Daily
May 19, 2023
Analysts at @BIS_org argue that the current pace of deflation is consistent with reaching the Fed’s target within the next 18 months. @HyunSongShin
Nominal wage increases of 4–5% in the euro area and 3–4% in the United States this year and next year are compatible with bringing inflation within reach of 2% by end-2024, provided that import price growth slows and profit margins stabilise or slightly shrink. From a historical perspective, the 2023–24 disinflation path of domestic prices and nominal wages are within the range of past disinflations in both economies (Graph 1, left-hand and centre panels). However, two observations are in order. First, while US real wages always tend to decline around the time when US inflation peaks, the 2022 decline in euro area real wages was unprecedented (upper right-hand panel).
Torsten Slok @apolloglobal argues the recession associated with this hiking cycle will impact asset prices more than the “real” economy.
What makes the coming recession so unusual is that it is happening after almost 15 years of money printing, which never really had any major positive effect on GDP growth. Instead, the 15 years of money printing created a significant bubble in asset prices. As a result, the big correction during this recession will not be in the economy but in asset prices as the Fed continues to deflate the buy-everything bubble created due to global easy money. A mild economic recession with a big recession in asset prices is what we call a non-recession recession. With inflation currently at 5%, well above the Fed’s 2% inflation target, the ongoing correction in asset prices will continue as the costs of capital will stay elevated well into 2024.
Despite being more diverse, younger millennials live in significantly more segregated neighborhoods than older cohorts of Americans did at the same age.
Residential segregation among young people increased, rather than decreased, from 2010 to 2019, according to the new findings from Noli Brazil at the University of California, Davis, and Jennifer Candipan at Brown University. Brazil and Candipan parse the data for 51,937 neighborhoods (or census tracts) in 222 metropolitan areas. In 2000, the average segregation index of the neighborhoods inhabited by 25- to 29-year-olds was 19. By 2010, the average index of people of that age (older millennials) had dropped to 16. By 2019, the average index of people of that age (young millennials) had risen to 22.
11.6M new Chinese graduates are entering the labor market in June. Currently 20% of Chinese between the ages of 16-24 are out of work.
The government reported this week that 20.4 percent of people ages 16 to 24 looking for a job were out of work in April. That is the highest level since China started announcing the statistic in 2018. The government, facing rare public discontent as young professionals in major cities across China protested the “zero Covid” rules, abruptly announced in December that it would start easing the policies. But the youth jobless rate has remained high, even as the overall rate has ticked down two months in a row.
May 18, 2023
A new @BLS_gov analysis finds the number of employees of new firms was 2.7 in 2021, down from 6.4 in 1996. Firms that make it to 1, 3, and 5 year survival marks also employ fewer workers than their 1990s counterparts.
The increasing number of establishment births in combination with the decreasing number of jobs generated by those births suggests that the average size of new businesses has been shrinking in recent decades. This theory can be examined through a measure informally nicknamed “birth weight,” that is calculated as the level of gross job gains from establishment births divided by the level of establishment births. While the number of new business establishments tends to rise and fall with the business cycle of the overall economy, the decline in jobs created by establishment births raises questions regarding the changing nature of startups. The average “birth weight” has been steadily declining over the last 20 years from a high of 6.4 employees per establishment birth in 1996 to a low of 2.7 employees per establishment birth in 2021.
Related: Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences
.@TheEconomist argues that the financial system is slipping into greater state control. Americans can park cash in money-market funds, which in turn park it directly at the Fed, circumventing the banking system altogether.
The real risk comes when policy preferences interfere with lending rules. In America this already happens in the mortgage market, which is dominated by two government-backed enterprises: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Together the two institutions now underwrite credit risk for more than half of mortgages. Their guarantees enable the 30-year fixed-rate, prepayable mortgages Americans have come to expect. They also help explain why America’s financial system bears more interest-rate risk than Europe’s, where floating-rate mortgages are common.
Seven of the world’s largest semiconductor makers including TSMC, Samsung and Intel announced plans for significant investment in Japan that would make Japan a “semiconductor powerhouse.”
At an unprecedented meeting in Tokyo with Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, the heads of chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Intel and Micron of the US described plans that could transform Japan’s prospects of re-emerging as a semiconductor powerhouse. Micron said it expected to invest up to ¥500bn ($3.7bn), including Japanese state subsidies, to build a plant to produce cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography technology in Hiroshima. Samsung is also discussing setting up a ¥30bn research and development centre in Yokohama with pilot lines for semiconductor devices. Japanese government officials said the move followed a thaw in relations between Tokyo and Seoul.
The U.S. trade to GDP ratio peaked in 2011 at 31% of GDP. Since then it has declined as trade has slowed relative to the economy. @AmSantacreu @LeiboviciF @stlouisfed
The figure shows the marked expansion in both U.S. and global trade (exports plus imports) as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), which is a standard measure of openness to trade. The world trade-to-GDP ratio climbed from about 25% in 1970 to a peak of about 61% in 2008. Similarly, the U.S. trade-to-GDP ratio rose from about 11% in 1970 to a peak of about 31% in 2011. [Headwinds to trade include trading blocs, geopolitical tensions, and a deteriorating US-China relationship.]
The tight labor market has led to record black employments rates, with black unemployment under 5% for the first time since 1972.
The unemployment rate for Black workers fell to a record low 4.7% in April. That was still above the national average, but below 5% for the first time in Labor Department records of employment for Black Americans, which began in 1972. About 1.1 million more Black Americans held jobs last month than in February 2020, just before the pandemic took hold. That increase accounts for nearly half the total gain in employment during that time. There are signs, though, that some of the improvements could last, in part because many Black workers moved into higher-paying industries and occupations during the pandemic. Black Americans accounted for 11.4% of professional and business services workers in the first quarter of this year, up from 9.6% in the same period in 2019, according to the Labor Department.
A review of relevant research suggests increased availability of immigrant household workers has had large positive effects on the labor supply of highly educated female workers and on the gender wage gap. @cortespatico
Overall, the existing research suggests that migrant domestic workers have large positive effects on the labor supply of highly educated women’s labor supply and on the gender pay gap for high-powered occupations. These migrants have contributed to the narrowing of persistent gender inequalities in the labor market, particularly for the highly-skilled native women in many countries around the world. The mechanism studied in this paper should be considered when analyzing the benefits and costs of immigration policies. Overall, the magnitude of the effects suggests that the low-skilled immigration flow to the United States between 1980 and 2000 increased the probability that affected native women at the top quartile of the wage distribution work more than 50 or 60 hours a week by 1.8 and 0.5 percentage points, respectively. Compared to the standard 40-hour work week, these higher hours at the higher end of the earning distribution, suggest that these women had jobs requiring long hours, which is typical of some high-powered occupations.
According to data from Quest Diagnostics, 4.3% of workforce drug tests came back positive for marijuana in 2022, up from 3.9% in 2021. In the accommodation and food services sector, 8.1% of tests in the were positive, up from 4% in 2018.
Of the more than six million general workforce tests that Quest screened for marijuana in 2022, 4.3% came back positive, up from 3.9% the prior year. That is the largest marijuana positivity rate since 1997. Positivity rates last year for certain classes of opioids and barbiturates declined. More than two-thirds of U.S. states have legalized recreational or medicinal use of marijuana. The percentage of employees that tested positive for marijuana following an on-the-job accident rose to 7.3% in 2022, an increase of 9% compared with the prior year. From 2012 to 2022, post-accident marijuana positive test rates tripled, tracking with widening legalization.
The CDC’s provisional count of overdose deaths suggests drug deaths are leveling off with 109,680 in 2022, compared to 109,179 in 2021. Synthetic opioids (mostly fentanyl) accounted for 75,217 deaths. effectively unchanged since 2021.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday released a provisional count of overdose deaths last year that indicated the toll of the fentanyl crisis leveling off after two years of surges during the Covid-19 pandemic. The CDC counted 109,680 overdose deaths in 2022 compared with 109,179 deaths from a similar 2021 projection. “It’s hard to know for sure where it will end up, but it will be essentially flat,” said Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. The plateau follows a 16% increase in overdose deaths in 2021 and a 30% surge in 2020. The U.S. has only recorded two years in which drug fatalities declined in the past several decades, 1990 and 2018.
The World Meteorological Organization has assessed that global temperatures are likely to exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels within the next five years.
Global temperatures are likely to exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in human history within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization has said in its latest annual assessment. In a stark conclusion, scientists said for the first time there was a 66 per cent chance that the annual mean global surface temperature rise would temporarily surpass 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in “at least” one year by 2027. The chances of this outcome were also “increasing with time”, the report said. The assessment of a two-thirds chance of a temporary breach of the 1.5C threshold compares with estimates of around 48 per cent a year ago, and “close to zero” in 2015.
May 17, 2023
Rating agencies are reporting that demographics are impacting governments credit ratings globally. S&P has forecast that, in the absence of policy reforms, half of the world’s largest economies will be downgraded to junk by 2060, up from 1/3 today. @FT
Marko Mrsnik, lead sovereign analyst at S&P Global Ratings, added that, according to an S&P stress test, a single percentage point increase in borrowing costs would increase debt to gross domestic product ratios for Japan, Italy, the UK and the US by around 40-60 percentage points by 2060. It estimated that, in the absence of reforms to ageing-related fiscal policies, the typical government would run a deficit of 9.1% of GDP by 2060, a huge increase from 2.4% in 2025. S&P also forecast that pension costs would rise by an average of 4.5 percentage points of GDP by 2060, reaching 9.5%, albeit with a large variation among countries. The rating agency projected that, between 2022 and 2060, healthcare spending would rise by 2.7 percentage points of GDP for the median country.
James Montier @GMOInsights notes that American firms’ profit margins have been supported by persistent fiscal deficits and argues that the current historically-high PE multiple “dooms investors to low returns in the long run.”
Between 1950 and 2011, the fiscal deficit averaged just less than 3% of GNP each year. In the period from 2012 to 2022, the fiscal deficit was more than double the previous average, at 6.6%. This isn’t just the impact of the pandemic: the same basic pattern holds even when I exclude the Covid years! The main sources of the increased deficit have been health spending and social security expenditure (again true even with Covid data excluded). Is this era of what Minsky would have called “Big Government” here to stay? Even if I take a very bullish view, that this is indeed a new era of permanent deficits and thus profit margins will remain elevated relative to history, I still cannot find any valuation attraction in U.S. equities in aggregate. The Shiller P/E naturally embodies the decade of higher-than-normal profit margins and yet still stands at 30x. Even without any valuation or margin mean reversion, this dooms investors to low returns in the long run.
.@TheEconomist estimates that, at current debt levels, every percentage point increase in interest rates will wipe out 4% of combined S+P earnings, putting pressure on capital expenditure and buy-backs.
In the years before the pandemic the non-financial firms in the S&P 500 and STOXX 600 index in Europe consistently splashed more cash on capital investments and shareholder payouts than they generated from their operations, with the gap plugged by debt. But if they wish to avoid a sustained drag on profitability from higher interest rates, they will soon need to start paying down those debts. At current debt levels, every percentage point increase in interest rates will wipe out roughly 4% of the combined earnings of these firms, according to our estimates. Many firms will have no choice but to cut back on dividends and share buy-backs, squeezing investor returns. Borrowing money in order to fork it over to shareholders makes less sense in a world of higher interest rates, argues Lotfi Karoui of Goldman Sachs.
Using his favored inflation barometer, restaurant prices, @M_C_Klein argues inflation has settled at a new baseline of 4-5%; he notes this was the pace coming out of the Volcker inflation victory.
Perhaps the clearest way to synthesize this is to look at changes in the price of eating at sit-down restaurants. This incorporates domestic wages, rents, groceries, equipment, and consumers’ willingness (and ability) to splurge. The good news is that price of dining out—which had been a harbinger of the durability of the 2021-2022 inflation spike, which I confess I did not fully appreciate at the time—is rising far more slowly now than then. The bad news is that annualized price increases are still 2-3 percentage points faster than before the pandemic. It is not obvious to me that this is a serious problem for policymakers. Inflation is not continuing to accelerate, but instead seems to be settling into the 4-5% range.
Benchmark Minerals forecasts that by 2030 China will build twice as many batteries as the rest of the world combined, leveraging advantages in raw materials, components, and domestic EV demand. @NYT
Despite billions in Western investment, China is so far ahead — mining rare minerals, training engineers and building huge factories — that the rest of the world may take decades to catch up. Even by 2030, China will make more than twice as many batteries as every other country combined, according to estimates from Benchmark Minerals, a consulting group. China controls 41 percent of the world’s cobalt mining, and the most mining for lithium, which carries a battery’s electric charge. China became the largest battery producer partly by figuring out how to make battery components efficiently and at lower cost. China can build battery factories at nearly half the cost of countries in North America or Europe, according to Heiner Heimes, a professor at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. China has the most electric cars on the road and nearly all of them use Chinese-made batteries. Companies anywhere in the world will look to form partnerships with Chinese manufacturers to enter or expand in the industry.
The mortality rate for young Americans (aged 1-19) is at the highest level in 15 years, with boys’ mortality 2x of girls.
Between 2019 and 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7%, and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year, according to an analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. Older children and teenagers, ages 10 to 19, accounted for most of the increase in death rates for young people. Boys, whose mortality rates are roughly twice those of girls, saw their death rates worsen to a slightly greater degree during the pandemic, Woolf found. The overall findings held true when researchers excluded those ages 18 and 19, who were included in the broader research because such government data is grouped in five-year age bands.
The gender pay gap has narrowed as women have become more attached to the labor force and moved into higher earning occupations. Between 1970 and 2015 the share of women in the four highest paying occupations increased from 30% to 55%. @stlouisfed
The figure shows how the distribution of working women across 10 broadly defined occupations evolved over time. We are looking at women in the beginning of their careers (in their late 20s). The occupations (top to bottom) are ranked according to the average male wages in 2015, with technicians, managers and professionals having the highest average wages that year, and machine operators and those in farming and services ranking near the bottom of the pay distribution. In 1970, women entered into lower-paying occupations, working predominantly in administrative jobs. Over time, women clearly shifted toward better-paying occupations. For example, we see that the percentage of women working in the professional occupations went up from about 19% in 1970 to about 26% in 2015. The fraction of women working in the top four high-paying occupations increased from around 30% to 55%.
Weekly
Week of March 20, 2023
A Spanish antipoverty program that gave recipients a cash transfer equivalent to almost 50% of the national minimum wage had strong negative labor market effects, with primary recipients 20% less likely to work relative to the control group. @iza_bonn
In this paper, we studied the employment effects of an antipoverty program that does not include any such conditions. The two-year program, implemented in Barcelona (Spain), consisted of a monthly cash transfer to households with income below the subsistence level. The benefit level depended on the household income, size, and composition. On average, households received roughly e500 ($792 PPP) per month, equivalent to nearly 50 percent of the national minimum wage. Although the benefit was household-based, transfers were made to the account of a designated household member, the main recipient. Our findings for overall impacts can be summarized in four parts. First, we find strong evidence for sizeable negative labor supply effects. After two years, households assigned to the cash transfer were 14 percent less likely to have at least one member working compared to households assigned to the control group; main recipients were 20 percent less likely to work. Second, negative employment effects persisted until at least six months after the last payment. Third, we find tentative evidence that effects are mainly driven by households with care responsibilities. Fourth, there is no evidence of effects on social participation and education-related activities.
.@samquinones7 argues that the drug cartels’ shift to synthetics such as fentanyl and methamphetamine is allowing them to drive down prices, which has led to increased usage.
"Two-thirds of the 107,000 overdose deaths in 2021 involved fentanyl or synthetic opioids like it. Agents seized more than 50 million fentanyl-laced pills in 2022, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced in December, and over 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder — enough to kill a quarter of the world’s entire population. The quantities of meth coming out of Mexico, spurred by easy access to ingredients from world chemical markets, have driven prices for the drug to historic lows. In Fresno, Calif., a wholesale pound of meth went for $20,000 in 2008; now it goes for $800. In Nashville six years ago, a pound wholesale sold for $16,000; today, it’s $2,000.
New @BankofAmerica research shows 7% fewer customers were spending money on child care relative to the start of 2020 suggesting the higher cost of childcare is keeping lower earning workers out of labor force.
Caregiving responsibilities have prevented some from returning to the workforce. In the latest Household Pulse Survey with data as of January 17, 2023, a combined 7% of respondents not working reported caregiving as the reason. This was broken down further: 5% were looking after children and 2% elderly relatives. The lack of affordable and quality childcare has forced some parents to stay at home instead of returning to work. According to the Consumer Price Index, daycare and preschool costs have increased by more than 10% since the start of the pandemic. This is an even bigger burden for lower-income households, which could partly explain the larger labor force exits at the lower end of the income spectrum. However, across the board, it seems that fewer parents are sending their kids to daycare relative to prepandemic days. Bank of America internal data shows that the number of customers making childcare payments as of December 2022 was 7% lower than at the beginning of 2020
Week of March 13, 2023
.@paulkrugman argues that higher marginal taxes rates won’t be enough to close the long-run fiscal gap. “We’ll eventually have to raise taxes, at least somewhat, on people making less than $400,000.”
Very high marginal tax rates create problematic incentives. Conservatives emphasize how taxes reduce the incentive to work and create wealth; this effect is surely overrated, but it does exist. More important, high tax rates encourage extraordinary efforts to avoid taxes (which is legal) or evade them (which isn’t). Estimates of the revenue-maximizing top tax rate tend to be in the range of 70 percent to 80 percent, well above the federal maximum of 37 percent — but bear in mind that many high earners also face state and local taxes that raise their effective marginal rate to something like 50 percent. So, the amount of additional revenue we can raise from taxing the rich, while substantial, is considerably less than their remaining untaxed income.
Labor force participation for workers aged 25-54 hit 83% in Feb, surpassing its pre-pandemic peak. However, participation for those aged 20-24 remains well below pre-pandemic levels, with 400k Americans missing from the labor force. @foxjust
In February, the labor-force participation rate for Americans ages 25 to 54 hit 83.1%, surpassing its pre-pandemic, pre-recession peak — which never happened during the past two economic expansions. The 25-to-54 age group is the core of the labor force, often referred to as “prime age.” But there are 58 million working Americans outside of it, 21 million younger and 37 million older. Teenagers are now substantially more likely to be in the labor force than before the pandemic, so they’re not the issue. But participation rates for those ages 20 to 24 and above 55 are still well short of where they were in February 2020. The decline among young adults is a different story. As the second chart above makes clear, it’s not just the 20-to-24 group that’s affected, with those in their late 20s seeing even bigger declines in participation and employment. There haven’t been big shifts in the age distribution within either group, so composition effects aren’t to blame. It’s simply more than 400,000 Americans in their 20s missing from the labor force, people who should be at the beginning of long careers, not fading into the sunset.
Migrants, including a sharp increase in Chinese, are surging into Panama as they seek entry into the United States. Border Patrol agents have arrested 4,271 Chinese nationals since Oct, a 12-fold increase from the same period a year earlier. @WSJ
The number of migrants crossing into Panama after trudging through the treacherous Darien Gap jungle reached record levels in the first two months of the year, data from Panama showed, posing a fresh challenge to their destination country, the U.S. In January and February, 49,291 people from as near as Haiti and as far away as China have crossed the Darien, a span of rainforest separating Panama from Colombia. That is more than a fivefold increase from the 8,964 migrants in the same period last year, according to Panama’s immigration office. About 2,200 Chinese migrants were among those crossing the Darien Gap in the first two months of 2023, a sharp increase in a group that usually has made up a much smaller proportion of migrants through the area. During the same period last year, 71 Chinese migrants were recorded passing through Panama.
Week of March 6, 2023
An increase in time spent on social media is associated with a decline in mental health, with the gradient steepest for girls. @jburnmurdoch.
Something is going very wrong for teenagers. Between 1994 and 2010, the share of British teens who do not consider themselves likable fell slightly from 6% to 4%; since 2010 it has more than doubled. The share who think of themselves as a failure, who worry a lot, and who are dissatisfied with their lives also kicked up sharply. The same trends are visible across the Atlantic. The number of US high school students who say their life often feels meaningless has rocketed in the past 12 years. And it’s not just the anglosphere. In France, rates of depression among 15- to 24-year-olds have quadrupled in the past decade. The more time teens spend on social media, the worse their mental health is. The gradient is steepest for girls, who also spend much more time on social media than boys, explaining the sharper deterioration among girls’ mental health than boys’.
Persistently loose monetary policies are associated with financial crises. A 1pp lower mean in a five-year window increases the probability of a financial crisis in the next 5 to 7 years by 5.5pp and by 15.5 in the following 7-9 years. @MSchularick @sffed
We are the first to show that, as a causal matter, a loose stance has strong implications for medium-term financial instability. The sample consists of 18 advanced economies over the period from 1870 until 2020. Since the unconditional probability of experiencing a crisis in a 3-year window is 10.5%, these effects are big. Moreover, these results are robust to alternative measures of stance and alternative definitions of financial stability. Lower interest rates in general and loose monetary policy in particular imply, ceteris paribus, higher asset valuations. This opens the door for collateral-driven credit booms. Such credit and asset price booms, in turn, have been identified by the literature as harbingers of financial turmoil.
Week of February 27, 2023
A new @ChicagoBooth paper suggests that “raising the inflation target today would be a serious mistake.” The authors estimate that sustaining a disinflation will require unemployment to rise to 5% from January’s 3.4%.
We start by analyzing the large disinflations that occurred since 1950 in the United States and several other major economies. We estimate and simulate a standard model over several time periods, using various linear and nonlinear measures of labor market slack. We draw three main lessons from the analysis: (1) there is no post-1950 precedent for a sizable central-bank-induced disinflation that does not entail substantial economic sacrifice or recession; (2) regardless of the Phillips curve specification, models estimated over a historical period that includes episodes of high and variable inflation do a better job of predicting the post-pandemic inflation surge than those estimated over the stable inflation period from 1985 to 2019; and (3) simulations of our baseline model suggest that the Fed will need to tighten policy significantly further to achieve its inflation objective by the end of 2025. We see that the model using the full historical period (1962-2022; red line in the graphic above,) implies that inflation will fall only gradually to 3.7 percent by the end of 2025. By contrast, the model estimated over the stable inflation period (1985-2019; blue line in the graphic above,) has inflation falling quickly to the 2 percent target in the first quarter of 2024.
A strong rebound in immigration in 2022 helped offset tight U.S. labor markets, contributing to a 6-percentage point reduction in the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers. @sffed
Immigration flows into the United States slowed significantly following immigration policy changes from 2017 to 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of state-level data shows that this migration slowdown tightened local labor markets modestly, raising the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers (V-U) 5.5 percentage points between 2017 and 2021. More recent data show immigration has rebounded strongly, helping to close the shortfall in foreign-born labor and ease tight labor markets. Data for 2022 show a strong rebound in immigration that has helped offset tight U.S. labor markets by contributing a 6-percentage point reduction in the V–U ratio.
As American energy exports to Europe surge, @DanielYergin notes that, “America is back in the most predominant position it has been in world energy since the 1950s.” @WSJ
Since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, average monthly seaborne cargoes to the continent jumped 38% compared with the previous 12-month period, according to ship-tracking firm Kpler. According to the White House, U.S. natural gas shipments to Europe more than doubled last year, cushioning the continent’s households and manufacturers after Russia throttled supplies. A fleet of skyscraper-size tankers carried more crude to Germany, France and Italy—the European Union’s largest economies—as well as Spain, which alone boosted purchases by about 88% over the period. The pull of oil shipments from the Gulf Coast to Europe, which Kpler pegged at 1.53 million barrels a day in January, has in recent months made the continent a larger destination for U.S. crude than Asia.
.@seba_hill documents that almost all the decline in real interest rates since 1980 occurred in a 3-day window around Fed announcements.
A narrow window around Fed meetings fully captures the secular decline in U.S. Treasury yields since 1980. By contrast, yield movements outside this window are transitory and wash out over time. This is surprising because the forces behind the secular decline are thought to be independent of monetary policy. Why did the secular decline in interest rates occur around FOMC meetings? While the Fed might have no direct control of long-term yields, it seems possible that the Fed provides information to the market about the long-run level of interest rates. This long-run Fed information effect might therefore explain why long-term interest rates move around FOMC meetings. In recent decades, this would imply that the market learned about secular interest rate decline – including the trend in r∗– from the Fed.
Money flowing into startups globally fell by a third in 2022 as valuations declined; however, there is still $300B of VC dry powder in the US alone. @TheEconomist
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell by a third in 2022, making it one of the worst years on record and drawing comparisons with the dotcom bust of 2000-01. According to the Silicon Valley Bank, a tech-focused lender, between the fourth quarters of 2021 and 2022, the average value of recently listed tech stocks in America dropped by 63%. And the plunging public valuations dragged down private ones. The value of older, larger private firms (“late-stage” in the lingo) fell by 56% after funds marked down their assets or the firms raised new capital at lower valuations. What new VC funding there is increasingly flows into mega-funds. Data from PitchBook, a research firm, show that in America in 2022 funds worth more than $1bn accounted for 57% of all capital, up from 20% in 2018.
Week of February 20, 2023
Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under age 45, driven by illicit fentanyl. There is now one overdose fatality every five minutes in the US. @FinancialTimes
Tens of thousands of American parents are mourning the deaths of their children amid an unprecedented drugs crisis, which has claimed 107,000 lives in the year to August 2022. About two-thirds of those deaths were caused by fentanyl. Illicit fentanyl has displaced legally prescribed painkillers as the main cause of overdoses in the US. The skyrocketing death rate — equivalent to one American overdosing every five minutes alongside Covid-19, has helped drive US life expectancy down to a 25-year low of 76.4 years. Unintentional overdose deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds surged by 150% between 2018 and 2021. Overdoses have replaced suicide as the leading cause of death for Americans under 45 years of age, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Labor’s share of output is shrinking across advanced economies as inflation continues to outpace wage gains. US average hourly earnings growth in the 12 months ending January was 4.4% vs. consumer price inflation of 6.4%. @WSJecon
Workers’ purchasing power—their average inflation-adjusted wage—was lower last year than in 2019, before the pandemic, according to the report. So, despite strong demand for workers and ultralow unemployment, labor’s share of economic output shrank in many advanced economies. Average hourly earnings for private-sector nonfarm workers rose 4.4% in the 12 months through January, down from 5.6% last March and less than the 6.4% rise in consumer prices in the year through January.
.@DailyMail reports that 8% of very wealthy New Yorkers (those earning >$25 million per year) left the state during 2021.
The number of those earning more than $25 million that fled the state in 2021 is 1,453, just 520 less than the amount that left at the height of lockdowns and intense social distancing [implying 17% of this cohort over two years]. The top one percent of earners in New York account for close to half of the state's income tax revenue. Between 2019 and 2020, New York City lost six percent of those earning between $150,000 and $750,000. EJ McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy claimed the data showed a 1.3 percent decline in the number of New Yorkers with adjusted gross annual income of more than $1 million. The precise figure fell from 55,100 to 54,370 - 730 individuals, while the national number climbed from 554,340 to 608,549 - a nearly 10 percent jump. According to new Census Bureau data, New York experienced the largest population decline of any US state this year - losing 0.9 percent of its residents.
.@Birdyword reports that Asian alternatives to China (including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam) have larger working age populations and exported more goods to the United States in the 12 months ending Q3 ‘22: $634B vs. China’s $614B.
Chinese labor is no longer that cheap: between 2013 and 2022 manufacturing wages doubled, to an average of $8.27 per hour. More important, the deepening techno-decoupling between Beijing and Washington is forcing manufacturers of high-tech products, especially those involving advanced semiconductors, to reconsider their reliance on China. Alternative Asian supply chain—call it Altasia—looks evenly matched with China in heft, or better. Its collective working-age population of 1.4bn dwarfs even China’s 980m. Altasia is home to 154m people aged between 25 and 54 with a tertiary education, compared with 145m in China—and, in contrast to ageing China, their ranks look poised to expand. In many parts of Altasia wages are considerably lower than in China: hourly manufacturing wages in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam are below $3.
.@GregObenshain highlights Edward McQuarrie research showing that, after a full account of survivorship bias, stocks only modestly outperform bonds, with most of the outperformance concentrated in 1943-1982 (where stocks outperformed bonds by 8.4%/yr).
For stocks, McQuarrie made major revisions to the pre-1871 data by including more stocks, cap-weighting returns, and, most importantly, correcting significant survivorship bias in the original data. According to McQuarrie, “Banks failed during panics, turnpikes and canals succumbed to railroads, and struggling railroads went bust in the 1840s and 1850s to an extent not previously understood. In short, Jeremy Siegel’s sources had left out the bad parts, producing an overly rosy picture of antebellum stock returns.” For bonds, McQuarrie engages in an impressive forensic effort to build a new and more accurate data set of investment-grade bonds available to the public. The first observation is that [geometric real] stock returns are lower (5.9% versus Siegel’s 6.6%) and bond returns are higher (4.1% versus 3.6%) in the revised data.
Week of February 13, 2023
The @USCBO now projects the 2023 deficit to be $1.4T (vs $1T in the 2022 forecast) and revises the ten-year deficit projection (2023-2032) to $18.8T, $3.1T higher than was projected in 2022.
In CBO’s projections, the deficit amounts to 5.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023. Deficits fluctuate over the next four years, averaging 5.8% of GDP. Starting in 2028, they grow steadily; the projected shortfall in 2033 is 6.9% of GDP—significantly larger than the 3.6% of GDP that deficits have averaged over the past 50 years. In CBO’s projections, net interest outlays increase by 1.2% of GDP from 2023 to 2033 and are a major contributor to the growth of total deficits. Primary deficits (that is, revenues minus noninterest outlays) increase by 0.4% of GDP over that period. Federal debt held by the public is projected to rise from 98% of GDP in 2023 to 118% in 2033. Over that period, the growth of interest costs and mandatory spending outpaces the growth of revenues and the economy, driving up debt. Those factors persist beyond 2033, pushing federal debt higher still, to 195% of GDP in 2053.
The median return on capital for an American firm in January 2023 is 7.4%, which is above the 5.6% cost of capital at the start of 2022, but below the 9.6% cost of capital at the start of 2023. @AswathDamodaran
The after-tax returns on capital, at least in the aggregate, are unimpressive, with the median return on capital of a US (global) firm being 7.44% (5.19%). There are a significant number of outliers in both directions, with about 10% of all firms having returns on capital that exceed 50% and 10% of all firms delivering returns that are worse than -50%. A combination of rising risk-free rates and surging risk premiums (equity risk premiums and default spreads) has conspired to push the cost of capital of both US and global companies more than any year in my recorded history (which goes back to 1960). A company generating a 7.44% return on capital (the median value at the start of 2023) in the US, would have comfortably cleared the 5.60% cost of capital that prevailed at the start of 2022, but not the 9.63% cost of capital at the start of 2023.
Database
Week of January 23, 2023
.@WSJ reports that year-over-year wages for the bottom 10% of earners increased 9.8% relative to 7.4% for the median for all workers. Workers in the top 10% of earnings saw a 5.7% gain.
Median weekly earnings for all workers were 7.4% higher, year-over-year, at the end of 2022, according to an analysis of newly released Labor Department data. The bottom 10th of wage earners—those that make about $570 a week—saw their pay increase by nearly 10%. Better pay increases late last year went to workers who attended college, a reversal from earlier in the pandemic when those who hadn’t completed high school saw outsize gains. The annual rate of wage growth for workers with less than a high school diploma touched a recent peak in the second quarter of 2022, when it was up 11.1% over the prior year, higher than the 7.6% wage growth during that period for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The median raise for Black Americans employed full-time was 11.3%, compared with the prior year.
The aging of the American population has left the US short 1.9M workers relative to 2019. A decline in labor force participation of older workers is responsible for a drop of another 500,000 workers. @gelliottmorris @S_Rabinovitch
The labor-force participation (LFP) rate of prime-age workers (aged 25-54) and the foreign-born workforce have almost fully recovered. Neither explains the current squeeze. The biggest shortfall comes from Americans getting older and leaving work behind. Since 2019 those aged at least 65 have gone from less than 16% of the population to nearly 17%. Moreover, unlike prime-age workers, many people who retired early as covid-19 struck have not come back to work. LFP among older Americans, which rose from 12.5% in 2000 to 20.7% in early 2020, has dipped to 19.3%, the same as in 2016. The aging of the population accounts for the loss of 1.9m workers (0.7% of people aged at least 16), while the overall drop in LFP, mainly among the old, is responsible for a further 0.5m (0.2%).
Charles Blahous @mercatus notes that America’s long-term Federal fiscal imbalance was largely set between 1965-72. The cost of programs enacted during that period is growing faster than economic output and neither party has made an effort to address this.
Over two-thirds of the structural fiscal imbalance derives from the unsustainable growth rates of federal health programs, most especially Medicare and Medicaid. Irrespective of future policy decisions in other areas such as tax policy, income security, and annually appropriated domestic and defense spending, federal finances will not be stabilized until Medicare and Medicaid’s growth rates are moderated. A survey of fiscal stewardship records produces the unsurprising result that more recent officeholders have tended to run far higher federal deficits than those countenanced by previously elected officials. The largest average federal deficits were operated during the Trump administration, followed, in turn, by the Obama, Ronald W. Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations.
.@Brian_Riedl offers practical suggestions on how Republicans could permanently stabilize the American debt at 95% of GDP, a goal that would start with running deficits at 3% of GDP relative to the current baseline of 6% over the next decade.
Fiscal conservatives should aim to permanently stabilize the debt at 95 percent of GDP. This goal would mean keeping deficits near 3 percent of GDP, compared to the baseline deficits rising past 6 percent of GDP over the next decade and 11 percent of GDP in three decades. In the short run, this means: Freezing annual discretionary appropriations. Building momentum for mandatory spending reforms with a modest package of savings (perhaps $400 billion over the decade) that address lower-hanging fruit such as leftover pandemic spending, program overpayments, and federal spending benefits for upper-income families. Begin working toward Social Security and Medicare reform—which drive nearly 100 percent of long-term deficits—by building bipartisan working groups behind the scenes.
.@Edsall argues that a “white rural red wave” is the driving force of the Republican party today and cites shifts in Wisconsin suburban and rural voting patterns between 2016 and 2022.
In 2016, Ron Johnson rode Trump’s coattails and the Republican trail blazed by the former governor Scott Walker to a 3.4 point (50.2 to 46.8) victory and swept into office, in large part by running up huge margins in Milwaukee’s predominantly white suburbs. That changed in 2022. Craig Gilbert, a fellow at Marquette Law School conducted a detailed analysis of Wisconsin voting patterns and found that Johnson, "performed much worse in the red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee than he did six years earlier in 2016. So again, how did Johnson win? The simple answer: white rural Wisconsin. As recently as 17 years ago, rural Wisconsin was a battleground. In 2006, Jim Doyle, the Democratic candidate for governor, won rural Wisconsin, about 30 percent of the electorate, by 5.5 points. “Then came the rural red wave,” Gilbert writes. “Walker carried Wisconsin’s towns by 23 points in 2010 and by 25 points in 2014.” In 2016, Johnson won the rural vote by 25 points, but in 2022, he pushed his margin there to 29 points.
Last year @Brian_Riedl compared Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush’s fiscal records and found that Trump’s policies in one term cost $7.8T over a decade, relative to $5T for Obama and $6.9T for Bush.
President Trump’s record on fiscal responsibility does not compare favorably to his immediate predecessors. Surely, it would not be fair to judge President Trump simply by the total budget deficits under his watch, however, as the $10 trillion 10-year baseline deficit that he inherited dwarfed the $4 trillion projected baseline deficit inherited by President Obama and the $6 trillion projected baseline surplus inherited by President Bush. That is far from a level playing field. On the other hand, President Trump also received the largest automatic deficit reductions from his inherited baseline. During his presidency, economic and technical factors that fall mostly outside of political control produced $3.9 trillion in 10-year deficit reduction, mainly through falling interest rates on the federal debt.
Week of January 16, 2023
Raj Chetty and his @OppInsights team find that America’s workforce earning <$29k/year is down about 20% relative to its January 2020 level. Adjusting for workers now earning over $29k, the low-wage workforce was 13.5% under its pre-pandemic level. @BSteverman
The US is missing about a fifth of its pre-pandemic low-income workforce. At least some of those workers moved to higher-paying jobs, but, after adjusting for wage growth, researchers found employment for the poorest quarter of the workforce was still 13.5% below pre-pandemic levels at the end of 2021. Analyzing local trends, researchers found an important clue to where those missing workers went: Low-wage workers are scarcest where 2020’s devastation was worst. “It is clear there are large swaths of the population who are still not employed, and these are low-wage workers who lost their jobs in precisely the places where high-income people cut back on spending so sharply a couple of years ago,” Chetty said.
.@JBSay notes there have been at least 400,000 unexpected deaths among the US working-age population since 2020. Netting out Covid deaths and unnatural deaths (homicide, suicide, overdose, etc.) he finds a spike starting in 2021.
In 2021 group life [insurance] payments exploded by 20.7% over the five-year average and by 15% over the acute pandemic year of 2020. If we remove both Covid-19 and unnatural deaths (homicide, suicide, overdose, etc.), we see a dramatic spike of natural, non-Covid-19 deaths among working-age people beginning in the spring and summer of 2021. To overgeneralize: In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.
Value-added/full-time employee in the US construction sector was ~40% lower in 2020 than in 1970; had construction productivity grown at 1% a year, aggregate US labor productivity would have been 10% higher. @Austan_Goolsbee @ChadSyverson @nberpubs
Figure 1 shows indices of U.S. construction sector labor productivity and TFP from 1950 to 2020. For comparison, it also plots the same indices for the overall economy. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, both measures of construction sector productivity grew steadily. Indeed, they outpaced their whole-economy counterparts during that period. By 1970, however, the construction sector’s labor productivity and TFP had both begun to fall. By 2020, while aggregate labor productivity and TFP were 290 percent and 230 percent higher than in 1950, both measures of construction productivity had fallen below their 1950 values. This is stunningly bad productivity performance for a major sector. Construction labor productivity fell at an average rate of about 1% per year from 1970-2020. Had it instead grown at the (relatively modest) rate of 1%per year, aggregate labor productivity (and plausibly, income per capita) being about 10% higher than it actually was.
According to a new analysis from the @stlouisfed, job switching is associated with lower earnings growth for lower-earning prime-age male workers but higher earnings growth for their higher-income peers.
Let’s consider two male workers, one in the bottom (in the first two percentiles) and the other in the 65th percentile of the lifetime earnings distribution. Both experienced on average a 2% growth in annual earnings if they stayed with the same employer. However, if they changed employers, the bottom earner did not see any growth in his earnings, whereas the 65th-percentile earner enjoyed, on average, 3% growth. This large heterogeneity among switchers indicates that the nature of job switches is very different throughout the lifetime earnings distribution. More than 35% of job switches were a result of a significant unemployment spell for the bottom earners, compared with only around 15% in the top third of earners, suggesting a much higher unemployment risk for bottom earners. Finally, earnings growth for both job stayers and job switchers increases steeply in the top third, reaching around 10% for the highest earners.
The uptick in so-called “deaths of despair” was preceded by a decline in religious participation. @econburner @D_Hungerman @TamarOostrom offer evidence that the repeal of blue laws is associated with the rise of such deaths.
Put differently, a 10-percentage-point effect on religious attendance implies that following the blue law repeals, about 10,000 out of every 100,000 middle-aged adults stopped attending services weekly. If mortality grew by 2 per 100,000 as a result, and assuming that the subsequent increase in middle-aged deaths came from this group, about 1 out of 5,000 of these of “marginal attenders” would consequently die from suicide, liver disease, or poisoning annually. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that declines in religious attendance can explain an important part of the initial increase in mortality due to deaths of despair. Of course, since the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, deaths of despair for middle-aged white Americans have increased dramatically both overall and relative to trend. The impact that we witness seems to be driven by the decline in formal religious participation rather than in belief or personal activities like prayer.
Week of January 9, 2023
Firms are using technology to shift work to remote employees and third-party subcontractors. Outsourcing intensity has doubled from 11% in 2005 to 22% in 2021, which may compress white-collar wages going forward. @TheEconomist
Pinning down just how much firms depend on outsiders is tricky—companies do not advertise this sort of thing. A measure, “outsourcing intensity,” [tracks] a firm’s external purchase commitments in the upcoming year as a share of its cost of sales. The Economist has calculated the measure using data from financial reports for a sample of large listed firms from America and Europe. Average outsourcing intensity across our sample has nearly doubled from 11% in 2005 to 22% in the most recent year of data (either 2021 or 2022). This growth is especially pronounced among tech titans such as Apple and Microsoft; businesses that grew little over the analyzed period, such as Unilever, a British consumer-goods giant, saw only small increases. This is consistent with research which finds that as firms grow ever larger and adopt more technologies, thus becoming more complex and unwieldy, they outsource more operations—precisely as Coase would have predicted.
Phil Gramm and John Early report on @MichaelRStrain analysis that found robust absolute mobility in America. Only 28% of children raised in the bottom quintile had adult incomes that were in the same quintile and 26% reached the top quintile. @AEIecon
When the income of the children is compared with the inflation-adjusted income of their parents using the real income quintiles of their childhood in 1982-86 rather than the income quintiles of 2013-17, measured mobility is dramatically greater. Only 28% of children reared in the bottom quintile had adult incomes that would put them in the bottom childhood quintile, and 26% rose all the way to the childhood top quintile, which required a minimum income of only $111,416 (in 2016 dollars) for a family of four in 1982-86. A family of four with that income in 2013-17 would have been in the middle quintile based on 2013-17 income distribution.
.@joshrauh of the Stanford Graduate School of Business presents evidence that migration from California is being driven by high taxes rates, suggesting California has limited ability to raise taxes without losing revenue.
Figure 2 shows the net departure rates from the state by income tax bracket between 2003 and 2018. Since 2003, only middle-income earners in the 9.3 percent income tax bracket have entered California at higher rates than left during any year over the time period. The top bracket, and the highest earners within the top bracket in particular, display the highest net out-migration rate over the whole period. Higher-income earners who leave the state are not being replaced by other high earners at the same rate. California's top earners are particularly mobile, showing the highest rates of departure around tax policy changes such as Proposition 30 in 2012 and the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 as well as the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Consequently, potential net outflows of taxable income spiked to nearly $4 billion in the year TCJA was implemented and $10.7 billion around COVID-19. High-earning movers have been consistently more likely to leave California for zero-income tax states since 2012, and those who experienced larger tax increases under TCJA were more likely to depart.
.@ATabarrok uses semiconductor manufacturing to argue that properly trained talent is the limiting constraint to growth at the technological frontier. He notes that only 164,000 potential American workers have the IQ needed to manage the process.
Although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above-average intelligence, and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ. At the very top of semiconductor manufacturing, you are going to need workers with IQs at or higher than 1 in a 1000 people and there are only 164,000 of these workers in the United States, and US might be able to place only say 100,000 high-IQ workers in high-IQ professions. It’s very difficult to run a high-IQ civilization of 330 million on just 100,000 high-IQ workers. To some extent, we can economize on high-IQ workers by giving lower-IQ workers smarter tools and drawing on non-human intelligence. But we also need to draw on high-IQ workers throughout the world–which explains why some of the linchpins of our civilization end up in places like Eindhoven or Taiwan.
New @nberpubs notes that the demand for safe assets from 1990-2020 grew even faster than the supply of safe assets, as rapidly growing emerging economies increasing desired to hold safe assets as FX reserves.
The sharp, secular decline in the world real interest rate of the past thirty years suggests that the surge in global demand for financial assets outpaced the growth in their supply. This phenomenon was driven by faster growth in emerging markets, changes in the financial structure of both emerging and advanced economies, and changes in demand and supply of public debt issued by advanced economies. The net foreign liabilities of advanced economies grew massively. The net foreign assets of advanced economies, as a share of their collective GDP, fell from close to zero at the beginning of the 1990s to about -20 percent in 2020.
A new @nature study documents a decline in the average “disruptiveness” of science and technology across both papers and patents, but notes that the absolute number of highly disruptive works remains stable. @michae1park
Across fields, we find that science and technology are becoming less disruptive. Figure 2 plots the average CD5 [an index that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology] over time for papers (Fig. 2a) and patents (Fig. 2b). For papers, the decrease between 1945 and 2010 ranges from 91.9% (where the average CD5 dropped from 0.52 in 1945 to 0.04 in 2010 for ‘social sciences’) to 100% (where the average CD5 decreased from 0.36 in 1945 to 0 in 2010 for ‘physical sciences’); for patents, the decrease between 1980 and 2010 ranges from 78.7% (where the average CD5 decreased from 0.30 in 1980 to 0.06 in 2010 for ‘computers and communications’) to 91.5% (where the average CD5 decreased from 0.38 in 1980 to 0.03 in 2010 for ‘drugs and medical’). For both papers and patents, the rates of decline are greatest in the earlier parts of the time series, and for patents, they appear to begin stabilizing between the years 2000 and 2005. For papers, since about 1980, the rate of decline has been more modest in ‘life sciences and biomedicine’ and physical sciences, and most marked and persistent in social sciences and ‘technology’.
New @nberpubs research finds that Americans are working 3% fewer hours annually in the aftermath of the pandemic. This reduction in hours worked means labor markets are even tighter than LFP would imply.
The negative impact of the Great Recession on aggregate hours worked and the ensuing slow recovery through 2019 materialized almost exclusively along the extensive margin. However, of the 3% decline in annual hours worked per person (including those who do not work) between 2019 and 2022, more than half is accounted for by the intensive margin. That is, focusing only on the extensive margin (lower employment and participation rates) will underestimate the total decline in labor supply by more than half. The most striking fact is the lower participation of young male cohorts without a bachelor's degree, whose participation rate is up to 7pp below that of older cohorts at the same age. The Great Recession seems to be casting a very long shadow, even on those who were in their teens when it happened.
Week of January 2, 2023
.@davidautor shows high school workers’ wage growth overtaking college wage growth in the aftermath of the pandemic and argues that higher wages better reflect rising productivity as companies compete more intensively for workers.
For first time in four decades, wage inequality falling, due to rising lower tail. Despite inflation, real wages rising among young HS grads, 1st quartile workers. It’s tempting to attribute this change to ‘tight’ labor markets—but what does this mean in practice? The simplest explanation is that labor markets are operating on a higher point on the labor demand curve. Evidence indicates this explanation too simple: Competition has intensified. Distinction is critical: Rising competition means higher wages that better reflect productivity and higher aggregate productivity — a double dividend.
J.P. Morgan estimates consumers still have $900B of excess savings, down from a peak of $2.1B in August 2021.
From March 2020 to August 2021, consumers amassed a peak $2.1 trillion in excess savings relative to the pre-pandemic trend. Since August 2021, consumers have drawn down on these excess savings. Household debt payments were 9.8% of disposable personal income in Q4 ’22 vs. a peak of 13.2% in Q4 of ’04.