtually no explanation. Just before the performances were scrapped, the authorities in Beijing had fined a Chinese comedy studio around $2 million, after one of its stand-up performers was accused of insulting the Chinese military in a joke; the police in northern China also detained a woman who had defended the comedian online. Those penalties, and the sudden spate of cancellations that followed, point to the growing scrutiny of China’s already heavily censored creative landscape. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has made arts and culture a central arena for ideological crackdowns, demanding that artists align their creative ambitions with Chinese Communist Party goals and promote a nationalist vision of Chinese identity. Performers must submit scripts or set lists for vetting, and publications are closely monitored.
May 23, 2023
.@benbernanke and @ojblanchard1 argue that bringing the current inflationary episode to target implies an unemployment rate of 4.3%, up from 3.4% last month.
Figure 12 shows the estimated sources of inflation from 2020Q1 to 2023Q1. For comparison, the continuous line shows actual inflation. (The inflation data are quarterly, at annualized rates, and thus more jagged than the annualized series we often see.) Figure 12 yields several conclusions. First, the contributions of food [light blue] and (especially) energy [dark blue] price shocks to the pandemic-era inflation were large. Energy price shocks in particular account for much of the rise of overall inflation in late 2021 and the first half of 2022, and the for the decline in inflation in the second half of 2022. The large and extended contributions of commodity price shocks to inflation shown in Figure 12 are not inconsistent with our earlier finding that price shocks tend to have transitory effects on inflation, as both energy and food prices rose continuously over much of the period (see Figures 4 and 5), which our procedure interprets as a series of positive shocks. Second, the combination of increased demand for durables and shortages [yellow] associated with disrupted supply chains was the dominant source of inflation in 2021Q2, and the effects of supply chain problems, both direct and indirect, remained significant through the end of our sample period. Third, and importantly, the contribution to inflation of tight labor-market conditions [red] —the leading concern of many early critics of U.S. monetary and fiscal policies—was quite small early on, and indeed was negative in 2020 and early 2021 as labor markets suffered from the effects of the pandemic recession. However, over time, as the labor market has remained tight, the traditional Phillips curve effect has begun to assert itself, with the high vacancy-to-unemployment ratio becoming increasingly important, though by no means dominant, source of inflation.
Michael Cembalest @jpmorgan argues investors no longer need to overweight the US and emerging markets relative to Europe and Japan.
By September 2022, Europe’s P/E multiple hit a post-2006 low relative to the US. While there were valid concerns at the time about Europe’s energy situation, rising inflation and exposure to a shuttered China, investors were receiving an enormous discount for taking European equity exposure, and I should have paid more attention to that. Europe’s outperformance is likely to have a ceiling since US companies generate higher returns on equity and higher returns on assets, as shown in the table. But everything has a price, and a 35% P/E discount was apparently it. As things stand now, the discount is still large from an historical perspective.
Torsten Sløk @apolloglobal argues that “it is taking longer to remove from the economy the $5T fiscal and $5T monetary expansion done during covid,” and expects a recession as households eventually run out of excess savings.
The consensus has been forecasting negative growth since October 2022, and the recession has yet to arrive because it has taken longer to run down excess savings in the household sector, see chart below. Put differently, it is taking longer to remove from the economy the $5trn fiscal and $5trn monetary expansion done during covid. On the back of stronger-than-expected growth, the correction in stock markets and credit spreads has been relatively limited despite the rapid increase in short rates. With inflation still at 5%, far above the Fed’s 2% inflation target, the Fed will keep the costs of capital high, and the recession will come as households eventually run out of excess savings. The implication for markets is that the Fed will continue to put downward pressure on earnings growth and employment growth until they get what they want, namely lower inflation.
.@biggsag of @AEIecon argues that funding Social Security by borrowing $1.5T and investing in American equity markets is a well-motivated but bad idea that would be “not meaningfully different from simply increasing the capital gains tax.”
Senator Bill Cassidy proposes that, over a five-year period, the federal government should borrow approximately $1.5 trillion. The current federal borrowing rate is roughly 3.9%. The federal government would reinvest those funds in stocks, private equity, hedge funds, or other instruments that are riskier than U.S. Treasury bonds but offer higher expected returns. The fund would hold its investments for 75 years, presumably building interest along the way. Until then, the federal government would borrow to cover Social Security’s funding shortfalls. After 75 years, the investment fund could, in theory at least, repay that borrowing. As Wharton School economist Kent Smetters has shown, Cassidy’s approach is not meaningfully different from simply increasing the capital gains tax: When the stock market goes up, the federal government takes a slice of the gains. Everything else is simply window dressing.
Pew reports that 25-year-old Americans are lagging previous generations in terms of full-time work, financial independence, and marriage. @r_fry1
Young adults in the United States are reaching key life milestones later than they did 40 years ago, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. Adults who are 21 are less likely than their predecessors four decades ago to have reached five frequently cited milestones of adulthood: having a full-time job, being financially independent, living on their own, getting married and having a child. By the time they are 25, however, today’s young adults are somewhat closer to their predecessors in 1980 on two of these milestones: having a full-time job and financial independence. In 2021, the most recent year with available data, 39% of 21-year-olds were working full time, compared with 64% in 1980. And only a quarter of people this age in 2021 were financially independent of their parents – meaning that their income was at least 150% of the poverty line – compared with 42% in 1980.
Tokyo will impose export restrictions on 23 chipmaking equipment types in July, aligning with US and the Netherland but potentially going further than US sanctions, posing a greater challenge for China’s semiconductor production. @FT
Tokyo has said it intends to put restrictions on exports of 23 types of crucial chipmaking equipment from July, as it aligns itself with the US and the Netherlands in implementing sweeping export controls that could limit China’s access to cutting-edge chips. However, Chinese industry executives who have examined the fine print of the intended rules say they could potentially go further than the US in restricting China’s ability to make semiconductors. “Japan’s export controls will be more disturbing to China than Washington’s sanctions last year,” said a Chinese chip factory executive, who did not wish to be named.
Chinese youth unemployment (16-24) is running at 20.4% well above its pre-pandemic level of 13% as a record 11.6mm college students are poised to graduate this summer.
China isn’t creating enough of the high-wage, high-skill jobs that are sought after by its expanding base of educated young people, many of whom have loftier expectations than previous generations. China has significantly expanded high education enrollment during the past decade. In the past three years, more than 28 million college graduates entered the labor market, accounting for about two-thirds of the new urban labor supply. “China’s high youth unemployment rate is not transitory but structural,” said David Wang, chief China economist at Credit Suisse. “There is a mismatch in the skills the youth are trained to provide and the skills that existing jobs require.”
May 22, 2023
Nicholas Eberstadt @AEI argues that America’s seemingly dominant post-Cold War economic performance is clouded by the poor performance of the wealth trajectory of the median American.
Overall, post–Cold War America has been fantastically successful in wealth creation. By the reckoning of the Federal Reserve, the net worth of American households amounted to nearly $140 trillion at the end of 2022: an average of over $400,000 per person and over a million dollars per household (for a 2.5 person home). America’s struggle for mass prosperity can also be placed in international perspective, thanks to the path-breaking research for the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. Those estimates are still a work in progress for poorer societies, but they look fairly reliable for most affluent Western democracies. The Global Wealth Databook offers estimates for “median wealth per adult” in current US dollars for the years 2000–2021 for 170 countries and places. Figures 2 and 3 show US estimated median wealth per adult for 2000–2021 in relation to America’s Cold War treaty allies in Europe and Asia.
.@NewYorkFed defines a new metric, the financial stability interest rate r**, which is the rate above which the financial sector tends to see vicious cycle selling and therefore breaks down.
The chart below shows the responses of credit spreads and output to a one percentage point increase in real interest rates in our calibrated model. The blue solid lines display the responses when the economy is in a tranquil period (r** is almost 1.5 percentage points above r before the shock hits). The one percentage point shock is by construction not large enough to push the economy into the crisis region, with the r**–r gap staying positive throughout. As a consequence, the shock has only modest effects on output and spreads. The red dashed lines display the responses when the economy is much closer to the financially unstable region (r** is only 0.5 percentage points above r before the shock). In this case, the increase in interest rates is enough for the financial accelerator mechanism to kick in, and the response of both spreads and output to the shock is much larger.
Foreign-born worker’s share of the US labor force is at its highest level in 27 years with persons born outside the US making up 18.1% of the US workforce. Foreign-born black, white and Asian workers earned more than their native-born counterparts.
Foreign-born workers’ share of the U.S. labor force rose last year to the highest level in 27 years of records, as labor demand surged, and the pandemic faded. People born outside the U.S. made up 18.1% of the overall labor force, up from 17.4% the prior year and the highest level in data back to 1996, the Labor Department said in its annual report on foreign-born workers. The number of immigrants in the labor force—those working or actively looking for jobs—rose by 1.8 million, or 6.3%, to 29.8 million in 2022.
.@fuxianyi argues that UN population projections overstate both China and India’s current and projected populations.
In April, the United Nations estimated that India had overtaken China as the world’s most populous country. While the announcement received a great deal of media attention, India’s 2024 census will likely reveal that the UN’s projections have been vastly overestimated. According to India’s most recent census data, the country’s population stood at 1.03 billion in 2001 and 1.21 billion in 2011. The UN’s 2022 World Population Prospects (WPP) report, however, put these figures at 1.08 billion and 1.26 billion, respectively. Moreover, India’s National Family Health Survey indicated a fertility rate of 1.99 in 2017-19, in contrast to the WPP’s estimate of 2.1.
Arizona, California, and Nevada have reached a three-year deal that will reduce water use from the Colorado River by ~13% through 2026.
Arizona, California, and Nevada have agreed to take less water from the drought-strained Colorado River, a breakthrough agreement that, for now, keeps the river from falling so low that it would jeopardize water supply for major Western cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles as well as for some of America’s most productive farmland. The agreement, announced Monday, calls for the federal government to pay about $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states if they temporarily use less water. The states have also agreed to make additional cuts beyond that amount to generate the total reductions needed to protect the collapse of the river. Taken together, those reductions would amount to about 13 percent of the total water use in the lower Colorado Basin — among the most aggressive ever experienced in the region, and likely to require significant water restrictions for residential and agricultural uses.
Phil Gramm and Mike Solon argue that even if the House GOP’s budget proposal was enacted in whole, inflation-adjusted discretionary spending would still be 2.4% greater than the CBO’s 2020 projection.
Since 1967, average inflation-adjusted transfer payments to low-income households—the bottom 20%—have grown from $9,677 to $45,389. During that same period, the percentage of prime working-age adults in the bottom 20% of income earners who actually worked collapsed from 68% to 36%. Before the pandemic, the Congressional Budget Office in January 2020 projected that total discretionary outlays in fiscal 2024 would grow to $1.549 trillion—which, adjusted for higher inflation, amounted to $1.694 trillion. The most recent CBO estimate projects that fiscal 2024 discretionary spending will clock in at $1.864 trillion—a 10% real increase from the pre-pandemic estimate. Nondefense outlays have risen 18.8% over the same period, while defense outlays have fallen 0.28% in after-inflation dollars. This growth in nondefense discretionary spending is the post-pandemic bow wave that Mr. McCarthy’s debt-limit plan seeks to mitigate. Even if the House GOP’s proposed reductions in discretionary-spending growth took effect, total discretionary spending would still be 2.4% more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the CBO’s 2020 projection for fiscal 2024.
In an analysis of the 2022 midterms using voter file data, @Catalist_US finds younger voters exceeded their 2018 turnout by 6% with 65% of voters 18-29 supporting Democrats.
Gen Z and Millennial voters had exceptional levels of turnout, with young voters in heavily contested states exceeding their 2018 turnout by 6% among those who were eligible in both elections. Further, 65% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Democrats, cementing their role as a key part of a winning coalition for the party. While young voters were historically evenly split between the parties, they are increasingly voting for Democrats. Many young voters who showed up in 2018 and 2020 to elect Democrats continued to do the same in 2022. Extreme “MAGA” Republicans underperformed. Across heavily contested Senate, Gubernatorial, and Congressional races, voters penalized “MAGA” Republicans. Women voters pushed Democrats over the top in heavily contested races, where abortion rights were often their top issue.
May 19, 2023
John Williams announces @NewYorkFed research that finds “there is no evidence that the era of very low natural rates of interest has ended.”
Based on the new r-star estimates for Canada, the Euro Area, and the United States, we see no signs of a significant reversal of the decline in r-star estimates evident in prior decades. In fact, in all three economies, the r-star estimates in 2022 are within two-tenths of a percentage point of the corresponding estimate in 2019. The current Holston-Laubach-Williams model estimates of r-star in the United States are shown in Figure 3. For comparison, the figure also shows estimates using a version of the model that is not adjusted to take into account COVID or outliers and holds the parameter values fixed at estimates using data through the end of 2019. The two sets of estimates are very similar through 2019. They differ sharply during the acute period of the pandemic, however, when the estimates from the unmodified model exhibit large swings due to the presence of sizeable outliers. Interestingly, the two estimates are very close to each other at the end of the sample.
Weekly
Week of April 24, 2023
Millennial wealth is now keeping pace with prior generations at this point in their life cycles. @jean_twenge
Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis made big headlines in 2018 when it announced that among families headed by people born in the 1980s (older Millennials), median wealth was 34 percent lower than what you’d expect based on the wealth of previous generations at the same age. The report, which analyzed data through 2016, theorized that Millennials might be a “lost generation” when it came to wealth. But when the St. Louis Fed updated its analysis of Millennial wealth a few years later, using 2019 data, it found significant progress. By then, older Millennials lagged only 11 percent behind previous generations at the same age. That progress was uneven: The gap was larger for Millennials without a college degree (19 percent) and even more so for Black Millennials (50 percent). Younger Millennials (born in the ’90s and still in their mid-20s at the time) also faced a bigger gap. Still, since 2019, both housing and the stock market have increased in value, last year’s swoon notwithstanding. Recent analysis by the Fed, including data through the middle of 2022, has shown average Millennial wealth to be neck and neck with the wealth of Gen X at the same age.
In real terms, the Case-Shiller national index (blue line) is 4.6% under its recent peak and 11% above the 2006 bubble peak. @calculatedrisk
In real terms (using CPI less Shelter), the National index is 4.6% below the recent peak, and the Composite 20 index is 6.4% below the recent peak in 2022. In real terms, national house prices are still above the bubble peak levels. There is an upward slope to real house prices, and it has been about 17 years since the previous peak, but real prices are historically high. Affordability was essentially unchanged in February as a slight increase in prices was offset by a slight decrease in mortgage rates. In October 2022, houses were the least “affordable” since 1982 when 30-year mortgage rates were over 14%.
New research shows that a major increase in federal student loan funding that started in 2006 had the effect of dramatically increasing tuition without improving either inclusion or the future earnings of graduates. @JeffDenning @Econ_Sandy @AEI
In 2006, the federal government essentially uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. We find that access to additional federal loans increased previously constrained students’ borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt. However, the increase in borrowing limits had no effect on graduate student enrollment or the racial and gender composition of entering graduate students. We find little evidence of short or longer-run effects on the human capital accumulation of students who were or would have been constrained by federal borrowing limits in the absence of Grad PLUS, even though cumulative debt significantly increased for these students when they gained access to Grad PLUS loans. This suggests that access to additional liquidity did not constrain graduate student borrowers’ human capital investments prior to the implementation of Grad PLUS. We also find little evidence of an impact on later earnings, consistent with no change in human capital accumulation. Where we do see effects is on program prices. Grad PLUS-driven increases in federal student loans significantly increased program prices.
.@tylercowen argues that the diffusion of AI will enable important companies to run with a small number of employees managing automated AI-based systems.
Consider ChatGPT, which has been described as the most rapidly growing consumer technology product in history. It is produced by OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco. By one recent estimate the company has about 375 employees. By contrast, Meta, even after some layoffs, currently has more than 60,000. OpenAI will make more hires. Still, it may be time to reset expectations for what a major tech company looks like. Important businesses with a small number of employees will need to hire exactly the right people to oversee the larger automated and AI-managed superstructures. Talent selection will rise in importance as a skill, and the people in these smaller units will command very high compensation. Investing will evolve as well, with Americans less likely to own businesses in their stock portfolios. If businesses become smaller overall, they will not have the same need to go public to raise capital for expansion. They will be privately held. Venture capital will rise in importance, but since most solo investors face SEC restrictions on making venture investments, they will have to put their money elsewhere.
Week of April 17, 2023
According to the UN, India’s population will overtake China’s this year if it hasn’t already. India’s population isn’t expected to peak until 2063.
The United Nations has said India’s population is projected to surpass China’s sometime this year. Many demographers estimate it could happen this month, if it hasn’t already. India’s population is expected to reach 1.429 billion by the end of the year, according to the U.N. China will fall to second place, with 1.426 billion people. Both dwarf the U.S. at a projected 340 million. India’s population is expected to keep growing for the next four decades, peaking at nearly 1.7 billion in 2063.
Stock-based compensation was around 6-8% of total compensation for public American firms, up 5x from 2006. At approximately 1.2% sales, stock-based compensation was up 6X since 2000. @mjmauboussin
In 2006, the year that companies had to reflect SBC as an expense on the income statement, total SBC expense for companies in the Russell 3000 was about $25 billion. The Russell 3000 is an index that tracks the largest stocks by market capitalization in the United States. We estimate that SBC was about $270 billion in 2022, or 6- 8 percent of total compensation for public companies in the U.S. Sales over the same period went from $11.5 to $21.1 trillion. Stock-based compensation (SBC) in 2022 was nearly 5 times what it was in 2006, measured as a percentage of sales, although total SBC remains less than 10 percent of total employee pay.
Nationwide, the difference between Republican vote share in rural vs urban areas increased to 21 percentage points in 2020, up from 10 pp in 2000 and 2pp in 1996. @SuzanneMettler1
Throughout the mid-twentieth century and as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, presidential candidates received fairly equivalent support from rural and urban dwellers, nationwide. Since the 1990s, however, the rural-urban political cleavage has grown steadily as shown in Figure 1. Although the rural-urban political divide in presidential voting has increased the most in the South, by 27 points between 1976 and 2020, it has widened in all regions over the same period, by seven points in the Northeast, 18 points in the West, and a striking 20 points in the Midwest. Urban areas captured a full 97% of all employment growth between 2001 and 2016. As the economic conditions in rural and urban areas diverged, the rural-urban political divide emerged.
Week of April 10, 2023
Growth in the US has outpaced growth in other advanced peer economies. In 1990, the US accounted for 40% of the nominal GDP of the G7, today it accounts for 58%. @TheEconomist
America’s $25.5trn in GDP last year represented 25% of the world’s total—almost the same share as it had in 1990. On that measure China’s share is now 18%. In 1990 America accounted for 40% of the nominal GDP of the G7, a group of the world’s seven biggest advanced economies, including Japan and Germany. Today it accounts for 58%. In PPP terms the increase was smaller, but still significant: from 43% of the G7‘s GDP in 1990 to 51% now. America’s outperformance has translated into wealth for its people. Income per person in America was 24% higher than in western Europe in 1990 in PPP terms; today it is about 30% higher. It was 17% higher than in Japan in 1990; today it is 54% higher. America’s labour-force participation rate has been falling this century, largely because of men dropping out of the workforce. But this American oddity is not large enough to make up for the country’s advantage in raw numbers. Even with lower participation, the past three decades have seen America’s labour force grow by 30%. In Europe the number is 13%, in Japan, just 7%. America’s working-age population—those between 25 and 64—rose from 127m in 1990 to 175m in 2022, an increase of 38%. Contrast that with western Europe, where the working-age population rose just 9% during that period, from 94m to 102m.
Chinese firms now make up 4 of the top 25 leading firms in research and development spending, according to a @foxjust analysis.
When I last compiled one of these lists five years ago, mobile infrastructure and device maker Huawei Investment & Holding Co. was in sixth place behind Microsoft, just as it is here, but it was the only Chinese company in the global top 25. It has been joined by TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd., WeChat owner and gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. and e-commerce, payments and cloud-computing purveyor Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Torsten Sløk @apolloglobal writes that “it is getting more difficult to argue that the banking crisis is not having a negative impact on the economy,” given that credit conditions for small businesses are at their worst levels since 2012.
Credit conditions have tightened significantly for small businesses after SVB failed, and firms with less than 500 employees account for almost 50% of total employment in the US economy. Small businesses borrow from small banks, and it is getting more difficult to argue that the banking crisis is not having a negative impact on the economy.
Torsten Sløk @apolloglobal reports that last week saw the largest two-week cut in bank lending in US history. “In short, the credit crunch has started.”
Weekly Fed data released every Friday at 4:15 pm shows how banks are responding to the SVB collapse and subsequent deposit outflows. The largest 2-week cutback in bank lending in US history. The largest 2-week cutback in bank lending to corporates in US history. Largest decline in lending to real estate on record. Fed hikes were already cooling the economy, and the latest weekly Fed data shows that the banking sector response since SVB is magnifying the speed of the slowdown. The bottom line is that the immediate risks in the banking sector are starting to fade, but the behavioral change in the banking sector is beginning to weigh on the economic outlook.
The French government reported that France had much lower income mobility than the US btw 2003-2019, with little movement in the top and bottom quintiles. Among those in the top 1% in 2003, 41% were still there in 2019. @markets
According to the first long-term study by France’s statistics agency Insee, there was a 71% correlation between the position of French people on the income scale between 2003 and 2019, with the richest and poorest groups least likely to change bracket. That inertia is greater than in the US, where a deeper history of income mobility studies has shown a higher probability of ascending or descending, the authors of the French report said. Among the lowest 20% in terms of income in 2003, 62% were still in that group in 2019. Only 2% of the group rose to the level of the 20% highest incomes.
Michael Cembalest @jpmorgan argues that the banking system is now stabilizing, with the pace of drawdowns slowing from mid-March.
The presence of unrealized losses on bank balance sheets is not abnormal, and is entirely consistent with a rising interest rate cycle. The problem this time: some banks were flooded with so many stimulus-related deposits at a time of low rates that their balance sheets are stuffed with low-yielding assets. And to reiterate, this is only a problem when large deposit outflows cause unrealized losses to be realized. The Fed’s new rules for the Discount Window allow banks to borrow against securities at book value rather than market value, so that should help. But it doesn’t address banks with underwater, high-quality loans or the flood of deposits departing for higher money market fund yields. Many system indicators are now stabilizing, but one news story, one rating agency action or an announcement from a single bank could reignite market/depositor concerns.
.@martinwolf_ argues that a savings glut in Japan significantly constrains its policy options and makes loose monetary policy and high deficits its best overall option. Japan’s private sector gross savings averaged 29% of GDP from 2010-19 vs 22% in the US.
Ultra-low interest rates are, for example, intended to raise private investment and reduce private savings. But in practice, the private savings surplus, especially the corporate surplus, has remained huge. Loose monetary policy has facilitated crucial absorption (and offsetting) of surplus private savings via the excess of government investment over savings. These deficits averaged 5 per cent of GDP from 2010 to 2019. Finally, an average of 3 per cent of GDP went into net acquisition of foreign assets via Japan’s current account surpluses. So long as Japan continues to run huge excess private sector savings, policy has to find ways of either reducing or offsetting them. Japan’s economy is still trapped. It also has no easy way out.
Week of March 27, 2023
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.
.@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.
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.
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
.@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?
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.
Database
Week of February 13, 2023
.@JonHaidt cites the percent of undergraduates diagnosed with a mental illness and argues that an epidemic of anxiety and depression started impacting young Americans in 2012.
There was no sign of a problem before 2010, and the epidemic is well underway by 2015. You can also see that the rate of depression is much higher in girls, as is the absolute increase (since 2010 an additional 18% of girls suffered from depression in 2021, compared to an additional 6% of boys), however, the relative increase is similar in both sexes: around 150%. The rate had more than doubled before the covid epidemic. The 2020 data were collected in early 2020, just before covid restrictions, and the 2021 data were collected a year later before vaccines were widely available. You can see that covid accelerated the rise in depression in that last year, but it was already rising really fast.
According to a @CDCgov survey, 57% of female high school students in 2021 experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness up from 36% in 2011. Male students saw only an 8 percentage point increase.
As we saw in the 10 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health among students overall continues to worsen, with more than 40% of high school students feeling so sad or hopeless that they could not engage in their regular activities for at least two weeks during the previous year—a possible indication of the experience of depressive symptoms. We also saw significant increases in the percentage of youth who seriously considered suicide, made a suicide plan, and attempted suicide. Across almost all measures of substance use, experiences of violence, mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, female students are faring more poorly than male students. These differences, and the rates at which female students are reporting such negative experiences, are stark.
.@TheEconomist argues that “The crunch caused by the war in Ukraine may, in fact, have fast-tracked the green transition by an astonishing five to ten years” via increased subsidies.
The crunch caused by the war in Ukraine may, in fact, have fast-tracked the green transition by an astonishing five to ten years. Last year global capital expenditure on wind and solar assets grew from $357bn to $490bn, surpassing investment in new and existing oil and gas wells for the first time. America’s Inflation Reduction Act earmarks $369bn of subsidies for green tech; the European Commission has unveiled a “Net-Zero Industry Act”, which will provide at least €250bn ($270bn) to clean-tech companies. China’s 14th five-year plan for energy, released in June, for the first time sets a goal for the share of renewables in power generation (of 33% by 2025). All told, the IEA expects global renewable-energy capacity to rise by 2,400gw between 2022 and 2027, an amount equivalent to China’s entire installed power capacity today. That is almost 30% higher than the agency’s forecast in 2021, released before the war. Renewables are set to account for 90% of the increase in global generation capacity over the period. Carbon-dioxide emissions look set to fall considerably faster than expected just 12 months ago. S&PGlobal, a data firm, thinks emissions from energy combustion will peak in 2027, at a level the world would still be producing in 2028 had the war not happened.
Week of February 6, 2023
Evidence from Sweden finds a strong relationship between cognitive ability and earnings up to annual earnings of ~$64k. There are no significant differences among the top three income percentiles. @ECSR_Soc
The figure above shows cognitive ability levels expressed with annual wage on the horizontal axis. Cognitive ability plateaus at high levels of occupational success. Precisely in the part of the wage distribution where cognitive ability can make the biggest difference, its right tail, cognitive ability ceases to play any role. Cognitive ability plateaus around €60,000 [$64,200] at under a standard deviation above the mean. There are no significant differences in ability between the three top income percentiles, despite there being 594 cases in each percentile bin and despite those in the 100th percentile earning more than double the wage of those in the 98th percentile. Past a certain wage threshold, having a higher wage is no longer telling of cognitive ability. The average score individuals in the top percentile achieved as adolescents on the cognitive-ability test is 7.15 ± 0.11 (95% confidence interval). On a stanine scale this amounts to less than a standard deviation (+0.86) above average.
.@generaltheorist notes that during the pandemic for every additional $1T in currency and deposits, American households saw $6T in non-monetary wealth driven by equities and real estate.
Household net worth expanded by USD34 trillion from end-2019 through end-2021, an increase of >150% of end-2019 GDP in only 2 years. This wealth increase was mainly due to the increase in financial and non-financial assets (housing). The chart below shows the change in the value of outstanding assets held by households for select items from end-2019. Currency and deposits held by households began the sharp increase in the first quarter of 2020, during the initial lockdowns, and increased by about USD4½ trillion in total. The increase in equity and real estate assets, mainly due to valuation adjustments, followed—and in value terms was a much larger influence on household net worth. At its peak, equity and investment fund shares, which fell in value by USD6 trillion by end-March 2020, increased nearly USD18 trillion by end-2021 on end-2019, or USD24 trillion peak-to-trough. The declines experienced last year during the interest rate normalization have weighed on such wealth since, but the levels remained above pre-pandemic norms. Real estate assets continued to increase in value still in 2022Q3, though at a diminishing pace as housing feels the strain of higher rates. Still, nearly USD13 trillion was added to household wealth through real estate since end-2019. Put another way, at its peak, every additional USD1 trillion in monetary wealth during the pandemic came to be reflected in roughly USD6 trillion in non-monetary wealth, mainly equities and housing.
.@TheEconomist reports that between mid-2020-2022 America’s lower earners saw cumulative inflation of 13.5% whereas middle earners saw 15.5%. The difference was largely driven by car prices and fuel expenditures. @XJaravel
Middle-income earners, not the poorest, appear to have borne the brunt of America’s current bout of inflation. Research by Xavier Jaravel of the London School of Economics has yielded a distinctive shape—an inverted-U curve—that illustrates the distributional effects of inflation in America from mid-2020 to mid-2022. For the lowest earners, inflation was about 13.5%. For those in the middle of the spectrum, inflation was closer to 15.5%. The wealthiest faced inflation of about 14%. Since 2020 nominal wages have increased at an average annual rate of about 4.2% for Americans as a whole. The lowest-earning quartile, however, has seen the biggest gains, with their wages up by 5.3% on average during the same period.
Evidence from Norway shows internet expansion reduced friction associated with finding a job and reduced the steady state unemployment rate by 14%. @AndreasKostol @nberpubs
We found that the internet led more firms to recruit online. It further caused a 9% decline in the duration of posted vacancies and 13% fewer unsuccessful hiring attempts. Next, we showed that the expansion increased job finding rates by 2.4% and starting wages by 6% among the unemployed. However, we found no evidence of changes in job-to-job mobility or wage growth for the employed. Through the lens of the calibrated model, we found that search technology is the primary mechanism behind the quasi-experimental evidence. Our calculations indicated that the broadband internet expansion may have caused a 14% decline in the steady-state unemployment rate. Our paper sheds light on two recent macroeconomic trends. First, the falling rates of worker mobility in the US have fueled a concern about the causes and consequences of declining labor market mobility. Our results suggest that online job search and recruitment may have improved match quality by providing more information about potential jobs and better tools to screen potential candidates. In turn, this improvement may have reduced the need to switch employers in search for a better match – consistent with a more optimistic view of recent trends in job mobility. Second, our evidence helps explain the inward shift in the Beveridge curve observed in Norway and in other countries from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Our evidence suggests that without the near-universal internet adoption rates, the unemployment rate after the Great Recession would have reached even higher levels.
The 13M Americans working in the manufacturing sector in January surpassed the peak set during the previous business cycle in February of 2020, a first since the 1970s. This growth has been accompanied by a decline in real output per hour worked. @foxjust
For the first time since the late 1970s, US employment in manufacturing has surpassed the peak set during the previous business cycle. This happened in May 2022, according to the revised 2022 payroll jobs data released last week by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of January 2023, the sector employed just short of 13 million Americans on a seasonally adjusted basis, the biggest number since November 2008. The huge manufacturing productivity gains of the 1990s and 2000s appear to have given way to a situation where producing more stuff actually requires hiring more workers.
Michael Spence and Belinda Azenui note that labor productivity between the tradable and non-tradable sectors started to diverge in 1998, and by 2021 per-employee value-added in tradable sectors was nearly double the non-tradable sectors. @ProSyn
Value-added per employee is a measure of labor productivity. In America’s tradable sector, it has risen steadily over the last two decades in both manufacturing and services, reaching roughly $185,000 (in chained 2012 dollars) in 2021. Over the same period, productivity growth in this sector averaged nearly 3%. The non-tradable economy [net government] is just 0.57% per annum over the last 20 years. This reflects below-average productivity levels and, in most cases, low-to-moderate productivity growth in the large-employment sectors. There was not always a large gap between the tradable and non-tradable sectors. On the contrary, as the chart shows, labor productivity was about $100,000 across the economy in 1998. But by 2021, after more than two decades of steady divergence, per-employee value-added in the tradable sector was nearly double the level in the non-tradable sector.
The share of single men who are looking for a relationship and/or casual dates has declined from 61% in 2019 to 50% in 2022. 32% of American men and 28% of women were single in 2022. @pewresearch
The percentage of single Americans who are looking for a relationship or casual dates is lower than in 2019, especially among men. Some 42% of single Americans say they’re looking for a committed romantic relationship and/or casual dates, down from 49% in 2019 (but similar to the proportion found in the Center’s February 2022 survey). This drop is largely driven by single men, who are now 11 percentage points less likely than in 2019 to say they are looking for a committed relationship and/or casual dates (50% in July 2022, down from 61% in 2019). During the same time frame, there has been no significant change in the share of single women who are looking for a relationship or casual dates: 35% said this in 2022, compared with 38% in 2019.
A new @NBERpubs study finds that in 2020 ~ 1/3 of children between the ages of 18-34 lived with their parents, but found no clear evidence that this impacts parents’ current or future labor market choices, or their wealth, health, or life satisfaction.
The share of U.S. adult children living with their parents has increased since the 1960s. Figure 1 shows that in 2020, approximately one-third of children between ages 18 and 34 lived with their parents, with men and 18-24 year-olds, respectively, more likely to co-reside than women and 25-34 year-olds. We examine the relationship between adult children returning home and parental retirement outcomes using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative panel of individuals over the age of 50 and their spouses; the HRS also tracks children of respondents. Our child-level analysis suggests that a boomerang event is likely associated with negative shocks to a child’s marriage, income, and employment. The event study analysis suggests that many of these shocks are temporary, and correspondingly most boomerang events are transitory. At the parent level, we find no clear, statistically significant association between boomerang children and parental health, wealth, probability of working, hours worked, or well-being. However, we do find an increase in the self-reported probability of working full-time after age 65. That increase is concentrated among men, those under the age of 62, and those in the top half of the initial wealth distribution. Overall, our results provide evidence that parents may delay their anticipated retirement when children return home.
Week of January 30, 2023
Matt Rognlie @ludwigstraub @a_auclert argue that it will take up to five years for excess savings to work though the systems as individuals with higher marginal propensity to consume generate income for individuals with higher savings rates.
Deficit-financed fiscal transfers generate excess savings. One person’s spending is another person’s income. As we show, taking this fact into account implies that excess savings from debt-financed transfers have much longer-lasting effects than a naive calculation would suggest. In a closed economy, unless the government pays down the debt used to finance the transfers, excess savings do not go away as households spend them down. Instead, the effect of excess savings on aggregate demand slowly dissipates as they “trickle up” the wealth distribution to agents with lower MPCs. Tight monetary policy speeds up this process, but this effect is likely to be quantitatively modest. The partial equilibrium scenario summarizes the conventional wisdom according to which the effect of excess savings will dissipate in a few quarters. By contrast, our benchmark scenario suggests that these effects will stick around for roughly 5 years.
Public firms’ returns on the book value of assets are down ~ 50% from 1980 and private firms’ returns have doubled. @EconTraina @ASollaci @CarterDavisFin
Why have US aggregate profit rates increased while financial market rates decreased since 1980? We propose a mismatch hypothesis: Profit rates in the national accounts track the return on capital for all firms, while financial market rates track the cost of capital for public firms only. We show public-firm profit rates halved since 1980, matching trends in financial markets and suggesting low market power. Mechanically, this residual private capital return series shows private capital returns had to have increased substantially to account for this secular break between aggregate and public firm profitability. The degree of this shift is significant: Private firms’ profit rates are on average 10% higher than public firms’ in the post-2000 period. Nonfinancial domestic private-firm profit rates doubled, suggesting high market power or risk. Size and sector differences cannot explain the divergence, though intangible-intensity might. Our results indicate substantial biases in extrapolating public-firm trends to the aggregate economy.
.@mattsclancy highlights evidence that major productivity gains in research result from allowing scientists & researchers to cluster with other highly skilled inventors. Allowing more high-skilled immigration could boost per capita GDP growth rates by 9%.
Moving to the USA raises citations to math publications four-fold, or 2.5-fold if you restrict attention to people who become a math academic at home or abroad. Comparing New Zealander migrants who return or stay abroad - the ones who stay abroad get up to four times as many citations as those who return. PhD students who stay in the USA get 4-6 times as many citations to their work as their peers in the same program who end up moving back to a country with GDP per capita outside the top 25%. That’s a pretty consistently large effect. And we get similar kinds of results when we look at other proxies for scientific achievement, whether it’s counting publications, patents, or becoming an invited speaker to the International Congress of Mathematicians. A model of the innovation/immigration/trade economy between the US and EU...implies if the USA doubled the H-1B visa cap from 65,000 to 130,000, it would raise the real GDP per capita growth rate in each region by 9% in the long run.
The @economist notes that “almost all” recent AI breakthroughs have come from large firms, in large part due to their access to the computing power required to develop state-of-the-art AI models.
Almost all recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence globally have come from large companies, in large part because they have the computing power. Amazon, whose AI powers its Alexa voice assistant, and Meta, which made waves recently when one of its models beat human players at “Diplomacy,” a strategy board game, respectively produce two-thirds and four-fifths as much AI research as Stanford University, a bastion of computer-science eggheads. Alphabet and Microsoft churn out considerably more, and that is not including DeepMind, Google Research’s sister lab which the parent company acquired in 2014, and the Microsoft-affiliated OpenAI.
Week of January 23, 2023
.@ojblanchard1 argues that the secular stagnation environment – where real interest rates were low, often negative, and much lower than the economy’s rate of growth – will soon reassert itself and will then be the “prevalent regime for some time to come.”
Summers has argued that the increase in public debt due to the fiscal response to COVID will lead, other things equal, to an increase in r [real return on capital]. He is right about the sign of the increase in public debt’s impact on r, but the effect is likely to be quite small. The debt-to-GDP ratio in advanced economies has increased only from 75 percent in 2019 to 82 percent in 2022; under standard assumptions, this implies an increase in r of no more than 15–30 basis points. That would be insufficient to offset the pre-COVID downward trend in safe rates, let alone to close the gap between r and g [growth rate of output.]
.@Jasonfurman notes GDP is “basically at CBO’s pre-pandemic forecast.” Consumer spending, which has enjoyed “huge fiscal support in 2020 and 2021,” is running well ahead of the CBO’s pre-pandemic forecast, while residential investment declined by 26.7%/yr.
Overall GDP is basically at CBO's pre-pandemic forecast. The big story for economic growth was the consistent strength of consumer spending, which is more than two-thirds of the economy. It has been consistently running well ahead of CBO's pre-pandemic forecast. Likely continued impact of huge fiscal support in 2020 and 2021. The countervailing story is the collapse of residential investment. It has fallen for 7 straight quarters, fell 19.3% over the last four quarters, with a decline of 26.7% (annual rate) in Q4. Biggest since the financial crisis. And the third story is that over the pandemic recovery the huge increase in US demand was partly accommodated by rising imports and production shifted from exports to domestic consumption. But the large increase in the trade deficit has been narrowing.
Tim Krupa from @GoldmanSachs reports that the foreign-born labor force is rebounding from 2.8M below trend in September 2020 to 1.2M below trend in March 2022.
Starting in 2019, tighter immigration policies under the Trump Administration followed by pandemic disruptions depressed the US foreign-born working-age population. The foreign-born labor force fell 2.8 million below its long-term trend level in April 2020 and remained 1.2 million below trend in March 2022. The foreign-born population has grown 137k per month in the past 18 months, compared to 68k per month from Jan. 2010 to Jan. 2019. The chart above shows the foreign-born labor force has grown 110k per month in the past 18 months, compared to 42k per month during the prior period.
.@EthanYWu offers support to the Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan view that population aging is inflationary as retirees create more demand than supply.
An ageing population, and the dependency it creates, will hamper supply and stoke inflation. Mikael Juselius and Elod Takats of BIS’s core insight: “The young and the old are inflationary, while the working-age cohort is disinflationary.” That is, prime-age workers create more supply than demand, while their elders and juniors do just the opposite.
Michael Cembalest @jpmorgan notes that it has been difficult for legislators to increase tax receipts beyond 19% of GDP, and yet entitlement spending plus interest is likely to exceed that level by 2032.
The above chart plots the history of US tax increases since 1950 (as % of GDP and vs Federal receipts as a % of GDP). While there have been tax increases of 2% of GDP or more, they occurred when overall tax receipts were much lower. The red square shows the required increases in taxes, which if spent entirely on increasing discretionary spending, would reduce the ratio of entitlements to non-defense discretionary spending back to 2.2x (its 2006 level). The Sanders high net worth income and capital gains tax plan and the Warren wealth tax plan appear as well.